Besides the great central food market, Les Halles, there were, of course, lots of neighborhood street markets throughout Paris in the 19th C. While poking around after finding yesterday’s painting by Béraud of Les Halles, I came across this picture by Victor-Gabriel Gilbert, Read More
Picturing a World
Béraud at Les Halles
February 2, 2018
While cleaning up my writing room this week, I found a slip of paper in a box of old research for Where the Light Falls. It noted that a painting of Les Halles by Jean Béraud was shown at the 1879 Salon (at which Jeanette exhibits) and was now at the Haggin Read More
Art and action
January 24, 2018
Cover art by Kathleen Jennings
A blog post on her cover art by one of my favorite illustrators working today, Kathleen Jennings, piqued my interest in the new fantasy novel, Arcanos Unraveled by Jonna Gjevre. I admire good cover art and dust jackets; I'm interested in textiles and love fantasy; it's great to be introduced to a new author, and this one grew up on a sheep farm! Of course I bought a copy. One thing we can do as artists in a time of trouble is support each others’ creativity.
Kathleen Jennings does so in praising a different artist who has illustrated her upcoming Heart of Owl Abbas.
That artist is Audrey Bejaminsen. She’s new to me. I find her fantastical work strange and accomplished and am grateful to have been led to it
Finally, Jonna Gjevre has other suggestions for making a difference in the world we face today. Also for her thoughts on publishing the novel this winter, click here.
Update: Funny, fast, one twisty yarn! Now that I've read it, I can report that Gjevre does indeed knit up the plot with oodles of textile lore. The characters are vivid. Some are archetypal, like the crone who owns a wool shop; others wackily original, like the kindly paranoid father who raises his hedge witch child in an abandoned missile silo. Not deeply resonant in a mythic way, but great fun—and no one who calls the University of Wisconsin alma mater should miss it. Read More
Kathleen Jennings does so in praising a different artist who has illustrated her upcoming Heart of Owl Abbas.
That artist is Audrey Bejaminsen. She’s new to me. I find her fantastical work strange and accomplished and am grateful to have been led to it
Finally, Jonna Gjevre has other suggestions for making a difference in the world we face today. Also for her thoughts on publishing the novel this winter, click here.
Update: Funny, fast, one twisty yarn! Now that I've read it, I can report that Gjevre does indeed knit up the plot with oodles of textile lore. The characters are vivid. Some are archetypal, like the crone who owns a wool shop; others wackily original, like the kindly paranoid father who raises his hedge witch child in an abandoned missile silo. Not deeply resonant in a mythic way, but great fun—and no one who calls the University of Wisconsin alma mater should miss it. Read More
Sisterhood and creativity
January 20, 2018
I try to keep these posts short and connect you to something you might use. This one is longer because, on this anniversary of the Trump inauguration, I’m pulling together several things to help myself move through and beyond the grimy, depressing aspects of the present day to something life-enhancing. I hope it helps you, too.
First, sisterhood: Reports on the Women’s March redux is enheartening. In the era of #MeToo, it’s good to focus on women’s worth—enlightened male companions welcome. We must also remember that it’s not just sexual predation that is an issue. I was interested to read in the January 12, 2018, Guardian, that “[a]fter 2017’s Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets included only four women, 250 writers have agreed to boycott anthologies, conferences and festivals where women are not fairly represented.” Read More
First, sisterhood: Reports on the Women’s March redux is enheartening. In the era of #MeToo, it’s good to focus on women’s worth—enlightened male companions welcome. We must also remember that it’s not just sexual predation that is an issue. I was interested to read in the January 12, 2018, Guardian, that “[a]fter 2017’s Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets included only four women, 250 writers have agreed to boycott anthologies, conferences and festivals where women are not fairly represented.” Read More
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Blonde lace
January 17, 2018
Blog post tip: For fans of textile history trivia, Loretta Chase’s Two Nerdy History Girls post, Blonde lace on the 19th Century Red Carpet, is worth a look. As she explains, the word blonde in this context refers to undyed silk.
