The verb that traumatizes

In this post-Christmas, post-Hannukah, post-Kwanzaa slow winter slog toward spring solstice a new year is born. It's time to discard old illusions with the used wrapping paper.   

One illusion is that the English we speak is the same as the English we spoke sixty years ago. 

To gift: a newish verb made from a noun, in the late 20th century habit of turning an innocent noun into an untrustworthy verb. 

We used to say "I gave a gift to someone" . So now we say "I gifted": it's shorter, saves you "gave" and "a".  Gifting is swifter. Hey, more time to tweet!  E-mail shortened or eliminated paragraphs and tweets abbreviated sentences. 
Now our verbs are slimming down to fit into the newish bikini of the 21st century.

But according to Merriam-Webster online you can say “he gifted her with flowers”.

And I say you can say "he gave her flowers" as it's shorter, but I'm a hair-splitting  codger.

Pour la petite histoire:
While I was online ordering holiday gifts, I gifted myself (with?) a soap from a fancy website. It arrived along with a couple of items I'd be gifting (to) others. The little soap was for me.
Mistake. 

I'd gifted myself a soap that smells like rose petals marinated in fermented yak piss. 

Perhaps I  shouldn't gift myself during gifting season. 
I should stay off sites with fancy graphics and promises of youth restored.  
Right--I made the mistake because I gifted myself from a website!
In a real, live store you can smell that soap. If it smells like yak piss, you can move on to another specialty soap, such as strawberry in propylene glycol, apple and vanilla with Dead Sea mud, coconut and chocolate in ripe lanolin, organic eggplant with olive oil and thyme. (No wait, that's a recipe).

Your sad skin will rejoice, and so will your nose.

Moral(s):

1) You cannot smell a self-gifted or any other gift-soap online. Yet.

2) Do not look your own gift-horse in the mouth, because it might contain a verb that turns round and bites you in the blog.


"Gift" has a long, illustrious etymological history:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gift

gift (n.) 

mid-13c. (c.1100 in surnames), from a Scandinavian source, cf. Old Norse gift, gipt "gift, good luck," from Proto-Germanic *giftiz (cf. Old Saxongift, Old Frisian jefte, Middle Dutch ghifte "gift," German Mitgift "dowry"), from PIE root *ghabh- "to give or receive" (see habit).

For German Gift "poison," see poison (n.). Old English cognate gift meant "bride-price, marriage gift (by the groom), dowry" (Old English noun for "giving, gift" was related giefu). Sense of "natural talent" is c.1300, perhaps from earlier sense of "inspiration" (late 12c.). As a verb from 16c., especially in gifted. As a verb, giftwrap (also gift-wrap) attested by 1936.

Martha Argerich

I've been on a classical concert binge for a few weeks but I can't help blogging about this one.

I must have been the first person to order second category tickets for the Concert de gala of the international Concours de Genève on December 5th. Front row left.
Fine musicians (winners of the competition)  and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in fine fettle, with the young Argentine conductor Alejo Perez. A water theme for the first half, with Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes of Benjamine Britten, three percussionists performing a Water Concerto for Water Percussion by Tan Dun. Advised by ushers to move out of the front row for this piece, we watched water splashed theatrically into the seats as Aiyun Huang and two other percussionists plunged various vessels into shimmering blue tubs of water and used newly invented instruments making sounds we'd never heard before. Rather '60s -- doing weird things to instruments or doing things to weird instruments or both.
In the second half, Polina Pasztirczak sang a haunting Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss.

And we were back in the front row for the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra of Francis Poulenc, composed in 1932. Two concert grands emerged from the basement on platforms for Martha Argerich and Nelson Goerner and then wow....!  (I'm not known for hero worship).

I have a deep appreciation for Argerich, whom I've followed for decades. She combines profound musicianship with impeccable technique. Stunning. For me she's the greatest pianist of her generation.

Argerich concertizes rarely, and when she does, it's mostly with fellow musicians.
Here she is, live in Geneva, performing in our garish, over-the-top, beloved Victoria Hall with Nelson Goerner. There are my unauthorized, flashless shots. I was sorely tempted to photograph her strong, fine, compact hands as she played, but didn't, out of respect for her performance.

She moves swiftly, turns, bows, turns again to acknowledge the conductor and Goerner and other musicians, spins around again and is very hard to catch. Brilliant smile and a huge mane of silver hair.
Sigh. Yes, hero(ine)-worship.

In a 2001 article about Martha Argerich for The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross wrote: 

"Argerich brings to bear qualities that are seldom contained in one person: she is a pianist of brain-teasing technical agility; she is a charismatic woman with an enigmatic reputation; she is an unaffected interpreter whose native language is music. This last may be the quality that sets her apart. A lot of pianists play huge double octaves; a lot of pianists photograph well. But few have the unerring naturalness of phrasing that allows them to embody the music rather than interpret it."

Live in Berlin in 1967

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pyf4sr6HDo

and recently with Lang Lang

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoy0W37sHRs

Yuja Wang plays Chopin Waltz_and others

Rockport bis

OK, two years later I’m back in Rockport, and this time my son, who’s done his google-work, comes up with a half-day excursion to a place called Halibut Point, which has nothing to do with the fish and everything to do with the words ‘haul about’ in your boat, warning of what you’d better do fast to get around the ‘point’.

