2012

some highlights of 2012;
New York City!, 25 February to 10 March 2012
starting classes at a new ballet studio that I love, 21 March 2012
seeing the Bolshoi Ballet perform Don Quixote, 26 May 2012
picking up my yellow Labrador Retriever puppy Lexington and bringing her home, 8 June 2012
camping with Mum and the pup, 30 July to 1 August
seeing The Nutcracker from the best seats I’ve ever had, 5 December 2012

favourite reads (or re-reads) of 2012;
1. Save Me The Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
2. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
3. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
6. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
7. The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling
8. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
9. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
10. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
11. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
12. Dracula by Bram Stoker
13. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
15. Bunheads by Sophie Flack

Christmas!

This Christmas couldn’t have been better, with tons of snow, mulled wine and a Downton Abbey marathon. ♥ I am now going to start on some of the books I’ve received!

monday mood-board #3

I am currently in the middle of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and adoring every word; here are a few quotes . . .

“I would leave the upper floor, where we children dwelt, and slowly slide along the balustrade down to the second story, where my parents’ rooms were situated. As often as not, they used to be out at that time, and in the gathering dusk the place acted upon my young senses in a curiously teleological way, as if this accumulation of familiar things in the dark were doing its utmost to form the definite and permanent image that repeated exposure did finally leave in my mind. The sepia gloom of an arctic afternoon in midwinter invaded the rooms and was deepening into an oppressive black. A bronze angle, a surface of glass or polished mahogany here and there in the darkness, reflected the odds and ends of light from the street, where the globes of tall street lamps along its middle line were already diffusing their lunar glow. Gauzy shadows moved on the ceiling. In the stillness, the dry sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling upon the marble of a table made one’s nerves twang. My mother’s boudoir had a convenient oriel for looking out on the Morskaya in the direction of the Maria Square. With lips pressed against the thin fabric that veiled the windowpane I would gradually taste the cold of the glass through the gauze.”

“I can visualize her, by proxy, as she stands in the middle of the station platform, where she has just alighted, and vainly my ghostly envoy offers her an arm that she cannot see. (“There I was, abandoned by all, comme la Comtesse Karenine,” she later complained, eloquently, if not quite correctly.) The door of the waiting room opens with a shuddering whine peculiar to nights of intense frost; a cloud of hot air rushes out, almost as profuse as the steam from the panting engine [...] For one moment, thanks to the sudden radiance of a lone lamp where the station square ends, a grossly exaggerated shadow, also holding a muff, races beside the sleigh, climbs a billow of snow, and is gone, leaving Mademoiselle to be swallowed up by what she will later allude to, with awe and gusto, as “le steppe.” There, in the limitless gloom, the changeable twinkle of remote village lights seem to her to be the yellow eyes of wolves [...] And let me not leave out the moon—for surely there must be a moon, the full, incredibly clear disc that goes so well with Russian lusty frosts. So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; and, as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.”

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

winter ♥

Lately has been beautiful, though much of it has been spent revising for exams—re-reading and re-writing notes—which has not been without enjoyment itself; reading Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic movement hardly feels like ‘work’—but in between I have been able to enjoy the snow, which always makes me feel like a child again, and blue twilights and trees strung with colourful lights lining the streets, and toffee pennies and clementines and the scents of pine needles (our Christmas tree went up yesterday!), strong coffee and mulling spices, and winter air has a scent of its own that must be one of the most beautiful scents I’ve ever known. (My favourite perfume is Philosophy’s Pure Grace, in part because I find it has some of the smell that rushes in when a door is opened to the cold wintry wind outside.)

Also, I went to see Anna Karenina (at an old cinema with red curtains in front of the screen and a balcony, no less), and it was beautiful, beautiful, perfect! The dresses, the music, the furs, the snow, the ribbons, the jewellery, the interiors, the train! . . .

Nutcracker season!

A recurring theme seems to be nutcrackers, Brown Betty tea pots and the colour red.

I just got back from Alberta Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker. Absolutely magical. The costumes and sets were unbelievably perfect in every single way, I want to live in them! I will never get tired of The Nutcracker, there is just too much to love. My favourites are always the party scene, snow (obviously), and the Arabian dance. And I love standing around before the show starts, seeing all the little girls dressed in glittery shoes and red or navy winter dresses and white tights and ribbons... The Nutcracker is a little girl’s dream come true. That feeling is rarely replaced or mirrored anywhere.