Cassandra Langer

There are hundreds of them out there that you can apply for. If you are really, really good at this sort of writing you may even get some money at some point in the process. For most of us the time it takes and the effort just makes it counter productive. Yet here I am once again pushing the rock up the hill in hopes of getting some money, time and space to finish my work. You would think I would have learned after all these years what a waste of my time it is. I simply do not write grant speak. I’d rather be really writing with a voice that doesn’t have to conform to formula. I’ll let you know if that works this year.

Enjoyed watching Tennis matches, particularly the women’s competitions. New stars on the horizon. Can hardly wait to see who will be the winner.

The political song and dance goes on with more stupidity than I can comment on here. I would need volumes to comment on the absurdity of it all. We need universal health-care coverage for every citizen in this country. That’s the long and short of it. Our so called representatives need to stop mucking around with their puppet masters and get back on track with what is moral and human in a civilized society. Clothed the naked, feed the hungry and provide health-care for the sick as well as a living wage for the majority of their citizens. It’s really very simple.

Am getting ready to go to Allen Frame’s opening tomorrow at Gittleman gallery off 75th and Lexington here in NYC. Allen is a wonderful photographer. He illustrates the Robert Bolano covers with his noirishly alluring black and white photographs. His new show, however, features some of the most nuanced and subtle color available in contemporary photography.

Have been under house arrest for six weeks now trying to meet a labor day deadline. I am so tired of fact checking that I am cross-eyed. These all nighters are really killers. I envy people who just dash off deadlines as if they were taking a walk around the block. Then there are all the permissions, copyrights and tracking down who actually owns what. Seems like a heck of a lot to go through get to open up new paths in Romaine Brooks studies or any studies for that matter. Does anyone out there care about critical thinking any more or the life of the mind. It seems to be that infotainment has taken over the airwaves and you can’t really tell what’s real.

Take the absurdity going on about health care reform. In Italy they send you to a spa when you need a rest, in Mexico you can get health care for a song. WHY is it the US of A is unable to meet the challenge of providing its people with affordable health care? I fail to understand why we are not up to the challenge. Could it be that all of the town hall spin is just to take us off point. The arguments about government controlled “socialist” healthcare are pure dada–congress has it–I wonder if President O took it away–and said now we are all in the same boat-how quickly this could be resolved so that we ALL could have prime healthcare like our so-called “representatives.” Just a thought!

I have been plunged into thinking about Romaine Brooks’s works and how music seems to have influenced her work. I keep wondering how many other artists were as deeply affected by the rhythms, cadences, chromatics and harmonies that one finds in all kinds of music? In her case the closest Match seems to be Debussy, especially his La Mer.

I think music is very much a part of anyone’s life but I think artists and writers are especially attuned to what composers of all sorts of music create. It’s like shaking hands across a communal table during a gourmet meal.

It’s late and I have been writing most of the day and evening so I am knocking off. I skipped the news. It is almost impossible. All of these unethical tactics straight out of Carl Rove’s play book. Do we have any “decent” representation or is democracy dead. I feel campaign reform might be one small step toward being able to get some half-way honest statespeople to run for office that actually are of the people, by the people adn FOR the people. Right now all we see are scum bags whose only concern is making sure they get the whole pie all to themselves with not a crumb left over for anyone who can’t grab a piece for themselves as they climb up the backs of the folks they are “supposedly” representing. A sad day for American and for those of us who still care.

Sacrifice (July 22, 2009)

Today

your take off your burqa

put on a backless sun dress

uncover your head letting

your dark hair stream

out into the sunlight

as you walk the streets of Tehran

heels clicking on the concrete

You hear them coming from behind

a pack of ravening hyenas

crazed for the kill

in only nanoseconds

they will beat you into the ground

spill your innocent blood laughing

as your life runs out on the merciless pavement

crush your bones into power with their clubs

teaching you what holy lesson

The photograph shows you

broken headed bloody

your streaming tresses

now matted with blood

your brains spattered

your bones broken

your flesh pulverized

you are a disobedient girl

a threat to mullah order

deserving of death

You dare to speak directly

saying, “Do you want to beat me?”

