|
|
I’m not a billionaire — yet – but my editor told me this week that Le Road Trip has sold out of its first run and is going into a second printing so wealth and fame can’t be far behind, and I better take notes on how my soon-to-be-peers live. I want to fit in when we all get together and complain about the 99.9% who live off my job creation, those sluggards. Dim wits. Hoi Polloi. Hey! Not being rich is your own damn fault!
But I digress.
Once a year, a certain hedge fund billionairein Westchester, New York opens his garden on behalf of the Garden Conservancy. So I moseyed up to Katonah to get a look at my soon-to-be-neighbor.
The first thing I noticed was the zebras. Note to self: Billionaries need zebras in the back yard.
Note to self: Also, find out where to buy a zebra saddle.
And then there were the camels.
These are the two-hump kind of camels which, I think, only come from Mongolia. Note to self: start thinking of cute names for pet camels. Ullan and Baator? Marlboro and Kent?
As you can see behind the camels, visitors parked their cars on the big lawn beside the pen where the camels and the zebras are kept. I was told by one of the 20 attendandts who were there directing traffic that they average 750 cars every time this garden is open to the public. Don’t worry: there’s room for 750 cars here. This billionaire has a 55-acre backyard. Plenty of room enough for all these nosey parkers, plus a flock of flamingos:
And monkeys: 
And kangaroos (red and white):
Now, when it comes to kangaroos, this is money well spent. I do like kangaroos. So having a dozen kangaroos romping in my backyard is just like being in Australia without all the bother of a 20-hour plane ride. I hear that kangaroos are quite fond of flying so I know these guys enjoyed their emigration from Down Under. 
After the kangaroos, all the emus and ostriches and black swans and other rare birds that were wandering around the backyard didn’t really grab my attention. For the rest of my walk around the property, I only have pictures of the really, really cute pets.
Like this guy:
We weren’t allowed inside the greenhouse where the billionaire grows rare tropical fruits from Asia and India, but we were permitted to stare…
….at the adorable tiny monkeys eating all the rare tropical fruits from India and Asia:
This fella is the size of a Barbie doll. Cute!
This guy was the size of a very fat Labradoodle:
There was a woman who, upon catching sight of this little piggy ( a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, from South America, weighing about 40 pounds), exclaimed to her husband and kids: “Look! A hippopotamus!” Secret note to self: It’s worth devoting great sums of money to keep morons away from me and my capybaras.
I almost missed this guy, who was napping with his herd in the Westchester savanna:
It took a half hour, but he finally revealed his full cerval self.
This kitty took an interest in me, and wandered over to my side of the fence to sniff my camera. I tried to get a close up of those infinitely beautiful and hypnotic cat eyes…
…but I only got his chin.
I know, I know: enough with the living lawn ornaments. You want to know what a billionaire’s garden looks like.
For one thing, there aren’t many flower beds except in the one-acre cutting garden (roses and tulips this time of year). Mostly the estate is a series of beautifully landscaped rolling hills to create habitats for the living lawn ornaments. But there is a spectacularly original garden that expresses the billionaire soul; It’s a 5-acre maple grove planted with every species of maple tree.
There are wonderful paths all through this space. And several bridges — this one is the Moss Bridge:
And this one is the Japanese Bridge:
Japanese bridges are usually painted vermillion (Monet either didn’t know or didn’t care about this when he painted his Giverny bridge that blue-green color) and the use of that Japanese maple tree is outstanding. Japanese maples are prized in Japan for their intricately gnarled branches, and this tree has maximum visual interest plus it mimics the arch of the bridge. This exquisite tableau is the mark of a true connoisseur, and represents a very high taste level.
It takes about two hours to walk around and take in a 55-acre garden, for your information. I was very satisfied with the day, having learned quite a bit about the de rigueurs of the Billionaire’s Club. You cannot spend two hours in a billionaire’s garden without becoming utterly convincedthat billionaires are different than you and me, both in scale and in monkeys.
But there was one last thing I had to check out. I walked all the way up the quarter-mile long driveway, all the way to the quaint dirt road that this billionaire lives on, because I had to find the answer to a question I’ve always had about billionaires.
