It stays dark so much later into the morning now, and it's starting to get cold. Yesterday when I stepped out the door there was frost on the windshield of my car, and I ran back inside to get a heavier coat. Before I have time to think about it, it will be winter and I'll be crunching out into the snow on my way to yoga, huddling into my coat and looking up at the red winter sky. It really is red in wintertime. Now that I've moved, my morning perspective is different--I used to sit right in front of a window, and I've spent seven winters watching the gradual change of light as my tiny point on the planet turns toward the sun. Now my desk is in a corner of a room, and my view is of the clutter of photographs and manuscript pages and notebooks and letters that surround me. The room is painted a beautiful shade of blue, and it's very peaceful in here, but as the hours of dawn creep ahead, I go out into the living room to watch the light come up between the branches of the trees. And soon those trees will be crusted with ice, and each branch will hold its small burden of snow carefully, and the black branches will be sketched against the red sky. But not yet.

Last night I saw a wonderful production of Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge." A difficult play, and beautifully done--about family, broken loyalty, desperation, America, love. What play isn't about love? Maybe a few by Beckett and Pinter, and I'll see Pinter's "The Caretaker" in a few weeks. A truly strange play--if you haven't read it, do. Does anyone around here read plays? A habit I've gotten out of, but one I need to get back to--something about closely knowing the language of a play changes the experience of seeing it entirely. I recently wrote an essay on seeing theater, and it gave me a chance to really think about what it means to take it all in--language, performance, production. And last night's production was spellbinding. One of the things I love about theater is the way it follows you out the door, down the street, into your night and next day, nagging at you, demanding to be thought about and considered on so many levels of the psyche and mind. And heart, maybe most of all--maybe that's where theater hits you hardest. In the heart. Miller's plays certainly do. So today the play will come trotting along behind me like a dog, which I'll enjoy.

Articles, research, lectures, grant proposals--I'm slammed, and it's not even worth going into. It makes me feel like wandering off and lying on the floor reading poems. I'm on an Elizabeth Bishop kick these days, and I'm dabbling a little in H.D.--if you haven't gotten to either of these two yet, you must. Another obsession of late: Georgia O'Keeffe, and her mutually inspiring relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. I have photography much on my mind--I'm working on an article about painter Megan Rye (link to her work in "Links"), whose work for the last four years has focused on Iraq. Her brother, an artist and a Marine, brought more than 2000 photographs back from his tour in the Middle East. The photographs are spectacular in their own right, but Rye has taken them to a different and fascinating place somewhere between sharp realism and almost imperceptible abstraction, which creates a slightly dream-like quality that unsettles the viewer in a very subtle way; the entire body of work is devoid of polemic or even commentary, instead casting questions back on the viewer as they stand before the paintings, which are of a great and unexpected beauty. It's a pleasure and an enormous challenge to write intelligently about visual art; I find it far more difficult than writing about theater or music, and at the same time I enjoy it a little bit more, partly because it's something I'm only now learning to do. Articulating the visual is an almost ridiculous pursuit, and yet there are few great paintings or painters--visual artists of any kind, really--who don't make you want to turn to the person with you and say something. But what? And isn't it strange, when you're looking at a work alone, how frustrating it is not to have someone to think it through with you, out loud? One of my favorite things to do is wander museums and galleries with a great friend. It's fascinating to see through another person's eyes.

And that, my friends, is what has captured me at my desk with my little lamp in the otherwise-dark early morning in fall. A fine day to you all--

Peace,
M