OLD WOMEN LOOK LIKE THIS: notes toward a talk

The announcement goes like this:

Susan Schultz on Writing Alzheimer's

September 23, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Manoa Campus, Henke Hall 325

---

The University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Center for Biographical Research Brown Bag Biography presents a lecture, "Old Women Look Like This": Writing Alzheimer's," by poet, publisher, editor, and UH-M English professor Susan M. Schultz

The talk will go something like this:

I was invited to talk about my recent e-book, Old Women Look Like This, which is available through Lulu, and was published by the Argotist Press, edited by Jeffrey Side out of Liverpool, UK.

Quala-Lynn Young, at the Contemporary Museum, organized a tour for writers last year, which was followed a couple of months later by a reading of poems based on the work of four artists. Having written Dementia Blog, I was most taken by the portraits of old women by Elizabeth Berdann, for their fidelity to their subjects. Here are some of her paintings. Edna is the woman whose face appears on the "cover" of my e-book. Each portrait bears the first name of its subject, along with her age. Edna is 91. (Old people, like children, are quite concerned with their ages; "I'm 86!" one of my neighbors said to me recently. Her dog is 12, she also told me.)

Elizabeth Berdann's paintings of old women

The poem I wrote for the museum event was based on several of these paintings. As I thought about the ways in which old women are seen in our culture, I thought to do a google search, "old women look like." When I did it, the results were (of course) profoundly strange. I found sites on how to appear younger, sites on how to appear older, pornographic sites, and sites about men who look like old lesbians. So I decided to write the poem by alternating brief descriptions of Berdann's faces with text I culled from my google searches. Here is the search: note that the current search includes the e-book itself, which is at once flattering (if anything computer-generated can be said to be so) and odd.

This method of writing takes something from a poetic movement that has grown in the past ten years from a joke to the subject of conferences, papers, and loud arguments among poets. It's called Flarf. For some writing about flarf, see this link, Flarf.

Some significant moments in the verbiage about flarf:

--Gary Sullivan's definition of "Flarf" as a verb: "To bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text." He brings up heavy use of Google.

--Mike Magee: "The use of Google being extremely common, the flarf method resembles in some sesen: a) the use of a thesaurus; b) eavesdropping and quoting; c) sampling; d) collage / cut-&-paste . . . What makes the flarf methodology different, to my mind, is the willful democratization of the method: the EXTENSIVE and even sole use of Googled material."

The best book of Flarf, to my mind, is K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation, which uses this method toward a (farcical) critique of American culture, focusing on the deer heads that people put over their fireplaces. But I didn't want farce so much as a commentary on the way old women are looked at, so the tone of my poem alternates between the google search's shtick and my own rather less absurdist takes on the women's faces. Part of the poem came out in the Honolulu Weekly; you can see it here:

and a snippet here: "She floats there, her neck rooted to the soil of its own shadow. Women talk openly about their sex lives after 60; I passed two women who held hands the way I imagine widows do. There are men who look like old lesbians on [cracked.com], but on the plus side, I look a lot younger than my age, or those who become senior before their time. Rose (90) has wide astonished eyes, hair a white nest; absence where her neck should be; she is all heart at the heart of her frame."

The move is from a Romantic poem image ("the soil of its own shadow") to the on-line source material, and then back again to hearts. (Berdann's frames are hearts and diamonds, so the play is on the frame, as well as on the literary frame/cliche of "heart.") Some of my lines are less Romantic (one is about the frame creating a baseball diamond out of the woman's face), but they are never "flarfy," in the ways the google materials are.

[read the entire poem at the talk]

I began to think less about image than about narrative, the stories we tell about old people, the way in which our narratives often fail to fit their lives, because our stories are more about children and about younger people. When I remembered that Sandra Day O'Connor's husband had fallen in love with another woman in his Alzheimer's residence, and that O'Connor was pleased because her husband seemed so happy about it, I turned to the computer again and found a soap opera generator. I took some of the short scenarios offered up by the generator and shifted them into the Alzheimer's home to see what would happen. The poem begins with an old woman stalking an old man (there are so many fewer of them in Alzheimer's care than women) and ends with a shotgun wedding based on the birth of a grandchild. The ways in which so many of our narratives depend on biology (who is the parent of whom is assumed to be a question about DNA and not about adoption) is made clear in this odd intervention. (Another of the poems is based on lists of children up for adoption, except that I substituted Alzheimer's patients for the orphans.)

