v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

National Gallery of Art July 17, 2024

We went to the National Gallery on my birthday and I got to take detail shots of larger paintings from 500 years ago. It confirmed in my brain that things really haven't changed much. Check these out.

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-The Museum

When We Were in Lima

In Lima we spent plenty of good times with Rafael and Ceci. I did not realize when I took these photos of Spot that he was so photogenic-almost model dog type. Anyway, look at these yourself:

Copyright-Vallejo Nocturno 2024

Beach Views

After a 4 week trip to Peru where i posted only once, I plan to share my photos and evolving thoughts as I come back to the US more sane after leaving this land of eternal conflict. Anyway some Peruvian beach shots.

Copyright-Vallejo Nocturno 2024

Digitized Finds

For Christmas my daughter got me a new scanner. A Plustek OpticFilm 8200 that is small and portable. I can recommend it highly as it makes the scanning task easier and faster than the traditional Empson scanners that can do negatives (both large and small) and also actual photos. The Plustek handles negatives and slides. Here are my initial scans.

Vallejo Nocturno 2024 -Copyright

Puff is Gone

Those who know me and our immediate family are aware of Puff. This canine of 17 years on earth has been authoring his own Instagram account under Breton9Dogtails where he has written about his battle with Dr Virus and the sycophantic Republican party. But Puff has been also an integral part of our life being there to enjoy life in his own relaxed fashion. After 17 years his body was falling apart. He had amassed various tumors and recently had a growth in his mouth that was impeding his ability to chew on food. He had lost his ability to go up and down the stairs gracefully and had to be carried outdoors. Then there was his arthritis. But like a good trooper he took each day at a time and usually had a very good night of sleep without interruptions.

 

Well he is now in his long sleep. See you very soon, Puff.

Copyright:Vallejo Nocturno 2023

Mother's Photobox February 2011

After a visit to the clinic Stella Maris in Lima for my mother's pneumonia at 94, my mom and I sat on the bed and went through some of her photoboxs.

Copyright Vallejo Nocturno 2023

 

From LA Riview of Books, a review by Eric Gudas  of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, a great book from last century that only recently is receiving the attention it so deserves:

NATALIA GINZBURG’S novel-cum-memoir, Lessico famigliare (1963), masterfully translated by Jenny McPhee as Family Lexicon, plunges its reader into a maelstrom of fart jokes, mimicry, conversation scraps overheard in childhood and repeated for decades, loudly bellowed parental edicts and epithets, invented idioms, puns, libretto excerpts, doggerel, and, occasionally, lyric poems. Often, Ginzburg remembers, their mother “recited poetry or sang” after dinner; at other times, the whole Levi family “had heated discussions over how ugly or good-looking someone was.” This cacophony of words sometimes verges on pure sound, as when the narrator’s father “let[s] out a long roar” in the shower each morning, or when her friend Lola eschews words for a “guttural and affectionate dove cry.” Gradually, a sense of time and place — Italy between the 1920s and ’50s — emerges from this barely controlled aural chaos, just as the hesitations and unfinished sentences of James Joyce’s Dubliners reveal glimpses of turn-of-the-century Ireland, or the brutally formal dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose novels Ginzburg revered, gestures toward Edwardian social hierarchies. In the author’s “Avvertenza” (“warning”) that opens the book, Ginzburg states rather elliptically, “Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer.” Indeed, Family Lexicon recalls the great modernists’ reimaginings of childhood — Joyce, Compton-Burnett, Katherine Mansfield, parts of Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, and, farther back, Swann’s Way, which Ginzburg translated into Italian while in exile and then in hiding during World War II.

In her novel, Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish-born father and a Catholic-born mother — adamant nonbelievers and socialists both — grows up as the youngest of five siblings during Mussolini’s rise to power. The scene is Turin, home of an antifascist resistance movement into which Ginzburg’s family is increasingly drawn. The young Natalia Levi marries Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Russian-Italian literary scholar active in the resistance, who will be killed in a Nazi prison before the war’s end, leaving his widow and their three children to return, eventually, to her parents’ home. (The chronological straightforwardness of my last three sentences differs totally from Ginzburg’s own mode of narration.) But it would be wrong to classify Family Lexicon as a historical memoir — say, My Childhood in Mussolini’s Italy — or the portrait of a writer as a young woman, since Ginzburg, one of Italy’s best known and most beloved postwar writers, ruthlessly downplays her own artistic development. In fact, Ginzburg announces that she has left out “much that concerned [her] directly”: “I had little desire to talk about myself. This is not in fact my story but rather, even with gaps and lacunae, the story of my family.”

Family Lexicon doesn’t so much narrate that story as immerse us in a language-world of dialect (Triestine and Milanese), memory (of Ginzburg’s own childhood, inextricable from her parents’ retellings of their childhoods), and, above all, conflict. When the Levis aren’t squabbling about their friends’ relative ugliness, they have “ferocious arguments over politics, which ended in tantrums, napkins hurled into the air, and doors slammed so hard the whole apartment shook.” McPhee’s translation expertly retains what critic Lorrie Goldensohn has called Ginzburg’s “own indelible voice-print,” a “tough, residual boniness carried over from the original sentences [that] gleams through even as they move in their new English sound.” That “voice-print” is intimately connected with her characters’ speaking voices, and in particular with a “brutal frankness” prized both in Ginzburg’s own family and subsequently in all of her writing, where it erupts on almost every page, often peppered with exclamation points. Family Lexicon is studded, for instance, with her father’s caustic barbs, including my absolute favorite, uttered at various times to different members of his family: “You’re bored because you have no inner life.” And in the novel’s leftist milieu, where characters accuse each other of being “bourgeois” time and again, Lidia Levi candidly and hilariously critiques herself: “‘If Stalin came to take away my maid, I’d kill him,’ my mother said. ‘What would I do without my maid? I, who don’t know how to do a thing?’”

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Some Recent Photos

These come from a variety of recent activities around this winter.

Some photos

Some recent work:

Vallejo Nocturno 2023 - Early in 2023 and some late 2022

Our Recent Addition- Camila

On the 23rd of this month my son and his wife welcomed Camila into their life. Here are some photos from Camila's new life:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Welcome Camila