Grammy Darning

It's been a long time. I'm still struggling with the thesis plans. Lots happening. Sore neck and shoulder. But this is a great photo, and I wanted to start back into blogging with something wonderful.

Can you imagine all those socks getting a new life at the nimble fingers of my grandmother?

I still do mending for my family, but holey socks go in the trash. At least Jackson's cotton ones. I guess I might darn a nice wool sock.

A New Degas!

Well, new to me, anyway. I had no idea that I'd missed this absolutely gorgeous Degas laundress painting -- thanks to Eavan Boland's poem, I found it. Here's the poem:

Degas's Laundresses

You rise, you dawn

roll-sleeved Aphrodite,

out of a camisol brine,

a linen pit of stiches,

silking the fitten sheets

away from you like waves.

You seam dreams in the folds

of wash from which freshes

the whiff and reach of fields

where it bleached and stiffened.

Your chat's sabbatical:

brides, wedding outfits,

a pleasure of leisured women

are sweated into the folds,

the neat heaps of linen.

Now the drag of the clasp.

Your wrists basket your waist.

You round to the square weight.

Wait. There behind you.

A man. There behind you.

Whatever you do don't turn.

Why is he watching you?

Whatever you do don't turn.

Whatever you do don't turn.

See he takes his ease

staking his easel so,

slowly sharpening charcoal,

closing his eyes just so,

slowly smiling as if

so slowly he is

unbandaging his mind.

Surely a good laundress

would understand its twists,

its white turns,

its blind designs --

it's your winding sheet.

Socks on a Rock

Stella spent 14 days in Montana on a great Outward Bound adventure. She took lots of gorgeous photos, even one of her laundry drying on a boulder, which just goes to show how much she loves her mother.

I'm working myself into a thesis topic about Eavan Boland's poetry -- something about how she uses domestic images -- an aesthetic or political choice?

Dick Cavett on Depression and ... Socks!

First of all, it's hard to get back from vacation. I'm certainly back in body, but my mind doesn't seem to be completely cooperating. This could take a while.

Second, a friend sent me a great hilarious column from the NY Times, Dick Cavett commenting on depression (ick) and socks (funny) and also (I do not lie) on finding humor "there" as well as can be expected. I love the idea of a depressed person somehow pulling his socks up and just getting over it all -- boy, I wish that had worked for me. Sure be cheaper than doctors and drugs (and phone bills to friends, the poor patient wonderful friends).

I don't think I have a photo of a depressed person pulling her socks up to post, but I do have a great picture of my daughter with her outrageous socks pulled all the way up -- definitely not depressed. She's still in Montana and I miss her a lot a lot. So, here's her picture. (You have to look closely to see the socks. She's sitting on a dead tree stump in the middle of a geyser crater in Yellowstone Nat'l Park. I don't know why she hikes in knee socks. What a great gal.) If you click on the photo you can see a close up of her beautiful face and socks.

Laundry from the Road

In Livingston Montana I spotted this laundromat, Off the Cuff. There are many many many of these wonderful homespun laundrys in all these smaller towns. I saw one somewhere else (Wyoming?) called The Missing Sock. I wish I'd started taking photos of them sooner. Still on vacation but home again this weekend.

On Vacation

Bye for now -- a funny thing about vacations -- I still do as much laundry when I'm away from home as I do all the time -- I need less soap in Tahoe (softer water) -- wonder what the water is like in Montana. (Montana Ghost Towns Photography)

Totally Nuts about Knitting!

You will not believe this (whoever you are) -- my favorite knitting store, Jimmy Beans Wool -- in Truckee -- has a whole collection of knitting YouTube videos! OMG they are spectacular -- colorful, friendly, funny, heartwarming and footwarming and lapwarming, too! Check them out. They also have a great blog. Link below in my "We Blog Alike" list.

Closet Auditing?

I had to post this -- not very academic or intellectual -- but definitely about laundry. Urban Darling is a website that FaceBook advertised on my site -- I think it's absolutely hysterical but also very interesting and I like the idea of a Closet Audit -- maybe that's the regulatory compliance side of my personality (shhh -- don't tell anyone!). This is their photo. I like the yellow ducky bathrobe. Excellent!

Photos from National Geographic

National Geographic's recent issue had this great photo of two girls taking off their coats and letting them fly into the oncoming storm -- I located the photo on their website, but I'm sure I'm not sure I'm supposed to post it here -- so go to National Geographic and look at all their terrific stuff!!

One poem forward, two poems back

So, I heard today that maybe my thesis prospectus is not good enough yet -- I think they are probably right, I am all over the place, not focused enough, and I didn't really try hard enough in those areas before I submitted it. Can't always fly by the seat of your pants, no matter how smart your pants are.