[I just checked my email and found an ad for Botox, to get rid of the dark circles under my eyes, RISK-FREE. I'm told that 89% of those who use this product get compliments from their friends about their lack of wrinkles and bags.]

Another kind of narrative of old age and death is the elegy, which celebrates a life as it passes on, substituting a transcendent truth for the transient messiness of a life. One of my favorite elegies is Wallace Stevens's "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," a poem for George Santayana. An honors student of mine, Gizelle Gajelonia, had written nearly an entire thesis out of poems by writers such as Stevens, which she willfully "revised" into poems about TheBus on Oahu. Her take on Stevens is "13 Ways of Looking at TheBus," after his own "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Unlike Gajelonia, Stevens never mentioned Mufi Hannemann and his rail system in his poem! So I thought I might do a revision of Stevens myself. Here's Stevens's poem about the dying philosopher; I'll read just the beginning and the end, but you can hear the high seriousness and beauty of his language.

I hollowed his poem out and replaced much of the language with parts of a recent report by the Alzheimer's Association (2010). To Stevens's "The threshold Rome and that more merciful Rome / Beyond," I countered with: "The threshold, ManorCare, and that more // merciful ManorCare beyond" and with lots of statistics about Alzheimer's sufferers and their caretakers. My poem ends:

monthly check (to the tune of $6,000) for room and board and hair styling

and medical care. It is a kind of total disruptiveness at the end with every

visible thing diminished and yet there is still a bed, a chair, a common room

for conversation, a nursing station, and a nook with benches for sitting on:

The moving walkway is now ending. Watch your step.

Stevens is also obsessed with the ordinary things: the bed and the chair come from him, as they also come from my mother's Alzheimer's home. But his "total grandeur at the end" becomes "total disruptiveness," and the threshold of heaven is reduced to a "moving walkway," or a kind of temporal treadmill that the very old move on in their own version of timelessness. Not transcendence, but a different (imitative, fallen, non-Platonic) version of eternity.

The poems that work the best for me are those I wrote in response to the standard comparison of old age to childhood. I have a mother who is 92, and children who are now 9 and 11, so I feel qualified to test the simile. So I began rewriting the children's stories I encountered as if their heroines were not children, but very old people, people with dementia. One such piece I based on Are You My Mother?, a book about a small bird who is looking for its mother. The bird asks all sorts of animals if they are its mother, but they all tell the baby bird that they look different. "I'm a cow, not a bird," would be one response. So the bird finally finds its mother bird, and all is well. A Mother for Choco revises that story for adoptive children. In this story, it matters not who resembles whom, but who loves whom. So the orphaned baby finds that her mother is a bear and that mama bear has other children, including a pig. I made my own mother the central figure in this piece, which I'll now read. "Are You My Mother?"

Another of these pieces is based on a news story about the first black woman elected to the South Carolina legislature (in 1974) who died alone in her house of hypothermia. She was suffering dementia, but would not allow anyone to help her. So I rewrote the opening to Pippi Longstocking to be about her. Here's a description of Pippi, for anyone who might conceivably have missed her. Pippi is all those things we admire: she's independent, naughty, answers only to herself, and she has lots of fun in her solitude. She's like a wacky pig-tailed Henry David Thoreau in a way, except that she also has friends.

My rendering of Pippi changed drastically when I moved Juanita Goggins into Villa Villekula, Pippi's residence. Here's that piece; much of the language comes from the Pippi book. As you can hear, the narrative of joyful self-reliance goes bad when Pippi is replaced by this old woman who suffers dementia. She needed to rely on others, but could not. They refused to knock her door down, and so she died in her house, the good American's castle.

I don't necessarily want to end on a despairing note, although there are plenty of those in the world of Alzheimer's patients and their families. But I hope that the playfulness of the poems, their forms, the waywardness of their narratives, also gestures toward the humor that can be found in a day at the Alzheimer's home. It's a humor based on the play of minds that can do nothing except play. The last time I spoke here, about my book on my mother's dementia, I made a bad metaphor. I said that Alzheimer's was like a neutron bomb, which destroyed everything but the body of the building or the person. Someone came up afterwords to remind me that Alzheimer's patients are persons. I hope that this project has gone some distance in reaffirming that sentiment.

I would love to hear responses to the work, and to take questions about it.

