hope and rosehips

Last night I went and saw Coraline in 3D with Reynardin and Faunalia which we all really enjoyed. I remarked that a lot of love went into making that movie.

Faunalia claimed that thoughts of spring are wrong, my maple tree is falsely optimistic to be budding- it will snow again, and lo, this morning there is snow. I'm blaming Faunalia. ;)

So "hope" as a theme has been theme co-opted by all and sundry of late. However it has come up twice recently in invitations to me to donate art to raise funds for cancer research and associated charities - one place where hope is precisely the right theme.

Last year I made a 4" x 4" (10 cm by 10 cm) 'chunky page' for alteredmommy's collaboration on the theme of hope. Initially she intended to auction the book to raise funds for the cancer society. She decided to feature the book at the auction but donate it directly to a cancer survivor. This year she has invited people to contribute a chunky page once again. She will make a wall hanging to auction to raise funds for the Cancer Society. She herself is a cancer survivor.


Yesterday, I got a lovely (& lengthy) message on etsy from local musician Erin Lang. She is involved in raising funds for a lymphatic cancer charity called the Hibiscus Fund For Hope. In her words, "they do really amazing things for people going through cancer treatment in terms of helping to have their families with them if they can't afford to be there and paying for drugs that are not covered by OHIP and things like paying for daycare when a low income or single parent family suddenly find they have to be at the hospital everyday.. and so many more things.." She decided to start an associated music and arts group called Hibiscus and Rosehips to do a series of fund-raising events. She's lined up a long list of musicians* and bands (local "quirky original artsy folksy" indie bands from Toronto and Montreal and some international) who are donating songs for a CD. There will be Folk Tea Party/Bake sale with live music and the CD release and local crafts, on Sunday April 19th in the afternoon. 100% of all says will go to the charity.

So, I will be donating some art for this event. I appreciate that they help the families of those with lymphoma. Money for research is important, but until we learn how to grapple with these diseases, it is the families who need immediate help. I thought some of you might be interested in also participating, or donating, or baking, or giving art. It's a very pleasurable way of giving (through creating).

*Some of the musicians involved:
Ohbijou
Snailhouse
Timber Timbre
Castlemusic
Luxury Pond
Snowblink
The Youngest
Owl Eyes
Kite Hill
Jesse Smith
Roger O'Donnell
Lettie

Urban Dodo

More pillows!

This pillow front is a patchwork of my hand-printed lino block dodo on handwoven Thai gray silk floral, a cotton print urban scene of many buildings in white on brown and dusky rose upholstery fabric. One of a kind.


I like how my lino block printed dodo turned out on the handwoven silk floral fabric. I think of the pink flower like a parasol for dodo.

The brown fabric is from the R. & F.'s neighbour Snoflake and Dagg's excess fabric sale.

Walrus dreams of dinner...

I made a new pillow:

This is the front with a patchwork of my "Winter Walrus" lino block, printed in brown and blue on striped white-on-white canvas, with a sushi print cotton, corduroy in lime and blue fabric.

The reverse shows a blue whale lino block print on lavender cotton, green cotton print and grey pin-striped fabric, with the minouette label block printed on a goldfish-print cotton (care of Reynardin - thanks R.!).



And in a new and creative entry in the "Injuries Which Only Happen to minouette" file, I managed to cut myself while photographing this pillow. Yes, I know. You have never heard of someone injuring themselves while photographing a pillow. This is how it's done: I wanted more light, so I detached my angle-lamp from my craft table and held it while photographing. Then I propped it up to use two hands on the camera. Then it fell over, shattering the lightbulb. I unplugged it and picked up the pieces. Then I noticed the blood. Clearly my fear of electrocution is stronger than my foresight about gravity and the dangers of cut glass. I'm telling you, not everyone can injure themselves with such creativity and regularity as I. It's an acquired skill, but I can't recommend it.

minouette is out there

Minouette products can now be found at Freedom Clothing, 939 Bloor St W., Toronto, M6H 1L5, a cute little shop between Ossington and Dovercourt. blogTO says, Freedom Clothing Collective "is a fun scavenger adventure into a realm where random eclectic finds are plenty and affordable designer pieces deviate from the mass market and their questionable labour practices." They have clothing for both men and women, accessories, some art and other lovely indie products. I was particularly taken with some of the screenprinted, re-worked vintage jackets.

Amanda, one of the Collective, invited me to stop by next Sunday when they are having a craft swap. You should stop by, if you are in the neighbourhood.

Looks like my things are in good company. I am really pleased!

