Postcards and Chess: The Creative Act: BookMarks Update, May, 2024

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Friends:

The creative act of art making is ultimately the personal response to the omnipresent questions of "who am I?" and "what am I doing here?". I spent a large part of my reading time this month with two artists whose unique explorations of these questions I found to be particularly moving and powerful. Before focusing on On Kawara and his postcards and Georges Perec and his chess moves, here is a list of the books I read in May:

On Kawara was a Japanese-American conceptual artist who died in 2014 shortly before I attended a major retrospetive exhibit of his work at The Guggenheim in New York entitled 'Silence'. It was not quite a 'Stendahl Moment' (defined as " a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations,^[allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty."), but it did have a profound impact on me then and in the years since. I describe Kawara's work in greater detail in the two book reviews hyperlinked above and in my web site about writing poscards, (www.EpsteinReads.com/postcards) but the brief summary of his artistic practice is that he spent his life observing, exploring, and ultimately recording the passing of time. In his daily postcards (I Got Up), his random telegrams (I Am Still Alive), his journals of where he went and who he met, his Today series of more than 3000 Date Paintings, his 100 year calendars, and his one million years past and future ten volume sets, Kawara, with unflagging regularity and repetition, explored the paradox of our limited time on earth---every day is precious yet nearly every day is forgettable and mundane.

I left the Guggenheim that day nine years ago profoundly impressed with Kawara's work, and adopted his postcard art project as a way of approaching my own struggle with the world's beauty and impermancence. Beginning on January 1, 2016, I've sent one or two postcards every day, whether in Vermont or Copenhagen, Cambridge or Jerusalem, to friends informing them of the date, where I was writing from, the number of the postcard (today's was #3108), the day of my life (today was 28,746), and what time I got up (5:54AM). I also send a postcard to each of my four grandchildren ages 2-9 every Monday, a present and future connection to those who will live on after I am gone. Among the many motives for these two practices, the one that has worked to center me over these last few years is the message, "I am Here. You are There. Isn't it wonderful that we are stil in this beautiful world on this day".

I don't want to trivialize Kawara's art with reference to my own efforts at art making. You should read the wonderful essay by Lynne Tillman in the Glenstone book; read the first essay in the Guggenheim catalogue; leaf through the beautifully reproduced images of his work in these two volumes. Visit Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland where the three Moon Landing Date Paintings are on permanent display. Let me know if you'd like a postcard. Dwell on this creative artist's 'self-observation' as he struggled to come to terms with time, place, and impermanance.

Georges Perec, though born only four years after Kawara, comes from a world that could not have been more different, but he also spent his life struggling with creative ways to address mortality and the paradox of his precious/mundane quotidian life. The son of Polish Jews who immigrated to Paris in the 1930's, he was orphaned by the Nazis, his father dying in WWII fighting for France and his mother murdered at Auschwitz. Whlle working as an archivist, he wrote poems, essays, and fiction, and when he was invited to join Oulipo in 1967, his creative work soared. Oulipo was a small group of French writers and mathematicians who sought to push beyond the usual limits of writing by setting constraints within which to write. For example, Perecs wrote 'The Void', an entire novel which reads as any other book except it is written without any letter 'e's. Similarly, his book 'The Exeter Text', was written with no vowels except the letter 'e'. Do not attempt this at home!

A 2019 New Yorker review of Perec's work described him in this way. “Even if Georges Perec had not written a novel without the letter “E”—“La disparition,” later rendered into “E”-less English as “A Void”—he would still be one of the most unusual writers of the twentieth century. Among his works are a treatise on the board game Go, a radio play about a machine that analyzes poetry, an autobiography cast in the form of a novel about a city of athletes, an approximately twelve-hundred-word palindrome, a crypto-Marxist anatomy of consumerist Paris, a scrupulously researched history of a wholly fictional painting, a deeply eccentric bucket list (“buy a number of domestic appliances” and “travel by submarine” are among the entries), a memoir composed of four hundred and eighty stand-alone sentences that all begin “I remember,” a novella in which the only vowel used is “E,” a lyric study of Ellis Island, and, from 1976 until his death from cancer, in 1982, a weekly crossword puzzle for the newspaper Le Point. It would be hard to disagree with Italo Calvino that Perec “bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else.”

'Life: A User's Manual' is a strange and beautiful book. Ostensibly the story of the inhabitants of an apartment building in Paris near the Parc Monceau, it constantly takes the reader down one worm hole after another, more than 100 strange 'tales' triggered by an object in an apartment, a painting on a wall, or a past association of the apartment dweller. Amongst all of these stories there are lists of people, objects, activities, etc. that maddemed me with their irrelevant details as Perecs darted up and down and side to side among the building's 22 apartments and their current and former inhabitants. Only upon completing the novel did I read that the seemingly random order of the book's chapters about the tenants and their lives, backgrounds and possessions had been dictated by a chess problem. The Knight's Progress is a classic chess puzzle in which the knight's standard move (2 plus 1 or 1 plus 2) touches down in every square on the chessboard without landing on any square more than once. It's a maddening and brilliant book, filled with wonder and boring detail----not very different than Kawara's work!