Allyn Bromley at "the Whitney of the Pacific": art, environment, age

["What Color is Invisible"]

One of the aspects of blogging--my own and others'--I most enjoy is the way in which personal and intellectual concerns weave together in unexpected ways over time. In recent weeks I've been thinking both about what it means to be a Haole artist in Hawai`i and about issues of old age and illness. Allyn Bromley's work provided a surprising bridge between them. This morning I attended a walk-through of her retrospective show at The Contemporary Art Museum in Honolulu; our docent was none other than Bromley herself. She's an 83-year old woman with bright red hair, a refreshingly irreverent view of herself and her work, and a lively sense of humor. At the point a baby started to cry loudly, she said, "I'll outdo the baby!" On one of her pieces about there being too many tourists walking up the Mānoa Stream, she declared that this was her way to say, "oh shoots." On the bottom floor we found a couple of mummy-like bodies, composed of woven strips of unsold prints: one is Mr. Pontificate and the other Mr. Knew It All. Both of them inert and fully recycled--Mr. Knew It All from her print, "Miloli`i," which is itself a commentary on over-development.

We get to know others through their repetitions, I suppose, as well as their reputations. Bromley pointed out that printmaking involves the creation of multiples, that it resembles what we see on teeshirts, that it is chamber music to the symphonies that are one of a kinds. So Bromley's repeated uses of words such as "personal" (as in, "this work is very personal") and "doubt" (her doubting dog was popular with the group of 60 or so who walked with her) and "indignations" and even "recycling," offered up a portrait of the artist as a cultural-confessional worker. While she claimed toward the end that she's not good with ideas (the ideas she ascribed to younger artists like Anne Bush, with whom she has collaborated), the most engaging of her artworks are idea-rich.

Many of Bromley's doubts and indignations center on Hawai`i. Born in San Francisco in 1928, she moved to Hawai`i at a time when it took over four days on a ship to get here, when you could smell Hawai`i before the ship docked, when the small fishing village of Miloli`i on the Big Island existed completely off the grid. She began visiting Miloli`i in the 1950s, but felt "anxiety over what was coming" not too long afterwards. Her print about Miloli`i starts on its left with a surveyer's stick, then moves rightward toward a lava field that has lines imposed upon it that demarcate "tracts." Let's face it, she said, developers here have not done a good job. She contrasted the rapacious development of Hawai`i with concern shown in Austria for keeping things Austrian. (Her intense localism is met by an equally intense internationalism, and the museum catalogue begins and ends with lists of places she has been. their longitudes and latitudes.)

Even her print of the doubting dog contains an indigenous coconut palm, and the yen scattered across the right side of the piece were inspired by Japanese real estate speculation in the 1980s. So a dog who began its art life in a children's book was then blown up 1000 or more percent by Bromley and entered into a very different scene from that of a children's book. It's a scene in which nature is under threat from yen, in which the doubting dog turns his nose toward great changes in Hawai`i.

That the dog began as French and forms part of commentary on Honolulu housing issues is apropos. Bromley, like the dog to whom she has given new, and larger, life, has stationed herself in a new space and has found valuable ways to intervene artistically. And so, after the print about bulk pickup and dumping, we find the print about Mānoa Stream, and then this piece that covers an entire wall:



In "Green Piece," 300 pieces cut out of recycled prints, which took some six months of cutting, is less direct in its intent on its audience than are some of the others. It's not "about" dumping or "about" development or "about" real estate, and yet somehow it engages all these issues. The piece contains what a poet might call refrains, or repeated images that serve to anchor the eye, even as it's invited to wander. If the piece is set up somewhere else, it will wander, as it can never be done the same way twice.

Then there are the prints of Waikiki, which were put into the Honolulu Convention Center by the SFCA (State Foundation on Culture and the Arts) and then taken out again because they were not the image the Convention Center people wanted visitors to take home with them. There is Bromley's large installation on homelessness, which brought out her own anxieties about audience (how about homeless people, the ones who are not here today?) and the value of art (where to put it post-retrospective). While no one on the tour was homeless, there were two or three women who know and work with homeless people (several degrees of separation that don't involve Kevin Bacon). "I can introduce you to the woman who sits on the steps of the building," one woman said. While something in me wants to use an ironic tone in telling this part of the story, there was a kindness to the artist's own questions that obviates the need for it. The truth is, perhaps, that most of "us" do not know homeless people, but are disinclined even to say so.

