osprey_archer | Entries tagged with art

My mother volunteers at the local library, and sometimes I help her process the new books, which is how I discovered Sandra Nickel’s Making Light Bloom: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Lamps.

Picture book biographies seem to be having a real moment, which is convenient for me as I’ve apparently got a weakness for them. Most of the current run focus on a lesser-known woman or person of color who did a cool thing, for values of “lesser-known” that vary from “actually I think this person is really pretty famous” to “no one has ever heard of this person.”

Clara Driscoll definitely falls in the latter category. Not only is she not famous now, but she was unknown in her own lifetime, as she did her work under contract in the Tiffany factory. She started out cutting out glass for the famous Tiffany windows, a job that required quite a bit of artistic taste as these windows are famous, among other things, for their gorgeous variegated glass - the cutters had to select the particular part of the big sheet of glass that would look best in the whole window.

Eventually, it occurred to Driscoll that one might also make stained glass lamps. Her design for a dragonfly lamp caught Louis Tiffany’s eye, and the lamp went to the World’s Fair, where it was a big hit. Tiffany gave Driscoll permission to design more lamps, and she went on to design at least sixty, all with beautiful nature themes.

The illustrations by Julie Paschkis are in a striking stained glass style: it was this reason that the cover caught my eye. Like Tiffany windows, the colors vary within one panel, orange drifting into red and green to yellow. A rich and lovely array of colors.

I wrapped up the Newbery Honor books of 2025 with Andrea L. Rogers’ Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott Medal this year for Rebecca Lee Kunz’s rich sunset-colored illustrations. It’s a picture book about a long-suffering older sister who watches as her two-year-old brother “helps” various family members complete their tasks, usually by accidentally making more tasks by spilling the flour, pulling up the newly planted garden vegetables, tearing out the stitches in a freshly sewn pucker-toe moccasin, etc.

The sister, standing in for older siblings everywhere, is exasperated. Although of course in the book she moves past that exasperation, once her parents point out that she’s one of her little brother’s most important teachers, I suspect that this book may not be a hit with older siblings. Why does no one ever validate their feeling that their younger siblings are so annoying!!!!

As a youngest sibling, however, I was enchanted, especially because this is exactly the stage my niece is in, although (knock on wood!) unlike Chooch, she’s usually not actively destructive when she “helps.” It just takes twice as long to get anything done when she’s “helping” water the plants or mix the pancake batter. But to an adult, it’s totally worth it to see her attempting to haul around a gallon or water or measure a teaspoon of baking soda.

(A side story: last week, as I was washing up the pancake dishes, she was trying to get a slice of orange onto her spoon. At last she announced, “I’m frustrated.” There is nothing cuter than a two-year-old using a ten-cent word, so of course I stopped to help her get that orange onto her spoon.)

The illustrations are just lovely, too. I love the sunset-hewed pallet, the way that the patterns on the characters’ clothes splash a little past their outlines, the Cherokee motifs that Kunz wove into the illustrations. There’s a particularly gorgeous illustration of Chooch gigging for crawdads with the friend of the family, both of them dark silhouettes against the orange water, and a pale gold moon with a glowing aureole of fireflies.

The university where I work happens to have a bronze cast of Degas’ “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”, so before I read Camille Laurens’ book of the same name (recommended by

troisoiseaux), I went to have a good long look at the sculpture.

It’s less than life-size - perhaps two-thirds, one-half the size of the actual fourteen-year-old dancer. You can see the bronze creases in her stockings at the ankles and knees, the places where socks begin to wear out. Her forehead slopes back sharply, more sharply really than I think the human forehead can. Her hair hangs down her back in a rope braid, which is tied with a golden satin ribbon. A real ribbon, fabric rather than bronze.

She wears, too, a cloth tutu, and the curator told us (when I visited with my parents months ago) that the tutu has to be replaced every now and then, always to great debate about exactly how it should look, as the tutu on Degas’ original statue (wax, not bronze) was long gone when collectors decided to make a metal cast. How long should it be? What color? What kind of fabric?

The one at my university is about knee-length, much pleated, creamy pale layers of some fabric that might be tulle, the outer layer purposely frayed for the bottom quarter inch or so. The dancer’s feet are in the fourth position, but her hands are behind her back, and seem rather large for her size.

Thus prepared, I dived into Camille Laurens’ Little Dancer Age Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’ Masterpiece, translated by Willard Wood. Laurens is attempting to write a biography of Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for the famous sculpture, but as there is very little material about Marie, it becomes a hodgepodge of other things, including a partial biography of Degas (and indeed it’s filed under his name at my library).

The book is also about the historical conditions of the young dancers at the Paris Opera, who were called rats and generally assumed to offer sexual favors on the side, giving the ballet a scandalous vibe that most 21st century viewers probably don’t pick up from looking at Degas’ pictures, since nowadays ballet is seen as a refined high art. (Is a picture, or a sculpture, worth a thousand words? Or can it tell us anything that we don’t already know?)

And it’s about the initial reception of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which more or less universally appalled viewers when it was first exhibited. Was it because Degas modeled the sculpture’s head to fit what was then considered the physiognomy of criminals? (Hence the sharply sloping forehead.) The association of ballet dancers with prostitution, which perhaps becomes a little queasy-making when you look at this flat-chested statue of a child?

Or the fact that the original statue was modeled in grayish wax, so the little dancer must have looked just a little corpse-like? A completely different viewing experience than the bronze cast I studied so carefully.

Degas, Laurens notes, was upset about the restoration attempts on a famous painting in the Louvre, a Rembrandt if I recall correctly. It was not the quality of the attempt that he objected to, but the fact that an attempt was made at all. Art, Degas thought, is a living thing; and like all living things, an artwork has its time to die.

