Proud Zionist

Now that Zionism has become more a knee-jerk accusation than description, a visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage:  A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Lower Manhattan provided a useful lesson about what the term meant a century ago, when Israel was an aspiration, not a right-wing government that I abhor as much as our own. Realpolitik has transformed the dream into a nightmare.

Had the Garden of Stones been open, I would have been able to see the Statue of Liberty from the second floor as well as the Staten Island Ferry.  The museum is impressively--and symbolically--situated.  I'd meant to visit when artifacts from the Anne Frank house were exhibited last year, but missed the opportunity, perhaps because I'd already seen them in Amsterdam twenty-five years earlier.

Art of Freedom: The Life & Work of Arthur Szyk finally got me in the door for the first time even though the museum has been open for more than two decades. His name recognition may have faded, but his life as a proud Pole, Jew, Zionist and American remains exemplary. The British and Polish-in-Exile governments, recognizing his illustrative talent and the power of his political cartoons, dispatched him to North America 1939 as a propagandist against the Axis powers. 

"Bubbe" from Celebration of Life (1936)

"Schmoozing" from Celebration of Life (1936)

"Poland on a Platter" (1939)

Shortly after his arrival in New York City in late 1940, he pulled out the venomous stops. There's a LOT going on in this work, just 14" x 13," but the perfect size for reproduction on a magazine cover.  Can you find Mussolini, Goebbels, Göring and Tojo?

"Anti-Christ" (1942)

The museum has enlarged the detailed painting considerably--making the tiny skulls in Hitler's eyes more apparent--and provided a key helpful in spotlighting less obvious details. Szyk embedded the Latin phrase "vae victis" (which means "woe to the vanquished") in the dictator's slicked-back hair. The banner in German held above the skeleton's head at the top declares "Europe is ours today, tomorrow the whole world."  

There's nothing subtle about Szyk's caricatures which appeared in Esquire and Collier's magazines, often on the cover.  To its credit, the museum connects the dots between his racist and dehumanizing depictions of the Japanese and Germans to the interment of American citizens whose ancestors immigrated from those countries.  Sometimes, the ends do justify the means.

"December 7, 1941" (Esquire, 1942) 

This wartime public service advertisement from Young and Rubicam informs readers that "By means of a series of sly rumors and clever propaganda, the Nazis are attempting to pit class against class, race against race in America." It exhorts American companies to appoint "rumor wardens," something we need just as desperately in Trumpian America, where some people believe that Haitian immigrants dined on cats in Springfield, Ohio, fake news that no doubt made their subsequent loss of Temporary Protection status more palatable.  

"Detour on the Glory Road" (Esquire, 1942)

I'm really surprised I didn't see this stirring work reproduced in the Warsaw Rising Museum.   It's as if Szyk had illustrated Mila 18, a novel by Leon Uris published a decade after his death.  Uris did for the Jews in best-selling fiction what Szyk accomplished in art.

"The Repulsed Attack (Warsaw Ghetto)" (1943)

Szyk's work may remain better known in the United States than Poland.  When I searched the website for the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, I found only a single item in its collection, his illustrated edition from 1928 of the Statute of Kalisz, a decree that made Poland one of Europe's most welcoming places for Jews in the Middle Ages.  Szyk highlights his tribe's contributions to Polish life with this depiction of tradesmen and craftsmen.  His father worked as a textile factory director until a worker threw acid at his face during the Łódź insurrection,  permanently blinding him when Szyk was just 11 years old.  

 

In 1948, the year Szyk became an American citizen, he published The Holidays, looking back at his roots in Łódź.  The paintings feature the likenesses of his parents and other family members, the only time he ever incorporated a personal element into his work.  I recognized Purim because of the hamantaschen in the lower right-hand corner.  An orthodox Jewish printing company I once worked with for years delivered a batch to my office every spring.  Yum!

The museum's permanent collection documents Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust.  Much of the material presented was familiar from previous visits to Jewish museums in Amsterdam, Berlin and Krakow, as well as numerous concentration camps.  But I was particularly struck by this 1921 photograph of young Zionists gathered around the grave of Theodor Herzl in a Vienna cemetery.  These vigorous young men look less like oppressors than idealists, a group in search of a land (which migh have been Uganda!) where they could thrive and observe their holidays without being treated like second-class citizens. They also don't seem like victims which is the unfortunate stereotype that I have come to associate with most early 20th century Jews as a direct result of "Never Forget."

In fact, eighteen-year-old Szyk had spent six months touring Palestine with other writers and artists to observe nascent Jewish settlement efforts when World War I began.  Forced to return to Poland, he was conscripted in the imperial Russian army which sought to invade Germany during the Battle of Łódź.  No doubt the idea of establishing a Jewish state became even more appealing as a result.  Is it any wonder that in the wake of the Holocaust the much older and wiser artist--whose mother and brother were killed by the Nazis--used his propagandistic skills to support the creation of Israel by any means necessary, including Biblical allusions and guns?

"The Modern Maccabees" (1942)

These virile young men--who gave me Tom of Finland vibes--personify rival Jewish militias that fought together in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War which resulted in the Nakba, a perspective with which it has taken me more than 70 years to become familiar, thanks largely due to New York City's last mayoral election. Haganah (center), formed in 1920 with funding from both Poland and the United Kingdom to defend Jewish settlers from attack by Arabs, initially wasn't as militant as Irgun and the Sternists but after World War II it, too, attacked the British occupiers of Palestine who had begun turning away Holocaust survivors and other Jews with nowhere else to go.  Once Israel finally became an independent country--with the support of the United Nations--these militias comprised the Israeli army, long respected throughout my lifetime for its sill and ferociousness.

"Irgun, Haganah, Sternists" (1947)

When Israel declared its independence on May 10, 1948, Szyk said it was the happiest day of his life.  He promptly set to work illuminating the document in Hebrew.

By then, he and his family had settled in New Canaan, Connecticut where he remained until his death three years later.  Illuminating the U.S. Declaration of Independence was one of his final projects although he also continued to produce work that reflected his unease with the social injustices of his adopted country.  The House Un-American Activities Committee eventually accused him of communism.  

Milestone: 50 JH Journals

The writing bug first bit in elementary school.  I vaguely remember turning in a story adopting the perspective of an animal caged in a pet store, longing for liberation, and another titled "My Ten Faces," inspired by a very weird movie starring an unrecognizable Tony Randall.  Both efforts were well-received by my teachers.

As a junior in high school, I began taking an enriched English class where I was the attractive young teacher's pet for reasons I didn't entirely understand.  Pale Miss Conroy, who wore her hair Cleopatra-style and shadowed her eyes heavily with kohl, assigned us to keep journals.  I can't remember if she read them, but when my friend Pattie read mine, surreptitiously, without my permission, she stopped speaking to me.  An entry vented suspicions I had been her second choice when she asked me to accompany her to a prom that required renting a tux and buying a corsage because she a member of the "royal court" representing Andress at another local high school.  But even then, I had been too cautious to commit my sexual orientation struggle to paper.

When I arrived at Columbia in 1971, the core curriculum included a required Humanities course where we read through the (white, male) Western canon.  Dr. Robert Belknap, an intimidating professor of Russian literature who was as tall and thin as his pointer, taught the first semester.  He gave me a B- on a paper about The Odyssey, commenting that it was "tersely" written and noting my lack of original thought.  The criticism stuck.  My writing improved more than my critical acumen over the next four years although I was very proud of a paper I aced about "New Japanese Photography." It presaged my obsession in retirement for photographing and documenting my reactions to museum exhibitions and travels on this blog.

The admissions office of Columbia's School of Journalism put me on the wait list.  I probably shouldn't have been surprised.  Although I had applied to be the editor of the Aquila, my high school newspaper, Mrs. Sanchez, our tippling journalism teacher, thought my talents would be better suited to the yearbook. Applying elsewhere would mean leaving New York City so I found a job in the publicity department of a book publisher and supplemented my meager income with an evening job at a department store.  I still had vague aspirations to be a writer and experimented with various formats including a snarky magazine article called "A Day in the Life of a Bloomingdales Employee" and "Backpedalling," a short story about engaging in anonymous sex for the first time that I shared with no one.  But the effort to come to grips with my shame opened up a desire to write honestly about my feelings again, dormant since Pattie's furious reaction to my speculative venting.  Letters home certainly didn't provide that release, although my stepmother, a romance novel reader, looked forward to my censored descriptions of 20something life and encouraged me to pursue writing in a way that no one else ever has.

