Month: June 2008

  • Summer of the Great War

    This summer I am reading through The Great War aka WWI.   I have never gotten beyond Sarajevo in my understanding and the time seems right to correct that.  My son Collin is joining me; we keep interrupting each other's reading with a new insight just grasped.  He is currently reading Jeff Shaara's To the Last Man while I revel in Barbara Tuchman's magnificent prose in The Guns of August.  My friend, LimboLady, getting some rest in between school sessions at our house, is engrossed in The Yanks are Coming which arrived from Amazon this morning. 

    On our bookshelf, waiting to be read: 

    Waiting at the library, all by the novelist Anne Perry:

    World War I-related DVDs in our Netflix queue:

    Gallipoli

    All Quiet on the Western Front

    World War I in Color (Kenneth Branagh narrator)

    Random Harvest

    The Great War

    Paths of Glory

    The Fighting 69th

    Sergeant York     

    A World War I soldier's blog:

    WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier  "This blog is made up of transcripts of Harry Lamin's letters from
    the first World War. The letters will be posted exactly 90 years after
    they were written.
    To find out Harry's fate, follow the blog!"
         

  • Fine Art Friday - Winslow Homer


    The Blue Boat, by Winslow Homer, 1892

    Happy exploring this weekend!

    Go with God.

  • Hannah Coulter

    When I received Hannah Coulter a few weeks ago, I determined to read it slowly. I limited myself to one chapter at a time, but often skimmed the previous highlights, just for the pure pleasure. 

    As I read, I kept thinking "the folks would love this", [fill in thirty names] will want to read this.  This is a perfect book to read aloud to Curt and Collin during our long Sunday drives to church.  At 186 pages it is a small enough book to give to readers who would be intimidated by an epic tome.

    Hannah Coulter is the quiet telling of a woman's tale, a tale of sorrow, goodness, love, hurt, work, holding and letting go.  It is Ecclesiastes 3 manifested in one woman from Kentucky.  "This is my story, my giving of thanks."   Wendell Berry gives her a voice which is modulated in a pleasing tone.  She speaks of her pains and her joys with honesty, clarity, and wisdom. 

    Here is a necklace of sentences from the book.

    And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.

    "It [Hannah's beauty] could get you an early start on a miserable life."

    When he came to work in the morning, Wheeler was like a drawn bow--lean and tense and entirely aimed at whatever he had to do.

    Books were a dependable pleasure.

    The days were separate and suspended, like plants in hanging pots.

    Happiness had a way of coming to you and making you sad.

    We had made it past hard changes, and all of us were changed, but we were together.

    What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

    "Hannah, my old girl, we're going to live right on."

    "Margaret, my good Margaret, we're going to live right on."

    He said it only when he knew that living right on was going to be hard.

    The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. 

    We sat down to it [Thanksgiving dinner], the four of us, like stray pieces of several puzzles.

    There we were at a great crisis in our lives, and it had to be, it could only be, dealt with as an ordinary thing.

    After she left, the house slowly filled up with silence.  

    Hannah Coulter.

  • Done Daily?

    "He [potential tenant, newcomer to town] was worried about getting his laundry done daily."

    "Done daily?" boomed Ella.

    "Done daily?" quavered Dimity.

    "The man must be mental," said Ella forthrightly, "if he thinks he's going to get his washing done daily, in Thrush Green too.  What's wrong with once a week, like any other Christian?"

              ~ Miss Read in Winter in Thrush Green

    I'm listening to Miss Read's book.  This exchange was so delicious I listened to it six or seven times.   The whole book has so many clever turns of phrases that I will either 1) listen to it once more with a journal close by  or 2)  get it from a library and copy sections into my journal or 3) order it from PaperBackSwap and highlight all the tasty morsels.

    our near-empty hamper

    Do you do laundry daily?  (Which is a silly question if  you have young children.)

    We do at our house, "we" being my husband, the Laundry Czar.   He and I hold different doctrines on the desired frequency of  this task. (He also starts the dishwasher when it is 3/4 full.) What can I say about a man who loves doing laundry loves having the laudry done?  When he gets up in the middle of the night, he'll put the load from the washer into the dryer.  And start a new one, if one is available.  We all fold clothes together in the morning and put them away.  

    I read this quote to him, and clearly taking Ella's position.  "This is too rich," I crowed. "I must put it on my blog."

    "Just be sure to mention that I am ALL for the man," was his cheerful reply.