These pieces about the environment, development, and homelessness strike me as wonderful examples of what a Haole artist can do here, without apology. One of my past and future students, Alexei Melnick, mentioned the other day that there is a big difference between a "Haole" and a "white person." The Haole has grown up as member of a minority group; the white person lives an unmarked life, freed from the very notion of race. Though "post-racial America" may simply be an America where white people have a race, too. While her art is cooped up in the upper class art museum, Bromley attempts to make connections with communities in Hawai`i. Outside communities, those that live outside. That these linkages have not been made directly is not her fault, but that of a culture in which art is assumed to be divorced from the streets, even when it reproduces them on the museum's floor (as with the homelessness piece). She does not claim to be from Miloli`i, but is able to comment upon its loss of isolation from the world, perhaps because she was herself an intruder upon it.


The remaining pieces that struck me most were those about her parents. In recent years she has returned to them as her subject matter. When her mother was dying of cancer, her father came and sat with her. That love is a form of patience was the subject of one painting, in which a man and a woman simply look at one another, A at B. Then there was this painting, which you can see to the left, of her mother reading as she was dying of cancer. It's as if the Stevens poem about "reading in a chair" were being wrenched back into time through the title, "Mother With Cancer."

Bromley had thought that these "very personal" images, like the one of her mother, would not be seen, that they might be "offensive" to viewers. She was surprised at the positive reactions to her work on death and transition. I suspect that there are many viewers, like myself, who want to see this stage of life represented in art. While her portrait of her mother is not "realistic" in the way Elizabeth Berdann's portraits of old women are, the effects are similar. Yes, here they are, the old people; they are granted life in art, too.

The last piece she showed us was a collaboration with Anne Bush. Perched on clear ledges are shredded bits of colored paper, representing all the previous catalogues from the museum. There was something light about this installation, as if the death of catalogues made a beautiful material joke. Bromley talked of having a ritual burning of some of her art, including this piece (a perverse take on the 14th century Pope who burned books). To render them into mandalas would be a logical next step. But the audience was more taken by the idea of selling pieces at auction and giving the money to an organization that works with homeless people. The shredded catalogues playfully de-present Bromley's many concerns, with the environment, recycling, transcience, age, humor. They seemed a good place to stop. For now.



And here's "Breakfast Buddha."


There's a fine catalogue of the exhibit, with an introduction by John David Zuern of the UHM English department. John is on the board of Tinfish Press.

Ed. note: Anne Bush referred to TCM as "the Whitney of the Pacific" in a conversation with Allyn Bromley.

_Old Women Look Like This_: an ebook

I have a new ebook from Argotist Press on-line, available for free download here. I don't use my Kindle, but perhaps you do yours! (You can also print it out in troglodyte fashion and read it off paper.) The chapbook is an off-shoot of the Dementia Blog project (and of that project's several off-shoots), and takes seriously the simile that old age is like childhood. It tests that too-simple comparison by placing very old people into children's stories--Pippi Longstocking, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Are You My Mother?, A Mother for Choco, Anne of Green Gables--and gauging what happens to them. I guess it's fair to say that the version of Pippi Longstocking (independent, high-spirited, living alone) does not work so well for a woman with dementia. Or that an 85-year old woman looking for her mother is bound not to find her. Sadly fascinating that children's stories, which so often praise the virtues of independence and even orphanhood, seem to maintain their power in American culture, despite evidence to the contrary. Or is it Ralph Waldo Emerson again (my favorite bogeyman these days)? (I can hear Ben Friedlander reminding me that Emerson himself suffered from dementia late in his life.) It's a power that turns against the elderly, prevents many of them from agreeing to care and from deciding how they want their final years to be lived. I'd link to another post, but there are so many at this point!

The project had its origins at Honolulu's Contemporary Art Museum. The Educational Curator, Quala-Lynn Young, was my student in two poetry classes last year. She organized a tour for writers of the museum's special exhibit of art about the body. After the tour, we went home and wrote poems about our favorite pieces. Mine were a series of portraits of old women by Elizabeth Berdann. You can find some of them here. There's a blog post about the event here, as well. I worked off google searches "old women look like," as well as off the paintings themselves.

After writing about her portraits, I began using residents of my mother's Alzheimer's home as "models" for other poems in the series. Along with those that use children's stories, I wrote one that adapted Wallace Stevens's "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" into a poem about Alzheimer's care, another about the World Cup, as if it were taking place in the common area of my mother's home. I also took the liberty to transcribe Ronald Reagan's later memory of his famous Challenger disaster speech--from the point at which Alzheimer's had undone him. Finally, I adapted one of those heart-wrenching lists of "waiting children," which an adoption agency sends us nearly each month, into a poem about Alzheimer's patients. On re-reading it, I'm not sure what it is they're waiting for, but perhaps that is part of the problem. Perhaps that is the problem.

In any case, I hope you'll make the free download. If you prefer books that you pay for, consider investing in a Tinfish book or in Dementia Blog, the book.

Art and Poetry at The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, April 18, 2010

[I cannot turn this program right-side up, so in the spirit of a piece Elizabeth Berdann sent me on email the other day (I said, "it's fine, but it's sideways," and she responded, "I wanted it that way"), I am presenting it as a rectangle. Turn your head and/or your screen, the better to read it.]


At 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 18, 2010, in the city of Honolulu in the neighborhood of Makiki, poets gathered to read work they had written in response to the Words Off the Wall exhibition at the Museum. I wrote an earlier post about the pre-write tour of the exhibition organized by Quala-Lynn Young. The post-write tour included "teams" of poets who had written on particular artists, chosen because of their concern for the body.


Team Fay Ku included Christina Low, Jade Sunouchi (seen above with the artist), Julie Tanji, Amalia Bueno, and No`u Revilla.




Team Elizabeth Berdann consisted of Neomary Soriano-Calderon (a 9th grader at Mililani High School), Susan M. Schultz, Jaimie Gusman, and Rachel Wolf. Allison Schulnik's team was made up of Tayla Yogi, another 9th grader, and Evan Nagle, a post-MFA newcomer to Hawai`i, by way of his girlfriend, Jaimie Gusman. Judy Fox provoked a poem from Jeff Walt, a Goddard MFA discovered at the reception desk of the museum, where he volunteers once a week.

I was unable to take down full accounts of the poems, but registered some single lines:

--Christina Low, from "Mer": "Make me a stone that sinks to the bottom of the sea"; later she said she saw the painting, "Alarmed Mermaid," once and then worked off her memory of it.

--Jade Sunouchi, from "Birdfeed": "wings partitioned into fingers," a fine image for metamorphosis. Here is the painting she and Julie and Amalia wrote about.

--Julie Tanji, who carried Japanese characters with her and held them up, yelled, "I am not invisible!"

--Amalia Bueno used Prometheus as her mythological reference for the Fay Ku painting that three poets chose to write on;

--No`u Revilla performed her poem about four young women braiding a horse's mane, largely from memory, and repeated the refrain, "I am your mother." She said she wrote about this painting because the one young woman seemed not to fit, belong, seemed outside the emotional energy of the poem. That was the woman on whom she focused her care.

--Jaimie Gusman wrote about Elizabeth Berdann's wall of 31 tongues, considering the tongues to be a map. Her speaker put the tongues on, over her head. As usual, Jaimie's work featured quick cuts between pathos and silliness, lyric and faux advertising copy.

--Rachel Wolf wrote about Berdann's "Ghost," the painting of an old person upside down on cloth. Among her zingers was the phrase "chamois shaman."

--Tayla Yogi, one of Steve Schick's 9th graders from Mililani, wrote a poem of various pronouns, "she/her/me/myself/I" to go along with the melting hobo of Allison Schulnik's video. Everyone was impressed by how bravely she and Neomary performed their poems.

--Evan Nagle took that video and made text values for the pixels, found phrases through webcrawler, employed a spam/poetic filter, and ended up with phrases like "save a puppy from the pound or something." His was the least representative of the poems--it was not in the least so--but an eye opener for the audience.

The reading was followed by a reception that featured cheese sticks, hunks of cheese, and fruit, mingling, and much photography before we dispersed and I, for one, returned to the Sunday "night" baseball game between the Cardinals and the Mets, which the Cardinals won.



[from left to right: Jeff Walt, Quala-Lynn Young, Jaimie Gusman, Evan Nagle, Christina Low, Rachel Wolf, Julie Tanji, No`u Revilla, Susan M. Schultz, Jade Sunouchi, Amalia Bueno, Neomary Soriano-Calderon; not in the picture because she had a softball game to play in was Tayla Yogi)

Many thanks to Quala-Lynn Young for organizing the event and to Shantel Grace for writing about it, over and again.

