A Lark

Elegiac...that's what an editor of the Missouri Review said about my poetry more than fifteen years ago.  I appreciated the comment.  I have been told and have seen that I like to wallow in the sentimental  but elegiac poems feel cleaner, like the moment has been captured not framed in black in a wreath of woven hair as the Victorians like to frame pictures of their dear deceased.
 Elegiac is from the Greek, elegia, and later the French translated it as "song of mourning" while the Greek indicated that it is a poem of lament, in particular for lost youth.  And we all know how the Greeks idealized youth!
So what would a Greek poet pen about the loss of this crimson bud, never to open, but to lie, eternally, firmly, closed beneath the snow?  I know what my dad would say..."Gather ye rosebuds whilst ye may!"  He loved that line.  

    What sort of elegiac poem would you write?

    The winner of the 2009 Turner Prize for modern art will be announced December 7 in London.  Among the entries is Enrico Davids bizarre toy like egg men which rock back and forth on giant  feet.

    Is this work a crack in the cosmic egg of the art world?  Is it art?  Would you display this work in your home?

    Forgotten songs from birds long gone...that's the message an artist in Sydney  hopes to impart in this installation of empty bird cages over a downtown street.  We forget and we do not even know what we are missing...

   

Hubble Finds an Hourglass Nebula Around a Dying Star

This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This Hubble image reveals the true shape of MyCn18 to be an hourglass with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. This picture has been composed from three separate images taken in the light of ionized nitrogen (represented by red), hydrogen (green), and doubly-ionized oxygen (blue). The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter which accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. In previous ground-based images, MyCn18 appears to be a pair of large outer rings with a smaller central one, but the fine details cannot be seen.

According to one theory for the formation of planetary nebulae, the hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud which is more dense near its equator than near its poles. What appears as a bright elliptical ring in the center, and at first sight might be mistaken for an equatorially dense region, is seen on closer inspection to be a potato shaped structure with a symmetry axis dramatically different from that of the larger hourglass. The hot star which has been thought to eject and illuminate the nebula, and therefore expected to lie at its center of symmetry, is clearly off center. Hence MyCn18, as revealed by Hubble, does not fulfill some crucial theoretical expectations.

Hubble has also revealed other features in MyCn18 which are completely new and unexpected. For example, there is a pair of intersecting elliptical rings in the central region which appear to be the rims of a smaller hourglass. There are the intricate patterns of the etchings on the hourglass walls. The arc-like etchings could be the remnants of discrete shells ejected from the star when it was younger (e.g. as seen in the Egg Nebula), flow instabilities, or could result from the action of a narrow beam of matter impinging on the hourglass walls. An unseen companion star and accompanying gravitational effects may well be necessary in order to explain the structure of MyCn18.

BACKGROUND: PLANETARY NEBULAE
When Sun-like stars get old, they become cooler and redder, increasing their sizes and energy output tremendously: they are called red giants. Most of the carbon (the basis of life) and particulate matter (crucial building blocks of solar systems like ours) in the universe is manufactured and dispersed by red giant stars. When the red giant star has ejected all of its outer layers, the ultraviolet radiation from the exposed hot stellar core makes the surrounding cloud of matter created during the red giant phase glow: the object becomes a planetary nebula. A long-standing puzzle is how planetary nebulae acquire their complex shapes and symmetries, since red giants and the gas/dust clouds surrounding them are mostly round. Hubble's ability to see very fine structural details (usually blurred beyond recognition in ground-based images) enables us to look for clues to this puzzle.

Credits: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA

 
    Vincent van Gough was fascinated with the starry night sky.  He wrote to his friend, the artist Emille Bernard in 1888, "Imagination enables us to create a more exalting and consoling nature than what just a glance at reality allows us to perceive...A starry sky, for example, well-- it's a thing I'd like to try to do." 

