Rudy’s Blog

Carcassonne is a town in the south of France that features a medieval walled fortress that was heavily reconstructed in the 19th century by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who also worked on reconstructing the Notre Dame. The fortress itself felt kind of plastic and whipped, like Disneyland, and in the daytime it was crawling with tourists, they fly over on Ryan Air from Merrie Englande. We spent a night in the castle.

In the evening and morning the medieval city was pretty empty, and I could get into the medieval mind-set a little. I pissed in a grass meadow (moat-bottom) against the castle wall.

In the 13th century there was a big heresy in the Carcassonne area: the Cathars. As I understand it, they believed that the God of the old Testament was in fact Satan! Not so unreasonable, really, given all that “for I am a jealous God” stuff. My SF writer friend John Shirley says something like this in his novel The Other End, that is, he says the god who made our world is a demiurge who turned evil and became parasitic upon human worship and then became addicted to the vibe of human suffering. A line about Shirley comes to mind: “Eschatology is too important to leave to scientists and theologians.”

[Our teacher Glen Moriwaki by a 13th C chapel.]

Downhill from the walled fortress is the Low City, the realer part of Carcassonne, and we hung out there, buying some food and some paper for me to paint on. They have lots of red marble in the sidewalks and walls; that’s the product of Caunes, red marble from their quarry.

The market food was good. Croissants from the bakery every day, rubbery and yeasty and doughy and multi-layered. An apple tart from a bakery. Hard, chewy greasy salami. Serrano ham. Semi-soft cantal cheese. Olives.

Oddly enough the best meal I had in France was a coq au vin that Sylvia made in our apartment, with French chicken and wine and garlic and olives. The garlic here is damp and soft; not dried like in the U.S.

At the market in Place Carnot in the Lower Town of Carcassonne we saw a group of bagpipers (bagpipe=cornemuse) with bags that were inside-out goatskins, the whole goat with. They blew into the neck hole, played a flute coming out of one front leg and a drone coming out the other, and had one rear leg doing something for them too, with the other rear leg being the only one that had been snipped off and patched over.

SF concept: some alien using the skin of a dead human in this fashion.

[Star artist of the class: Kevin Brown.]

The days slide by, time as shapeless as sand. We get up, eat, paint, go to bed at any old time, nothing is punctual.

I got to show my slides to the group, and the teacher, Glen Moriwaki, gave me a really hard time about how big I sign my name. That was about all he talked about relative to my old pictures, which really got embarassing after a few slides.

But I like the guy anyway, he’s a character, an artist full of ideas. And I guess I’ll start signing my name smaller. I’d thought, all along, that it was funny and cute to sign my name big. Also I was doing it as a kind of Warhol goof, taking off on the fact that a key thing that makes my pictures potentially marketable is the fact that I’m a well-known writer, so the branding is an essential part.

When I raised this point later, Glen suggested that I could forget about the SF branding and try to reach a new audience of people who aren’t even interested in science fiction.

To break my habit of doing heavy SF paintings, I did a realistic painting of a yellow lawn couch, the style a little like Mel Ramos, a West Coast Pop artist. I was frikkin’ scared to sign it big…

Walking around the little medieval village of Caunes day after day. It’s so tiny. And on most of the streets you can’t see the horizon, or even any green. You just see the walls. It’s like being inside a very high-walled maze. The village. And when you get out into the green fields it’s such a relief. I see Thuy and Jayjay having this feeling in s’Hertogenbosch.

The other students are friendly, and accept me as a painter. It’s like when I started being a science-fiction writer. Everyone is, like, “Come on in, the water’s fine. The more the merrier.” Kevin painted a great portrait of Sylvia in about half an hour. He’s an inspiration. He rents the Live Worms gallery for his studio on Grant Street in North Beach.

Thinking more about Glen’s reaction to my slides, it might have breen that he was, like, flabbergasted by my paintings and simply couldn’t think of anything to say. Talking about this with Sylvia I said I felt like an outsider artist, and she said, “So what else is new?” Referring to my career as a novelist…

In any case, I’m here to learn, and Glen gives great advice on the paintings as they move along.

Still getting started on my workshop paintings, I wanted to paint these chestnut tree blossoms. I’d picked two interesting tendril-blossom flowers from a tree something like a chestnut.

I got two fig leaves and traced their shape onto some thick (140 lb) paper. I painted in the leaves, and then I mixed some local red marble dust with acrylic medium to make my own pink paint. I used that for the ground, then added some ultramarine to get a bluish tint for the sky. I wanted the chestnut flowers in front of that. But it seemed too hard. And I wanted some SF.

