"The artist Edward Gorey (1925-2000) ornamented his correspondence with elaborate drawings."

"Each year, the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod runs an all-ages envelope art contest. This year’s theme is 'The Utter Zoo.' You have until Dec. 1 to submit envelopes decorated accordingly. The website suggests 'a compilation of creatures, a bestiary, a compendium of the fictional, plausible, cranky, vengeful or just highly undomesticated.'... My favorite winners from last year are the ones from little children who seem deeply imaginative but not necessarily artistically gifted in the classic sense. A friend told me recently about taking a singing class with a guy who couldn’t hold a tune but who was so passionate that the teacher gave him a solo in the class’s final presentation. Of course his performance was the one the audience found the most stirring...."

Writes Melissa Kirsch, in "The Good List: 6 Things to Add Some Delight to Your Day" (NYT).

Click on that link for winners from last year. Lots of great stuff, mostly by the artistically gifted. As for singers who can't hold a tune but are powerfully passionate... reminds me of the early years of "American Idol." It's highly amusing... up to a point. And these days, what's the problem? All the singers are auto-tuned. 

"The Mysterious Cover Artist Who Captured the Decline of the Rich/Mary Petty was reclusive, uncompromising, but she peered into a fading world with unmatched warmth and brilliance."

I hope you can get past the New Yorker pay wall to see this article, with writing by the artist Chris Ware, and many wonderful New Yorker covers by Mary Petty.

Excerpt:

Her eye was extraordinary, conjuring an Edwardian era through its tiniest features: the brocaded wallpaper, the finely tiled kitchen floors, the thin brass faucets, the plush upholstery.

James Thurber, in an introduction to “This Petty Pace” (1945), the sole published collection of the artist’s work, describes the young Petty as a “slip of a girl.” Like her husband, she initially preferred to mail in her submissions, but by the nineteen-forties she had become a “common sight” at the magazine’s office, “sitting, cool and almost undismayed, on the edge of a chair.” Thurber reports that she would spend three weeks on a drawing; when she was done, she would say that she hated it and herself. “Everybody else, of course, loves it and her,” Thurber adds, observing that what Petty offered in her work was “not a trick, but a magic. . . . She catches time in a foreshortened crouch that intensifies her satirical effects.”

Time in a foreshortened crouch — is anyone catching that anymore?

Example:

ADDED: Ware notes that Petty seems to have influenced Edward Gorey. And I'll just note that the book title — "This Petty Pace" — is a reference to a Shakespeare soliloquy, from "MacBeth," which also has something to say about time.

Understated sunrise without the sun.

We were there for this at 5:16:

Later, I continued my practice of sitting in the front-yard and reading an entire book. Sample page:

I showed that photo of the page to my son John, who said, "When I was a kid I loved that kind of understated humor" and sent me Salvador Dali's "Fried Egg on the Plate without the Plate":

Understated humor... and yet when the sun does something like that sunny-side-up egg, I consider it one of the most extravagant sunrises of the year. Like this, from last May:

Feel free to understate or overstate whatever you like in the comments.

And consider supporting this blog by purchasing a readable-in-one-sitting book by Edward Gorey using my Amazon Associates link. The book containing the threatened deviled egg is "The Betrayed Confidence."

Redstarts and that Wobbling Rock.

Rain nixed the sunrise run today, but the weather was lovely when the time came for what I call The Second Walk, and I encountered 2 very tiny, very active birds along the woodland path. 

The "Visual Intelligence" button on my phone informed me that they were redstarts. Redstarts! Never heard of them. And I say "them" because they're both there, male and female. The female is hard to see, but as The Beatles observed long ago, that means she's good looking.

I got a second outing, to the front yard, which is heavily shaded now. I sat on the bench and read a book — read it 3 times. Almost understood it.

Write about anything you want in the comments. Did you get outside 2 or 3 times? Did you read any books cover to cover, multiple times? 

"These cryptic smears are nevertheless meaningless, nor do I know how they got there.... Mess, not mystery."

From "The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey" (Paris Review/no pay wall).

A nice selection of Gorey drawings — on envelopes — from what will be a book, out in February, "From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey" (commission earned).

Have you ever drawn on envelopes? I have... enclosing fan letters when I was a teenager... long ago.

"I told my mom, 'This isn’t serious.... I’m just going to wait till I’m 6.'"

Said Mira Nadon, when she was 5, quoted in "At City Ballet, a Once-in-a-Generation Dancer Arrives/Mira Nadon, the rising New York City Ballet principal, is coming off her best season yet. And it’s only the beginning."

