The Innocents (1961) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

My favorite ghost story. The Innocents. Based on the short story by Henry James and adapted by Truman Capote. There is so much I could say about this film, but won't right now due to time. I will come back to it later in the year. I want to post it here, now,  because I watch it every October as part of my 31 Days of Halloween. Not a year goes by that I don't look at it and wonder why modern directors cannot make films such as this. I love film. This is psychological for one, with subtext. Hollywood does not know how to do that well right now. They are trapped by the predicament of technology. How ironic.

 

"...I walked into the bird-haunted solitude of the Erl-King, who keeps his feathered things in little cages he has woven out of osier twigs and there they sit and sing for him." 

                               — The Erl-King,  Angela Carter. 

                                🎨 Igor Karash

Happy Birthday William Faulkner

 

I wish I was at home, still in the kitchen with my family around me and my hand full of Old Maid cards.

William Faulkner

(Happy Birthday, Bill.)

Anne Rice talks about writing on Facebook

I've been looking at all my Anne Rice books, thinking of my reading of her over the years, I remember vividly some of my thoughts when reading one of her books for the first time, thoughts which made my own journals or that I wrote as marginalia in the book. Rice was a consummate researcher and reader by personality and in this video she talks about that. Research was a part of her life. Reading was her life. Like myself, she read far more nonfiction than fiction. She said that she liked detail, those dry details that many people read over or soon forget. 'Those are the things I love.' In this video she talked a bit about Michael Curry whom she loved as much as she loved her character Lestat. 'Micheal Curry is equally important to me. She answers questions about her process while talking about writing. Writers face "constant battles" when creating. I sometimes believe it is absolutely neurotic to be sitting alone in a room, spending hours talking to imaginary people. But some of us are dreamers like this. She talks about those horrible moments of trying to shut off our minds after hours of creating, something I often experience.' I laughed and smiled when listening to her talk, because she was so "NOLA" Irish Catholic that it's funny at times and I so loved that because I also grew up in that kind of atmosphere in the South. Anne Rice was an incredible human being, a wonderful writer, a loving wife and mother, and was lucky in both her experience and career. Like all human beings she faced pain and suffering. Jack and I were talking about her and her dreams/goals and how she never really got her books to TV the way she wanted because she simply ran out of time. I don't watch the current series. I followed her carefully over the years and I knew what she wanted. 'I hope fans of the TV shows will buy her books and read her stories so they can see these characters as she envisioned them.' One of the most wonderful things about this particular video for me personally (as a writer) was Anne saying she does not work in drafts. I loved discovering that because I have felt so alone in the world of publishing at times. I do not write in drafts at all. I don't even understand that process. I don't really share my work or ideas, I keep them close to me. I don't need beta readers, and have never used a beta reader in my entire writing experience. I sometimes think I will, but never do. Usually other writers I know will see my work when I am done. Laughing. One "definitive" piece of advice Anne gives is about trusting your own emotional instincts, right or wrong. She did lament killing off Armand, and later brought him back to life. And I was surprised to find out how much editorial advice she took from Vicky when I knew how much freedom Anne had when working. But of course, Vicky and her had one of the longest editor/writer relationships in the history of publishing. I often wish I had been in the room when Vicky read Interview with a Vampire for the first time. In those years, Knopf was a literary, upmarket publisher (still is) and we all know Victoria Wilson knew she had never seen a book like Interview with a Vampire come across her desk. OMFG. Even now as I write this I am laughing, because my own experience in publishing gives me a true understanding of that moment. Vampires. Vampires at Knopf in the 1980s and not by some dead 19th century writer. Pardon me while I lie back in my chair and laugh while marveling at the thought of it. Of course, vampires were popular in genre fiction, but this was not genre fiction. Well, as they say, the rest is history. Yes, I have some friends who would never ever admit they had read an Anne Rice novel. A couple times, I gave them as Christmas presents to professors at college. They are full of philosophical thoughts and the cosmos is a metaphor for life. I miss Anne Rice. Her complexity. Her contradictions. Her love of beauty and understanding people who lived in the past. She got history better than most. Really. She had struggles. She was very nuanced in her thinking and often changed her mind, back and forth. That's a rare thing in the world right now. Too rare and a loss. I wanted to write this post because at some point I might not have time myself. We are all running out of time.