I got to thinking about how old married couples are so entwined with each other, sometimes billing and cooing, sometimes bickering, and I decided to have the flowers be mollusks grappling with each other. I gave them shells and did the tendrils. I called it “The Old Marrieds.”

Where have I been? My wife and I went at our fortieth reunion at Swarthmore College, visited daughter Georgia and family in NYC, and then we flew to Paris, rented a car and drove to the southwest of France in Caunes near Carcasonne and the Pyrenees for a two-week painting workshop with Glen Moriwaki.

I got about five paintings done; one of my favorites is called Hylozoic like my novel. It’s a square meter.

And another favorite is a Theibaud and Hockney influenced landscape called South of France. Wanted to show these two right off, the “big fish” I caught on my expedition. I’ll write more about the painting workshop in a later entry. But today I’ll talk about the journey itself.

At Swarthmore, we did an alumni parade and then were herded into our lovely old commencement amphitheater for a series of talks. Sadly the programming of this alumni event was in the hands of money-grubbing morons. The Alumni Association works hand in glove, or in some even more intimate fashion, with the multiple-layered and ever-expanding bureaucracy that has turned the college into a business for generating money for hiring ever more administrators.

[Iron crabs hold up the “Cleopatra’s Needle” obelisk in Central Park behind the Met.]

After the money-raising talks, my classmates and I were wondering if we were the only class perennially in the grip of reflexive rebelliousness. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that when we graduated, our government wanted to send us to the slaughtering-fields of Viet Nam. They said we were cowards not to go.

[A corner of Chartres cathedral.]

I dream that my classmates and I can plan an insurrection for our 50th reunion. We could drive the money-changers from temple; usurp the stage and speak of art, science, and philosophy. Play some music. Dance and tell jokes. Be silly and sentimental. Give the finger to the establishment one more time. Perhaps our 50th reunion class gift can be a detailed plan for how to cut the number of administrators by half…

After the reunion, we visited daughter Georgia and her husband Courtney and their daughter in NYC.

My granddaughter!

On the way south we spent nights in Chartres, Tours, Rocamadour, and Carcassonne.

[A wall in Chartres. Gnarly ivy.]

The windows at Chartres were wonderful, dating back to the 11th or 12th century.

[This and the next glass image are from the lesser known but awesome Gothic cathedral in Bourges; these windows also from the 12th century.]

I liked thinking the windows are nearly a thousand years old. We even took a little tour, and the guide pointed out that in the Middle ages most people didn’t read, so the cathedral itself was like a book, with the key facts of the religion on display.

The ultimate Sunday funnies. He showed us how to read the windows; bottom row to top row, often reading each row left to right.

Stained glass windows are a great medium, a very heavy means of information transmission. Like runes or glyphs. And so psychedelic. In another church I sat with the sun shining through a stained glass window onto my face and slowly the colors against my eyes changed as the sun moved across the sky.

Standing, I was outlined in colored light.

The portals of the cathedral are ringed with sculptures. I found one alien-like beast, but the guide said it was just a scorpion, for the zodiac sign.

In Tours we had a nice cheap room overlooking a square. I had 3 a. m. jetlag there, light from the square through the window, content to look at my foot’s shadow.

The big thing in Tours is to drive out and see castles of the Loire. We picked off Chateaudun and Chenonceau in particular.

Chateaudun was off the beaten track and medieval. I love the conical tower and the conical-trimmed trees. And a crow in the air.

It rained at the castles. Inside a hall in Chateaudun they had a stone stag over a fireplace that segued into a stuffed stag’s head.

Peaceful and quiet.

Asymmetric arches in the chapel.

Chenonceau was the best, with a long leafy entrance path. The castle stretches across the Loire, a shallow not all that wide river. It has a long ball room set onto what was once a bridge.

Amazing formal gardens.

This was a very romantic day, the clouds coming and going.

Sylvia looked so cute in her white raincoat.

A rose garden on one side of the castle.

In the basement kitchen a special pan for roasting pigs, with snout-extension.

A beautiful little canal with plane trees growing next to it. I’d like to paint this.

Rocamadour was a wild card that I found in the guidebook.

A bunch of chapels set into a cliff, with a castle on top and a little town at the base.

Incredible clouds behind the lacy towers.

Tons of swallows busy in the air all the time—swallows around all the castles, as a matter of fact.

Incredible iron work.

We hit the freeway to head further south. Note the rhino on the hay truck mudflap.