THE COMMONS ROOMTHE APPLE
OF HER EYE
THE COMMONS ROOM
I n the movie il
Postino, a timid Italian lover discovers poetry by stumbling over it. With poetry, Mario
"There. You've made a metaphor," Neruda
says.
"But it doesn't count," Mario argues. "It just came out by accident."
But in the end, Beatrice can't resist Mario's sweet words, no matter where he found
them.
I was reminded of Mario and the power of metaphor in a second-floor room in
David Lawrence Hall where 40 ninth- and tenth-graders were having their own
encounter with poetry. Sponsored by the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, a
Pitt outreach program, the ninth annual Young Writers Institute attracted 250
third- to 12th-graders. Representing city, suburban, rural, and private schools,
they had come together for three weeks last summer to develop their craft. On
this morning, a few of the high schoolers were poring over the latest drafts of
their stories and poems. Others couldn't be distracted from very thick novels.
But the vast majority were captivated by each other's gossip, screeching, "You're
kidding me!" and "Oh my God!" as only teenagers can. The one guy in the crowd
with a beard and black hat was busy tuning his guitar.
In walked instructor
Sheila Carter-Jones, gripping a paper bag under her arm and wearing a dress so
orange that "bright" wouldn't even begin to do it justice. The sight of her
approaching the front of the room hushed the laughs and whispers. Everyone swung
around in their seats, faces front, and settled down in anticipation of yet
another of the surprises with which she'd spirited the past three weeks.
"Okay, everyone," she said, after instructing them to assemble in circles of four or
five desks. "Take out your notebooks. Let's divide a page into three columns.
We'll call them 'sight,' 'smell,' and 'touch.' And two rows--'whole' and
'section.'" The flapping of pages began, the hunt for pens was on.
"All right," she breathed, while uncrumpling her paper grocery bag on the front table. "Let's
see what we have here." She dipped her hand inside, circled and searched, but her
downcast eyes and her lips, scrunching to one side then the other, teased at
disappointment. Then she looked up and smiled. Chairs creaked as the students
sitting in them inched forward.
The moment of truth. Out came her hand, holding,
of all things, an apple. An apple? Carter-Jones turned it in the air in wonder
while a front-row observer asked, "Is that it?" Giggles rippled to the back door.
"Mmmm," she admired her find. "Very nice." She set it down as gently as an infant
before reaching in the bag once more, removing another, and holding it up in
plain view.
When the apples were placed in the center of each circle, the
students greeted them with blank stares. One girl in aqua-colored glasses sneered
and rolled her eyes. "Begin by writing down whatever images come to mind as you
look at these," Carter-Jones instructed. "But don't stop there. What does the
smell remind you of? And not just 'red' or 'fruity,' please. Reach out. Come up
with something unusual."
"Oh, I can be unusual," the girl in the glasses assured
a friend. "But that," she pointed an accusing finger at the culprit, "is not
unusual. It's an apple!" This last word she enunciated as if the one in front of
her were seeping with venom.
There was a quiet boy to her right forever brushing
his bangs away from his eyes. Unlike his neighbor, he had fallen under a certain
spell. He studied the apple intensely, as if he was trying to see beneath the
surface of the red and waxy skin. Then he picked up the fruit and, to the
astonishment of the more resistant members of his circle, held it up to his ear,
as if half expecting to hear the ocean.
The next part of the assignment had to do
with taste, so Carter-Jones appealed for help to her assistants--graduate students
and instructors from the English department who until this moment had been
blending in to the point of invisibility. They rose and tried cutting each apple
in half, then quarters, then eighths--no small feat considering they were working
with plastic knives. This slicing took a good ten minutes and left behind a lot
of snapped plasticware.
Though she had rejected it as run-of-the-mill only
minutes before, the apple's old foe now jumped to its defense. "Easy. It sounds
like you're breaking its bones," the blue-spectacled girl appealed to an
instructor wrestling with the fruit. "Dry, snappy bones," the girl continued.
"I'm not morbid or anything, but I won't be eating it." As the others in the
group nibbled at their piece, their expressions changed. Raised eyebrows spoke
for their uncertainty--maybe it wasn't just any ordinary apple. A girl who had
been sitting with her feet propped up on her chair and her chin alternating from
knee to knee turned to her notebook.
