Sunday Scrapbag

"Spring"
Walter Crane

Yes, I know, it's summer now. But I love this painting, and I completely forgot to post it during spring, so here it is, just a few days late. It reminds me very much of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that I learned as a child:

     Afternoon on a Hill

     I will be the gladdest thing
          Under the sun!
     I will touch a hundred flowers
          And not pick one.
     I will look at cliffs and clouds
          With quiet eyes,
     Watch the wind bow down the grass,
          And the grass rise.
     And when lights begin to show
          Up from the town,
     I will mark which must be mine,
          And then start down!

Quite fitting to the picture, except that the girl in the picture has picked some flowers. Oh, well, one can't always have perfection, can one?

 

How d'you like the new look of this blog? Are we liking the barely-there-lavender background? The leaf green accents (also in the artwork)? I haven't made up my mind about the background, but will live with this whispery lavender a bit longer and see. This blog has gone through so many different looks, only because I tire easily of looking at the same thing all the time. Mind you, I wasn't always like that. My studio at Houston Grand Opera had the same prints and photos hanging on its walls for years; I would only change one or two every few years or so, and I was in it for thirteen years (my first two years, I didn't have a studio of my own, because I was only in the Studio—that's with an upper-case "S"—and didn't become a bona fide member of the music staff till my third year).

 

Let's see, what have I been up to lately that I can actually tell you about? Now, you know I'm funnin' ya; I'm much too straight-laced and have too much fear of the Lord ever to be up to no good. Not intentionally, anyway.

I'm reading a few things, trying to be a literary multi-tasker:

• The Love Letters by Madeleine L'Engle. Have you ever heard of the book The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun? They're French translations of letters (possibly authored by Guillerague) that were supposedly written by a 18th-century Portuguese nun who had a torrid affair with a love-'em-and-leave-'em officer. Very Heloise and Abelard kind of thing. Anyway, L'Engle's novel takes these letters and juxtaposes them with the story of a modern-day heroine. I've only just started it; pretty dismal thus far, but strangely compelling and difficult to put down. In addition to flipping back and forth through time between modern day and the seventeenth century, L'Engle also flips to and from the modern heroine's childhood. Sounds confusing, but L'Engle manages to make it all quite lucid, with the help and abundant use of that handy little tool, the ellipsis.
• The Life of Faustina Kowalska: The Authorized Biography by Sr. Sophia Michalenko, C. M. G. T. This is a re-read, actually. For those who don't already know, St. Faustina, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II, was the 20th-century mystic through whom Jesus Christ gave the world particular devotion to the Divine Mercy, and the powerful chaplet of the same name.
• The Lord by Romano Guardini. Yes, I'm still reading this! The writing is dense and the print is very small, and I'm taking it at a very meditative (i. e., snail's) pace. Besides, I'm reading two other things at the same time, not to mention the readings at Mass and the readings in the Office of Readings (of the Divine Office), which I pray every morning. That's a lot of reading.

I usually reserve the afternoon for my leisure reading, but sometimes I forego my own thing and watch a video with Mom—a movie, or a few episodes of a TV series. Lately we've been watching my DVDs of The Golden Girls in order from the beginning. I prefer watching series in order from the beginning. I'm very obsessive-compulsive that way. With many series—Frasier, for one—it's advisable to do it that way, as there are continuing story lines, such as the Niles and Daphne saga. The TV-Land channel used to air a few back-to-back episodes of The Golden Girls in the early evenings around 6:00 or so, but they keep changing their lineup, which is sort of annoying. Mom has come late to The Golden Girls; up until very recently, she swore up and down she didn't like it. But now she loves it.

 

Well, I've been "up to" more than this, but I'm tired of typing now, so this is all you're getting. Till next time, anyway! Ciao, ragazzi!