A rare edition of What I Quit Reading. Last week I was struggling with Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, but decided that might be because the first part was about two artists I’m not familiar with, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. So I went on to part two, which is about Degas (I love Degas!) and Manet (Smee’s other book Paris in Ruins made me interested in Manet!)... and unfortunately I didn’t particularly care for this section either. It lacks the firm grounding in the wider historical milieu and social world of the Impressionists that made Paris in Ruins so absorbing. So onward and upward to other books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My break from the Newberies lasted about two seconds, and then I was back in the saddle with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky, which is written in verse (ever since Out of the Dust, Newbery books written in verse have frightened me), and printed in eight-point font, which is not the author’s fault but MY EYES.

However, despite these unpropitious first impressions, I enjoyed the book as a whole. Like Out of the Dust, it’s historical fiction about a family in a hard time. In this case, Lettie’s Black family is migrating from Mississippi to Nebraska in 1879, looking for a new start. A covered wagon story with all the covered wagon trials (is someone going to get cholera?) plus the extra concern that white men might attack their caravan, but overall more successful than Out of the Dust at portraying hardship without slipping into misery porn.

I also read Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, which is about Bringley’s decade as a security guard in the Met after his brother Tom’s death.

There is a very moving passage about going to a museum with his mother soon after Tom’s death, and finding his mother standing in front of a painting of a Pieta, Mary holding the body of her dead son. Throughout the book Bringley insists on the importance of an emotional connection to art, the primacy of the personal above learning facts by rote - primacy in the literal sense that this is what comes first: why would we care to learn facts about Degas if his ballerinas weren’t so beautiful?

But, as with Paris in Ruins, sometimes learning more about an artist’s life can make you want to revisit their art - to feel that there is more to be seen in it than you have seen heretofore…

Anyway he’s not in any sense arguing against learning facts, just arguing that to really experience a work of art you have to bring not just your intellect and your facts but your whole self, your emotions; to allow yourself to be moved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, which is like a warm bath. Right after World War II, Mrs. Tim’s husband has been posted to Egypt and her children are both in boarding school. At loose ends, she takes a job helping to run a hotel in Scotland. On the train to the hotel, she meets a man who is baffled because his fiancee has just broken off their engagement after years of correspondence over the war. And then at the hotel, Mrs. Tim meets a girl who just broke up with her fiance, because she is simply so exhausted after years of looking after an invalid aunt that she feels she can never make a good wife…

What I Plan to Read Next

Eight Newberies left. The next one on deck is Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person.

I’ve read Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” before, but when I saw that Barbara Cooney had illustrated it, of course I had to pick it up. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer of the “local color” school famous for her works set in Maine, while Barbara Cooney was an illustrator who spent her childhood summers in Maine and eventually settled there.

The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.

But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.

In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.

I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.

troisoiseaux was reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, which is about the effects of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War on the baby impressionist movement. Of course I had to read it, as I am tragically incapable of resisting anything about the impressionists, and in this case it worked in my favor, because this book is fantastic.

This book balances a lot of different strands. It situates the impressionists within the wider political and cultural milieu of France, while also touching on how France’s relationship with the rest of Europe shaped that milieu. Most dramatically in the form of the Franco-Prussian War, of course, but Smee’s description of Manet’s fascination with Spanish art, particularly Goya, is also illuminating. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, Manet tried to make Goya-style lithographs of the horrors he’d seen, but the misery was still too raw.

In fact, Smee notes, most of the impressionists never engaged artistically with the war at all, partly in reaction against the Academy’s elevation of heroic history paintings in general and its insistence on heroic history paintings of the Franco-Prussian War. Instead, they focused on the ephemeral, the evanescent, the shifting light of daily life as an antidote to a demoralizing political reality and a deeply disillusioning experience of war in which pretty much all the political forces in France came out looking bad.

Napoleon III? The idiot who started the war. (People tend to forget this, possibly because the Prussians trounced France so thoroughly, but France did start the war.) The Communards? Completely out of touch with the political reality outside of Paris*, also had the unfortunate habit of lynching people who looked maybe kind of spy-like. The monarchists? Bad on principle, also lost their chance at monarchy when their numbskull candidate for king tried to insist on a return to the white Bourbon flag. The forces of the republic? Lost the war, massacred the Communards, but somehow they’re here to stay.

(*The Communards complete failure to grasp that much of rural France remained a bastion of Catholic royalists started me on a train of thought about how so-called “popular revolutions” are often revolutions that are popular only in the capital city, which then imposes its will on the truculent countryside which is, numerically, often 70% or more of the population of the country, and often wants nothing to do with the revolution supposedly enacted “for the people.” Popular revolution as urban imperialism?)

The book also describes the social milieu of the impressionists, where political divisions are ferocious sometimes to the point of firing squads, and yet Berthe Morisot (daughter of moderate constitutional monarchists) can be courted both by reactionary Puvis de Chavannes and republican Eugene Manet, brother to painter Edouard Manet (who probably would have been courting Berthe herself except awkwardly he was already married). They all meet peaceably at the Morisots’ salons and chat about painting.

Although various impressionists bob in and out of the book, Berthe and Edouard are the focal points. (Smee refers to them by their first names, which gives the book an novelistic flair.) These are not my top impressionists, but I came out of the book with a greater appreciation of their work, because as well as being a good social and military historian with a fine eye for the subtle shifts in relationships between individuals, Smee is also a perceptive art critic who can help you see new depths in paintings you have previously not fully appreciated. I’ve struggled with Morisot’s work in particular, but I’d love to return to her work to view it through this new lens.

This brings me to the one flaw in the book: not enough art reproductions! Presumably the publisher’s fault rather than Smee’s, but I do wonder who thought it would be a good idea to put in, for instance, a photograph of the balloonist Nadar rather than another example of Morisot’s work. Not that I wasn’t fascinated by the use of hot air balloons to get mail out of Paris, and carrier pigeons to bring back replies in the form of film negatives containing tiny, tiny pictures of thousands of letters that then had to be blown up and transcribed! I just didn’t think a portrait of Nadar was the best use of the limited picture space.

Overall, though, loved it. Highly recommended if you’re interested in either the impressionists or French history. I’m going to read Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art next. I’m really most interested in Manet and Degas, but I love a good feud so perhaps that will carry me through the 20th century artists too.

By popular demand (well, okay, a single request, but I'm sure you were all thinking it), the Bramble watercolor!

He appears to be sitting in front of a French flag. This was in fact an attempt at drawing in the window and the windowframe, but the French flag works too, as Bramble's motto probably is in fact "Liberte, egalite, fraternite!"

I had a whirlwind weekend! The first weekend in October is always the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon, a reenactment of a French trading post that was active in the mid-1700s, and for the first time ever I was not merely a spectator but a participant: on Sunday, I spent all day playing my dulcimer with the Dulcimer Gathering.

First, however, came Saturday, which I did attend as a spectator (although in costume), because I had a friend visiting and because I needed to buy my dulcimer. Hitherto I’ve been using a cardboard loaner from the Dulcimer Gathering (you can get a surprisingly nice tone with a cardboard dulcimer actually), but there’s always a dulcimer seller at the Feast and my plan from the beginning has been to get my dulcimer there, so I could try out an array and find the one that called to me. And I did indeed find a beautiful sweet-toned cherry wood dulcimer.

I also got fry bread and meat pies and a red-and-green cockade for my hat, which may have plighted my troth to God knows what political movement (there were some tartans that I sedulously avoided), but it really put a nice finishing touch on my costume so if I’m now a Jacobite I guess I’ll just have to live with it.

Fortunately, after all this gaiety, Monday and Tuesday were fall break, and I took both days off to recover. On Monday I spent the day with Mom and Dad, who were watching my niece, who is one and a half and talking up a storm. Does anyone understand most of what she’s saying, no, but most of the time she seems to be talking to herself anyway, and she has a special voice that she uses when she’s actually trying to communicate with us: slightly louder and more demanding, as mostly she is communicating her wants. “Up!” “Don!” (Down.) “Kib!” (Crib. She likes to play in her crib.) “Mek!” (Milk.) I’ve heard her say a very clear “ap-pul,” although she didn’t on Monday.

She also seems to call her grandmother “Mama,” having perhaps adopted this as an all-purpose word for trusted female caregiver. Also much easier to say than “Grandma,” of course.

Then on Tuesday I had the day completely off, with no responsibilities, and spent the day happily puttering. I ambled downtown (it’s within walking distance from my place), replenished my stock of notecards at the local artists’ cooperative, crossed the bridge for a happy morning catching up on correspondence in Starbucks, and then recrossed the bridge and stumbled upon the early voting location, which had such a line that I went over to the library to grab a book before getting in line. (The book was Katherine Applegate’s Odder, the story of a sea otter, which is very cute.)

And I painted a watercolor portrait of Bramble! I was not quite brave enough to do it with his eyes open (eyes so often break a picture), but it is recognizably a cat, perhaps slow-blinking at the viewer from the top of his cat tree.

I posted a few weeks ago about an imminent watercolor class, which was then postponed, but happily it finally happened this Monday! So I spent three hours Monday evening learning about watercolors, and ended the evening with a watercolor of two fat birds which I have pinned to the bulletin board in my office. There was also a watercolor of an orange cat which was very cute right up until I added the eyes... somehow they are people eyes rather than cat eyes and give the whole thing a feel disturbingly like the Cats movie.

However, I will persevere! One of my watercolor goals is a portrait of a cat who I met in the Brooklyn Cat Cafe, as I would like to put her picture in my scrapbook (planning a spread called Cats at Work), but I currently have only a blurry video which will not screenshot well... Hopefully I can do Pink Salmon justice in watercolor. She deserves the tribute of a portrait rather than a mere photograph, anyway.

Scrapbooking progresses! Despite Baby Boy's interference (he knocked the table over RIGHT after I had finished laying out the pages...) I am finishing up the section for my thirtieth birthday party. It is ten pages long, which is longer than the spread for my entire 2017 road trip... Well, look, sometimes you just have more things to put in the scrapbook, you know? Not only are there more photos for the birthday party, but I'm putting in many of the birthday cards I received, as well.

Have begun work on my massive 2023 road trip. So far I have a better record than I feared, although to my dismay have have discovered that I have nothing from either (a) John K. King Books - not even a photo of the stack of books I bought! - or (b) the Boston Public Library, which was about 75% of my sightseeing in Boston. Oops. (This reminds me that I was planning to get a little cocktail umbrella and paint it black in honor of A Spy among Friends. Must add to list.)

Because it's so big, I've been sort of storyboarding the road trip pages. I stopped after Boston last weekend, but this weekend I'm hoping to get through the last few weeks of the trip - PEI, Belchertown, and Philadelphia for

skygiants and

genarti's wedding. (Which I also don't have pictures for! But I DO have pictures from the Rodin museum, including a miniature sculpture of a penguin, which is a parody of Rodin's commemorative sculpture of Balzac.)

Since I started a new job in January, I've been so busy that I've really posted about nothing but books. In this post, I thought I would catch you up on a few other things in my life.

The scrapbookening continues! I had vague visions of doing this in some sort of systematic way, but in fact I've been hopping around in time from event to event. Right now I'm on a wedding kick, having realized that wedding invitations are an excellent "scrap", as are the thank-you notes if the bride and groom happened to send them. (When you are trying to scrapbook events that happened years ago, which you were not at the time planning to scrapbook, often it's difficult to rustle up anything but photographs for the pages.)

