Richard Wright stamp

While I was on the USPS website, I discovered to my surprise that a stamp honoring Richard Wright came out last year.

It looks nice, but it’s a 61-cent stamp. Who uses 61-cent stamps? If you really want to honor a major American writer, wouldn’t you put him (or her) on a first-class stamp? Instead we have Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, and the Simpsons. 

The Melvin Memorial

On a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum, I spent some time with the figure of Mourning Victory, reproduced in marble from the Melvin Memorial that stands in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

This is one of my favorite works of art. It is even more impressive where I first saw it, on a shadowy hillside in the cemetery, not far from Poets’ Ridge where Thoreau and Emerson are buried (Emerson under an impressive boulder, Thoreau beside a small white headstone marked Henry, where bunches of goldenrod are sometimes left). The gloom of the site emphasizes the power and melancholy of the flag-wrapped figure emerging from the stone.

It didn’t occur to me until recently, though, that the three Melvin brothers whose death in the Civil War are remembered with this monument (Asa, John, and Samuel) must have been related to George Melvin, the local man noted by Thoreau as a dedicated hunter and for having a discovered a rare pink azalea (May 31, 1853).

He was sitting in the shade, bareheaded, at his back door. He had a large pailful of the azalea recently plucked and in the shade behind his house, which he said he was going to carry to town at evening. He had also a sprig set out. He had been out all the forenoon and said he had got seven pickerel,—perhaps ten. Apparently he had been drinking and was just getting over it. At first he was a little shy about telling me where the azalea grew, but I saw that I should soon get it out of him.

Corn Dark

Jenn and I went to the Whitney the other day, for the first time in several years, and saw the Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction show.

I’m not ordinarily a big fan of abstraction, but I enjoyed the exhibit—perhaps because O’Keeffe’s abstractions are often not very abstract. Many of these begin with objects in nature—a flower, a bleached bone, a stalk of corn—and stylize or otherwise alter them. They are speculative nature paintings, in the way that Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist takes place in a speculative version of New York.

I liked in particular Pelvis I, It Was Blue and Green (which might or might not be derived from an aerial view of a water landscape), and Lake George (1924), in which the wave in the foreground is carved like a sand dune.

Corn Dark reminded me of this passage from Thoreau’s Journal (February 26, 1840), a precursor of his credo from Walden: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”

The most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. They seem hedged about by secrecy. It is concussion, or the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum, which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be suddenly filled; as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood, but an assassination, which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately.

Corn grows in the night.

P.S. The color of the universe is beige. 

Jose Gaytan’s Gowanus

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn is not known for its scenic beauty, to say the least. But the photos taken there by Jose Gaytan are well worth a trip to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where they will be on display until August 29. Gaytan’s website has many more striking images (though I found it a bit buggy) and the Times recently covered his work and included a slide show.

Almost every day for the past six years, Mr. Gaytan and his two dogs have crisscrossed the streets and bridges along Brooklyn’s famous mile-and-a-half long canal, photographing moments of serenity, color and even beauty amid the decaying postindustrial landscape.

Turbulent cloudscapes float above panoramas of yellow brick projects and milky-slick water. Flowers poke out defiantly from cracked concrete. And moss-covered castoffs from long abandoned factories bob by the shoreline.

These sights might drive others away. For Mr. Gaytan, they trigger powerful memories of his childhood in 1950s Mexico.

“When I was growing up in Juarez, my grandfather was a handyman who took me on jobs with him,” he explained. “The first thing he would do was go to the junkyards in Juarez to buy toilets and things he would clean and fix to sell to the people across the border in El Paso. I used to play in those junkyards. That aroma is embedded in my brain: a mix of sewage, kerosene and oil. That’s what the Gowanus brought back to me. My childhood.”

Caillebotte at the Brooklyn Museum

The first painting by Gustave Caillebotte that I fell in love with was a still life of a fruitseller’s stand that I saw at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It gave me the impression that he was an artist devoted to intense tropical colors (not at all true, as I found out later).

Next was the painting shown here, La Place de l’Europe, Temps de Pluie. When I sat in on a course by T.J. Clark on art and social change, he used a slide of this painting to show the long airy vistas of the new Paris created by Baron Haussmann, who drove broad avenues through what was a labyrinth of narrow streets (at least in part to make it more difficult for rebels to blockade their neighborhoods). Then I was fortunate enough to see Caillebotte’s painting The Floor Scrapers in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

According to the Brooklyn Museum, there has not been a major exhibition of Caillebotte in New York for thirty years, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss this one. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed. None of my three favorites were on display—though there was an alternate version of The Floor Scrapers that was among the best works there.

I did learn what I didn’t know before, that Caillebotte was an avid yachtsman, and I enjoyed seeing the polished wooden models he made for yachts that he planned to build and sail. Each one was a half-hull, about three feet long, and the curves of the hulls and keels were like the contours of powerful sharks.