There is another fascinating connection between Kawara and Perec. Kawara's most important work is 'Today', the Date Paintings he made over a period of 48 years while the central action in Perec's novel involved an individual who painted a seascape at a regular time and date over a period of 50 years. Kawara painted over 3000 Day Paintings using one of 8 standard canvas sizes. He painted a background of one of three colors (blue, red, grey) and then painted the date in white sans serif letters and numbers in the language of the city where he was that day. If the painting wasn't finished by midnight he destroyed it. If it was finished , he placed the painting in a cardboard box he had made lined with newspapers from that day----a unique way of marking another day in his life.

The main character in Perec's book is one Percival Bartlebooth, an Englishman living in rooms on the fourth floor. Bartlebooth was a wealthy 30-something when he embarked on a conceptual art project. Having taken art lessons with another apartment dweller and having a fondness for jigsaw puzzles, he decided to embark on a trip around the world with his man servant Smautpf, stopping at a seaside location every two weeks to paint a watercolor of the scene to be completed on that day. He mailed these watercolors back to Paris to Gaspard Winckler who lived on the seventh floor and who glued the watercolor to a wooden board and then cut it into 750 pieces to create a nearly impossible jig saw puzzle. The puzzle was then delivered to Bartlebooth in a specially designed cardboard box made by another resident of the building. After Bartlebooth finished solving the jigsaw puzzle (a process that sometimes took him the full two weeks!), the puzzle was then treated with a special chemical invented by Morellet who lived on the top floor of the building to separate the reconstructed watercolor from the wood. The watercolor was then sent by Bartlebooth back to an agent at the original site of that painting who, provided with a special solvent, treated the watercolor to remove all paint. The blank white sheet was then sent back to Bartlebooth. This exercise was carried out 500 times over a period of 20 years!!! Whew.

Date paintings. Jigsaw puzzles. Postcards. Chess---creative responses to address those ultimate questions----who am I and what am I doing here.

The rest of the reading in May included two books whose fast paced, tense plots were a good antidote to the more weighty readings in Kawara and Perec. Daniel Silva in "The Collector'and Richard Stark in 'The Outfit' have both created fascinating characters who remain compelling despite more than 20 novels featuring each of them. Silva's latest book has Gideon Allon, an art preservationist and former head of the Israeli equivalent of the CIA, saving the world from a Putin plot to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine---very au currant. In contrast, Stark's Parker is a laconic, hard living criminal whose heists, partners, and escapes from the law began with "The Outfit" more than fifty years ago. Both of these series are well worth the time for escape and beach reading.

The essays of Gaiman (accompanied by great cartoons) and Cusk (accompanied by beautiful photographs) about art making make for fine reading as do the beautiful elegiac poems by Frederica Steinberg about her late husband, Arthur, their long love affair, and the world after his death.

Christopher Hitchens, a Brit who lived most of his life in the U.S., died in 2011. He was a 'bad boy' essayist and reporter whose work never failed to stimulate thought and often brought a smile as he lambasted politicians, hack writing, and the general quirks and failures of the world. These pieces published in the London Review of Books though a bit uneven and too England-o-centric, were fun and entertaining.

The late Amos Oz is perhaps Israel's best known writer, and this book of interconnected short stories is a fine example of his work. Situated in a kibbutz in the early days of Israel, the stories convey the universality of the human condition---love, loss, conflict, ideals and the failure to live by them. Worth reading.

Finally, Elisabeth Tova Bailey tells the story of her years-long struggle with a little understood and undiagnosed autoimmune condition that resulted in her being bed-ridden and how that loss of her old life was made somewhat tolerable by living with a wild land snail. The snail provided her with distraction and a subject for in depth study. She shares the story of her illness which was reminiscent of Meaghan O'Rourke's "The Invisible Kingdom" another excellent book about chronic, non-specific illness which doctors chalked up to female hysteria in the not so distant past. Perhaps more than I wished to know about snails, but a valuable read nonetheless.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles has had a challenging though ultimately rewarding history. Beginning in 2008 or so, I began to place poems on a beautiful, twisted, ancient cherry tree along the Charles River not far from our home. Using laminated sheets to protect the poems and plastic ties to protect the tree, I would often sit on a nearby bench admiring the River and watching walkers, runners, and bicycle riders stop to read the two or three poems. After several years of this practice, the laminated sheets began to disappear, often on the same day I posted them, and despite a 'Columbo-like stakeout' from my car on Mt. Auburn Street, I never did identify the culprit who either loved poetry so much that he/she had to have my copies or who hated this man-made incursion on the riverine nature.

At any rate, I abandoned the actual Tree and went virtual around 2015, creating the web site Poetry on the Charles and posting 4-5 poems each month hyperlinked to my BookMarks updates. That system worked splendidly until last month when Word Press informed me that the site had become 'inaccessible'. My crack IT team, i.e. Eliza in Salt Lake City) and her consultant, I.e. John in California) determined that the web site might be able to be reconstructed but only at significant expense of time and dollars.

Instead, I've decided to keep the label but use the monthly update to link to several of my favorite poems each month, bypassing the defunct site. In this first try at this approach, I've chosen works by Billy Collins, Donald Hall, and Robert Frost.

Finally, in closing, I'm drawn to the comments of three interesting writers who considered the paradox of time as did Kawara and Perec. Joan Didion, wrote "Everyday is all we have." Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, "Ritual is a machine for the destruction of time." Lynne Tillman in writing about Kawara wrote that he "dedicated himself to a single lifetime project, the Today series, in which he strove to emphasize the most ordinary and fundamental fact of life----having it."

Good reading and good travelling!