In the Labyrinth

Bunny Totems II: The High End Bunny

Ok, I am on a bunny roll today -- maybe it's the presence of my mother looking over my shoulder while I post. But I found these gorgeous bunnies in Selvedge Magazine -- a fiber arts quarterly that is so ridiculously expensive and so worth lusting after each issue for the articles, the exhibition reports, and the Selvedge "Drygoods" shopping online. Here are their high-end bunnies: Top row are bunnies by Apolline Dolls, a Paris based fiber artist, row two are Felt Bunny egg-cup cosies, manufactured in Germany, and last row is Hut Up felt Rabbits.

Bunny Totems I: The Ears Have It.

In sorting through the boxes (by now if you've been following my blog you might be tempted to wonder how many boxes of stuff does that woman have? -- the answer is lots.) I have started working on all the stored textiles and came across these charming beauties below -- a trio of flannel, handstitched bunnies. My mother was delighted to see them again and told me she had made them when she was seven years old. She was sitting on the back porch eating lunch when the idea of a bunny puppet with snaps for eyes came to her. She cut it out and promptly stitched it up (the one on the left with winsome smile and shinning metal eyes) between bites of the sandwich.

Others were to follow, especially as she now had a handcranked child's sewing machine that did fancy chain stitch on the bottom of the "mother" bunny's blue skirt. She created stories about them and the "girl sprouts" with their green uniforms and merit badges. In her teen years there was a Bunny Puppet Theatre. Let's just say the bunny totem spoke early and often to my mother throughout her life.

I am a magpie (all those filled boxes remember?) but I seem to get a long very well with bunny-totem women. After all, my great consoeur in myth and folklore has been editor,artist, and author Terri Windling -- most definately another woman with a deeply invested bunny totem. If you've not seen her lovely bunny paintings for children such as "Teatime" at the top,  and "Bunny Troupe," above, stop by her studio and have a look here. Terri also wrote a terrific article for the Journal of Mythic Arts, "The Symbolism of Hares and Rabbits," which I thought was one of the more lavishly illustrated articles we did...and which includes a gorgeous Windling painting, "The Hares of Pink Hill," which lets us know Bunny girls do grow up into lissome hares and rabbits.

 Before I photographed my mother's happy trio, we washed them carefully, hung them on the line, stitched a few repairs to the ears...and figured they are now good for another 72 years. Go Bunnies.

See What the Sun Can Do...

It only took a few hours of morning sunlight to transform the budded cactus above into its glorious fiery self below. Isn't that amazing? I know...I am still something of a tourist in this town because I always get knocked out when the cacti begin to bloom.

And here are a few other little blossoms that showed up this afternoon as well.

From the Family Vaults: Vogue Pattern 1953

I have been waiting for the last two years to finally go through the boxes of textiles, family embroidery, linens, quilt pieces, clothing -- including muslin blouses, aprons, petticoats, christening gowns, bonnets, rolls of crochet lace, jet beads, dolls over a hundred years old, gold and ivory cane handles...

Well, you get the picture. There is so much involved and I knew once I unpacked everything, I would begin the process of carefully washing soiled pieces, sorting, repacking in archival containers, cataloging the rare pieces before shipping them to a future home in  historical society, and just falling in love with all of it over and over again. It's hard...but as of today, it's also filling every space in my spare bedroom. So I expect periodically to share special finds with readers on the blog. So here is the first:

A vogue pattern from 1953 (my mother made this outfit before I was I was born...but not much before). It's beautiful -- supremely tailored and the pattern instructions are nicely detailed. Here's the description on the back:

"Short fitted jacket with opening at sides from waist-line. Buttoned front closing below shaped collar. Three quarter sleeves, buttoned below elbow are joined to long shoulder line. Flared Skirt has deep pleats at sides, pocket between pleat edges."

Also...this was the days when a size 14 meant a 32 bust and a 35 hip. Boy are those days gone...

The Showgirl Cactus: The Opulent Blooms of Trichocereus Grandiflorus

I awoke this morning to the blooming of my trichocereus hybrid cactus. These cacti are truly the Las Vegas showgirls of the cactus world. The flowers are huge -- about five to six inches across and the colors are absolutely neon-electric. I bought a fushia and pink version -- but I am going back to start collecting others in blazing reds and tequila sunrise shades. While most of the blooms grow from the top of an elongated cactus,  "Big Bertha" is a shorter, rotund variant that has enormous bridal white flowers edged in creamy buttermilk or pale pink. (put "trichocereus" into google images and see teh range of these remarkable cacti -- really, everybody who owns one can't resist throwing up photos of their prize beauties.)

