Too much Edith Wharton

me: I am greatly perplexed as to the location of this pen…

tim: (pointing) neh!

oh, right.

You & I

we’re like two pebbles, smoothed by the sea and each other.

i don’t know why anyone would think otherwise.

Luisa

When I read about the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the eccentric Italian socialite whose life and legacy are the inspiration for Georgina Chapman’s line “Marchesa”, I went absolutely nuts for her. Here was a woman who took her life’s motto very seriously indeed – I want to be a living work of art, said she and so she was. She wore couture everywhere, even when walking her greyhounds and dalmatians; she commissioned paintings and sculptures to ensure her immortality… even when the money ran dry, she was rumoured to be seen rummaging through rubbish bins in the streets of London, looking for feathers to decorate her hair.

My favourite part is the inscription on her gravestone in Brompton Cemetery (which I must visit one day) it reads:

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”

from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

One of my friends summed her up quite nicely – Carrie Bradshaw on speed.

two to love

It was hard to say when exactly winter arrived. The decline was gradual, like that of a person into old age, inconspicuous from day to day until the season became an established relentless reality. First came a dip in evening temperatures, then days of continuous rain, confused gusts of Atlantic wind, dampness, the fall of leaves and the changing of the clocks – though there were still occasional moments of reprieve, mornings when one could leave the house without a coat and the sky was cloudles and bright. But they were like false signs of recovery in a patient upon whom death has passed its sentence. By December, the new season was entrenched and the city was covered almost every day by an ominous steely-grey sky, like one in a painting by Mantegna or Veronese, the perfect backdrop to the crucifixtion of Christ or to a day beneath the bedclothes.

- The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton

She also posed in attitudes, holding things. Pre-Raphaelite, she combed out her long, black hair to stream straight down from a centre parting and thoughtfully regarded herself as she held a tiger-lily from the garden under her chin, her knees pressed close together. A la Toulouse-Lautrec, she dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down on a chair with her legs apart and a bowl of water and a towel at her feet…

- The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter

I don’t fall in love easily, but when I do, I fall hard. Seek these two out.

Again and again and again and again

“How kind of you to let me come.” – Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle

Remember – Always be a lady.

Dance Dance

Hello faithful patrons of my faithless, erratic blog!

Here’s to a wonderful Sunday afternoon whiled away in a Christmassy coffeehouse (oh you know the one) with toffee nut lattes heralding Christmas for some, Joy tea for others and yuletide muzak for all.

And then, (please don’t tell me I’m the only one) my favourite trick for wasting time in an upbeat mood – put on crazy LALALALAAHH dance music (it was Running on Sunshine by Jesus Jackson this time), slip on a gorgeous silk-OTT-gown which hasn’t had it’s coming out yet switch on the fan on full speed and DANCE!!!!

oh yeah. I’m bringing my christmas CD to work tomorrow.

The Beholder as Artist

We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that gave…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.

- Proust, preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies

Here, Proust admonishes the creative emptiness of hero worship; and here I faithfully reproduce his golden words, waist deep in irony.

Cat

One of my many running lists of names is called “Names for my cat”, but since I don’t have a cat and won’t be having one in the forseeable future, this is very much a wishful thinking list. Cats are such elegant, haughty, mysterious creatures that I find them much funner to name than dogs. I have such names as Scheherazade, Carabosse, Odile…etc.

But I’ve found one to trump them all! Magnificat!!!!!!!!! Mag for short. Like it?

Henceforth all ages will called her Blessed.

Am going to be smote anytime now.

Bus

I saw a bus that was majorelle blue this morning. No one aboard that bus might have known that it sported such a legendary hue much less paid any attention to the colour of the bus they were boarding but still, it made me smile.

Reading the newspaper

‘That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper,’ wrote Proust, ‘thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.’

- extract from How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton

Now if only everything he wrote was as succinctly insightful and humorous as this little blurb, I might muster up enough courage to dip my toes into In Search of Lost Time. Sylvia Townsend blames Proust’s translator on the lengthy tome but I’m not so sure myself.