The ballet class for 5-year olds was "pre-ballet, which meant running around the studio, maybe getting a shot at fluttering like a butterfly" and Nadon "found out that students began proper training at 6."

Is it okay to love seriousness in 5-year-olds? Mostly, we want the very young to laugh and play — experience delight. What's up with early-arising seriousness? When is it too young to manifest staunchly that you know you've been presented with the bullshit kid's version of something and you want the real

Have you ever known such a kid? Were you one?

I'm picturing the child drawn by Edward Gorey....

"I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression. Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife..."

"... and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting.... I have to say, that waking up to the news, waking up to how this administration has or has not responded, waking up to, yet another, story of a Black man or a Black person somehow being dehumanised, or hurt or killed, or, falsely accused of something, it is exhausting. And, and it, it has led to a weight, that I haven’t felt in my life, in, in a while.... Barack’s in his office, making calls, working on his book. I’m in my room, the girls are on their computers. But right around five o’clock, everybody comes out of their nooks, and, we like, do an activity, like, puzzles have become big, just just sitting and doing these thousand piece puzzles.... So Barack has taught the girls [the card game] spades, so now there’s this vicious competition.... It’s almost like they needed the world to stop a little bit. You know they didn’t realise that they were, that the world they were on, and the way they were living it, was so treadmill-like. So fast and furious. Um, because it was all they ever knew.... [The pandemic is an opportunity to] decide how you want to show up in the new world. Because it will be a new world."

Said Michelle Obama, in her podcast, quoted at The Guardian.

I wonder if Michelle Obama suffers from the medical condition, depression. I hear "some form of low-grade depression" to mean that she feels low or sad based on the current conditions, not that she has clinical depression. But perhaps she does, and I would hope that people who suffer from depression feel supported by her words.

As for the Obamas, under lockdown, doing puzzles at the end of the day — I imagine that millions of people, reading about that, feel uplift just to picture the beloved family around a table in the evening  laughing and talking over a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I am not kidding when I say that typing out that sentence brought tears to my eyes. What is more wholesome than a married couple with their adult children working on a complicated puzzle together? Such a beautiful life, and yet they still think of the troubles of the world and carry that weight along with them.

What puzzles do you imagine them doing? Maybe Van Gogh's "Starry Night" or Edward Gorey's "Cat Fancy" or this William Morris tapestry. That's what the Obamas in my evening fantasy are doing, and if someone made a puzzle out of an intricately detailed painting of the Obamas doing a puzzle, I would do that puzzle and so would millions of Americans. It might cure low-grade depression.

And here are the rules for the card game spades. Key rule: "The spade suit is always trump."

ADDED: "There's a tramp sittin' on my doorstep/Tryin' to waste his time/With his methylated sandwich/He's a walking clothesline/And here comes the bishop's daughter/On the other side/She looks a trifle jealous/She's been an outcast all her life/Me, I'm waiting so patiently/Lying on the floor/I'm just trying to do my jig-saw puzzle/Before it rains anymore...."

"Mr. Gorey himself never really acknowledged his own sexuality. To Mr. Schiff, he described himself as 'reasonably undersexed.'"

"To another interview’s probing question about his sexual orientation, he said, 'I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.' Later in the interview he added: 'What I am trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else.' While today’s L.G.B.T.Q. community may read that as a closeted gay man from an earlier generation refusing to come out, 'it’s far more complicated than that,' Mr. Dery said. The few romantic feelings Mr. Gorey confessed to in letters to friends, most of them for other men and best described as infatuations, show him as someone for whom the messiness of human relationships was much too much. Perhaps for that or other reasons he kept himself buttoned up. Mr. Dery honored that. 'I wanted to allow Gorey his self-definition, and his self-definition is essentially not to define himself,' he said. 'I wanted to allow Gorey his mystery.'"

From "Edward Gorey Was Eerily Prescient/A new biography celebrates his mysterious life and art."

The book, by Mark Dery, has a fantastic title, "Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey."

On the subject of vague sexuality, I love this Gorey drawing:



The caption is: "When they tried to make love, their strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing" (from Gorey's book "The Loathsome Couple").

"Edward Gorey watched television for the first time this summer... and in the process the 53-year-old artist became a 'Star Trek' fan."

Shaenon K. Garrity reads an old newspaper article, which says the artist has taken to watching "Star Trek" reruns 11 times a week and has yet to catch "The Trouble With Tribbles." Inspired, Garrity draws "The Trouble With Tribbles" in the style of Edward Gorey. 

ample:



(Via Drawn!, via Metafilter.)