A Walk Around Shoreline Golf Link

Self Portrait

Shooting in the Rain

A Road Less Traveled (at Moss Landing)

Salinas River State Beach near Moss Landing.

A nice day, but my allergy got a better hold of me and forced me to cut my trip short. 

My right hand was holding the camera, my left hand the Kleenex.

Kids practicing horse riding.

The bright colors of the flowers in the cemetery caught my eyes. It reminds me Almodovar's movie Volver.

Looking at my trusted car Blanky. It's only 1 hr's drive from Silicon Valley, but you are entering a very different world.

An Opera Lover's Happy Moment

With opera's mega star, French soprano Natalie Dessay. As an opera lover, this is a moment to remember.

New Photo Project Idea

Lately I had an idea about a series of photos (or videos) I wanted to take. (It is a bit hard to execute but can be fun.) I want to look at the same scene, but shoot it with different time frames. For example, a high speed frame rate (>60fps) slow motion, a time lapse, normal one shot photo, and long exposure (>30 seconds, with Lee big stopper, I had done a 10 min exposure). The idea is to look like how time retracts and extends and its impact on our seeing (and many things). In a way, I am reflecting on the fact that we only live in our limited time frame (mostly historically) and pondering on the what-ifs. I have no idea some of those photos would be like (depending on the subjects, unfortunately not all subjects can be shot with different time scales), but that's just part of the fun.

This Is Why You Should Never Read Your Favorite Poet's Biography

A huge mistake for me to reread Bishop's biography, especially the period between 1968 to 1970 (right after Lota's death). What a mess!!! It's like witnessing someone rock bottomed. It's difficult to watch and one's totally unable to help makes it even more painful*. I swear from now on I will stick with her letters and poems (even critical reviews). No more biographies.

*In a way, it is not unlike watching a Lars von Trier movie. You can't understand (or disagree with) the behaviors or choices his characters made but it really makes you question and challenge your own belief.

Serendipity from the Angela Hewitt's Recital

The Angela Hewitt recital turned out to be such a treat! (Chinchih exchanged the ticket for me so I had no idea what program I was attending till tonight.) The best part, to me, was Miss Hewitt's 10 minute pre-performance lecture on how to listen to "the Art of Fugue". (I confess without that I would definitely fall asleep during the recital.)

While listening to Miss Hewitt explaining how Bach used mirroring and inversion in each piece (she even did a little demo), I suddenly had an epiphany. Not on Bach, but on Bishop's poetry. There are a lot of mirroring and inversion in Bishop's poetry (from her early work "The Gentleman of Shalott" to the love poem "Insomnia") through her unique way of using images. In her villanelle "One Art", repeating sounds (words like master/disaster) appear like recurring musical subjects. I suddenly remembered when Bishop went to Vassar, she was to study music (then changed to English Literature due to her terrible stage fright). She actually studied Baroque music and counterpoint for a year. All that knowledge, she carried into her poetry. (After all, poetry can be considered a form of music.)

With that insight, I felt like Columbus discovering the new world. 2014 is really a breakthrough year for me as a reader. Life is really "awful but cheerful", and full of serendipities.

Looks like I am not the only one who identifies the relationship of music and Bishop's work.

Poetic Justice

When I first read "One Art" (Bishop's letter collection) years ago, I noticed it only included one letter E.B. wrote to her Brazilian lover Lota. How was that possible? Bishop was a prolific letter writer (it was her life line to friends) and her "selected" letter collection was already a 600 page tome. How could it only contain one letter from the fifteen-year (often considered the happiest period of E.B.'s life) relationship? Then I discovered from the footnote that E.B.'s letters to Lota were all burned by Lota's families after Lota commit suicide in New York. (The one survived because it was put into a book as a bookmark.) 

Now, after almost 20 years, Bishop is in the Pantheon of Library America. Numerous books, biographies, and papers had been written about her. Even her unpublished poems had been dug out of libraries and assembled into a new (though controversial) book. (We even have a feature length movie about her love affair!) No stones in her life hadn't been turned and no closets unopened. Bishop would be totally horrified to discover how her life had been exposed. Surprisingly, no "new" letters to Lota had been uncovered, not a single one. Without her letters, her love story stays forever a mystery; we can take a peek from her love poem such as "The Shampoo", but we will never know the rest. In some way, it seems to be the poetic justice this very private poet needs. It also makes reading the only surviving letter in "One Art", right before E.B.'s other letters to report Lota's death, a poignant experience one can hardly describe. 

