M IS FOR MURANO

     I know I already posted about glassblowing, but this post is different.  It's about a very special place at a very special time: the tiny island of Murano, off the coast of Venice, during the 16th century.
     There were glassblowers in Venice dating back to about a thousand years ago.  But they didn't work in big factories; glasshouses were tiny buildings that would get suffocatingly hot from the kilns, which had to be perpetually stoked with wood to create roaring fires.

     Often, there were accidents; glassworkers could not contain the fires, which leapt out to destroy not only the glasshouses, but the surrounding areas.  In the year 1291, the Venetian government had had enough of this dangerous industry coexisting with homes and shops and churches.  It decreed that all the glasshouses in Venice had to be relocated to Murano.  From that time to the present, Murano has been home to generation after generation of glassmakers.
     In the 16th century, Venetian glass was the best in the world, coveted by the wealthy everywhere that Venetian traders could transport it.  The government wanted to ensure that the trade secrets of the Muranese glassmakers remained secret, so that the local industry remained extremely lucrative.  It accomplished this goal by decreeing that the glassmakers were forbidden, under penalty of death, from ever leaving their island, or even speaking to visitors.
     But some glassmakers dared to violate these laws, despite the threat of being pursued by assassins sent by the government wherever they might flee.  Terrifying as it must have been, some of them did escape, and survive, and establish their own glasshouses in London or Paris or German cities.  By the 18th century, Venice had lost its monopoly over top-quality glassmaking.
     When I first heard this story, I was instantly hooked.  The more I read, the more I realized that 16th-century Venetian glasswork was not primitive, as a modern reader might think.  The facilities and the tools were primitive, but the work produced was anything but.  The image at the top of this post, for example, is of a lamp made in Murano in the mid-1500s.   And here is a chalice from the early part of that century:

     And a wine decanter, also from the early part of the century:

     And a fruit container, from the mid-1500s:

     The source of all of these images is a book, "Glass from Antiquity to the Renaissance," by Giovanni Mariacher, translated from the Italian (Hamlyn, 1970).   I chose them to illustrate that the level of 16th century Venetian glassmaking has (in my opinion) never been matched before or since, let alone surpassed.
     And maybe someday my middle-grade novel, GLASS ISLAND, will be published,  and then I'll be able to share a lot more about this magical, dangerous, thrilling place and time.

L IS FOR LOFT

     I've lived in my house for about 17 years.  For most of that time, the space above my garage consisted of some rotted-out wooden floorboards.  You could get up there via a rotted-out wooden ladder, if you were willing to risk it, but there wasn't much point to that because once you were up, wherever you set foot, there was a good chance of your crashing through the floor to the cement below.
     When my daughter was in middle school, my husband and I decided to hire a handyman to construct a real space up there, so that she and her friends could use it as a playroom.  He did a wonderful job, installing a sturdy floor, a window, insulation, electricity, and a staircase.  So of course, my daughter and her friends used the space maybe twice and then completely abandoned it.
     Meanwhile, at some point my daughter decided that one bedroom really wasn't enough to meet her very sophisticated needs, so she annexed the guest room.  This became her bedroom, and her bedroom became her closet.  The main problem with this was that the guest room, when not being used for guests, was supposed to be MY space, to be used specifically for writing.  Not that I actually used it very much, but still, at least it had been my theoretical space, and now it wasn't even that.
     It took a long time, but eventually I came up with the following thought: if she's going to take over my unused space, what's to stop me from taking over hers?  So I did.  Voila!  My writing nook:

 

 

 



     I adore my loft.  I truly do.  I decorated it with carpet scraps I cut up to form a patchwork, with bits of furniture donated from friends, and with pictorial references to every book I've written and some I haven't yet.  Maybe, if you've been following my A to Z posts, you'll have figured out that it's probably my adult version of a dollhouse.  Or maybe it's modeled after the Swiss Family Robinson's treehouse, another space I coveted as a child.  The key is that it's ALL MINE.
     There's only one slight problem.  I haven't spent any time in my beloved space in probably over a year.  After all the work I put into fixing up my nook, I do my writing at the kitchen table instead, right in the middle of whatever is going on around me.  Like daughter, like mother, I guess.  But it makes me so happy just to know my loft is there, waiting for me whenever I feel like visiting again...

