Meredith Sue Willis

Author and Teacher-- Personal Blog and Photos

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February 5, 2010

I'm exhausted: took a train and two subways to go to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to do an author visit in a new charter school-- so far all sixth graders: the Summit Academy Charter School. Look at the website to see some of the kids I taught!

It was a good experience but wore me out. Just twenty or thirty blocks from where we used to live-- I crossed Court Street and Clinton and Henry and Hicks. Neat to be down there, briefly in Carroll Gardens, then under the BQE and over to the school. The kids were lots of fun-- a teacher founded school, and my connection via Teachers & Writers has written them (successfully) some grants. Lots of emphasis on colleges-- they have signs saying the year their class will graduate from high school and college!

 

January 30, 2010

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sad the book is done, also relieved, looking out at a still and extremely cold day. The book was Baltasar and Blimunda, so far my favorite of Saramago's, along with Blindness, but B & B is so much younger a.k.a. hopeful in its attitudes. Historical, magical realistic, politically astute, with working class characters.

 

We went out last night to the new restaurant just opening, Hat City Kitchen. The food was really good, the menu limited so far, but it's home style and Louisiana, full bar, very attractive, and last night anyhow mostly patronized by people from South Orange and Maplewood! There's to be music often, and here's the part that is unusual and really interesting: it is not owned by individuals, but rather by HANDS (Housing and Neighborhood Development Services) in Orange.

The concept is that HANDS has been buying properties and investing in "The Valley" in Orange, the small working class and formerly industrial (hat factories, for example) town north of South Orange and south of West Orange. They are renting spaces to artists, and now opening this moderately upscale or at least, meant-to-be trendy restaurant with music in the bar. I wonder if it will work out?

I’ve got an invitation to participate in a literary reading in another of the HANDS locations, the Luna theater. It seems to me that this is at least possibly part of the spilloover work of our South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race : that we may see white people re-integrating 75% African-American Orange-- for arts and entertainment, but perhaps also the good but cheap housing stock. Regional integration strategy? And what about super-white Millburn? When does that become a location of choice for People of Color?

 

 

 

 
Close Harmonies: Reading, Music, and Dancing: 1983 in New York City.
MSW on left, then Maggie Anderson, and on far right, Marc Harshman.     

 

 

 

January 22, 2010

 

Well, a day away from the computer, and it takes me over an hour to do the various tasks associated with email. I did a little more than that-- a homework from the online class, but mostly email.

I got so behind because I spent yesterday in New York, including a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. I hadn’t been there since it reopened, which I now learn was in fall 2004-- a little over five years! I've been going a lot to the Metropolitan, where I have a membership, and also doing more museum visits when I'm away from home, like the Sterling Clark in Williamstown, and of course San Francisco Museums, the winter the MOMA reopened, we went to Italy. The truth is, I don't go to museums nearly as much as I think of the art there.

Anyhow, at the MOMA, I especially like the way everything circles around the central space. Right now, there's a huge whale skeleton, real but with paint on it, hanging on the second floor and you see it from below and later from above. This is by Gabriel Orozco, along with a lot of other things. I liked his work (but I still can’t get clear his family line– was the great contemporary of Siquieros and Rivera and all of them his grandfather? My lazy-- emphasis on the lazy-- google search isn't answering my question. Anyhow, he does a lot of different things, worth looking at more.

I was less enamored of the very crowded Tim Burton exhibit– I like his movie work pretty well, but didn’t find the sketches particularly exciting, or maybe just didn’t like the crowds.

Also just wandered around enjoying the space and visiting old friends– Matisse’s big red room and Chagall’s floating goatheads and lovers and oh all the incredible stuff there in MOMA. Blows you away, really. When I first went, they still have Guernica in your face.

Monet’s water lilies are in a not-huge gallery on the second or third floor next to a café-- almost perfunctory, as if the new curators are saying, Okay, tourists, you came to see the water lilies, here they are now get over it.

Even less pride of place to Christina’s World, also on a lower floor in a hall–easy to find, but dimly lit and just there. A message-- disdain for the tourists? A statement about how rapidly modern art isn't modern anymore?

The water lilies seemed smaller than they used to be. Partly the old room was hushed, and I remember it as spacious and lavender or blue, with a small peek out to the street, and they so enormous just two of the big paneled paintings. Partly I was so much younger and so much one of the breathless ones: Oh! The actual Water lilies! Themselves! Here they are!

Otherwise yesterday was bright cold New York, Ingrid down at a café on Second Avenue and tenth, then to Carol’s for writers’ group, and we had a really animated discussion (centered on Joan’s story) about couples and sex after seventy.

 

January 19, 2008

Bad news for health care and a progressive legislative agenda: the Republicans took the special Senate election in Massachusetts. Americans express their frustration almost always by Throwing The Bums out. Some comfort: a beautiful old photo by Charlie Cowger of a snowy day on Palmer's hill in Shinnston.

 

 

January 8, 2010

Tonight is my third (!) fund raiser Appalachian Coal Miner's dinner-- this one a fund raiser for the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race-- and I've got eight people coming, plus Andy and me and my mother, who won't sit at the table. It's legal moonshine and a miniature coal car on the coffee table, Songs of the Coalfields in the cd player, lots of Appalachian books on the side tables. I know what I'm going to wear, and the cooking is pretty much under control. All pig, mostly: pork chops, mustard greens cooked in bacon, beans cooked with bacon, cole slaw, potatoes (fake fried), cornbread, and biscuits. Oh, and pies! apple from Costco, berry pie, and vinegar pie!

 

 

Happy 2010!

 

1-2-2010

 

On not being articulate

People assume that if you are a writer, you are articulate, but I have never been very fluent with words– that is, with precise words, long words, vocabulary words. I have always tended to expressive language, word pictures, a surprising word that, if I'm lucky, conveys what I want it to. People I think of as British-trained in universities and high style will write pages and fluent pages with the the perfect word, the great word, the most precise word. I love it when I know those words, and there was a time in my life when I kept elaborate lists of words as I learned them, but when I am precise and especially when I use big words, I am almost always wandering exuberantly in what feels like someone else’s arena.

I also have odd losses, of fairly common words, possibly psychological blanks as once a few years back I lost AUTISM for a week or two.

Technology is exacerbating the problem because I'm developing some new means of expression-- I can make web pages with pictures, for example, and I think some of my struggles with computers and html and now desk top publishing are cutting into my vocabulary developing spaces.

 

Special New Year Book Deal!

Buy any book by Meredith Sue Willis by mail order and get 10% off your entire order (exclusive of tax, shipping and handling).  For information on books (or to order online--no discount), see Commentary. To order by mail with discount, go to Orders.

 

 

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