Autumn, Bloomsbury, and Other Inspirations

Since last week's post, I took a quick trip down to South Carolina to visit my big brother.  As we sat on the pier that extends from my brother's back yard into a glorious tidal marsh full of oysters and sea birds, the temperature rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  There's not enough sweet tea in the world to cool me off once it's above 95.  My body and brain were fooled for a few days into thinking that summer was far from over.

A glorious sunset at the end of a sweltering South Carolina September day.

Then I flew back north to Maine and stepped off the plane into--shiver--50 degrees and rain.

   

That's okay, though, because as I said last week, autumn here means dahlias and asters and still more tomatoes, at least until the frost.  It also means that it's almost time to begin planting bulbs for spring.  Last year I planted white 'Thalia' daffodils that grew beautifully in our little woodland border, along with fritillaria meleagris and alliums of various shapes and sizes.  This year I'm turning to my small library of gardening books for ideas about what bulbs to plant.  As much as I love blogs, websites, and Pinterest, when I need garden inspiration, there's no substitute for flipping through the pages of my favorite books.  In particular, I'm always interested in anything to do with English gardens, especially Bloomsbury gardens. Here's the book I've put on my wish list this fall: Virginia Woolf's Garden by Caroline Zoob with photography by  Caroline Arber and a Foreword by the wonderful Cecil Woolf.  

Available here.

Speaking of Bloomsbury and all things domestic and beautiful, Mr. Magpie and I had the great pleasure of reviewing two books for the Spring 2014 Issue of  The Virginia Woolf Miscellany a few months ago.  If you click on the link, you'll find our review on page 36 of the online pdf version of the journal.  It was a joy to discuss Virginia Wolf, a lush and heartfelt children's picture book by Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault, as well as The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, an edited collection of a series of "supplements" co-authored by Virginia Woolf and her nephew Quentin Bell in the early 1920's.  The collaboration between Woolf and the then 12-year-old Bell is a humorous and entertaining chronicle in pictures and words of the daily life at Charleston Farmhouse, the Sussex home of Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and as we state in our review, "a motley band of Bloomsbury bohemia engaged in disciplined creativity, strenuous play, and the daily practice of crafting life together" (36).  Some of you know that Mr. Magpie (aka Todd Avery) is a Bloomsbury scholar, and that Charleston Farmhouse is a touchstone for us--a place to connect with the things we value most about art, friendship, and living an ethical life.  If you'd like to learn a bit more about Charleston Farmhouse, visit the post I wrote after my first visit there a few years ago.

And for some quick visual inspiration, scroll down through this post for a few shots I took late last summer on a very cloudy day in the garden at Charleston:

I will soon have other publishing news, but in the meantime, click here at the Lilly Library's page to read Close and Affectionate Friends, a beautiful, small book that Todd wrote back when he was completing his PhD at Indiana University.  He curated an exhibition on Bloomsbury at the Lilly in 1999, and he wrote this book on Desmond and Molly MacCarthy to accompany the exhibition.  At the time it was only available as a printed book, but now you can read the e-version for free.

Todd has written and edited many articles and chapters, along with other books on Bloomsbury and Modernism since then, including Radio Modernism, which a review in the Woolf Studies Annual calls a "compact but meticulously sourced and argued volume," and Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey, published by Pickering & Chatto. He has also penned two volumes--one published and one forthcoming--for Cecil Woolf Publishers' Bloomsbury Heritage Series, which you can read more about in the 'Books' section of Blogging Woolf.

It's not often that I allow myself to sing the praises of Mr. Magpie here on the blog, but I admire his work tremendously, and I love when we have the opportunity to collaborate on a project.  We are currently co-writing another book review, and yes, it is Bloomsbury-related, so I will keep you posted about it in the coming months.

I have so much to share with you--more Italian gardens, more Maine gardens, books I've been reading, and food I've been cooking.  As always, I'm grateful to you for visiting, and I love hearing about the daily ins and outs of your life, too.  Thank you for always inspiring me.  xo Gigi

Inspiration: Dirt, Books, and the Gardens of Others

I have an obsession with exploring other people's gardens.  Botanical gardens, city parks, backyard plots, and balcony pots--all of them fascinate me.  

