Manicure set, Elizabeth of York

Speaking of treasured possessions, here's my manicure set, a present from Handsome Partner well over 60 years ago and still in use. Quality. One little tool is missing, probably somewhere in the bathroom closet where I keep the set. 

The buffer, padded kid, is very good for nail health because it massages the nails and the underlying circulation.  

I think of him every time I use the set, remembering the care he took of his own nails. He was so grateful, after he lost the use of his hands and feet, that I did his nail care for him. 

I'd catch him admiring his manicured nails, when he thought he was alone.  A small task for me to do,  but vital for his spirits. He wasn't a vain man, but he respected self care.

I've been reading several books in tandem and here's a rundown:

The Housekeeper and the Professor is brilliant, touching, the poetry of math and human connection in unlikely places, very worth reading. I listened to it, exactly the right Japanese voice narrating .

Dinner Ladies was light and sweet and a good contrast to my other reading. A cosy mystery, it's about an old lesbian couple of dinner ladies who find themselves investigating a murder.  It's also funny.

Huge contrast to the grim reality of the 1619 Project, about the importation of African people into slavery starting then and the continuing struggle to establish their rights. 

It's hard reading which I feel obliged to do, as a white immigrant, though from a family here in the 1850s, who had no idea of the privilege she stepped into, even when things were tough. Because never have any of my trials been caused nor made harder, by my skin color. 

I'm in an online book group discussing this with mainly black readers, and I listen more than I talk, unless called on, or unless I have some different insight because of my different background. I'm definitely getting an education in this group, who are exquisitely polite to me, inclusive, walking the walk.

Then there's Elizabeth of York, who was at the confluence of the Plantagenets and the Tudors, and very confusing it is. 

Practically every woman seems to be named Elizabeth or Anne or Mary, the men's limited first names equally confusing. Also everyone has a title and a completely different family name. And they're all intermarried. And the women get new titles when they marry. There's a complicated chart at the beginning of the book explaining these relationships, and I got lost there, too.

It's like a Russian novel set in 15th century England. And Scotland. And France. And Burgundy. And small children being betrothed to unite kingdoms and territories. And powerful people suddenly being murdered because they said the wrong thing. 

I'm persevering because I like Alison Weir's scholarship and writing style.  I don't think I have a true historian's outlook on this period.

The oat crackers, toasted to crisp them back  up, they went a bit soft overnight, went well with the soup. And the weather is bright and cool, lovely for walking. 

And in the course of following Marion's World, I found a great construction idea for a fabric book. One thing led to another and that wall hanging I stitched a while back, and haven't been too satisfied with, is about to be cut up for a new life.

I'm probably going to use the sashiko stitched stiffened pieces for the book cover and use the appliqued sections as some of the pages. 

I think more embroidery will happen. I do like to have a bit of stitching around, among other projects. I may not use the same construction, devised originally by Ann Wood, but that's the springboard.

So all's well, all manner of things, even.

Happy Passover to blogistas who observe. 

High 90s, good day for reading

Since the days of doing a photo spread of current library books, I've switched to online. Hoopla , though a limited number of books per month, already used all my June ones, is great.

So here's where I am and have been.

Still in the midst of the Penelope Lively, wonderful nonfiction based on the historic family home she spent time in, her family, and the tangents triggered by the history and passing guests who also stopped by.

 I love social history, and hers is engaging, takes in a wide swath of countries, social position, attitudes, with an accepting but sceptical eye. Highly recommended.

The others are fun with a purpose. The Rabbi books sneak in a lot of Jewish history and tradition, wrapped in the fun of a mystery. The Jeff Cohens deal with very real issues of life with a son on the spectrum, folded into mysteries of the reluctant detective type.

 He borrows heavily from the Andy Carpenter mystery form, incompetent narrator, brilliant wife, dog in picture,  but  is still very readable anyway. Similarly has a good cause in mind, his being  autism understanding, Carpenter's, very different, dog rescue.   

 I read and like both.

