Author: ellen

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What is art good for?

Today was the final day of the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan and I was glad I got there to see it. The Guggenheim is stunning, though, as my companion observed, maybe better for looking at people looking at art than for actually looking at art. There’s often an assumption with Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that human comfort can be sacrificed for artistic integrity. Perfect tradeoff in this case, even though the sloping ramp can feel like an uphill slog and the work doesn’t always seem shown to best advantage. And in this exhibit you get “looking at people looking at art” at its best: across the sky-lighted space you see people in dark silhouette against canvases exploding with color–quite amazing.

I read, in the wall text, about how as a young man Wassily Kandinsky had two experiences that determined his artistic mission–seeing one of Monet’s Haystack paintings and hearing a performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He came away, it said, determined to create an emotional reaction through color and composition and, like music, in the absence of a recognizable subject. And above all, he believed in the transformative power of art to inspire human beings to a higher level of living.

As I walked the ramp and looked at painting after painting, I came upon several school groups clustered with their teachers in front of paintings. In each case, hands were eagerly being raised and ideas offered about the work. In each case the group was spending time looking carefully at paintings that offered no easy way in. It made me think of all the school budgets in which art education is one of the first things to go.

It made me wonder what the “takeaway” is from a school day. What, years from now, will those children remember? Photosynthesis? The rules of grammar? (I hope so!) The Treaty of Ghent? Certainly all of these. But more. How about the ability to look hard at a baffling painting and try to find something in it that tells them something new about their lives? How about the ability to appreciate what art can do?

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Where the poem comes from: Mary Bonina

I probably first saw Mary Bonina’s work back when I wrote a literary column for The Boston Globe and did a story on the trail of poetry and prose inscribed on monoliths along the MBTA Orange Line. She wrote the poem that’s outside the Green Street Station. I can only imagine how satisfying it is to see your words carved in stone!

I talked with Mary on a fall day just as she was getting ready to go on a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts , where I’ve also had the pleasure of working. It was a little cool but not so much that we couldn’t sit outside at Cafe Pamplona in Harvard Square hunched over our hot coffees. She told me about the pleasures and challenges inherent in switching among genres, in her case fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and memoir She is the author of a poetry chapbook, “Living Proof.” Here is her poem, “English Lesson Plan: Present Perfect,” published in a 1991 issue of Hanging Loose, along with her description of how that poem came to be written.

“One of the many jobs I have held while trying to balance a writing life with financial needs, has been that of freelance ESL teacher to recent immigrants in their workplaces, mostly hospitals and banks in Boston. I was teaching adult students new to the U.S. from China, Haiti, Central America, Africa, Sicily, Poland, and other countries, students who spoke some sixteen different languages and held a variety of positions, including clerk, cashier, cafeteria worker, phlebotomist, research doctor, custodian, patient transporter, parking attendant, and nurse’s aid. Many of those I taught had had professional positions in the countries they’d left, but coming to the United States and not knowing English, most of them had taken service jobs.

“I loved teaching these students and I had great empathy for their situation. I suppose I was motivated to help them partially by my own family’s experience, immigrating from Sicily and Ireland, and having to negotiate a new culture and language themselves. So I took my role seriously, always prepared with a lesson plan I had labored over.

“Often though, after just a few exchanges of dialogue, I would have to abandon my script. Desperate to learn the language, to be able to navigate in a new culture, my students would interrupt me with their own pressing needs for specific vocabulary or grammatical construction; and when they did follow my lead, they asked questions and offered interpretations I had not anticipated when planning my classes. Eventually, I accepted and gained more confidence and got comfortable with allowing what I’d initially seen as interruption.

“I began to find it exhilarating, letting my teaching benefit from an improvisational style. I began to feel like a jazz sax player must, taking my cues from my students, and creating something new, building upon what they offered me. I felt like I was writing a poem, recognizing that familiar process of one word, one thought, leading to another — often unanticipated – recognizing endless possibilities and finally settling on specific ones, when realizing a moment of revelation. I learned how to encourage the flow, to go with the stream of consciousness, and how to bring it back to my intended lesson.