Q: What does a billionaire’s mailbox look like?
Now I know.
I’m still at it. Still flummoxed by gardens. My paintings of them still look like crap. If you remember, when we last left off I was trying to do justice to a small walled garden off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh called Dunbar’s Close:
In the past two weeks I’ve actually tried TWICE to re-paint this, but the results were even worse so instead I went back and made certain necessary corrections to make this illustration a tad bit less crappy:
(I corrected the paved area in the background — it’s actually gravel there — and I darkened the tree so it pops more, and I studied my reference photos to try and get the benches right. I like everyone’s suggestions about putting something human-scaled in there, which I will incorporate in the rest of the garden that I haven’t yet had the nerve to tackle — Dunbar’sClose goes on and on and on…)
I’ve contacted the caretakers of Dunbar’s Close in Edinburgh and they have kindly agreed to send me a list of plantings in the three parterre gardens in the Close, my thinking being that if I could look at botanical references maybe I’ll be able to paint the damn hedges better. While I await receipt of these lists I went back to my comfort zone, garden-wise. I did a miniature painting of the secret doorway to Dunbar’s Close on the Royal Mile (miniature being my preferred canvas):
And then I did a street scene that includes this portal to Dunbar’s Close (line drawings and coloring-in being my wheelhouse, illustration-wise, if you know what I mean):
There are 83 “closes” on the Royal Mile such as this one that leads to Dunbar’s Close. My experience of this stretch of the Royal Mile is in January, in the rain, but I did not have a good reference photo of this so I got in touch with an Edinburgh photographer who went and took a wide-lens shot for me last month:
As you can see, it was a sunny day when John took his photo so I had to rain-it up for my purposes…because I’m an ARTIST, damn it, and I have a license. And because you have to maximize your natural defects the best way you can, eh? Oh, if only I could spend my life making line drawings….
But no. I’ve always wanted to paint in shadows and light, which I think I’m going to HAVE to learn how to do if I want to become a good garden painter. So while I’m still waiting for the list of plantings from the caretakers of Dunbar’s Close, I’m skipping ahead to another wonderful garden I love, in Key West. And when it comes to Key West, I’ve always been very fond of this picture I took in 2005 when Top Cat and I spent a long February weekend there (this is our guest room at the Conch House Heritage Inn, built in 1885):
I love the monochromatic effect of this picture, the long afternoon shadows, and how the orange cat is the only spot of color. To paint this, I first had to draw it, enlarged from this snapshot :
I had to leave out that second rocking chair — waaaay too complicated for my skill level and I didn’t want to make myself any crazier than I had to. I also opened the left shutter on the door to make the French doormore comprehensible. And of course, there is only one way to paint this drawing: on my light box:
By putting my 90-lb Canson watercolor paper over this drawing and firing up the light box, the outlines of this sketch show through to guide me as I “color in” the shadows that I see in the photograph. It took me about two hours to paint this, pretty much holding my breath the whole time. This would be so easy to screw up and, in fact, I did make some flubs but hey– This was my first attempt at real painting so I expected that it wouldn’t be perfect. I was listening to NPR while I painted, and it seems Martin Sheen and his son Emilio have written a book about being a father and son and OH MY GOD Emilio Esteves, who I remember as a high school kid in The Breakfast Club, now has a grown son of his own who is married and living in Spain. That’s not right. That Emilio has adult children, I mean. I mean, for chrissake.
Anyway, Martin Sheen’s voice is what I remember when I look at this finished picture:
Yeah, I had to ditch the French door and the window entirely — there was no way I had the manual dexterity to pull that off. It was the rocking chair and the cat that I most wanted to paint any way and if you had not seen the original concept you would think that this was a pretty completely realized composition, eh?
Keep that in mind whenever you see any artist’s work: the end result is probably not what the artist had in mind (does any end result live up to the standards of perfection that exist in the artist’s mind?) and one’s artistic “style” is most likely a result of making the best of one’s natural defects.
Thank you, one and all, for all your garden book recommendations last week. I’m still searching for the garden artist that I can steal from…I have a specific viewing experience in mind when it comes to garden art, and hoo boy some of the garden books I’ve come across miss it by miles.