 

Slow Textiles: Alabama Chanin Creating Beautiful One of A Kind Pieces of Clothing Art

Consider Alabama Chanin a sort of American answer to William Morris' Arts and Craft movement, mixed with the surge of Green Eco-friendly attention to fabrics and clothing. It is hard to know which excites me more -- as a consumer oh so lusting after their exquisite one of a kind clothing, all hand-stitched and richly embroidered, or as a fabric artist, fascinated by the return of such lavish needle work techniques to enrich the fabrics. Read and View More >>>

"Believing in Flannery O'Connor" by Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout -- known as the chief drama critic for the WSJ and his terrific blog, About Last Night -- recently published an article "Believing in Flannery O'Connor" in Commentary Magazine online. It's a compelling and thoughtful article because Teachout drives home the point of her importance and durability in American Letters (so many contemporary short story authors still claim her as their most important influence) and the continuing misunderstanding of the point of her work "in an age of increasingly militant secularism."  It's really a great piece on O'Connor.

 And I'd like to take this moment to reccommend reading A Habit of Being, her collected letters which are incredible. She has much in those letters to offer new writers (on staying committed to one's work, one's voice), on the craft (so many of her letters reveal a great deal about how she wrote her short stories and labored over every detail), her Catholic faith (which is as tough and unsentimental as it gets), and her considerable humor -- the letters at times, even some of those written in the hospital when she was suffering from Lupus, are hilarious.

Joy Williams, writing a review in the NYT of Brad Gooch's new biography of O'Connor (also highly reccommended) said this of her:

"Strangely innocent indeed. Also, forbidding, doctrinaire, witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave as her illness ground her along on her long passage to death. In the hospital the spring before she died, she worked between blood transfusions — she joked that she was hearing a celestial chorus but the song, over and over, was “Clementine” — correcting the galleys of the marvelous short story “Revelation” and completing another, “Parker’s Back,” which she had been working on and revising for years. Always, always in her work, she struggled to find the delivering image, the delivering word that would offer “experienced meaning.”"

Hoshruba, The Land of the Tilism: Or When the Tale Behind the Tale is Almost as Good As The Tale

I am absolutely engrossed in Hoshruba, The Land of the Tilism by Muhammad Husain Jah, and translated from the Urdu by author Musharaf Ali Farooqi. The tale is rich in sorcerers and tricksters -- both male and female -- giants and demons, outrageous acts of magic, magical devices, villainous rulers, plucky princesses, hapless princes, dazzling splendor and unspeakable punishments. In short, everything one could wish for in an Arabian Nights style epic. (For Cat Valente readers of The Orphan's Tales, this is a short trip to the wellspring of ornate, embellished, exotic tale-telling).

As soon as I finish reading the novel I will write a much longer review of the work. But in the meantime -- because this novel is only the first of twenty-four volumes to come of this 8,000 page fantasy epic -- I wanted to write about the amazing tale behind the tale.  Farooqi has a brilliant (and very amusing) introduction that lays out the remarkable origin of the Hoshruba, and at times, I felt I was in a  Borghesian moment when I was left to wonder whether the tale of translation was part of the whole tale itself -- especially when in the middle of this peculiar history, Farooqi writes: "Only an infidel would doubt that it did not happen exactly in this manner."  Read More>>>

Kora, Calabash, and Drum: West African Musicians, Photographs circa 1964

My father Emile Snyder was a professor of African Literature and Languages, specializing in contemporary African Literature written in French and English. He taught at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the University of Dar- es Salaam, Tanzania, and Indiana University. In 1964 when he was just embarking on a career change from 17th century French literature to African Literature, he received a fullbright to do research on African contemporary literature in West Africa. While he was there he met and interviewed many emerging African authors and had a chance to visit quite a bit of the west coast -- thriteen countries in all. I have decided to post an amazing series of photos he took of a huge festival/procession in a small village that brought together a wide range of musicians and griots (itinerant praise poets.) You can see the entire collection in an album in the right-hand sidebar column. Read and view more photographs >>>

"Molly" in Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

The new anthology, Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villianous Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is now out for the reading pleasure of your favorite middle grade scary-book reader. (My kids devoured all of Alvin Schwartz's wonderfully ghoulish and creepy tales at that age.) The anthology offers versions of well-known fairy tales, but from a unique perspective -- the villains'. Do they really suffer at the hands of our familiar heroes and heroines? In my story "Molly," based on the English fairy tale "Molly Whuppie," the Giant ogre and his family are certainly made to suffer cruel and unusual punishments. In the traditional version of the tale Molly Whuppie is a heroic youngest sister, outwitting a flesh eating Giant, and securing riches for her sisters as well as royal marriages -- on the Giant's dime of course. Read more>>>