Dead Letter Department #122

weather report

Well, my dearly beloveds, if you’re reading this, it means you made it through Thanksgiving, however touch & go it might have been at the time. As I’ve written about here before, I am not an observer or an admirer of these winter holidays, but that does not mean, unfortunately, that I can wriggle through them unscathed, like some sort of oblivious eel. I mostly turned my brain off for a couple of days, spending my time scarfing down the first few of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, with occasional sojourns in Stardew Valley, and then took myself off for a field trip in Seattle on Friday. I’m not a good city driver, or perhaps more importantly, a good city parker, so I simply scurry into the outrageously expensive parking garage underneath and disgorge myself into the museum elevator like the country mouse I am.

It’s been ages since I visited SAM, possibly even as long ago as S & N’s last visit, & longer since I took myself by myself, which is a whole different type of art day. There were new exhibits everywhere, including the lobby (pictured above), a redo of the American wing, and a Saul Steinberg hallway (although this may just have been new to me, since it was the first time I sought the bathroom out on that floor). I could see the pinholes in the corners of his sketches, the crumples where they had been folded, and I kept thinking about how much my dad would have liked seeing them.

Part of what’s enjoyable, of course, is watching other people looking at things, which on this visit included all kinds of family configurations, looking a little tired and overstuffed, including one ten year old who had clearly already contracted a terrible case of museum leg, which he was treating in an attitude of complete exhaustion, fully laid out on a bench near the restrooms. I inadvertently found myself pulled into the gravitational sink of a pair of women, both very chic, divided by about thirty years, with the older one seeming to conduct some sort of single student lecture, constantly eliciting the younger one’s thoughts, refining them with careful questions. It was tempting to trail along discreetly behind them, but seemed to rude to take it past a couple of paintings, so I never did figure out if it was some sort of curatorial training or just the smallest art history class I’d ever seen. The exhibit was interesting enough that I may try to go back before it closes, and those of you in the Real Mail subscription tier will be getting a postcard from the show before long.

This was one of my favorite pictures: of course it is impossible to feel the scope as you squint at the screen, but try to imagine the dimensions, if you would (almost 5.5 feet long & 4 wide), and that gaze, coming right off the painting at you.

Afterwards, I walked up to Pike Place Market, which was simply swarmed with tourists, all posing in front of the sign and making pleased exclamations at the fish counter. I wedged into the roped-off line at Mee Sum to procure lunch to bring home, which I always end up wishing I’d bought more of, dim sum-less as my small city is. I was lecturing myself firmly on how I really need to get into Seattle more often, and isn’t it a shame and a waste to live so close & go so rarely, etc, when the traffic well outside Marysville bogged down to a crawl and I abruptly remembered why: sometimes it takes an hour an half to get home, sometimes it takes three.

It took me ages to put together the particular pieces, as I inched forward, and then I felt both foolish & slightly indignant: doesn’t everyone shop online now? Still, it was Black Friday at the outlet malls, and the off-ramps were packed so full of shoppers they were backed up all the way onto the highways. I am sure there is an inducement that would persuaded me to shop under those circumstances, but it is difficult to imagine.

The weekend I spent doing chores and a round dozen of those small projects that accumulate around the edges of a life, niggling at your attention when you glance at them, though there doesn’t ever seem to be enough capacity to get them all done, and by the time evening rolled around I felt satisfied with my progress. The house was clean & good smelling, all the laundry was done, with fresh sheets on the bed, and the chaos had been reduced, just in time for me to go for a walk with C. at the abandoned golf course, always a delightful & slightly apocalyptic feeling circuit to walk.

Now we’re truly into the long, cold slide of December, which can feel dark and precipitous, not least because that last week is just so hard. I’ll be trying to plan for it without fixating, always a delicate balance, and keeping a bit rigidly to my routine in the meantime with the hopes of both socking away a chunk of side gig money to make up for that lost week of work and skittering into that fresh calendar with a big swathe of my draft finished. Progress is being made; I’m too superstitious to say more on that at the moment.

reading room

In addition to the Bujold, I’ve also been reading Glitch, snatched up off the shelf of personal recommendations by the librarians downtown, and Chasing Beauty, a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which I am hoping to be more immersed in as I go on. It’s a little heavy at the moment on the biographer’s unconvincing use of “we assume” & “it is thought,” but I think that’s likely due to a lightly documented early life, and once we get into the meat of it, she will feel more real to me. I’m hoping to persuade J. to figure out how to go back to that museum with me sometime, maybe the next time I’m flying into Boston.

I’ve also assigned myself 20 pages of poetry a day, and am about to spring out the other side of my beloved old copy of A Geography of Poets (sadly out of print), given to me decades ago by B., which I never got all the way through until now. It’s amazing how many of my favorites are represented there in brief, or in their youth. After that I’ll be poking at my to read pile until it coughs up some more poetry, but if you have recommendations, you can always send them to departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. If you want to write, you must read, and so many of my favorite writers make a discipline of it as well as a pleasure.

More soon, my friends, and in the meantime, may you find your end of the month (& end of the year) plans are shaping up into something coherent & tolerable, even if that’s to simply go to ground in your winter warren, as the small animals most sensibly do.