Empress of the World » Art

Some of this trip’s discoveries

Sara — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:39:15 +0000

I quote myself: “As the child of two librarians, one of whom worked in rare books and special collections, I don’t have family stuff so much as a museum and archive.”

So when I’m at my parents’ house, I dig around. This time I found some scrapbooks. Steve wrote about the contents of one of them over at the Periscope blog. The other one was kept by my great-grandfather:

I just made this lady into a LiveJournal icon:

You can see more of what’s inside over on Flickr.

ALAN report, finally.

Sara — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:03:59 +0000

Here at the Undisclosed Location (a.k.a. my parents’ house in Ohio), catching up on email, deleting comment spam (Why, why are the spammers so deeply attracted to the post about Rules being a Junior Library Guild selection? It’s harder hit than any other post, by far…) preparing for another small, low-key Thanksgiving, it’s hard to believe that I was at ALAN just a few days ago.

The theme of the workshop was about finding a sense of self and place in young adult literature. Our panel was about place in different genres within YA, and I’m still thinking about it. We each had about five minutes, and I’ll give you a tiny snippet of what we said. Cecil Castellucci talked about how a scene (punk, movie monster-making, etc.) can be a place, how a city can be a character, how art itself is a safe place for a lot of us. Holly Black talked about how description in fantasy needs to suggest, even before any fantastic elements come into the story, that the reader is someplace unexpected, where anything might happen. Garret Freymann-Weyr discussed how inextricable place is from memory. I talked about how in Rules, Battle adjusts very quickly to Portland, and the very ease of that adjustment to a new place underscores how hard it is for her to connect with and understand her brother. (I also told everyone about the anxiety dream I had the night before, appropriate for a conference full of English teachers: that all of us had to relate our own work to the Great Gatsby.) Jo Knowles talked about how an abuser can make every place feel unsafe, but also how places can, eventually, be reclaimed. And Ann Angel did a search for all the places mentioned in the anthology she edited, Such A Pretty Face, and saw that the places mentioned most often — bathrooms, locker rooms, bedrooms — were all locuses of anxiety about where the characters fit in the world.

I was so glad to have the chance to be part of the conference.

More soon, but right now, it’s sunny and I’m going for a walk.

Vita brevis, ars longa

Sara — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:19:43 +0000

Earlier this evening I identified a Pieter Brueghel painting that was in service to swank up a wine label. I was vaguely displeased with myself for not remembering the name of the painting, and also surprised that I was the only one at the table who recognized it as Brueghel. I forget that not everyone is all up in the Northern Renaissance. A search reveals that it was Peasant Dance.

And the same search revealed that there is also a Brueghel painting available as a table lamp.

I am now sort of tempted to buy both the wine and the lamp, and juxtapose them. I wonder what else you can get Brueghel paintings on?