end of April, via Instagram

Degas dancers

The idea of choosing a favourite Degas painting seems daunting, but this one may be it for me. It’s the windows, which remind me of the windows at the studio I go to—although these are obviously much more stunning as they have a view of Paris in springtime, my dream—and the dancers doing temps liés.

I also love this one because it is at l’Opéra de Paris. . .


It reminds me of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photos, also in the rehearsal room at the Paris Opera:

It makes me wish that Woody Allen’s idea in Midnight In Paris were a plausible thing. How fun to imagine...

(If you also find ballet and Paris and this time period to be captivating, I highly recommend Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me The Waltz, particularly part two, chapter three, which can be found online here, and all of part three, found here. ♥)

last spring

I love my iPhone because it is the most extensive photo diary. Seeing as I almost always have my phone with me and feel slightly less conspicuous pulling it out when something catches my eye, a lot more gets captured. This has meant thousands of pictures and an external hard drive—plus a lot of memories. Here is a (very small) collage from spring 2012 (mostly June). Puppies!, sunbeams through tree leaves, overcast skies, fluffy peonies and pink-frosted tulips, library books, ballet schools, blue hydrangeas, lilacs falling over brick walls, old ivied academic buildings . . .

monday mood-board

Paris, printemps, pirouettes. What could be more inspiring? Green and pink are my favourite colours (trees, ballet), and I love the blues and greys of Paris (and overcast days). ‘Petals on a wet, black bough.’—that is the ‘mood’.

I would like to be in Paris right now, or Regent’s Park under cherry blossoms . . . but there are little buds growing on the trees where I am, and I have a summer job. Perhaps I can start a savings account to go toward finally making it across the Atlantic.

Oh, and it’s Nabokov’s birthday today!
(I knew this date was significant for some reason, but couldn’t remember which, until I came across this.)

“I’m very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There’s nothing so beautiful.”

– Michael Gambon

sketchbook

This is where my mind has been lately. I am fortunate enough that all of the writers illustrated above have been on my reading syllabus this year and studying them hardly feels like ‘work’ at all.

flowers

“. . . what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar I Id a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets . . . ” – James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

“There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!”
– Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

“Yellow roses she bought with her money like Empire satin brocade, and white lilacs and pink tulips like moulded confectioner’s frosting, and deep-red roses like a Villon poem, black and velvety as an insect wing, cold blue hydrangeas clean as a newly calcimined wall, the crystalline drops of lily of the valley, a bowl of nasturtiums like beaten brass, anemones pieced out of wash material, and malignant parrot tulips scratching the air with their jagged barbs, and the voluptuous scrambled convolutions of Parma violets. She bought lemon-yellow carnations perfumed with the taste of hard candy, and garden roses purple as raspberry puddings, and every kind of white flower the florist knew how to grow. She gave Madame gardenias like white kid gloves and forget-me-nots from the Madeleine stalls, threatening sprays of gladioli, and the soft, even purr of black tulips. She bought flowers like salads and flowers like fruits, jonquils and narcissus, poppies and ragged robins, and flowers with the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh. She chose from windows filled with metal balls and cactus gardens of the florists near the Rue de la Paix, and from the florists uptown who sold mostly plants and purple iris, and from florists on the Left Bank whose shops were lumbered up with the wire frames of designs, and from outdoor markets where the peasants dyed their roses to a bright apricot, and stuck wires through the heads of the dyed peonies.” – Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me The Waltz (1932)

“She paused there a moment, looking absently at a growth of nasturtiums and iris tangled at its foot, as though sprung from a careless handful of seeds, listening to the plaints and accusations of some nursery squabble in the house. When this died away on the summer air, she walked on, between kaleidoscopic peonies massed in pink clouds, black and brown tulips and fragile mauve-stemmed roses, transparent like sugar flowers in a confectioner’s window—until, as if the scherzo of color could reach no further intensity, it broke off suddenly in mid-air, and moist steps went down to a level five feet below.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934)

literary Paris in the 1920s and ballet

(Isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwriting the most beautiful handwriting you’ve ever seen?)

I went on this tangent because of this artricle by Joan Acocella for The New Yorker—I’ve been fascinated by Zelda Fitzgerald since I read Save Me The Waltz last year, and I didn’t realise how many parallels there were between here life and Lucia Joyce’s (well, parallels meaning Swiss sanitariums and ballet lessons from Lubov Egorova, schizophrenia, Paris, want of artistic expression, and famous writer males—husband in Zelda’s case, father in Lucia’s—but that’s enough overlap to make you wonder, right?)

Also, The Great Gatsby was published eighty-eight years ago yesterday.

Two things to listen to:
James Joyce reading from Finnegan’s Wake
F. Scott Fitzgerald reading Shakespeare

“5 April: Wild spring. Scudding clouds. O life! Dark stream of swirling bogwater on which appletrees have cast down their delicate flowers. Eyes of girls among the leaves. Girls demure and romping. All fair or auburn: no dark ones. They blush better.” – James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

mood-board

“For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” – Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway