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Frankencorn Threatens Mexico�s Ancient Maize Stocks
By Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers
Association
CANADA FISH FARMS ENDANGER MARINE ENVIRONMENT
By Neville Judd
PETA SUES ON BEHALF OF FARM ANIMALS
FRANKENSOY REQUIRES MORE HERBICIDES
WEIRD DNA FOUND IN ROUNDUP READY SOYBEANS
by Cat Lazaroff
DO NOT EAT VEAL
EUROPE GOING ORGANIC
PUSH FOR ORGANIC PROGRAMS AT WSU
Why Airbus will Beat the Crap out of Boeing
by Martin Nix, contributor
Clinton on AIDS, War, Climate Change, Globalization
�Curious, Odd & Interesting�
The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets,
Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West
By Wesley Wehr
Endocrine Disruptors and the Transgendered
By Christine Johnson, contributor
New Findings on Global Warming
What Is a �Just� War? Religious Leaders Speak Out
by David Harrison, Contributor
Local Vet Counters the Big Lie about Pearl Harbor
By Captain O�Kelly McCluskey, WWII DAV
Case Against John Walker Lindh is Underwhelming
By Glenn Sacks, contributor
Unique No More
opinion by Donald Torrence, contributor
US in Afghanistan: Just War or Justifying Oil Profits?
opinion by David Ross, Contributor
Sharon Plans Alternative to Arafat
Opinion by Richard Johnson, Contributor
Mexican Workers Fight Electricity Deregulation
Our neighbors try to avoid the California
crisis
By David Bacon, contributor
NASA Commits �Wanton Pollution� of Solar System
opinion by Jackie Alan Giuliano, PhD (via ENS)
The Secret National Epidemic
By Doug Collins, The Free Press
Trident: Blurred Mission Makes Use More Likely
by Glen Milner
US Needs All the Languages It Can Get
By Domenico Maceri, PhD, contributor
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'Curious, Odd & Interesting'
The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians,
and the Wicked Witch of the West
By Wesley Wehr
University of Washington Press
2000, 301 pages
Paperback, $17.95
"You have known some remarkable people during the years I have known
you," the pianist Berthe Poncy Jacobson told Wesley Wehr one day, "I
was just wondering to myself how you came to know them?"
"Opportunities arose," Wehr answered her.
"That's it! That's it exactly!" Mrs. Jacobson exclaimed,
"Opportunities arose, and you were quick to recognize them as such."
Unaggressively yet persistently, Wesley Wehr took advantage of such
opportunities to make friends with some of the most important artists,
writers, and musicians in the Northwest, beginning from the time he
entered the University of Washington in 1947 up through the 1980s.
Wehr, while just an undergraduate, had the chance to serve as a
stand-in music composition tutor for Mark Tobey in 1949. Wehr seized
that opportunity and over time became friends with Tobey and Tobey's
circle of artists.
Inspired by the examples of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel
Johnson, LL.D. and William Hazlitt's Table Talk, Wehr began in the
mid-1950s to take notes on the conversations he was having with his
creative friends, starting with Tobey, who though he criticized the
idea of turning into an "advice factory" ran one at top speed. Now
Wehr has turned those notes into a compelling series of portraits in
The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians,
and the Wicked Witch of the West.
Wehr's literary sketches are invaluable additions to Northwest
cultural history. He recounts personal stories that enliven our
understanding of luminaries such as Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy
Anderson, Imogen Cunningham, and Theodore Roethke.
He tells the story of Tobey's short marriage to a woman who had
respected his painting before their wedding day, but afterwards
declared that he'd have to give up his artistic pretensions and get a
real job. "Good God," Tobey told himself, "I'm going to have to listen
to this for the rest of my life!" So instead Tobey immediately packed
his things, left her, and moved out to Seattle.