Last Sunday I journeyed to the wilds of Westchester County to visit a billionaire’s garden because I wanted to see what a man with an undogly amount of money puts in his garden. Stayed tuned: I’ll show you, right here, next week.
So here’s where I stand: My garden book has, so far , a Winter Garden in Edinburgh, an American Tropical Sunset Garden, Robert’s Found Art Garden, a Billionaire’s Garden…do you see where I’m going? This is not your typical Garden Book.
You might remember my friend Robert from pages 190 and 191 of my book When Wanderers Cease to Roam, where I talk about how Robert operates the drawbridge over the Eastchester Barge Canal off U.S.Route 1.
 He spent 30 years there, planting trees and creating art from the debris that floated his way, hanging hundreds of his “collages” (they looked like wind chimes to me) from the branches of his trees because, as Robert said, ” God put me here to straighten out this part of Earth.”
Robert retired last year and yesterday I went to visit him at his home in Westchester County, on the shore of the Long Island Sound. 
No, this isn’t Robert’s yard. This is Robert’s neighbor’s yard. I’m just showing you this for a sense of contrast because Robert’s been as busy in his own acre of Earth as he was at the drawbridge — Robert’s yard looks like this:
Robert’s made his yard into a wonderland garden, sculpted the landscape by installing a staircase, railings, statues, more “collages” set into the ground, etc.
These photos make the place look a little more chaotic than it is — I just love the way Robert adds all these different shapes (like the fans) into the scenery.
And the sinks.
You can get lost in the scale of the surrounding installations here —
—and I didn’t bring a tea bag so I’m pointing to this particularly lovely little vignette to show you that some of Robert’s work is quite diminutive.
This is one of the more elaborate “collages’/wind chimes hanging in Robert’s home garden.
Robert surprised me with a very special gift — a wind chime of my very own!
These keys used to hang at the Eastchester Barge Canal and when a county supervisor made Robert get rid of “all that trash in the trees” Robert saved this one and gave it to me!
Robert’s garden is an inspiration to me. I need to illustrate this space, make sense of the landscape so I can communicate Robert’s vision to others, the same way I was trying to make sense of the Dunbar Close garden in last week’s post. I’ve been painting the Close all this week, taking your fine suggestions into considerations, and if you stay tuned to this blog I’ll post the final results next week along with my first study drawings of Robert’s garden.
Oh! I almost forgot to tell you about the most fantastic part of Robert’s garden! I saw something that I’ve never seen and never could have hoped or dared to see with my own eyes right there, in Robert’s garden. I saw this:
This is a mother blue jay sitting in her nest in Robert’s garden (giving me the hairy eyeball). If that’s not the official Gardening Visionary Seal of Approval, I don’t know what is.
As for Le Road Trip, I must give thanks to the kind reviews that have appeared this past week in the Sunday Mail in Brisbane, Australia ;and the Oklahoman of Oklahoma City; and the Roanoke Times of Roanoke, VA.
Thanks also to all my dear readers, who are reading both Le Road Trip and When Wanderers Cease to Roam in original hard copy (since neither book can be Kindled), putting up with my old-fashioned idea that a reading experience mustinclude a real book-shaped object. That’s, like, soooooo 1990′s!!
(P.S. I’m looking for good garden books — ones that have great illustrations and stories about gardens and their gardeners. I’ve already ordered , sight unseen but just because I like the title, an out-of-print book called Remembered Gardens…does anyone know of any other good books that get to the heart of the garden experience? Or will I have to write that one myself?)
First, I did a number of sketches. 
Oh, wait. I forgot to tell you that I’m working on some illustrations of a delightful walled garden in Edinburgh called Dunbar’s Close, a small secret green space off the Royal Mile. Dunbar’s Close is a long narrow formal landscape comprised of three outdoor “rooms” — this is just one of the sketches I made of the general layout of the garden. The space is sandwiched between the Canongate Church and its cemetery and another tenement building. There’s a hill in the distance with the old Scottish Royal Academy on it.