    ~   ~   ~

    In another century, a young friend took a job as a temporary mother's helper.  She would phone me daily and report her progress.  "I did three loads of wash, I made dinner, and I read to the kids," she exclaimed, drawing the word three into three syllables.  I paused.  I chuckled.  I checked my tongue.  "Welcome to my life, " I murmured.

  • June Snow!

    Someone wise once said, "Never complain about the weather.  You can't control the weather, so don't waste your time complaining."

    I'm not complaining.

    I'm exclaiming!

    It's snowing!
    It is June!

    Big, fat, pregnant snowflakes.

    Perhaps I'll make butternut squash soup for dinner.

    Go figure.

  • Thrift-in-Trifles Decorating

    Although the Doctor's daughter [Lucie Manette] had known nothing of the country of her birth [France], she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability to make much of little means, which is one of its most useful and most agreeable characteristics.  Simple as the furniture was, it was set off by so many little adornments, of no value but for their taste and fancy, that its effect was delightful.  The disposition of everything in the rooms, from the largest object to the least; the arrangement of colours, the elegant variety and contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and good sense; were at once so pleasant in themselves, and so expressive of their originator, that, as Mr Lorry stood looking about him, the very chairs and tables seem to ask him, with something of that peculiar expression which he knew so well by this time, whether he approved?
                 ~ Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities  

    I've been in homes that have this pleasant, comfortable, tasteful ambiance.   They are lovely places to live.

    I think decorating know-how is a gift, don't you?  Just like some women can wear rags with panache, some folks can take cast-off furniture and make a cozy home.  It doesn't come naturally to me, but I can be taught.  My oldest sister and my youngest brother have "an eye" for placing furniture, for hanging pictures, for creating visual balance. 

    Where did you learn this stuff?  From catalogs, magazines or television?  From floor models of stores?  Did anyone take interior decorating classes?

    I have to see it modeled, usually in a friend's home, and imitate it. 

  • One Paragraph, Eight Hours

     

    Move over, David McCullough.  Make room for another Pulitzer Prize winner, Barbara Tuchman, to stand next to you on the pedestal of my high esteem. 

    Folks, I have found an  Important New Author. ("New to me," she shrugs and grins.) I've only read the preface, the introduction and the first paragraph, but I am twitterpated. Tuchman's success in writing, given in the preface, is "hard work, a good ear, and continued practice." 

    ...hard work, a good ear and continued practice...

    What does that look like, fleshed out?  It took Tuchman eight hours (!) to write this opening paragraph, all five sentences, of  The Guns of August.  

    So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of adminration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun.  After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens--four dowager and three regnant--and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries.  Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last.  The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

  • The Shield Ring

    The Shield Ring is a story of the Vikings and the Normans in the Lake District of England in the eleventh century.  The reader is rooting for the Vikings (for a change!) who keep a secret stronghold from whence they repel the Norman northern onslaught.   Sutcliff weaves the elements--a boy with a harp, an orphan Saxon girl, a sword called the Fire-drake, the Road to Nowhere, intrigue and espionage--into a vivid and vibrant story.

    Sutcliff is the master of historical fiction.  Her prose lifts you from your modern surroundings like a hot air balloon. You land in a place and time and culture that is very Other but also faintly familiar.  Sutcliff does not explain every cultural reference; she lets the reader to work it out.  However, when I read Sutcliff, it is always her prose which delights me: her bright shining, shimmering prose.    

    There has been a revival of interest in G. A. Henty's books; I have a bookcase full, myself.  But if I had a choice between a Henty and a Sutcliff, I would take Sutcliff every time. 

    It was a curlew that they were watching now, a curlew at his mating flight, weaving, it seemed to Frytha, a kind of garland of flight round the place where his chosen mate must be, among the heather.  He skimmed low over the ground, then suddenly swerved upward, up and up, hung a moment poised on quivering wings, and then came planing down, his wings arched back to show the white beneath, skimmed low again, and again leapt skyward.  And all the while he was calling, calling; a lovely spiral of sound bubbling and rippling with delight.  But his whole dance, undulating, floating, swerving, with always that flash of underwing silver on the downward swoop, was a dance of sheer delight.  p.16

    Another Sutcliff review here.

  • Incredible Marriage Proposal

    Oh, read this.

    Wow.

  • Fine Art Friday - Velázquez


    The Old Woman Frying Eggs, 1618

    Today is the birthday of the Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez (1599).
    I love pictures of ordinary people fixing food.
    What astounds me is that he painted this when he was 19!


     Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) 1656

    Notice the self-portrait on the left, the blurred image of the king and queen reflected in the mirror.
    The Infanta Margarita became the empress of Austria at 15, but died at 22.

    Google tipped their hat to Velázquez today: