I was just rifling through Mr. Martini's bookshelf and stumbled upon a few things of special interest to me.
First is a slightly yellowed copy of Franny and Zooey by Salinger. I adored that family when I was 15. Today, being the day of his death, finding it on the shelf was a bit touching. I flipped through it and found a passage I thought I would share:
"In Zooey, be assured early, we are dealing with the complex, the overlapping, the cloven, and at least two dossier-like paragraphs ought to be got in right here. To start with, he was a small young man, and extremely slight of body. From the rear--particularly where his vertebrae were visible--he might almost have passed for one of those needy metropolitan children who are sent out every summer to endowed camps to be fattened and sunned. Close up, either full-face or in profile, he was surpassingly handsome, even spectacularly so. His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like "the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo." A more general and surely less parochial view was that his face had been just barely saved from too-handsomeness, not to say gorgeousness, by virtue of one ear's protruding slightly more than the other. I myself hold a very different opinion from either of these. I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces--a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast--could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second. But what was undiminishable, and, as already so flatly suggested, a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic esprit superimposed over his entire face--especially at the eyes, where it was often as arresting as a Harlequin mask, and, on occasion, much more confounding."
The other book that caught my eye is One Hundred Year's of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is actually MY copy of the book, despite what Mr. Martini may claim. Anyway...Ooh, ooh, this book makes me swoon. You know, I never found President Clinton the slightest bit sexy until I found out that he lists One Hundred Years of Solitude as his favorite book. A man that can appreciate a story that is such a lusty romp through life, well, maybe he's just might have it going on. This book has one of my all time favorite opening lines: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
So life is nice. I've been painting a lot. Mostly feeling like I am wasting paint, but I am trying to be forgiving to myself. I've been using paper instead of canvas because then I don't mind playing around and throwing it away, if needed for my ego. I've been staying in Van Buren at Mr. Martini's quite a bit, so I've been dragging around my large sketch pad, wooden table-top easel and my picnic basket, which I use as a paint box. I feel like I am packing for an expedition every time I come over here.
Tonight I am working in my art journal and waiting to see if we're looking at an ice storm. I think a pot of coffee is in order.
Next post: Cookin With Caleb