On Arthur Rackham

Haunted Wood, 1913, Arthur Rackham

"He became, in my eyes, a wizard who with one touch of his magic wand would people my imagination with elves, gnomes and leprechauns. He would make me gaze fixedly at a majestic tree with massive trunk, and tell me about the little men who blew their horns in elfland. He would say that under the roots of that tree, the little men had their dinner and churned the butter they extracted from its sap. He would also make me see queer animals and birds in the branches of the tree, and a magic door beneath its trunk..."

              — Walter Starkie's memoirs of his famous uncle

Rufus Wainwright - Sonnet 29 - Shakespeare

This is all I have to say today.

A Cassandra that nobody quotes or talks about now.

🎨 Leonard Baskin

The bee is domesticated but not tamed.

     — William Longgood

The Origin of Love (feat. KJ Apa, Lili Reinhart, Camila Mendes & Cole Sp...

I am reading The Symposium by Plato and I found this song which is version of Aristophanes's speech. Everything cost. Love is a wound. The search eternal.

Meet Me in the Woods - Lord Huron - Lyrics

This song is a new addition to my writing playlist. I don't choose songs because they are my favorites or what I normally like to listen to, but because the songs match the both the tone and meaning of a scene or multiple scenes happening in the book. I have written the ending of the book. This song is one of the last four songs on the writing playlist that support the ending of story and its tone and meaning. I really like Lord Huron, too, not just this particular song. It's been a great discovery. Taking a week off now to clean my house and rest. Before I tackle the middle of the book which is a mess.

Working this morning.

 

When writing a book, one has to be many things besides just the creative writer. Creating is one aspect of writing a novel. At some point, one has to become a stern reader, an experienced editor, a capable book doctor, meaning rewrites if necessary. One has to be able to look at the work and know what its weaknesses are and if the book can sustain those weaknesses or not. For example The Night Circus, it's exquisite at many points, but it does have a weakness, drama and plot, especially toward the ending. However, that was a weakness the book in totality could carry, and the reader does not care. Atmosphere held it up, it's own enchantment. But certain readers do feel that weight, the ambiguity, especially when concerning Celia and Marco. How working writers learn how to examine this is: They simply take the magic away from The Night Circus and then look at it without the exquisite language and atmosphere. This is what editors do. This is what book doctors learn. This is what very stern readers can see. This is one of my favorite books and I can see this with no judgment as a beloved reader. But as a writer, I have to know it. I have to know it, because I love this book intensely and I admire the atmosphere, and I want to learn those skills, but I also want a plot. Can a book like this hold both? Is it necessary? If one chooses plot and drama, does one forfeit atmosphere? Hmm. Questions for this morning.

My favorite female writers who are influencers.

I was just thinking, after Angela Carter, Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, has had the most influence on me. These two women. There are others. Isak Dinesen, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Mary Gaitskill, and of course, Shirley Jackson and A.S. Byatt.

Musing on Angela Carter this Saturday morning....

My sister and friends are always sending me Angela Carter articles and essays to hang on my wall. Perhaps this is because I do connect with Carter in many ways. For one, she was never likely to toe the party line or simply resign herself to the current political. She liked complicated. She was interested in contradictions. Questions were necessary. Agendas were small. Carter could never have been an academic in the traditional sense. Publish or perish, searching for new directions all the time, a head rolling with purposes and theories, riding the waves of trends. She saw right through those constructs and gimmicks. She was formidable. I admire all these aspects of her personality and basically over the years, turned similar.

            Jane, Notes. August 5, 2023

The Light in August

All my stories end up as family sagas, or towns decaying, even my lit fantasy is a phantasmagorical fairytale about the weight of history and how place is predicament. Most people never geography.

Wishes are.....

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”

— Cathy from Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

A thought......

“A society in flight from death is also in flight from life. Refusing to believe the worst will happen, we cannot see that the best requires it—that whatever makes life worthwhile, be it love, adventure, children, settling, has death as its price.” 

                           —Roger Scruton

Kip and Her Cat

 

Kip the Enchanted Cat is a fairytale about witches, curses, and cats.

🎨 Adrienne Ségur.

I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.

 

Writing Advice

"Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life."

                            — Louise Erdrich

This has been my fate and the fate of many women who believed as Angela Carter.

"You are always true, but never believed, like Cassandra." — Angela Carter.

I've very fond of these colors.