I was similarly inspired by the idea of using birthday cards from my 30th birthday bash in my scrapbook. I'd just finished laying out ten beautiful pages when my cat Baby Boy leaped on the table. "Baby Boy!" I wailed, and Baby Boy fled to the far end of the table top, at which point the table tipped under his weight and all my beautiful pages went flying as the table fell over.

Baby Boy is alive, but he was for about ten seconds in serious danger of being made into cat stew.

I've put the 30th birthday pages back together. (Baby Boy fortunately didn't damage anything except one of the cardstock sheets, which is of course now part of my Adventures in Scrapbooking scrapbook page, with a photograph of the destruction that he wrought, with Baby Boy crouched in the background gazing dazed at the fallen table.) But I haven't had the heart to start in on the captions; hence working on weddings instead.

I've also been on a Quest for the perfect three-ring binder. After some experimentation I have concluded that the path of wisdom is a series of one-inch O-rings, as the scrapbook pages turn much more easily than in either O-ring or D-ring two-inchers.

Other things! I'm signed up for an intro to watercolor class tomorrow. As a child I really enjoyed watercolors, but it's been years since I've used them, so a class seemed like a good way to ease back in. Over the summer I acquired a book about nature journaling (a castaway from a retiring professor's office), which enchanted me, and watercolor seems like the perfect medium for a nature journal, since so much of what I find enchanting in nature is the color.

I haven't done much writing - aside from book reviews for DW, and letters, and scrapbooking... Okay, I haven't done much fiction writing this year, but I am ever so slowly dragging myself through the copy-edits on Diary of a Cranky Bookworm. My goal is to get it out in October! (Sage starts her diary in October. Maybe I should make her diary start date my deadline.)

Oh, and I've started going on an evening Cat Walk, as I call it, which consists of walking around the neighborhood to meet the local cats. Porch Cat is an orange tabby who lies reliably in the sun on his porch; Trinket is a one-eyed black cat with a white bib who sometimes prowls around my house. He likes to be petted if he's in the mood, but his two-eyed lookalike runs away whenever people approach. There is a house with a set of associated kittens, half-wild, including a cream one with dark rings round the eyes whom I call Goggles; and around the corner, a fluffy black kitten all tail and eyes named Umi.

I haven’t actually read Susan Fletcher’s Journey of the Pale Bear yet, but I’m fairly sure that A Bear Far from Home is a picture book version of the same story. In the 1300s, King Haakon of Norway sent King Henry of England a polar bear as a present, and both books deal with the polar bear’s journey.

A Bear Far from Home focuses on the experience of the bear, who was born in the polar north, is captured by traders, and finds herself living in a cage in the Tower of London, until the king decrees that she will be allowed to fish in the Thames every day. (Were her food bills too high? Or did the king think it might cheer her up? Unanswerable questions at this point.)

I enjoyed the story, but mostly I decided to write about this book because of the enchanting illustrations by Rebecca Green. The first page, which outlines the basic story, is a close approximation of a medieval style. Afterward, the art style becomes more modern, with a touch of perspective here and there (there’s London Town in the distance behind the Thames!), but still with that medieval flavor in the mostly flat stylization and the borders.

The color palette is a pleasure, too: blues and whites for snowy northern Norway, greens and umbers and burgundies for England. Two distinct feelings for two very different places, so the reader can feel a little bit of the polar bear’s disorientation. Just really lovely illustrations all around.

In my youth, I directed a few films starring my friends. The films have since been lost, but I have a few stills, and I thought it would be fun to put them in my scrapbook… and then I thought it would be fun to write up my filmmaking career in the form of an academic article… and, well, here it is.

“The Lost Films of A. G. Gray” is a perfectly cromulent subtitle, but I’m trying to think of a title to go with it. Some poetry quote, perhaps?

***

In the early 21st century, a new star appeared in the directorial firmament. But like all too many female film directors, A. G. Gray faded into obscurity after only a brief career. All four of her films have been lost.

Of the first two, there is no record even of the titles. Only the synopses remain. Gray’s debut was a black and white silent melodrama about a young girl (Emma M.) slowly driven mad by her quest to pursue fifty-five majors. As she sinks deeper into her obsession with a can of Spaghetti-Os, her desperate friends (Caitlin A. and Sarah T.) take her to an asylum, knocking the Spaghetti-Os from her grip. (In a dramatic close-up, the Spaghetti-Os roll from her hand, like the baby carriage rolling down the steps in Battleship Potemkin.) But the Spaghetti-Os catch A. in their wicked net. The film closes on a close-up of her face as she holds the Spaghetti-Os to her cheek and strokes it. “My precious,” proclaims the closing intertitle.

Before Gray began her next film, the era of sound dawned, and her use of music shows that she was swift to grasp its possibility. In this psychological drama, two friends (Micaela C. and Monika F.) find themselves trapped in a ski lodge by a blizzard. F. passes the time by singing Christmas carols, until C., driven mad by the incessant singing, locks F. outside in the storm. F., frantic, bangs on the door. But soon her knocking falls into a rhythm, and her irrepressible spirit triumphs as she bursts into song again.

Gray’s third and most experimental film, Fans in Three Modes, has left the most complete record. The film begins with a young girl (M. again) in a black dress, attempting to pick a fan to complete her outfit for the evening. As she considers various fans, different scenarios appear. In one, a girl in an orange shawl (A., another reappearance) peers over a black fan at a tempting plate of strawberries. In another, A. does battle with an adversary (Myra A.) armed with a red fan. The red fan triumphs. We return to M., who selects the red fan and sets out to conquer.

Questions, however, remain. Though the title alludes to three modes, we only see two. What was the second mode? (One feels instinctively that the fan battle is the climax of the film.) And what is the deeper meaning of this fan-tasy?

