Sister Cities and Such

When my world — surely not yours — turns to a roiling bucket of vomit, I write. Doesn’t matter what. The topic could be a current project, say, the William Halsey Wood manuscript. Could be bad poetry — though I shall never post it here. And then there is Agincourt, my own personal rabbit hole of avoidance.

Quite by accident this evening, the word “worpswede” crossed my path. Was that a misspelled reference to Star Trek? Or a criticism of liberal agendas in Scandinavia? No, Worpswede turns out to have been an artists’ colony in Lower Saxony, about 100k from Hamburg, a city which I would like to know far better. Worpswede is an old community but in the late 1880s it accidentally acquired the seed for becoming a colony of fine artists, printmakers, sculptors, but primarily painters of the vernacular landscape.

My knee-jerk reaction is predictable: fascinate, investigate, appropriate. Agincourt already has a similar phenomenon — a summer colony at Sturm und Drang — so why not an exchange program of sorts between the two. The world has witnessed far stranger things. Consider the last seventy-two hours following the Supreme Court’s recent finding. I find my efforts far less damaging.