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January 2010

Saturday, January 30, 2010

In which we are feeling artsy

My favorite class in college was an art history course I took--something like Cave Painting from a Really Long Time Ago to Pictures Painted by People You've Heard of, or something like that. It covered the paintings at Lescaux up through the early nineteenth century, and our final was a series of 50 slides. The professor scrolled through and we had to identify the piece, the period, and the artist. I LOVED it. If there had been an entire degree plan structured around it, I'd still be there, believe me. As it was, I didn't even have enough spare credits to take the second half of the course and consequently used to know much more about Hellenic sculptures than Cubism. (I say "used to" because most of what I learned in college is GONE. I found a Russian history notebook a few years ago full of detailed notes about boyars and such and I literally could not remember a single fact. Oh, yes, I can. Parts of Russia are cold. See? I was paying attention.)

Anyway, I particularly loved the Renaissance paintings, the shift from purely religious works to a more secular perspective--although Renaissance madonnas are some of the most sublime works ever painted. But while I just admire these paintings, other folks are digging deeper.

Poor Leonardo is about to be exhumed so researchers can determine if the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait. (The rumor has been circulating for ages.) I remember seeing a documentary where a self-portrait of Leonardo was superimposed upon the Mona Lisa's face and the features were almost an exact match. And if memory serves, they fit the Shroud of Turin's features as well....

In further Leonardo news, someone else has apparently discovered a musical score buried in The Last Supper. You can actually listen to the music here. A commenter referred to it as "The Last Supper: The Musical", but it would have to go a LONG way to light a fire under Andrew Lloyd Webber.
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Friday, January 29, 2010

In which you might wonder what Valerius March looks like

Wonder no more, my dears. Charming reader Doris, who has shared her talents with her portrait of Brisbane, has come through again, creating a portrait of Valerius March, erstwhile physician and younger brother to Julia Grey. You can find his image here. I adore his March green eyes and the suggestion of an overbite, which I think makes him look earnest. Doris has also very kindly provided wallpaper of the image, in 1600x1200, 1280x1024, 1152x864, and 1024x768. Doris would be very pleased for you to make use of these images for your own personal enjoyment, but they are not for distribution.

Seeing this image of Valerius, I wonder which of the March brothers is your favorite so far? Julia claims her own favorite is Benedick, of whom we have seen very little--there was a quick reference to him in Silent in the Sanctuary. But we have gotten to know Valerius, Lysander, Bellmont, and Plum rather well. Which would you rather have as a sibling?
Thursday, January 28, 2010

In which we are domestic

I don't usually like granola. It's too sweet, too chewy, too oaty. (And too expensive--seriously, have you priced it lately? It's OATS. It shouldn't cost $8 for a small bag.) But my mother ran across this recipe on Chow, and it is SO worth the effort, largely because there really isn't any effort. It has far fewer ingredients than most granola recipes, and most of them you probably have hanging around the pantry. I love having it on hand to use as a topping for Greek yogurt. (The rest of my family just douses it in milk and eats it like cereal.) I make it with unsweetened toasted coconut--for some unaccountable reason I have FOUR bags of unsweetened coconut in my freezer and have no idea how to get rid of it all--and raisins. And it makes the house smell divine! Perfect project for a snowy afternoon because you will feel virtuous when you are finished and have something delicious to show for about five minutes' worth of puttering.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010

In which we talk of cabbages and kings

Alright, not really. But it sounds nicer than "miscellaneous things", don't you think? First off, several days ago I flogged Alan Bradley's delightful book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Now the second in the Flavia de Luce series is available for pre-order--on shelves March 9. The Weed That Strings The Hangman's Bag it is called, and the cover is a delicious pale violet with a dancing skeleton. My galpal Jomie alerted me to the fact that the book is about to come out, and I'm glad she did. I would have hated to have missed out on the further adventures of Flavia de Luce! (I should also point out that a few days ago I received a very charming email from the author himself thanking me for my support of his work. I dearly love to see nice people do well, so I think everyone who reads this should go out and buy two or perhaps seven copies of the book...)