Twelfth Night, 2018
January 5, 2018
On this Twelfth Day of Christmas, a last image. Robin Tanner was one of the English artists who were much influenced by a 1926 show of Samuel Palmer’s work at the Victoria and Albert in London. Somehow it seems fitting to catch a final glimpse of the receding holiday from high up and far away. The vantage point might also be the start of a story that moves down into the lit street with evening pressing in from the countryside beyond. And it seems to hold secrets—always a good beginning for art. Read More
Nappy New Year
January 1, 2018
I was planning to skip a post today. Then I saw this The Saturday Evening Post cover at Lines and Colors. And THEN I mistyped Nappy for Happy and decided, yup, it has to stay. Here's to chuckles as well as tears in 2018! Read More
Flowery insults
December 30, 2017
The phrase petaloid monocot jumped out at me this morning from one of my Christmas presents, a copy of Walter and Graham Judds’ Flora of Middle-Earth: What a great insult! Imagine growling at somebody, “You, petaloid monocot.”
How about concocting a list of similar, offensive-sounding, totally innocuous, botanical phrases for personal use or attribution to a fictional character? As 2018 nears, beware the glaubrous corms.
The Judds’ book satisfies the Tolkien, naturalist, and woodcut geek in many ways. For a discussion by the father-son, author-artist team on why they wrote it, click here. Read More
How about concocting a list of similar, offensive-sounding, totally innocuous, botanical phrases for personal use or attribution to a fictional character? As 2018 nears, beware the glaubrous corms.
The Judds’ book satisfies the Tolkien, naturalist, and woodcut geek in many ways. For a discussion by the father-son, author-artist team on why they wrote it, click here. Read More
I take up the challenge
December 26, 2017
Yesterday, I called for feminist meditations or new art based on the appearance of two midwives in the same apocryphal gospel that introduced the ox and the ass to Nativity lore. Well, after writing the post, I took up my own challenge.
Midwives at the Manger
I don’t care who the father was,
The girl could not give birth alone.
So young, both of them.
Shepherds might have known what to do;
They assist their ewes at lambing time;
But they came later.
No, the carpenter begged for a midwife,
And the innkeeper sent for me, Zebel.
I brought Salome along.
(We did have names, but forget
Anything you’ve heard about a withered hand.)
We arrived by starlight,
Angels up in the rafters,
Otherwise a normal birth: pain,
Blood, squalling baby, a bath afterward.
An easier labor than most, I admit,
As though the child would spare his mother then
Inevitable grief.
Behind the manger where I laid him down, swaddled,
A sweet-breathed ox and ass who came in when we did
Were allowed to stay. For millennia.
Only we departed, Salome and me.
All the same, we had been there, were there, are there,
Midwives to transcendence.
© 2017 by Katherine Keenum. All rights reserved
For Giotto’s splendid Nativity with angels in the rafters and the midwives, click here. Read More
Midwives at the Manger
I don’t care who the father was,
The girl could not give birth alone.
So young, both of them.
Shepherds might have known what to do;
They assist their ewes at lambing time;
But they came later.
No, the carpenter begged for a midwife,
And the innkeeper sent for me, Zebel.
I brought Salome along.
(We did have names, but forget
Anything you’ve heard about a withered hand.)
We arrived by starlight,
Angels up in the rafters,
Otherwise a normal birth: pain,
Blood, squalling baby, a bath afterward.
An easier labor than most, I admit,
As though the child would spare his mother then
Inevitable grief.
Behind the manger where I laid him down, swaddled,
A sweet-breathed ox and ass who came in when we did
Were allowed to stay. For millennia.
Only we departed, Salome and me.
All the same, we had been there, were there, are there,
Midwives to transcendence.
© 2017 by Katherine Keenum. All rights reserved
For Giotto’s splendid Nativity with angels in the rafters and the midwives, click here. Read More
Midwives on Christmas
December 25, 2017
In the 2nd C, when the ox and the ass entered Christian nativity lore, so did a pair of midwives for the Virgin Mary. I learned about them a decade ago when I first read A Book of Carols (1966) edited by Eleanor Sayre and illustrated with artwork from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. A note to an engraving says that until the 15th century, the midwives were frequently shown performing various tasks Read More