Here is my daughter knitting a square for the Haiti project, for which you can see yesterday’s post or download the flyer here.
If she looks a little dreamy-eyed, it’s because we are also watching Walt Disney’s Cinderella, made in 1950. My, the animation is impressive, considering it was hand-drawn and painted frame by frame with no computer assistance! Go watch again the scene where Cinderella scrubs the floor, her image reflected in dozens of lovely floating multicolored soap bubbles.
This rather yellowed sketch is from a previous lifetime when my husband and I were first married and living in Paris, drawing, painting, sculpting. Before children. Before we became rather yellowed ourselves. I chose this particular walk down la rue des souvenirs, when we were temporary expatriates, in honor of Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), whose birthday it is today.
Beach was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and was actually christened Nancy, but she later changed it to a name she chose herself. There were generations of clergy and missionaries on both sides of her family, but Beach chose literary passion and Francophilia over religious fervor. Definitely similarities there though.
Perhaps she became a Francophile during her father’s assignment to the American Church in Paris when she was fourteen, because she returned to Paris later to pursue studies in French literature, and stayed for the rest of her life. Her research led her to a meeting, collaboration, and romance with Adrienne Monnier, who had in 1915 opened a bookshop-cum-lending library specializing in French translations of modern works. By 1921 Beach’s own shop, Shakespeare and Company, was installed across the street at 12, rue de l’Odéon, in the Latin Quarter, offering classical and modern literature and periodicals in English and English translations.
Shakespeare and Company quickly became one of the centers of the Paris literary world, with authors, poets, and readers wandering back and forth across the street between the two complementary shops (imagine!) to engage in discussion, exchange news, and borrow money (struggling writers being ever short-handed). But she was far more than a seller of books. Kind, cheerful, enthusiastic, and generous as well as learned, she took it upon herself to help aspiring writers succeed, introducing them to one another and to helpful contacts, taking them round to visit Gertrude Stein’s salon of poets and artists, organizing readings to bring their works before the public. She helped James Joyce and Henry Miller find publishers for their work, which was banned and unprintable in their native countries.
When the Germans invaded Paris in 1939, Beach was forced to close her shop and spent six months in an internment camp, afterwards hiding out with a friend (she was after all an enemy American) until the war’s end. The shop never reopened after the war, but a new version was launched in 1951 under the same name, with Beach’s permission, on rue de la Bûcherie (about which more in a later post).
Pretend you are a young, aspiring American writer on your first visit to Paris. Back on the farm they think you’re crazy. You wander into Shakespeare and Company and encounter Ernest Hemingway… F. Scott Fitzgerald… Ezra Pound. Miss Beach ropes you in to help edit press proofs. In the afternoon she takes you to the Steins’ to see the new work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and in the evening to admire Josephine Baker dancing at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées. Paris in the 1920s was a refuge from Puritanism, Prohibition, and Prejudice, and Sylvia Beach did her part to make it so. Happy Birthday, Patron Saint of the Independent Booksellers.
Kara
This poem, which I believe is by Arthur Guiterman (someone please correct me if I am wrong), is in our family verse book, and sometimes we recite it on a Saturday morning to jump-start the chores. Better, though, is when we play “Happy Little Working Song” from the film Enchanted at a really loud volume. That gets us moving, and into a jolly mood, too.
Today all the text is in the sketch.
For years I’ve assumed that there was an etymological connection between “lentil” and Lent.” You have no idea how disappointed I am to have discovered recently that it is nonexistent. It seemed so perfectly and seasonally appropriate. Sigh. Well, more on that later. In the meantime, here is my favorite recipe for “Lent”-il soup, from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, modified somewhat by me:
Pick over & rinse 3 cups raw lentils. Simmer them in 7 cups water or stock (I use veggie bouillon), on the stovetop or in a crock pot, until lentils are almost tender.
Saute in olive oil 2 tsp. fresh minced garlic, 1 cup chopped onion, 1 cup minced celery, and 1 cup chopped carrots, until almost tender. Add to almost-tender lentils along with 1-1/2 cups chopped fresh tomatoes or, lacking those, fire-roasted canned tomatoes; 2 T dry red wine; 2 T lemon juice; 1-1/2 T molasses or brown sugar; 1 T wine vinegar; 1 T capers. Simmer for a while longer until lentils and veggies are tender. Add black pepper and salt to taste.
This is even better the next day, after flavors have blended.
Aunt Mary
Lisa
Georgetown Cupcake often has a line out the door, but Sunday afternoon it was amazingly long, and customers were carting away cupcakes by the dozens. People were either stocking up on a supply to get them through the Oscars later that evening, or, with the approach of spring, planning to consume as many as possible while winter coats still disguise the results.
Willard
Oops… Does this happen to anyone else?
Terence
How is this for a romantic tale: Intellectual semi-invalid is still living at home in seclusion in her mid-thirties, quietly writing poetry and essays. Her published, widely read poems catch the attention of a handsome fellow-poet, six years her junior, who writes her a lengthy letter that says, among other things:
I love your verses with all my heart, Miss Barrett… so into me it has gone, and part of me it has become… and I love you too.
Thus began a correspondence—reluctant on her side, urgent on his, between Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), whose birthday it is today, and Robert Browning—that culminated in their growing mutual attachment and eventual secret elopement. Like many (all?) romantic tales, it had its dark underside, this one of slavery, paternal tyranny, multiple sad deaths, and mysterious illness.
Barrett was the first-born in a large prosperous family in Coxhoe, England, whose income derived partly from slave-worked plantations in Jamaica (perhaps this was related to Barrett’s later abolitionist stance). She was educated at home and demonstrated in childhood a gift for language: writing poetry, reading Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante, and learning Greek, Latin, and Hebrew (incorporated later into her poetry) sufficiently well to take up translation and analysis. To these she later added Italian, German, and Spanish.
But by age twenty she was already declining physically from some unknown, untreatable cause. The deaths of her mother and grandmother took their toll on her, and the accidental drowning of a favorite brother made her a recluse in her misery. In the meantime the abolition of slavery in England brought an end to the Jamaica income and obliged the family to live simply. Throughout all this she continued to write and publish essays and poetry, passionate, deeply felt, finely crafted, expressive of political and social as well as personal themes. And despite her seclusion, she corresponded widely with other writers and scholars.
Thus Browning was smitten. When he finally whisked Barrett off secretly to tie the knot and honeymoon in Italy, her father disinherited her—as he did each of his children who chose to marry. Some family therapy would not have been amiss here.
After their marriage Barrett showed Browning the sonnets she had been writing, the most famous of which (not the one above, but number XLIII) has been widely reproduced (and parodied). The couple stayed in Italy and, despite their late start, Barrett/Browning gave birth to a little Robert when she was 43. So their tale concludes probably as happily as any—with the two of them madly in love, raising their babe, writing poetry together, respected, reasonably comfortable, and in ITALY besides. Happy Birthday (and apologies), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with gratitude not only for the poetry but for the love story.
Follow-up to Each Day post 3/4: more sketches from a Vermont trip, this one from an afternoon hike along country lanes.
To see some really beautiful images of Vermont, go to the blog of Vermont artist Susan Abbott, who, among the many other things she does, has been traveling the state capturing its wonders in paint and sketchbook. Her son is the creator of the “802” video mentioned in yesterday’s post; obviously talent runs in the family.
