Consortium of Seven: Year 2

  What was nice in Florida this week? Catching a nice view of this little structure. The community recreation center and pool house has a nice little 80's art deco look. Nothing special, really, without that circular hole at the landing, besides being photographed at night, which highlights the round reflections cast by the sconces, and the reflected blue of the pool water. In my quest to have a house full of thriving plant life, which was impossible with the lighting in the Ohio house, we are taking care of the recently purchased snake plant. The Sansevieria is now in a later stage of bloom, the flowers more showy. They resemble dainty fireworks and still smell of cinnamon and honey. Today it was repotteded into a big clay pot. It had some trimming and is no longer rootbound. We made some green beings happy today. Night time walks and beach-going were a peaceful end to a busy week: Last, but not least, I had to smile when I looked at my coffee cup, named Kimbo. One of my sister...

If ever an artist changed the course of his own life through sheer will, determination, skill & hard work, James McBey (1883-1959) did. From extremely humble beginnings on the Aberdeenshire coast, his early life was difficult & poor. Initially, he seems to have had little encouragement - & little training - & his sense of purpose & interest in art were what took him further. His was a tale like many others born into poverty & difficult circumstances, with no apparent opportunity or help who manage through their own willpower, discipline & single-mindedness to escape the path originally set for them. Haarlem,  1910 It’s lucky we have his autobiography to tell us about his first twenty-eight years of life because his later art & lifestyle give away very little of what he endured. A keen diarist, his writing is remarkably matter of fact in places & in others surprisingly reflective, for instance on discovering his mother hanged at her own hand in th...

     Aside from pressing on with some comfort viewing, rewatching Babylon 5 and Venture Brothers , the week's been lighter on general viewing.        I've gotten interested in watching a drama based on a 2017 murder investigation in Denmark: The Investigation . This is a 6-part series currently still rolling out on HBO, Mondays at 10pm Eastern. A Danish production, it's done in its native language and subtitled in English. That works fine for me, but I know it's a negative factor for some, so I want to put that out there up front.       The drama revolves around the suspicious disappearance of a Swedish journalist, Kim Wall, who was on assignment for Wired magazine to interview the Danish inventor Peter Madsen aboard a submarine of his own construction. That was the last time she was seen alive.       There's an intensity to the show because we're following it all through the course of the investigation...

Happy Friday, everyone.  Sorry about dropping the ball yesterday, but I had some bug and spent most of the day sleeping or in a DayQuill haze.  But I'm much better this morning!  Now, because of that and other reasons, I didn't buy anything this week but looking over my shelves my eye alighted on something I already have, so let's talk about...the unauthorized Lord of the Rings books! The Allen & Unwin first edition, which can go for $30,000 So back in the late '50s, Houghton Mifflin (HM) was getting ready to become the hardcover publisher of LOTR in the USA, taking over from the UK publisher Allen & Unwin (A&E).  HM would print the majority of it in the United States, importing certain materials from A&E and binding them here.  All well and good, Tolkien was getting paid, everyone would be happy.   The Houghton Mifflin first edition A few years after the HM edition was published, enter Donald A. Wollheim, the science-fiction edito...

“If God is God He is not good, If God is good He is not God; Take the even, take the odd, I would not sleep here if I could Except for the little green leaves in the wood And the wind on the water” Archibald MacLeish wrote this in his play,  J.B.,  a modern version of the story of Job. Leaving the theological discussion about God, goodness, and the sex of the divine for another day, I want to think about hope and wildflowers. I learned a long time ago that in bad times it is crucial to cling to hope on a daily basis. It’s like a spiritual practice; if I let it slip for a day or two pretty soon, I can slide into despair. I also learned that hope is a choice. Sometimes I do better with that choice than others. I don’t need to belabor the point that it is hard to find hope these days given that we are a country steeped in grief for 500,000 dead from Covid, insurrection, rampant bigotry, all of it. Also, I live in Texas where winter, real winter, reminded those of ...

Program for the play "Mr. Gilhooley," in which Helen Hayes starred I'm close to getting a bit out of my depth this week, because my topic is 20th century Irish writers. I did just request an anthology from the library so I can get up to speed by self-education, but in the meantime, here's this.  The Irish writers whose work I know best is James Joyce, meaning that I've read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , The Dead , and the stories in Dubliners. And I've read a bit about the censorship struggles around Joyce's books.  Book to skip Finnegans Wake by James Joyce    Why to skip it Honestly, I feel that James Joyce, like Ernest Hemingway, became one of those writers whose work gets less attention than his personal style or his private life and all of that. Joyce of course has brought the world some amazing work, world-changing stuff. And the fight on his behalf to make his once-forbidden writing available to any reader who wants to decide independent...

  by whiteray  When one wanders through the vast field of American folk songs – the songs that arose here in the years before recorded music, that folks sang at home and passed on via oral traditions, and that provide at least part of the foundation of today’s popular music – one finds nastiness and mayhem of all sorts. Take a listen to numerous entries, for example, among the eighty-four tracks of Harry Smith’s massive Anthology of American Folk Music , and you’ll find jealousy, robbery, rape, accidental death, murder and more.  At least two of those are present in “Down On The Banks Of The Ohio” as recorded in 1936 by the Blue Sky Boys. The song wasn’t included in Smith’s original three volumes in 1952 (reissued in 1997 in a six-CD box), but it showed up in a 2000 release of a fourth volume Smith never completed.  In the song – released on the Bluebird and Montgomery Ward labels (and used in 1973 in the soundtrack to the movie Paper Moon ) – the Blue Sky Bo...

  https://www.joyusgarden.com/sansevierias-snake-plant-care/ The work weeks seem to be blending together, rushing toward the end of the school year. I am thankful for the pleasure of houseplants, audiobooks for commuting, and Mike's delicious cooking when he's here. If you look closely at the heavenly  scented  Sansevieria trifasciata , you can see nectar dripping from the flowers. I recently bought a vanilla orchid, too, and will soon repot it in a wooden orchid basket. Walking in Naples one evening, I came across a traditional landscape planting, but the lighting made it look like something special, I thought. I like more wild and untamed gardens, but the vertical lines of the wet palm leaves made me stop and admire this scene. One warm night we went to the beach to experience the magic of nighttime beach walking, and the moon and clouds did not disappoint. It's the little things. Maybe you are watching illuminated icicles drip from the eaves of a garage. It's out the...

Here we are more than halfway to a hundred.  51. Alphonse Mucha (Czech Republic, 1860-1939): Winter Night , 1920 Alphonse Mucha developed one of the most distinctive styles in art history. Designing adverts, windows, posters & even bank notes, he cultivated an Art Nouveau shorthand that was never matched. Once again though, the dates give away the history. Sadly, he was captured & released by the Nazis in 1939 as they began their invasion of the then Czechoslovakia before the war. Mucha was never the same after; his health failed & he died a few months later of pneumonia. Winter Night portrays a starving Ukrainian woman, alone & distraught in a frozen wilderness. Without the lightness & distraction of the admittedly beautiful decoration he often employed for his commercial works, we can appreciate his talent as a portraitist. Only the pattern on her shawl hint at the artist’s usual style. Mucha masterfully captures the woman’s angst & pain as seen in the de...