Alma Mater

 

The Getty

This last weekend when I was in Los Angeles, the first place I went after my early morning flight was straight to The Getty to catch lunch and the ocean breezes from its hillside heights. It's really the perfect place to ease into a California state of mind and the Pacific timezone. I love this place and am often more interested in taking in the scenic views, the Richard Meier architecture, and the sunny Cali weather than I am intent on touring all of the art galleries and exhibitions...although this last time, the Jackson Pollock and Queen Victoria exhibits appealed to me in a personal way.

I had to laugh about the long lines, gift shop memorabilia, and gallery tours surrounding Pollock's Mural during its traveling stint at The Getty. As an undergrad at the University of Iowa, I often crossed the river over to the UI Art Museum to sit in front of Pollock's Mural while reading or studying or writing my ridiculous attempts at Jorie Graham--inspired poetry. Back in the day in Iowa City, I usually had Pollock all to myself for hours at a time---quite the contrast to the Mural's Getty reception...

And, since I'm defending my dissertation on the Victorian novel in less than a week, this series on Queen Victoria and Photography seemed like one I ought not miss. One of the things I learned from this exhibition: royal photographers often "photo-shopped" Victoria's visage to lessen her "royal jowls" (as anachronistic as Photoshop would have been to those eminent Victorians). A lovely afternoon all around at the Los Angeles Getty!

Jorie Graham

"The Visible World" by Jorie Graham

The first poetry reading I ever attended was Jorie Graham's reading of The Errancy. The auditorium at the University of Iowa Main Library was abuzz with Writers' Workshop poets, Prairie Lights regulars, and unsuspecting undergraduates such as myself. I had not a clue who Jorie Graham was nor did I realize her hugely illustrious reputation. But it was clear to me even then that there was something unbelievably cool about Graham---her dramatically monotonous alto delivery; her perfectly unperfect tousled hair; her entourage of beautiful graduate students, publicists, and reporters; her fluency in Italian, in existential philosophy, in Virginia Woolf, in metaphysical theories; and, oh yeah, her Pulitzer Prize. She became my intellectual idol par excellence, and I often told my young formative self that I wanted to be her someday.

I became something of a Jorie Graham devotee: I was downright giddy when I would see her on Clinton Street or at the Java House or at Prairie Lights, and I never missed any of her readings. And, when Graham landed the prestigious Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric at Harvard, her move coincided with the start of my graduate studies at Harvard. From Iowa City to Cambridge, the Graham sightings continued, albeit at Harvard I spotted Graham less frequently (two times exactly: once in the Barker Center and once in Harvard Square).

The last Graham poetry reading I attended was in an overcrowded, hot, salvaged space off of Mass Ave. I was the first to arrive and scored an awesome front-row chair with the hopes that Prof. Graham would remember me back from her/our Iowa days. But, my Midwestern sensibilities sabotaged my fan-club aspirations. Every time a more senior person than myself walked in the door, I felt it my responsibility to give up my chair to him/her. It was obnoxious. I eventually found myself peering through the doorway and over the heads of all of the people to whom I had relinquished my primo seating. Perhaps it was the dismal setting, perhaps it was the chair fiasco, or perhaps it was a change in my aesthetic temperament, but by the end of the Overlord reading, I was no longer a Graham addict--an admirer, yes--but no longer the adoring, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, Jorie Graham wannabe of my earlier days. And besides, she pronounced Simone Weil as Simone "Weel"--humph! The glamour was gone.

"I can't say what it is then, but the golden-headed / hallucination, / mating, forgetting, speckling, inter- / locking, / will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous / veil of / echoes and muddy nostalgias will / be gone."