Fine Art Friday

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Pastourelle (Shepherdess) (1889)
by William Bouguereau

I’m listening to Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and this picture closely resembles my mind’s picture of Tess.  Tess’s story is a sad tale: she grew up in a dysfunctional family, was assaulted by a “gentleman”, struggled as a single mother, lost her baby, and moved away to start anew.  This book reminds me of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  I’ve never before read Hardy; listening is an easy way to get some exposure to this author I feel I ought to know. 

Listening to Hardy is an odd juxtaposition to reading Wendell Berry.  Hardy makes you indignant and angry about the tragedy of this young woman, the toil and drudgery of her life as a dairy maid; he is unsettling and edgy.  Berry paints pictures of healthy, nourished families within an agrarian community where work is valued, souls are fed, generations are connected, and hope abounds.  

Random

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~  Opera practice (Carmen) continues.  The director put us into groupings with little back-stories to play out when we’re not singing.  I keep a boarding house for the four girls in my group who work at the cigarette factory.  I’m supposed to guard their reputation.  Opera choruses, so we’re told, have only 4 jobs: to be happy, sad, angry or shocked.  We are a happy chorus.

~  Honestly?  The best part of the Super Bowl for me?  Billy Joel’s piano playing during the National Anthem.  Diminished and augmented chords – I really liked his style of playing.  And I was thankful that he sang it straight.  All the note-bending attempts of some singers to be cutting-edge are wearisome.

~  A family of cougars moved onto the hill about three blocks from our house.  They have been harrassing humans; there were three reports last weekend.  It is my goal to hike to the top of this hill on my 50th birthday.  I am by nature a wuss.  You see the problem. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

~ This week my son and I will finish reading through the Latin Psalms.  We started in September 2004, reading about 10 verses a day.   We don’t get it all; we read through the English translation too. Nevertheless, certain phrases are embedding themselves in us.

~ I refuse to buy boring postage stamps.  My current favorites are Baseball Sluggers.  I was so sad when they ran out of Mary Cassatt stamps. Which ones do you like?

~  If you had a guest bedroom on the southwest corner of your house, with oak floors and one southern window, which colors would you recommend for the walls and accent?  I’m floundering at making a decision.  Monochromaticism has been a previous decorating sin I wish to repent of without swinging to garishness.  Do you have a guest room?  What color is it?

Poetry as Furniture

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From

Field Observations: An Interview with Wendell Berry
by Jordan Fisher-Smith

The country in front of us now falls off steeply toward Cane Run and
the horse barn. Berry says he hunted squirrels here as a boy. As we
begin to descend, I am thinking about boyhood and Berry’s poetry, and I
ask Berry if he agrees that school children should be reintroduced to
the lost institution of memorizing and reciting poems.

“Yes,” he replies, “you’ve got to furnish their minds.”

The idea of poetry as furniture expands within my imagination and for
weeks, I think about a poem committed to memory as an old chest of
drawers in the corner of a child’s room. At first the thing is simply a
place to put clothes. With time, the grown man, or grown woman learns
to see more of it: toolmarks left by the hand of a long-dead craftsman,
a cornice molding around its top in a shape found on ancient Greek
temples. And by gazing at its sturdiness for so many years, he or she
knows something about how to make things that last.

Financial Advice for Sons

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In a sentence: real estate trumps wheels. 

When we took car trips our teenaged boys used to scan the horizon looking for cool cars.  Their heads swiveled as they yelled, “Jaguar!” with whatever mysterious letters that are part of car models: XK, SE, GTS, CLK, MKS, MKZ, yadda, yadda, yadda. 

They saved their paper route and lawn care earnings and bought their first car or truck when they were 15 or 16.  Rule # 1 was that they had to pay cash for the vehicle (a rule we have followed ourselves).  Money is the number one struggle for many marriages. We wanted them to learn to wait, especially with an optional purchase, and to view voluntary debt with disgust.  No car payments allowed. 