I returned to journaling in a haphazard way, filling an occasional notebook purchased for the purpose, but mostly using plenty of down time at the New York Public Library to type entries on a self-correcting IBM Selectric which I hole-punched and kept in a binder.  I bought my first composition book in 1977 which offered portability, significantly increasing the opportunities for scribbling.   Early entries are a collection of random thoughts, dream descriptions, quotes from books, overheard conversations and even a few pathetic stabs at poetry.  Dates first appear when I take a solo road trip from El Paso to San Francisco in a Volkswagen Scirocco borrowed from my father.  In an analog preview of "PhotoPest," I jotted down travel observations on one side of a page and left the other blank so I could tape in snapshots of my travels once they had been developed. 

In the summer of 1980, in advance of another road trip, this one from El Paso to the Arctic Circle, I bought a fancy blank journal made in France with a grey floral cover that looked a lot like a William Morris print.  My sentences still weren't complete but I made daily entries which served as the basis for Other Frontiers a play I wrote about failing to come out to my father while camping together along the Alaska Highway for nearly a month. Dad, an inveterate letter writer, had taken notice: when we began circumnavigating Australia in December 1983, both of us would pull out our journals after dinner and record the events of the day.  Long after his death, while composing Homosaic, a memoir of my life before turning 40, I compared our entries.  Two people could not have seen Down Under or apprehended the world more differently.

By then I was on volume XI (Roman numerals gave them more serious heft!) of the blue hardcover journals--124 pages each--pictured at the top of this page and writing in complete sentences.  That had begun on April 28, 1981:

I picked up this new notebook before riding to work.  When I filed the previous one away, I noticed that it covered a greater period of time than the one prior to it.  I guess I'm not so verbose as I once was although that may change now that I've to decided to write in complete sentences.

As the bluebooks accumulated, it gave me great satisfaction to see them lined up on a shelf; even if their author would remain unpublished, they provided solid evidence that I had been writing regularly which is, of course, what successful scribes advise. Their content changed with my life and times.  Accounts of my difficult relationship's end with David, the sexual promiscuity that resulted and kvetching about what happened at the office dominate the early volumes; then AIDS rears its ugly head.

Entry, July 4, 1981 

July 4, 1981:  Barnet called to see if I would like to join him and Chris to see S.O.B  I didn't make a commitment, but later figured what the hell, it would get me out of the house at least.  By then I thought the rain would stop, but it hadn't, so when I left I dressed in my nylon rain outfit which kept me perfectly dry wherever it covered.  Only my shoes and socks were soaked by the time I reached the Baronet, where I discovered that the 4:20 p.m. show was sold out, although both Lars and Chinny Buns, wearing glasses [my nicknames for a sexy Upper West couple; the latter eventually achieved closeted television fame], as well as one of the stars of The Paper Chase and several hundred other trendy New Yorkers already had tickets.  Barnet and Chris showed up a few minutes later and because we couldn't get in, I was more eager than ever to see it.  We hung around for a couple of hours waiting for the next show . . . after we had an expensive cafe mocha under the Roosevelt Tramway, I brought up an article about a rare form of cancer I had seen in Friday's New York Times.  Recent studies indicate that it affects promiscuous homosexuals ("those who have frequent and multiple sexual encounters, as many as ten times an evening, up to four times per week") who use amyl nitrate and LSD.  Purple spots on the skin are a first symptom.  Until this study, doctors thought Kaposi's sarcoma was a slow killer found in the elderly, but now 26 cases in younger homosexual men (who also have had just about every other sexually-related disease known to man) indicate not only is it not as rare as had been believed previously, but that it may even be contagious!  This has yet to be proven, but doctors hope that it may eventually teach a great deal about what causes more common types of cancer.  Medical guinea pigs!  The tone of the article led me to conclude that the Times, which has been criticized for its avoidance of "gay news," has adopted a new strategy:  all of the unpalatable homosexual news that's fit to print."  Some long-suppressed radicalism may be rearing its head here, but I found the statistic about the men who have been diagnosed as having KS almost beyond belief and certainly difficult to substantiate.  Yet it was included so matter-of-factly under the headline RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS that a casual reader might easily think that 40 sexual encounters per week was common.  Neither Barnet nor Chris [a dancer at the time who eventually directed a film called Test] had seen the article so they weren't able to discuss these ramifications, nor were they eager to hear me rant about them.

