ECP will be hosting an educator from the Presbyterian Ladies’ College of Melbourne, Australia in mid-December. She’s headed to the Walker to learn about all things art education-related for secondary students. (That’s high school, for the uninitiated.)

I’m taking a special interest because I lived in Western Australia for a couple of years while my mom was stationed at the Harold E. Holt naval communication base in the little town of Exmouth. I’ve been thinking of ways to slyly insert this bit of information into our soon-to-be-meeting. Alas, everything I think of just makes me look a little desperate. But I miss Australia sometimes!

Here’s a very typical scene of life in Exmouth – the emus wandering freely. On the military base, guards would open and close the gates to allow emus passage. They headed directly for the base commissary (grocery store) to get scraps from people.

This post at least started out ECP-related.

“ And while I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something bigger and better than myself.” – Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation, p. 11

Every Nov. 22nd I re-read the front page of the New York Times, from that fateful day in 1963. Now, it’s even easier of course, because I can access it on-line from the comfort and convenience of my laptop. This saves me the trouble of pulling out the yellowing and increasingly brittle copy tucked neatly away in my Kennedy scrapbook, along with the photographic images, seared forever in my brain: Jackie, LBJ, Lee Harvey Oswald taking a bullet at close range.

I’m not particularly morbid, and neither is my fascination with JFK. But, as I’ve come to realize over the past few weeks, after taking in the Warhol/Supernova exhibit at the Walker, reading Assassination Vacation, and viewing the film Capote, I am a product of a popular culture that iconizes violence in infinitely fascinating ways.

Truman Capote befriends, idolizes, and ultimately betrays killer Perry Smith. Andy Warhol silkscreens Elvis, Marilyn, and Jackie. Sarah Vowell frantically cris-crosses the country in search of the next bullet, or grave, or fragment of skull.

And, as with that proverbial car crash, I just can’t seem to turn away.

Last night’s meeting of The Artist’s Bookshelf proved to be such a brain-stimulator, that I had a difficult time winding down and getting to sleep. Well, maybe the Peet’s double-espresso I consumed in the lobby beforehand had something to do with my heightened state of neural transmittitude. And maybe all that chatter about Freud and the interpretation of dreams left me so fearful of what I actually might dream (and what it might mean!), that I subconsciously avoided lapsing into prolonged periods of REM.

The focus of our free-wheeling discussion, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie, led us to a number of unexpected destinations including, but not limited to: contemporary Chinese art, the iconic status of Sigmund Freud, cross-cultural issues encountered in the translation of fiction, current Chinese funereal customs, and the allegedly voracious sexual appetite of Chairman Mao.

We spent a considerable amount of time marveling over the current Huang exhibit, and generally agreed that it somehow aided our understanding and appreciation of the novel under discussion, perhaps because both works seem to embrace and embody a number of paradoxes: East/West, pharmacy/alchemy, contemporary/ancient.

We were fortunate that two of the book-club participants had spent considerable time in China (one in Taiwan, one in mainland China), and were thus able to guide us through some of the cultural nuances that might otherwise have sailed right over our semi-clueless heads.

We ended the evening by pondering a quote from the novel, which seemed in an eery sort of way, to not only evoke the spirit of our discussion, but to acknowledge the artists whose work we had so enjoyed encountering :

“ But not even artists, a breed apart, understand the meaning of dreams. They merely create them, live them, and end up as the dream of others.” – p. 281

At last month’s meeting of The Artist’s Bookshelf, I jokingly referred to the protagonist in question (Umberto Eco’s semi-auto-biographical hero Yambo) as a “stud muffin.”

Little did I know that such literary luminaries as the creators of a GOOD HOUSEKEEPING column called “Book Babes,” not only shared my thoughts, but displayed a shocking degree of synchronicity with The Artist’s Bookshelf, by recommending, in response to a reader’s request for “literary hunks,” our first two books in precise, sequential order:

“ Now let’s go from the brawn to the brains. Yes, ladies, it’s possible to define hunk on a more cerebral level, and that’s why I feel free to endorse two new novels with thinking heroes. Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana features Yambo, a rare-book dealer in Milan who can remember the plot of every book and line of poetry he’s read, but not his wife’s or children’s names. If you like literary allusions, his odyssey through illness is saturated with them.

Another brainy hero is found in Dai Sijie’s Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch. Sijie, author of the bestselling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, builds his second novel around a Chinese convert to Freudian theory who returns from France to liberate his countrymen through psychoanalysis. Mr. Muo may be a bespectacled 40-year-old virgin, but his quixotic vision and Sijie’s sense of the absurd made me fall in love with him, anyway. Like Eco’s, this book plays off a naive wonder that offers a terrific escape from the real world.”

–The Book Babes, Good Housekeeping

(In case you are wondering how I ever discovered this gem, I can only say that Google sometimes leads to very scary places.)