Month: November 2007

  • Cleaning the Grout

    I have a tendency, when the pressure is on, to lose myself in tiny details, neatly blocking out the necessary big items.  We have a phrase for this in our family lexicon: I’m cleaning the grout.  While cobwebs are merrily waving hello, food in my fridge needs to wave goodbye; while beds need to be changed, batteries need to be charged; while dust bunnies need to be banished and resident dirt needs to be dismissed — I take up a toothbrush and focus in on two square inches of grout. 

    My grout at the moment is the issue of Christmas stamps.  This is a tiny detail in the totality of Advent, but one about which I happen to care.  Here are some choices.  Generally there is a secular choice and a religious choice.  There are some other non-holiday stamps which might work.


    Holiday Knits. 
    Folks, these are a little too, um, folksy for me.
    They remind me of Grandma Sweatshirts.
    You are allowed to like them, though…

    Luini’s Madonna of the Carnation
    I like this as art.
    But I’m not sure as a stamp.
    I’m betwixt and between.

    Polar Lights
    These are certainly colorful. 
    I will purchase some of these for regular correspondence and bills.

    Celebrate
    I guess this stamp replaces the traditional Happy Birthday stamp.
    Christmas is the ultimate reason to celebrate, no?

    Okay, it’s audience participation time.
    What is your favorite?
    Do you care?

  • Home

    Home

    Some books are read simply for pleasure.  Let’s call them Baby Bear books.  Some books are read primarily for education or information.  These would be Papa Bear books.  But some books are a pleasure to read while they instruct.  Home is a perfectly just-right Mama Bear book. 

    I had great expectations for this book, recommended as it was by George Grant.  The first chapter was disappointing, focusing on Ralph Lauren, nostalgia and invented tradition.  Beyond chapter one, however, the book was an absorbing and satisfying read.

    Home is a culture history of comfort. 

    The idea of comfort has developed historically.  It is an idea that has meant different things at different times.  In the seventeenth century, comfort meant privacy, which led to intimacy and, in turn, to domesticity.  The eighteenth century shifted the emphasis to leisure and ease, the nineteenth to mechanically aided comforts – light, heat, and ventilation.  The twentieth-century domestic engineers stressed efficiency and convenience.  p. 231

    As a confirmed word-bird, I particularly enjoyed all the little etymological notes, some of which I cannot resist sharing with you:

    ~ comfort originally meant to strengthen or console » comforter meant someone who aided or abetted a crime » ample, but not luxurious » physical well-being and enjoyment, a word used often in Jane Austen’s novels

    Take a word like “weekend,” which originated at the end of the nineteenth century.  Unlike the medieval “weekday” that distinguished the days that one worked from the Lord’s Day, the profane “weekend” – which originally described the period when shops and businesses were closed – came to reflect a way of life organized around the active pursuit of leisure. p.21

    ~ Saturday (Lørdag)  only day of week in Scandinavian countries not named after deity; “a day for bathing”

    Differences in posture, like differences in eating utensils (knife and fork, chopsticks or fingers, for example), divide the world as profoundly as political boundaries.  Regarding posture there are two camps: the sitters-up (the so-called western world) and the squatters (everyone else). p.78

    If you have someone in your life interested in architecture, interior design, or just in a comfortable home, this would make a wonderful gift. 

    More quotes from Home from previous blog entries: Interior Space and Privacy.

  • Candle Hat

    Candle Hat   (a poem by Billy Collins)

    In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
    Cézanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
    Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
    Rembrandt looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
    from painting The Blinding of Samson.

    But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
    and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
    addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

    He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew
    we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head
    which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,
    a device that allowed him to work into the night.

    You can only wonder what it would be like
    to be wearing such a chandelier on your head
    as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

    But once you see this hat there is no need to read
    any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

    To understand Goya you only have to imagine him
    lighting the candles one by one, then placing
    the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

    Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,
    then laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

    Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house
    with all the shadows flying across the walls.

    Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door
    one dark night in the hill country of Spain.
    “Come in,” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”
    as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,
    illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

    Don’t you just love the playful humor in Billy Collins’ poems?
    I’m not sure which self-portraits Collins had in mind,
    and each painter made several self-portraits,
    but here are my guesses:


    Cézanne, Self-Portrait


    Van Gogh, Self-Portrait


    Rembrandt, Self-Portrait

  • Driving Creatively

    When I was a young mother, I was earnest.