“ The poem “English Lesson Plan: Present Perfect” is one from a collection of poems called Lunch in Chinatown, after the fact that one of my teaching sites was on the edge of Chinatown and students there often attended my classes during lunch break, “brown-bagging it.” This poem, as the title suggests, is about teaching the present perfect tense, a task that has stymied many an English teacher, even those working with native speakers of the language. It just might be the best example in the collection that illustrates the way I would encourage a riff to take its natural course, yet bring it back eventually to the original theme.”

English Lesson Plan: Present Perfect

1.

The Roz Chast cartoon in The New Yorker
shows a goofy mother, father, and children
seated all in a line, pressed tight together
between the sofa arms, staring at the TV:
“The Lintners,” the caption says,
“Stuck on the sofa since 1987.”

I show it to the class, thinking: will they laugh?
The clipping is an example I use
to illustrate the present perfect tense.
It gets passed around. Everyone nods,
very, very serious about learning
the present perfect tense.

Q. “How long have the Lintners been stuck on the sofa?”
A. The Lintners have been stuck on the sofa since 1987.”
2.
Stuck on a sofa, “hypnotized” by TV, brings up new
vocabulary. I explain “to be in a trance.”
This leads to “sleepwalking,” then to “daydreaming,”
and finally to “hallucination.”

“Hallucination” inspires Margarita to tell a story:
her last job….the State Hospital….there was a man
who had lost his mind when he lost his wife.
Whenever he got angry, says Margarita,
he would hallucinate that he was still in Cuba,
still in the hot sun. He would mime
cutting sugar cane with his machete

3.
Someone is using the word “cuckoo.”
I must explain that it is the name of a bird,
and not the right word to describe someone who is ill.
The Haitians think I’m talking about the owl, a bird that
frightens them, its face, the face of a cat, the eyes….
When they say nocturne I know
their mistake, draw an owl on the chalkboard.
4.
And the lesson for the day ends this way,
me saying, “It is an owl, not a cuckoo.
Haven’t you ever seen a clock shaped like a house
and a little bird comes out of the upstairs window saying,
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” the exact number of times
to tell the hour? The present perfect tense, like time
goes on and on, or like the Lintners, or the man who has
been cutting sugar can ever since his wife died, or
the owl that has been awake all night long, hooting.”

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Books given and stolen

I always make sure to have plenty of books when I’m going on a trip–ones I know I’ll like and ones I take in case I don’t like others and ones I take in case I’m not in the mood to read even the ones I know I’ll like. So when I left on our family vacation, I had a good supply. I didn’t need another book. But…

…we passed a bookstore and Jenny and Nate ran in because they wanted to buy me a book. It was “The Book Thief.” They said it was a YA, but that they thought I’d like it. Jenny, Nate’s mother, was listening to an audio version. Nate, who is 14, read it a couple of years ago and considers it one of his favorites. He is currently reading ”To Kill a Mockingbird” and that’s already another favorite. Because of who he is, I know he has a lifetime ahead of him of reading books he will love.

I started it as soon as we got back to the house. A little strange at the beginning. The narrator was Death. There were some graphic elements, which I am never charmed by. But once the story really got going, I couldn’t put it down. The book is over 500 pages and when I finished it the next afternoon I cried. A lot.

The author, Markus Zusak, includes a lot of visual imagery in his unusual use of language. And I liked that the book’s familiar subject, the Holocaust, was viewed from a much less familiar perspective: the main character is a young German girl living with her German foster parents among their neighbors in a small town not far from the concentration camp at Dachau. The girl is the “book thief” who has a passion for books even before she can read and collects them whenever and however she can. As you might expect in a book narrated by Death–or, I guess, any decent book–the people run the basic human gamut, monsters to heroes, with most occupying the flawed and complicated middle ground.

And what a fascinating character Death is as Zusak has imagined him. He’s not an enemy. He’s pretty much just following orders, too. He goes where he needs to be and even seems to have a heart that breaks occasionally at what he’s called on to do. The souls he must carry away he bears softly, often tenderly, even sadly. He is nothing to be afraid of. He is just the natural consequence of what happens.

A gift carefully chosen is always a treat. But when someone gives you a book they have read and loved, it carries an extra dimension. The giving of a treasure from one book-lover to another is a gift of time well-spent and ideas lovingly offered. What could be better?

Thank you, Jenny and Nate.

