Sharon Gilbert (So Quiet)

2009-06-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

My father spent 2001 dying. I would drive from TriBeCa north of the World Trade Center, up Highway 81 through Camp Drum, N.Y., to Kingston, Ontario. After 9/11 the WTC burned for six months. I smelled it everywhere, even in Kingston. I decided my clothes and shoes must be contaminated and started to discard. Finally my doctor said I had sinusitis. Many TriBeCa people had sinusitis. My father died of a brain tumor 11/14. He had once stayed at the W.T.C. Marriott and so would watch the collapsing towers as they played over and over on television, but he couldn’t understand. Sharon in the WTC plume caught fatal lung cancer. In October, 2001, driving back to New York, the local Watertown newspaper said soldiers from Camp Drum were in Afghanistan. Two days later it was in The New York Times. In September I had written Michael Wilding, the Australian novelist, that US troops would be in Kabul by Christmas and Baghdad by Easter. I was more or less right but Baghdad has been, let’s say, problematic. I demonstrated like so many against that disastrous invasion. Whether the “surge” worked or not, Obama has been crowned Prez. The Watertown Daily Times on Washington Street in Watertown continues to turn out material on the soldiers of the Tenth Mountain Division in and out of Afghanistan, and offers me, every time I’m there, an up-close perspective of America’s vengeful 21st century wars.

2008-05-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 3, 2003, I took Vyt, Sharon Gilbert and my mother to Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme on Broadway. We had lunch first at Victor's. Sharon, Vyt and Mom were great company, but I felt like I squandered $500, for La Boheme featured half an orchestra and thin students with thin voices.

That day, as today, woody blossomers shed their petals. That May may ever!

2008-04-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

As Allen Ginsberg was known as the Beat poet, John Cage was the Silent composer. His most famous work is 4’ 33” of Silence.

I published a lot of Cage’s writing. On the morning of 11 September 2001, I had it all in the Kinko’s on Reade Street, and was determined to make it into a book. But the building shook. I said to myself, “Gas explosion. Someone’s been careless.” I looked out the window. There were flames a couple blocks south. Damn careless! I resumed my work with greater care. Eventually there was another explosion. Parts of the World Trade Center bounced off the window. People outside were running. Only the cashier and I remained in Kinko’s. “Oh my God,” she said on her cell. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

I danced the John Cage Waltz starting precisely at 3:00pm 26 April 2008 at the southern foot of Trinity Place and then concluding north of there in the middle of James Street at 3:40.33pm. I walked silently past the site of the WTC. It was a mediation and a mourning. I mourn John Cage and Sharon Gilbert and my mother who died March 6 and the victims of 9/11 and the many more victims of miasmal America’s horrible revenge.

http://johncageshoes.blogspot.com/

I walked to a waltz composed by Elodie Lauten. I entered St James Church at the last second.

2008-03-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

My mother died last week. Some years ago I was visiting my mother in Canada and I happened to phone Sharon. She told me her husband, Vyt Bakaitis, had just lost his mother. Vyt and I are too old to call ourselves orphans. But Sharon left two motherless children, Ellery and Elena. Elena's first job in high school was working for me at Unmuzzled OX. We get old, we fall apart, we die. Hah, hah!

2007-09-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

Courtney Martin gave an excellent lecture on Sharon's work Thursday September 20 in conjunction with an exhibition at the Arts of the Book Collection, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. Go see it!

2007-06-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a good piece on Sharon's work, which was just posted:

http://www.library.yale.edu/aob/SharonGilbert/PoisonAmericaExhibitEssay.html

I'm working to get them to make the rightful correction to "OakRidge/Tennesse."

2006-01-31T04:46:00.000-08:00

Drove up to Beacon with Sharon Gilbert one rainy spring day to see newly-opened Dia: Beacon, a museum of minimalism. Andy Warhol’s Shadows had their gallery there, largely because Dia helped set up the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; and the two museums have the same architect. And Flavin, Beuys, Judd, and Palermo had their galleries. A docent was leading a tour as we sat in the Irwin gardens. Sharon said she thought the light on the Flavin was inappropriate. The docent said each gallery was set up with the active co-operation of each artist. Sharon refrained from asking how Judd, Palermo, Warhol, Beuys and Flavin managed that, being dead.

2005-11-14T02:03:00.000-08:00

We put stones over bones to remember. Then the snow blows like dust, and the tombstones are buried in snow. The stones, with names and dates inscribed, stand in a field surrounded by a stone wall. The bus whirs past on wet pavement. Sharon was always worried about the flu and when she couldn’t get a flu shot last year, I wasn’t too surprised to learn she ended up in the hospital. Her lung she said had collapsed. We commiserated on the phone. She was an artist and worked with chemicals.

2005-11-06T06:06:00.000-08:00

Janet’s daughter Alison is my son Ben’s age. One night we double dated. I like Alison and Janet; they live in Los Angeles. White Oleander got Janet on Oprah. In White Oleander Ingrid is a poet who murders a worthless boyfriend. Ingrid goes to prison leaving her daughter Astrid adrift. Astrid makes her way through a cross-section of Los Angeles society. That’s the brains of this excellent novel. But then the book concludes with feminists somehow freeing Ingrid from prison and Astrid falling in love, moving to New York and living happily ever after. Do such happy endings bring tears to Oprah’s eyes? I missed that episode. There’s also a movie….

2005-09-28T00:10:00.000-07:00

Sharon made artists books. She advances the aesthetic of Jiri Kolar. Using white-out in Police (State) USA, for example, Sharon makes a legal brief about a trivial arrest interesting. Drawn in by her art, you actually read the text, and you are shocked to discover the Supreme court has essentially vitiated the Fourth Amendment, legalizing arbitrary arrest. Politics is always debatable.

2005-09-13T03:06:00.000-07:00

Sharon Gilbert read White Oleander as she lay dying of lung cancer. White Oleander is a great novel. There was also an adequate movie. It's about a mother and daughter and the effect of the mother on the daughter. In the movie the mother is an artist as Sharon was an artist. In the novel the mother is a poet. Elena Bakaitis writes to say she too is reading White Oleander.

2005-09-11T15:00:00.000-07:00

The plume from the burning World Trade Center blew over Sharon's house in Brooklyn for six months. She accompanied her parents while her father worked on the Manhattan Project. "You never smoked," I said to her. "Yes, I did," she said, "before Elena and Ellery were born." Her illness seemed political because Sharon was so aware of the political element in everyday life and words.

2005-09-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

I lived with Sharon's art one summer when she and her family were in Spain. I was house-sitting, and trying to edit a libretto by Carlo Goldoni translated by W.H.Auden. Sharon cut up texts and used the words, let us say, to collage into drawings. In the autumn I gave her a Xerox of Auden's old typewritten manuscript. In the spring her three collages illuminated the published edition of Arcifanfaro.

2005-09-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Against the invasion of Iraq:
Sharon Gilbert and Michael Andre by Vyt Bakaitis; Michael Andre and Vyt Bakaitis by Sharon Gilbert.

Medium: Color Xerox.
Montage: Sharon Gilbert.

Caption in pencil:
Why are we smiling?