the cassandra pages

Le jardin d'Éric P.

The garden of Eric P., pencil and watercolor, 13"x6".

After working at my own plot early this morning, I did a sketch of my friend Eric P.'s garden, which is one of my favorites in our community garden. I'm fortunate that he is my garden neighbor so I can watch the constantly changing pattern of blooming. He's a landscape designer, and it shows!

What really impresses me about this garden is its dramatic sculptural quality. I did a charcoal sketch of the forms last year, but this is my first attempt with color. I'll do some more and eventually, I hope, get somewhere close to the beauty of the scene in real life.

Below is the sketch as it was when I stopped working on it outdoors: a pencil drawing with light watercolor washes. The painting at the top of the post was finished this afternoon in the studio.

It's a complicated proposition, and a fun challenge. What I want to do is to convey the identity of some of the various plants -- their "growth signature," while also simplifying the scene a lot more to help the overall play of forms come through. Here, everything is competign with everythign else. It's really hard! I think going back with charcoal might be a good idea, and then when the forms and values are more established in my head, to try again with watercolor.

Some Recent Links, and thoughts on the Humanities

Blogging used to be about linking, as well as all this personally-generated stuff we seem to do. I think I'm going to revive the effort here, since each week I often discover, read, and link to some wonderful articles and websites through other people, on Twitter and Facebook. Quite a few people who read this blog don't use those social networks (and I say good for you!) so it makes sense to share the links once in a while.

So here we go, with a little something for everyone, I hope!

The top ten words for which there is no English equivalent. I only knew a few of these: how about Wei-wu-wei, a Chinese word that means a deliberate decision not to do something?

Privacy and the Threat to Self. When did the very nature of personhood become a political and legal issue?

... its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.

The Stunning Grandeur of the World's Great Opera Houses. A photographic project by David Leventi. (via Bint Battuta.)

Estates Theatre, Prague, Czech Republic, 2008, by David Leventi.

--

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences released a report on the state of the humanities called “The Heart of the Matter.”

Here are two op-ed pieces in response:

The Humanist Vocation, by David Brooks. I'm not a big David Brooks fan, but there is a lot here worth pondering about the change in thinking (and therefore in society) that is resulting from lack of education in th humanities.

But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise...Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, “the dark vast forest.”

The Decline and Fall of the English Major A related piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

In the past few years, I’ve taught nonfiction writing... Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.

They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.

Please leave a comment if any of these articles generate thoughts of your own. I'm especially interested in your thoughts about the last two, since many of us have spent our lives in the arts and humanities, in caring about good writing, and thinking about "that vast dark forest" of the human spirit. Do you think this way of being is endangered? What trends do you see in the young people who you know, or perhaps teach?

From my own observation (which is limited, as I don't have kids of my own, and don't teach) I don't think young people today are any less idealistic than we were, or less creative, or less concerned about important things, less spiritual, or less hungry to learn. But as David Brooks suggests, I think we, the educational system, and society in general, may share the blame with a difficult economy for not making the case convincingly about why the humanities matter, and for failing to offer them enough and giving up too easily, perhaps because of our own fatigue and discouragement. What do you think?

A Tale of Two Skirts (and a Scarf)

I've been on a bit of a sewing binge lately, and the results have been two new skirts and a scarf/stole sort of thing. Each piece has had its fussy challenges, but I'm pretty happy with the result, and I really enjoyed doing the work

  

Here are the two skirts, both from the same pattern, New Look 6107. It's a classic tailored skirt pattern with front and back darts and a yoke that falls just below the waist.

I made the beige linen-blend tweed skirt first, and followed the pattern fairly closely. The fabric was lovely but a bit prone to wrinkles, so I decided to add a lining to give it more body and help  the skirt hang nicely.

For the second skirt, I planned to use this lovely Indian block print, in a heavy cotton. But when I laid out the pattern pieces, I realized I didn't have enough fabric - and not just because my "helper" was lying on it.

Eeking out clothes from too little fabric is a good challenge, and I was determined to make a skirt out of this piece! Since this was going to be a summery skirt in a more informal cloth, I decided to just let it be short -- as short as 1/2 the length of fabric I had. I cut it right to the edge, and figured instead of turning up the hem, I'd make a three-inch hem facing out of the leftover fabric, and use topstitching to finish the hem; the extra weight and stitching would make the hem hang well, and keep the cotton from wrinkling. I also eliminated the darts for a less tailored look, and cut the yoke a bit wider than in the previous skirt. It was also necessary to pay attention to the positioning of the pattern on the center front of the skirt, and match the pattern on the yoke pieces. It was kind of fussy, but worth the trouble in the end.