I have an idea to paint all three of the Dunbar Close garden “rooms” seperately so I settled on an eastern view of the first “room”, which I drew on tracing paper and taped onto a light box so that when I turn the light box on I will be able to paint the image on my watercolor paper without having to draw it on my watercolor paper. Andyes, I am deliberately screwing with perspective so I can show more of the fancy shrubbery without dong an aerial view. That’s Coco, my really feral cat, helping me. I trapped her over ten years ago and it’s only been in the past 12 months that’s she begun to let me pet her. I’m left handed, so of course she’s decided to park her butt right where she will be most “helpful”. Yes, that’s a cup of tea in between two jars of water for the paints. Yes, sometimes I get confused and dip my brush into the tea cup instead of the water jar. I like the taste of ultramarine.
It wasn’t until I got this far that I realised that I had no idea how to paint shrubbery. It looked so easy — just swab some green stuff around! But oh, crap: it’s going to be harder than I thought. So I started to experiment:
This is how I learned that stippling is the only way to paint boxtree shrubs.
This is my second attempt to paint the damn boxtree shrubs. Still pretty icky. So I started over again:
Only to discover that I can’t paint ivy, or trees, or gravel, or background. So I start over again, but this time I’ll start with the gravel:
The gravel still looks shitty. Time to START OVER AGAIN. Technically, by this time I’ve turned the view of this garden from east to west…but you don’t really have to know that. I just wanted to avoid having to paint a whole lot of ivy, and the western walls have a nice stone pattern that I think will be more fun to do, so that’s why you won’t see two walls of ivy in the finished picture. Aren’t you glad to know that?
I liked this gravel better — made by letting the water do a lot of work while all I did was drop blobs of paint into it. So, whew. Now I can start on the cobblestone pathway.
So far, so good.
As it is starting to look a little monotonous, I’m going to add some warm color here in the cobblestones. Also I love this garden and I want to make it look a little more magical…
I’m not saying that this is the final illustration, or that I’m totally happy with it, but obviously I’ve learned a lot since this –
And it only took two days out of my life. Just imagine what I can learn if I START OVER AGAIN!
So that’s what I’ll be doing this fine Spring Friday: learning again from my mistakes, forcing myself to get it right this time, suffering for my art.
I’ll let you vote: Who isn’t entirely bored by my detailed telling of my trial-and-error methods and wants to see what this thing will look like after I’m done today? Better yet: does anyone have any suggestions to make this picture better?
This is the only other book about France that you should read this year: Finding Me in France is the blog-turned-book real-time true story of one woman’s search for a life less ordinary. Bobbi French is a psychiatrist from Canada (sorry: Newfoundland) who chucked it all (career, native language, daily access to Miracle Whip) to go live in Burgundy and test the outer limits of her capacity for change, adventure, and redemption. And today is her Pub Date!
I know Bobbi through her wonderful blog, www.findingmeinfrance.com, and her writing is fierce, funny, and totally frank. And the photographs of her so-called everyday life in the village of Semur-en-the-vineyards-of-Burgundy are drop dead gorgeous.
And even though the book is a Canadian import (I know! How cool is that?) it is easily available at Amazon.com for no extra cost for postage. Isn’t free trade great?
Bobbi is kind of a star in Canada, by the way, so she’s been given The Proust Questionnaire here:
http://www.atlanticpublishers.ca/
Until yesterday I did not know that The Proust Questionnaire was actually a real thing, and not just some dopey list of queries thought up by a magazine editor at Vanity Fair or James Lipton at The Actor’s Studio. Marcel Proust actually answered a list of these questions (a popular parlor game at the turn of the 20th century, it seems) when he was 20 years old and it was discovered in 2003 and sold at auction for a couple hundred thousand euros. And since then, this questionnaire has been one of the most popular interview gambits in Europe and North America, not that anyone has ever asked moi not that I’m bitter.
For the record, here are some of Proust’s own answers to The Proust Questionnaire:
What is–
Your favorite virtue?
The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired.
Your favorite qualities in a man?
Feminine charms.
Your favorite qualities in a woman?
Manly virtues, and frankness in friendship.
The thing you appreciate the most in your friends?
To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness.
Your idea of happiness?
I am afraid it be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it.
Your idea of misery?
Not to have known my mother or my grandmother.
Where would you like to live?
A country where certain things that I should like would come true as though by magic, and where tenderness would always be reciprocated.
Your favorite color?
The beauty is not in the colors but in their harmony.
Your present state of mind?
Boredom from having thought about myself to answer all these questions.
*****
Obviously The Proust Questionnaire needs some improvement, because it doesn’t ask the really most important question of all, the one that scientists who devise compatibility tests for on-line dating sites have researched as the one most revealing question of all, the one whose answer, yes or no, will determine the utmost depth of soul-matey-ness between two people.
And that question is:
Do you like horror movies?
Well? Do you?
(Go read Finding Me in France, everyone, and no, I don’t, not at all.)
Thank you, everyone, for your wonderful messages of support on Pub Date for Le Road Trip — April 10, 2012. Just think. A mere eight months ago this was all I had:
A stack of Damn France pages (and a tea bag). And now:
I’ve got a Damn France Book!
The cats can’t hardly contain their glee and pride at this great achievement.
I’ve certainly been enjoying every single message of approval, validation, and assurance from you dear readers that what I’ve sent out into the world doesn’t suck. Whew.
I don’t know what other writers do on the eve of Pub Date — is there a writer who is cool, calm, and collected 48 hours before The Day of Reckoning? — but this writer gets her husband to take her to Atlantic City. Because I got important people to meet and greet in America’s Playground.
You know who I mean. Under the boardwalk:
A lot of people don’t notice the ally cats of Atlantic City, or the big Ally Cat Allies of Atlantic City sign, until there’s a crazy cat lady taking pictures under the boardwalk, attracting attention.
And then I have to explain that the wild and stray cats of Atlantic City are provided for by a corp of dedicated animal lovers at Ally Cat Allies of Atlantic City who bring food, water, and medical care to the colony.
Although there are people who free-lance it, which is not recommended. (There’s a black cat on the second step there, being fed by the guy in the baseball cap.)
But sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. That is, sit and feel better about the world in the company of a cat.
I also don’t know what other writers do the day after Pub Date – if I were Neil deGrasse Tyson I’d be watching my book leap onto the New York Times best-seller list, and if I were J. K. Rowling I’d be getting a kick out of the tsunami of consumer demand for my e-book crashing the internet, and if I were a soft-core pornographer I’d be signing a multi-million dollar deal with my New York publisher…
…but I’m just a humble illustrator/memoirist, so I’ll be sitting at home, sorting out all my big ideas for my next illustrated travel memoir.
And no, it’s not going to be a cat book. I’ve tried, and I can’t make a cat book work for me — I don’t have a disease, a divorce, or a personality disorder that will be resolved through a poignant relationship with my cats that will sustain a narrative of 200 pages. And besides, you know what lunks my cats are:
Do you think I could possibly do anything with this?
I wasn’t in the best mood when I started out on my walk yesterday.
But when the shadows start to look a lot like June (not more than ten steps away from the Winter silhouette above) I have to lighten up.
Look around.
See what there is to see.
You never know what’s hiding in the tall grass.
I had never noticed this house before.
But it’s an outstanding example of my philosophy that any house with a Picture Window becomes a Museum of the Self, an exhibition space for what the homeowner feels is most important to display to the outside world:
I was still in too grouchy a mood, though, to walk up and inspect the artifacts on show. And I can tell you now that today isn’t shaping up to be one of my best-behavior days, either. All I’m saying is that people, especially annoying and boring people, better stay out of my way today.
To all bores and dunces: You’ve been warned.
But when I came across this house, I fell instantly in love with whoever lives here. Can you guess why?
I’m in love because this is the first Norman flag I’ve ever seen flying anywhere on Long Island.
You can tell this is a Norman (from the French province of Normandy) flag because it’s got two leopards passant, known as les p’tits cats. If there had been three leopards — les treis cats – it would have been an English royal banner (the English monarchs, as many of youse know, are descendents of the House of Normandy).
