The above photo gives an idea of the hardscaping we had put in last week.  There's still some concrete work that needs to be done, but hurricane Sandy put that on hold for a bit.  Happily we escaped the brunt of the storm.  Some of my east coast relatives weren't so fortunate.  It's just grey and wet here in NE Ohio.  Which isn't unusual for this time of year.

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If you haven't ordered this anthology yet, you should.  It's a game changer.  Go here.

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Richard Lopez and I have been having an interesting exchange about Balthus' painting The Guitar Lesson.

It's probably Balthus' most controversial painting.  Some critics think that the teacher's face is Balthus' self-portrait.  There are many ways to read the painting.  It's pretty fair to say that the teacher is holding her pupil like a guitar.  So, a lesson is beginning?

The painting is more or less disturbing, depending on your point of view.

For me it is a painting about the cusp of sexual awakening and not much else.

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This morning I re-read the first couple of pages of Don Delillo's Cosmopolis.  The 2nd paragraph in the book haunts me:

"He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful.  He read science and poetry.  He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper.  Poems made him conscious of his breathing.  A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.  This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him at night, these long weeks one breath after another in the rotating room at the top of the triplex."

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