Reading is sexy XVII

13. A. S. Byatt Still Life. This is the second book in the quartet, which started with The Virgin in the Garden, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and harkening back to Queen Elizabeth I, which I read some time ago. I don't think I realized at the time that it was one of four. But, there are the characters, the Potter family, strangely still living in 1954 in England, where I left them. Frederica is still as cursed with intelligence, red hair, and little sense of the interior life of others; she goes off to Cambridge, of course, and continues to fall in love with impossible men. Stephanie starts her more docile, womanly life as wife and mother to Vicar Daniel. Marcus is recovering from his bizarre folie à deux and the strain of living with his angry, demanding, atheist father Bill. He is living with Stephanie and Daniel, and Daniel's horrible mother. Mother Winnifred is left alone in the house with Bill. Alexander is trying to follow up his play Astraea, and his writing about Vincent Van Gogh, and his relationship with Gaugain and his letters to Theo. His new play is The Yellow Chair. The staging involves the two paintings above, of Vincent's own chair and the chair of Gaugain. Many secondary characters are there too, including Wilkie and the Pooles and so on.
The story is compelling. The characters are real and full. She manages to evoke the time and place and its conventions and culture. To the point, for instance, that she made me angry at the way pregnant women in Yorkshire, in 1954 were treated like cattle, herded from waiting room, to hallway, to waiting room, without so much thought as to provide sufficient chairs. The prose however, feels dense and abstruse, in a way which differs from later novels. I found myself reading and rereading sentences thrice to try and glean their meaning. I have really enjoyed the way she weaves in allusions to other literature, say in Possession. Here it seems almost too academic, occasionally like a novel for people who read English at Cambridge in the 50s - a rather limitted audience. I am glad at least that I have read Lucky Jim, thanks to , so I could understand the discussion of it in terms of contemporary fiction. At times though, I felt like I would have to go read Mallarmé, Milton, D.H. Lawrence and Pound to know what they were going on about (even if I could recall the metaphors of Woodsworth or Andrew Marvell). Also, she managed to work her obsession with insects and taxonomy into this novel as well; this time it is ants.
Sociologically, it is very interesting to see how these people lived their lives. We tend to think of the 50s as sort of innocent and sheltered. Though the people are English - uncomplaining, reserved, polite - they are anything but innocent or frigid. Frederica of course, lives life to the fullest, and goes through quite the collection of men. At Cambridge they outnumber the women eleven to one. These characters are memorable, especially her Scottish cameleon friend Alan. Also the household in which Alexander lands, living with Thomas and Elinor Poole and their three children in London, while he writes his play, is certainly a fascinating arrangement.
She also breaks your suspension of disbelief sporadically by commenting on her own goals as novelist, or revealing the image in her mind which inspired the novel. She discusses how she planned initially to write a novel without metaphors, a particularly odd goal for her it seems to me. She quickly gave up this plan, and resorts instead to simply discussing it with the reader directly. She writes about her process and what happens in the minds of readers. Today this seems a bit self-consciously post-modern. However, she does seem to convey that the characters are none the less real, as if they were people, who lived their lives, and she just came along and wrote about these particular lives, to reach her stated goals, to look at the lives, particularly of women in England in the 50s, and the meaning and role of metaphor.
Not an easy read. Perhaps I needn't worry so much about the details. But, I will say, that I intend to read the remaining two novels in this series. I want to know what happens to these people. I do feel invested in their lives.

Reading is sexy XVI

(image is A Yong Girl Reading by Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) via Guarda chi legge)
Well, I am home sick again today. I hardly ever take a day off sick. In fact, I hardly ever take a day off period - occupational hazard. I have checked my email remotely and the like. I have my laptop and could be working on the paper I should have finished, but I figure my brain is tired and busy fighting what ever bug it is that has taken up residence in my throat.Plus, I feel like death warmed over. The least I can do though is catch up with my record of what I have been reading... because I have. Been reading. If I don't write it down I feel like I will forget.

6. The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman - I bought this book because of the rave review by Zadie Smith and the cover by Marcel Dzama. It is short but moving book. It is a memoir of sorts. She is breathtakingly honest. She grapples with her father's death - the titular Pharmacist's Mate, having been rejected by the Navy because he was in medical school, and doctors were needed, he signed up for the Merchant Marine and ended up in the dispensary - and her and her husband's quest to conceive a child. She intersperses her life, her grief, with excepts of her father's journal while at sea. This is a little gem.