On to matters perfumery....I've almost finished working my way through the samples I ordered from The Perfumed Court, and I sit in puzzlement. En Passant, I am absolutely enraptured with; Tea for Two had to be chucked out. But there are three that simple bewilder me because they just sort of hang about doing peculiar and inexplicable things. Stella McCartney's Rose Absolute is a pleasant enough rose when it goes on, but it dried down to smelling precisely like Comet. People asked me if I had been cleaning the bathtub--and anyone who knows me well should NEVER ask that question. Tom Ford's Black Orchid was another curiosity. Again, it went on well enough, but the drydown was vanilla. Just...vanilla. With a name like that, I was expecting something large and lush and dangerous, not a cookie. Hermes Hiris simply smelled like an old woman's laundry hamper. A very clean, well-to-do old woman with a very nice hamper, make no mistake. But I don't especially want to smell like geriatric laundry. Having said that, any of the three would very likely smell quite divine on someone else, but they are not right for me. My personal litmus test is whether or not I can keep my nose away from my arm when I'm testing a new fragrance. If the answer is no, then I buy it. Anything less than luscious is getting tossed away. (I also sampled YSL's Parisienne. Mistake--I should have opted for the last bottle of Paris at the counter. Parisienne is a lush rose, but later it smells like a rose that has been pickled in alcohol. Paris is a better bet for me.)

Speaking of perfume...one of the Kardashians has launched a fragrance, and I cannot understand for the life of me why she would want to flog it dressed as JLo. I would never in a month of Sundays looked at this ad and thought, "Ah, one of the K girls is frolicking in public again." Instead, I figured it was Jenny from the Block promoting Glow 2.0 or some such.

And finally, it is awards season--I watch the red carpet arrivals and usually ditch the rest of the evening unless it's Oscar night and I've watched three or more of the Best Picture nominees. Usually the gowns are deeply disappointing for various reasons. (If you have more money than a small principality and a team of people to dress, coif, shoe, and bejewel you, you ought not to end up looking like you just rolled out of Del Taco and into your limo. There was a short white bedsheet affair during the Golden Globes that I STILL have not recovered from.) But this season has been well worth watching because I have found my Holy Grail of evening gowns--beautiful drape, exquisite silhouette, perfectly fitted. I concede the color might be better, but at least she pulls it off. If it were me, I would have begged them to make it in dark, bottle green or a lush violet. And then I would never take it off.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

In which it is burrowing weather

At least here it is. We keep swinging between gloomy rain and blustery cold, and both of those extremes are lovely reading weather, I think. I like something meaty and rich this time of year, both to eat and to read, and Nancy Goldstone's The Lady Queen fits both of those criteria. It is the biography of Joanna I, Queen of Naples--one of those distant, shadowy historical figures who often get short shrift by biographers and filmmakers. Thank goodness, Goldstone has stepped into the breach because Joanna is a wholly fascinating character. Queen in her own right, she struggled in each of her three marriages to maintain control over her own domain throughout a life that reads like a medieval soap opera. Poison, infidelity, strangling, papal politics--this story has it all and significantly more. And if the raw material weren't enough, Goldstone is a deft writer, avoiding the frequent biographical pitfall of pedantry. A perfect book for a winter's day.

Also, on the very good news front, my lovely blogger friend, Maryam in Marrakesh, has had her fabulous blog nominated for a 2010 Bloggie in the category of Best African Weblog! If you haven't read Maryam's blog, you are absolutely missing out. She's gorgeous, she shops, she travels to very dangerous places to write about human rights abuses, and she's building a guesthouse in Morocco with her adorable family. (Yes, I know. She seems like the effortlessly perfect person it would be so fun to hate--but Maryam is entirely lovable. She is whimsical and thoughtful, has splendid taste, and her posts from her travels regularly move me to tears. If you want to know how to move through life as an actor rather than a member of the audience, you can find no better example than Maryam.) Fingers crossed for a Bloggie win!
Monday, January 25, 2010

In which I am blogging elsewhere

I have two recent entries on other blogs that you might want to check out--they're giving out freebies! You can find me blogging for my publisher about writing enriched content for ebooks--did you know that when you buy one of my ebooks there is always exclusive content in them you can't find anywhere else? True story. There are recipes, letters--all kinds of goodies.

