by Sinead - 2008
My daughter is a photographer. This is her Monet-style photo of the garden pond. When the fish hear the backdoor slap, they dash to their meal-site, just in case!
Archive for May, 2008
Have you heard that fairies (or faeries or fay folk) are alighting in town and country, making their homes in hollows and gardens and tucked away places? It’s true, and they are everywhere. My mom and my sister have many residents in their yards, and have supported them by building houses, installing fences and paths, and planting beautiful gardens to encourage them to stay. I didn’t have any fairies in my yard, so my mom and sister helped me out, and sent a fairy, a castle, and a couple odds and ends to me.
It was quiet this afternoon. We had the requisite barbecue yesterday, children and extraneous friends drifted off on their own agendas, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. I decided it was time for my little adopted fairy to have a home.
First, I put their tower castle on a hill. It reminds me of the towers the monks in Great Britain built to protect themselves for the marauding Vikings.
Once that was done, I added the plants, a pond, a path, and a bee hive! Then I introduced the fairy to her new home.
She looks pretty happy sitting on the side of her pond. If she is still there tomorrow morning when I step out into the back yard, I will know she plans to stay.
The fairy is called Columbine Cornglow
She is a creator of bounty and harvest.
She lives in quiet gardens near water.
She is only seen in the light of a full moon.
She wears pink and green and yellow like columbine flowers. She has butterfly wings the colour of yellow corn.
Edmund Dulac
I knew there were fairies when I was a child. There were no fairies at home in the city; they lived in the woods where I spent summers at my grandparents cottage. I built houses for those fairies. First, I would collect the supplies: twigs, bark, acorns, moss, and lichen. I had no idea what lichen was, botanically, but I loved its appearance. My very favorite was called British Soldiers, which evoked all kinds of magical stories for me. I have since learned in Latin it is Cladonia Cristatella; really quite a beautiful name. I’ve also learned that lichen is a symbiosis of two organisms: fungus and algae. That didn’t matter then. What mattered was it made a comely, red and green garden for my fairy houses.
Warwick Goble
First, I would search through the woods near the cottage to find the perfect little nook between the roots of an oak tree. It had to be an oak tree; fairies were particular about that. Then I would use twigs and bark to build a cozy, small cottage. I would lay moss on the floor before adding the roof, so the interior would be comfortable for the fay folk. When the house was complete, I would line a pebbly path with acorns, and cover the ground around the house with a garden of moss and lichen. If I had a found a particularly nice rock on my walk that day, I would add it as a piece of sculpture to the garden.
Arthur Rackman
I checked on the houses when we returned, every weekend. Sometimes, after a storm or a ravaging squirrel, the houses needed repairs. I maintained them all summer. I don’t know where the fairies lived during the winter, when we didn’t go to the cottage. Maybe they hibernated in hollow tree trunks, I wasn’t sure.
John Anster Fitzgerald
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
I read this when I was very, very young. Not that I was reading Shakespeare at that time (and I avoid him to this day, whenever possible… sorry). It came up in the context of poetry somewhere, but I can’t remember where. It imprinted, as animals do on the first ‘mother’ they come across, on my brain. These words of admonishment pop up from their little hiding place when least expected. When they appear, I know it is time for change. In 2007, I promised myself major metamorphosis before 2009 ended. I figured that gave me enough time to figure out what I wanted to do next, and the space to figure out a way to go about doing it. I am half-way through that timeline, and busily working towards the successful end. I think Brutus was talking about one tide, one time, one chance. My life has had many changes of tide, and I am grateful that I have always had the courage to take off on them. Of course ‘taking’ a change in course is not exactly an apt description. For desired change to occur, one normally has to work for it. At least, that has been my experience.
Yet for all of the joy, all of the experiences, all of the challenges, all of the people in my life, I feel there hasn’t been enough, and I am starting to worry about running out of time. It is a frightening feeling – I panic. I have to quickly slam that door shut, and open another.
Figuring out what I wanted to do next, on this new path I have laid for myself, was easy. I want to write, and I want to get paid to write, and I want to be able to write from anywhere I want, at whatever time I want. Okay, so much for that. Plan number two. I have been applying for various positions over the past year, testing the water, practicing, pondering. This week was crunch week for two different posts I felt I could do justice, and that I had a chance of at least interviewing for. But applications!!! What a pain. I like writing. I love writing. I can sit and write for hours and hours and hours. But this was not fun. Many, many questions requiring one page answers each. Blech!
