Free I see you everywhere by Julia Glass Page A

Because I also happen to like words. So I write a little, and I edit. This is how I came to work for Artbeat. It’s a monthly magazine, thick with glossy photos of paintings, sculpture, videos, and so-called installations. My job is to pore over the long, contemplative essays on the artists who make them, artists who aim beyond butter plates and mugs. I can carry batches of these essays back and forth on the train, back and forth to the beach.
    The editors at Artbeat give me what they call the hot-potato essays, the ones that are transparently pretentious (but must be published for various political reasons), bloated with critical ego (often transparently pretentious as well), or just plain poorly written (on a timely subject that can’t be reassigned). I deal with meek authors who cannot put a sentence together and with vain authors who cannot put a sentence together. When I have no idea what something means, I am not (unlike the editors I work for) afraid to say so. I am paid to be a verbal backhoe. It’s not a job to choose if you need to be loved by the people you work for. That’s why the editors give the worst stuff to me.
    I had two big essays with me that first week: one about a Scottish artist who makes strange, delightful confabulations from nature—towers of driftwood, gardens of ice, Herculean braids of grasses and leaves—and the other a provocative rant against Jeff Koons, David Salle, and a herd of other artists this critic believed to be the worst case of emperor’s clothing in decades. TONE IT DOWN!!! the editor in chief had scrawled across the front of the manuscript.
    Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 50 50
    Julia Glass
    Hugh, the managing editor—who, as far as I can see, is much too nice to work with such sharks—had kindly added, just for me, an illuminating postscript. Author is protégé of Hilton Kramer. One afternoon, as I sat on a velvet chaise in the Katzes’ parlor, poking my arms and legs to see if I’d burned myself at the beach, I spent an hour on the phone with Hugh going over specific gripes on the essay about the Scottish artist.
    “Hugh,” I said, “is the guy allergic to commas? Reading this piece is like reading semiautomatic gunfire. It leaves you mentally out of breath.”
    “He’s very big in L.A.,” said Hugh, sounding apologetic.
    “And they don’t like commas out there?”
    Hugh laughed. “I’ll have to look into that theory. But he attached this note saying that . . .” I heard him rustling papers on his desk. “Yes, saying that punctuation mustn’t be ‘impedimentary.’ ”
    Now I laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind.”
    “Oh, listen. Change whatever you like,” said Hugh. “I will deal with the fallout. That’s my job. Just how about this: how about no semicolons? I know he hates semicolons most of all. ‘Roadblocks,’ he called them on the last piece we ran.”
    I agreed to hold back on semicolons. But I love them, I have to confess; I find their particular flavor of hesitation similar to the lip I like to form on the large bowls I make, holding my right thumb up and slightly cocked, a hitchhiker’s thumb, as I spin the wheel, as the velvety lavender slip runs over the heel of my hand and down my wrist. The slight return of the lip allows you to hold the bowl securely, carry it heavily laden with apples or oranges across a room. I had brought one of these bowls as a present to the Katzes, and it sat on their kitchen counter. I was using it to hold their mail.
    I took a shower and rinsed out my bathing suit. I fed the rabbits and birds their dinner, took out the hose and watered the garden, trying to conjure a rainbow. Half soaked in the end, I coiled up the hose, mixed a margarita, and (there being no Ella Fitzgerald, no Sarah Vaughan) put on Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks. It’s odd to spend your vacation with Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 51 I See You Everywhere
    51
    someone else’s music,