Beyond that, I was attempting to change their view, persistently persuading them to think house instead of car.  If you drop all your available funds into a car, where will you find a down payment for a house?  I explained the tax law which is quite favorable to handyman-guys willing to build up some sweat equity. 

You can purchase a house, a junker; live in it for at least two years while you fix it up into a cute starter home; sell it, and reinvest your gain into another house.  The gain, if you reinvest, is tax free.  The sticking point is getting into the first house/trailer/shack.   It’s tough.  It takes long-term perspective.  But it can be done.  Our oldest son bought a home when he was nineteen with minimal assistance from us.   

Higher education plays a considerable part in the puzzle.   It is expensive.  I prayed that my  middle son would graduate from college debt-free, and the answer has been  “No.”  My intention is to do a better job researching avenues to ameliorate the load for our youngest.   Our assistance has been  minimal – part of me wishes it were more. The other part likes the independence and strength that develops when you put yourself through. 
 

Wendell Berry

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wendellberry wendellberry      i love his writing       wendellberry wendellberry wendellberry wendellberry
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I read two short stories aloud to my husband and son this weekend: The Hurt Man and Don’t Send a Boy to Do a Man’s Work.   After hearing The Hurt Man my husband exclaimed, “That’s some of the best writing I’ve ever heard.” I want to get up in the middle of the night and read more.  I want to grab people, stop them in their tracks and make them listen.  I want to buy 50 copies and pass them out left and right.   I am smitten.

Here are a few phrases which have captured me:

At the age of five Mat was beginning to prepare himself to help in educating his grandson, though he did not know it.

The shape of his hand in printed on the flesh of my thigh as vividly as a birthmark.  This man who was my grandfather is present in me, as I felt always his father to be present in him.

At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house.

Fine Art Friday

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Back from the Market, 1739
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

From A Short History of Art by Janson and Janson:

“Back from the Market shows life in a Parisian middle-class household.  Here we find such feeling for the beauty hidden in everyday life, and so clear a sense of spatial order, that we can compare him only to Vermeer.  However, Chardin’s technique is quite unlike any Dutch artist’s.  His brushwork renders the light on colored surfaces with a creamy touch that is both analytical and lyrical.  To reveal the inner nature of things, he summarizes forms, and subtly alters their appearance and texture, rather than describing them in detail.  Chardin’s genius discovered a hidden poetry in even the most humble objects and endowed them with timeless dignity.  His many still lifes avoid the sensuous appeal of their Dutch predecessors.  In Back from the Market, he treats the platter, bottles, and earthenware pot with a respect close to reverence.  Beyond their shapes, colors, and textures, they are to him symbols of the life of common people.”

Beauty hidden in everyday life. 

Sigh.

Happy Friday.

The Opus of Opera

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Opus (n. singular) – work
Opera (n. plural of opus) – works, theatrical performance set to music

The Opus of Opera is baaaad Latin.  What I mean to communicate in the title is the toil it takes to put an opera on, Labor Operum.   Opus means creative work.  So please excuse my Latin and let’s move on.

Some of you know that my brother is an opera singer, a tenor to be specific.   Guess what?  Next week, I get to be an opera singer for one night!  The Portland Opera is sending a team out to the hinterlands to  put on  an abridged version of Carmen by Bizet.  The local Children’s Choir, the Community Choir and the university Chamber Choir will sing the chorus parts of the final act.

We’ve been rehearsing, getting the music memorized, singing ourselves silly with the final, famous chorus. Altos are singing high Es and F#s at full-bore!  I’ve been looking for a sample of the dum DEE da dum dum tune we’re singing and this is the closest I could get.  Go to Disc 2, track 2, Les Voici La Quadrille.  Alas, we’re singing a perfectly wretched English translation.  I’ve always wanted a chance to use my high school French.

Next week we rehease with the Opera Company and learn to move and dance on stage while we sing.  There is safety in numbers, right? Yikes!  Oh, what great fun it will be for this middle-aged mama!

Poetry of Grief

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One of my newer online friends, Lynne, has been quiet on her blog for a while.