    So earnest that I read a book called How to Raise a Creative Child.  I’m sure there were many efficacious ideas, but the only one I remember implementing was the one about driving.  Instead of traveling the same route to a typical destination, say the library, you were supposed to mix it up.  Get outside the groove.   I earnestly suggested this to my forbearing husband. 

    Curt had a way of humoring my silly notions and having fun at the same time. 

    “Let’s turn on H instead of G” I’d prod.  [Can you believe it?  Our city planners named the streets after the alphabet!!  Their mothers hadn't read the book.]

    “Oh, is it time to drive creatively?” he’d ask.  And he’d drive as if we were in a go-cart at the fair, broad curves, on the wrong side, herky-jerky brakes, coming to a stop in the middle of the road.  [We live in a small town and this was always when there were no other cars on the road.] 

    The boys loved it.

    “Daddy, drive creative!”  they’d scream, never quite knowing if or how Daddy was going to obey the command.

    Those fun memories came to me on our recent trip to Seattle.  We went through four or five roundabouts.  If you look up roundabout in the dictionary it will say “a method of traffic control designed to produce creative children.”  Seriously, if my son had not just gotten his four wisdom teeth and a few shards of jawbone extracted yesterday, I’d make him write a paper on the engineering design of roundabouts.  Someone must believe they are beneficial; they are slowly replacing traditional intersectins.  Before Seattle, I’d only seen them in New England. 

    Curt will have his fill of driving creatively in Scotland and England.  He’s already nervous.  I offered to move the gear shift knobs while he pushes the clutch in, an offer which fails to bring him comfort.  We hope that we don’t run out of petrol, bang up the bonnet, blow a tyre running up a kerb, crash into a lorry, or rear-end the boot in front of us.  Translation here.

    Any roundabouts in your neighborhood?

  • Stunning Improv

    This, my friend, is well worth the six minutes to watch it.
    I.  Am.  Entranced. 
    Gabriela Montero.
    My new favorite pianist.
    Within two minutes of watching this video I purchased a CD.

    Have you heard of her?

    Hat Tip, Waving the hat in the air,
    Jumping up and down, waving the hat to my new friend Nettie.
    Who also taught me how to embed a video.
    Thank you SO MUCH Nettie!

    ** I just watched/listened to the live concert on her website.
    She starts improvising on Chapter 5.
    Oh. My.
    She does stuff like “Summertime” in a baroque style.
    The theme from Beethoven’s Fifth symphony.
    This is beyond belief.

  • First Chapter Rule


    A Child Who Sleeps on His Book  Jean-Baptize Greuze

    There is a difference between assigned reading and an assigned book.  One of the rules of our house for assigned reading was

    “If, by the end of the first chapter,
     you don’t want to continue,
    stop reading it. 
    Pick another book.” 

    I had enough confidence that a good book would draw in the reader by the end of the first chapter.  I weaseled a lot of books into my sons’ hands with this promise.  They often looked at a book I was pedaling with mistrust, refusing to acknowledge that their mom had any idea what boys would want to read.  And I tried not to rub their snotty noses in it when they kept reading beyond the first chapter. 

  • My Mother Read To Me


    Mrs. Leopoldine Masari with Her daughters at the Artist’s Studio
    Hans Tichy, 1896

    “I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. 

    She’d read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story.  She’d read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with “Cuckoo” and at night when I’d got in my own bed. 

    I must have given her no peace.  Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story.”         ~ Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings

  • Glasgow Children and Scottish Seascapes

    I want to highlight a modern Scottish artist,
    Joan Eardley (1921-1963).
     
    Her paintings fall into two groups:
    street children of Glasgow and
    land and seascape paintings of Catterline,
    and East coast fishing village.

    I would pair her pictures with Charles Dickens, don’t you think?


    Children and Chalked Wall 3


    Brother and Sister

    This is a compelling picture: the proprietary grip,
    the arm cradling the milk, the clear eyes amidst the squalor…

    Winter Sea IV


    Seeded Grasses and Daisies, September

    The Seeded Grasses reminded me of this photo, taken by Donna.
    Donna at Quiet Life blesses us with beautiful and artistic photos every day.