 

This is another piece of very lightweight Indian cotton with a beautiful large hand-block print (these fabrics came from a seller in India I found on Etsy.)

I downloaded a pattern for a sleeveless top that I thought might work for this fabric, but again I didn't have quite enough, and I decided the pattern was just too large for a top. But the fabric was so floaty and light, it seemed like it would make a beautiful scarf or Indian-style summery stole. Finally I just cut it down the middle and joined the two ends with an enclosed hand-sewn French seam finish, like those used on lingerie. Then it was just a matter of making  a hand-rolled hem all around the perimeter of the very long scarf. The reason for those handworked hem- and seam-finishes is to preserve the sheer, floaty nature of the fabric without adding stiffness or weight; that's why they are often used on silk lingerie and scarves.

My helper always arrives within two minutes if I've spread out a new piece of cloth...

Hand-rolled hems are one of the magic wonders of sewing; they're really cool. You take a series of double stitches at the top and just below a very narrow fold on the edge of the fabric:

Then, after every three or four inches, you pull gently on the thread and voila, the edge rolls over to form a perfect, narrow hem!

If you want to try this, there are some very good instructional videos on YouTube. It was a long way around my scarf, but I enjoy doing this kind of hand sewing: it's meditative, and you improve as you go. My hem was OK, but not nearly as fine as one on a silk scarf I bought at Ten Thousand Villages at Christmas, probably made by a woman or even a child who does this daily. When I looked at that scarf after doing my own, I had much greater appreciation for her beautiful, careful handwork.

Here's the finished piece. I might add some Anatolian-style edging or crochet tassles to the ends or the corners; it feels like it wants something blue as an accent.

I've always loved to sew, but just haven't done much of it for a long time. I think I got back into it because of helping to make new white dickies - a kind of collar/bib that our choir wears under their red robes: a very fussy project that came close to production sewing. But I've also been inspired by some nice Indian cottons I bought earlier this year, and my friend V. and I are both doing sewing more these days, and encouraging each other, which is nice.

All of this sewing is also avoidance of writing, because I'm at a place in my current project where I feel a bit stuck. However, it helped me to do something different, and as I sewed, I figured out what to do about some of the problem places in the writing. I feel like it gave me a break, and cleared my head.

There's one more piece of Indian cotton waiting to be made into a blouse...and this scarf might need a dress. Happy summer, happy solstice!

Mexican poetry in the garden

He hands me the white book
by the flowering fava beans:
Octavio writing of cinnamon sails
billowing with wind --
the breathing of breasts.

--

At the garden today, a friend lent me a bilingual edition of the complete poems of Octavio Paz. I opened it to the poem below which we read together. My Spanish is very poor but I recognize many words  - canela, for instance: cinnamon; iglesia: church - and can figure out others. This friend, who is Canadian-American, lived in Mexico for quite a while and knows the country well; he's fluent in Spanish and French and English, and I am envious! He's away for a week and asked me to water his vegetable garden, in a different community garden than mine, closer to my studio. So J. and I met him there and he showed us his fava beans and tomatoes, his lettuces and mustards, and the routine of watering, and then we had a wide-ranging conversation about plants, politics, poetry, and places we've lived and visited, while sitting in the very welcome sun.

I've copied the first two stanzas out in Spanish, and the entire poem in English. It's from Paz's book East Slope, poems written between 1962 and 1968.

 

COCHIN

1.
Para vernos pasar
se alza de puntillas
dimunata y blanquisima
entre los cocoteros,
la iglesia portuguesa

2.
Velas color canela.
El viento se levanta :
respiración de senos.

 

1.
Standing on tiptoe
to watch us go by
among the coco-palms
tiny and white,
the Portugese church.

2.
Cinnamon-colored sails.
The wind picks up.
breasts in breath.

3.
With shawls of foam,
jasmine in their hair
and earrings of gold
they go off to six o'clock mass
not in Mexico City or Cádiz:
in Travancore.

4.
Beating more furiously
before the Nestorian patriarch:
my heretical heart.

5.
In the Christian cemetery graze
dogmatic
     probably Shivaite
cows.

6.
The same eyes see, the same afternoon:
the bougainvillaea with its thousand arms,
elephantiasis with its violet legs,
between the pink sea and the jaundiced palms.

 

A Few Recent Tanka and Haiku

What right do I have
to this morning's brilliance
its pellucid peace?
In the ancestral cities
distant cousins wake weeping.

--

The million green leaves
above me cannot shelter
one child of Taksim.

--

My arch on your thigh
slow movements in the pale light
rain again today.