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A tale of two endings

First of all, I had a “Wuthering Heights” problem just because I had never read it. No, really, never read it, I have to confess, though I had read and reread its cousin, “Jane Eyre,” many times. My friend Susan and I had coincidentally just finished rereading “Middlemarch” and were thinking about reading something else together.

“’Wuthering Heights’,” I said. “I hate “’Wuthering Heights’,” she said. But, being the person she is, she agreed to go along with me. Now I know what she meant.

I had not gone far into the fresh hell that is Emily Bronte’s great work when I noticed that I hated, if not the book itself, then every character. Ok, not Lockwood. Lockwood’s not really a hate-able character.

So for the past week my bookmark has remained at a page just short of the end. I’m not sure why I am so reluctant to be done with it. That’s more like the way I sometimes am with books I love. Like the one I galloped through while avoiding Heathcliff, et. al.–“Persuasion,” Jane Austen’s final and posthumously-published novel.

It is a particular triumph, don’t you think, to have written a novel that is still a page-turner 193 years later. I recently saw an exhibit of Jane’s letters at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and was charmed by how closely her snarky comments to her correspondents echoed the ever-so-gently snarky observations of her heroines. Reminded me of Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s comment, “If you have nothing nice to say, then come sit by me!”

I couldn’t put it down. Until I got close enough to the end so that I knew Anne would be reunited with her love (it’s not a spoiler if the book is almost 200 years old, is it?) and her silly sisters would grow a little wiser and all manner of things would be well. Though not so much for Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay, whom we despise, right?

But at that point I stopped for a while, trying to stave off the wrenching moment of parting from the wonderful world of Jane. I even considered going back to Heathcliff. But it felt impossible to veer from “Persuasion’s” privately guarded emotional turmoils to the heavy lifting of sturm und drang on the moors. So I finished it and loved every delicious sentence.

In the intro to the edition I read, Margaret Drabble calls “Persuasion” a “novel of second chances” and what’s not to love about that? Especially at this time of year, when we look forward to January’s illusion of a clean slate.

Now I know what’s waiting for me. A hot and cold dose of human flaws and passions. I’ll read it and I’ll be glad I did. I know, I know. I’ll finish “Wuthering Heights” tomorrow.

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The occasional recipe: sugared nuts

As I write this my house smells like holiday cooking. The sugary kind of cooking rather than the potato-pancake-frying kind. I tried a recipe my friend Paula gave me. It’s for sugared nuts, which make good munchies to have on hand, as well as fun little gifts. I put some of mine into small bags and tied them with ribbons as gifts for my neighbors. And if that’s sounding kind of Martha Stewart-ish, keep in mind that the recipe adheres to my usual ratio of easiness to delish-ness.

Here’s what you need:

nuts–about 2 lbs. I used raw pecan and walnut halves
2 egg whites
1 c. white sugar
1/3 c. brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1 1/2 tsp. 5-spice powder

Preheat the oven to 275. (I wish I could find the little “degree” circle on my computer. Someone reading this must know.) Whirl the egg whites in a food processor and add all the other ingredients except for the nuts.

Put the nuts in a large bowl and pour the egg white mixture over them. Toss to coat the nuts well. Spread the nuts in a single layer over 3 cookie sheets. They should have enough room so that they’re not clumped together too much. And I covered the cookie sheets with parchment just to make the clean-up easier. Bake 55 minutes. Then lift them from the cookie sheets with a spatula while warm to separate any that are stuck together. I think using parchment makes this step easier, too.

That’s the whole thing. They’re really good and, as you can see, really easy. I doubled the recipe and my second batch just came out of the oven. Only little problem is that now I’m alone in the house with them. Uh-oh.

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New on the Bookshelf: “Americans in Space” by Mary E. Mitchell

Mary E. Mitchell is one of my unseen online friends. We’ve never met in person, although I’m hoping we will, since we are both in the Boston area. But what I know of Mary is her generosity and good humor in taking on the “herding cats” job of organizing a lovely retreat for women writers each spring in Duxbury, and her accomplishments as a writer of well-reviewed novels, including this latest one.

Mary’s new book is “Americans in Space.” Her style has been described as “one party poignancy, one part humor” and, in choosing “Americans in Space” as an Indie Next selection, the reviewer said, ” ‘Americans in Space’ will speak to all readers, especially to parents of teens.”