 

Wallpaper with olives, lemons and pomegranates, by William Morris. Watercolor. London, England, 1862

THIS.THIS. THIS.

“a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”

        — W. G. Sebald

Another view on fairies.

 I enjoy Twitter for all the beautiful people I meet. Here's one of them.

A rare thing in this modern culture.

“Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier – and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.” 

    The Double Standard of Aging (1972) — Susan Sontag

This is how I always feel about Percy Shelley. Always.

 

Kestrels Overcome Adversity as Chicks Hatch & Grow | Apollo & Athena | R...

Nature is amazing. Evolution is a wonder. We are all sexual creatures by biology, made to create and reproduce. We are born, we live, we die. Species come and go. Enjoy the ride while you are here.

It's pretty plain that commitment is important followed by self-discipline.

"Highly focused people do not leave their options open. They select their priorities and are comfortable ignoring the rest. If you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything." 

          — James Clear.

In a churchyard near Caernarfon.

 

   

@MorleyRA

Another possible door.

Groupthink and stories are now a challenge and not a solution.

‘None of us is as dumb as all of us.’

     (This was a note on a board at NASA referring to groupthink.)

Hermann Hesse, ( 2 July 1877 - 9 August 1962 ).

 

"No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. " Hermann Hesse.

 

I love you, you bold red, So sun-thirsty, wild and alive, In the summer scent between day and death So blooming and happily floating. — Hermann Hesse

Sometimes one has to choose.

 

       By Tom Gauld.

July 2023

“July is hollyhocks and hammocks, fireworks and vacations, hot and steamy weather, cool and refreshing swims, beach picnics, and vegetables all out of the garden.” — Jean Hersey 🌿 🍉 🏖️

Jefferson Airplane -White Rabbit-

My last June (birthday) post is White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. I was really too young to understand the "hippie movement" but I wanted to be part of it so some of my core values came out of that movement. I was "Green" before there was a "Green Movement." I was Alice at one time, too. But I guess reading changed me. I ran off with a hippie at 18, (we read Thoreau together and played folk songs) only to leave him later and marry a Renaissance Man who said he married me because "only with me could he be his true self." I was so honored to have his trust and love. But he knew I was a wild child. I've had a lot of wonderful birthdays in my life. I've been incredibly lucky. Here's my favorite hippie song, my brother used to send me Alice in Wonderland pictures. They hang over my bed now. I still play this song almost every day. See you all later.

Doors and Portals

 

@Springborn21

My next to last post of June 2023 for the end of my Birthday month celebration and reflection. I saw this door on Twitter this last week and I knew when I saw it that it would go in the story. Doors are portals, literally, even if they are just portals from one room to the next room in a small house. Metaphorically, doors are passageways to separate spaces that may be metaphysical. Doors are always choices or journeys. Some small. Some grand and wide. They are also, in a very different context, openings in walls which keep separate spaces.

I've always been obsessed with doors. I've always found the architecture fascinating. I often paint my doors, over and over, different colors or even paint flowers on them. This door is from a garden in Suffolk. The aesthetics moved me emotionally. I love flowers and brick walls. The colors are pleasing to me and some of my favorites. The door is very old. What lies behind it?

Doors are essential to my own mythology in The Ambitious Fairy Project which is a tale that pays tribute to portal fantasies but not in the usual ways.

Much of what I have celebrated in June 2023 has been leading me to my work and my novel. There are many stories in the world but some only one person could have written. 

It's too idiosyncratic, too shadowed by personal experience, its edges are not shaped properly, the spaces are off kilter. They feel uncomfortable and at the same time, pleasant and inviting. They are full of contradictions and layers.

Open this door and this is what you will find.

In all Joy, we will find some sorrow.

“To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall.”
         

                         ― Denise Levertov

(We must all carry our sorrows as best we can)

Jane in June long, long ago.

This was another summer, another June, so long ago, in a town I loved and still love. It's the setting of my fictional town in the novel. Though we really lived in two towns, Greenville, Mississippi and then a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, this third town was where we spent a lot of our time when not on other trips. My mother kept us very busy. It was nothing for us to take a long weekend somewhere any time of the year, to pack up and just go somewhere. She had wanderlust. 

We spent lots of winters and yes, summers in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where we rented trailers and houses and little cottages for weeks at a time. St. Francisville was our jumping off point to New Orleans, LaFayette, Morgan City, Baton Rouge, Sulphur, Lake Charles, places where my mother knew people or had had relatives. We would go down on weekends a lot. But when school let out in May, mother took to the road. The two youngest of her children never returned home until after Labor Day. 

When she got into horses, this changed some and our trips were scheduled around horse shows. I did not like horses or horse shows so sometimes I went down with my Daddy to St. Francisville or with my older brother and his wife. This summer that happened. My brother later went to booth camp and then in 1971 he was in Vietnam. We slept on couches and floors that summer. I never wanted to go home. I could have stayed all summer in St. Francisville where I had local friends, some I had known since I was six years old. But mother wanted to go home for some reason. 

I ended up staying a month in Greenville with some friends and then going over to Moorhead to my cousin's where I spent at least two weeks. My grandmother lived nearby. I am not sure how I got home or when, probably by Greyhound, which was my friendly travel service in those days.

I suppose this old faded polaroid made me think of how much I really loved St. Francisville, the Mississippi Delta, and how I never settled into that little suburb of Memphis as a young girl and even struggled with it as a young woman, though I live there now and have for years. I am not sure where I call home, but the house I live in or the proximity of my children and their families. Where is my home?

I suppose the answer to that now is where my books and computers are. My flowers. Outside my children, all the people I truly loved are gone and this girl looks like a ghostly memory of the wildflower. She was lonely and always floating. 

The wildflower now still is and does.

Make meaning or go insane.

“Meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience. A smart person is more likely than the next person to be aware of its absence and to be affected by its absence. He is more likely to get bored, to experience meaninglessness, to begin to see the extent to which neither his society nor the universe are built to satisfy his meaning needs, and to then hunt for soothing or exciting meaning substitutes that ultimately reduce his freedom. Meaning is a smart person's most difficult challenge.” 

 ― Eric Maisel

P.S. I have posted this previously on the blog, but it fits in June things that are totally necessary. Meaning is a difficult challenge but finding it and maintaining it is always my first objective these days.

Gustave Moreau, “The Peacock Complaining to Juno.”

Juno, from which the month of June takes its name. She was the Roman sky goddess, who married Zeus and while he never resigned himself to a restrained life of any sorts, Juno was a good wife, occasionally indulging in turning Zeus' lovers into other things. Smiling. I never thought I would truly fall in love, the kind of love that would bring a marriage full of delights and even children. I was so self-absorbed. When younger, I did not trust easily and I did not desire steady companionship. I liked my freedom and the fact that I could do as I pleased most days. A lack of commitment allowed me to indulge my own whimseys.

     And then I met Johnny.

     He was different. Odd. Childish. But a Renaissance man.

     It was the wildflower he loved and wanted.

     Smiling.

    And so we married and were lovers and had babies...

    We spent years exploring and understanding each other.

    Happy Days. Sad Days. We shared a life, really.

    Summer was our time.

    Summerland.

    We named our home, "Satis House" which means "It is enough."

Death is at the center of things.

 An important book. Not an easy read. But perhaps, a necessary one. As I wrote in the post previous to this one, Psychology has really helped me get out of the little box that was me and view the world differently. You have to step outside that box to see the world. Perception is not everything. That's the postmodern lie. And we no longer live in a postmodern world. We are shifting into something else even as I write this.

Psychology changed my life for the better.

I began studying Psychology in 2001, too. I'd like to mention these great men and thinkers. Of course Freud! His greatest student Alfred Alder, Jung gets an okay, Laughing. Ernest Becker and his influences, which included many great thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard, Norman O. Brown, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Otto Rank. Others Rollo May, John B Watson who created Behaviorism, Alfred Beck who followed and formed CBT. And Daniel Kahneman. Going to therapy off and on throughout my life, studying Psychology gave me a chance to view the world outside my own little box. And believe me, getting out of our boxes is hard to do. My June celebrations would like to thank all these people, to recognize their brilliance and hard work and how studying them has changed me, make me a better version of myself.

The Big Influences

 

At the Bottom of the Garden by Diane Purkiss

Mortals and Immortals by Jean-Pierre Vernant

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner

The Big Influences. A little over 20 years ago, I bought these books. I think I bought all of them around 2001, the same year. These three books led to the buying of other books and helped reform "my thought on everything" really. Laughing. This June I've taken stock of my influences, my luck, and how I have changed as a person, all the little crooked paths that led me to be the person I am. In some ways we are all the same people we were as children. The core foundation and value were there in childhood. But as adults we grow and change and become better versions of ourselves if we are lucky. And I have been lucky.

The Walkabouts - The Light Will Stay On

The other song that gets a spot in June 2023 celebrations is  The Walkabouts' The Light Will Stay On. Even though I had created some of my world in a paracosm as a child, many things came along that made a mark. This video inspired a certain idea that had been floating around in my mind after I read a book titled The Porcelain Dove by Delia Sherman and it really fit into the world of my paracosm and I knew it would always be there. It is on my writing playlist and never rotates out.

Placebo - Come Undone [Rock Am Ring 2009] HD

June 2023, has been a month of the things I love. Birthday month, Midsummer, flowers, gardening, beloved books to read and yes, music that haunts me.

A lot of whimsey and beloved aesthetics. Living with the fairies, learning to Re-enchant my ordinary life. Romanticism. Fairy tales, children's books, the wildflower and child in me. The best things that I am embracing in order to live the best possible life now.

And this performance of Come Undone is one of those beautiful things that I will always cherish. It is on my writing playlist and never rotates out. At one time, it was the Placebo song I played the most year round. Brian Molko never, ever, looked more beautiful than in this 2009 performance at Rock am Ring.

Current Motto.

"Creatives need "imaginative space" to produce art. We have to balance the amount of information we crave with the needs we require to let our imaginations thrive. So we must choose carefully to protect that imaginative space. Too much information destroys our capacity to create." — Jane  Harrington

(This post was inspired by an earlier post/quote by Percy Shelley on creativity.)

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.” 

                       — Percy Shelley

Inside the Tim Walker: Wonderful Things exhibition

Sexual Communion.

His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you could bear me. 

              — Angela Carter. The Erl-King

The biggest influence on my novel is this story by Angela Carter.

 

The biggest influence on my novel and yes, my entire work is Angela Carter, and especially this short story, The Erl-King. While Carter's work is subversive feminist reinvention of fairy tales, my work is something else. Angela Carter was the postmodern. I have deliberately left postmodernism behind and looked to something else.

When the flower blossoms, the bee will come.

 

Swamp Mallow.

Summer love.

Inside this flower a bee buzzes right now.

From The Erl King by Angela Carter...

‘The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the labyrinth and nobody comes.' 

                                        —     Angela Carter, The Erl King

Midsummer Love.

"I am doomed to overflowing, both in living and in imagination." 

               — Anais Nin

June, June, June

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” 

                                — Pablo Neruda

Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness (Official Music Video)

Kiss me hard before you go
Summertime sadness
I just wanted you to know
That baby, you the best

I got that summertime, summertime sadness
Su-su-summertime, summertime sadness
Got that summertime, summertime sadness
Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh

I'm feelin' electric tonight
Cruisin' down the coast, goin' about 99
Got my bad baby by my heavenly side
I know if I go, I'll die happy tonight

Oh, my God, I feel it in the air
Telephone wires above are sizzlin' like a snare
Honey, I'm on fire, I feel it everywhere
Nothin' scares me anymore

Kiss me hard before you go 

Summertime sadness 

I just wanted you to know 

That baby, you the best 

— Lana Del Rey

Victorian Fantasy favorites

 

Favorites.

Climate Choir joins XR at Bristol Cathedral for Luke Jerram’s Oil Founta...

This is a fascinating image. I've been having trouble getting it out of my mind, even in June, which is a month I dedicate to myself and whimsey. But it somehow fits, and how that is happening I am not sure. And I have seen it and cannot unsee it, and I am affected in ways I do not fully understand and they are NOT simple directions that I can easily follow. For now it is puzzle that will surely be a story of some kind. Sighing. 

The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger.

 

“He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Selfish Giant

What I am Reading Now, June 18th.

 

“None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.”                      ― Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

(reading now, June 18th, 2023)

Choose Life. Choose possibility. Choose Joy.

 

"That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough." — Emily Dickinson

Jane is June, June is Jane.

 Having been born and spent my childhood in Greenville, Mississippi, I learned to cherish summers where I lived outdoors like a free little wild creature. I was born on the first day of June and perhaps because of that birthday, June became part of me and I part of it. A month of magic and play. The official kickoff of summer vacation from a long list of family obligations including my own schooling. This morning, I wrote on Twitter (then deleted it for placement here) that I have a lifelong habit of going around barefoot in the house and garden. I've also developed a lifelong habit of sitting on the side of the tub and washing my feet throughout the day. It seems so easy to think about putting on a pair of shoes or even slide-on sandals, but I never take the time. Today, when I was washing my feet for the first time, before noon, I thought about all those who had lived who had sat in houses with dusty floors and washed their feet in a bowl of water which I am sure was a luxury. It gives new meaning to those people in Biblical stories who washed and anointed feet, doesn't it?

I like the feel of floors beneath my bare feet, the blade of green grass, even the stones that I walk across, the paths I have made in the garden over the years. I love summer, I love June. It's easy to see that I love myself and my life, that I work to slow it down, to feel as much as I can, pay attention to as much as I can, be grateful as much as I can. That I relish the senses, even the thorns and small pebbles that occasionally prick and cause pain.

How do we stay enchanted when we see so much horror throughout our lives, when we experience illness and pain, and great losses? I am beginning to believe that this is about personality and that forms in childhood. The toddler here was never free from trauma, a medical issue, and yet, that little girl, with all her pain, saw great beauty everywhere. I am still that girl. I was flexible and teachable. Curious. Grateful.

Walking around with no shoes, perpetually living in a "summerland" even when winters came, enchanted by being alive at all.

June is always Yellow.

 

Le petit Dejeuner by Pierre Bonnard. 1936

(I like yellow.)

RIP July 20,1933—June 13,2023

“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”

― Cormac McCarthy

Metaphors and Storytellers

 

Much to consider on why we read or write tales of enchantment, those magical stories from our childhood and adolescence. Some of us love these tales our entire lives in their original form or ones we create for our adult minds. It is a complex journey to understand why tales of enchantment and magic are so steadfast in a post-postmodern culture built on existentialism, personal identity, and even cognitive science. Perhaps this is really a question about metaphors and history and even psychology. Perhaps it is an enchanted tale about a species who built a world completely out of stories?

Grandmother and Hollyhocks on Summer Vacation.

 

“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic.”
                                 ― J.L. Carr

I like Henri Lebasque's work and it's new to me.

 

Young Girl Sewing on a Sofa by Henri Lebasque

Nature is important.

 

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.”
            ― May Sarton

Art by Angela Barrett

For me, it was both.

“Psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic.” 

                 — Philip Roth

Magic is powerful.

"Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism". 

           — Bronisław Malinowski

Stepping outside yourself

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. 

                           — W. H. Auden

Gondal and Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights Grade 9 GCSE

Diane Purkiss on Wuthering Heights and the paracosm of Gondal. 

Gondal. Gondal. Gondal.

Soulmates are two people who have a deep understanding of one another. Love is easier. Understanding is complicated.

 

“For you
i have saved poems
under my skin.”
― Sanober Khan

Art by Max Švabinský

The Own Service by Alan Garner

 

Going to post every day in June to celebrate beautiful things I love. This is about finding an anchor, doing my art, being enchanted by the beauty of life, and learning to live in the present. Worked in the garden today, planting sun impatiens, Shasta daisies, and new lilies. Soaked everything. Tonight, after supper, I am going to read The Owl Service by Alan Garner, a classic low fantasy novel. I love low fantasy where something extraordinary intrudes on ordinary life. This is a classic story that I never got to read as a child. I've been making up for all the age appropriate fiction that I missed. I'm feeling both confident and good about my own work-in-progress and it's coming along faster now. I still face challenges in my personal life and am working all that out. But I am optimistic.

Modern Restlessness

"Collapse into never."
— Brian Molko.

All reactions:

Come from the fairies

I got drunk on that honey wine🌼

of the lunar cocoon that the fairies

collected in hyacinth glasses:
dormouse, bats and moles
they sleep in the crevices or in the grass,
in the deserted and sad courtyard of the castle;🌿 🏰

when the wine spilled on the summer land🐝 

or amid the dew its vapors rise,

happy their blissful dreams become
and, asleep, they murmur their joy; well, they are few
the fairies that carry those chalices so new. 🌺
— Percy Shelley

June 1, 2023

"And then one fairy night, May became June." — F. Scott Fitzgerald