Sunset, Monday, 17 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I heard tonight from a visitor to this site from Slovakia. Despite my father’s Dutch name, from van Doorn, from ancestors who started farming in what is now Brooklyn in 1630, I’m half Slovak, as far as I know, through my mother, whose parents came here from Czechoslovakia more than 250 years later.

I sketched a rock in the dirt road, about a quarter mile to the right of this vantage point; I sketched the sun in clouds at about six o’clock from the same place. It’s one those scratchy-hot uncomfortable dog days, of which we’ve actually had few this year. (I perhaps should note that we don’t have A/C.) I wanted to think of the clouds as cool blue rock and not boiling gray steam; I wondered how much the rock, the clouds, the sun and I might have in common – and other thoughts of a mild delirium.

Sunset, Saturday, 15 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Some days, topics revolve around each other like fragments in a kaleidoscope. Today it started with wild black cherries and one of my favorite books, Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Bradford Angier. Then there was a strange connection, in an odd (even by Wikipedia standards) article on Angier, between him and Stewart Edward White, author of two other favorite books, but books on an utterly different subject –The Betty Book and The Unobstructed Universe. These are books I might, perhaps, find less compelling today, I can’t say, but they had a huge impact when I read them. In fact the connection that cropped up today between Angier and White is exactly the kind of weird thing that was always happening in The Betty Book. 

Then a certain sort of sky comes along and ... for now, the pieces will just have to float.

Sunset, Friday, 14 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

D.H. Lawrence:

We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation, to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and is an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last.

Sunset, Thursday, 13 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Sunset, Tuesday, 11 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Oscar Wilde:

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.

Upon the other hand, they go on. 

Sunset, Monday, 10 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Tonight we’re making panzanella, with a recipe very freely adapted from Saveur Cooks Authentic Italian. Since we don’t have a garden this year – we usually have at least 30 tomato plants – we broke down and bought a flat of tomatoes from Planet Earth Diversified. We’re using baguettes from Albemarle Baking Company and – hey, what’s this, has product placement come to the Daily Sun Times?

No, just enthusiasm. Saveur was once a truly great magazine, before they changed editors a few years back, and if you ever had a baguette from Albemarle Baking, you also might gratuitously advertise its virtues.

As for Planet Earth Diversified, they’ve been pioneers, in this region, in the growing and distribution of ‘local’ food. Not only that – their delivery truck runs, not on regular gasoline, and not on corn or soy or some other agricultural product that could otherwise feed someone, but on used fryer oil.