K IS FOR BUSTER KEATON

     Joseph Frank Keaton was born in a trunk, as the saying goes.  This may not have been literally true in his case, but it is true that by the age of three (which would have been in 1898), he was appearing in his parents' vaudeville act, dressed like his father as a bald, bearded stereotype of an Irishman.

     This was the benign part of Buster's entry into show business.  And if you don't like that part, you'll probably really hate the part about his mother sewing a suitcase handle onto the back of his little jacket so that his father could get a good grip when he flung his son off the stage and out toward the back wall of the theater.  Seeing how the little boy would just get up calmly from wherever he landed, as if nothing had happened, a fellow performer (some say it was Houdini) said to his father, "That's quite a buster you've got there!"  And the name stuck throughout his life.
     When he grew up (despite what seem to have been his parents' best efforts to prevent it), Keaton casually found his way into a career in the movies, and he proved himself to be a genius of silent film.  He wrote, directed and starred in hilarious comedies through the 1920's and 30's.  His two hallmarks as a comic actor were his permanent deadpan expression - he was known as The Great Stone Face - and his extraordinary gift for physical humor.  A superb natural athlete, Keaton always performed all of his own movie stunts, and some of them have to be seen to be believed. 
     Everyone knows who Charlie Chaplin was, but the same is not true about Keaton, and that's a tragedy.  To me, Keaton had an innate delicacy and vulnerability that Chaplin lacked.  The Little Tramp was a poignant figure, but in such a studied way.  Keaton's persona was of course studied too: he never allowed himself to be photographed smiling, even when not in character.  But he still somehow managed to project both outrageous humor and a deep melancholy at the same time, while making it look like he wasn't even trying.  "The General," a full-length feature film starring Keaton as a train engineer in the South during the Civil War, is widely regarded as his masterpiece.  But if you don't want to start learning about Keaton by watching a two-hour film, I urge you to turn first to You Tube.  Start with the compendium of his best stunts, move on from there to some of his short films, and I hope and believe that by that point, you'll be hooked.
     Keaton died of lung cancer in 1966 at the age of 70.

     Remember those ads, "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's?"  Well, here was Buster as an old man.  Same porkpie hat, same Great Stone Face, eating a deli sandwich on rye.  He always had the world's saddest eyes. 
    Buster's midlife descent into alcoholism robbed the world of so many brilliant films that he could have made, but I want to focus on the positive.  Buster was physically beautiful, incomparably graceful, and madly talented, and I have a huge crush on the young man he once was.  Do yourself a favor and get to know him.  You will be richly rewarded.

    

J IS FOR JIF PEANUT BUTTER

     I kind of have food issues.  I've kind of always had them.  There have always been a lot of things I wouldn't eat.  I've grown out of some of these aversions, like to tomatoes and eggs, but some remain.  Primarily, I can't even think about eating anything that has a gooshy texture.  This category includes: cheesecake; custards; puddings; meringues; whipped cream; avocadoes...  need I go on?
     Anyway.  When I started elementary school, my mother was at a loss as to what to pack me for lunch, so she fell back on peanut butter sandwiches.  No jelly... right, the whole goosh factor thing.  PB and no J.  Day, after day, after day.  Year, after year, after year.  Always, always Jif.   First grade through eighth grade.  Every.  Single.  Day.  I never tired of it, and I never complained, so why fix what isn't broken?  I ate my peanut butter sandwiches, and I was happy.
     Until eighth grade.  Either my body's reaction to peanut butter changed, or I suddenly became aware of it for the first time.  I began to realize, to my complete mortification, that every day, after lunch, I had an uncontrollable urge to fart (or, as my mother would say, to "expel gas").  And this urge did not go away after I indulged it once or twice; no, it came back repeatedly, for what felt like hours.  If I was excrutiatingly careful - and believe me, I was - I could prevent the noise, but preventing the smell was beyond my power.  And the very worst part was that we all sat in assigned seats, and in the seat just behind me sat Leslie Berger, a boy whom I now remember as having been rather sardonic and mean-spirited, but who at the time was generally considered by the girls to be cute.  Every single afternoon, I sat at my desk, mortified, wafting my Jif-induced farts in Leslie Berger's direction.  And somehow, during that never-ending year, I never associated my gaseous state with the peanut butter sandwich I had just finished eating.
     Oddly enough, Leslie Berger, who was not shy with nasty comments, never snickered or said "pee-yew" or in fact said a word to me, or to anyone that I knew of, about my Condition.  Maybe he had no sense of smell.  I don't really know what the disconnect was, but I do know that it made it possible for me to survive eighth grade.
     By high school, I had somehow figured it out.  No more peanut butter sandwiches for lunch.  But guess what?  That doesn't mean I ever lost my taste for Jif.  Why, I still bring myself a peanut butter sandwich (albeit reduced-fat) to work for lunch once a week or so.  The difference is that Jif no longer seems to have the same physiological effect on me.  And, even if it did, now I have my own nice big office, and nobody sits four feet behind me, in prime position to share any odors I might generate.  See, kids?  If you can survive middle school or its equivalent, life does get better!
     Viva la Jif.

I IS FOR IRIS

   

 

 

     To me, irises are the most exquisite flowers on earth.  When many people think of irises, they think of Van Gogh's heartbreakingly beautiful purple blooms:

 

 

But in fact, in modern times irises are grown in every color imaginable.

     The original French fleur de lys were the precurors to today's irises.  Traditional irises were what we would consider small (and here's Van Gogh again):

     But the trend in recent years has been towards bigger, showier, bearded varieties.

     I'm not, by any means, an iris expert.  They're just my favorite flowers, and anything I know about them is what I've picked up by serving as a part-time volunteer every bloom season (more or less the four-week period surrounding Memorial Day) for the past eleven or twelve years at the Presby Memorial Iris Gardens in Montclair, New Jersey.   The Presby Gardens have been a fixture at that site since 1927, and bloom season there is really something to behold.  The beds house over 3,000 varieties of iris, some dating back to the 1500's and some hybridized just in the past year.  The people who really work at the gardens are incredible fonts of information on all things iris, and I can't think of many ways I'd rather spend a few hours than sitting in that extraordinary setting at the "host table," greeting visitors and trying to answer their questions.  I've also worked in the Bloom Room, the on-site gift shop featuring a wide variety of home and garden items, many of them iris-related.  The Gardens have become a symbol of spring to me.
     If you live in New York or northern New Jersey, please stop by this bloom season!  People visit the Gardens from all over the world.  They bring their children, they bring their dogs, they picnic on the hill.  Pretty much everyone leaves there smiling.  Even grumpy old me!!!

p.s. Sorry about my tantrum yesterday.  Will try to complete the rest of the alphabet without any further disruption.  Will no doubt fail, but will sincerely try.



H IS FOR...

     H is for How Can It Be That Posting About My Favorite Things For Only Eight Days Makes Me Want to Shoot Myself in the Head?
     I'm not even a third of the way through the alphabet, and yet here I am, rebelling against my self-imposed oppression.  Did anyone force me to sign up for the A to Z Challenge?  No.  Did I have unfettered freedom to choose my own topic?  Yes.  Did I plan to post this evening about my deep and abiding love for horses?  Yes.  Do all of these facts, which render my opposition absolutely pointless, diminish it in any way?  Nah.  Am I the most self-defeating person in the universe?  You betcha!  For proof, just check out the title of my blog.
     I can't remember what I've planned to post for I, but trust me - it's going to be phenomenal.  Meanwhile, however, tomorrow is so very far away, and H isn't going away for another couple of hours, and so tonight it's just going to have to stand for

HELP!!!  GET ME OUTTA HERE!

G IS FOR GLASSBLOWING

     Almost twenty years ago, when I was in England, I visited a glassblowing factory for the first time, and - I'm sorry, but I have to say it - I was blown away.  The factory had a small library which included some books about the history of glassmaking, and I bought one or more, and thus began a journey which eventually led me to spend a couple of days visiting the Corning Glass Museum and its incredible library; to spend another day visiting a professional glassblower whose kiln was in his back yard*; to try my hand at blowing glass myself... and to write my first children's book, set in 1574 on the glassblowers' island of Murano, off the coast of Venice.  And that's all I'm going to say about it for now, because (1) I'm dead tired, and (2) I have to leave most of what I want to say about Murano for six posts from now, when we get to M!

* For years, I've been struggling to remember the name of this lovely man, who 18 years ago (I was pregnant with my daughter), along with his wife, hosted me for an afternoon and let me shadow him in his glasshouse. Last night, his name suddenly came to me: Larry Roff.  I just googled him, and here is his website: http://www.accentgallery.com/roff_larry.htm.  Isn't his work beautiful?  A true craftsman!