The World Examining Works

Foreign Details: File under Overload

 

Travel is meant to broaden the mind. I think it just confuses me. I just got back from England where I spent the first half of my life, but is now almost a foreign country. I'm overwhelmed by echoes from the past.

A shop in Spitalfields -- Jack the Ripper territory --where I never ventured as a child since the buildings were black as your hat. It's now rather chic.

 I search for typically English things: here a roller towel -- something that doesn't exist in America.

Here a poster of where my brother worked for many un/happy years and charming lampshades by Cressida Bell.

I go on a bus through Picadilly Circus where large numbers of people are rushing about as people do in cities....

but some of them sit.

Normal life: invitations and CD's and socks.....

not to mention the Aga and the teacosy

and my friend Rosie's piece de resistance: Toad in the Hole. Bliss.

And another roller towel with more jolly color than usual.

The next day I go to the Imperial War Museum where one is bombarded with so much information the mind reels.

A bus from The Great War recalls Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Here technicians work on a plane from the Second World War....

and children make notes....

Here a horribly bad photo of Edith Sitwell from the current Cecil Beaton show....so I think I'd better stop and go and look for more roller towels, and maybe have a nice cup of tea.

 

On a completely different note: Urban Intersections opens at The Quidley Gallery today featuring one of Robert's paintings. Do go if you are in Boston.

Bookish

 

Rosie said, "You should read Barnaby Rudge." So I got it down off the shelf where it had resided in untouched splendor amidst all the other Dickenses that I had had shipped out from England long ago.

The spine was much faded but the illustrations were lovely. The pace of the opening was somewhat slow  --as it could be before Twitter and all that -- but the typeface was tiring so I went all 21st century and downloaded the novel for 99c onto my Kindle....

Then I started looking at all the illustrations in all the other hitherto untouched volumes.... Note the fug of smoke and wonderful long pipes.

 

and came upon poor Little Nell looking pretty damn abject. In my laziness, I had always sort of assumed that the books came from my father's family who lived in Kent so was surprised to discover who had really been the first owner.

Here is the rather grand bookplate of my grandmother Gretchen's favorite brother Leslie who died young of diabetes as people did in those days.

So I turned to my greatgrandmother Sarah Bayley's little date book where she recorded his life. 

I half wondered if I should give all the Dickens away, but realise now that I probably won't even though I doubt I'll ever read them.

 

Bookish and Wet

 

I absolutely hate knowing all about a book or a movie before I go to see it. I much prefer to dive headlong into the world of the novel and find out how things go on there.

I recently read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford the title of which had rattled round in my head for ever. Not sure how I ever missed reading it. Maybe because the author's name was so silly, or else I got him confused with Ford Madox Brown or the whole book confused with Musil's The Man without Qualities. All that aside, I urge you to read it.

It made me think of the world of James Tissot (above). God, what an elegantly tedious evening! And of Henry James (all those rich Yanks loose in Europe).

Even if you have wonderfully pretty clothes, you can be miserable, bored,

and even deceitful. 

There is always the possibility of a walk  

even when it's raining.

Then you can come home and read a book,

think about squirrels

etc

knit

eat, and then hibernate.

 

ps Nicola Beauman founder of the wonderful Persephone books imprint

will be in NY on Friday Oct 28th

see http://thepersephonepost.blogspot.com/

I will definitely be there.

Stuff We Keep and Stuff We Throw Away

 

 

A friend brought me this cotton boll from Alabama. I think it is very beautiful though I rather doubt I would have thought so if I had to pick cotton. I digresss.

On Saturday we were helping with a stall at a flea market and I was looking round our spare apartment for stuff to get rid of.

This character, Mr Samuel Worsley, who has lived in my desk for some years, had this  miniature done in 1821 . He seems to have lived in Orwell in Suffolk and looks a little like Wordsworth.

He was almost certainly married to poor Sarah ( above) who died aged 55 years. Where he looks bland beyond bland, she seems rather pinched and miserable. I cannot imagine how they came into my mother's possession unless they were relatives of some distant sort. However, I do not feel I can ditch them to the tender mercies of people who will feel even less connection to them than I do.

Item: two slightly sentimentally sweet French prints of children playing with animals. Kate Greenaway meets toile, much beloved by my grandmother.

I can't ditch those either.

 

 

Wednesday

 

We are staying out of the city so feel it incumbent upon us to see the local sights.

These include Nykuit built for the Rockerfellers in 1908 at vast expense and with mixed results. Here a fountain as seen in Florence.

The side of the house and

the various pools in the garden  which are really more interesting. 

A lot of rocky grotto types of things.....we think Boboli Gardens rather often.

Lots of stone  from all the blasting that took place for the foundations.

Of course, you have to go there in a group which is a bit dreary. I would much prefer to poke about at my own pace. So now I sound grumpy.

Crossing the  broad Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge was stunning. 

A late lunch at McDonald's less so.

Reflections on Nyack

 

A small town on the Hudson --here a table in the public library where we enquire about Edward Hopper the town's most famous son.

Here a higgeldy-piggeldy independent bookshop which I didn't enter for fear of buying all sorts of things.

Here a consignment shop where we could have dropped off things.

A very old fashioned office with clock and photo of the founder, and,

at last, the Hopper House, which, since it was Monday, was closed to the public, so 

I took a photo of the porch

and the trash can outside, then

went in search of Hopper architecture

and lunch.

 

 

Union Square/Friday

 

You never know what you will discover at Union Square.

I had gone in search of golden sage

and discovered the Falan Gong

and Lafayette, who Robert told me was a French mercenary -- as well as a street in Soho

and Andy Warhol who may, perhaps, have been amused ........

 

Recipe for a Tea Party

First you need some sort of pretext. (No prizes for guessing)

Then an invitation from a neighbor.....

 

who you help cut bread into heart shapes.

She has set out the very best teacups (but we're drinking bubbly as we work).

Here is the first part of the spread:

 ham and cheese sandwiches and the egg ones, and the chicken and the smoked salmon and cucumber (of course). The jam and the clotted cream are for the scones which you can't see.

Enter the ladies with hats.

The fascinator.....

the feathered do

the sunhat adorned with tulle. (What is tulle?)

The piece de resistance --from an ostrich I think.

But the day, really,

is all about crowns.

 

A Curious House/ Maison Tiskiwin

 

Bert Flint, a Dutchman who is now eighty, has lived in Marrakesh since 1957. In the middle part of the last century he traveled round North Africa collecting all sorts of things --textiles and tent pegs, sculptures and jewelry. His house --actually two houses joined together --is called Maison Tiskiwin and is open to the public.

 

 How wonderful to have your very own personal museum, quirky and remarkable. When a friend, who has taught in Nigeria and was interested in the Tuareg, talked to Bert Flint a few years ago he was concerned what would happen to his collection when he died.

So you had better go and see his house now.

No one is quite sure who this forbidding woman is --or whether she is, in fact, a woman at all.

And the windows.....

..well I could devote a whole post to the windows alone......

And who are these warriors -- one of whom seems to be posed atop a pomander (you know --those oranges studded with cloves --given as Christmas presents to unwitting aunts)? They look like creatures from another planet.

Pity the poor camel who has to carry such a burden through long desert days....

...and maybe meet up with this jocund crew.

The stairs in themselves are a delight.....

as is a bedroom --decorative but not absolutely comfortable.

Such jewels, weighty and marvelous...

...and last a scrap of embroidered cloth. Altogether there is so much to see and to ponder, this only gives you the least inkling of the treasures there.

All this makes one dream of magical journeys to places like Timbuctoo and Samarkand where I don't think I'll ever go.

*

Infinity in All Directions

 

So many Italian photos....

...an annunciation in S.Croce. As iconic scenes go this is the right one to choose:  a lovely young girl is told by an angel that she's going to have a baby. A young man dying, pierced by nails, is in a different category altogether.

We stayed in what had once been part of the Badia, a Benedictine Abbey in the very heart of Florence, originally built in the 10th century, but reconstructed later. We slept in a vast room with a bit of fresco on the wall. I first stayed there almost forty years ago....

A vast desk there too.

At Malpensa Airport the things we sit on are red too.

.... the barstool and the bar which stretches on forever.