I'm also over at Writerspace chatting about how I created the blueprint for the first Julia Grey book. It's a story I end up telling fairly often because people always want to know how you got started, and they always gape at me when I tell them I stopped writing for a year. ON PURPOSE.
Saturday, January 23, 2010

In which we are getting our haint on

I do love the word haint--it's Southern for "ghost". On a messageboard I frequent, a poster by the name of Chris shared this link to the 10 Best Ghost Photographs of all time. I have to say, some of those scared the BEJESUS out of me. (Another Southern word, by way of Ireland, I suspect.) Anyway, creepy ghost children are the worst--give me a nice grey lady any day. I noticed they didn't include the fabulous photo from Hampton Court Palace a few years back that was captured on CCTV. I suppose it was a hoax? If so, it's a shame, because that one was divinely detailed.
Friday, January 22, 2010

In which I don't do spring cleaning

I have never been able to wait for spring to overhaul the house. To me, the post-holiday doldrums offer the perfect time for pottering. It's too cold to go out and usually dreary to boot. It's the time of year when we feel bloated from too much holiday excess, both inside and out. Our cupboards and closets are groaning from holiday decorations, gifts, miscellanea. It's the absolute best opportunity to meander through the house, taking a drawer or shelf at a time to organize and purge. It feels virtuous to throw things out or fill up bags for donations. (And honestly, after the holidays, it is lovely to have something to feel virtuous about, don't you think?)

In my quest to declutter, I love to read about other people's systems and rules. I'm fascinated by folks who declare they will throw something out every time they bring something new in, and actually stick to it! I am more spontaneous in my purging. I never discard an item just because something new came in, but I will happily get rid of a drawer full of things a week later. (Now that I have started watching HOARDERS it's become even more satisfying to get rid of things.)

Earlier this week, I tore through Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life by Gail Blanke. It was superb. The principle is simple: throw away fifty things in two weeks. The catch is that like items count as ONE. (Which means if you decide to purge a magazine collection, good for you, but those hundreds of pounds of glossy pages that you hauled out to the recycling bin are still only one item.) The beauty of the system is that once you start weeding out the excess clutter, you weed out the bad thinking as well. It is just as much a self-help book as one about organization, and I found myself flagging page after page so I would go back and read certain passages over again. One of my favorites: There is no way it is. There is only the way you say it is. A beautifully succinct reminder that our reality is what we make it. Anyway, if one of your resolutions was to tidy up, this book is a must-have.
Thursday, January 21, 2010

In which we have literary bling

Dear Sally--of the fabulous Already Pretty blog--sent me a link last week to these extraordinary necklaces. They are absolute conversation-starters and completely unmissable--certainly not something to wear on a day when you feel a trifle low-key--but they are rather aggressively interesting and certainly different. I wonder, what snippet of literature would you be willing to sport around your neck?
Wednesday, January 20, 2010

In which we talk mottoes

I am intrigued by the notion of mottos--the words we would use to describe our intentions or our values. If this were the fourteenth century, we might carve them on the lintels of our stately manors or embroider them onto banners to carry into battle. Today we tattoo them on our bodies or use them as signatures in our web postings--a trifle less impressive, but more accessible to the general public. (Did serfs have mottoes, I wonder? BTW, I have pluralized it as "mottos" and "mottoes" while writing this. AskOxford claims both are correct, but both look impossibly stupid.)

My family--the Mackintoshes--have a motto, "Touch not the cat bot a glove", which is a variation on the ever-popular "Nemo me impune lacessit" when you think about it. (If you've forgotten your Poe, that motto is the one he trots out in "The Cask of Amontillado". It translates to "no one touches me with impunity" and, if memory serves, is also the motto of the city of Edinburgh.) But while I do like the quirkiness of the Mackintosh motto, and it is understandable that the Scottish clans would need to take a firm stand with one another, it does seem a trifle unfriendly in this day and age, don't you think?

I have a few mottoes of my own and they vary depending upon my mood and situation, but there is one that rather neatly packages up the bits and bobs of my life and ties the whole thing in a pretty bit of Latin--"specto subitus", which is a welcome reminder to "expect the unexpected". I have toyed with the notion of having it discreetly tattooed someplace, but I could just as easily paint it above the door of my study or have it engraved on notecards--less expensive, less painful, and less permanent.

And I wonder, what is your motto? And how would you choose to proclaim it?