    That year he painted The Starry Night over the Rhone.  That same year he wrote to his brother Theo:  "It often seems to me that night is much more alive and richly colored that the day..."
    Interesting, as his 1888 Sunflowers, says critic Robert Hughes, "remains much the most popular still life in the history of art, the botanical answer to the Mona Lisa."  So the audacious, passionate brushwork may be more evident in his daylight paintings, but according to the curator of  a new van Gough exhibition mounted at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), his twilight and night scenes are elaborate constructions that call on all his skills, including his impressive literary knowledge.

    In a letter to his sister, written in 1888 as he was painting his first night canvas, he wrote that he was inspired by Walt Whitman's poems..."He sees...under the great starlit vault of heaven a something which after all one can only call God -- and eternity in its place above the world."

   

Murano is a small group of islands on the edge of the Adriatic Sea in the Venice Lagoon and home to the artisan glassmakers since the 8th century.  Most historians agree that the glassblowers were regulated to Murano in 1291 because of  a fear of fire from the glass furnaces.  However, it is generally agreed that the isolation protected the master glassblowers' secrets.   
    The vivid red and blue glass, the yellow glass daisies, illustrate for a me a bit of a dear friend's childhood.  Since Laura took this picture, I can say it is her story.  Her unique childhood in Africa with a loving father who encouraged her fairy gardening.  The fairies were invited to slumber in  beds of fresh flowers covered with glasses and leaves, little glowing homes in the sunlight.  Sweets were left under leaves to refresh the little ones trundling home after a long summer's night of mischief.

    What?  You don't believe in fairies?   Who else changed the mud pies I'd leave in the oven into sugar cookies?  I've knocked on their doors in Ireland and danced with them in Glastonbury.  Believe!

(I'd love to hear your childhood fairy story!)

Born in Nothcumberland, England in 1867 Millicent Sowerby inherited her father's artistic talent and desire to perfect her work.  As they lived in a rural locale, the most Millicent could manage was two art classes a week.  She was predominantly self-taught and studied, she said, the work of other illustrators. A quick glance a partial listing of her body of work give you an idea of her talent and determination...not unlike my own dear cousin, illustrator and designer, Mary Engelbreit.

These are Millicent's illustrations.  To view Mary's work, click on her link to your left.

• Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chatto, 1907, New York, Duffield, 1908.


• Sowerby, Githa, Childhood, London, Chatto & Windus, 1907, New York, Duffield, 1907.


• Sowerby, Githa, The Bumbletoes, London, Chatto & Windus, 1907.


• Sowerby, Githa, The Merry Book, Oxford, 1908.


• Sowerby, Githa, Yesterday’s Children, Chatto & Windus, 1908.


• Sowerby, Githa, The Happy Book, 1909.


• Stevenson, Robert Louis, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Scribner, 1909.


• Stevenson, Robert Louis, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 1909.


• Stevenson, Robert Louis, Little Stories for Little People, 1910.


• Sowerby, Githa, Little Plays for Little People, 1910.


• Sowerby, Githa, My Birthday, 1911.


• Sowerby, Githa, Poems of Childhood,. Henry Frowde & Hodder & Stoughton, 1912.


• Sowerby, Githa and Joan, Natalie, The Gay Book, 1915.


• Sowerby, Githa, Cinderella, New York, Hodder & Stoughton, 1915, New York, Oxford, 1915.


• Sowerby, Githa, The Dainty Book, 1915.

• Sowerby, Githa, The Bright Book, 1915.


• Meade, L. T., The Angel of Love, London, Frowde/Hodder, c. 1915.


• Sowerby, Githa, The Bonny Book, Oxford, 1918.


• Fyleman, Rose, The Sunny Book, Oxford, 1918.


• Joan, Natalie, The Glad Book, Oxford, 1921.


• Sowerby, Githa and Joan, Natalie, The Darling Book, Oxford, 1922.


• Joan, Natalie, The Joyous Book, Oxford, 1923.


• Stevenson, Robert Louis, Cinderella’s Play Book, 1927.