The most difficult application is in. I am almost finished with the second. Then there were the letters of recommendation. More blech. Calling people, asking them the favor, picking up the letter. Time consuming is a major understatement. Now it is Friday, and I am looking at a four-day weekend during which I am going to indulge myself and pretend I write for a living, instead of filling out job applications.
And thus, here I am at the Friday Confessional, instituted by The Literate Kitten. Half of my writing confession is above. The rest follows. On a little trip to Savannah, Georgia in March, I began a new novel. I am now on page 166 – I wrote only two pages during the week this week, but most of my writing is done on the weekend, anyway. I find it difficult to write in the evening; there are too many distractions and just too many other tasks calling me (dog, laundry, refrigerator!). While the writing waits until the weekend, it is hard to keep an inspired thread going with that five day break in between. Now Friday is half over, and I am spending my free time writing this; the novel will have to wait for Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I hope by next Friday I can report another ten pages completed. Here ends the confession for the week.
Iris’s life couldn’t get much more complicated. She runs a vintage clothing shop which is barely supporting her, she is having an affair with a married man who frightens her by wanting to get serious, and she lusts for the forbidden: her step-brother. Unfortunately, her life can and does get more complicated. She receives a phone call that her great aunt, of whom she has never heard, is a patient in a mental hospital and about to be released after more than 60 years of incarceration, can Iris come and get her and care for her?
O’Farrell’s telling of the story is dreamy and intense at the same time. Sometimes pain filled, some times frightening, it is part gothic novel and part modern suspense. There have been many stories written of the British colonies, the servants, the children brought up by the native ayahs while there parents drank tea under the mimosa trees. In 1911 Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden about Mary Lennox, a difficult child, whose family was wiped out by cholera in their home in the Indian colony. Mary was found alone in the deserted house, near the body of her ayah. In O’Farrell’s book Esme Lennox, also an unusual and difficult child, is found during a cholera epidemic alone with her dead ayah and rocking the corpse of the baby brother she adored.
When returning to Edinburgh with her parents and sister, Esme becomes even more strange than she was in India. She reads, she is not interested in a husband, and then her perfect (and jealous) sister Kitty mentions that 16 year old Esme is having hallucinations. That is all it takes for a doctor to commit her to a lunatic asylum.
Stories have revealed this was a common occurrence for women who were “different” in the 1930’s and earlier. One could be put away for “going on long walks alone,” for “reading too many books,” or being “too interested in boys.” These women were then subjected to various forms of torture including cold baths, comas induced by insulin injection, and horrifying cliterodectomies and frontal lobotomies. If you weren’t insane to begin with, you certainly were when they were done with you.
Sixty-one years later, Iris picks up her great aunt, and ultimately brings her into the family home, which has been divided into flats. Esme remembers every room, every doorknob, and it all brings back the past she has been shifting in and out of her whole life. The story changes from Esme’s view, and her memories of the family secrets, to Iris’s frazzled voice, interspersed with Kitty’s recollections. Younger sister Kitty is now in a nursing home with Alzeheimers.
The novel weaves the reader into the weft of family lies, betrayal, and the selfish destruction of another’s life. There is revelation inside of surprise inside of surprise by the end. It is a very sad story you should read.
In an interview of Lennox in The Guardian:
The novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, is set in the 1930s and it is a book I have wanted to write for a long time. I tried to start it more than a decade ago but I ended up abandoning it to write what became my first novel, After You’d Gone. This was in the mid-90s, when the aftershocks of Thatcher’s care in the community scheme were still being felt. The large Victorian-built asylums had been closed down and as many as 20,000 people were sent out into the “community”.
Around this time, there were stories circulating about some of these women - they tended to be female, more often than not - who had been put away in their youth for reasons of immorality. They had shown too much interest in boys, or not enough; they had had an affair or even got themselves pregnant.
Sometimes they had been put away for almost no reason at all. A friend told me about his grandmother’s cousin who had just died, a month away from being discharged from an institution in the Midlands. She had been committed in the 1920s, at the age of 19, for planning to elope with a legal clerk. I spoke to someone whose aunt had been incarcerated in Colney Hatch, north London, for “taking long walks”.
I could not forget this cousin, or the girl of the long walks. That there had been an era when a woman could be considered insane for such things was a horrifying thought. And so I began to delve deeper, to read books about the subject, to track down records, to talk to former patients and employees.
It is a shameful and shadowed chapter in our society’s history. And despite having spent years researching the subject, despite having read every book I could find about women and psychiatric institutions, I really had no idea just how widespread this issue was until people started approaching me after every single reading to say: this happened to me, to my mother, to my grandmother.