"The stem is drooping over, like the apple can't bear to face a Monday morning,"
she scratched down with certainty. Around the circle, in another notebook, the
apple's mottled skin was "painted as a creek bed speckled with pebbles." From
almost every pen, metaphors came trickling.
Outside, the sun was shining. But
when class was over, everyone took their time filing out of the building onto
Forbes Avenue. And as they rode home, down streets they'd traveled a thousand
times, I imagined them admiring the weeds-turned-wildflowers on the side of the
road. They'd enjoy the low hum of tires on asphalt. They might even smile and
wave at the elderly woman on her porch at the end of the block, now understanding
how she could spend a whole summer sitting still.--Alan Friedman
is certain, Beatrice can be won. So at a craggy sea-shore he seeks help from a newfound friend, none other than the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Listening to the master's poem, Mario says he feels like he is rising and falling with the waves--"like a boat tossing upon your words."
Illustration by Janet Darby, who holds copyright. Not for use without permission.
Illustration by Janet Darby, who holds copyright. Not for use without permission. |
Charles Carpenter discovered abstract expressionism at just
about the perfect time, right
before America's art experts
did. This was back in the mid-1940s when Carpenter was a
young man. He was not a
painter. He was a collector, or
about to become one. But even
then he possessed a very good
eye. And over the past six decades his aesthetic instincts have proven eclectic,
brilliant, ahead-of-the-curve as he acquired a treasure trove of art: paintings
of abstract expressionism, Shaker furniture, exotic playing cards, scrimshaw,
Andy Warhols.
Last year, Carpenter was here in Pittsburgh as the Carnegie Museum
of Art mounted a grand exhibition, titled "The Odyssey of a Collector," of what
he has owned and loved over a lifetime.
Carpenter has never collected art as an
investment. He does so out of love, out of reverence for magnificent objects born
of the human spirit of creativity. Over the years he has gathered together an
extraordinary collection of treasures by such artists as Jackson Pollock, Andy
Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jean Dubuffet, Ad
Rheinhardt, Mark Rothko--many of them leading abstract expressionists, all of them
revered by Carpenter.
Now 80 years of age, Carpenter seems alien to the
razzle-dazzle art-buyer world. He has lived a straightforward life as a business
executive in the chemical industry. He speaks with what can only be described as
politeness and humility. A Quaker by religion, he is by nature an unassuming man.
His odyssey, in essence, began here in Pittsburgh in 1941, Carpenter having just
earned a master's degree in chemistry from Bucknell. With war in Europe looming,
his draft board ordered him into the defense industry. He did so at a U.S. Steel
subsidiary in Clairton, Pennsylvania, at that time the largest coke and coal
chemical plant in the world. While working full time, Carpenter enrolled at Pitt
in quest of a chemistry PhD. Across the street was the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Almost compulsively, he was drawn there before and after classes.
During the war,
the museum was quieter than usual, and Carpenter traversed the corridors alone:
observing, learning, sharpening his sense of judgment. A traveling exhibition of
van Gogh paintings arrived.
"I was particularly intrigued by the sunflower
paintings," he recalls. "In the reproductions, they were pretty and soft. But the
paintings themselves were rough and direct and could not be called pretty.
"I soon knew that I did not want a reproduction of a van Gogh sunflower in my home.
In fact, I did not want to own any reproductions of paintings." What he did
desire was original, first-rate art.
A few years later, visiting the Art
Institute in Chicago, the odyssey entered its next chapter. Among the paintings
on exhibit was the spectacular Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
by Georges Seurat. On repeated visits, Carpenter would just sit and gaze at that
masterwork of pointillism. But he also made another mind-bending discovery in the
Art Institute, something emotionally provocative and powerfully American--abstract
expressionism, "which had not yet made its way into the art books."
Abstract expressionism, which came into being during World War II, was not necessarily
abstract, nor expressive. But it was new, highly individual, highly
improvisational, conveying morally loaded themes (such as patriotism or war)
often on a grand scale. Among the leaders of this movement was Jackson Pollock, a
painter whose vibrant, kinetic, densely figurative work had proved a revelation
to Carpenter in Chicago.
In particular, Carpenter had his eye on Red and Blue
(1946). Carpenter offered $100--all he could afford--to an agent at Pollock's
gallery in New York. The collection began.