Ramifications, indeed.  Suddenly I was writing my own Journal of the Plague Years which continued as soon as I returned to work when my lesbian boss referred to it as "Spencer's disease," referring to a co-worker with the tell-tale purple spots who was out sick.  Many years later, I learned that Spencer Beach, who loved opera and Brideshead Revisited, had been one of the epidemic's first casualties in New York City.

While re-reading the blue books has been a source of continuing fascination at various ages, I avoid volumes XXI through XXIII when the disease claimed David who had been diagnosed in 1991 and was gone just two years later, along with my father, who had suffered a fatal stroke just six months before.  Their deaths convinced me of writing's therapeutic value; letting my raw feelings flow through my pen helped me flush them from my consciousness.  It also seemed like I had nothing else to lose.

By that time, entries had become less frequent, though longer.  I eliminated any mention of work because it made for very dull re-reading.  Capturing the experience of sharing a house in the Pines, begun in 1988, was way more exciting.  Entries became focused on summer weekends or out-of-the-ordinary happenings in my life, and were often timed to the (every third) Friday nights when I washed my clothes at the laundromat or weekend afternoons as I surveyed the Ramble from a park bench.  Although I almost never wrote in front of my friends, I enjoyed being seen scribbling away by strangers, some of whom were even bold enough to approach. A stunned father of young children in the West Palm Beach airport reacted as if he were witnessing the birth of calligraphy when I explained what I was doing and for how long.  He clearly didn't have the time for endless self-examination.

Remember "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles from 1979?  Blogging nearly vanquished my blue books just three months before 9/11 when I was between jobs and pseudonymously started Chasing Rapture, "the picaresque adventures of an unemployed gay sex addict in Manhattan and Fire Island Pines."  The new medium deserved some formal experimentation, too, cribbed from the shorthand used to hook up using AOL "Man for Man" chatrooms:  "you" became "u," dialog (without quotation marks) and thoughts were italicized, capitalization was abandoned except for proper nouns, ellipses replaced periods and I linked to external websites whenever possible because I read that doing so could improve your search ranking in Google.  In other words, I was hunting for an audience and was soon rewarded with a sole "follower" (nomenclature that hadn't yet become familiar), Dante Woo whose cheerleading was a powerful motivator, although I already had learned to be suspicious of virtual relationships.

Two years later, again jobless for the summer, I hit upon the idea of chronicling my time in the Pines with a jaundiced eye in an ancillary blog. The House of Six MEs delighted some of my housemates (the Expatriate), others not so much (Testa Grande, who was offended that I referred to a group of his day tripping friends as the Freeloader Cartel).  The Curmudgeon even kept a journal of his own.  I'll never forget the night we discovered that we had attended the same party long before becoming friends. We compared entries as soon as we returned to the city; neither of us had mentioned the other, but it quickly became apparent that my journal was much bitchier than his, as Pattie had learned in high school.

Unfortunately, blogging cannibalized my journal keeping.  The span of time covered in subsequent volumes widened significantly.  During my late 20s, a single year could yield four volumes; by age 40, I barely filled one annually.  And when my career finally kicked into high gear, often months would pass before I sat down at my schoolboy desk to write.  My journaling hit rock bottom in Volume XXXVI which took more than four years to complete.

Retirement in 2014 again increased the frequency of entries; it also gave me the time to read through boxes of letters my father had written after I decided to remain in New York City upon graduation from college.  His voluminous, often repetitive accounts of working on what he proudly called his "stable" of four automobiles (three VWs and a Corvair), written in longhand on yellow legal pads, had bored me upon receipt but with the perspective of age they didn't seem so different than my early journal entries about cruising the Ramble: clearly, we both felt a compulsion to document our passions.  Had he passed down a writing gene?

When I celebrated my 70th birthday in the Pines, Christine toasted the occasion by noting that  "no one I know has documented their life more than Jeff."  Of course this also means that I have written about my friends extensively both publicly on this blog and privately in my journal.  The latter includes two or three entries each year about the growth of Magda and Zoltan, my god children, usually composed after birthday or holiday visits to New Jersey, and who continue to make regular appearances now as adults. They add a level of detail to memories that photos can't of enjoying kids without the responsibility of raising them.

I began ordering blue books in bulk quite some time ago; after completing the 50th, I now have two left. If I continue to travel, which precipitates most recent entries, they should last until the summer of 2028, shortly before I turn 75, my self-determined expiration date.  But their continuation interests me less now than their eventual disposition.  It's a quandary I faced when deciding what to do with my parents' photo albums.  Throwing the visual evidence of Ken's and Mary's lives away seemed too much like discarding them.   So  I scanned and posted many of the photos on this blog in a kind of digital resurrection that will last as long as Blogger remains accessible.