Mary’s first novel is “Starting Out Sideways,” a 2007 Thomas Dunne Book from St. Martin’s Press. For years she has taught writing at the Joan Brack Adult Learning Center and at Bethany Hill School, a living and learning community, both in Framingham, Massachusetts.

In describing “Americans in Space,” Mary says:

“For months I have been telling readers that “Americans in Space” is about loss, and about the long, excruciating road back from loss for a young widow and her unmoored family. The novel’s main character, Kate Cavanaugh, struggles mightily two years after the death of her beloved husband. She cannot reach Charlotte, her angry teenage daughter, who acts out in cyberspace and in tattoo parlors. She cannot get Hunter, her four year old son, to speak in full sentences, or relinquish the ketchup bottle he carries clutched to his heart. She cannot find happiness, despite the best efforts of resourceful friends, an eager love interest or colleagues at work. Kate is a guidance counselor at the Alan B. Shepard (first American in space!) High School, and runs a weekly counseling group for mixed-up, troubled students. Her group is called New Frontiers. My misfits, Kate lovingly calls them.

“It is the one area of Kate’s life that seems to work, her weekly efforts with these deeply troubled children. Unlike with her own daughter, Kate feels she can bring comfort and meaning to these young people’s lives. They look up to her and trust her and try not to curse when they’re around her. She has a way of making them believe in themselves, even when they’re feeling most self-loathing or unsure. One girl in her group, Phoenix, especially captures Kate’s interest.

‘She looks nothing like my Charlotte,” Kate muses, “yet I often imagine Phoenix to be my daughter’s psychic twin. She is sensitive, intelligent, volatile. If my own daughter were blonde instead of dark, and named for a city instead of for Kyle’s grandmother, Charlotte might be this lovely waif in my office. Except that Charlotte didn’t swallow a whole bottle of ibuprofen last year.’

I think what I realize, only after writing this novel and then seeing it in print, is that Kate has been healing herself all along, through her work with other people’s children. It is the giving of herself to others that finally touches the iceberg within her heart. The warmth and forgiveness she feels for these children begins to allow her to forgive herself and love her children just the way they are. A truth, then, emerges from fiction.

It’s a funny thing to find a lesson in one’s own work. Maybe we are our own best teachers, if only we listen closely enough.”

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Recipes for connections

It’s strange how things intersect. Here I was thinking about secrets around recipes, and then just yesterday I was given a very special cookbook. It’s called “Emily’s Table.” The recipes in it are from the kitchen of Emily Mehlman, a beautiful woman I had the privilege to know as a friend.

Emily was a homemaker in the finest and largest sense of the word–a community-maker, with her table as its center. She was one of those people–mysterious to me–who always “knows”–how to get cut flowers to open, how to store sweaters properly, where to shop for a new car, how to make Jordan Marsh’s blueberry muffins, how to get any kind of stain out of any kind of fabric. She was the wife of Bernard Mehlman, former senior rabbi and now senior scholar of Temple Israel in Boston. When the temple was active in helping bring people from the former Soviet Union to Boston, she instinctively understood what the newcomers would need to know and when. A few weeks after they had arrived, when they had caught their breaths from the first frenzy of moving in, she would arrive to make sure they knew things like how to adjust the thermostat in their apartments, how to take publc transportation to wherever they needed to go, how to find a doctor.

When Emily died in 2006, a group of her close friends decided to collect some of her favorite recipes into a book. It’s a book much like Emily herself–beautiful, thoughtful, filled with goodness. These are recipes for meals eaten with family and friends. They are not, by and large, recipes for special occasions as much as they are recipes for making a special occasion of every day. You can picture people gathered around doing what human beings have done throughout our existence–sharing sustenance, talking, making the necessity of food into something sacred.

Sharing recipes, like sharing food, is a generous and nurturing act. It is an act that defies mortality. It lets us, in a very immediate, concrete way, keep close something real about those we no longer have physically present in our lives. It’s a line drawn through generations and across borders. What more basic human act can carry us through time and space than the words on paper telling us, “This is good–try it.”

