January 31, 2010



Breakfast at Ezra's Pound is definitely not something I can afford every week, but it was pretty delicious, and the service rather nice. I had a rich latte bowl, the crispiest most luscious croissant on this side of the Atlantic, and a lemon ginger scone that was moist and zesty through and through. Top that with some shy sunshine peeking out, Alex's big baby blues, and a cute little boy to get fuzzy about, and it was a damn fine morning.

January 30, 2010





A desperate reminder that we really are in January, a silent yell blowing through the city, leaving as quickly as it arrived, leaving every early riser wide-eyed, and purified.


January 29, 2010




We had a few mild days where the air was thick with sepia and lavender hues pulsing through small gaps in the sky.


January 24, 2010



For the past two weeks I have been keeping myself busy with the following,

♥ taking things easy and being happy about it
♥ buying & listening to new records (see previous post)
♥ reading Rilke's "The Book of Images", very slowly because it is so beautiful
♥ working slavishly but joyously on my 2010 diary


In Graphic as a Star Josephine Foster puts her bewitching vocals to the task of resurrecting Emily Dickenson. Twenty-Six of the poet's works are set to some of the most shiver inducing ballads I've ever heard. I listened to it for the first time on a stormy night by candlelight.

download Exultation in the Going and I see Thee better in the Dark



Jorge Ben's Força Bruta is a Brazilian classic that I can't live without. From bright beats to heart fluttering string orchestrations, I just can't avoid dancing. I enjoy it early in the morning with a hot cup of coffee.

download O Telefone Tocou Novamente and Pulo Pulo

January 13, 2010



Freddy's winter haircut means that he needs extra warmth every morning. I wake up to his little nose poking under the covers, and we go back to sleep for a few more minutes. It's a ritual I would never forsake, having his tiny paws pressed against my eyelids until dawn removes them.

January 10, 2010



I am all aglow on the inside too.

January 9, 2010



I took this photograph in mid December in order to celebrate the bravest leaf on my vine, before her eventual fall. Today is one of the coldest days I've ever witnessed and she's still there, whispering against the windowpane, holding up her brittle frame with iron will.

January 5, 2010



The Churchyard was veiled in a whirlwind of snow in an effort to conceal warm secrets. The pearls of the Parish House.

January 3, 2010

Under a blanket of snow, citrus, petals, and Rilke are mandatory presences.


Wait ..., that tastes good ...It's already in flight
... Just a little music, a stamping, a humming - :
Girls, you warm, you silent girls,
Dance the taste of the fruit experienced!

Dance the Orange. Who can forget it,
how, drowning in itself, it resists
its being-sweet. You have possessed it.
It has been deliciously converted to you.
Dance the Orange. The warmer landscape,
fling it out of you, that the ripe one be radiant
in homeland breezes! Aglow, peel away

perfume on perfume! Create the relation
with the pure, reluctant rind,
with the juice that fills the happy fruit!


Flowers, kin in the end to those arranging hands,
(girls' hands of then and now),
you that lay on the garden table often from edge
to edge, drooping and gently hurt,

awaiting the water that once more was to recover you
from death already begun -, and now
lifted again between the streaming poles
of feeling fingers that are able to do

even more good than you guessed, light ones,
when you came to yourselves in the pitcher,
slowly cooling and giving warmness of girls,

like confessions, from you, like dreary wearying sins,
committed by your being plucked, relating you
again to those who are your allies in blooming.

(Polaroids by me, portraits by David Hamilton)

Rusty Dusk





The infernal grey blanket is here, thickly woven, and stretched taut. Any prolonged absence of incandescence or volume in the sky puts me in a fowl mood. It’s as though a gauzy film covered my own eyes, and so I must travel back to this November day, where all bleakness was ravished by a rusty sunset. It spilled forth in copper waves, against which charred silhouettes gladly gave up the ghost. Leaves crackled like small flames on branches, falling in between rocks whose moss shimmered secretively. I stood outside in the humid chill warmed only by the electricity that pulsed through my retinas. What I wouldn’t give for such a current at this very moment.

January 2, 2010



This was the perfect book with which to finish off the year. A richer experience I could not have asked for. When you are faced with a will to create such as this one, you can't help but feel transformed. I was dead to much I experienced for many months. It was a self imposed numbness, based on a conviction that my desires were faulty, and my dreams worthless. But as I brought out my little green highlighter, and began to mark the passages that made me swoon, I realized that I could no longer hold back my love. Be it for woman, book, or tree, every vision is worth having. And if I allow myself to envision beauty, then I shall possess it. And I shall be happy.

♥ ♥ ♥
'The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it: That I confess, is part of my morning prayer.' - The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn

'I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's night standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon the earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strage in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious professes up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes...One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavements, living rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree.' - The Mark on the Wall

'For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water lillies, the first red water lillies I'd ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn't paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only - it was so precious - the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life.' - Kew Gardens

'Don't you remember, in early childhood, when, in play or talk, as one stepped across the puddle or reached the window on the landing, some imperceptible shock froze the universe to a solid ball of crystal which one held for a moment...' - 'It's an easy thing to confess one's faults. But what dusk is deep enough to hide one's virtues? I love, I adore - no, I can't tell you what a rose of worship my soul is - the names trembles on my lips - for Shakespeare.' - The Evening Party

'John, who had exclaimed “Politics be damned!” began burrowing his fingers down, down, into the sand. As his hand went further and further beyond the wrist, so that he had to hitch his sleeve a little higher, his eyes lost their intensity, or rather the background of thought and experience which gives an inscrutable depth to the eyes of grown people disappeared, leaving only the clear transparent surface, expressing nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display. No doubt the act of burrowing in the sand had something to do with it.' - Solid Objects

'The pointed fingers of glass hang downwards. The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the lustre drop green upon the marble. The feathers of parakeets­ their harsh cries­ sharp blades of palm trees­ green, too; green needles glittering in the sun. But the hard glass drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the desert sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantlepiece; the ruffled surface of ocean. No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky. It's night; the needles drip blots of blue. The green's out.' - Blue & Green

"Quite alone" Mrs. Sutton repeated. That was what she could not conceive, she said, with a despairing swoop of her dark bright haired head - being happy, quite alone. "Yes" he said. In happiness there is always this terrific exaltation. It is not high spirits; nor rapture; nor praise, fame or health, it is a mystic state, a trance, and ecstasy which, for all that he was atheistic, skeptical, unbaptised, and all the rest of it, had, he suspected, some affinity with the ecstasy that turned men into priests, sent women in the prime of life trudging the streets with starched cyclamen-like frills about their faces, and set lips and stone eyes; but with this difference; them it prisoned; him it set free. It freed him from all dependence upon anyone upon anything' - Happiness

'It was so that Julia looked too, as she sat half turned on the music stool, smiling. It’s on the field, it’s on the pane, it’s in the sky—beauty; and I can’t get at it; I can’t have it—I, she seemed to add, with that little clutch of the hand which was so characteristic, who adore it so passionately, would give the whole world to possess it! And she picked up the carnation which had fallen on the floor, while Fanny searched for the pin. She crushed it, Fanny felt, voluptuously in her smooth veined hands stuck about with water–coloured rings set in pearls. The pressure of her fingers seemed to increase all that was most brilliant in the flower; to set it off; to make it more frilled, fresh, immaculate.' - Moments of Being

♥ ♥ ♥







Pablo (Pablito) takes baths while singing, every morning. Claude, our Parakeet, is madly in love with him. He watches the daily ritual from on high, his cloud coloured plumage shivering with adoration. If you listen closely, he too coos out sonnets, only very quietly.