A Calm Interior

Today I put some color on a drawing that I did when visiting our family near Philadelphia. I started on a left-hand page, drawing this brass coffee pot and the cross-stitch tapestry hanging on the wall. When I moved over to the right-hand page and the continuation of the shelf under another window, the scale of things got distorted. It was pretty funny. I kept going, but the drawing/painting doesn't work as a whole; the composition is bad when the tapestry is right in the middle, and the coffee pot looks as large as the lamp! It's OK as two halves though.

One of my teachers told me never to be afraid to cut things up or to look at drawings and paintings using cropping tools. He was right; it often helps, and it's so much easier now, in digital image editing programs!

That's an Inuit sculpture between the lamp and plate; it's a mother leaning over with a baby in her arms, perhaps to pick it up. The mother has on a thick parka and mittens and the baby is all swaddled too; it's carved in soapstone. My brother-in-law, now retired, was a doctor in ob/gyn, and he has collected Inuit prints and sculptures, especially those depicting childbirth and mothers and children, since his medical school days in Canada when the annual Cape Dorset print editions were being offered by just a few galleries. However, the little figure on the windowsill is an Asian dancer, and I think it probably dates back to my sister-in-law's days in India. Their home has a very calm feeling, with white walls, lots of books, and very little clutter. If we'd had more time there, I'm sure I would have drawn a lot more.

New Specs

Well, I recently got new glasses. These are especially for singing and for drawing: the two occasions when I have to be able to see equally well up close, and far away, and shift quickly between the two distances. Until recently, I've been wearing my contact lenses for singing, with a pair of readers down on my nose that I look over when I glance up at the conductor. But I don't wear my contacts regularly -- especially not for days like this, when I'm at the computer most of the time: my eyes are drier than they used to be,  and by the end of the day they're tired.

Still, that routine was working all right, but when I started doing more outdoor drawing I really had problems. I never knew when I was going to want to sketch something, so I might have on my distance glasses...and then not be able to see the drawing paper. Or I'd try my reading glasses, the prescription ones corrected for my astigmatism, and then not be able to see the subject well enough. Outdoors in bright sunlight with my contacts on, I absolutely have to wear sunglasses- but then what about the readers?

Some of my friends have gotten progressives, but for singing, almost all of them have had problems, because (they say) you have to move your head to see properly. I finally decided to get a pair of old-fashioned bifocals, which is what these are, in a sort of hip, oversized frame. I ordered them online, the same way I've bought several other pairs, and they were very inexpensive. Better yet: they work beautifully! I can't use them on the computer, but that's fine: I just continue to use my reading-only glasses for that.

What really surprised me, though, was that I had expected a really visible line or half-moon shape, but when these are on my face, you can barely see the semicircular bifocal part. Is this something new? In the close-up below, you can just barely see it. The stigma of bifocals may be a thing of the past: my vanity is intact, and there hasn't been any adjustment period at all. What a relief!

 

Sunday, Between Time

"Once in a while it vanishes - in the sense that I become deaf to beauty for a week or two or three. This coming and going of the inner life - because this is what it is - is a curse and a blessing. I don't need to explain why it's a curse. A blessing because it brings about a movement, an energy which, when it peaks, creates a poem. Or a moment of happiness."

  - Adam Zagajewski (via Whiskey River)

The underground food court is filled with the sounds of voices and cutlery and plates and plastic trays reverberating against the low ceiling, but this is where there's WIFI so after finishing my lunch of Indian fast food I call my father, who's been trying to call me, and after we talk I go up the escalator and decide to visit the English-language bookstore a few blocks away. When I walk in I'm greeted by a cheerful woman who asks me if I know about today's special. No, I don't. Buy any three items and get the fourth free, she tells me, gesturing at a display of colorful pillows and decorative throws behind her. It can be anything, she says. Books, gifts...Thank you, I say, moving away and looking around with dismay; every time I come here it seems like there are fewer books and more housewares, soaps, candles, and expensively-packaged cookies and chocolates. Worse, there's hardly a book I want to read. I do one circuit of the second floor, and stand for a few minutes in front of Poetry, a small display of two book cases at shoulder height. On the endcaps are a recent collection of essays by James Wood, an edition of the Odyssey, and a volume of poems by local hero Leonard Cohen. I'm looking for the latest Adam Zagajewski, but it's not here; none of his books are. Instead I pull out the new Anne Carson, Red doc>, and recoil at the price. She's Canadian so most of her books are on the shelf: Plainwater, The Beauty of the Husband, Autobiography of Red, NOX,translations of Euripides and Sappho. The price for the new hardcover is just too high, I'll probably buy it in paperback later online or used -- the irony of which is not lost on me -- and then I think about having a coffee and sitting down in the cafe for the forty-five minutes before rehearsal, but decide against it and walk out, rather sad and annoyed, but tell myself to let it go, and I do.