I went up and knocked on the door of this house, intending to introduce myself as a kindred spirit, but no one was home. Sigh. The story of my life.
Surprisingly, dear readers and Damn France Book followers (as far as you have been hanging in here on this blog with me during the composition of my damn France book) we seem to have like-minded amigos in the land of the tsars. The Russian rights to Le Road Trip have been sold to a publishing company in Moscow. This news matches my very Russian mood, in that I’m sure there is something to regret, sooner or later, in every bit of good luck.
The National Geographic Traveler magazine has a mention of Le Road Trip in its current issue:
Vivian Swift’s Le Road Trip is both the true story of an idyllic French honeymoon that winds from Paris through Normandy, Brittany, Bordeaux, the Loire Valley, and Chartres, and an illustrated road-trip handbook on topics ranging from “How to Vagabond” to “What to Wear in Paris.”
The good people at France Magazine have a lot more to say:
Veteran globetrotter Swift set out to chronicle her French honeymoon but ended up penning a quirky love letter to travel filled with cultural, historical and literary references. Delightful watercolors illustrate this wide-ranging field guide, which offers hilarious travel survival tips for every clime as well as ruminations on subjects as varied as Parisian windows, Breton sailor-stripe shirts, and lettuce (not to mention a highly idiosyncratic A-to-Z on vagabonding in the Bordeaux region).
There is more wonderful press coverage in the pipeline and as soon as it becomes finalized I will tell you all about it, not to brag but to confirm your own good taste for being well ahead of the curve.
And according to Moscow time (eight hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Savings Time), it’s already Friday night. I have some crying in my vodka to catch up with!
Toesey!
That’s a word to describe how I feel when I’m happy and peaceful and alive right down to my toes: Toesey. (This photo is courtesy of Stacy Horn, who managed to capture her cat Finney at just the right moment in his own fit of toesey-ness. I discovered Stacy in 2003 with the publication of her first book, Waiting For My Cats to Die, a smart, funny, touching memoir that is what Sex and the City could have been if Tina Fey had written it. It’s newly available for e-readers. She’s also written about the cold case squad at the NYPD and scientific investigation of supernatural phenomenon — her blog is at www.stacyhorn.com.)
It ‘s FRIDAY and it’s a beautiful Spring and I am happy that Winter is over and all good things are on the horizon. I know this mood can not last, so I’m doing everything I can to prolong it.
For one thing, I starting anew art journal! It’s a journal of one page illustrations of my 50 favorite books and poems.
My first favorite book is The Pillow Bookby Sei Shonagan, written in Japan in the 10th century and still read as a classic of Japanese literature. It’s the diary of a very cultured, artful, opinionated, determined woman who was a lady-in-waiting for the Japanese Empress. It was a lusty, cruel, deeply aesthetic time at the dawn of a distinctly Japanese culture that had previously borrowed much of its arts and language from China. It is said that The Pillow Book is the first book to be written in vernacular Japanese.
I got books on Japanese art from the library and searched old prints for scenes and moods and portraits that I could use for my illustration. Here’s what I ended up with:
And here is how I am arranging these images on my page:
(These are color copies of my watercolors, reduced 55% to fit in this setting. )
As you know, I like to leave a lot of white space on a page for text, which in this case is for about 100 words that will sum up this 600-page Pillow Book . Because the text is as much a desgin element as the pictures — never forget that.
I already have my next four books lined up: Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Mary Poppins by Mary Travers, and The Silent Traveller in Endinburghby Chian Yee. Come to think of it, I don’t really like Steppenwolf at all, having recently re-read it for this journal, but I loved being 20 and living in Paris when I read it for the first time so that’s why this book is in this list.
This is just a reminder that I’m giving a talk about my new book, Le Road Trip, at the Writers Salon at Hofstra University on Long Island this coming Monday night, April 2. For more information, visit ce.hofstra.edu/writing, email ce-writing@hofstra.edu or call 516-463-7200.
I’ll be doing a half-and-half at the Writers Salon: half shop talk to the writers in the room, with the other half being me taking advantage of a captive audience to give the world a piece of my mind that I’m calling The Three Biggest Lies and the Two Biggest Truths of Travel.