I also, while we're on the spectrum, I read but on my Kindle, Convenience Store Woman, where the narrator is herself autistic, struggling for acceptance against a world that wants to "fix" her. It's a very good insight, and really worth reading. I read the whole novel while I was waiting for my car yesterday.

It was for an online book group which I used to attend in person. And which I was all set to join in this afternoon. Because I thought it was Tuesday. Turns out Tuesday was yesterday. Oh. Anyway I'll email my opinions, late but oh well, today to the group.

Reading and where it leads to

It leads to more reading at this point.

In urgent need of some antidote to the urgent and fearful things going on, still being politically active as I can, on what I see as the right side, I still need some sort of mental resting place, who doesn't.

I came across this a couple of days ago. It's a rapid read, maybe an hour, which I did on the sofa, hand-knitted blanket over my legs. Very welcome.

And it led me to my current plunge-in reading, The Cazalet Chronicles.

 Instant access as ebook, and it's become my go-to. Very readable and well wrought. Elizabeth Jane Howard knew what she was doing.

After a few trips up two flights to collect crates to bring down one flight and stow in the guest room closet, I get the reward of reading while my legs recover, ready for the next trips.

On the Great Winnowing, I've winnowed down to where I'm putting the art materials a floor down, in the guest room, very accessible, surprisingly compact.

All the clothes I had in the guest room closet are now moved to the bedroom closet. I never put clothes in there during Duncan and Marigold's life, because their boxes were there. This has freed up space for art materials.

I loaded the car yesterday for the next thriftie run, between snow showers.

And offloaded frames, matboard, and nice wood boxes to a friend who's a contractor, woodworker, artist, who can use them. Some of the frames will go to his daughter.

I say, lightly, frames. In fact framed artwork I have no further investment in, and he can use them for other artwork. They're metal sections, so getting ready-framed work means all the wire, screws and clips are there, easy to reuse. We're both happy.

I'm not a curator or conservator of my art. To me the opposite of curating is creating. Once the work has been out there, I'm done. It's like letting children go off to their own lives. So exhibiting, selling or eventually donating is all fine.

I don't really miss earlier work, because I'm usually engrossed  in the next studio adventure. That makes it easier to part with them. Just ripping off the band-aid.

And now for a bowl of homemade veggie soup, with homemade whole-wheat/oat bread with caraway seeds, and Cazalet Chronicles.

Books I have readed

I read a lot but only occasionally feel moved to recommend books.

Here are a couple worth your time:

Noreen Crone-Findlay you may know from YouTube, very appealing presenter.

Here's her book about bags, entertaining and very well written, illustrated, and generally presented.

It comes in an ebook too, but I can't work from e-books, can't see several places at once, refer back and forward, so paper is my choice. This one you really can work from, and it's just fun to read anyway.

Then a new discovery, though not a new writer. This is a really great mystery, with a cast of actual characters, not just puzzle pieces. Set in the first world war, in London, some excellent women protagonists, really well plotted.

Just one problem:this just came out, and it's the first of the series. So I have to wait till she writes another.

And, since it's Bloomsday, I made my annual Kindle visit to Ulysses. As you see, I'm getting there.

Lively, bluejay and Marigold goes under cover

A while since I did a book review, though I've been reading all along.  I don't review books I didn't get much out of, or that I really didn't like, not fair, just my opinion.  But when one seems really worth the energy, I do.  

And, it's Monday, not that Marigold is particularly concerned about that, more that it's rainy and she was disturbed by my insisting on a picture. But readers who had to go back to work might enjoy a suggestion of a book to check out.

So here's the current choice:  latest collection of short stories from Penelope Lively.  

 
It's a bit uneven, but has a lot of layers and levels and is definitely worth reading.  She likes to slide between real and surreal, points in history, points of view.  Her writing is a kind of rollercoaster of technique, and very engrossing.  You always feel she's pulling your leg a bit, and is really onto you.

One odd choice: usually the title is from the strongest story, and it's put at the end of the book.  Probably to keep people reading.  In this instance it is the strongest story, but it leads off the collection, which, to me, tails off a bit after that.  I think Lively really is better at following a thread or ten throughout the whole novel form, rather than encapsulating them as in the short story.    But read it, and let us know what you think.

