BOOK: "This Body of Death", by Elizabeth George

16th in a series by Elizabeth George, featuring Investigator Thomas Linley, a wealthy Earl who just happens to work in the police department - or maybe it’s Scotland Yard.  His beloved wife, Helen, was killed off in the prior novel, and he is persuaded to return to work in this novel.  Better he should have stayed in bed.

First things first: be prepared to read the most horrifying and gruesome narrative about the abduction, torture, and murder of a 2-year old child - I had to skip over this thread because it was so revolting, coming just after the Newtown shootings, and being a grandmother. The author tries to make us understand how such a dreadful event could happen. OK. I just don't enjoy reading bloody sadistic descriptions of degradation.

The setting is very British, set in scenic Hampshire - slang and vernacular that need to be looked up ( thank goodness for a British dictionary selection on my Kindle). Researching the The New Forest setting helped - thank you Wickipedia. The major storyline involves an ancient treasure, the aching need for romantic love and its fatal consequences. A lost puppy victim is stabbed in a moody cemetery, and the suspects are a varied group: a mentally ill man, her old and new lovers, her fellow lodgers, even her own brother.

The story itself is long and choppy. George withholds information, switches points-of-view as fast as a pony's tail flick, and the Isabelle Ardrey character left me grinding my teeth with her insensitivity and stupidity - I was incredulous that she would be in the running for a superintendent's job as she ineptly directs the murder investigation.

What's interesting is how the disjointedness of the narrative begins to resolve towards the last quarter of this overly -long novel. Then ending is predictable.

Other reviews suggest that this book, the 16th, is suffering from series staleness, as happens more often than not with detective novels. So, forewarned, read only if you're hungry for a Brit murder mystery and can't find anything better.  (Review also published on Amazon.)

As for me, my favorite literary genre, the mystery -what’s to be done here? They should publish “spoilers”, rate the gruesomeness and horror of them for me, so I could just read the dainty Agatha Christie spin-offs and be contented thusly.

ART: Sean Scully

"One might say the passionate colour of immanent desire meets the intellectual resistance of transcendent geometry, resulting in an uneasy balance of forces, a nervous self-containment and a sense of unfinished, burdensome emotional business..." about Sean Scully

...They reveal the unresolvable conflict between the determinate and indeterminate —

Scully is a humanist Old Master in abstract disguise. His paintings have the spiritual depth and universal import of the best Old Master paintings, distilled and coded in modernist abstract terms. In Scully spiritual experience is conveyed through nuance and intensity rather than through iconography and imagery — and with greater effect. For where traditional art mediates spiritual meaning through cultural symbols, so that it becomes more of a learned communication than a lived experience, Scully gives it direct perceptual life, so that it becomes an intensely lived meaning. It loses its dogmatic character and becomes a nuanced process. In much traditional painting the paradox of the best abstract painting is that it gives spiritual immediacy to what is a dead academism. Paradoxically, spirit is no longer an abstract concept in abstract painting, but a concrete sense experience.  - Donald Kuspit

ART: Georgia O'Keeffe Goes to Hawai'i

Georgia O’Keeffe was paid to go to the islands to paint by Dole Pineapple.  She returned with some lovely paintings but no picture of a pineapple, so Dole had one sent to her in New York.  She finally did finish it and the image was used in advertising.

I’m so glad she went there - it is one of my dearest places. The place where I first experienced real comfort, luxury, generosity, and freedom of spirt and body, of cleanliness and soaring open water and sky, of intense green spiked with black lava.  Pineapples, coconuts, macadamia nuts, papaya, kiwi, ginger, maile blossoms - the island fruits of desire and plenty.

FILM: "Anna Karenina"

FILM/BOOK: The Life of Pi

ESSAY: My Autumn Roses

The fall roses are always big and glamorous - the last of this year's bed before I renovate it extensively for spring.

ART: Chuck Webster, Painter: Smile when you see that!

I love the blocky, child-like awkward directional changes, the scratchy canvas colors, the bold black outlines, like a child drawing maps.  The yellows punch and yell, they are aggressive and funny, like stand up comedy.  The sutures look like telephone poles askew in the tempest, kites blow about and anchor forms, a blocky heart bled and was sewed.  Clowns cavorted with blah-blah horns.  And the beautiful necklace on the yellow Nefertiti’s neckline awes with its symbolic beauty.

 From NYT, June 2012, Roberta Smith:

“Chuck Webster’s new panel paintings, seen in his sixth solo exhibition at this gallery, are the best of his career. They are also very much, if not startlingly, little big paintings: they have a strange, irrepressible scale, a largeness that exceeds their size and creates a distinctive, slightly comedic sense of intimacy.

All feature variations on an enclosed, linear, somewhat hieroglyphic motif, usually rendered in thick black lines. Suggesting cave paintings, irregular ziggurats and primitive maps, these variations also strongly evoke the art of Paul Klee, meaning they would seem natural to paintings not much larger than your face. Two works here are almost that small, but the others are five or six feet high and seven or eight across. This is not big by Gagosian standards, and that’s the point. The bigness resides within the paintings, in the three-way tension involving panel size, the drawing of the linear motif and surface textures.

Mr. Webster puts his motif through its paces, milking it for various associations, exploring different figure-ground relationships and adjusting paint handling, color and spatial depth, always guided by a generous, enlarging impulse. In the most memorable work, the black lines are thick, the area within them is white and the surrounding ground is sectioned off in big blocks of red and orange. The whole thing jumps. But each painting is very much its own pictorial being: vulnerable, rambunctious and fully inhabited.

Mr. Webster has debts. Philip Guston, Carroll Dunham and Jonathan Lasker are all rightly cited as precedents in the news release. But Klee’s art is his greatest obligation, which he both honors and updates on the springboard of scale.”