JH Journal Volume L (July 16, 2025 - July 6, 2026)

Discontinued software or the elimination of an internet platform doesn't threaten my journals, however, and as the end of this branch of the Hon family tree, I can't decide what should be done with them. On the one hand, I'm convinced they've served a mostly therapeutic purpose: who cares how I reacted to the Challenger Explosion or planes crashing into the Twin Towers?  On the other, I have the sense that there can't have been too many gay men who both survived both the closet and AIDS who committed their most intimate feelings to the page for nearly 50 years.  Maybe, just maybe,  the JH Journals would be of interest to some future historian.

But I can’t forget the Pattie lesson either.  Maybe burning this voluminous record of my state of mind along with my body when I’m cremated is a safer way to go. That way the people depicted in them can remember me only for how I behaved, not what I thought.  

After all, I did rent a tux and buy a corsage.  And if memory serves (which, if nothing else, my journals have proved time and again that it doesn’t!), Pattie and I had a lovely night when we represented Andress at the Ysleta Junior Senior Prom back in 1970.

Red, White & Blue on Dartmouth Green

Desi and Della will likely be around for the nation's Tricentennial.  Imagine what their world will be like (or don't, if you're a half-empty glass kind of guy like I am).

"Hoarfrost with Rabbit" by Kiki Smith (2014), Hood Art Museum

We happened upon an Independence Day parade in Hanover, New Hampshire while checking out Dartmouth College where Victor, my former Pines housemate, is an alumnus.  

Watching the small-town parade made me feel a lot better about life in America than anything I read in the newspaper.  I felt the same way after driving to Seattle and back three summers ago.  Polarization is less apparent in person.

Wrapped samples of Red Kite Candy, tossed from this tiny Fiat, definitely elevated my blood sugar level, but in a really good way.  If the store hadn't been closed, I would have bought a box of melt-in-your-mouth caramels and I'm not usually a candy guy.

A fierce bull painted on a blue pick-up served as a reminder that they're not all like Ferdinand whom Thom and I had visited on the drive to Quechee.

Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art commissioned this work for a nearby building's exterior. Artist Ellsworth Kelly says its architecture reminded him of symmetrical Renaissance arches. Alumnus and private equity investor Leon Black paid for it before he was besmirched by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Dartmouth Panels (2012)

Victor's college experience must have been considerably different than mine, not only because the campus is somewhat rural and isolated.  Dartmouth has the Ivy League's smallest undergraduate enrollment and a reputation for conservatism.  Both of these buildings face the Green, a large town square where the paraders and locals celebrated the sweat-inducing holiday.

Dartmouth Hall

Brauner Library

Somehow, I can't imagine a petting zoo on the South Lawn.

Local firefighters displayed their trucks and equipment and gave away some red plastic hats.  Too bad Dagny was at sleep away camp for her first time.  Kids really do grow up so fast . . . 

Della always manages to find a way to provoke.  Nobody else was shouting out the British capital on their tees!

The Tricksters, a New England wedding band, really, REALLY rocked.  I never realized how much Shake It Off owes to Hey Ya!

Dartmouth is full of surprises, like this oddly tricked-out car.

We assembled for a Semiquincentennial photo op with the Founding Fathers and Abigail Adams, both a founding mother and wife if anyone's asking.

Occasional showers did not dampen Desi's enthusiasm for the pool later that afternoon.  He does love his binky.

Despite her raspberry, Della was enthusiastic about the new summer outfits Thom bought for the D-Kids.  Dagny's awaited hers in Boston.

 

I gave Desi one last spin prior to our departure Sunday morning.  Blind Moofy wanted to get in on the dizziness, too.

LieCENTENNiAL

“It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth whether about the president or anyone else,” said President Theodore Roosevelt in 1918.

“Broadly put, nationalism is about allegiance to one’s own kind; patriotism is allegiance to a creed,” said Jon Meacham, a presidential historian. “The Age of Trump — and that is what historians will have to call this — is a nationalistic one.”

“​His [Trump's] version of patriotism is rooted in his narcissism,” said Chad Williams, a historian and professor of African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University. “It’s self-aggrandizing on the one hand, but it’s also deeply ahistorical, and I think this entire commemoration has been reflective of this.”  