The park was gorgeous and flooded with songbirds, and we came to an old New England granite mine which was abandoned in 1929, and has since become a natural lake. The veins of granite are visibly layered. There’s a resident cormorant with other bird buddies and the most perfect serenity – inspiring both of us to meditate then and there, on birds, bushes and granite. Animal, vegetable, mineral.
Beauty, nature, love, the full monty.
And of course the only non-rainy moment for several days.

The park had the requisite crumbling trees and rampant vegetation as well as the myriad birds, who seemed to be the very soul of the place.

Down by the point were long, narrow slabs of granite, immortalized by Emerson*

"'Tis a noble, friendly power and seems to me 'Why so slow and late come to me? Am I not here always thy proper summer home? Is not thy voice my needful music, my breath thy healthful climate in the heats; my touch thy cure?...........Lie down on my warm ledges, and learn that a very little hut is all you need.  I have made thy architecture superfluous and it is paltry beside mine.  Here are twenty Romes and Ninevehs and Karnacs in ruins together, obelisk and pyramid and giant's causeway---here they are all prostrate or half piled.'"

All this, Bearskin Neck, Emerson Inn, lunching with dear ones and the Jupiter Quartet playing at sundown in the Shalin Liu Performance Center ---  le paradis, quoi.

see also one of my early blogs http://lexieintrator.blogspot.fr/2011/08/blogport-little-piece-of-heaven_11.html 

STUDS

So I wondered: am I too old to do studs? I mean the metal kind.

Needed some shoes to walk me around London and not look like a LOLIT (Little Old Lady In Tennis Shoes). The original LOL phrase dates from the early mesozoic era and meant ‘frumpy and without style’ before sneakers became a definitive fashion statement.

Found a perfect pair, and wow were they comfortable! And sort of chic.
I began to notice that London was full of studs, both human and vestimentary. Studs are in, sprinkled on shirts, dresses, wallets, bags and epaulettes and flaunt it:  I am urban, shiny and tough and I don’t take (sh)it from nobody.

Well of course my new shoes ended up taking (sh)it, and it’s not an urban legend. But they also took me up and down Southbank, through museums and London markets and off to the countryside.


Walkin’ tall in my studs.

PATTI

She was 96 and tiny and wise and beautiful and the undisputed (but not self-appointed) matriarch of the Indian community in Geneva.

Her parents had her married by age 13. She bore three sons. She visited Geneva with her husband in 1949, and in 1956 they moved to Geneva for good when her husband was recruited by the ILO. Not end of story.

Her middle son died in his twenties in a tragic car accident, her eldest son died in the US at age 47 leaving a wife and two young daughters. Patti outlived her husband by decades. She lived with her youngest son and daughter-in-law, who died in her fifties of cancer; her youngest son (my good friend) went totally blind. Patti was there for her family and there for friends. The household was warm and open to friends from all over.  

Patti loved to dance. And to teach. She taught dance, she taught a bit of Tamil. Patti loved to read, all kinds of books and the international press. Patti loved the Indian soaps. Patti loved to cook, her vegetarian cuisine was legendary. Patti loved to knit and did so any time her hands weren’t busy working at something else. Patti loved to hang out with people, and listened with interest and compassion and responded with frankness and intelligence. Her grandchildren adored her. Her great-grandchildren adored her. We all did.

She was one cool lady.

Ekphrasis

Don't be shy if you need dictionary.com. I had to look it up a few years ago.  
Ekphrasis is Greek, and is the (usually verbal) praise of a work of art (usually visual), often in poetry (my definition). 
See also http://lexieintrator.blogspot.fr/2012/07/daphne-transformed-poem.html

Went with my sister-in-law and niece to the Courtauld Gallery on the final day of Becoming Picasso. And as we drifted toward the Impressionists,  appreciated the grand lines and proportions of Somerset house, the present home of the collection. A sumptuous building, Victorian and neoclassical.

Works by Cézanne hang in a fancy room at the old/new/old home of the Courtauld Gallery. And there is a disconnect. Inappropriate and distracting, this beautiful, ornate room makes this Cezanne look a country cousin attending a posh tea in old trousers. 
To place him here disrespects Cézanne. I suppose curators wish to give him a prominent spot, so they chose this room. But why? Why here?
Cézanne’s simple portrait of a man in a hat hangs way above a fancy mantelpiece, well above anyone’s eye-line: painterly, eloquent, plain-spoken and out of place.

But then there is another painting hanging closer to the window, and my eyes focus in on the lake with a castle, perhaps the Château de Chillon?
Turns out it's the Lac d’Annecy, but no matter.

It is the Léman of my mind. Cold weather blue on blue with blue, the kind of blue that moves through thick waves, deep and understated.
The kind of blue you feel watching an ancient glacier lake feeling the unexpected roil and flow of your life. The water holds me as it moved on the oil canvas, carrying whole epochs in its liquid mass.


Didn’t matter where the painting was, I was elsewhere.