It's been suggested that I focus on Eavan Boland's poetry, still taking a look at domestic imagery. Does she qualify as an American Poet? She didn't even raise her kids here -- will I let that stop me? What can I find in Boland that will start me up? Here is Poets.org's bio of Boland. It's not a great photo, but it's a start. This is a link to a lovely poem "Pomegranate" about how Boland can find herself in both halves of the Persephone/Ceres myth -- any daughter who is now a mother of a daughter can imagine herself here -- Boland has done it with a Coke can. This is Norton's site, her publisher, and links to her books and other goodies. They also have this photo, which is much better.

Here's a poem, "It's A Woman's World" and criticism of the poem. Maybe I'll be okay in her company. (And because blogspot will not let me put in the line breaks, I do not know why, you have to go to another site to see them -- or better yet, buy the book --)

It's a Woman's World

Our way of life

has hardly changed

since a wheel first

whetted a knife.

Maybe flame

burns more greedily

and wheels are steadier,

but we're the same:

we milestone

our lives

with oversights,

living by the lights

of the loaf left

by the cash register,

the washing powder

paid for and wrapped,

the wash left wet:

like most historic peoples

we are defined

by what we forget

and what we never will be:

star-gazers,

fire-eaters.

It's our alibi

for all time:

as far as history goes

we were never

on the scene of the crime.

When the king's head

gored its basket,

grim harvest,

we were gristing bread

or getting the recipe

for a good soup.

It's still the same:

our windows

moth our children

to the flame

of hearth not history.

And still no page

scores the low music

of our outrage.

Appearances reassure:

that woman there,

craned to

the starry mystery,

is merely getting a breath

of evening air.

While this one here,

her mouth a burning plume -

she's no fire-eater,

just my frosty neighbour

coming home.

Lady Madonna

Hi again -- it's been a long time and I have a lot of ideas. Trying to clean up my desk so I can write -- and I came across a note that I wanted to post the lyrics to "Lady Madonna" on this site. We drove home from Alpine Meadows Sunday afternoon, July 6, listening to Beatles "Love" album. For some reason that music doesn't give me a headache loud -- Love to Paul and John who thought it all up --

Lady Madonna, children at your feet
Wonder how you manage to make ends meet
Who find the money when you pay the rent
Did you think that money was heaven sent

Friday night arrives without a suitcase
Sunday morning creeping like a nun
Monday's child has learned to tie his bootlegs
See how they run

Lady Madonna, baby at your breast
Wonders how you manage to feed the rest
Pa pa pa pa...
See how they run

Lady Madonna lying on the bed
Listen to the music playing in your head
Tuesday afternoon is never ending
Wednesday morning papers didn't come
Thursday night you stocking needed mending
See how they run

Lady Madonna, children at your feet
Wonder how you manage to make ends meet

Milk Bottle and Poem

Okay: So here's a link to a blog by Justin Clayton, a painter who does a painting a day for his blog, "Daily Paintings." Very cool. Reminds me of my poem a day resolutions. I hope he's more successful than I am. The painting I'm including here is his Milk Bottle painting, which I needed to go with my funny story about moms and milk (last post). You can go to his blog if you want to buy his paintings. He seems to have the most paintings about chocolate and food and candy. Which makes sense. I think I might ask him to paint something with laundry in it. Wouldn't that be great?

Okay: So here's a poem about milk. By Anonymous (I think you can tell why)

Carnation milk is the best in the land;

Here I sit with a can in my hand.

No tits to pull, no hay to pitch,

You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch

And for people who come to my blog (where ARE you?) expecting serious domestic scholarship: Here's a link to Tory Dent's poem "Black Milk" as read by Adrienne Rich on ATC, January 3, 2006. And, here's a link to AAP's web page about Paul Celan, whose lovely poem "Fugue of Death" opens with the words "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night." The poem goes on to offer a stark evocation of life in the Nazi death camps.

I'm still looking for happy, not silly, milk poems. Maybe I'll have to write one.

And for those of you who have read this far, a special treat. A video of Jimmy Stewart reading a "No Milk Poem" on the Johnny Carson show. Now this is the true miracle of the internet. That I could find such a thing.

"Life's truest truth, it's that truth itself / unravels in ways that reveal less not more sense or comfort." Tory Dent

Milk

I just love this story. The creeps at Wal Mart are trying to do something right and the Moms don't like the mess. Well -- all I can say is they're trying and all we really expect of our small children is that they try their best. Now I have to find a milk poem and a photo of a beautiful old fashioned bottle --

Thesis Prospectus Approved!

With reservations - of course - but still!!