He soon added a watercolor, Boat with
Sun, Deer Isle, Maine (1921) by John Marin, then ranked by experts as the
country's greatest living artist. Tastes change, but Boat with Sun still holds up
beautifully. To purchase it, Carpenter (then a young married executive in the
chemical business) paid $750, representing two months' salary. He forfeited an
annual vacation, a new suit, and a down payment on a new car. Art came first.
With friends, too, art came first. "It seems all my best friends have been
artists," says the modest businessman. He talks of Charles Shaw, pioneer of the
abstract art movement, writer for The New Yorker, all around Manhattan bon
vivant, and, most of all, extraordinarily gifted painter.
Says Carpenter, "Even
when he was dying and his hands were gnarled with arthritis, he painted on and
on. He reminded me of the Japanese artist Hokusai, who, in late life, used a
signature that translates, 'Old man, mad about painting.'"
A bachelor, Charles Shaw died in 1974. After the funeral, Shaw's lawyer asked Carpenter to stop by
for a talk. "I was aghast when I learned that he had left me his entire life's
artwork." Also included were such art treasures as the looking glass owned by
Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll's model for Alice).
There is a sort of wonderland
quality to the Charles Carpenter collection, or at least the selection of it
arranged in the Carnegie exhibition. Andy Warhol was there, represented by a
Jackie [Kennedy], a silkscreen of bold flowers, and Brillo Box--"I have never
really been able to explain to myself why I like this 'dumb' object so much,"
says Carpenter. "I am not only fond of it, but also have never had any doubts
that it is a work of art."
He is likewise very fond of Sandwich, a brilliantly
colored soft sculpture. "People under 30," Carpenter says, "know the work
represents a sandwich. People over 30 don't know what it is."
Carpenter earned a good living, but never attained super-rich status. His extraordinary collection
was accumulated by sagacity, by seeing--before others--what is genuine, what will
last.
As a Quaker, he believes in the need for simplicity, and at times he feels
a little guilty about his pleasure in material beauty. But essentially he
believes his kind of collecting has little to do with money, everything to do
with the great continuum of world art, a legacy of what it means to be human.
And so, the odyssey continues for Charles Carpenter, a serene soul and an American
original.--Tommy Ehrbar
Illustration by Janet Darby, who holds copyright. Not for use without permission. |
Doug Kassab, director of clinical support services and the man in charge of Roameo, likes the name--if UPMC decides to acquire another robot, they could name it Juliet. The two would make a cute couple. Hopefully, they wouldn't end as tragically as Shakespeare's original Montague and Capulet.
As it is now, Roameo, who looks like a small white refrigerator on wheels with blinking yellow lights, has already been fixed up with candy machines by mischievous staff members. Unfortunately the relationships haven't worked out. Roameo's 24-hour schedule keeps him from having any naughty vending fun.
During the day, the 600-pound, armless Roameo, thanks to a map of UPMC programmed into his computer, carries X-ray records in his locked interior cabinet between radiology film library departments at Presby and Montefiore hospitals, saving valuable time for staff members. He makes endless trips back and forth across the skywalk between the two buildings where he encounters doctors who like to block his path and challenge his directional skills, curious families, and other onlookers.
In the evening, he delivers supplies to nursing stations in Presby. The nurses make a fuss over him and talk to him as if he were a person. Sadly, Roameo can only answer back with one of 15 pre-programmed phrases. Usually he says, "I have completed my mission. Please press the green button," or, "I am about to move," which he uses to warn bystanders.
Using ultrasonic sensors and infrared vision, Roameo can take two specially programmed elevators and open automatic doors. If he encounters anything in his path, he stops, readjusts his position and continues. Built and distributed by HelpMate Robotics, Roameo can carry up to 200 pounds and travels at two-and-a-half feet per second. But he is not fast enough to escape the jokers. Someone once tied a broom to the poor guy.
Even though Roameo is just a semi-intelligent, moving computer, he has roamed his way into the hearts of everyone at UPMC. While he was parked in front of the nurses' station on the seventh floor at Presby, a little girl walked up to him with a faraway look in her eyes. "Oh, Roameo," she sighed and blinked her eyes. Roameo, fickle as ever, responded, "I am about to move," and went off to complete his next mission.--Elizabeth Starr Miller