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.”

Second-quarter relief

In its overview of mutual fund performance in the second quarter, the New York Times quotes James Swanson of MFS. “A few months ago a lot of people thought the world was coming to an end. Now they’re dancing in the streets and going out to restaurants.”

This may be overstating things a bit. Elsewhere the article suggests that investors aren’t so much celebrating as sighing in relief. It’s a well known quirk of psychology that investors feel more pain from their losses than pleasure from their gains. And as of now, the most e-mailed article at the Times is about how long you should wait before taking your Social Security benefits—a calculation that many baby boomers must be wrestling with.

Still, though the future is always uncertain, it was good to see positive, even eye-popping returns, across the board:

The markets were so strong in the period that nearly every fund category — whether in stocks or bonds, or whether specializing in foreign, domestic, growth, value, small-cap, large-cap or various industry groups’ shares — showed a gain.... Among the highlights, foreign-stock funds rose 25.4 percent on average, with specialists in Asia and Latin America particularly strong. Real estate was the best of seven categories of funds focusing on single industries, gaining 29.8 percent. Financial, communications, technology and financial service funds had returns greater than 20 percent.

Jenn goes to Stonecoast

Jenn is on her way to Maine for her first ten-day residency as a student in the Stonecoast graduate writing program. By all accounts, it will be pretty intense.

Congratulations, Jenn, and have a great time! Dudley and I will hold down the fort while you’re gone. 

An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

My review of An Elegy for Easterly appears today in the Christian Science Monitor. I’m delighted to be appearing in the Monitor for the first time, and it’s especially nice to be writing about Zimbabwe, where I lived and worked for a time. It’s a good book, too.

The characters in these stories are not Zimbabwe’s worst off. They are not dying of AIDS, though they know people who are. Many have seen foreign countries, though they may no longer be able to afford a plane ticket. Many are educated, with bits of T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy in the backs of their minds.They are suffering, though others are suffering far more, but they face the grim realities of their country with creativity, liveliness, and a resilient sense of humor.

“An Elegy for Easterly,” the title story, follows the lives of the inhabitants of a squatter settlement until the government’s bulldozers come to scrape away their homes of poles and mud and plastic. “The Annex Shuffle” is about a law student’s mental breakdown, temporary yet long-lasting in its effects. “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion” tells of an aging coffinmaker with an unexpected flair for disco dancing.

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.