21 January 2012
An exhibit at Tibor deNagy of Elizabeth Bishop‘s art — both her original art and art she collected — reminds me that the creative process is constant. Writing, painting, collecting too – these are all acts of seeing.
I love the inscription of “Happy Birthday” here – no one knows to whom Bishop wrote this, some speculate that she wrote/painted it for herself.
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43 King Street in NYC, where EB lived not too happily (for a year or so, I believe). She was never able to feel at home in New York. ”I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s about right for a poet’s sense of home.”
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EB did not have an easy life — she was adrift, suffered heartbreaks and isolation — but she made her own way, always finding ways to live where she wanted, and how she wanted (Maine, Key West, Brazil) — as an artist. A rare and beautiful thing.
23 August 2011
So we’re finishing up Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” here, and it just gets better and better. If you haven’t watched it yet, run don’t walk. I often find myself saying out loud, “Wow.”
In the most recent episode we watched, Season 2 Episode 13, I think I may have “discovered” a literary reference. It seems impossible to discover anything these days, with so many fan sites and discussion boards and most people being much more current than myself (I mean, here I am, still on Season 2, for goodness sake); but after googling several different combinations of words, I was only able to come up with one discussion page (and the thread is so long I couldn’t find what I was looking for). What I googled was “Breaking Bad Elizabeth Bishop.”
A character named Jane falls off the wagon (heroin), and her father enters her bedroom to dig around. There is a photographic portrait on the wall, and the prominence of it gives an impression that the portrait might be Jane’s dead mother. The woman in the portrait looked very familiar, and I soon recognized her as Elizabeth Bishop. Later, after Jane overdoses and the father is asked by the police for Jane’s mother’s maiden name, he says, “Bishop.” Hmm… Perhaps writer and creator Vince Gilligan is an EB fan.