He replies, YES, YES, YES

breathlessly banging his club

eyes glittering with blood lust

fucks the consciousness out of you

fading you repeated the names of your family

as each ruthless blow silences you

“I believe in freedom, redemption, the holy Prophet

you are not of him!”

Your slender hope dies

running between the stones

where your blood demands

that the lies be laid to rest

with your beautiful body

your marytr’s soul

Do not miss the Patricia Cronin exhibit at the Sackler Feminist Center at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NYC. Cronin’s exhibit is a homage to the 19th Century sculptor, Harriet Hosmer who was the inspiration for Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. Hosmer was a friend of the Brownings and a lover of women. She helped to support Emma Stebbins another sculptor whose lover was the actress Charlotte Cushman, one of the original drag kings. Cronin’s water colors are real collector’s items. Done in velvety rich blacks and luminous whites with touches of gray they glow with a radiance that speaks the love the artist has for her subjects. Cronin painstakingly researched and attempted to restore to the public all of Hosmer’s works. Many of these are lost and so instead of trying to replicate them from descriptions, Cronin created a series of “ghosts” as standins for the missing works. The book that Cronin did is a steal at $32.00 and sold in the museum shop. Distinguished American art historian, William Gerdts contributed a beautifully written information packed essay. 

Meanwhle, I will be attending the Jackson Heights Poetry Festival next weekend. It is sure to be an exciting and fun event with readings by poets from Jackson Heights and other regions. Many of these take place at the Garden School. Check it out on Facebook. Tune in for more news.

At times I wonder if any writer who isn’t a celebrity will ever be deemed “good enough” by the editors at some of the publishers we have to court to get our work out? I wonder how other serious writers academic and otherwise feel about the state of publishing now? I am thinking of a biography and art panel I recently attended in NYC. This is my forth event concerning biography and the writing of other people’s lives. I find myself deeply disappointed by what I have heard and seen. Most of the time the presenters are not prepared. They fly by the seat of their frayed pants expecting the audience to suck up to whatever they happen to let fly. Most of it is fart city and an insult to those attending. For a serious writer it is just an exercise in frustration. You wonder if these people are just plain irresponsible, so into the performative that they cannot not even access their own scripts, or just plain don’t give a damn wanting to take the money and run. The only biography sessions that have seemed serious are those that have been held by the psychohistory association which at least seems to want to know something about the person’s background, life and how they constructed themselves in the world as well as how that played out in their interior life.

On a better not Anyone who hasn’t seen the Louise Bourgeois film-The spider, the mistress and the tangerine which is playing in NYC at the Film Forum should not miss it. This is a model of what art/biographers and interviewers might achive if they put their nose to the grindstone and their minds to giving audiences insights into art and artists.

My Brooks works comes along gradually as we move into her life in the aftermath of WWII. The Italian situation is complex and requires understanding what an incoherent mess Italy was after the German’s surrendered. The hows and whys of Brooks’s decision to stay in Italy rather than return to France with her lover, Natalie Barney remain obscure and misleading. In trying to tease them out of what she wrote in her ms. about the war years and in later letters one runs up against Brooks’s somewhat duplicitous representation of herself.

June roles around with new political revelations from Obama and the do nothing to help the real working class congress.  His stance on the Holocaust is encouraging but what is he really doing to make a difference? My chapters on Brooks are moving along. I hope to finish up the last two by the end of August if I am lucky.

I Am rereading Barbara Guest’s Herself Defined about the American imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) whose work I have always been crazy about and deeply influenced by as a writer by. I think she and Emily Dickensen remain my favorites. I had the pleasure of meeting Perdita (H.D.’s daughter) once out in the Hamptons. She was a very bright and lovely woman. I enjoyed our afternoon together.

Currently working on the transcript of my interview with the photographer and writer, Allen Frame. This will be finished some time next week and I hope to see it published in time for his September show here in New York City. I also want to catch Pattie Cronin’s show at the Brooklyn Museum. She has done a wonderful take off on the lesbian sculptor, Harriet Hosmer’s work. Hosmer worked in Rome and was the prototype for Henry James’s novel on the women artists there. So lots of good work happening and enjoyable.