“He’s completely engineered the weight and the power of the executive government to tell Americans how they should conceive of their past,”  said David W. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University.  (New York Times, July 9)

Bullish on Ferdinand

The Story of Ferdinand, an iconic children's book by Munro Leaf, didn't enter my consciousness until adulthood when, attracted by the bright red cover, I bought it as a gift. But Robert Lawson's illustrations are so artful that I asked Thom if we could stop in Amherst to see the originals en route to Quechee for Independence Day.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is celebrating the 90th anniversary of the book's publication with Under the Cork Tree: The Story of Ferdinand. Founded in 2002 by the man best known for writing and illustrating The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the museum also served as a cooling station and picnic site on a brutally hot day.

Nobody read to Thom as a child but he enjoyed the exhibit enough to purchase a sleeved copy of the book for a future grandniece or nephew.  Actually, Ferdinand reminds me a lot of Thom who always has insisted on going his own way, although he has never been a shade-seeker.

Nearly a century after the book's publication--which coincided with the Spanish Civil War--it can be a little hard to discern the intentions of the book's creators.  Does the presence of a vulture atop a tree marking Ferdinand's growth suggest he doesn't have long to live because his destiny is a ring where he likely will be gored to death?  Or does it symbolize the rise of fascism in Europe?  Neither Franco nor Hitler had any doubt:  they both banned the book.

Ferdinand leaves the head butting and ground pawing to other young bulls but he ends up in the ring anyway because of a roving band of matadors, his enormous size and a random bee sting.  Lawson illustrates the events almost cinematically in a sequence that could have been storyboarded by Alfred Hitchcock.  Text isn't even really necessary.

"Ferdinand knew that they wouldn't pick him and he didn't care."

Then, in tight close-up, a bee appears, positioned between his rump and swinging tail.

"He didn't look where he was sitting..."

Cut to Ferdinand's face as he experiences the initial shock of the sting with widened eyes and flared nostrils

"Well, if you were a bumble bee and a bull sat on you what would you do?"

. . .  before he jumps reflexively

"Ferdinand jumped up with a snort."

. . . attracting the attention of predatory matadors who mistake his actions for a fighting spirit and take him away to Madrid.   

"The five men saw him and they all shouted with joy."

But instead of charging a red flag in the ring, Ferdinand prefers sniffing the flowers protruding from the women's hats.  The matadors send him back to pasture.   While I embrace pacifism philosophically, the story can just as easily be taken at face value--in a world of random events, remaining true to yourself is a good thing--which explains why the charismatic bull became a 20th century commercial juggernaut with lots and lots of merch!

Pinning a tail on Ferdinand seems inadvisable considering his reaction to the bee sting.

Walt Disney broadened the book's appeal with a short animated film in which he voiced Ferdinand's mother in a fluting voice.  It won an Oscar in 1938.  You can watch Lawson's unique artistry sanded down into slapstick and stereotype on You Tube.  Disney, whom some accused of Nazi sympathies (he gave Leni Riefenstahl a tour of his studios), eliminated the vulture.  Just sayin'.

Production Sketch (1938)

Or maybe Uncle Walt feared political controversy would reduce sales of his "own game."

The illustrations are on loan from the Morgan Library, where Mary Flager Cary donated them. She's the granddaughter of the man responsible for the development of south Florida and the settlement of Palm Beach in particular.

We checked out the other galleries, too, including another terrific exhibit, Soul, Sound & Voice: The Art of Jerry Pinkney. His work embraces both the imagined

"The Grasshopper and the Ants" (2015)

. . . and the seldom-seen realistic.

"The Sunday Outing"  (1994)

Carle himself drew this cat

 

and painted the bright murals that decorate the lobby.

(detail)

Villa Coco (5*)

What I feared might be a silly book turned out to be a profound one with just the right amount of madcap shenanigans.

They lived in a sealed world of comic-strip logic, and within that world, all schemes ended as happily as a monkey’s life in Zanzibar.

A young gay archivist at loose ends in a rotary-phone world accepts a temporary job in Tuscany cataloging what seem to be the ever changing contents of Villa Coco, imperiously ruled by a self-made Baronessa entirely set in her nonagenarian ways.  Although author Andrew Sean Greer withholds his narrator's name until the end of the novel, she insists on calling him Giovedi--Italian for Thursday, the day of his arrival--and demands that he learn the language.  He accedes, a little grudgingly, with the empathic counsel of Oscar, the Baronessa's oldest friend.  Discreetly gay, he also delivers an ambiguous warning that Giovedi nearly misinterprets:  "Do not be lazy in love."