Aside from a lot of other things going on, some too soon to write about in the art side of life, I've been observing the feeder, kept supplied with suet put together in Minnesota and NJ birds seem to think this is the best thing ever.  The feeder is mobbed and I get to observe a lot of interesting and some comic avian capers.

There are about three or more bluejays feeding regularly.  One has got the hang of clinging to the side of the feeder, one is dedicated to standing on top of it, even when the food is so far down he can hardly reach.  And the third, my favorite, tries to hover under the feeder and snatch food which he eats on the deck.  You get to know birds as individuals if you observe them enough.

Here's a pic of him trying to flutter up to the bottom of the feeder.  He's a bit off course, feeder being over there on the left, in front of the lantana on the fence. Which attracted the first hummingbird of the season a couple of days ago.  Just a flash of a sighting.

Then there was a standoff between a female cardinal and the red bellied woodpecker, neither conceding until they feed at the same time before flying away at the exact same moment.  And a real fail from a male house sparrow going beak to beak with a little downy woodpecker.  Sparrow had no hope of holding on, eating, and fighting all at once, against the downy, small, but with that tail that enables them to hang on to trees.  Sparrow eventually basically fell off, chuntered and stomped around the deck, catching the crumbs that the downy dropped.

But it's not all birding.  Cooking is happening, too, since I got back the gumption to do a big shop, vegetables and tofu and parmigiano, and all kinds of good things.

So today, I roasted vegetables.  Sweet potatoes, white potatoes, carrots, squares of firm tofu, all tossed in olive oil, mustard seeds, fresh ground pepper, kosher salt, turmeric, home ground curry powder (from Bill Veach, let me know if you want the directions). Then roasted at 425F for thirty minutes, sort of stirred about a bit, then another 25 minutes and all was done.  And very good.  You can make a whole meal from this mixture.  Which I did.  And three more meals to come.  Probably next time Handsome Son gets here for a dinner, he'll get some of this.  Maybe with sausage or chicken or something.

Here's the before:

and the after:

As you see, they shrink a little, but everything was just right.  A bit crisp and spicy on the outside, tender on the inside.  Highly recommended on a day when you can tolerate a hot oven.

Time to look at a few books

In the enforced abstinence from making art, or much of anything other than a fuss, I've been reading, figuring I could use the time fine that way.  Once I'd got the hang of operating a Kindle or a paper book with one hand, surprisingly tricky when you can't hold the K with one hand and push buttons with the other, or when the paper book keeps wanting to jump out of your good hand, or shut by itself.  And the helpful little cats were on the scene at all times, planting a paw on the word I was reading, such accuracy.

Anyway, I read a bio of Georgette Heyer by Jane Aiken Hodge, no pic, now back at libe, and found that GH was so private that her bio is very very dull.  

Aside from being married to a man to later in life became a QC, that's a posh sort of lawyer, and whose work therefore was not discussed for the benefit of bios, and of being a person who never gave interviews, wouldn't write anything other than her books except for the occasional blurb, she was actually not a very interesting person in life.  Terse at best with anyone outside her family.

Odd, since she wrote some of the best laugh out loud farcical scenes in literature  in Frederica, Reluctant Widow and Faro's Daughter, to name only three faves.  I guess all the interest was poured into her work.  

So I supposed I shouldn't complain, having revisited all the above novels for light relief during the last few trying days, and just last evening burst out laughing yet again at Aunt Lizzie in Faro's Daughter, having a breakdown at Deb's latest exploit.

Then, since Hodge has been described as the literary successor in the Regency genre to GH, I thought I'd read some of her novels, too, as well as her bio of Jane Austen.  And found that she can sort of write a plot, and sort of keep it moving, but has not one particle of humor.  She misses a lot of the point of GH, in other words, sigh.

And she tends to be of the had I but known school of writing, very annoying stuff, not respectful to the reader.  Oh well, I tried.  I did read Marry in Haste and got fed up of the endless mental hamster wheel of the heroine, then I tried Rebel Heiress which was faster moving, better done, but still pathetically earnest.  She's worth a look, in case she's to your taste though.

Her bio of Jane Austen is meticulously researched and she clearly has great sympathy with what she knows of Austen, but again, all the power of Austen is in her own words, not in a bio, so perhaps this was not surprising.  

And Austen was never a name dropper or a big saver of correspondence, that goldmine for a bio, in fact had her sister destroy their letters.  So this bio gets an A for effort if only a C plus for execution.

However, you'll have great fun if you read Andy Miller.  I'm halfway through his "Year of Reading Dangerously," and it's a wonderful mix of his daily life and times and struggles and his attempts to keep up his literary education.  

He creates a list of books he means to read, and has at times claimed already to have read, and schedules them to actually read.  All the ones I'd heard of I'd read, and the others I'd never heard of anyway, so this was an interesting discovery for me.

Very happy that he did eventually realize in mid-read of Middlemarch that he was in the presence of greatness. He even documents the point at which that happened.  I heart this, since I had exactly the same experience, except at a different point for me, the scene with Rosamund and Dorothea, where I suddenly stopped reading and realized this is a genius showing me what great writing can be.  Anyway, that's why I push it on people just in case they can have this experience, too.

Miller is funny, witty, full of allusions and quotations, many of which bypass me since they're of the UK since the 80s., a closed book if you didn't live there or like pop music or watch their tv programs.  But it doesn't really matter, still great fun to read. And his analysis of what he reads is just spot on, carries you further than you imagined into the significance of the work and its context.  A major critical brain, disguised as an editor and accessible writer.

He has the great idea at one point of walking across London, with Beckett going in his ear, as an accompaniment, and a farewell to the London he knew as a student then a young working man, partly as a ceremony, partly to grasp Beckett better.  

I really took to the idea of choosing something that you could listen to while walking a specific place, so as to inform both the book and the place at the same time, having them illuminate one another.  And I am thinking about how to implement this once we get the sort of weather than lets me get out to walk.  

I also notice the synchrony of Beckett and Billie Whitelaw, who died recently. I was amazed to find when I read her obituaries a few days ago, that the actress I knew was only in the first part of her career, getting seriously into it with Beckett's work later, and making her name there, rather than on the BBC series where I'd seen and liked her.  That's what happens when you move away. You lose track. Anyway, finding this out meant that what Miller said about Beckett and Whitelaw made sense in a way it wouldn't if I'd read his book last week.

All his choices are novels, he points out, but only three are by women.  He plans to pay attention to his gender bias. He doesn't seem too worried about genre bias, though. I like the gender bias observation. 

Particularly since so many classics by men are those tiresome quest novels, where it's all so obvious, so one track minded, so, what can I say, Y-chromosome....after a few thousand pages I really didn't care any more about the white whale, or Ishmael, or any of it.   The point had been made over and over in slightly varying ways.  It's all a bit bankrupt, really.  

Worth trying, everything's worth trying, but there are times when it's okay to stop reading, since the writer has now had as much of your attention as you plan to give in this life.  Anyway, I think this, and found to my surprise that Miller stopped a book or two for reasons similar to this.  And I was amused by his, very fair, I think, take on Dan Brown the da Vinci Code writer.  

I literally refused to pick up that book, figuring that anyone who thought Leonardo's last name was da Vinci, I ask you, did he know nothing about the period, was not going to be worth going on with.  I notice Miller slips in a little reference, without underlining it, that shows he knows Leonardo's name is just that. Surnames rarely used at that period, but occasionally the place of origin used in conversation.  It's like referring to "my friend Bill from Manhattan" and from then on calling him Manhattan.

Still to come, not yet opened, "There must be some mistake" by Frederic Barthelme, whom I've never read and now should, having read a great review of this book by writer and friend Katherine H.  See her poetry in Red Spork Poetry for an adventure in good stuff.Go here

So this is what I'm up to, between knitting a little for my wrist, quite helpful that, and sorting the studio ready for the Great New Phase.