Resuming...

    It seems to have been a long time since I wrote anything here--I see it was April 28th when I last did anything--which means we have been close to a month here in the mews house we are renting in behind St. Mary Abbott's church, in Kensington--with Kensington High Street to the south and Kensington Church Street to the east. This is Drayson Mews, and there is a house here advertised for the unbelievable price of two million, six hundred thousand pounds. We have rented here before, a few summers ago: each year the landlady goes to another house she owns in Yorkshire. Our tenancy will run to July 17, when we will start a gypsy existence with a rented car, visiting the Cotswolds, Pembrokeshire, and Cornwall, with a couple of stops at my sister's home in Plymouth before ending at Heathrow on August 11th and flying to Washington.
    But I have been reading--extensively, and doing what I often do, which is to start following a trail--that is, reading some review, or noticing something in the newspapers, which sets me off googling and--then--one book leads to another.
   At the start of the last few weeks I remained fascinated by Siri Hufstedt. In addition to being a tremendously talented novelist, she is also a philosopher (expert on Kierkgarde), and art critic. I decided to read a book of her essays on art called The Mysteries of the Rectangle. She writes in detail about pictures by a number of artists such as Goya, Vermeer, and Gerhard Richter. She stresses the rewards to be gained by sustained, careful attention, noting that she spent two hours looking at one painting. She notes that books and films progress over time--but "a painting is all there at once," and you need to spend time with it and revisit it. She writes that it is only with patience and repeated viewings that "elusive meanings present themselves." She has a web-site, which is worth visiting and she has a blog in the New York Times.      Something has gone wrong with the font here, and I think the only thing I can do to remedy it is to post this entry and start over.