It takes a lot of experience for a girl to kiss like a beginner.

I confess. I read and love john grisham books, they are luckily the only really close to trashy thing I read, other than a people magazine  or instyle while waiting at a doctor’s office. He is so formulaic and so engrossing.  And in each book he gets a few schticks which keep coming up, in the King of Torts it was gulfstream jets and women only wearing string bikinis. In the broker it was espresso vs cappacino but hell, each book starts off with a bang, takes two days to read and has the same temptation as pistachios. So this week I confess to having read three in a row and I bought a forth: the last juror.

 

They make great movies which is often true of midling books while really great books seldom make a great movie. Some of the few exceptions are anything written by jane austen, the brontes , hardy or eliot. And Sophie’s Choice – one must note the passing of William Styron this month. I will never forget the last moments of the film. The foggy fade out of her face was exactly the sensation I had after finishing the book. Just quietly placing the book down and having her face float through my mind. Hanta Yo did the same thing decades ago. I recall sitting in a leather beanbag chair by the fireplace in Denver, it was a snowy day and I was reading by firelight. The  world hushed by the snow and as hanta yo ended I was left with a mixed feeling of wishing it would go on forever and a thankfulness that it had lasted as long as it had. It’s one of those experiences you dare not revisit because it can never be better  as even good..  But not so with grisham, they all start to blend after a while and you could accidentally pick one up you read years ago and only half way through recall that you read it already. It’s like the Italian film that jim and I rented three times and only half way through realized we had seen it already and it wasn’t very good. We laughed a lot when we both reached for it a fourth time in the video store and then exploded simultaneously with the comment. WAIT, that’s the lousy movie we keep renting. I still can’t recall it’s title but its got a compelling box which never lives up to the film.

 

Then there are the excellent books which make you stop and think and change your view and enter your dreams. Memoir of a Geisha was like that. And this Matisse biography – two volumes- is taking me running with the fauves and fills my dreams with vivid color. We own two original Matisse lithographs. No color of course, just the element of line that  defines the figure and nothing extra.

 

 

 

 

How extraordinary that such a colorist can be so perfect and essential with the line. Like Ingres. My other favorite painter.  But I can’t come close to affording anything by him. We also have some Miro, Talcoat, Garache ( my first piece of original art purchased while I was a junior in college)  and one Chagall. The Chagall is in the dining room. The only other I would sacrifice other luxuries for would be a small frankenthaler.

 

It is raining again today so I may create more chaos by dividing books by categories and at least getting the ones going to the loft and the ones going to the garden room where they belong. We are hoping the library will be done by new years so we will see the last of those seemingly endless Armstrong movers boxes.  I opted to have a professional install the kitchen tile and mural as it would really hurt to fuck up an 800 mural. And I chose stainless metal ceramic tiles as a canvas for the mural. Nothing will detract and the change in reflective surface will work because it as though one goes from metal to canvass. Ah…….. August Macke.. another fauve, right in the kitchen. Delish.