I read about a Flemish painter who loved his wife so much he painted several hundred portraits of her, and sold all of them. He made a lot of money out of love.
What a nice way to get rich and earn a living. We live in different times, and Maria would never let me take hundreds of portraits of her, and it would seem a bit creepy and obsessive.
Romantic love is not in fashion in the midst of our populist revolution.
I also wouldn’t want to make a living taking pictures of Maria, I’m not a Flemish painter living in medieval times or the Renaissance, she has her life and I have mine, and I want to earn a living off of my own blood and sweat.
Still, I do love taking portraits of her, I’ve always believed the best portraits are of people I know and love or like very much.
Maria is a wonderful photographic subject, her face is always full of emotion and feeling, just as she is, especially those that reveal a part of her that most people never see.
That would be her vulnerability. This morning, we got up in our hotel room and I saw her sitting perched in the window like a bird, deep in reflection, staring out over the rooftops.
She liked it there, and when she turned to look at me, I saw her vulnerability, one of her most sensitive and, to me, beautiful traits, one that touches me and challenges me as a photographer. I only get to catch it once in a while, it is always special to me.
And I don’t walk around pointing a camera at her all day, that would bother both of us
We much enjoyed our 14 hour, mad dash vacation, our specialty, we found a Mexican restaurant and I got to eat a delicious lobster – I had q taco plate with three small lobster rice and beans. We read, talked, went to sleep, read and talked some more, and then we came home, were we are both back at work.
We both work all the time and get or heads filled with things, and sometimes we just have to see something different to stop the wheels from spinning, to clear our heads. Next Sunday, we are going to a beach cottage in New Hampshire for three nights, it looks cozy and cheap, and we have to bring out own linens and towels.
And it’s going to be chilly, a high of 65 on Sunday. I will love that.
Our cottage is right on the ocean, and there is a wonderful seafood restaurant just up the road, they specialize in fresh lobster, one of my favorite things. Last year we went to New Mexico for eight days, this year we are going to New Hampshire for three days.
We are both just too busy and the Open House is almost upon us (Columbus Day Weekend.) About that time, Bud arrives, and we need to be around to meet the truck coming up from Arkansas.
We are excited about this trip, we are both tired and drained, we need to do nothing in a beautiful place for a few days. This year just has never stopped coming.
We always love to come home, we were hardly gone.
The border collies look fine, so do the sheep and donkeys, Nicole Tanton is a wonder as a farm sitter. Socks, the sheep isn’t limping any more. We learned years ago to wait before calling the vet, sheep either recover or keel over and die, and every vet visit is $200 and up. If it looks bad or painful, we call.
Nicole will take care of things next Sun-Tuesday as well. I’m not bringing any computers with me, I’ll give the blog and all of you a brief rest.
I know I need this trip. My head is exhausted.
When I got back, I had about a half-dozen messages from blog readers graciously offering me cottages to stay in along various coasts – Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey. We actually have a cottage reserved in New Hampshire close to the Maine border, we have been there before, it is quite lovely and private.
It’s interesting, I was primarily a book writer for a long time, and any kind of contact with my readers would have been considered inappropriate and uncomfortable.
The Internet is a whole different ballgame, so is blog writing, and I have readers I talk to often for years now. We are a community, especially since the Army Of Good came into being.
It isn’t the formal relationship of the book writer and reader, we share common values and can get to know each other in a completely new and different way. And it is good for me to know the people who read my blog and my books.
I am also obsessive about not taking advantage of my position or my readers.
And there is really no reason for anyone to give us a cottage for free, we can afford to pay for it and should. I am uneasy being beholden to anyone, it can strain friendships quickly.
And then there is privacy, I like being where nobody knows me or know where I am or who i am. If I can pay for a cottage rental, and morally speaking, I feel I should. If I can’t, I shouldn’t go. Gifts should go to people with no money, I think.
But I have evolved, and am forever changing. I don’t see this quite the way I used to. My life is about opening up to new experience, and how nice for people to think of me in that way.
Requests like this, they are lovely and gracious and I realize they are compliments. I see the people who write as hospitable and giving. more and more as friends, not “readers.” We have been through a lot together, we know one another quite well.
I also know I’m not there yet, I’m not quite ready to stay in somebody else’s space, even people I’ve been chatting with for your years. This world gets closer and closer, more and more intimate. It will never be perfectly comfortable for me, but I am getting used to it. It still makes me queasy to get that close.
For me, it’s a visceral matter of boundaries, it’s about what privacy and friendship really are, and about how much space I really need to enter my head and so some hard work.
The Open Houses have cured me of much of that concern, so has time. These are very nice people. I still need to keep some space in my own head, I doubt that will ever leave me.
I wrote books for a long time. Back when publishers loves writers and worried about them, they formed a protective cordon around their writers. Publicists did the talking, writers were rarely available, readers were seen as something we needed protection from, and publishers wanted to control us.
The book writers all believed and were taught thatthey needed space and privacy to create good books and write well, there is something to that.
A book was considered a rare and precious thing, it took time and great concentration and peace. The blog has been a profound change, now I see that I need interaction with my readers, and they need it from me. The question is always in the Facebook age, how much and how often. I don’t believe in instant friends, I need to know people well to consider them friends.
Facebook and social media are still sometimes shockingly intrusive to me, I am not used them.
I get messages all day long that are not really messages at all – waves, greetings, “how are you’s?” and “let me tell you about my dogs,” or “can you help me to stop my dog from chewing on the carpet, or will you please read my manuscript?” or “how is Simon, how are the dogs?”
Today, there is a new understanding of reader’s rights. In the book era, people did not assume reading a book would bring them into conversation with the author. Today, people who read books often assume they are entitled to talk with me. Sometimes, they are. But as E.B. White said, there are many thousands of you and only one of me, and i am not going to spend a minute of my life “waving” to people on Facebook or chatting about the daily lives of Red and Fate.
I am sorry to tell people that Simon is dead, but I don’t want to spend much time doing that either. Does it matter?
I work hard all day, and I balk at writing messages to people I don’t know telling them I am fine or chit-chatting.Perhaps I am grumpy. Perhaps I am trying to preserve some creative space inside of my head.
This world has changed me, and is changing me, and for the better. I have alway lived my life with moats all around me, and one of the big stories in our world is that the moats are all getting drained or plowed under.
The castle doors are mostly left open. The question is really how wide.
