(no subject)

The hickory tree outside my window is starting to pick up its normal gold fall color. Goldenrod's blooming, too. There are a few early leaves on the road every morning, and the coats on my cats and pony are getting thicker. Summer is definitely on the way out. *sigh*

I like autumn, but every year the seasons seem to swing round faster. Where did the summer go? Where did all the time go? (Why is the rum gone?) And, damn it, when did we switch from I'm bored, there's nothing to do to The world is a surfeit of entertainments but I do not have enough time to do any of them properly? Was there a memo I didn't get?

Dinner last night (and breakfast this morning) was eggplant stuff. It is a lot like ratatouille except with fewer ingredients. I didn't have any green peppers or summer squash handy, so I just made what I had, which turned out amazingly edible. For the folks at home, and perhaps Cranky Review Guy if there are eggplants in Korea:

In a large frying pan, sautee several cloves of garlic and half an onion in some olive oil until the onion is near-transluscent.
Peel and cube the eggplant, add that to the pan. Salt it a bit to help draw out some juice.
Add a sliced up tomato
Add a handful (six or seven) of mushrooms, sliced

Plop a lid on top, and put on fairly low heat. Stir occasionally. Add a teeny bit of water if you're having sticking problems. Cook until done. Salt, pepper, eat. You can have it with rice if you want, but that's not required.

I was talking to Ash on Sunday and he said that I was the oldest thirty-something person he knew, not like age, but how I am. I'm not sure I know what to make of that. I don't think he was being mean -- he's generally a pretty nice kid.

They eat horses in Iceland.

(no subject)

I expect a lot of what people get out of art is made from what they, themselves, bring to the table. Here's an essay about someone who took Hamlet to the African bush to see what the people there would make of it. Turns out they had a lot to offer Hamlet and Hamlet had quite a bit to offer them. Interesting reading, that.

This morning, on the drive into work, I was thinking about Andrew Wyeth art because the overly-long, gone-to-seed grass (still haven't cut it) in my yard is turning rusty and brown and it reminded me of Christina's World. That painting, as it happens, shows up as a plot point in Preacher, where it's Jesse's mom's favorite painting because it reminds her of her own life. (I'll post that panel later tonight when I get home so that all ya'll can see it.)

I was also thinking about the Helga pictures, by the same Wyeth fellow, which my mom and I went to see in an exhibit in the days before we decided that *art* wasn't really a good choice for our mother-daughter outings. (We do opera nowadays.) I looked at the pictures and pictures and pictures of Helga. There were a lot of them at the exhibit. I saw a rough-boned nordic woman, a strong woman, painted over and over, variations on a theme. As art went, it wasn't bad. I liked it better than the suggestive flowers by that dreadful O'Keeffe woman, anyway. (Me to mom on O'Keeffe: I don't get it... if she wanted to paint snatch, then why didn't she? Why muck about with suggestive flowers? We gave up on joint art expeditions shortly after the O'Keeffe exhibit.)

So anyway. Looking at Helga, Helga n+1, Helga n+2... I saw lots of pictures of a rough-boned nordic woman, which were okay but not all that write-home-worthy. This was not the exhibit that my mom saw. My mom saw the entire exhibit through the haze of a woman scorned. The primary thing she got out of the exhibit, least as far as I could tell, was a sense of rage and unfairness. After all, Helga was not his wife. He did, indeed, have a wife who was not Helga. How dare he, said my mother, paint his (years and years of) affair for everyone to see? What about his wife? Mom was not appeased by my take on the situation: "Well, he's a rich painter dude and they've probably worked it out between them. It is not our problem, about him and his wife. Here, look at the light on this one... he's made her look fragile." We took different things to the exhibit, and we took different things home from the exhibit.