In Arts Last Week

Top: Patricia Clarkson at the Cafe Loup in the Village, NYC
Middle: A new production of "Madame Butterfly" at Santa Fe Opera
Bottom: A tribute performance to Merce Cunningham in New York roughly titled, "We Give Ourselves Away At Every Moment." (NYTimes)

Images For You

Alfred Dreyfus in 1884. (all photos provided by the New York Times Book Review)




















Two Earlier Novelists: William Somerset Maugham and E. M. Forster



















Soldiers at Roehampton Hospital in London, a center for prosthetic limbs, after World War I.
























A Contemporary Novelist-Lily King

Discovered Poetry--Found Buried Amid The Prose

A dancer who is worshiped as a part-time god,
A female mystic who inhabits a cremation ground
Drinking from skulls,
A sculptor of Hindu idols who believes
He is creating live deities,
A Tibetan monk who enrolls in the Indian Army
In the hope of returning to his homeland,
But ends up killing Pakistanis.

They are survivors from a seductively various world.
Ascetics and mystics,
Mendicant singers and dancers,
Yogic initiates and outcasts.

The nun Prasannamati Mataji is a follower of Jainism.
Mataji’s gentle companion,
Mortally ill with tuberculosis,
Took her own life in the Jain fashion,
Starving herself to death
By stages,
In ritual self-purification.

Mataji is afflicted with the sin
Of intensely missing her.
Mataji has decided to follow the same
Slowly suicidal path,
Although her health is good
And she is still young.

Manisha Ma Bhairavi,
A mystic, worships the demonic god Tara.
She has fled her violent husband
And even deserted her children
To find refuge among sadhus,
Wandering holy men,
In a Bengali cremation ground.
She seeks comfort among other tolerant outcasts
In the goddess’s care.

Ash-smeared and naked,
They sip tea and listen to cricket on the radio.
“It is here, in this place of death,
Amid the skulls and bones and smoking funeral pyres,
That we have found love."
.
[These words, which read as poetry--were discovered amid the statements of a very common form, the book review. They did not reside adjacent to each other but hide among the the ordinary statements of book selling, emerging to be heard only when we listened with the mind's ear. -je] from a review of the book, "Nine Lives," by William Dalrymple and reviewed by Colin Thubron whose next book, "To A Mountain In Tibet" will be published in March (New York Times Book Review dated July 18, 2010)

Atop An Ocean-Drilling Oil Rig

Equipment used to drill for oil under the ocean--a mile deep.

At The Edge of the Earth

The ship contains the orange "Union 76" ball and also the logos for Bank of America and other entities. --from the painting "Ship Shape" by Scott Greene in a gallery exhibition now at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco through Aug. 21. Reviewed by Kenneth Baker in the SF Chronicle Saturday July 17, 2010

Still Mortal--After All These Years

. Beginning of life makes being older the goal. I'm not 7, I'm 7 AND A HALF! Can't wait to get a driving permit. Can't wait for that day to come. Then the mad hustle begins, with leaps through phases that make your head spin. Proximity makes clear vision possible--so that the current place far from proximate youth makes youth seem all hazy now. But, the proximate is now the other end of the timeline. Spending time with hospitalized people offers the view of all of the steps that we don't want to know about. The tubes, the beds and especially the aging process. It is even possible to see all the way to the end of the line. Don't stare too long. Medusa is there. -je
. "Lots of people get cranky when they get old, largely because they're dealing with pain and fear. It's a good excuse, certainly--I ain't gonna judge it but Richard's embracing of kindness strikes me as a lot more noble.
. The other thing I learned from Richard: Don't give up. Of course, don't give up jousting with [it] , but raging against the dying of the light is only one part of the process. Don't give up being kindly either. Indeed, be more kindly. See if you can do it. See if you can leave a legacy even larger than the one you already have. And if it turns out that you're alive three years from now, hey, it's all gravy." -Jon Carroll

Process . . . Completion . . .Process Again- -Never Finished

. The act of completion, for artists, provokes profound emotion. The painter Arshile Gorky once said that he never finished a piece but that "I just stop working on it for a while." [Artists] . . . speak to the somewhat artificial lines we draw to pronounce a work of art complete. Though it may be ready for departure, the creator can feel a pull to go on painting forever, the way one would feel pulled to continue nurturing a child.
. Or the way a novelist might feel pulled to reopen a story, even decades after closing it, intent on writing fresh resonance into the characters' world.
. --excerpted from a review of the novel "Beautiful Maria of My Soul" by Oscar Hijuelos. Reviewed and quotation from Carolina De Robertis [Special to The SF Chronicle] Sunday July 11, 2010

Neighbor Saves Scores From The Edge

SYDNEY Australia--In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. "Why don't you come and have a cup of tea?" the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his smile was often their salvation.

Don Ritchie Keep His Watch In Australia

For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia's most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called the Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.
. He's saved 160 people according to the official tally. "I'm offering them an alternative, really," Ritchie says. A smile cannot, of course, save everyone. . . But simple kindness can be surprisingly effective.
. Mental health professionals tell the story of a note left behind by a man who jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. The man wrote, "If one person smiles at me on the way to the bridge, I will not jump." Ritchie helps those . . . think beyond the terrible current moment.
. Psychiatrist Gordon Parker: "They often don't want to die, it's more that they want the pain to go away. So anyone that offers kindness or hope has the capacity to help a number of people."
. from The San Francisco Chronicle, Monday June 14, 2010