Although the formerly randy narrator has sworn off sex for the duration of his mostly rural sojourn--described so evocatively you will want to make good on your threats to self-deport from 21st century America--the childless, always scheming Baronessa has other plans.  She insists he take a brief road trip with Giacomo, her handsome and married cousin (in the European way) to Commachio, a charming village unknown to tourists where their dilapidated Mitsu-Bitchy breaks down.

What would it be like, to know you were secretly Venice? I envied the town, though of course in the canals were not gondolas but the local specialty—eels—which made the waters wriggle slightly in their courses. Yes, eels. They were the basis of the town’s famous cuisine and were its familiar spirits, beloved, much the way other towns cherish their swallows or poplars or stags; if it had been an American town, the local high school team would have been the Fighting Eels.

Giovedi couldn't be farther from America at Villa Coco where the plumbing is primitive and everything has a provenance, especially the people who surround him and whose old world values begin to shape his identity.

One can find the experience, in America, of standing where it seems no person has ever stood before—on a wilderness peak or a rocky, inaccessible shore—but seldom do we feel that thousands have stood there, for thousands of years, and empires have risen and fallen and will continue to do so long after we have gone.

During his formative expatriation, Giovedi faces some difficult choices, particularly after he meets his older doppelganger by chance in a cafe and he can't quite shake his predicted future. Should he embrace his alluring new lifestyle or should he return to America in pursuit of a real career and relationship?  For what he initially believes to be solely selfish reasons, the Baronessa counsels him against leaving.

“You would start thinking again that literature began with Hemingway and art with Warhol. That the fate of the world depends upon your presidential election. That a proper dinner conversation is to discuss your favorite television shows. Like every American, you would lose—”

“Really?” I broke in, irritated. “What would I lose?”

She looked at me at last. “Your sense of humor.”

Humor matters to the Baronessa no less than to Greer.   When Giovedi decides his next move after a disastrous visit to Florence "to see a Caravaggio"--forbidden by the Baronessa--he finally opens up to her, confessing his hearbreak.  She responds with the kind of advice that perfectly captures the generous impetus of Greer's novels, particularly at a moment in time when storytelling faces grave threats both technical and political.

You must tell it again another time, she had said on our way to Ferrara. Made better, not just for the sake of the listener but for the sake of the teller. To have mastered the story. It is the work of the metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.

Villa Coco comes to a most satsifying end with an unanticipated train ride to Venice.  By this time Giovedi has become less and less American, almost like a Henry James character but one shorn of cynicism rather than innocence by his stay abroad.  We learn his real name just as he experiences an epiphany.

The price for seeing things as they really are. It is our youth.

Fresh Perspective

I reached out to Cynthia as soon as I read about the wildfires in southern Colorado.  One broke out just five miles from her home.  How would you like to look see this from your kitchen window, knowing how tinder dry the landscape is?  Fortunately, she and her husband have trimmed trees and reduced scrub oak around their property to reduce fire risk and they're in the process of installing a huge water cistern, too.

 

Their neighborhood is so remote that it took fire trucks almost 35 minutes to arrive; by then it had engulfed more than 20 acres.  The blaze has been 30% contained since Cynthia took this photo three days ago.

Spraying fire retardant helped, but they're not out of the woods yet: some fires farther away are still burning out of control.  

But Cynthia has never been one to sit around and worry, particularly when she can put her skill set to good use.

I sort of volunteered myself to feed the firefighters.  And I’ve been making meals for 25 to 100 hungry people for 3 days now.  I go through 6 dozen eggs for breakfast casseroles or burritos, 30+ pounds of chicken for chicken rice casserole, 30+ pounds of beef for beef tips etc.  The challenge is not feeding that many but running 40 minutes into town to buy groceries 😬

May she and Bill remain safe.  Their situation really puts New York City's sweltering temps and our seriously leaky pool at the Folly in perspective!

More Cynthia: 

Semi-Grand Tour (1975)

FLASHBACK:  Bestie (1980s)

Dear Friend (2021)

Hot Fun in the Summertime (2021)

Overnight @ One Binkley Gulch (2024)