Immortal Goes Flying!

Immortal Goes Flying!

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My wonderful, long-time friend Geoffrey Knauth, who is a pilot among all his many accomplishments (like being fluent in several languages, including Russian and French), sent me this image of his lovely wife Dr. Robin Knauth. She took my novel along for a ride in their airplane.
Now, Geoffrey is no slouch, having been the cox for the Harvard crew team. But Robin is a super-genius, and a professor, and a distinguished biblical scholar. It gave me a nervous thrill to imagine her perusing my tome. Especially given that she has the education and wherewithal to know… where I misconstrued radical Manichaean dualism… The liberties I took with the Gnostic gospels…. What I stole from different mythologies in the name of telling a story.
Robin is as kind as she is brilliant. I am assured that she will read with an eye toward giving me the benefit of the doubt. This is really a question of my own neurosis, which I try to keep in check.–What is ego that thou art mindful of it?–I am grateful for every reader, from the super-geniuses like Robin to the people like me who want to curl up with an absorbing tale!
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Life and Hope Haiti

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My friend composer Jan Carter, who wrote the musical score for the documentary HAITI’S SMALL MIRACLES (Little Voice Productions), called me today. She’s been involved with relief efforts for Haiti for years, and tomorrow she’s heading there on a cargo plane with a load of medical supplies donated by various organizations.

“How do I help?” I asked.
“Send money to Life and Hope Haiti, a wonderful organization founded by Haitian Lucia Anglade,” Jan said. “They’ve been doing good work for years and now they need every penny they can get. Even $5 will buy clean water for a child for a week.”
So I donated, and I urge my readers to do so, also. Here’s the link to the site.
A visit to Sabin Howard’s studio, from Adam Matano’s blog
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A visit to Sabin Howard’s studio, from Adam Matano’s blog

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My husband Sabin Howard is an excellent cook. Caroline Myss might say it arises out of the artist archetype he inhabits. Regardless, I am the happy recipient of his delicious Italian edibles (most of which come with rosemary, now my favorite spice).
There is only one problem, and no, it’s not the extra 5 pounds I carry on my small frame since we got together. Okay, 10 pounds, but I’ve decided to pretend that it’s only 5.
The problem is that he is the messiest cook imaginable. Yes, his shrimp scampi is delectable, to die for… He buys the fresh shrimp, when he can get them, and shells them himself. He heats the butter and garlic together in a small pan with a few onion bits for added zing and bakes them together with the shrimp until the salt-and-peppered white and pink crustaceans are the perfect hot succulence….
But the kitchen looks like a cyclone hit it. Slicks of olive oil glisten on every surface: refrigerator, cabinets, counters… How does a man with singularly excellent eye-hand co-ordination get McCormick’s steak seasoning on the ceiling?
“Sweetie,” I say, “I’ve invented this new and wondrous process. When I cook, I clean up as I go along.”
Sabin gives me that blank stare as if I’ve grown a second head and am speaking Martian. Now, I contend that I do have 1/3 alien DNA, but my English is at least as good as my Martian, and I take care to enunciate clearly when I speak with him.
I try another tack. “Honey bunch, there’s no cleaning fairy. When you do this,” I gesture at the piles of dirty dishes everywhere, “I HAVE TO CLEAN IT!”
Again the blank stare. Maybe I will try Martian, he might be more receptive to that tongue.
But in the midst of our on-going domestic skirmishes, and my sense of him as the man who lies diagonally across the bed so I have to sleep all squinched up on a tiny triangle, something else comes in. A reminder that he’s more than my sweet, sexy, maddening husband.
Sabin Howard is the greatest living sculptor of male nudes.
It’s pretty intense when that realization strikes. Few of us can say we’re the greatest living anything. I try to be the greatest living Traci L. Slatton I can be, and most of the time I don’t live up to that.
A talented young artist went to visit Sabin in his studio. His name is Adam Matano and he’s entering his senior year at the Lyme Academy. He left uplifted and inspired, as does anyone who visits Sabin’s studio. I don’t think there’s been anything like Sabin’s studio for a few centuries. Matano took with him his friend Kristi Kinsella, who took the photos, and who wrote, “To be a guest in Sabin Howard’s sculpture studio was to be influenced by the magical art of living.”
Sabin’s heroic scale APOLLO, which is nearing completion, is the ultimate expression of this magical art. In my opinion, and that of a well-known art critic, it’s the finest standing male nude since the David.
The question, then, is: should I stop hassling him to clean up after himself in the kitchen?
Social Questions
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Social Questions

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Last night at a pre-Sundance party in NYC I had the great good fortune of meeting the talented and impressive Anthony Whyte, whose work is being made into a movie.

