Book Club Post Postponed Due to Urgent Gardening

Speaking of books, I seem to be writing one.

Broccoli start in hay mulch. For more on hay mulch, see Gardening Without Work and other titles by Ruth Stout.

I returned to New Hampshire to find a plethora of domestic and professional obligations awaiting me. One of the former was the need to get some vegetable starts in the beds in advance of a week of rain. One of the latter was to hammer down some edits on a chapter of a book I’m writing so I could apply for a grant.

I didn’t mean to write a book. I meant to write a blog post. But this thing now has ten thousand words, two dozen bibliography items, and a reading pile I have to tackle that might qualify me for a PhD. I didn’t think I had that much to say about anything, even art. But I continue to obey my muse, and she continues to surprise me.

I’ve pushed off the scheduled Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading from Art in America 1945-1970 so we can begin Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noë next Friday. I’m taking further phenomenology titles off the track because I’ll need to research them for my book; discussion of them may appear here as reports or even livecasts. Consequently, after Noë, we will have our summer fiction read, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. (It ought to be a touch pleasanter than last year’s summer fiction read.) Then we’ll do Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. After that, I feel like we need to hear from some artists directly, so we’ll read The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence. The last item on the list, for now, is Clement Greenberg: Late Writings. Art in America 1945-1970 remains interspersed between the titles in two-week chunks. That takes us to Thanksgiving, at which point we’ll be halfway through Art in America and I may institute another reading break through New Year’s Day 2026. The ASBC calendar has been updated accordingly.

I left Nepal, but Annapurna remains in my heart. I find that my attitude has changed about some things. The Harvard piece I just posted had been in the works since March, so I wrote it up and sent it before the story developed yet again. But expect that kind of cultural commentary to drop off significantly here at DMJ. The Himalayas, I learned, are some of the youngest mountains on the planet. Other ranges in Europe were far larger at one distant time, but the wind wore them down to their present size. Stories coming out of the arts presently are as galling as they were in March, but I find myself unable to get worked up about them. From the standpoint of the mountain, it will all be over soon. In the meantime, I have art to make and vegetables to grow and a book to write for some reason.

Thanks for following along. I’m grateful for you.

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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noë. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.