Gray ended her career with a more conventional offering, The Trojan Horse. Long-time collaborator M. is joined by newcomer Rebecca W. (visible in the only extant still), who is attempting to infiltrate Purdue gear onto the IU campus, prompting a battle of wits with M. There are unsubstantiated rumors that the director herself played a cameo as the evil mastermind behind the scheme. No record of the ending remains.

There is no record, either, to explain the abrupt termination of Gray’s career. She had the experimental verve of Maya Deren, the unflinching eye of Agnes Varda, and the highly aestheticized interest in the female experience of Sofia Coppola. The loss of the films that she made is hard enough to bear, but the loss of the films that might have been is incalculable.

Greetings from Massachusetts! It has been ~~thirty-five years since my last confession~~ five days since I posted. Where does the time go? Well, one simply does get busy traveling…

My last day on PEI was bright and shining, a blue sky and a hint of crispness in the air. Perfect weather for a long wander on the beach, and then drifting across the road to watch the geese gather on the pond. More and more came, till the pond was thick with them, and then almost as one they rose into the sky and flew away, leaving only a tiny rear guard sharing the still quiet pond with the seagulls.

The afternoon wore away, until it was time to go to Dalvay-By-the-Sea, where I ate another ambrosial dinner as the sun set over the water. Then Anne of Green Gables by the wood fire, until encroaching dusk forced me to go. A perfect final day.

The next day I left early (and it's a wrench leaving Prince Edward Island), because I intended to cross most of Maine... on US-1, which hugs the coast, and is therefore not the most efficient route. I still maintain this would have been a good idea, if only I had allotted, say, at least two days, possibly three: enough time to stop and smell the sea air, explore the towns, have a lobster roll perhaps. (I envision Daniel and Gennady giving this a try, sometime in their latter days.)

Unfortunately (1) my plan was to do this all in one day, (2) I accidentally took a detour to Bangor, (3) when I say "accidentally" I mean that as I turned onto this detour there was a large sign saying "US-1A, Bangor," so I knew full well that I was on the way to Bangor, and also knew full well that Bangor was completely out of my way. Why not turn back? Why indeed. Sometimes the processes of the human soul are a mystery, aren't they.

But I reached my destination eventually, and the next day dawned bright and shining, and I visited two used bookstores nearby. One was devoted to military history, where I found a present for my dad, and also experienced the general delight of a bookstore that clearly began as a collecting hobby gone awry. There are a few labeled shelves, but also stacks of books piled haphazardly against the wall without rhyme or reason. Why is there a book about flower collecting sandwiched in between this history of the Korean War and that meditation on General Custer? Who can say.

And then onward to Beach Pea Bakery, where I had a delicious chicken salad sandwich on a croissant and finished Anne Lindbergh's The Worry Week, which is about three children who contrive to stay at the family beach house in Maine without their parents... only to discover that there's almost no food left in the house, so they have to forage for their rations! Delightful. My favorite Anne Lindbergh yet, and the perfect book to read in Maine.

And now I am staying with

asakiyume! We are in process of making croissants, which are now on their third rise. Also we have been to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, which is one of my favorite museums in the world, and further endeared itself to me by having an entire exhibit devoted to Horse Tales: Galloping into Children's Books, which is mostly about picture books of course, but they also had a case that contained about two dozen editions of Black Beauty, which was fascinating!

Also in one of the other exhibits there was a place where you could try your hand at drawing a still life, which I did, and although my skills are very rusty, I did manage to produce a recognizable glass jar with three butterflies inside.

And today we went to the Norman Rockwell Museum, which was fantastic. In the basement there's a long gallery containing all of Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers, four high, all up and down three walls of the long, long room. We walked along, taking in all the covers, every cover telling a story, and you never get tired of them. But then suddenly at the end the Post insisted that he should start doing portrait covers - at which point the covers get boring, and Rockwell himself got bored and severed his ties to the magazine, although he'd been painting Post covers for over forty years at that point.

Then he went off and started painting covers for Look and Life, many of them on Civil Rights themes, which the Post wouldn't let him do.

Later on Rockwell got a reputation as a conservative painter, in the sense that he was popular with conservatives and therefore, one presumes, guilty by association. It was striking to realize how much of that is a result not of Rockwell's own views but of the Post's editorial policies, which demanded cheery, non-controversial covers that would draw in the widest possible cross-section of readers. More and more I realize how many decisions that are discussed as if they are purely artistic, a direct reflection of the artist's own views, are profoundly shaped by outside pressures, the need to please an editor or a certain audience in order to make money.

Tomorrow: the croissantening! If all goes well, the croissants will be ready for elevenses, to be taken with a nice hot cup of tea.

Greetings from Boston! I have been visiting

skygiants and

genarti and talking about books and watching A Spy Among Friends (someone clearly read Ben MacIntyre's A Spy Among Friends and was like, love it, but wouldn't it be better if Nicholas Elliot and Kim Philby were like at least a little bit in love) and doing far less sightseeing than I had intended. Sometimes one simply gets a bit tired and needs a rest!

However, the little sight-seeing I've done has been top-tier: I went on a tour of Trinity Church, which is the one with the Burne-Jones window, although as it turns out the Burne-Jones part of it is a very small square in the middle of a riot of William Morris vines, which has an interestingly pagan effect. It's an absolutely gorgeous church, stained glass windows in at least six wildly different styles, one of which enraged the congregation, and no, it was not the William Morris vines; it was the up-to-date French stained glass window with perspective?? Whoever heard of a stained glass window with perspective! Stained glass is supposed to look flat my friends!!