I've heard from my Dean today and as soon as my potential advisor gets back to town, I could be in business. I guess I better get down to business. This blog could get very interesting very soon (she says hopefully and with much trepidation!) Here's the working title: The Sock of God: Evolution of Domestic Imagery in American Poetry in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. But, which poets???? Here's the Stanford bio for Al Gelpi - who, from the look of this bio, might be just the guy for me!

And here's a photo, just for inspiration - one of my heroes -- Anne Sexton. It's her poem, "Snow", from which I derive my title, "the sock of God."

Oh, and what the heck, here's the poem.

Snow

Snow

Snow, blessed snow,

comes out of the sky

like bleached flies.

The ground is no longer naked.

The ground has on its clothes.

The trees poke out of sheets

and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

I bite it.Someone once said:

Don't bite till you know

if it's bread or stone.

What I bite is all bread,

rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

Today God gives milk

and I have the pail.

The Best Shorts Ever

For Jackson. Who wants his picture on my blog too, and who chose this photo, because those were the best shorts ever. Lucky guy.

Made in China and Phebus Etienne

I'm running into these domestic literary songs a lot these days -- once you start looking it never ends. Here's a great article I read in the UCSD alumni mag about Sara Bongiorni and her family who tried to live for a year without buying anything "Made in China" -- I'm sure that was very laundry challenging.

"I worry about human rights and the hardships of Chinese factory life, but it was too late to think we could solve those problems by pushing China away."

She wrote a whole book and told her story on TV. I could try that with my laundry problems.

Here's a poem I read this morning in a Autumn 2006 volume of "The Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets." I am way behind with my journals. The poem is by Phebus Etienne, an emerging (emerged) Haitian-American poet who published her first (only) book Chainstitching in 2006 -- the title poem of that collection, "Chainstitching" belongs at the top of my laundry songs list -- and as I've been looking around the internet today to find a copy of it (retyping lazy about I am) I learn that she is dead.

Only 41 years old, only one book of poems. (Strange that even though AAP published her poems in their journal in 2006, one can no longer find her mentioned on the AAP website -- I had to go to poetryfoundation.org to locate her obituary.) The most information about this poet can be found at Cave Canem's website, and all over the blogosphere (is that spelled right?).

CHAINSTITCHING

After I buried my mother, I would see her often,
standing at the foot of my bed
in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace
whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.
I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,
it only confirmed my heritage.
Haitians always have relationships with the dead.
Each Sabbath, I lit a candle that burned for seven days.
I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.
It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of The Three Musketeers,
freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.
My offering of her favorite things didn’t conjure
conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.
But there was a dream or two where she was happy,
garnets dangling from her ears,
and one night she shuffled some papers,
which could have been history of my difficult luck
because she said, “We have to do something about this.”

She hasn’t visited me for months.
I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,
that she looks in and turns away
because I didn’t remain a virgin until I married,
because my debts will remain unforgiven.

Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make
corsages to honor living mothers.
I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled
by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.
But I remember that first Mother’s Day without her,
how it pissed me off to watch a seventy year-old daughter
escort her mom to sip from the chalice.

Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,
I planted creeping phlox on my mother’s grace,
urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year
like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor’s gate.
I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.
Tonight I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,
add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me,
sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.
I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,
keep stitching her presence in my life.

So here's a question....

Do you think prostitution is domestic work? It certainly has some of the characteristics -- beds, sheets, clean, dirty, repetition, boredom, oppression, expression -- I heard epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani speak on Fresh Air last week. The way she talked about her book The Wisdom of Whores, and the bureaucracy surrounding AIDS research and treatment, got me thinking about this. She says this about changing the way we educate about HIV/AIDS: "It would mean spending lots more of the available money on prostitutes, addicts and gay guys, and lots less on school kids, pregnant women and church groups. It would mean making fun things (sex, drugs) safe, instead of trying to make safe things (abstinence, monogamy) fun." I could say that about changing the way we think about a lot of domestic tasks ... we could try making fun things (hanging up clothes, arranging flowers, playing with children) "safe" -- that is, acceptable as domestic work, instead of making the acceptable things (scrubbing toilets, driving kids around in cars, ironing his shirts) fun.

I may have to look into finding photos and poems along this line -- that is if everyone agrees with me that sex workers can be considered domestic workers -- (is anyone listening to me?)

Magnificently Overqualified Mothers

MomsRising delivered nearly 9,000 resumes -- from working mothers -- to Senator McCain yesterday in support of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. If that's not a Laundry Song I don't know what is. A new kind of domestic beauty --

See the video and send your resume from their website.

I wonder what Daumier's laundresses would think of this? What does it tell you about those women that I don't even know their names -- or how to refer to them without the name of the man who painted their pictures? I think I'll freshen up my resume today. Just in their honor. 5,000 loads of laundry a year and proud of it. That reminds me -- there's some wet stuff that needs to get hung on the line right now -- before I go to work.

Bessie Thomashefsky

This past week the SF Symphony has been performing "The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater" -- a wonderful music, multi-media presentation of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky and the Yiddish Theater in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Amazing to me was the feminist stance of much of the work Bessie T. did -- her newspaper articles, her songs, her beliefs about women's suffrage and birth control, her trouser roles. I particularly liked several of the songs -- and will try to recreate them here. Here's what the SF Chron had to say. Stay tuned...

Okay, so this is really domestic work

Another painting at the Stanford Cantor Art Center's exhibit (Saved from the Storm) -- this time by Renoir -- of a seamstress. All the proper Laundry Songs ingredients -- a woman, a bent spine, a window, cloth, sharp objects -- art and light and thank goodness the Impressionist painters loved these domestic chores.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919), Seamstress at a Window, ca. 1908, oil on canvas. Collection of New Orleans Museum of Art

Saving what you care about -- Floods and Flowers

"Painted in New Orleans, Portrait of Estelle Musson De Gas (1872), was the last in a series of portraits Degas made of his sister-in-law."

A wonderful exhibition is currently being shown at the Stanford Cantor Center. This photo is of one of the paintings saved from a museum in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina by dedicated museum staff. I love the picture -- although I'm not convinced that arranging flowers technically qualifies as domestic work -- saving something you love from a catastrophic natural disaster -- that might qualify. There seem to be many many gardening poems, almost as many as the laundry poems I've found in my searches -- but that's another topic. For now, I'm sticking with laundry, dusting, ironing, bed making -- I think there's another entire oeuvre of cooking and food poetry, too. For another day, another blog.

Tea as Domestic Art

This is one of the most beautiful photos I've seen all year. I've not really thought of tea (making, serving, brewing, drinking) as domestic art before today. Perhaps I should rethink my definitions. Thanks to the NY Times for the photo. And then, we need tea poems.

A Kashmiri woman carried a traditional teapot to family members who were planting the rice crop in Chak-e-Kawoosa, 16 miles west of Srinagar. India expects its rice harvest to increase by 2.4 million tons and wheat output to increase by over 1.2 million tons next year, a top farm ministry official said this week. Photo: Fayaz Kabli/Reuters

Laundress with Attitude

Here is one of my favoirte paintings. This is The Laundress (Renoir, Pierre-Auguste --1880 -- Art Institute in Chicago). She's really telling somebody to turn their socks right-side-out before they dump them in the hamper.

Laundry, Easter 2007 with the poet

I guess I actually do some work around here --- Thanks to Brad whom I think took the photo and to Dad who sent it to me --

Hang it on the line!

This week, town board members in Southhampton NY who had banned hanging clothes out to dry in 2002 voted to allow the use of clotheslines. This is a small victory for environmentalists and lovers of the laundry aesthetic, but the fact that the decision is economic is a sad sad commentary about modern (suburban) life. Don't these people know of the rich culture --art, music, poetry -- lauding laundry? Here is Richard Wilbur's famous and widely anthologized poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" which is a pretty sneaky title for a poem about laundry. (Blogger doesn't display the beautiful floating line breaks so go to the Poetry Foundation site to see the shape of this lovely lyric.)

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”

Very Funny Mother's Day

I read this in the New York Times today -- ways to stay smart -- great article -- but this is the best part: "Parenting asked readers at the Web site what would make the best gift for Mother’s Day, which is Sunday. The overwhelming (72 percent) favorite response: a self-cleaning home. " I agree. I'd still do the laundry, but the place can damn well dust itself!

A New Ironing Poem

By my good friend, Angela Narciso Torres, whom I have not seen since she moved to Chicago. Here's a great poem of hers, called "Ironing Woman" -- a woman's hand like snakes -- lemongrass -- and that anger tempered with fatigue and steam.

Women's Work The First 20,000 Years

What a great book: "Women's Work The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times" by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. And she means early -- starting in 800 B.C.E. in what is now Hallstatt Austria. An amazing story of why and how women became the custodians of clothing and cloth production in early societies. I recommend it. I read it in preparation for some kind of thesis I'm going to write on domestic imagery and poetry and women and working and mothers -- still thinking about it.

Fragonard, Daumier, and Degas

I wrote a paper for my Stanford MLA seminar this past winter exploring the art of these three French painters -- in particular their imagery of women doing laundry and ironing. If I figure out how, I'll post the paper.