Far From Algiers is “on the truck”
Those of you who ordered Far From Algiers from Kent State University Press in advance of last Friday’s publication date have received notice that it’s “on the truck.” Thank you for this vote of confidence. I hope you will be rewarded. If you contact me, I will be happy to inscribe a bookplate for you.
I was in Provincetown, MA, when the book was released Friday. Wagnerian thunder and lightning storms were passing over that topsy-turvy arts colony. My mission there was relevant to the book, in a way. The cover of the book features Hole in Time, a Surrealist painting by my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione, and I had come to Provincetown for the opening of an exhibition of three of her Surrealist paintings and three gouaches by her sister and my aunt, Irene Rice Pereira. You can see Hole in Time if you click on Far From Algiers.
I was happy to be there because it’s a bastion of tolerance and thoughtfulness in a time of heightened intolerance and witlessness. There are more than sixty art galleries in Provincetown and people wander the streets, dropping into galleries and socializing as they go. The town is full of people who look as if they ought to be famous. Undoubtedly some of them are. But, unlike many art colonies, there is little exhibitionism. People don’t seem to go there as much to be seen as to see, to share the hospitable eccentricity. This is just where I want to be as my little book appears, I told myself.
I had another reason for being there, too. I had helped manage my aunt’s paintings when she died in 1971, as I manage my mother’s paintings now. They had devoted their lives to art, to the creation of beauty, and I thought Provincetown was a fitting place to pay my own homage to that achievement.—DM

