Want to first give a memorial shout out to the artist Betye Saar who passed away last week. She received tributes from all major media. I have been lucky enough to see her work on display in various museums and galleries. Images of her art are widely available on the internet. I return to them frequently for inspo. Her artistic expression was satire-laden assemblage, and I’m a big fan of that, and she was awfully good at it.
Betye Saar's 1972 piece The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Meanwhile, my writing continues, as does reading, thinking, notetaking, and I’ve added a new habit: staring into space.
As W.S. Merwin wrote “the trouble with pleasure is the timing.” Yesterday as I lay dying and reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, my laughter practically healing me, I got about why, and how i came to be, a writer.
I attended the University of Southern California (USC) for the same number of semesters (3) that William Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi (Old Miss).
Bedight with delight, John Keats went to the ocean for the same reason I do, to refresh “ears…dinn’d with uproar rude/or fed too much with cloying melody.”
Just a coincidence? Or are there a deeper connections. For example, I was born in Chicago as were Sandra Cisneros, John Dos Passos, Patricia Smith, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sherwood Anderson, Fenton Johnson, and Studs Turkle, among many others.
I'll give it some more thought.
And in closing, have I mentioned that my hometown library participates in a consortium of county, city, and university libraries in California where if one library doesn’t have the book being requested, there’s a good chance that one of the other libraries will. I’ve requested books from libraries all over state and they’re ready to pick up at my hometown library usually within seven days.
Works used for this post:
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, 1931
The Window Seat, by Aminatta Forna, 2021
The Shadow of Sirius, by W.S. Merwin, 2008
And various poems by John Keats, circa 1820
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