"It's art, d*mn it!" version 3.0
Ah, lazy days when there's nothing pressing to do. Or rather, there are plenty of pressing things to do, but you chuck them all & go to a museum instead.
PF & I went to the Minneapolis Insitute of Arts yesterday. I was last there with Anne, there somewhere around the end of the summer, that fateful day she & I tried to meet up with Seth & riverrocks &, though we were all there for several hours, we never found each other. It was clear that PF & I had frequented different parts of the museum in the past, so we got to show off 'our' sections to each other. Among other amazing things, PF's section has the 'Jade Mountain Illustrating the Gathering of Poets at the Lan T'ing Pavilion'. Mine has Pius VI's inkwell and its case. It's good to be Pope. It's even better to be in a museum with an artist. A real artist. None of this namby-pamby 'writer' crap (I'm kidding! Stop hitting me. All of you!). An artist who will encourage not-exactly-museum-appropriate behavior when the guards aren't looking. Hey - if the art entertains us, don't we have an obligation to entertain the art, as well?
Our last stop was the Judaica room. Which is actually more of a Judaica vestibule. Anyway. PF knows very little about Judaism. I'm in no way the most qualified person I know to explain some of this stuff to her, but I was the only one handy. So I got to explain things like what an omer is & why one would need to count it, & what use anyone could have for a long silver stick with a tiny hand on the end. On the other side of the 'room' is the MIA's collection of ketubot. We stared at the one by Renanah Halpern for a good five minutes. The woman is truly gifted.
Because we had no place better to be after that, PF took me to The Bookhouse in Dinkytown. How have I lived in these cities for 7 years & never stepped into this magickal world? How? It's frankly more than a little overwhelming, the sheer amount of books they have there. Fields of Auden. Scads of Eliot. The Moonstone, ferchrissake! While PF wandered the French section, I examined the rest of the foreign language shelves. They have a guide to teaching yourself Hausa. Hausa! Right next to that, naturally, is the Hebrew. They had The New Bantam-Megiddo Hebrew & English Dictionary (which, amusingly, gnomi identified right down to the ugly brown & blue stripes on the cover - without, I presume, having one sitting right in front of her). And next to it..."Oh, my gods. Grab that one, would you, please?" PF took it down for me. "What's that?"
That, ladies & gentlemen, is a hard-cover copy of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open. For $7. There's not a word of English in it anywhere. Translating it could conceivably take the rest of my life. Translating it will probably make me cry, scream, & pull out my hair in large chunks. But how could I not buy it? I'm being careful with my money (because I don't have any), but how could I not? I couldn't. It's like having a mission now. Because, apparently, my 17,000,000 other projects just weren't cutting it for me.
One more reminder: We're at 4th Street Station tonight for the Dead Influence gig. We think they're going to start playing at around 10. Stop by if you can!
Hey, cool! Thanks, eal.
You are Judith Butler! Your postmodern queer theory
has shaken up people's ideas of gender,
sexuality, and sex. Your work has blurred lines
between what it means to be a womyn and what it
means to be a man. Queens and transbois all
over the world worship your Birkenstocks!
Which Western feminist icon are you?
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