Saw the Picasso show at Gagosin Gallery. It was remarkable. He was a prick and a genius. These last works are so free, sexy and full of life that it simply blows one away. The lushness of the paint, the sheer engagement with art and what it means to be an artist of Spanish heritage as well as dialoging with the history of art. His poetic vision in relation to the female body is astonishing in its eroticism and appreciation given how much of American culture is hateful toward women in general.  I also caught the Yayoi Kusuma show at the other Gagosin space. She is living and working in an asylum. Perhaps it is, like King of Hearts, the only sane place to be these days? Who really knows. Even so, the work engages chaos theory in ways that almost no other contemporary artist seems to be capable of doing. Her works evoke particle and wave theory in a beautiful and alive way with startling beauty. I was enthralled.

The ASJA went fairly well this year. I had seven interviews. Three of them were promising and a friend also put me in touch with an agent who was interested in the ms. The organizations is very professional and the information one gets in the panels helpful. Although I belong to PEN and have belonged to the Writer’s Guild I find ASJA the most pragmatic for those of us who are journalists as well as authors, critics, etc. I always meet interesting people, make new friends and get practical tips for realizing the goals I have set myself. Each organization has its strengths and weaknesses. I respect them all.

The publishing industry is changing so rapidly that anyone wanting to do a serious book who isn’t a celebrity is going to have to face more than a few challenges. The important thing is to believe in the work you are doing regardless. Remember not to get carried away by the hype agents put out about 6 figure books and so on and so forth. That’s all nice, well and good but reality is if you get your work out it’s all good. If you make a little money to carry you through to the next book–even better. If you do better than that with a nonfiction book that isn’t trendy–you get the gold ring. Now I have to print out the entire ms. and send it out to the agent who I think I may be working with depending on our rapport. The bottom line is keep trucking.

In service of doing that I am working on my last two chapters of the Romaine Brooks book. In rushing around last week I managed to fracture my ankle in two places rushing to catch the R train to get somewhere.  For those of you who rush around and have an A personality (well more or less) try to remember that while the mind may think it has wings the body reminds one you don’t and things can happen that really, really slow you down. So I am happily off the walker and on a cane with five weeks to recovery to go.

Despite the lay up I am working on poems, paintings and various book reviews. Let’s not talk about pain management–that’s entirely another realm. Anyone with any kind of chronic problem understands exactly what I am talking about. My latest, would you believe Lana Turner on Roller skates, is out in HG&L reviews. My Richmond Barthe just went in for edits.

Starting work on the Francis Bacon exhibit. It is hot, steaming and raw up to a point. After the late seventies it starts to taper off into monumental, decorative and a little vapid for my tastes. I think Bacon lost his edge. In many ways like Munch and Ensor who eventually made a kind of peace with their individual demons. Meanwhile back to the aftermath of World War II. and Romaine Brooks’s accommodation.

Welcome to my author’s site. I hope you enjoy sharing my world as a celebration of the life of the mind. A place where people know the difference between knowing and feeling. Where traveling restlessly from subject to subject is encouraged and animating and expanding the imaginative in significant ways is at the top of my list.

Much of the writing you see here will be about paintings and direct experiences with art and artists that I see in museums and galleries in and around New York City. My writings focus on the mythic poetic; on metaphors and symbols recalling the narratives of Proust and other writers who think of their work as labyrithine galleries and vast repositories of experiences and curiosities. So welcome to my cabinet of curiosities.

Alice in wonderland or maybe it is nightmare land! I sometimes think all the sane people should be in an institution like King of Hearts. The behavior I witness on a daily basis smacks of such barbarism that it sometimes boggles my mind. Able bodied young men and women plugged in and plugged out. Sitting on buses when people with walkers and canes are left standing because these excuses for human beings sit on their fat asses listening to i-pods and diverting their eyes–that is those of them who have any shame left in human terms. I can’t do anything much about it except bless that I am still strong enough to stand on my own and not have to sit down because of ill health. These seats–are for the handicapped, old people, pregnant women and those who cannot stand on their own. What is it about give these seats up that these excuses for human beings don’t get??? It isn’t brain surgery–Hey maybe it is? Is this the solution to common civility and sense in our society. I even had one person use the excuse that “hey we have a black president” does this make any sense? clue me in. I simply replied, yes and he has manners. Common human compassion knows no color, no age, no class. But hey, I’m a throwback to civility.