In 2014, I was in London, and I’d just recovered from my back going out that I spent a good 24 hours immobilized on the floor of our hotel room. A house doctor was called in, and he gave me a muscle relaxant via hypodermic. My back “felt like a solid brick,” he said. It took about 10 hours to work, but I could finally start moving around again.
The floor of a hotel room is not the way to experience London. The maids were, however, very polite as they vacuumed around me.
Two days later, I was moving normally again, and I went to see an exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’d heard of the German artist Anselm Kiefer; the St. Louis Art Museum has two of his works. One is a massive painting called “Fuel Rods.” The other is a sculpture, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels,” comprised of a huge shelf of burned books and thousands of pieces of glass scattered on the floor. It commemorates “Kritstallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” when German Nazis attacked Jewish businesses, buildings, homes, and people across Germany on Nov. 9-10, 1938.
The London exhibition was simply entitled “Anselm Kiefer.”
Some Tuesday Readings
Winter penance – poem by Franco Amati at Garnage Notes.
The Kreutzer Sonata – poem by Donna Hilbert at Every Day Poems.
Into the Wasteland – Malcolm Guite at The Rabbit Room (video).
“The Shadow on the Stone,” poem by Thomas Hardy – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
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