He was there with his business partner Jason Claiborne, who runs Augustus publishing, “Where Hip Hop literature begins,” and fellow author Erick S. Gray.

They were an intriguing trio. Whyte has a background in the armed forces, as did my dad, so we had that to discuss, as well as books and movies.

This morning I did some googling around and learned that Whyte had trouble getting his first novel published. He then self-published, and people were so hungry for his message and his platform that he sold several thousand books quickly. Of course then a publisher jumped on the bandwagon, bought the rights, and republished… to sell over a hundred thousand copies. Pretty good! Whyte mentioned none of this to me; he was classy and unassuming, and left it to me to discover his story.

We talked about Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. I remembered reading how Hurston had ended her life working in a library, and as a maid. It’s distressing that she died in obscurity, enduring financial struggles, when she’d written one of the masterworks of American literature. It left me thinking again about some questions that my oldest daughter had posed to me, over a year ago, when we discussed an African American Literature class she had taken: How did we in the U.S. create an underclass that left an entire group of people disenfranchised, struggling to find and authenticate their voice?

Is it enough that we have elected Obama as president? Is it enough that brilliant minds like Whyte, Claiborne and Gray are not accepting the status quo regarding their work, but are going out and creating new opportunities?

What does it take to create a truly equal society based on the hard work and merit of the individual, without regard to race, gender, sexual preference, and religion?

I hope none of these questions are offensive. I don’t know if they are politically correct or incorrect. They are the musings of a basically white woman of mixed genetic heritage who can not document her Native American ancestry because records were lost during the Trail of Tears. I’m just a mom with smart, irreverent kids, who ask good questions and expect me to engage them honestly.

And what else about the party? It was too much fun for the responsible parent I am, and included me introducing myself to a famous TV/movie actor who now believes I am sketchy. Because I did make a sketchy introduction, and he was far more gracious to me than I deserved. But I had to sally up to him with my big, tipsy grin–if only to be able to text my kids that I’d met him.

BODY PARTS
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BODY PARTS

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BODY PARTS

There’s something wonderful about that moment of enchantment that shocks us out of our normal ways of seeing things and lands us in a fresh way of looking. Travel to a new city, a great poem or painting, a moment of communion during prayer or meditation, even a child’s shout of laughter can be the catalyst. It’s not necessarily a higher way of perceiving, it’s usually a lateral jump. But it gives a rebirth into the moment, an unexpected and palpable sense of the mysterious now.

I live with a classical figurative sculptor whose mind processes the world so differently than mine that those little jolts occur regularly, in our communication. If what passes between us can rightly be called communication. Because I think in words and paragraphs, in flashes of energy and leaps of feeling and intuition. Sabin thinks in concrete visual images, in form and color and volume. Sometimes I think he has to translate his thoughts into a language that I can understand, and I still have to reverse-engineer his words into my own dialect, to finally grasp what he’s trying to convey.

Which kind of works out between us, because he’s normally a quiet-spoken man of few words, and I can fill the space between us with my own loquacity. And I don’t even mind when his eyes glaze over because I figure he’s going to the happy place in his mind–best I can figure, that’s the Medici tombs in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, with Michelangelo’s breathtaking funereal monuments.

But sometimes Sabin gets a word in edgewise, and there it is, that little frisson, the world cracking to reveal itself anew. The other day he said, “The babysitter’s head is a near perfect sphere. Do you think she would model for me?”

Now, I know he’s planning to do a set of twice-life-sized heads, male and female, with an eye to the hotel and grand lobby market, when he finishes the Apollo (see the pix above). Those heads would look beautiful outdoors in gardens and near pools, also. It’s a good idea because he’s not just thinking about art but also about selling art, and, you know, artists have to eat and pay their kids’ school tuition, too.

