Accessioning

Get to the museum before the rain starts, unlock the gates, turn the lights on, before any of the committee arrive. When they're all (six of them) seated and the chit-chat has quieted, I opened the box with white-gloved hands, to show them the nudes. The other pieces are on top and I show them what we suspect Clarence traded his own work for. Some decent Paul Travis prints, a couple of watercolors, one of which is very good, and some other prints. Then the 13 nudes. These are really excellent drawings, beautifully rendered, some horizontal, some vertical, high-lighted in white chalk. I've seen them now a dozen times and they just get better. It's a treat, handling them. Everyone loved the catfish. It's an odd point of view, from below, and the fish is turning. It's one of my favorite drawings ever. I'm getting adept at floating the buffered tissue. It's like floating mother sheets of newsprint (they must be 36 by 40 inches) onto the old flat-bed cylinder press in the shop where I apprenticed. Press must have been eight feet by twelve feet, you had to climb halfway up one side to feed it. Printed a weekly newspaper, four pages to a run on one side of the uncut sheet. Two sheets made one of the papers. Charlie had sold the newspaper, by the time I worked for him, so it was a two man job shop. He printed all the forms for the courts, that type kept standing, in galleys. A lucrative little shop. After six months he paid me, by the page, to do the linotyping. His eyes were going bad. He'd take his bride to Central America every winter, and leave me to run the shop. The Cape Cod years. So I had access to a linotype and that allowed me to do 80 or 100 page books, letterpress. Poetry looks best, impressed into the page, it reads better. That led to bookbinding. A lot of grants, in those days, to fund small presses. There was a lot of good work. I must have a thousand pieces done by various presses, we traded too; I need to go through those boxes, hope to god a mouse hasn't found them. The committee votes to tell the board they should accession the Carter's absolutely, the other stuff, only if we can de-accession it at a later date, to pay for framing the Carters. De-accessioning is all in the art news right now, as museums are dying. Universities selling off collections to pay the light bill. Where's that Carter that was at Rutgers? It was that same model I'm in love with. I'd be really pissed if it sold for a few thousand dollars to some asshole middle-man who didn't appreciate what a strong image it is. I have an ink-jet print, scanned from a slide, but it's enough to see, to know this is a painting the museum needs to own. De-accessioning to bolster the permanent collection, would be a good thing, and Sara steers them that direction, a separate fund, set aside for maintaining the permanent collection. If the provenance is right, on something we're donated, and all the money goes into the correct place, I don't have a problem with this. I'm remarkably silence, I say a few things, about condition, paper quality, what foxing is. But James and Nick run the show. If meetings could be delightful this was one. James does a monolog, it's hard to keep up, and Nick, with his perfect one-liners, interjects them, with perfect timing, when James has to take a breath. It's a stunning display of stand-up comedy. Their timing, mostly Nick, but James is turned on by this, is exquisite. The Catskills. I swear they could play the circuit. Nick is a Thurber character, he always makes me laugh, and I'm not the laughing type, really. Stay close, but don't be obvious. Work that out as well as you can. You and your cell-phone. My people have some questions about that. Wherever I am I'm generally alone, so I never have an alibi. Maybe what I was reading, if it came right down to the passage in question. Certainly Thoreau, though Emerson bores me to tears. I'd look to see if I might be lifting something from Emily. Stealing is usually easier than making something up. Keep your story straight. What you think he said. Right, the Rolex, there was a tattoo on his shoulder, something really offensive.

Tom

The playing field is a simple rectangle. .I'm just saying.