Julie & Julia

While I'm not smitten with the idea of blogging about cooking my way through an entire Julie Child cook book, I'm smitten with Julia Child. She was a magnifiscent woman, undaunted by the fierce challenge of French cooking. And she reigned supreme. I can't wait for this film to come out. I'm sure Meryl Streep will be at her spot-on best.

Lilacs for Diane

My sister Diane loves lilacs and would surround herself with them daily if she could. Sweet little lavender explosions of scent that last only a couple of weeks. They lend romance and elegance to any room you put them in.

As the poet Amy Lowell says in her poem 'Lilacs';
You persuaded the housewife that her dish pan was of silver.
And her husband an image of pure gold.
You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms
Through the wide doors of Custom Houses--
You, and sandal-wood, and tea,
Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks
When a ship was in from China.

Happy Spring, my dear Diane!

Robin's Egg Bleu

This is a special gift for my sister, Carol. You think that I spelled blue wrong? No, that's how you spell it in French. She has a special place in her heart for the color, and I can see why. Happy Spring, my dear sister!

Magnolia

My neighbor Erin has kindly allowed me to photograph her magnolias as I wait for my own to bloom. I have a madness for magnolias. Their soft pink-white blossoms slowly unfolding in a spring breeze on branches that, a month ago, were bare. And so quickly, they're gone ...

Sound

Music, when soft voices die, vibrate in the memory ~ Byron
As if the pictures in Sensual Living weren't enough to strike an emotional chord in your heart, Llyod's descriptions of the sounds we have known all our lives are also vivid and powerful:
the gentle applause of rain
voices of people we love
a cat purring
village church bells
the clang of a toaster popping up

What sounds do you treasure?

Sensual Living

Another of my favorite home décor books that really isn't even a home décor book is Sensual Living by Claire Lloyd. Much like The Sensual Home, she outlines her own subjective and earthly pleasures with stunning photography and literary references.

These pages, from the Smell chapter, are accompanied by some lines from Proust. In A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, he makes the observation; ‘when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are all dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.’
I have such scent-memories from my own childhood, more enduring than my memories of sights and sounds. What are yours?

The Sensual Home

In my attempt to return to a more simple, unvarnished aesthetic, I’ve revisited one of my favorite home décor books, which is really not a home décor book at all. It’s more, as the book’s tagline declares, of a ‘liberating your senses and changing your life’ book.

Some of the tenets that Ilse Crawford advocates are:
· One of the biggest luxuries in modern life is uncommitted time. Defend it fiercely and value it. Free time is not wasted. Your brain needs to filter through the daily assault of information and come up with new ideas.
· Have at least one room you think of as a decompression chamber; plan it as a haven from the stresses of daily life.
· Think tactile; what is the point of surfaces that don’t thrill your fingers? Choose sensuous surfaces such as wood, fur, leather, wool, cashmere, and linen.
· Make room for the things that have meaning for you.
· Art is a way of making sense of the world. Invest in a piece you really like and place it where you can enjoy it every day.
· Know your home in every phase of the day. Learn to appreciate and plan around how the light falls at angles throughout the day.
· Cooking is like love, it should be entered with abandon or not at all.
· Nothing completes a home like good friends.

If you don’t own this book, you really should.

Stately, plump …

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve been thinking about Ireland’s greatest author, James Joyce. Those who have read Joyce’s Ulysses fall into two camps; they either hate him or love him. I fall in the latter group. Ulysses was voted by the Modern Library as number one on the list of 100 important books of the 20th century, and if you’ve read this stream-of-consciousness book, you understand how radically different this was from all other literature in 1920, and for several decades to follow.

If you have never picked up Ulysses, there are a few things you might want to know. Joyce based his story on the ancient Homeric poem, The Odyssey. Joyce’s protagonist is a man named Leopold Bloom; we follow him through a single day in his travels through the streets of Dublin. As in Homer’s poem, he meets with the same obstacles, temptations and moral dilemmas as Odysseus. Well, not the very same, but symbolically similar.

I first read Ulysses when I was in my twenties. I found myself often losing the thread of the plot easily and getting swept up in the textures, colors, smells and sounds. This is perhaps what troubles so many readers; Ulysses resembles life more than literature, or what we conventionally think of as literature. In real life, sights, sounds, smells, colors and textures all come at us randomly. I would like to tell you that in Ulysses the sensory experiences have no meaning and do not contribute to the story – but that would be untrue. Joyce has packed his book with hundreds of little complex enigmas. Did I perceive and understand every reference … no. But that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the colorful day of one man’s life.

For example, as Dedalus is walking along the shore talking to himself, he reflects upon the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible.’ Roughly translated, the visible world informs his understanding of life; he is Odysseus facing the irresistible call of the Sirens.

For me, the most poignant part of the book is the very end where Bloom’s wife recalls an intimate moment with him.
O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The Art of Nature

Georgia O’Keefe was one of my first artistic crushes. Her larger-than-life flowers were unapologetically sensual; her colors and shapes defied convention.

So when my friend Leann showed me this article from the British editiion of Country Living on the work of this London artist, Sarah Graham, I was newly smitten. Her work doesn’t technically resemble O’Keefe’s, except perhaps in subject matter. She uses charcoal or pencil on brown butcher’s paper, or white paper.

Like her mother, my mother is a voracious gardener. This madness for flowers is the sort of thing that sinks into your psyche whether you see it coming or not. It was only in my thirties that I was able to embrace this enthusiasm I inherited from my mother; either in the garden or in my work.

With my renewed interest in representing nature in its raw, noble uniqueness in my home, this approach holds endless possibilities for me. So, with all due respect, I’m going to borrow Sarah’s approach. I already have something in mind … to go above the mantle and compliment the new chair.