I also love reading books written by gardeners.  In fact, I have a collection of books--not just how to's, but philosophical ramblings, scientific explorations, and historical overviews of garden design and landscape architecture.  

The more I read these texts, and the more I wander through the beds and borders planted by other gardeners, the more I learn, of course, but it's not the kind of learning that brings clarity.  In fact, I find gardens more mysterious and wonderful now than I did when I was five years old, building fairy kingdoms beneath the hostas and rhododendrons.

No matter how many seeds I have sown over the years, no matter how many daylilies I have divided, I am still amazed when a plant I planted makes its way up out of the soil and into the light of day.  Does this make me a simpleton?  If it does, so be it.  It's a heck of a lot more fun than the alternative.

So, I keep wandering.  And I keep reading. 

 This morning it was a book by Charles Dudley Warner, published in 1870 called My Summer in a Garden.  

"So long as we are dirty," Mr. Warner writes, "we are pure."  Amen, I say, as I find this passage in perfect keeping with that wonderful quote from Margaret Atwood: "In spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."  I nearly always do, whether it's dirt from my own garden or someone else's.  Either way, it's my favorite perfume.

P.S. I took all these photos the other day at one of my favorite places, Gilsland Farm (Maine Audubon).  As my regular readers know, the community gardens there are an endless source of inspiration to me.  I hope they inspire you, too.

Friday Afternoon at Home

I wrote all morning.  I'm working on a writing project that takes up most of my heart, mind, and soul right now, so please forgive me for a wee bit longer as I am less attentive to blogging--my blog and yours included.  

This afternoon my brain needed a break, so I took a few shots around the house of flowers and books.

Anyone who knows me well understands why this blog is called The Magpie's Fancy.  I am a collector of many things; books, keys, and ribbons are among the things I treasure most.  I found this stack of J.M. Barrie's works for a couple of dollars at a used bookstore last year.  An avid Barrie fan, I scooped them up and have loved them ever since.

This antique salt-glazed pitcher is actually my sister's, but she lets me keep it, because she knows how much I covet it.  It has a large crack and can't hold water, so I simply fill a glass with water and slip it inside.  I think these pink stock don't mind one bit.

I allowed a bunch of white ranunculus to dry out over the past few weeks, and I am taken by the graceful curves of their dried stems and the papery wrinkles of their petals.  

The whole city is filled with light today.  Spring has decided to let the cherry trees bloom.  The air tastes like a promise.

I have so much to share with you--a post about John Keats, photos of my beautiful city, thoughts about fear and writing . . . and so much more.  I'm anxious to learn what you have been up to as well.  In the meantime, the weekend is sneaking around the corner.  Hope yours is full of the best kind of surprises.

"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"  

~Oscar Wilde

In Memoriam Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday, and I am torn between the need to write what she has meant to me, means to me still, and my utter inability to do justice to her life and work. I am stunned and saddened by her passing.  It's not that she was young.  She lived to be 88--a respectable stretch of years.  It's not that she was my best friend or my favorite aunt. I didn't know her at all.  In fact, if she hadn't won the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen years ago, I probably never would have heard of her.  

But I did hear of her.  I was a graduate student in creative writing at the time, gulping down poetry every day along with my morning coffee, my afternoon bagel, and my evening pint of Guinness.  Poetry--writing it, writing about it, reading it, studying it, discussing it--that was my life.  I remember seeing an article about Szymborska by Edward Hirsch in the New York Times shortly after she won the Prize.  He spoke of how reclusive she was, how relatively unknown she was outside of Poland.  And she discussed with him her life in Poland during World War II, then under Communism, and later after its fall.  At one time she had believed that Communism could save not only Poland, but perhaps all of humanity.  She soon realized this was not so, and she eventually joined the Solidarity Movement's struggle against Poland's Communist regime.  

Three of her sentences in particular stood out for me, and they ultimately became the central theme of my graduate thesis.  Speaking of her early enthusiasm for Communism, Szymborska stated, “At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.”  At first glance, this sentence sounded hopeless to me--but then I read her poems.  

Maybe All This 

Maybe all this 

is happening in some lab? 

Under one lamp by day 

and billions by night? 

Maybe we’re experimental generations? 