But they loved the vines, and they also loved John LaFarge's stained glass windows, which were a totally new technique to stained glass, using sheets of colored glass layered over each other so that the windows look like captured fragments of sky. "Like a Tiffany window?" you say. Exactly like a Tiffany window! LaFarge shared his technique with Tiffany, who rode it to fame and glory. Ain't that always the way?

And also

genarti and I went on a tour of the Boston Public Library, with all its beautiful murals. My favorite was the Galahad cycle, which features Galahad all in red (an unusual symbolic choice but an excellent pictorial one) bopping along on his adventures: seeing the grail, battling knights, falling in love with Blanchefleur, taking the grail to the king of something or other who decides to reward Galahad by sending him to heaven directly! "But Blanchefleur?" we cried piteously, and the guide assured as that as Blanchefleur is a pure maiden (a white flower, stainless) she will surely reunite with Galahad in heaven someday... "It's a happy story!" IS IT THOUGH.

It is an interestingly Edwardian twist on the Galahad stories I'm familiar with, though. And I do love the way that Arthurian legends morph: a never-ending mirror of whatever society they find themselves in.

***

Also of course there has been some reading! First, a book from a different library visit, to the New York Public Library - the classic main building, with the lions Patience and Fortitude, which is really more of a museum than an active library now, although there are still reading rooms where people can research with an appointment, and yes I did think a little bit about seeing if I could read one of my 1930s Newbery books there next time I’m in NYC...

Also, when you buy a book from the NYPL gift shop, they stamp it with the NYPL lion stamp. “Will you stamp my blank book too?” I asked shyly, for I had also bought a blank book with a cover patterned after the Hunt-Lenox Globe (one of the library’s treasures; also one of the only maps in the world to actually contain the words “Here be dragons,” in Latin of course), and the clerk kindly did so.

"But which book did you buy?" you demand. It's Stéphane Garnier’s How to Think Like a Cat, which is basically a self-help book about being more like your cat: living in the moment, realizing that you are just fine just as you are, letting go of artificial productivity goals in favor of sitting in the grass stalking a mouse for six hours if that’s what you want to do, etc. It's cute!

The other book is Audrey Erskine Lindop's The Singer Not the Song, a.k.a. The Bandit and the Priest, which sounds like the nickname you would give a book when you want to emphasize how gay it is, but is also, in fact, an official alternate title. I've been on the hunt for this book ever since I read

skygiants' amazing review, and I regret to inform you that finishing it has simply put me on another hunt, this time for the sequel, even though the sequel can't possibly live up to the sheer intensity of the priest's battle to save the bandit's soul, which the bandit resists to his utmost because he can't stand the Catholic church, while being unable to quell his admiration of the priest as a human being. If only the priest had given his whole heart and soul to a cause less stupid!

It's very intense! I did however often find myself on the side of the people who tactfully suggested that perhaps Father Keogh ought to put the souls of the rest of his parishioners at least on the level with the soul of Malo the Bandit. Yes yes, no soul is beyond redemption and it would be nice to save Malo, but is it worth endangering every other soul in town?

Greetings from New York! This is actually my last morning in the city (soon I will be on my way to visit

skygiants and

genarti!), but I'm making a leisurely morning of it to spend a little bit more time with my hostess's cat Bagels, so I thought I might also post about my NYC adventures.

It has been a glorious trip! Some highlights:

DINNER AT DELMONICO'S. This is the umpteenth reopening of the oldest restaurant in America, and my God was it delicious. They make their own butter, in house, lightly sprinkled with black salt, we were forced to request a second basket of bread to ensure that no butter was left behind. Then I had the short rib tortellini, the short rib filling so perfectly tender, and a brown butter foam for a sauce - so rich and yet so light! - and everything sprinkled with hazelnuts, which drew all the disparate delicious flavors into one grand symphony. And for dessert, baked Alaska made with walnut cake and banana gelato and sweet meringue, and a tart apricot jam on the side to cut all the sweetness... to be honest I would have switched out for a different gelato, a classic vanilla or perhaps (this was Elena's idea) a hazelnut, but it was still very good.

And then we walked back to Elena's place over the Brooklyn Bridge, which is all lit up in the night and oddly peaceful up above the cars.

The Cloisters. This is the Met's medieval art outpost, a small castle of a building set at the top of a park in Upper Manhattan. One of the most peaceful museums I've ever visited, built around four cloisters, each with its cloister garden (although one of the cloisters is enclosed to protect the limestone pillars, so that garden is some pots of ferns, haha) and its fountain and its fruit trees. I took a garden tour (I've gotten very into tours this trip; the docents are so fun), which included not only the gardens but a discussion of plants in medieval art, particular the Unicorn Tapestries with their flower-strewn backgrounds, so meticulously woven that art historians have managed to identity more than 80 species of flowers... and also a little tiny frog in the lower right quadrant of The Unicorn Rests in a Garden. Love all the animal details, too.

A talk by Jane Goodall! Elena nabbed the tickets for this, and it was fantastic, the audience so pumped that we surged to our feet in a standing ovation when Goodall walked on the stage. The talk had an interview format, and the questions were mostly about her life. How did she get into studying animals? "When I was ten, I was in love with Tarzan." How did scientists react to her work early on? "They said National Geographic wanted to photograph me for my legs. Nowadays this would result in a lawsuit, but at the time I thought, if National Geographic wants to fund my research for my legs, *smacks legs* go legs!"

And a trip to the Tenement Museum. In keeping with the general literary theme of this trip, I took the All-of-a-Kind Family tour. Okay, there is no All-of-a-Kind Family tour, it's just the tour of a Russian Jewish immigrant family's apartment in 1911, but still, thematically appropriate. This family had six children and three rooms - not three bedrooms, three rooms total. The parents slept in the bedroom, the girls in the kitchen, and the boys in the front room, where they also sometimes put up a boarder, although unless he hung from the ceiling like a bat I'm not sure how he'd fit! But the oldest girl married one of the boarders so presumably he slept in the normal way, as it would seem to be a bit of a red flag if your suitor sleeps hanging from the ceiling.

(I can see real advantages to marrying the boarder, tbh. You'd already know all about his domestic habits. Does he snore? Will he pick up a dish cloth once in a while to help out?)

All in all an excellent visit. And now onwards! Boston awaits!

Greetings from Gettysburg! I'm on the road again, first with a stop in Knoxville to see my pen pal Grace, with whom I visited a wolf-dog sanctuary (important PSA: do not get a wolf-dog hybrid for a pet! They make terrible pets!) where we saw the wolf-dogs frolicking in their enclosures, A+++, if you ever find yourself in Knoxville consider booking a tour.

ALSO we went to Sunday brunch at Ancient Lore Village, which basically looks like Hobbiton, a series of hobbit-holes built into the side of the soft sloping hills. You can rent them for the night, but can they possibly be as charming inside??? So we contented ourselves with the delicious brunch on the terrace overlooking the waterfall (manmade) and the mountains (which have been there since the beginning of time).

Next stop is New York City, but I've been taking my time about the drive. I left after lunch, intending to reach Gettysburg, but as a result of misadventures (read: getting tired of the interstate and mucking about on state roads for a while), I only made it to Harrisonburg. Often mucking about on the smaller roads leads to serendipitous discovers, but serendipity was not with me on that route... perhaps only because it was waiting, though, because that evening as I contemplated my route to Gettysburg, I noticed that a short detour would take me to the Luray Caverns.

And they are magnificent. You can walk through on your own, at your own pace, hovering over the perfectly still dream pool that reflects the tiny stalactites above so perfectly that it seems not a reflection at all, but a tiny city or a delicate forest of white spires and deep crags. The water itself is never more then a foot or so deep, but the reflections are far deeper, and at the edges sometimes those reflections seem to burrow under the rock.

And the white shining flowstone, which always looks wet; and the stubs of stalactites, broken off by long-ago tourists; and the ripples of rock, so like cloth, so thin that the light shines through them. The vast stalagmites like strange intricate wedding cakes or Towers of Babel, and the pillars where stalagmite and stalactite have met and melded together, and the ripples of the dripping water made rock.

And the Cathedral, where they once held dances, women in hoopskirts and music provided by the local band. Now there is an organ there, which "plays" the stalactites, a soft haunting sound in the quiet of the caves that are so silent that you can hear the water drip.

And it all gave me a story idea, or rather coalesced with an idea that I've been playing with, a retelling of Orpheus, and in the cave it seemed perfect, but later on when I tried to write it down it did not... we'll see if it comes back together.

The caverns were wonderful and absolutely worth it, but I wish I could have done Gettysburg properly too. As it was I got there too late to do the bus tour of the battlefield, which in any case I hadn't realized existed, as I didn't properly research this part of the trip at all. (There is of course a driving audio tour that you can do yourself, but I didn't feel like doing more driving.)

But I did get to visit the Cyclorama, a giant oil painting from the 1880s of the culminating moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, painted as if the viewer were standing atop Cemetery Ridge during Pickett's Charge. The painting is vast, stretching unbroken all around the inside of a cylindrical building, and nowadays there's a little sound and light show that comes with it, presumably because they don't trust the jaded modern viewer to appreciate the painting on its own.

But after the show there is a little time to just walk around and look, and see all the detail that Philippoteaux put in: a soldier on a stretcher, two soldiers helping a wounded comrade, the last skirmishes of Pickett's Charge, fighting in the Wheat Field.

There was a little exhibit outside about the history of the Cyclorama, which spent summers in Boston and Philadelphia and goodness knows where else before finally finding a permanent home in Gettysburg. They sold season tickets, and I understand why: you could spend hours in there finding new details that you'd never seen before.

Now onward to New York City! I have a reservation at Delmonico's and tickets to a talk of Jane Goodall's.

With a flying update I burst across the internet like a meteor! A small, sniffly meteor, laid low by a head cold, but nonetheless hopeful that the cold will subside in time for the next leg of my journey.

In the days since I have posted, I have been camping at the Indiana Dunes, with a side jaunt to the Art Institute of Chicago on the South Shore Railway (the last of the interurban railways that once laced Indiana, insert rant here about how I could have been taking the railway between Indianapolis and West Lafayette for years if the car companies hadn't bought the railways up in order to run them into the ground decades ago). Delightful! One of my favorite things is the Tiffany window as you go up the main stairs, which will land you right at the Impressionist exhibit, where you will be greeted by Caillebotte's Rainy Day, Paris Street, one of those paintings that it looks like you can walk right into.

Then it was up to Michigan to visit my old friend Micky (I've known her since fifth grade! How long ago that seems now), with a side jaunt to John K. King Books in Detroit.

My friends, this bookstore is perfection. It is an old warehouse, four stories high, a maze of books so vast that there are maps by the entryway, and as you explore the breezes drift through the open windows, for the place still has no air conditioner, so stepping inside feels like slipping through the cracks into the past. (I concede that this is a more pleasant thing to do on a cool September day than it might be in, say, July.)

I spent four hours there, and could have stayed more, but (1) I needed to be back in time for dinner (Detroit style pizza! Which appears identical to what the pizza parlor of my youth called a deep-dish Sicilian, which was my favorite, so I was glad to be reunited with it), and (2) I was struggling to carry all my books, so it was time to call it quits. Until next time, sweet John K. King...

My finds! My hoard! My precious treasure!

1. Doris Gates' Little Vic, another horse book, illustrated by Kate Seredy! Apparently I've decided to try to ferret out all her books if I can.

2. TWO Mary Stolzes: Bartholomew Fair (historical fiction) and Good-bye My Shadow (no idea what that ones about, but hey, the title is promising). Hopefully I'm not trying to find all of her books, as she wrote SO MANY, but all signs point in that direction.

(Also checked for books by Vivien Alcock, Penelope Farmer, and Anne Lindbergh, but no love on those quests. And forgot to see if they had any Naomi Mitchison! A fool, a fool...)

3. Mary Renault's Return to Night, which I never thought to see in the wild! Also The Praise Singer, which I definitely have seen in the wild before, but they had a nice copy and that you don't always see; used Renault books often look like they've been read to bits.

4. MANY books by Audrey Erskine Lindop! This is a quest I have undertaken on behalf of

skygiants, who has been seeking Lindop books for many a year... and apparently in those years, Lindop's works have been quietly congregating in John K. King Books! I found Journey into Stone, The Self-Appointed Saint, The Singer Not the Song (the extremely gay bandit & priest book), and the ACTUALLY gay Details of Jeremy Stretton, published in 1955, and possessed of a forward written by "a Consultant of Psychiatry," who assures us that "it is written with understanding and compassion, yet without any false sentimentality; and, from a lifetime of experience in medico-psychological work, I can add that it is written with sincerity and truth."

Naturally I've started with that one. Will report back!

5. LAST BUT NOT LEAST. I found not one, but TWO D. K. Brosters! The Yellow Poppy - and The Flight of the Heron!

All in all most successful, a fine and excellent day. Someday I shall have to go back! For now, however, it is enough to gloat over my spoils.

I was reading Gretchen Rubin's Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life, and she mentions these enchanting miniature buildings made by Charles Simonds, “Dwelling places for an imaginary civilization of “Little People” who are migrating through the streets of neighborhoods in cities throughout the world...”

These tiny sculptures are SO delightful - even tinier and more adorable than the fairy rooms dotted around Ann Arbor - I just had to share.

Rubin also at one point lists her favorite children's book authors, including Mary Stolz, "who didn't get the attention she deserved," and I pumped my fist in the air in agreement. The one author she mentions whom I haven't read is Kristin Cashore... maybe I should finally give Cashore a try?

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! Today is clear and cold and the sunlight is shining on the snow, and I am drinking tea and reading my Christmas presents, not least John McPhee's The Random of Russian Art, which is about Norton Dodge, an American professor of Soviet economics who smuggled out of the USSR (or caused to be smuggled) over 9000 pieces of unofficial Soviet art.

The book reminded me irresistibly of The Pez Outlaw, although there are important differences: the Pez smuggler did it to make money from collectors, while Dodge spent a startling amount of money on his collection, driven by his fascination with this transgressive (often literally pornographic) art, a collectors' desire for completion, and perhaps, murkily, for reasons to do with the CIA, although Dodge insists that he had no official connection to the agency. But the CIA had so many connection in the American Soviet studies departments that "they knew anything I was doing anyway, because they were my professional colleagues."

The book also offers a fascinating glimpse of the unofficial Soviet art scene. Apparently many of the male artists were bankrolled by their wives, who worked as official artists because someone needed to put food on the table and also have official access to art supplies. These women also did all the household chores, and raised the children, and put up with their husbands' philandering, and and and. One does sometimes want to yell "Women of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"

Hail the conquering hero! For I have finished the last four Newbery Honor books of the 1970s.

Janet Gaylord Moore’s The Many Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the Pleasures of Art is a delightful book about not only the pleasures of art, but about the fact that learning to see art more clearly and thoughtfully can lead, in turn, to a richer vision of life, and vice versa. “For not everything that is thought and felt by human beings will fit into verbal patterns; music and art are other languages, capable of shades of feeling, of nuances that may slip through the web of words.”

Allan W. Eckert’s Incident at Hawk’s Hill has a great premise: lost on the Canadian prairie in the late nineteenth century, six-year-old Ben gets adopted by a badger and spends six weeks living in a badger sett. Isn’t that delightful?

Unfortunately, the execution is pretty dry. There are a number of passages about geological history and badger habits that read like they’ve been ripped directly from a dull natural history text. ( Spoilers )

Miska Miles’ Annie and the Old One is a picture book (with spare, gorgeous illustrations by Peter Parnall) about a Navajo girl coming to terms with her grandmother’s approaching death. Clearly in the category of “Newbery books about dead relatives” but a gentle, restrained variation on the theme.

And finally, Jamake Highwater’s Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey, one of those books where the story behind the story is more interesting than the book itself. Highwater presented himself as Cherokee, but in fact he was of Eastern European Jewish ancestry, a fact exposed in an article in the Washington Post a few years after Anpao won the Newbery Honor. Despite this high profile exposé, however, Highwater continued to work as a consultant on Native American issues, most notably for the character of Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager.

But how is the book, you ask? Well, it reminded me of Mary Q. Steele's Journey Outside, which also features a hero drifting through a series of disconnected episodes in countryside peopled by characters so flat one can only assume they're meant to be allegorical, only Anpao is almost twice as long. There must have been something in the water in the 1970s that made this sort of thing appealing to the Newbery committee.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with art

Picture Book Monday: Making Light Bloom

Picture Book Monday: Chooch Helped

Book Review: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Wednesday Reading Meme

Picture Book Monday: A White Heron

Book Review: Paris in Ruins

Bramble watercolor

Feast of the Hunter’s Moon

Watercolor + Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking, nature journaling, the neighborhood cats.

Picture Book Monday: A Bear Far from Home

The Lost Films of A. G. Gray

Greetings from Massachusetts!

Greetings from Boston!

Greetings from New York!

Greetings from Gettysburg!

John K. King Books

Tiny TINY homes!

Merry Christmas

Last Call for Newbery Honor Books of the 1970s

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January 2026

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