Letters of Two Elizabeths

I once mailed a poem of Elizabeth Bishop to my late roommate T.F. (who lived in Taiwan). She loved it, thanked me profusely, and told me when she was in Germany (she once won a scholarship to study German for a summer), her teacher had chosen the name Elisabeth for her. Rereading Bishop's poems reminded me this episode. I suddenly realized, the two Elizabeths in my life, I actually knew them through their correspondences. I started reading Bishop because of her letter collection "One Art". And T.F., private and shy just like Bishop, was reserved in person but always passionate in her letters. Without those letters, my two Elizabeths would be lost to me forever. 

Rereading Bishop After A Disappointing Movie

In the movie "Reaching for the Moon", the poet Elizabeth Bishop heard someone reciting a poem of hers and felt terribly mortified. If that is true, I can now see her spinning in her grave, because "Reaching for the Moon" is not interested in her work, but in her messy personal life, and manages to make her a very dull person. (A truly unforgivable sin!) That said, even a bad movie can have a few redeeming qualities. To me, they belong to the moments where Miranda Otto (who played Bishop in this movie) reads Bishop. Her throaty voice gives Bishop's lines a palpable intimacy, haunting, beautiful. Oh, how I wish the movie had stayed in those moments!

After watching this movie, I dug out my Bishop collections and went over the poems referenced in the film. Since the movie mostly focused on the early days of Bishop's staying in Brazil (around the publication of "A Cold Spring"), most of the poems are Bishop's early work (other than "One Art", which bookend the movie). Personally I prefer Bishop's later work, but through this rereading I realized how much I had missed in my previous reading. Here are some of my thoughts on the poems appeared in the movie:

One Art - the movie covered the time span of 1952-1969, but Bishop didn't write this poem till 1976, three years before her death. (Shall we call it the poetic license of movie making to change certain facts?) This is one of Bishop's most famous poems. The poem was written in a form called villanelle. (Here is a link to more details about the form: what is villanelle.) Unlike "the art of losing", the form is extremely hard to master. Bishop had done it beautifully. In the Vassar library, which houses most of Bishop's manuscripts and notebooks, you can see Bishop's early revisions of the poem (the final published one was the 17th edition). The fragment cited in the beginning of the movie seems to be taken from revision 10 or 11.

Sleeping on the Ceiling - this is where Bishop felt mortified when she heard Carlos recite it at the lunch scene. The poem is one of Bishop's really early work. (I roughly remembered she wrote it in Paris during a trip when she was about 25.) Like many her early work, it's set in a surrealistic landscape. I find the poem much more interesting when it was cited by Carlos and Lota in the movie. 

The Shampoo - probably the only "erotic" poem E.B. had ever published in her lifetime. (Bishop was a very private person and believed in "closets, closets, and more closets".) Needless to say after watching the movie you know where she got the inspiration. 

Insomnia - its last stanza showed up beautifully in the movie, and it's my favorite scene. Here are those beautiful lines:

into that world inverted

where left is always right,

where the shadows are really the body,

where we stay awake all night,

where the heavens are shallow as the sea

is now deep, and you love me.

(When I read the poem for the first time, the last "and you love me" struck me as an amazing surprising ending. At that time, I interpreted it as (note the world is inverted) "you don't love me". Watching this movie I suddenly realized it could also mean "and I love you". The meaning of the poem suddenly changed.)

At the Fishhouses - I totally missed this one in my early reading, now I consider it my favorite in E.B.'s early work. It is such an incredible poem, fully sensual (you will smell, touch, and taste the sea in the poem). How could I have missed these lines?

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

(It is a poem I promise myself one day I will read on the coastline of Nova Scotia.)

As for the "close close all night...", where Bishop read to Lota after the Pulitzer night. It was actually an unpublished poem E.B. gave to a friend as a wedding gift (discovered posthumously). It is not what E.B. would consider a "publishable work", but gives this movie such a gentle and loving moment:

Close close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,

close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.

Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.

The melancholy ending. The movie starts and ends with Bishop's "One Art".