Elegy

My mother's birthday was yesterday, June 9th; she would have been 89. I was singing all day, which would have made her happy -- she knew how important music is to me, and during the period of my life where I wasn't doing much of it and was rather unhappy, she finally suggested, gently, that I might consider getting back to it. I did; she had been right.

She wasn't a fan of the Church, nor was she a believer, though she faithfully attended services every Sunday during the long years when my dad and I were singing in the choir; she did it for us, not for any other reason. For her, Nature was holiness -- that and loving those closest to her. But through a keen intelligence, a great deal of reading, observation of human life, and personal challenges that included the Depression, World War II, and chronic asthma, she developed a personal philosophy that was far more robust than that of many "religious" people; it stood her in good stead her entire life, including her last years. She was tremendously patient, generous, and kind; industrious about whatever needed to be done; and almost never complained about personal problems. My admiration for her grows as I too get older; I miss her actual presence but am happy to continually notice that her love and wisdom stay with me.

She'd be quite amused to know that my father, at 88, played table tennis and came in second in his age bracket in the New York State Senior Games on Saturday.

That day, while he was competing, I spent some time listening to Ian Bostridge singing English songs by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams. Somehow Bostridge hadn't been on my radar until I visited Teju last weekend, when he played an episode of the BBCs "Desert Island Discs" for us featuring the selections of Vikram Seth, author of A Suitable Boy. When I heard Bostridge's voice, I knew I had to listen to a lot more. Some people prefer Peter Pears for Britten, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and others for German lieder; be that as it may, I think Bostridge's voice is perfectly suited to these very English works by Vaughn Williams, and I like his interpretations of Britten, too.

I wasn't consciously thinking of my mother as I was listening, nor is this her kind of music, but for me it created a reflective and elegiac mood that reminded me of the countryside, and only afterward connected with my mother. Later, on Sunday evening, I sat down at the keyboard and played through a bunch of jazz standards that she really did like. There was a bouquet of yellow roses from my garden in her Wedgewood pot, too, adding their spicy fragrance to the night air as I played and thought of her sitting in her favorite chair, listening while she read or knitted, the screen door open so that the sounds of insects, birds and frogs filled the silences. When I finished there would be tea and a little something sweet, and before going to bed, we'd step out on the deck and look up at the stars.

 

JOHN DONNE - HOLY SONNET 17

Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt

To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,

And her soul early into heaven ravished,

Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set.

Here the admiring her my mind did whet

To seek thee, God; so streams do show the head;

But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,

A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.

But why should I beg more love, whenas thou

Dost woo my soul, for hers off'ring all thine,

And dost not only fear lest I allow

My love to saints and angels, things divine,

But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt

Lest the world, flesh, yea devil put thee out.

 

A Philadelphia Garden

Alliums, poppies, and veronica at Chanticleer.

We're back in Montreal now, after a long drive yesterday. While in the outskirts of Philadelphia, visiting my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, one of the nicest things we did was to visit Chanticleer, a large public garden on a former estate. It's quite different from Les Quatre Vents, the incredible garden we visited in the Charlevoix -- smaller, more urban, less quirky -- and planted in a considerably warmer growing climate. In fact, my initial reaction was zone envy.

More alliums planted through ornamental grasses in the bulb lawn.

The garden has a number of areas, closer and further from the house, each planted differently. One leit-motif throughout, during these weeks of early June, were giant alliums, which appeared everywhere but made a different effect in each context.

A great strength of the garden as a whole was its masterful use of texture, and of unusual plants to achieve this. In one planting I noticed frilly red lettuces, beet greens, and crinkled apple-green kale mixed in with more predictable perennials to add their own particular textures and colors.

The garden also plays with ideas of scale, with long views and meadows contrasting with smaller, more intimate tableaux.

Succulents reflect in a flat pool in one room of "The Ruin."

These hens-and-chickens are planted in an armature of -- what else? -- chicken wire lined with sphagnum moss.

In the "Library," another room in The Ruins, visitors can browse the collection of carved stone books...

Mature trees and flowering shrubs form a backbone for the smaller gardens. And the Korean dogwood was in bloom.

Have you ever seen anything lovelier?

The lily pond contained not only pink waterlilies and lotus flowers, but Eastern painted turtles and many koi.

The cutting garden.

And another view of the poppy hillside: almost everything was in shades of purple/fuschia/lavender to contrast with the brilliant crimson poppies: a banquet of color.

For me, a garden like this is a living artwork, a giant sculpture. I find it endlessly inspiring, not just for my own gardens but for painting, textile design, printmaking -- any place where texture, color and form work together. And of course it's also a source of genuine joy and calm.

In the next post I'll show you a gallery exhibition of sculpture that alludes to very different forms and ideas.