Stay toesy, everyone, and have a great weekend!
Spring is usually one of the most disheartening seasons here on the Long Island Sound. It tends to be cold, grey, wet, muddy, COLD around here until May, so the whole “Spring” thing is usually purely hypothetical. March is usually particularly brutal, a month of sleet, low clouds, filthy — and I mean filthy — snow, and complete exhaustion. Like John Lennon said, Spring is a concept by which we measure our utter fed-up-ness with life.
But not this year.
This year, Spring is right on time, all grassy and greeny and balmy with the zephyr breezes of southern climes.
And we are happy, basking in the rejuvenating sunshine brought to us by this [also hypothetical -- ha ha] phenomenon called “Global Warming“. Thanks, all you Hummer drivers out there!
This is so much better than last year, when all we got for Spring was the cold comfort of its Not Being Winter (In Name Only). And a cardboard box.
So, invigorated by the joyous brightness of Spring, I took myself an a Long Island pilgrimage. Through the beautiful scenic country which the original Rockaway Indian inhabitants called “Paumonok”, the “Land of Tribute”, I journeyed unto the County of Suffolk.
My destination lay behind that fence, the one with the big white sign on it, on Route 110.
Yes, that fence.
The fence that separates the object of my quest from the more attractive parking lots of this land, which was once a 100-acre farm before it was turned into a bunch of strip malls surrounding a really big mall known to us locals as the Walt Whitman Mall. For that is how we celebrate native-born poets on the Isle of Long; we pave the crap out of their old family farm.
And then I entered unto the other side of that fence and lo, I tried to take a photo of the splendid T-Mobile phone shop that butts up against the small parcel of family farm still sprouting grass, but that damn statue of Walt (the poet) got in the way.
This is Walt’s family home, which is abutted by the western side of that fence. When photographed from the right angle, it can look almost bucolic.
The fact that the whole house hasn’t been knocked down in favor of a much-needed Bed Bath and Beyond is all down to the good work of some fine ladies who preserved the homestead in the 1950s. (this is two of the worthy ladies, whose names I did not write down. But any lady who wears a pillbox hat is OK in my book.
There is absolutely nothing of Walt’s in the house, which can only be seen by paying $6.00 for a guided tour. Even if you are the only person at the Walt Whitman birthplace that day, and have the doughy face of a harmless old illustrator of terribly digressive travel memoirs, you will not be allowed to roam the grounds without a minder. The house is furnished with antiques from the era, or reproductions.
I really prefer it as it was in the 1940s, when the house was the domicile of a Long Island doctor and his lovely wife. I love the look of hideous Victorian furniture, especially if it’s in a dopey anachronistic setting, but I understand that that isn’t to everyone’s taste.
What I cannot stand is modern stupidity. This is the ladies’ room of the office where I slave away Mon-Fri, squandering my few remaining years of sex appeal and intellectual acuity.
Note how both the soap dispenser and the spiggot are juuuuuust short enough to spew soap onto the counter, juuuuust short enough to make it tricky to get your hands under the faucet, juuuust idiotic enough make washing one’s hands juuuuust that unpleasant.
And it’s not like this was not intentional, oh no. Every single sink is set up juuuuuust this way.
And me, being such an advocate of cleanliness and washing my hands at least five times a work day, I get juuuuuust enough enraged about this situation to earn my restorative G&T, Mon-Fri.
But I cannot leave you on this note of despair because I am all about bringing light and clarity and joy in to my reader’s lives. So please, check out this video of Le Road Trip and tell me if you can identify the music. I keep forgetting to ask my publisher what it is — maybe one of my brilliant blog Commentors knows?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCAMRLvDNdA
My doctor told me that I have a Vitamin D deficiency so now that we’re back to Normal [Daylight Savings] Time I’m soaking up the sunshine of these fine early Spring days. 
Meaning that when I make my afternoon G&T I take it outside and sit out in the backyard for the 11 minutes it takes for me to drain it. Sitting in the sun makes a cocktail healthy. It’s a fact.
