PAULA WHYMAN

If you're in or near the Philadelphia area, don't miss this exhibit now opening at the new Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art. Works on view include "A Basket in Two Waters," a painting by my friend, Shari Seltzer. Seltzer's work is previewed, along with others, in the exhibit catalog.

The works on exhibit were created in response to murals in the ancient synagogue at Dura Europos. The Dura Europos Synagogue murals are the earliest known examples of Jewish Art (250 AD).

Here's a brief description of Dura Europos: A Greek colony on the Euphrates River near the modern town of Salhiyé in Syria, and the site of the earliest known Jewish diaspora synagogue. First occupied by the Babylonians, Dura-Europos was built as a military outpost by the Seleucids about 300 BC. About 100 BC it was captured by the Parthians, and then in AD 165, it was annexed by Rome. It was destroyed by the Sassanids in 256 AD.

Seltzer has described herself and her work in the context of another exhibit, and I think it generally still applies to this one:

"I view the world as a miraculous place. And I work to translate my sense of wonder into the visual. My creativity is nourished by the flexibility and freedom of working in multiple media. . . The patterns and layers I see in the world are conveyed in my artwork. The joy and playfulness of producing art makes it richer."

"The Dura Europos Project: An Ancient Site Revisited Through 21st Century Eyes" opens this Sunday, Dec. 5th, with an opening reception from 4pm-6pm. The museum is located at 615 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, inside Congregation Rodeph Shalom. Admission is free.

Bethesda Magazine has just moved their website to a new platform, which is primarily important in that it means the address has changed for my suburban dysfunction humor column, Semi-Charmed Life: Surviving at the Center of the Universe. Click away for the new locality. And have a heapin' helpin' of our...ah, whatever it is...

This week's column is called In Which I Give Instructions That Are Likely to Be Ignored, and attempts to address, in absentia, burning questions like, "Honey, where are my keys?"

I'm getting ready to head out for a short sabbatical at VCCA, an artist colony in southern Virginia. I've been there before, and I posted here and here about the work of visual artists and others at the colony.

Each time I've visited in the past, I've had a specific project to focus on. The last time, I was supposed to be revising part of a novel. Instead, I started writing a new one, and wrote 40 pages of it in about 10 days. I like to think I was helped along by the mostly silent audience of local wildlife.


I don't count the cows as wildlife, exactly. And the cows are not silent. At this time of year, a number of them are about to give birth, so they make a lot of noise, and you can hear it from far away.

My studio was in a cottage that had not been used by Fellows before, so I was breaking it in. This is probably the only time I'll be happy to say my name is the first on a tombstone. The "tombstone" is the place in each studio where each Fellow "signs in" to show who has worked there and when.



As it happened, last year, there was a plague of stinkbugs in that area, and most of them seemed to land in my studio, where they would crawl out of the ceiling light and fly, buzzing, across the room at random, surprising moments. I started keeping a vacuum cleaner next to me, and after a few days, I was adept at typing with one hand while reaching up with the vacuum hose and sucking stinkbugs off the ceiling where they tended to gather above me, 20 or so at a time. They might have been interested in my work, but I don't really like anyone to read over my shoulder. On the other hand, when I read my new pages aloud, which I often did, they refrained from critical comment.

Once the stinkbugs abated, the fake ladybugs arrived. Fake in that they're not the useful kind that eat aphids, but a cheap imitation capitalizing on the good reputation of their betters. They streamed in around cracks in the old window frames by the hundreds. I had brought some painter's tape for hanging up manuscript pages on the wall...I used that to seal the cracks where they were getting in. And, after a few days, they stopped coming, too.

Then, on a particularly nice fall morning, I opened my back door and was swarmed by wasps. I called up Bruce Hartless. Bruce is the facility manager at VCCA, and also tends a herd of Angus cattle. I'm sure that poor Bruce was tired of hearing from me, but he was always good-natured and never let on. So I told him about the wasps.



He said, "These might not be the stinging kind; not all of them are." And he described the difference for me. I didn't want to test the theory.

Bruce came by to check out the wasps. "They are the stinging kind," he said. "But all you have to do is take a paper towel, fold it up, and squeeze them a little." He proceeded to demonstrate, quickly dispatching a wasp that clung to the wall. I told him I thought I would leave the squeezing of stinging wasps to someone else.

My upcoming trip to the colony will be the first where I don't have a particular project I feel compelled to work on. If I'm overwhelmed by limitless options, there are some story drafts I'd like to finish and some new novel chapters I could write. But there is absolute freedom in the idea that I can start from nothing, that all I really need is a pencil and paper. (And if that's the case, what's all this stuff I'm bringing along??) Maybe, like last year, the first line for something will simply pop into my head while stinkbugs are milling around above it.

Last year, when I came home and unpacked, and I was back in my office here, I heard a scratching sound coming from somewhere on my desk. As it turned out, I had a stowaway: A stinkbug had hitched a ride in my printer. It's still there. I read to it every day, and it never complains.

I read recently that Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti typewriter, which he used to write all his books, was sold at auction for over $250,000. Maybe the buyer thought to capture some of McCarthy's talents via magical transference through the keys of his typewriter.

McCarthy had to replace it, of course, so he went and bought another one, for $20. I think he made out pretty well there.

My dad used to sell Olivetti typewriters, and to my knowledge he never sold one for $250,000.

Anyway, this got me thinking, what talismanic object stands in for the typewriter, now that the typewriter is basically history? Does anyone want to buy Jonathan Franzen's laptop with the sabotaged ethernet jack? How would you display that in your home? Oh, here's my collection of laptops and flash drives belonging to famous writers! See how Shteyngart didn't update his virus software for 3 years? and here's the empty toner cartridge from Joyce Carol Oates's printer. That one wasn't worth as much, because she uses so many...

Okay, clearly this is hyperbole, and in the age of vanishing drafts, there are other items we might imbue with value besides the instrument through which the work is produced. And anyway, I'm sure that someone is going to tell me about a famous writer's laptop selling for a lot of money on eBay.

On the other hand, I'm strangely comforted that a writer's typewriter itself is held in such high esteem, as opposed to the treasured paperweight or the stuffed pet cat. (I'm not saying that McCarthy has a stuffed pet cat! I hope not.) What separates it from a dress a celebrity wore on the red carpet, or, of all things, William Shatner's kidney stone (which supposedly went for $20,000 on eBay), is the transcendent value of the creative project that came out of it.

But still, $250,000 for a typewriter?

I'm pretty sure the IBM Selectric I used in college is still in the attic. Tell you what, I'll give a deep "early career" discount to anyone who wants to wager on my future output...

Twenty dollars, you say?

That sounds about right.