Twenty Summers Introduction from Twenty Summers on Vimeo.
As the summer begins to make DC close-to-uninhabitable for those of us from more temperate zones, I’ll soon be off to Provincetown, for my 21st consecutive summer. That puts me one over Stanley Kunitz’s marker of the Cape escape he loved so much:
Light glazes the eastern sky.
Celia gyrates upward
like a performing seal,
her glistening nostrils aquiver
to sniff the brine-spiked air.
The last stretch toward home!
Twenty summers roll by.
I’m looking forward to two big things: my garden, which should be finally reaching some sort of equilibrium this summer, and taking Bowie, our beloved little triped, to the beach. I got Dusty partly because I’d just gotten a little wharf unit for the summer and figured living there for three months without a dog was a bit of a waste. And since Dusty, the great joy of introducing our two current dogs to the last dregs of sand before the Atlantic has not diminished.
But I’m also psyched about the Twenty Summers program, which will inaugurate this year, with a series of events in the glorious, vaulted barn that Charles Hawthorne built for his painting school in 1907 and Hans Hoffmann subsequently took over. See here for details. The barn’s history was tartly summarized by the Boston Globe thus: “Norman Rockwell studied there. Norman Mailer, renting a house next door, attended parties in the space. Tennessee Williams danced and Jackson Pollock got drunk in the barn.” I’ll merely be part of a day of story-telling there on June 14, around the theme of “coming out.”
Today, I took a delayed whack at Sarah Palin’s re-writing of history and Larry Kramer’s inane views on Truvada. I tried to make sense of the populist revolt in the European elections and we pondered the hopeful emergence of President Poroshenko of Ukraine. Plus: in our renewed effort to highlight the facts of climate change, we worried about the fate of the male turtle; and in the wake of the UCSB nightmare, the male human.
The most popular post of the day was Church Sign Of The Day (a classic), followed by What The Hell Just Happened In Europe? II. Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails, including a key correction to a graph on global gentrification, the story of a potential homicide disguised as suicide, and advice from a few fellow sufferers of wheat allergies. You can always leave any unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish.
24 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here. One writes:
I’m a long-time fan, but you finally tipped me over the edge today by pushing back just a little on the insane self-flagellation of some male bloggers in response to the Santa Barbara tragedy. Must this nasty little creature really drive us to dispense with masculinity altogether? Is the condition of the modern American woman so intolerable that all male behaviors must be extinguished to improve it? It’s a bit, dare I say, hysterical. Yes, the pick-up artists and the male-rights communities are full of disgusting examples of the worst of masculinity, but particularly so close to Memorial Day, let’s not forget the self-sacrifice and the heroism of the best.
See you in the morning.
The Dish 