I’m all about restoring the mind-and-body on this second week of vacation. My other mentally and spiritually healthy activities include catching up on my reading, taking long walks through the neighborhood, treating myself to a fine tea-time pastry (sometimes those last two things are one and the same:)
I also try to go to my Happy Place as often as possible, the place where I feel safe and calm and rejuvenated.
I go to Ikea.
Specifically, I go to the Ikea House, the 600-square-foot fake home that my local Ikea has installed on its main floor as an example of the pristine Ikea lifestyle.
It’s like walking into a Scandanavian vision of domestic perfection where there’s a place for everything and, most importantly, everything is in its place.
Clean lines, blond woods, small-scale sense of what it takes to be complete.
This would be my work room. I would thrive in such simplicity. I can see me having only one thought at a time here, no room for conflicting or competing ideas, no debris from non-sensical or overly-complicated notions about life, art, self, or DoG. I could be pure in this room.
I find great comfort in imagining my life in the Ikea House, limiting my intellectual and emotional baggage to just what I could stash into Scandinavian closet space. The Ikea House would fit in half the downstairs of my dusty, cluttered, cat-infested 100-year-old-house on the Long Island Sound. The rationality of living the Ikea Way comforts me against the baffling stupidity of modern life.
The latest pop cultural dope-slap to my sanity is a book titled 50 Shades of Gray. Have you heard of it? It’s a monster: selling in the hundreds of thousands as an e-book, it’s just been bought by a mainstream New York publishing house for 7 figures. Now, I don’t begrudge any author’s success (which is not true; I begrudge the success of any and every author who is not me) but this soft-core porn/romance novel is a piece of shit from page one.
But it’s what hundreds of thousands of women around the world (the book is Australian) want to read.
Really? Really???
So, faced with the utter futility of my writing career, filled as it is with non-porn notions of what makes a book worth reading, of course I want to crawl into the security and rationality of the 600-square-foot Ikea House.
Except when I want to quicken my pulse with Ikea-esque porn. Which is this:
The 315-square-foot Ikea Apartment.
Getting back to the title of this post, I want to ask my dear readers: Do you know what is up with Boston? I’ve never sold many books in Beantown, or in all of New England, really – I’m too Pacific Northwest for the entire East Coast is what I tell myself — but all of a sudden When Wanderers Cease to Roam is selling like Red Sox T-shirts at the Cheers bar in Boston. It started last month and is still going strong: Boston is outselling (outbuying?) every other part of the country combined. No one at Bloomsbury can explain it, and Amazon only gives me raw data (and a spiffy map of the U.S. with Massachusettes lit up like an Xmas tree). Are readers there using the Wanderers dust cover to hide their copies of 50 Shades of Gray?
Can anyone tell me why Boston has recently become one of my favorite cities in America? Yes, dear readers: Boston is my new Happy Place.
Where is your Happy Place, and is it cocktail hour there yet?
P.S. I forgot to tell you all that I’m speaking at The Writers Salon at Hofstra University on Monday, April 2, 2012. Here’s the info:
Hofstra Continuing Education is proud to host monthly “Writers Salons” that feature guest speakers, faculty and student readings, on- and off-campus field trips, and the opportunity to network with fellow writers. The Writers Salons take place on the first Monday of every month (except June, July and August), and are free and open to the public. For more information, visit ce.hofstra.edu/writing, email ce-writing@hofstra.edu or call 516-463-7200.
Save the date for thisupcoming Writers Salon:
7-8:30 p.m.
Monday, April 2
- Author/adventurer/illustrator Vivian Swift will be speaking at the next Hofstra CE Writer’s Salon on April 2 at 7 p.m. to inspire writers and art journalers to take their work to the next level. A former jewelry historian and Faberge expert at Christie’s auction house in New York, Ms. Swift is the author of two illustrated travel memoirs, When Wanderers Cease to Roam and Le Road Trip and has been called “my favorite travel writer” by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Ms. Swift will discuss her unlikely career path as a writer and offer her tips on getting real, getting down to business, and getting published. The Salon is free and open to the public. You may register online, or by calling 516-463-7200.
|
|
My Book