Wehr describes how Guy Anderson accosted him when he and a friend
knocked on the door of Anderson's studio in La Conner. Anderson,
dressed in a maid's uniform and wig, demanded to know, "What gives you
the idea that Mr. Anderson would have any time for the likes of you?"
then slammed the door on them. Minutes later, Anderson, now dressed in
more typical clothes, let them in with apologies for "that terrible
maid" whom he said he had just fired.
Wehr recalls how Morris Graves, with his physical charisma, could
capture the attention of an entire room of people while remaining
aloof from everyone.
Wehr's portraits also remind us of other significant Northwest artists
from that period whose reputations are now fading, like Helmi Juvonen
and Pehr Hallsten. Juvonen was a very public artist; who would hang up
her latest prints each morning on a clothesline outside her apartment
in the University District, priced at only fifty cents each. Her
linoleum block prints and watercolor paintings won the admiration of
critics and local museum curators. Juvonen's unconventionality, which
included a wild infatuation with Mark Tobey, was the primary reason,
according to Wehr, for her institutionalization in a state mental
health center in 1960. Pehr Hallsten was a scholarly, cosmopolitan
Swede who became Tobey's life-long companion. Inspired more by
Juvonen's playful artistic approach than Tobey's seriousness, Hallsten
taught himself to paint at the age of fifty-six and in less than a
decade gained an international audience for his colorful paintings of
childhood memories--"unforgettable realms of reindeer, Lapps and snow,
nights of darkness where trolls stole the light of day and Baldur was
slain by an arrow made of mistletoe."
Wehr also sets the historical record straight and credits the
flamboyant art dealer Zoe Dusanne as the originator of the notion of a
Northwest school of painters. Dusanne had a friend on the staff of
Life magazine and suggested that the magazine do a story on the
"solitary, 'mystical' painters living and working in the far reaches
of the Pacific Northwest." A year later, in 1953, Life ran the feature
"Mystic Painters of the Northwest" that made Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson,
Morris Graves, and Kenneth Callahan nationally famous.
Surprisingly, and refreshingly, Wehr is a memoirist who ignores Freud.
He offers no psychosexual exposes, violates no confidences, and
refuses to categorize these artists and thinkers by sexual
orientation. While demurring from writing about sex, he does write
about love. He tenderly describes Elizabeth Bishop's longing for her
friend Lota back in Rio de Janeiro that first dismal January when
Bishop had come to Seattle to teach poetry at the University of
Washington, and then Bishop's surprise when he asked her some advice
about love. "If you ever were to know much about my personal life,"
Bishop answered, "you certainly wouldn't come to me for any sagely
advice about a thing like love. I've usually been as confused about it
as just about anyone else I've known. If you really are concerned
about that subject, I'd suggest you go and read W.H. Auden. If he
doesn't know something about love, I just don't know who else does."
The title the "Eighth Lively Art" refers to the art of conversation,
yet none of Wehr's friends and acquaintances is a genius of the bon
mot; none is an Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker. Wehr doesn't present a
full defense of the idea that conversation is an art. But what he does
do is accurately capture the energy and intelligence that can be found
in conversations with very talented people, with their common human
need for contact. And he gives us a primer in the ways of friendship,
how dinners, calls, courtesies, letters, and simple gifts can braid
strong bonds. In a memorable visit to Morris Graves' beautiful home in
Loleta, California, Graves proudly retrieved a note Wehr had written
to him years before, a note Graves had kept in his eyeglass case ever
since.
When Wehr was a young man, his mother challenged him "to decide...
whether I was going to have a rich and interesting life, or merely a
dull and conventional existence." Elizabeth Bishop testified to Wehr's
decision in a 1974 letter to the poet James Merrill in which she
wrote, "Wesley is older, but a very curious, odd and interesting
painter and person so mad about fossils the university has given him
some sort of position telling them about fossils." Wehr seized the
opportunities that came his way and has made an interesting life for
himself, and in sharing it he has also passed his mother's challenge
on to us.
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