7. The Troll Garden by Willa Cather. This is a book of short stories I bought at the U of T bookstore because a) it was some ridiculously nominal price, like $2 and b) I had not read any of her work, so I thought I might as well. It is one of those University Press editions with erudite introductions. I did not read all of the introduction, because while part of it was helpful, it was bent on systematically spoiling every plotline of everything she ever wrote. The stories themselves are mainly about artists and rustics, civilization and rural existence. They are not vastly different from contemporaries such as, for instance, Henry James.

8. Tortoise by Peter Young. This is a cultural history of the tortoise. A bit Anglo-centric, light on science, heavy on history. I learned some interesting things.

9. The Brie Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. This book is as good as they say. Read it. Oscar, is an overweight, hapless, scifi-obsessed Dominican nerd, living in New Jersey. Sadly for Oscar, he is not one of those nerds who are oblivious to women- no, Oscar loves women. This is an incredible story. It is the story of Oscar, and his family - his mother, and how and why she left the Dominican Republic, his sister, his abuela, interwoven with the history of the island and its fukú (or curses), violence, love and tragedy. And golden-eyed mongoose. The story is told by a narrator who eventually becomes part of the story and relates the story as Oscar himself might think, in scifi, pop culture metaphors and extensive footnotes- in a gripping, high-energy style. Later part of the story is told by his sister. What I know about the Dominican Republic and its former, brutal, dictator, "the failed cattle theif", El Jefe, Trujillo, I learned from Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, a novel referenced a few times here, and which I will never forget. This novel explains more of what happened to some people in this community after Trujillo, those who immigrated and those who remained, and how the country is still recovering. Mostly, though, it is about individuals. This novel, amazingly, is about love.

10. The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. It took a little while for me to get into this novel, but once I did I was hooked. It weaves together Florence under the Medicis with the Mughal Emperor's court. A tall, yellow-haired man in a magician's coat, decorated with lozenges and filled with hidden pockets, arrives at the Mughal court, to deliver a message, tell a story and claim kinship. The story is about what is real, what is make-believe, east and west, religious tolerance, love, beauty, treachery, family and friends. Not 14 pages in, we have Scottish pirates, with what some on the f-list might call slashy angst, and the rollicking tale goes on from there. An enjoyable read.

11. Cloud Atlad by David Mitchell. I got this book on the suggestion of . She is also a Haruki Murakami fan, so I was intrigued. It is quite an amazing book. I do not want to tell you too much about it. You need to read it for yourselves. Its structure is musical in six parts, life stories in different times and places, subtly woven together. The story takes place in the 1850s in the south Pacific, in the early 1930s in Belgium (near Bruges, fresh in my mind having just watched In Bruges and being in nearby Holland while reading), in 1970s Buenos Yerba, more or less contemporary England, and into the future. The story is about humanity, society, consumerism and freedom. Just read it.

12. Scribbling the cat by Alexandra Fuller (author of Don't let's go to the dogs tonight). Scribbling is African slang for killing, as in curiosity scribbled the cat. The hero of the memoir, Bobo, is home in Zambia, visiting her parents (her husband and children, safe in Montana), where she meets their neighbour K. He is a veteran of the wars of the region. He fought in one of the elite corps for the Rhodesians and also for the Portuguese in Mozambique. Bobo gets it into her head that the two of them could return to where he fought these wars. She wants to understand what could make this violent, estranged, born again man. He, for his part, thinks he is in love with her. The narrative voice is strong and recognizable from her last memoir. I am not sure what this will all tell us.... People are rotten? War changes people irreparably? Yet, in some senses, some people (especially men) thrive on it.

wandering Amsterdam part III

Conversation on Saturday night went till closing time. Apparently, in his spare time he is setting up an internet shop for his best friend, a painter, so KS told him about my etsy shop. Our Dutch friend proceeded to tell us all about his personal life and then asked several personal questions of each of us. It is not the way I am used to speaking with people I have just met, but I did appreciate his frankness. Also, it was interesting because this seemed such an obvious cultural difference - here it might have seemed like a stranger prying, but there it was more like it had never occurred to him to communicate in any other way (despite his American education).

Sunday, I was pretty tired, but we went for one last walk before I took the shuttle to the airport. Mercifully, my stop in Frankfort was less terrible than previous experiences there. I was back in Toronto and home by 9 pm.

Today, I think I will not try anything more challenging than grocery shopping. Afterall, I worked Saturday to Friday last week, not including all the hours spent travelling to and from meetings - I have decided I have earned a day off.




Even the gnomes are smoking in Amsterdam.