dual personalities

Month: March, 2012

March 17, 2012

Getting along with an old house

by chuckofish

Old houses have quirks and foibles, and they can sometimes be like difficult, grumpy old people. Even so, they deserve to be treated with respect and it is usually best to let them have their way. Shirley Jackson instinctively understood that moving into an old house requires a period of adjustment while the house and the new inhabitants get used to each other. In Life Among the Savages, a wonderfully witty, sometimes slightly creepy, memoir about raising her family in 1950s Vermont, Jackson got it exactly right. She clearly understood old houses.

“After a few vain attempts at imposing our own angular order on things with a consequent out-of-jointness and shrieking disharmony that set our teeth on edge, we gave in to the old furniture and let things settle where they would. An irritation persisted in one particular spot in the dining room, a spot which would hold neither table nor buffet and developed an alarming sag in the floor when I tried to put a radio there, until I found completely by accident that this place was used to a desk and would not be comfortable until I went out and found a spindly old writing table and set a brass inkwell on it.

There was a door in the attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close goodhumoredly for a time when some special reason required it…One bedroom chose the children, because it was large and light and showed unmistakable height-marks on one wall and seemed to mind not at all when crayon marks appeared on the wallpaper and paint got spilled on the floor.

It was a good old house, after all.”

The idea is to work with a house not against it. One doesn’t want one’s house to feel like a museum,

this is a nice enough room, but a might too perfect. Is it the bust in the corner?

a hotel,

a hideously overdone Queen Ann mansion

or a decorator’s show-place.

Nice, but everything doesn't have to match. It's a giveaway that you've had a decorator do it.

I prefer the mix and match of time — I like to work slowly and look until I find exactly the right object at the right price that will fit with what I already have. And when I buy, it’s for keeps — I’m not interested in how current I am (I guess I’m very bourgeois). My house is definitely a work in progress. We’ve lived here going on twenty years, but it is a long way from being finished and that’s the way I like it. I think I’ve got most of the disharmony worked out (e.g., the 1960s orange, gold, and avocado green), but there’s still plenty to do.

I’ll say this for our ‘good old house’: it doesn’t mind a mess, grubby hand prints, or dust-bunnies .. and if you’re lucky, you can sometimes “hear a faraway voice in the house”, which will sing to you at night.

3 Comments
March 16, 2012

Wherefore art thou, Kirk Douglas?

by chuckofish

“Meanwhile great Odysseus in the river scrubbed the salt crust from the flesh of his back and broad shoulders and cleaned his hair of the frothy scum dried in it from the infertile sea. When he had thoroughly washed and anointed himself smoothly and put on the clothes given him by the girl, then did Athene daughter of Zeus contrive to make him seem taller and stronger, and from his head she led down the curls of his hair in hyacinthine tendrils. As when some master craftsman (trained by Hephaestus and made wise by Palas Athene in all the resources of his art) washes his silver work with molten gold and betters it into an achievement that is a joy for ever–just so did the goddess gild his head and shoulders with nobility. Then he went far apart and sat down by the margin of the sea, radiant with graciousness and glory, so that the girl in wonder said to her well-coiffed maidens…”

Homer, The Odyssey (Book VI)
translated by T.E. Shaw (1935)

Methinks the gods and goddesses were not unlike the movie moguls of yesteryear.

3 Comments
March 15, 2012

God be in my head

by chuckofish

"Old Sarum" by John Constable

God Be in My Head
Anonymous
(from a 1506 Sarum Book of Hours)

God be in mihede And in min vnder ston dyng
God be in myn hyyesse And in min lokeyng
God be in mi movthe And in myspekeyng
God be in my hart And in my thovgvt
God be at myneyende And ad myde partying

God be in my head
And in my understanding;
God be in mine eyes
And in my looking;
God be in my mouth
And in my speaking;
God be in my heart
And in my thinking;
God be at mine end,
And at my departing.

Old Sarum as it looks today.

And here’s a picture of the “New Sarum” also by John Constable.

2 Comments
March 14, 2012

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

by chuckofish

[Time out now from our Lenten movie festival for a St. Patrick’s Day Distraction.] In our decidedly un-Irish family we do make one concession to the Emerald Isle. St. Patrick’s Day is nothing if not a fine excuse for watching one of the greatest movies ever: The Quiet Man (1952).

It is firmly imbedded as one of our family favorites and is on my personal top-ten list of best movies. As with all our favorites, we know the dialogue by heart and many of the lines have become part of our family lexicon:

“Sir!… Sir!… Here’s a good stick, to beat the lovely lady.”

and

“Now I want you all to cheer like Protestants!”

and

“Impetuous! Homeric!”

And, of course, whenever we refer to our own antique furniture, pewter, plates and dishes, we like to call them our “Tings”, pronounced as Maureen O’Hara does, without the benefit of an “h”.

Last year when daughter #1 and I visited daughter #2 in Ireland where she was studying at Trinity College in Dublin, we took a day tour up through County Mayo and Connemara, stopping in the tiny village of Cong. Why, you ask? Because Cong is where The Quiet Man was filmed! It is a lovely little place and still a wee bit of a tourist attraction.

Your dual personality in front of Pat Cohan's pub in Cong.

