Thanksigiving

Well, the turkeys are pardoned (Thank you, Mr. President; can I retire to Mount Vernon too?), the pies are made, and freezing rain is washing my front steps. I buzz about in eager anticipation of the much-advertised, self-stereotyping NPR thanksgiving broadcast, featuring warm and fuzzy thoughts from Chopra Deepak and Thanksgiving cooking advice from Nigella Lawson. Clearly, NPR enjoys egging on angst-riddled, middle-class Americans, for whom Thanksgiving holiday is quite problematic.

Gobble, gobble.

Wearing White in America

When it comes to wearing white, Americans adhere to a peculiar code. Of course, this code alters with geography and culture; wearing white in Washington D.C. is very different from wearing white in New York City, Chicago, or Atlanta. And, before you read further, I must confess to not knowing much about the west coast as I've spent most of my life adhering to that one simple, possibly unfair, rule: "Limit your time in California."

The Hollywood Smile

1. White Teeth: We like our teeth as white as our paper, or so my German friends tease. You can never have teeth too white or too glossy. Teeth are no occasion for modest, matte tones.

2. Wear white shoes between Easter and Labor Day: This rule firmly continues to make its mark on America.  Whether or not you follow the rule speaks volumes about how you view yourself and your place in society. Wearing white shoes is synonymous with vacationing, an activity relegated to those months between Easter and Labor Day for most middle-class families. (This probably explains the reputation American tourists have for tromping about Europe in gleaming white tennies.)

Summer 2009 collection

3. Bright vs. weathered white clothing: Although there are exceptions, Americans, as a general rule, do not wear bleached, bright whites in urban or country settings but rather at the beach.  Our whites tend to be weathered or "dirty" to an outsider's eye, so our whites are not pure white, per say, but off-white, ivory, winter white, or "natural" white.  The one consistent exception to this is a professional one, wherein some business, medical, or political occupations beg for a crisp white collar as a part of the daily uniform.

Whitney White Linen Night (captured by Kevin Zansler)

4. One of many exceptions is White Linen Night: Every sultry summer, southerners (particularly those in Houston and New Orleans) don their white linen and stroll around the arts districts for an evening of cultural leisure. For some reason, this habit, as well as its cousin--Dirty Linen Night--which falls in step with the American tradition of mussed whites, has a way of popping up at any Southern art festival.

White Bucks

6. White Bucks v. White Tennies: These two staples of the American wardrobe probably represent the range of American dress better than anything else. The bucks fall into that mussed white category while the tennis shoes fall into the gleaming white category.

White Tennies

7. A girl & her pearls: I would be remiss to overlook the tradition of the Bostonian socialite and southern belle. A girl must always have a string of gleaming white pearls.
 

Of course, the list is far from complete. Perhaps there is something which you would add?

Dressed to the Kilt

The Oft-kilted Sean Connery
Photo: Source Unknown

Well, the word has made it all the way to the Washington Post: The Scottish Tartans Authority wants to put and end to the "childish and unhygienic" habit of going commando beneath one's kilt. Really. Yes, it was an official announcement. 

Parentalism is alive and well...

Queen Elizabeth I

'The Ermine Portrait' of Elizabeth I, c1585, by Nicholas Hilliard

On November 17, 1558, Elizabeth I acceded to the English throne. Edmund Spenser famously wrote of Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene. In his work, he names the queen Gloriana.

Sunne of the world, great glory of the sky,

That all the earth doest lighten with thy rayes,

Great Gloriana, greatest majesty!

When Elizabeth I heard the news of her accession that November, she allegedly quoted the twenty-third line of Psalm 118 in Latin: A Dominum factum est illud, et est mirabile in oculis notris. ("It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.")

"Fox Pouncing"

British Wildlife Photography Awards (BWPA),

Animal Behaviour Highly Commended

& Urban Wildlife Winner: 

Dale Sutton of Sussex, "Fox Pouncing"

Another American Dream

Americans love a house. It's indispensable to the American dream. Of course, the houses in America are only, at the most, several hundred years old. Thus, Americans are quick to hire a decorator--arguably an American invention in itself--to make their new houses feel modern, "lived-in," fresh, or ancestral (to each his own) as soon (or often) as possible.

Making the client's house feel worn and familiar strikes me as one of the American designer's more difficult tasks.  The Badgley Mischka duo's Kentucky 1920s limestone-and-clapboard Dutch Colonial Revival qualifies, I think, as an "oldie but a goodie" in this regard. (The internet age has lowered the standards even further for admission to the American "oldie" category.) What's more? They are talented enough to decorate and develop the property themselves.

Photos taken by Roger Davies for Elle Decor

At War

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962)

In elementary school, I could not get enough of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's war poems. And I loved them for all the things that a young dreamer loves--their sentimentalism, mystery, agony, and romance. My tastes may have altered, but I'm loyal or nolstagic enough to return to Gibson each Veterans Day.

