Sue's art show, "What the Weave"

Sue was a hair dresser before she retired about ten years ago. I'm sure she was a skilled and creative hair dresser. But retirement let her blossom. She began writing poetry -- very good poetry, good enough to win the Kathrine  Lee Bates annual poetry contest twice already. She has not given up poetry but has turned to collage and to weaving. At present she has a show of over 40 small-ish woven pieces at the Falmouth  (Mass - Cape Cod) Art Center. They are fascinating, most made of yarn, but some using other materials like paper, plastic, wire.  All are fairly small and I was delighted to see that some had red "sold" stickers on them when I went to the show about ten days ago. 

The first piece encountered is this one with the banana. Those who read about the big-bucks art world with their annual art shows in various cities in Europe and the US, will remember that last spring the talk of the show (Miami? Basel? somewhere) was a a banana affixed to the wall with a piece of duct tape. I believe it sold for $120.000 - and the purchaser ate the banana.  Sue's piece is a bit smaller and she replaces the banana every 3 days and has put a purchase price -- due to the fact that weaving takes more time and skill than smacking on a piece of duct tape -- at $1250,000. She doesn't expect it to sell but did ask that her friends do a selfie with the art. I had a regular camera but here I am with the immortal banana piece.  (Remember, if you click on the photo, you will enlarge it enough to see the weaving more clearly.)

Christmas book winner

(I love the Mandarin or Clementine oranges that are very much in season right now.)

As I wrote in the previous post, we've been giving one another books for Christmas. This year, as last, grandson Joel found the "hit" which this year went to his sister Cory but is making it's way around the family. I finished it last night after an immersing couple of days, finding myself in a world so clearly and perfectly drawn, but so truly dreadful that I couldn't read without breaks.  The book is Educated by Tara Westover who never went to school until she defied her fiercely fundamental Mormon father (as had two older brothers) and went to Brigham Young University having studied alone (as one brother instructed) to pass the entry exam. Eventually a teacher arranged for her to go to Cambridge  (in England) and from there another helped her get a Gates Foundation scholarship to get a Ph.D. at Harvard. That is the education part in the narrower  sense.

Her father was fanatically dominating, fearful, (bipolar in spades!), he owns property on an Idaho mountain where he collected wrecked autos and other junk which he stripped and sold. The mother became a very competent midwife and eventually an entrepreneurial herbalist. There were seven children, one brother was (to any reader but not to the family) severely violent. The larger story beside her very bumpy formal education is the emotional immersion and dependence she feels toward the family and how very slowly and very painfully she finally becomes a self-aware, individual. The family tie is ingrained so deeply she is in emotional pain (and sometimes physical pain) most of the time.

This sounds like a difficult read and it is. The difficulty comes from the reader's perspective (can't she see what's happening) but not from the writing which is amazingly vivid but without over-reaching.