Poured from one vial to the next, 

shaken in test tubes, 

not scrutinized by eyes alone, 

each of us separately 

plucked up by tweezers in the end? 

Or maybe it’s more like this: 

No interference? 

The changes occur on their own 

according to plan? 

The graph’s needle slowly etches 

its predictable zigzags? 

Maybe thus far we aren’t of much interest? 

The control monitors aren’t usually plugged in? 

Only for wars, preferably large ones, 

for the odd ascent above our clump of Earth, 

for major migrations from point A to B?

Maybe just the opposite: 

They’ve got a taste for trivia up there? 

Look! on the big screen a little girl 

is sewing a button on her sleeve. 

The radar shrieks, 

the staff comes at a run. 

What a darling little being 

with its tiny heart beating inside it! 

How sweet, its solemn 

threading of the needle! 

Someone cries enraptured: 

Get the Boss, 

tell him he’s got to see this for himself! 

—(translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh)

As I read the poems in Szymborska's View With a Grain of Sand, everything I thought I knew about  poetry--not just its craft and form, but the life and the purpose of poetry--shifted.  This deeply brilliant, funny, sensitive, and most of all, ethical woman wrote poetry that did just what Emily Dickinson said poetry should do: make the reader "feel physically as if the top of [her] head were taken off."

Szymborska's poems examine ordinary, everyday subjects from extraordinary perspectives.  As I read them for the first time, the seventh time, and the fortieth time, I discovered what she meant in those three sentences that had puzzled me so.  I was young myself at the time, so I was just beginning to internalize what she had discovered years before under much more trying circumstances.  A deeply ethical, aesthetically beautiful, and intellectually challenging poem does not try to change the whole world.  It tries to speak to the individual reader.  To you, to me, to the man who lives around the corner and orders take-out Chinese every Thursday.  It is not dogmatic; it needs no soapbox from which to holler.  If the words are crafted from the gut, the heart, and the mind, a poem will speak to the reader and make him think, make him feel, make him see the same old world he's always seen, but from a different--an unexpected and enlightening--vantage point.

I ended up writing my graduate thesis on the subject of personal and communal responsibility in the poetry of Szymborska and her fellow countryman and Nobel winner, Czeslaw Milosz.  Her poetry helped to shape my own work as a poet, but perhaps more importantly, it helped me to shape my life as a person.  

I'm going to end with a Szymborska poem that possesses all her trademark wit, empathy, and candor.  I know it will be quoted and shared a great deal in the days and weeks to come as news of her death spreads.  Szymborska wrote this poem after a friend died.  It will not save mankind, but it will touch one person, then another . . . and then maybe even a third.

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.

Since what can a cat do

in an empty apartment?

Climb the walls?

Rub up against the furniture?

Nothing seems different here

but nothing is the same.

Nothing’s been moved

but there’s more space.

And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,

but they’re new ones.

The hand that puts fish on the saucer

has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start 

at its usual time.

Something doesn’t happen

as it should.

Someone was always, always here,

then suddenly disappeared

and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.

Every shelf has been explored.

Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.

A commandment was even broken:

papers scattered everywhere.

What remains to be done.

Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,

just let him show his face.

Will he ever get a lesson

on what not to do to a cat.

Sidle toward him

as if unwilling

and ever so slow

on visibly offended paws,

and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

__(translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh)   

Desires

Nesting Bowls from Terrain

Press Camera Makeup Bag from Anthropologie

Cabbages & Roses Guide to Natural Housekeeping

I like cleaning products to look and smell 

like spa products.  

If it comes from an apothecary jar, 

just maybe I can trick myself 

into using it to do housework.

Incanto Ruffle Dinner Plate from Vietri

Or anything by Vietri.

Chan Luu Lace Scarf from Garnet Hill

Silver Heart from Willa Wirth

She's a local silver artist in my Portland neighborhood. 

Her shop is beautiful, and so is her website.

1908 Crazy-Quilt Pillow from Enhabiten on Etsy

I love this Etsy shop!

I'm in window-shopping-magpie mode, both physically and virtually.  Just thought I'd share some lovelies I've been spotting, in case anyone else is craving pretty things in silvery greys, creamy whites, and plummy pinks.