She and her family are going through hard times; a heavy, private grief.  I don’t know the trial, but I can hear the hurt.

Lynne is a poet, a very good poet.

Her Opus #11 is a must read, a beautiful expression of her heart.  The photographs on her blog are also her own. 

Reading Roundup – Jan 07

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Books Completed:

:: Confessions (Augustine) – finished the last books.  I wrote about it here.  I do hope to read this at least  one more time during my lifetime.

:: Dr. Thorne (Anthony Trollope) – I enjoyed Trollope’s third Barchester book very much.  His next in the series, Framley Parsonage, should arrive in the mail today!

:: Emma (Jane Austen) – audio book with quick searches in the written book for particular quotes.  Listening to a great book gets me over the motivational hump of ironing and cleaning the fridge.

:: Beowulf (Seamus Heaney, trans.) – I read and listened at the same time.  This epic Anglo-Saxon poem   stiffens the sinews, makes you want to benchpress, lift weights; it will accompany us on future car trips. 

:: Robin Hood (Howard Pyle) – a book for youth that’s fun to read as an adult.

:: Oxford Book of Ages (chosen by Anthony & Sally Sampson) – a library find, quotes from which filled at least ten pages in my journal.  Funny at places, poignant at others, it records what people wrote at a  particular age.  From newborn to 100 there are quotes for every age.

:: Ernest Rutherford, Architect of the Atom (Peter Kelman) – a science history book which I sold, but  quickly read before I shipped it off.  Science is my Scylla. Science is my Charybdis. 

:: Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking Peoples (Bede) – I’m glad that I read it but it took an effort towards the end.  Unfamiliar names, Egberts, Ethelfreds and Eadbalds, made me thankful for the Johns and Gregorys and Theodores.   This is a book which I will  open and  browse as I periodically clean and organize my bookshelves.  I wish I had the time right now, on the heels of Bede, to read The Life of St. Columba and Winston Churchill’s The Birth of Britain in his series The History of the English Speaking People.  Oh the synthesis!  I’m almost convincing myself!

Stalled for Lack of Time:

:: Kepler’s Witch (James Connor)
:: On the Incarnation (Athanasius)
:: Miniatures and Morals (Peter Leithart)

Reading Aloud to My Husband:

:: Life is So Good (George Dawson and Richard Glaubman)

House

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We watched an unusual episode of House last night.  Instead of a medical mystery to diagnose, the plot was driven by two relationships between doctor and patient:  House and a rape victim, and  Cameron and a terminal  homeless man.  As the young girl was processing through the ugliness she made a connection with House and refused to speak to any medical personnel except him.  Their conversations ranged from the meaning of life, the existence of God, eternity, to justice, the problem of evil, and abortion.

In juxtaposition to House’s patient is the homeless man who wants to spend a night in the hospital.  He refuses pain medication in the last hours/days of his life for a very odd reason. He has no family and no friends and wants to be remembered.  If he took the medicine, it would be an everyday, forgettable cancer death.  In his search for significance he chooses to go through the pain.  There is also an element of atoning for his past in the decision. 

After we turned the TV off, we sat and talked for half an hour about the consistencies and inconsistencies of the philosophical positions presented.  We put our reluctant 15 year old on the spot – how do you answer these valid questions? 

At 4:30 a.m. my husband woke me up to talk about it more.  “I figured it out,” he quietly exclaimed.  “I want to meet this writer.  We were focusing on the wrong storyline.  The man is a Christ figure.  What did he keep saying? ‘Remember me.’ He was doing what his father said.  He wouldn’t take the vinegar.  She washed his wounds after he died. His death was significant.  And how did the show begin? With STDs in young, middle and old people.  What is our disease and how is it transmitted? So House persuaded the girl that life is not significant in contrast to the old man who had no expectations but to die with significance.”

Did anyone see this?  What did you think?    

[Added later: Donna at Quiet Life also blogged about this episode here.  MFS at MentalMultivitamin blogged about it here.]