From Barnes and Noble:
Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, and raised in Wales and Scotland, Maggie O’Farrell worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and as an editor at The Independent on Sunday before bursting on the literary scene in 2000 with her acclaimed first novel, After You’d Gone.
Since her extraordinary debut, O’Farrell’s fiction has earned more accolades. Her third novel, The Distance Between Us received the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award; and in 2007, O’Farrell achieved international bestsellerdom with The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.
More information on Lennox can be found on her website.
India is such a vibrant country. I just had to close with some photos:
Ellora Kailasa Temple
Flower Shop
Hampi Hindu Temple
Hyderabad Mosque
Theatre Kathakali
Small Traffic Jam
Water Buffalo
First disclaimer: I don’t read books I don’t like. Life is too short… you know, the ‘so many books, so little time’ thing. There really are so many things to do, books to read, gardens to weed, and then there’s all that time wasted, sleeping. So, if I read a chapter or two, and I just can’t get into it, I put the book down. Even if it is a gift from my best friend; I do not like to waste my reading time.
I had great expectations for The Secret History of Moscow when I read Neil Gaiman’s comment,
A lovely, disconcerting book that does for Moscow what I hope my own Neverwhere may have done to London… the prose and the atmosphere is beautiful and decaying, and everything’s grey with astonishing little bursts of unforgettable colour… deep dark, remarkable stuff.
And then when I read the blurb on the back of the book, I thought, wow. This is a book for me,
Every city contains secret places. Moscow in the tumultuous 1990’s is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets – a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and fairytale creatures whisper strange tales to those who would listen.
Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia. In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away - prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances. Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal…in the secret history of Moscow.
Second disclaimer: I don’t like to say bad things about books I … don’t care for. I appreciate how very difficult it is to write a book. What a challenge it is to find an agent. How hard the agent has to work to sell a book to a publisher. I don’t think bad books get published. Who am I to malign something that people have been so dedicated to, that people have spent so much time working on? So if I can’t say wonderful things about a book, I just don’t say anything at all.
I felt I had to stick with this book. It was on my Once Upon a Time Challenge II list, for one thing. I really wanted to like it, for another. I loved Neverwhere, I really like urban fantasy. Unfortunately, this story just didn’t work for me.
One big problem was I could not become fond of any of the characters. One of the gods in the underworld was a cow! Cows, in my opinion, are just not revere-able. When this cow was milked, it splat out stars. I just couldn’t see it. I didn’t have much empathy for the main character, Galina, or any of her side kicks, either.
There was so much Russian history, I was completely clueless. I had to skim over lots of the historical stuff. Another problem for me was I could see Moscow, but I just could not picture the world below the city. There was a lot going on: Russian mafia, fairy tales, gypsies, politics, capitalist Russia, mental institution/prisons, and on and on. It was smatterings of so much different stuff, I became impatient and could read only little bits at a time.
Sedia’s writing is beautiful, but I simply didn’t like the story very much. Sorry. If you are interested, Sedia has a website you can visit.
Photo by Tait Chirenje
Once again, Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings has jettisoned me back to another time in my life. I had to search across bookshelves and through boxes, and finally found two volumes I purchased in the 1980’s from The Black Pennell Press. This photo of the last page tells you what makes these particular small press books nonpareil. These limited edition volumes were hand-set, printed on handmade paper, and hand-bound. That means the printer painstakingly, most definitely lovingly, set every single letter and space marker from individual metal letters to print this book, and each page was printed by hand.
In 1439, Johann Gutenberg invented metal, movable type, which greatly simplified the existing method of book production, which was handwritten manuscripts. For the next 500 years, virtually all printed matter was produced on letterpress equipment.
Printing is primarily divided into three main categories depending on whether the image surface that gets inked is indented - engraving, or flat - lithography, or raised - letterpress. In letterpress, the image is raised metal, cast backwards, then inked and pressed onto the paper. If you run your hand over the page, you can feel the indentation of the letters.
To get an idea of the complexity of letterpress printing, watch this short documentary of Firefly Press. You can learn more about the press at Elsa Photos.
Though letterpress is no longer an economically significant segment of the printing market, it continues to live on as the heart and soul of a wonderful world known as the private press movement.
If you are interested in letterpress printing, you can learn everything you need to know from this introduction at Five Roses.
The Black Pennell Press is located in Greenock, Scotland. It was established in 1982 by Thomas Rae after he retired from other printing business. Thomas Rae also produced books under the Grian-aig Press and the Signet Press names. I scoured the internet, but could find no recent mention of Thomas Rae. I did find a number of his books (just like my books) in university, small press books collections.
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