New bike, break-in ride, Binghamton, NY
My bike’s final resting place …
… well, not “final,” exactly, but the last time I saw it, back when it owned it earlier today.
Someone stole it. I figure they needed it more than I did. Go in good health, both of you.
My bike had a really great parking spot, though, the last time I parked it: across the street from the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. To the thieves’ credit, they have a good eye. I imagine them shopping, comparing — look, nice blue fenders on that one — wait — a red Cannondale!
Behind Jawlensky’s “Girl With The Green Face”
In my WRD103 and 104 courses this year we discussed Alexei Jawlensky’s 1910 painting, Girl With the Green Face as an exercise in textual and contextual analysis, with an eye toward meaning: what does it mean?
The painting seems particularly well suited for that kind of analysis and reflection: its subject is ambiguous (she is, in fact, a girl with a green face); Jawlensky isn’t the most well known of painters, making research that much more difficult; and the painting hangs here in Chicago, at the Art Institute, where, in Gallery 392 in the new Modern Wing, it is surrounded by much more well known artists and paintings.
We initially discussed methods of analysis and meaning-making and compared them to the ways we discuss textual artifacts:
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Rubén Darío
Rubén Darío, Nicaraguan poet (1867-1916) is on the 500 Cordoba bill; the other side represents a literacy classroom.
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Kayo Miwa’s “Winter Shadows”
From her new work in oils, shown in her September show at the Vertin Gallery, Calumet, MI. We’re making arrangements to use the image as the cover art for the Keweenaw Poetry Anthology, Vol. I.
Reading at Busboys & Poets: Washington D.C.
Busboys and Poets, a bookstore, gallery, and restaurant at 14th St and U Ave., is named for Langston Hughes, who worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in the 1930s, prior to gaining recognition as a poet.
This reading took place in the expansive and beautiful Langston Hughes Room.
From the restaurant’s site:
In the early 1920’s Hughes resided in Washington DC where he worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. Working at the Hotel, located at 2660 Woodley Road, NW, resulted in a stroke of good luck for the money-strapped Hughes. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, the famous Russian poet, stayed there. Due to the City’s segregated policy, Hughes could not attend the poet’s reading in the auditorium. However, using the ingenuity characterized by his fictional creation, Jesse B. Semple, Hughes hatched a plan. After writing out three of his poems, “Jazzonia,” “Negro Dancers,” and “The Weary Blues,” on a piece of paper, he placed them beside Lindsay’s dinner plate one evening. As he picked up trays of dishes, Hughes saw Lindsay reading them. That night, Lindsay read Hughes’ work with his own. The next day, in local newspapers, Lindsay informed the world of his discovering a “Negro busboy poet.”
Shortly thereafter, Hughes gained nationwide fame when an interview by reporters appeared in The Associated Press.