    We watched Visions of Scotland last night, one of those films shot
    from a helicopter with minimal narration.  My husband was a skeptic.
    Green fields, castles, and lochs abounded, picturesque to the 13th degree.
    Of course, Scotland was showing her best side. 
    But every country has its shot-nosed ragamuffins, doesn’t it now?

  • Update on My Previous Request

    A few weeks ago, I asked for suggestions of good books to read for a 16 year old reluctant reader that I am tutoring.  I was so blessed by the interest and responses that you gave.  I have a increasing list of books to read from your suggestions.  I love good children’s literature and plan to keep reading through that genre until I die. 

    We had a major breakthrough yesterday which I wanted to share with you.

    Let me back up.  I cleared a complete shelf of my books and put a collection of books for this girl to choose from.  Some were borrowed from friends, some were borrowed from the library, and most were gleaned from my shelves. The first day we moseyed through the collection and I gave her a short synopsis of each book.

    She chose “The Midwife’s Apprentice” and took off.  Note: it is a small book, not very long and had a compelling picture on the front.

    One of my readers, you know who you are, was incredibly perceptive.  She looked at the request through the eyes of a young non-reader.  What would be attractive to her?  She suggested “The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants” might draw my girl in.  This is not Lord of the Rings, nor is it A Wrinkle in Time.  I previewed it and decided to give it to her. 

    It’s not a book I would recommend to a typical homeschooled teen-age girl.  It is a coming of age story of four girlfriends.  There are some “mature” situations, but not the steamy, Harlequin variety. What I appreciated about the “mature situation” is that the author clearly shows the deleterious effects it had on the young girl.  The book didn’t say, “Don’t have sex before marriage because that is breaking God’s law.”  However, the author understands that this was wrong on all accounts for this girl.  Whether the author was choosing to be didactic, I don’t know; we’ve had some good discussions springing from this.

    Yesterday.  We went to the public library.  16 years old, and never had been to a library before.  She had already read the first two Traveling Pants book and wanted to check out the third.  Visibly excited.  The director of the library issued my student her first library card with a cool plastic holder.

    In two 1/2 weeks, she has read three books, more reading than ever in her life.  She has lost herself in a book and chosen to read in her free time.  We have purchased a small electronic dictionary and she has a small notebook – both fit in her purse.  We’re collecting words, building vocabulary.

    And we have stacks of books waiting in the wings.

  • Fetch the Heavenly Fire

    I am reading The Reformed Pastor aloud to my husband and discussing Pilgrim’s Progress with my son.  Although Baxter (1615-1691) and Bunyan (1628-1688) were contemporaries, I haven’t read anything that connected the two.   Time seems to be less available to me these days; I haven’t found the leisure to follow fun little rabbit trails lately. 

    Baxter wrote The Reformed Pastor when he was too ill to speak at a ministerial conference.  Reading the Puritans is like climbing upward through thick bramble bushes into a clearing with a fantastic vista.  After reading through thick and creeping prose you come upon a clear and radiant sentence that rewards the effort.  In truth, after reading a few pages, you find your feet and make your way with greater ease.

    The Puritans were much closer to our tidy medieval fathers; they are fond of enumerations and list-making.  There are handwritten notes in my copy which are sobering to read.  My brother-in-law bought an entire library from a pastor who left his pastorate and his faith.  His personal Ex Libris label is still in the flyleaf.  Sigh… 

    I wanted to share some quotes about teaching that you might appreciate.

    Theology must lay the foundation, and lead the way of all our studies.  If God must be searched after, in our search of the creature, (and we must affect no separated knowledge of them) then tutors must read God to their pupils in all; and divinity must be the beginning, the middle, the end, the life, the all, of their studies. p.58

    Be much at home, and be much with God.  If it be not your daily business to study your own hearts, and to subdue corruption, and to walk with God–if you make not this a work to which you constantly attend, all will go wrong, and you will starve your hearers; or, if you have an affected fervency, you cannot expect a blessing to attend it from on high.  Above all, be much in secret prayer and meditation.  Thence you must fetch the heavenly fire that must kindle your sacrifices.  p.62