Monday, Monday [by Vincent Katz]

Ah, ah, Monday, Monday.  Ah, ah, don’t like that day.  Actually, I’ve grown fond of it.  I used to feel, waking on Mondays, that a tidal wave or steamroller was set to descend on me, but now I wake up at about 6:30 ready to live the week.  Meditating helps, then I wake up my kids, and I am reminded, it’s not about me.  In fact, it’s really not about me, and that’s very exciting.  Rudy Burckhardt wrote something I love, which is that every morning he would wake up feeling like a speck in the universe, of no significance, then his wife would smile at him, his son would crack a joke, and life would begin again.  He realized he could do something, maybe paint or make a film.  I am  excited that Burckhardt has a show opening at the Met ("New York, N. Why? : Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937-1940") on September 23.  It will be his second museum show in New York this year.  Maybe Rudy Burckhardt has finally "made it" into the photographic canon.  Of course, he already made it, decades ago, probably the day Edwin Denby wandered into Burckhardt’s atelier in Basel and asked for a passport photo.  Burckhardt was  20, Denby  31.  Soon, I will go out into the July-like heat to a press preview of another Met exhibition, paintings by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964).  I’ve been thinking about what "making it" means, also how poetry is a renewable resource, the Black Mountain school, Pound and Vorticism, the Oresteia, John Ashbery’s collages, but now I must go.  I will return.