A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
April Issue, 2024
Alexandria, The End of the Affair
“I sit on the wall and watch a fisherman wrangle his net; the sea is dark and a little choppy, and I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.”
East African Lockdown Drawings: Bamboo and Marigolds
There is a second sort of bamboo growing here, with beautiful varied dark green stripes on a yellow background. My friend tells me that in Vietnam this is special and a spirit might live in such bamboo. There is a large stand of such striped bamboo nearby. I’ve seen no spirits but there are weaver birds occupying the grove, much activity from the birds building their nests. The ground around the stand is littered with failed nest attempts.
Ripples on the Nile
The idea, a loose brief, of following the Nile to Aswan, close to where the river enters Egypt from Sudan, I would talk to farmers and fishermen and those whose livelihood depends on the seemingly eternal flow of the longest river in Africa. I wanted to learn of the potential risks posed by climate change on rural Egypt. I also wanted a photo or two, and, an anecdote would be good.
Hardly a Day’s Journey
That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
July Issue, 2023
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Erosion 2023
Everywhere the surface was changing, crumbling to dust, washing away … Gradients of color, broken edges quickly softened. Never straight lines, only gravity pulling water on paths of least resistance.
Lemon Balm Ice Cream
This ice cream is small reflection of the glowing, balmy restorative days; a distillation of the bright coolness, the sharp scent of new green growth, and the creamy sweetness of perfect air.
After the Apocalypse (Or My Grandmother was a Landscape)
So what remains after you lose everything? When water or fire or clumsiness or meanness or a pandemic or cancer or war or ignorance and obsolescence changes everything–breaks everything, what do we do with what remains? We make art.
The song of the white-throated sparrow
There is a pause, a thick electric hush, as we wait for the thunder. But in the yard the white-throated sparrow, seemingly unphased, sings and sings his wild and melancholy song.
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