My first concept of modern war was, after all, shaped by "Breakfast," his ironic war poem:

We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread
That Hull United would beat Halifax
When Jimmy Strainthorpe played full-back instead
Of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head
And cursed, and took the bet; and dropped back dead.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead. 

Later, in secondary school, I became fascinated with those Gibson poems paying tribute to the houses he would chance upon (I'm American, after all; so I love a house). Two of Gibson's references to houses I named favorites because of their juxtaposition in my mind. The first was "Tenants," a poem which reminded me of a cottage we would visit as a family each summer:

Suddenly, out of dark and leafy ways,
We came upon the little house asleep
In cold blind stillness, shadowless and deep,
In the white magic of the full moon-blaze.
Strangers without the gate, we stood agaze,
Fearful to break that quiet, and to creep
Into the home that had been ours to keep
Through a long year of happy nights and days.

So unfamiliar in the white moon-gleam,
So old and ghostly like a house of dream
It seemed, that over us there stole the dread
That even as we watched it, side, by side,
The ghosts of lovers, who had lived and died
Within its walls, were sleeping in our bed. 

The second, "Reveille," recalled those first impressions that Gibson's war poetry made on me in elementary school:

Still bathed in its moonlight slumber, the little white house by the cedar
Stands silent against the red dawn;
And nothing I know of who sleeps there, to the travail of day yet unwakened,
Behind the blue curtains undrawn:

But I dream as we march down the roadway, ringing loud and white-rimmed in the moonlight,
Of a little dark house on a hill
Wherein when the battle is over, to the rapture of day yet unwakened,
We shall slumber as dreamless and still. 

Melancholy & Funk

Hello. No, I've not disappeared. I've been in a funk. And now that I've relished its proportions, I  am going to put it behind me. But not before I alert you to this lovely piece in The Independent this morning:

[A]utumn has a peculiar personality of its own which is powerfully attractive.

Most obviously, the world rebeautifies itself: the autumn foliage becomes resplendent. I've never heard anyone remark on quite how curious this phenomenon is, in biological terms, given everything negative we know about ageing.

The leaves of trees are welcome and wonderful in their green iridescence when they burst out in April, but by June their bloom is gone, and by August they're plain dull. With most life forms, that would be it. We could expect no more. Instead, by a pure accident of organic chemistry, leaves are reborn, as they start to die, in an astonishing range of colours that puts their spring birth to shame.

It's as if they have another spring in another palette, the second one even more vibrant than the first: terracotta, russet, bronze, purple, gold. Even that subtlest of shades, old gold – gold with a burnished look, gold with a tiny hint of red, almost the quintessential autumn colour (look at Stourhead in Wiltshire, pictured opposite).

And this is decay. This is the winding-down of everything, towards death. Yet the great gift of autumn is that the beginning of the end doesn't feel like decay, at least on the surface, it doesn't feel like a crumbling and a rottening and a collapse from within; it feels like the arrival of a world of new sensations.

The first one is mist. To me, autumn mist is something you smell before you see it; it's the initial hint of a tang on the air as you leave the house in the morning, just creeping into the nostrils, and you know in your tissues at once that summer is over and the world is turning; then you notice that the sunshine is hazy. I've sensed it as early as the last week of August, but I would guess it's mainly a feature of September.

The next one's smoke. This is another tang that drifts to the nostrils after the summer, the smoke of wood fires (and coal fires in the past), the smoke of bonfires; you start to smell that in October, and see it hanging in the air on still days of high pressure. A third one is frost: different again. Not just a whitening, but a hardening and a sharpening of everything, yet welcome, when it first arrives, with the pleasant surprise of novelty.

Mist, smoke and frost; yet so much more. Tastes: the earthy taste of mushrooms; the rich soft crumble of roasted chestnuts; the dark pungency of game; the resinous bite of juniper berries. Sounds: the swishing of kicked leaves and their crunch underfoot; the roar of a gale; the metallic cough of a pheasant echoing through the woodlands. Sights: the foliage, of course, in all its glory, but less obvious things: the softening of the sunlight; the faded blue of harebells; the reddening of ripening apples; the understated dun shades of chrysanthemums.

All of this is gladdening, a source of the most enormous pleasure, but would you not agree that it doesn't quite lift the heart the way spring flowers or birdsong do?

For bluebells and birdsong have hope about them, a promise of what's to come, whereas the signs of autumn, for all their splendour, are the signs of a world that is dying; and there's no escaping that.

There's where the melancholy comes from: the subtext, the underlying, insistent theme beneath the year's last burst of beauty is that this is only occurring because the end is not far off, the end that comes to all living things, including us. If we look, in the autumn foliage we can see our own mortality: a beauty with a sadness never far away.

And, eat-my-heart-out Michael McCarthy draws all this pathos to a close by referencing one my favorite 19th century poems, "Spring and Fall," written by Gerald Manley Hopkins:

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and now why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.