SEPTEMBER
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.
You cannot see them anymore, They are not there
So I am content to draw, each drawing a provocation, another layer in an ongoing process of poking and prodding at notions of place and landscape and in that sense I am content to let things drift.
An Interview with Liz Johnson
“I like to introduce something remarkable into ordinary, everyday circumstances because I think that there are always interesting things happening all around us––and sometimes some very surreal things.”
The Valley of the Moon Main Stem Project
I want to capture the “ghosts” that inhabit this area and intertwine them with contemporary images.
Tom Titanic, A Cautionary Tale
Both living on their nerves, growing thinner as Tom grew fatter, they refused follow-up visits from the authorities. She missed her post-natal check-up, and they did not attend the vaccination clinic. The authorities became concerned.
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colors and Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium
There’s so much in life that we can’t capture in words or pictures: everything is shifting, changing, and with more hues, values and shades than our eyes can see, more notes than our ears can hear, more subtleties than our hearts can feel or our minds define. But I love that we still try.
Rag and Bone
He hasn’t lost the love or the language, he’s just brought them down to earth. He’s using them to make the ordinary beautiful–rags, bones, broken bottles. And things as extraordinarily ordinary as aging, as remembering.
Fiction: The Fallen Fighter
All night long they clung to each other, bobbing on a sea of whisky and memories and dreams, lashed to a floating spar that sank and rose and sank and rose again.
Everything fresh summer pizza with a cracker-thin crust, and Bicycle Thieves
The joy of sharing the fruits of our garden with my family in our wild and teeming summertime yard. Listening to music and talking, and feeling grateful for all of it.
Germaine Dulac: Listen in Silence to Our Own Song
“The time has come, I believe, to listen in silence to our own song, to try to express our own personal vision, to define our own sensibility, to make our own way. Let us learn to look, let us learn to see, let us learn to feel.”
Letter From the Editor: It might be our anniversary.
Thoughts on our first year. Our editorial calendar is serendipitous, and each month’s theme is make-the-road-by-walking.
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AUGUST
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.
Auto Anthropology
“I know that part of my attraction to a lone old car on some quiet urban street or sitting out in the desert is because it plays into a fantasy of a time after the car.”
Featured Artist: Lauren Mary Barnett
“Even if it’s just the way the light is hitting a glass or a strange assortment of items on a table or power lines swooped in front of a house. And really these moments of beauty can be fleeting so it feels nice to capture them somehow. “
The Dowry: Federica Armstrong
The dowry becomes a cathartic process of mourning, remembrance and consolation.
The Irony of “Fever Dream”
We quickly find ourselves in hypnagogic territory, sorting real, unreal, and surreal at the edges of a dream.
Wormley Hughes
The man who dug Jefferson’s grave was named Wormley Hughes. He was the principal gardener at Monticello. The garden at Monticello is a true thing of wonder. Beautiful, useful, inspiring – a perfect spot to sit and ponder questions of liberty and independence. Wormley Hughes was informally (not legally) freed after Jefferson’s death (famously, on…
La Noire de…
She doesn’t have a voice in their presence. What we get instead is the rich, intelligent voice of her thoughts and her memories.
Linden Tea Madeleines
But this magical madeleine and tea, which he accepts while full of adult cares and woes, brings him such joy that he no longer feels mediocre, accidental, mortal, which is what being an adult feels like, on a bad day.
American mythologies: Everybody in Khakis
Of course the truth is that despite the fact that advertising agencies are shaming us into looking alike on the outside and conservative politicians are trying to make sure we’re all the same race and religion, despite the fact that we haven’t always had the highest tolerance for difference, America has a splendid history of…
Flash Fiction: How skinny the leash, how thin the arms that hold me.
“Maybe this meant something, maybe it didn’t.”
Letter from the editor: August
Creation as an act of remembering and remembering as an act of creation is the unofficial theme of our August issue.
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JULY
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.
The Harnessed Rage of Paula Rego
To elaborate on the metaphor of harnessed rage: I don’t mean to say that she tamed it. Rego permitted her rancour a life of its own, a force of creativity to be exploited in the studio.
Cristina Finotto: Poems and Photographs
Poetry and photography by Cristina Finotto, of the Po delta.
Featured Artist: Marjorie Thompson
“The images for these paintings weave and intermingle in my mind and present themselves as a mélange of overlapping histories.”
Pierrot by Watteau at the Louvre
I recklessly mentioned that Watteau’s Pierrot is my favourite painting in the Louvre. I have been invited to explain why, and it has to do with the ability of some great paintings to convey hidden messages and intrigue us with their meaning as well as beauty.
Pennhurst: Abuse and Neglect
More and more, Pennhurst’s amazing true story is is becoming buried. I like to think my little film is helping keep it alive.
Maria Prymachenko: Finding a Subversive Voice
From Philomela to Prymachenko: Because this work is beneath the notice of the powerful men, not seen in the same lofty light as their manly ambitions and achievements, women find the freedom to tell their story as thoroughly, beautifully, and strangely they need.
James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter at the National Gallery of Scotland
“You’d not want to mess with her. She’s got a knife. But you do wonder what her future will be.”
The Elegant Leftover Scheme
My proposal is to look back to the attitudes and methods people used during trying times in the past, and combine those with the epicurean skills and knowledge of the present, to plan our daily meals in a way that provides the most delicious food with the least amount of waste.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
He wasn’t scared of them, but he had a feeling of powerful things and deep things. He said that we need to find a way to look at the cave paintings. Where would he start to search for this new way of looking? Everywhere.