But I had never noticed that our babysitter had an especially round head. I had seen her to be lovely, and better still from my point of view, kind to our mischievous 4 year old daughter. So I went back to look at her again, next time she was working for us. Sure enough, part of what makes her so pretty is that elegantly-shaped head.

“Sabin says your head is beautifully round,” I told her. “Would you be interested in modeling for him?”

“I’ve always been self-conscious about my head being so round,” she confessed. “I’d be honored! I can’t believe he would ask me.”

“Don’t be honored,” I warned. “As a boss, working on his sculpture, Sabin makes Attila the Hun look like a sweetie pie.” I know this because he’s working on a bust of me. I’ve experienced his exacting demands for myself.

“The forms on your face are defined and highly symmetrical,” he told me, when we started the project. It’s probably the only compliment he’s ever given me, and boy oh boy, does high symmetry make a woman’s heart palpitate. But I did check myself out in the mirror, when he grudgingly gave me permission to pee. I’m not sure I saw what he did. All I could think was that I’d better give botox a try.

But it was a new way of seeing even myself, and that’s something I seek out, too. I wanted to discuss modes of perception when I sat back down to continue modeling. Though, do you believe, he doesn’t like me to talk while he’s sculpting me? Claims it’s distracting. We put the bust on hold until I’ve finished what I have to say. It may be a few decades.

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The reality show of my life, part 1: Boob Model

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Personally, I think that reality TV shows herald, and probably contribute to, the demise of civilization. Reality shows are spawned when interest in story wanes; interest in story wanes when values do not grip people. When people stop believing in sin and redemption. When the mental vacuity of moral relativism numbs us to the fact that we define ourselves by our actions, and every action matters.

(I only sound Republican. I’m a registered Democrat.)

But if they’re going to make reality TV shows, why not one of my life? From the point of view of sad, absurdist comedy, it’s pretty rich. Start with an author married to a Renaissance-obsessed sculptor, four kids from three different marriages, a melange of religions, one communist daughter attending Amherst and one studious pre-med doctor-in-training-daughter at Johns Hopkins, my wild middle child whose first rule of conduct is “No restraining orders!” and a 4 year old imp who talks and reasons like a 7 year old.

The show could debut with the time my husband decided to advertise on Craig’s List for a boob model. Now, this was not a sketchy activity; Sabin is a classical figurative sculptor (think Michelangelo) and he was hard at work on a life size Aphrodite. He’d used several women already, one for gesture, a dancer for the uplifted arms, a tango teacher for the legs, an aikido master for the goddess’ core, all in their 20’s. But he didn’t like any of their busts.

I’m pretty sure he spent a few hours one evening evaluating my humble decolletage, such as it is after nursing three children. He was squinting down my shirt with a crease between his brows, in too clinical a manner for it to be foreplay. But there was no mention of my posing topless for the goddess. My husband was smart enough to hold his tongue. The rejection came and went unsaid.

Ecco, Craig’s List. “Wanted: breast model for a life size figurative sculpture. Professional classical sculptor pays same rate as art schools. See my website www.sabinhoward.com before contacting me.”

There were thousands of responses. Dutifully Sabin opened every single one. About 90% of the emails came from… Heather in New Jersey, who thought a shot of herself hanging upside down off a pole best showed her watermelon-sized endowments. Also exposed her nether parts in a way that only gynecologists, and not fine art sculptors, would find professionally interesting. Or there was Lindyloo in Queens, clad only in sequins, who charged not by the hour, but by the act. She listed a whole menu. I’m a writer and I know a lot of words, but there were things I’d never heard of. I thought about emailing back for elucidation. Maybe then my husband would look down my shirt in a less detached manner.

Sabin was not amused. Not by my chortles and not by the women who could read the words “breast model” but not the words “professional classical sculptor.” He wasn’t titillated, either. This is his work and his work is his God. Sabin was looking for a specific physical attribute and he might as well have been looking at elbows or knees.

He eventually auditioned a few women and chose someone whom I thought was too small for Aphrodite. She is the Goddess of Love, after all, shouldn’t she have a really great set of knockers, full Double-D’s that knock people over?

But of course, he of the exquisite taste was right. Aphrodite was finished and she’s gorgeous, modest bust and all. So maybe there is something elegantly appealing about the less-endowed chest, after all….

fragment-of-aphrodite-hires