Anthropologie Book Drive

Madeline

Anthropologie is holding a book drive this holiday season, 

so while you're at their website stocking up on these

Bird and Branch Decoupage Chandelier  

Corrigan Chair

or this

Blazing Poppies Wallpaper

or this 

Glacial Glow Clutch

or (sigh) these

Final Flourish Heels

please add one or two (or more!) of these

Peter Pan

The Secret Garden

to your shopping cart.  

They will be donated to Reader to Reader, 

a nonprofit organization dedicated to stocking the shelves 

of public schools and libraries.  

"Oh, magic hour, 

when a child first knows she can read printed words!"

— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1943 

Come Sit By Her Fire With Me

Hello, friends!  Today I am visiting over at my friend Relyn's beautiful blog, Come Sit By My Fire.  Relyn devotes the entire month of April to people's passions, which is only fitting, since she herself is a woman full of passion and creativity.  I hope you'll come on over and visit with us, too!

Have a beautiful weekend.  

Q

is for Queens and Quests

One of my passions in life is fairy tales.  Give me a story with a queen, a prince, a tower, a quest, a cat in swashbuckler boots, or a cursed frog, and I will lose myself in it.  That's why I am happy to celebrate the birth of one of the great literary fairy tale writers, Hans Christian Andersen, who turns 205 today.  Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who gathered, altered, and published several editions of traditional oral fairy tales, most of Andersen's tales were original works, including The Ugly Duckling, The Little Match Girl, The Red Shoes, The Nightingale, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Mermaid (Disney's version is very different from the original, which is absolutely beautiful), Thumbelina, and the tale that many consider to be his masterpiece, The Snow Queen.  The Snow Queen illustration above is from an edition of Andersen's tales published in 1911 with illustrations by one of my favorite fairy tale illustrators, Edmund Dulac.  

If you're reading this post today, April 2, you might want to fly on over to Google to see their tribute to Andersen.  And if you're a fan of fairy tales, too, there's a lovely recent collection of his works edited and annotated by the wonderful Maria Tatar.

 A Margaret Tarrant illustration for The Little Mermaid

In many ways, Andersen's own life was a quest for recognition, which he eventually received, and for love that he never found.  While he wrote memoirs that colored his life as a fairy tale, the truth of his life was far from enchanted.  His tales are achingly beautiful, often satirical (read The Nightingale for a scathing portrait of aristocrats), explorations of love, the quest for spirituality, and the importance of the artist in society.  

A special note of thanks today to all my blogging friends.  Your comments and sense of community inspire me and teach me.  Have a wonderful weekend, and if you celebrate Easter, may it be a blessed and peaceful day of joy.  xo

  

B is for Books . . .

. . . and Beatrix and bunnies and blue.

"TV.  If kids are entertained by two letters, 
imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six.  

Open [a] child's imagination.  Open a book."  

                                                                          ~Anonymous

Simple Gifts

Today I'm joining with Christina and several other bloggers to celebrate the simple things.  Thank you, Christina, for your warm and brilliant heart.  


Here are just a few of the many gifts for which I am grateful: 

~taking a deep breath~

~beginning~

~a clutch of daffodils from my husband~ 
(yes, he wrapped that milk jar in craft paper 
and tied it with twine, crafty guy)

~knowing that my camera is by my side and ready~ 

~finding loads and loads of faux tulips 
at Michael's for a dollar a bunch~ 
(just perfect for making a wreath 
to beat the winter blues) 

~a peanut butter sandwich any time of day or night~

~discovering lipstick in the perfect shade of plum~

~sharing take-out Indian food with good friends~

~Scout~ 
(and Theodore)

~Dill~

~working on drafts with a girlfriend~ 
(editors and agents be damned!)

~becoming so lost in revising a poem 
that time ceases to exist~

~strong women like this one~

~taking a walk on a trail I've never followed before~

~discovering an old barn~

~watching a hawk fly by almost near enough to touch~

~funny people~
~stacks and stacks of books~ 

~manicotti~ 
(I made not one, but two pans on Monday!)

~a phone call from a friend I miss~

~forgiving~
~being forgiven~

~moving on~

~letting go~

~beginning again~


xo