Anyway, this is a movie not to be missed. It stars, of course, Ford’s “repertory company” which included John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Victor McLaglen, Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields, Ward Bond, Mildred Natwick, and a host of Irish character actors. John Ford won his fourth Directing Oscar and Winton C. Hoch won his third Oscar for color cinematography. What a team they were! The film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Writing, and several other Oscars.

As usual, John Wayne was overlooked. But just try to imagine this movie without him if you will! He is terrific as always, throwing his hat hither and yon, dragging Maureen over hill and dale, riding both a stallion and a tandem bicycle (at different times but in the same hell-bent-for-leather fashion), fighting the squire through the town and into the river. He was the most graceful and amazingly physical actor ever, and he could still manage to convey deep feelings without uttering a word.

Recently I saw another Irish-themed movie with a similar plot. The Field (1990), written and directed by Jim Sheridan, and starring Richard Harris, John Hurt, Sean Bean, and Tom Berenger, tells a similar story of another “rich” Irish-American who comes to a small village in the old country and attempts to buy a field. However, The Field is the nightmare flip-side of The Quiet Man. Ignorance, fear, suspicion and chronic abuse take center stage. Ultimately the rich foreigner is beaten to death for his trouble. The newer movie does somehow ring truer than Ford’s fairy tale, but I’ll take the fairy tale any day.

8 Comments
March 13, 2012

A trip to the Butterfly House

by chuckofish

The Butterfly House is a “butterfly zoo” operated by the Missouri Botanical Garden in far West County. Its mission is to “increase awareness of the natural habitat in which butterflies thrive.” It is full of butterflies and orchids and other exotic flora, not to mention people looking at all this.

March is Blue Morpho month at the Butterfly House, and if you like BIG blue butterflies, the Butterfly House is the place to be. Truth be told, I am not that into butterflies, but last Saturday, my best Grace girlfriends took another birthday field trip–this time to the Butterfly House. Here’s what we saw:

And the best for last (our birthday girl):

One last word: “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

4 Comments
March 12, 2012

A Mary picture for Monday

by chuckofish

Here is a picture of daughter #1 when she was about 7 months old. She is pictured with her grandmother and namesake, along with the daughter of my friend Harriet and my friend’s mother–all four named Mary. How great is that?

Even if my mother had been named Ethel or Gertrude or Bernice, I would have named my daughter after her. And I would have learned to love the name Ethel or Gertrude or Bernice. As it is, I love the name Mary and have never regretted naming my daughter #1 after my mother. I was named after my grandmother who was  named after her grandmother. My  mother was named after her great-grandmother. Her older sister was named after her 2 grandmothers, Susie and Anna, i.e. Susanne.  It is a tradition of which I heartily approve. Ahem.

9 Comments
March 10, 2012

Enjoying Rilke

by chuckofish

I went through a Rilke phase in my youth and recently rediscovered him. He was a thoughtful kind of guy and a fine poet. I like his lyrical poems, especially “Ich lese es Heraus aus deinem Wort” (translated):

I read it here in your very word,
in the story of the gestures
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming – limiting, warm.

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.

But before the first death came murder.
A fracture broke across the rings you’d ripened,
A screaming shattered the voices

that had just come together to speak you,
to make of you a bridge
over the chasm of everything.

And what they have stammered ever since
are fragments
of your ancient name.

But I also like his prose. Rilke was a writer who was prepared to suffer for his art (perhaps a little self-indulgently) — someone who would not let mundane matters such as fame intrude in his inner life. In this passage from The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge Rilke perfectly captures what writers go through as their work gets misinterpreted (as it so often does) or they let other people define them.

There I sat with your books, obstinate man, trying to understand them as the others do, who don’t leave you in one piece but chip off their little portion and go away satisfied. For I still didn’t understand fame, that public demolition of someone who is in the process of becoming, whose building-site the mob breaks into, knocking down his stones…Don’t ask anyone to speak about you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice that your name is circulating among men, don’t take this more seriously than anything else you might find in their mouths. Think rather that it has become cheapened and throw it away. Take another name, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And hide it from everyone.

I always think of poor old J.D. Salinger when I read that passage. Salinger was quite right to retire from the crass attention of the public and I guess Rilke felt the same way. Here’s to both of them!

7 Comments
March 9, 2012

More signs of spring

by chuckofish

Look what I saw blooming the other day in front of the chapel on my flyover campus!

Unbelievable. The red bud in my yard is nowhere near blooming.

(Thank you to daughter #2 who took these pictures for me yesterday. I was without a camera and she is never without her phone!)

2 Comments
March 8, 2012

Back to Buechner

by chuckofish

“What’s prayer? It’s shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who’s to say? It’s reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish into the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. Prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God’s grace, a prayer is heard.”
― Frederick Buechner, Godric

3 Comments
March 7, 2012

Making progress

by chuckofish

Last month I blogged about getting back to my unfinished needlepoint project, “Naxos Cat” by Ehrman Tapestry’s Elian McCready. I am determined to finish it and I have made progress recently. Let’s hear it for me!

I also bought this pillow at a recent estate sale. It is a large needlepoint picture of Edinburgh Castle. Isn’t it great? It needs to be made into a new pillow, losing its black polyester frame and backing, but I really love it.

I am looking forward to a trip to the world-famous needlepoint store in this flyover state, The Sign of the Arrow. Daughter #1 worked there when she was in high school and once took a call from Kate Spade New York asking about finishing costs. But then, Kate Spade is a flyover girl herself, so she would be in the know.

3 Comments