Words Off the Wall [Pre-Write Tour of Honolulu's Contemporary Museum]

[Quala-Lynn Young, left]


[Judy Fox, "Sloth," from "Snow White and the Seven Sins"]



[Fay Ku, from "Burden Lightens Piecemeal"]



[Elizabeth Berdann, "Emma"]



[Writers]




Today, Quala-Lynn Young (or Lynn, or Q), Curator of Education at the Contemporary Museum on Makiki Heights, gave a tour of the current show to a group of 12 writers in hopes that they will write poems on the art for an event called Words Off the Wall on April 18. Among the writers was my colleague, Anne Kennedy, and many of my students, fresh from poetry boot camp. Lynn, who took Form & Theory of Poetry from me last semester and is currently the "salty" one in my undergraduate Poetry Workshop, has been imagining this event for months, and has talked up the current exhibition for as long as that. The museum describes this as "four exhibitions concurrently in which the artists work in different media and styles but have a common denominator in their interest in the figure." These artists are Fay Ku, Elizabeth Berdann, Judy Fox, and Allison Schulnik, the first of whom is herself in residence in the gallery.

Lynn told us that when Fay first arrived at the gallery she drew several faces on a sheet of paper. Several days later, Lynn looked in and all the faces had been erased. Ku says that she always begins from the face (but never works from photographs or live models) and goes where the faces take her, erasing until the lines are right. On her studio wall at present is a drawing of three women at the top of a palm tree, at the bottom of which an octopus curls itself like a root system around the tree's trunk. Ku explained her love of octopi (including her love of their taste), as well as her fascination with palm trees, which she encountered during a residency in Las Vegas (the seventh of the Hawaiian islands, since so many people here travel there to gamble and take in shows). The palm trees, she admitted, are cliches, but she opts to "own them in some way." The octopi she found at the Waikiki aquarium, and likes their mirroring of the palm's tree's fronds. Ku works with large pieces of paper when she can, since such large sheets present her with "her own world."

Ku is an artist who can talk poetics. When asked to talk about her large piece, "Burden Lightens Piecemeal," which features a woman with long braids dragging what appears to be her dead double, who is being pecked by crows and ravens, she told us about the autobiography of the famous 19th century Siamese twins, Eng and Chang. But not only did she tell us about the twins, the one who died and the one who remained attached, but also about the ways in which we attach ourselves to our pathologies, her research on funerary practices in China--where unmarried women and children are not buried, but left out for birds to consume--and talked about how definitions accrete for us over time.

Fresh from Ku's room with its "Mad Dash" and "Where Ghosts Live" and "Alarmed Mermaid" and "Taking Down a Giant" drawings made of graphite, ink and watercolor, we moved into room of work by Elizabeth Berdann, an artist obsessed by "the plasticity of bodies." Berdann has the portrait of a buttocks inside a gold frame, the kind you might put grandmother's face in; she makes tiny pieces you have to peer at; she uses found objects from flea markets. And she has an old chair called "Chair of Insults" (1992). On this old chair are doilies carefully sewn with sayings like "Let me know when you've written your book" or "If I loved you / I would tell you" or "You're the dog in the photo" and so on. Heirloom of insult. But from insults and tongues we moved into "the dog room," where Berdann's loving sketches and paintings of dogs are on display. As a new mother, she discovered a world at the height of her daughter's stroller, the world of the canine. Her portraits of these dogs are detailed, loving, and odd, as are the later pieces done after she developed breast cancer.

Around the corner from the dogs are the old women, a row of them on one side of a corridor, the other side of which is the wall to the outside. One of them, Emma, can be seen at the top of this post. Berdann painted these women (on copper plates) when one of her residencies placed her across the street from a nursing home. I was most struck with these portraits, for my own reasons, and want to go back to visit them. Each face peers out of a steel frame that is either in the shape of a heart or of a diamond. The faces are wrinkled, fallen, lovely in their age, yet off-putting because we are not accustomed to finding beauty there.

The attraction-repulsion effect of the nursing home corridor was heightened when we moved to the work of Judy Fox. Fox's "legendary beings" range from Krishna and Lakshmi to Snow White and her Seven Sins, surreal dog-like gnomish objects in bright terracotta that combine the qualities of vegetables with those of sex organs. Odd effects. One of the two men on the tour spoke of the feeling he got looking at these objects knowing that someone might be looking at him, wondering if he found them arousing. They were more, as the artist herself says, "icky cute" objects, funny/disturbing "characters," some of whom looked to be zipped up in surreal symbolic vests. By the time I arrived at Allison Schulnick's short videos of appearing and disintegrating hobos and clowns in states of nature I could handle no more.

On April 18 at 2 p.m. the Museum will host a reading by the writers, with a reception to follow.