Looking through “Emily’s Table,” I am tempted by one recipe after another. And as I remember this extraordinary woman I think, too, of the extraordinary women–her friends–who took on an enormous project in order to preserve their delicious memories of her. They created a worthy tribute. Anyone who knew Emily will treasure this book. And anyone who didn’t know her would be well advised to try the recipes.

I have a food spatter on one page already.

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Secret recipes and the secret of recipes

Item number one: My old friend Jay came to visit a few days ago, brought the most delicious chocolate chip cookies, and sent me the recipe. It’s from Neiman Marcus, but it’s a real recipe for really wonderful cookies.

(If you’ve never heard the story–which is total urban myth–it involves a woman eating at the restaurant in Neiman Marcus, loving the chocolate chip cookies so much she asks for the recipe, only to be billed $250 or some such outrageous sum for it. Story is a complete fabrication.)

Item number two: In today’s New York Times Michelle Slatalla has a piece on neighbors trying to outdo each other with secret recipes for stuffed cabbage.

The confluence of those two items got me thinking about the whole idea of the secret recipe. Not a pretty picture. For two reasons.

Take one: Food is a basic need and also love made concrete. It’s nurturing, caring, the one indispensable thing we can offer someone else in true generosity. So the whole idea of withholding a recipe is so stunningly miserly when you think about it that it’s really not so far removed from bread lines and continents of starving children. The smallness of begrudging someone food–maybe especially delicious food–has implications of a world view that goes way beyond our little recipe files.

Take two: Just who is it who is usually seen as hoarding those secret recipes–or maybe giving out the recipe but with one vital ingredient missing? Women. Women whose place was so firmly rooted next to the stove that the secret recipe can be a stand-in for the miniscule power they had, the perceived value of what they had to offer in the world. Tiny scraps of yellowed paper. Tiny aspirations, truncated possibilities.

So, thank you to my friend Jay and to Neiman Marcus for the cookie recipe. Thank you, Marcie, for carrot pudding,; Caryl Kahn for peach pie; Fran for bread pudding and another Fran for Tuscan bread soup; my late neighbor Dan for country stew; my aunt Sara, gone for decades, whose noodle pudding recipe lives on and has now evolved to include one new ingredient suggested by my granddaughter. My recipe file is filled not only with foods, but with people, with their history, and with my ties to them. My thanks to you all: your generosity continues to sustain me.

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December 1: World AIDS Day

Tomorrow is World AIDS Day. Again. The epidemic first identified in 1981 has now claimed over a half a million lives in this country, over 25 million worldwide.

Little was known about its cause or treatment in those first years. The one definitive thing that was established early–prevention–was silenced by the Reagan administration, which was more concerned about offending its supporters on the religious right than about doing right. By the time the word AIDS passed President Reagan’s lips in 1987, more than 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed and 20,000 had died.

Meanwhile, activist groups like New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP, and AIDS Action Committee in Boston were founded. Their mission was prevention–spreading the very explicit word on condoms–and service to those who were HIV-positive. I was a volunteer with GMHC and those days were unforgettable. Nothing went on there that was small; everyone was a hero. I remember the people I knew there with huge admiration.

Here in the Boston area there is an exhibit of part of that early political struggle around AIDS education, prevention, and care. “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis 1987-1993 is on view until December 23 at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street in Cambridge.

I will be spending time there on World AIDS Day there, honoring the astounding courage shown by so many and remembering that silence still equals death.

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Thanks-giving

In between making the third kind of cranberry sauce and the carrot pudding for my family’s holiday dinner, I’m taking time out to write this. I’m sure everyone who writes a blog or a newspaper column or an e-mail to a friend is composing a similar message today, but that’s fine. It’s as it should be.

A few years ago on a trip to Key West, I was struck by the “sunset celebration” that goes on there every evening at the water’s edge. In the travel article I wrote on that trip I said, “If the sun set only once a year, so the folk wisdom goes, everyone would stop to watch. In Key West they watch it every day.” I think, too, of a Jewish teaching that, at the end of our days, we will be called to account for every fruit in its season that we did not taste.

Isn’t that what Thanksgiving is all about–noticing the things–small as a pear, huge as a sunset–that enrich every one of our days?

I wish you all a holiday warmed by the presence of loving family and friends. I hope you find yourself surrounded by what nurtures you. And I wish us all the good sense to notice.