Fiction: Profile
“The suburban kids are the worst.” Joe Bird stands with his hands on his hips, disconcertingly unperturbed by the repeated crashing behind him. “Kids” aged roughly 12 to 18 years, of both sexes, throw themselves violently into a chain link fence.
Letter From the Editor July: Words and Silence
It seems more important now than ever to tell our stories and share our stories, and listen to the stories of others. To amplify the voices of anybody struggling to be heard, and to celebrate when the words or images or silences speak to us or bewilder us or transform us. To harness our anger…
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JUNE
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.
An Interview With Simon Quadrat
I am beyond grateful for the chance to discuss the beautifully mysterious paintings of Simon Quadrat.
Alternative Process Photography – Amy Marie Gladding
“I am driven to document my surroundings to try to find a sense of place in the world.”
Spirits and Demons
These phantasms are concocted from a little kernel of conscience, or guilt, or fear, or loneliness. Sometimes others see them, sometimes they don’t, they’re shifting and dreamlike, and they operate according to their own rules. They’re unreliable narrators. They’re wise or foolish, in turn; they speak in riddles, they speak a questionable truth, changing and…
Fiction: Exact Fare Please (The Hours)
When bells ring out the time, the time passes strangely. The space between tolls seems impossible, like it’s hanging, waiting for something. For me.
The Photography of Jack Delano
I feel I share a common interest in subject matter with Delano, and have traveled to many of the same places – just in very different times and circumstances.
I am the Light of this World: The Life and Music of Reverend Gary Davis
“I’m all the time studying what I can do for my people. You can’t do nothing for yourself unless you do it for somebody else first. You can’t bake a corncake for yourself unless you bake it for somebody else. It ain’t worth the effort. In this world we have to talk a little and…
Why I Love Hidden Fortress
Hidden Fortress was an inspiration for George Lucas in the making of Star Wars, and it is every bit as thrilling and swashbuckling, full of adventure and romance. But whereas Star Wars seems to operate on an almost mythological idea of good and evil, Hidden Fortress is more nuanced.
On Birdwatching
It boggled my mind that all of these birds had been here, all along, so vivid, so loud. They weren’t new. I’d never bothered to look at them, I’d never taken the time to look up, and discover the colorful teeming world in the tangled branches of the trees.
Letter From the Editor: June
Imagination is the dream of a house, familiar and yet entirely new. Behind every door is an unexpected room, or staircase, or garden, or folly.
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MAY
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.
Pinhole Photographs: Harvey Mills
“I find that one has to take an almost Zen-like approach to image making with pinholes – you can’t rush the process! Your subject matter and compositional decisions need to be very carefully considered – although framing is usually imprecise. The simplicity is perfect as you can concentrate on the creative aspects of photography rather…
Poets Love Bruegel (and so do I)
This is written not as an art historian, a poetry professor, or an academic or expert of any kind. This is written as a lover not a scholar. Though I’ve probably said too much, there’s so much more to say.
Flash Fiction: Pond
Cars wait at the light. You are at the breakfast table in bare feet, wearing Jillian’s robe. A woman in a heavy coat labors onto the bus carrying all her things, a line of riders shuffle behind. Brakes release.
An Interview With Suzy Birstein
I felt the need to create beautiful images, nurturing, reflecting, mentoring. The Tsiporas became pregnant – pregnant with life, pregnant with hope and appreciation for all we have had and need to continue to create – To heal our beautiful world…
La Chinoise
“They talk about class struggle, they talk about the workers, but they never work. Except for Yvonne, one of two women in the group, who is constantly cleaning, and tells of her part-time work as a prostitute so that she can afford things.”
Fortunes in Apples: Photo Essay by Mark Ludak
“Photographing places particularly hard hit by the transition from an industrial and agrarian economy to an economy of unfettered consumption on the margins of mainstream society is a story I feel compelled to tell.”
Why I love gesture as a language, and a Recipe for a Bright Spring Hand Pie
I have long been fascinated with the motion of human hands. Gesture is one of my favorite languages. It’s oddly both universal and specific to one place at the same time.
Mark Cohen/Vivian Maier/Thierry Guetta
Work that lies dormant and unseen is like the art we create in our dreams, so perfectly full of potential and possibility- glimpses into the memories of others and the collective memory of all of us.
My Pop Life: Don’t You Take It Too Bad – Guy Clark
And the idea of living a pure heroic life dedicated to your art is naturally selfish and few attempt it without collateral emotional damage to their nearest and dearest. I get it and maybe that is why the songs move me so much.
Character Study: The Pencil Collector
Someday he’d write the most perfectly beautiful story ever written, and he’d use one pencil for each word, and then he’d put each pencil back in its chipped plastic drawer until the next time. Some day.
Letter from the Editor: May
At the end of Voltaire’s Candide, Candide famously meets a character known only as “the Turk,” who tells him that he doesn’t concern himself with the affairs of the world, rather he contents himself with tending his garden. He has twenty acres, and he cultivates them with his children, “work keeps away three great evils:…
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APRIL
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.
Interview with filmmaker Ana Maria Vallejo
I think there is a rather subversive character of animation that can be used … as a strategy to take a reality, maybe an oppressive one, and show a different perspective over it, by the creation of other realities
My Pop Life: ‘The Emperor’ – Haydn
They are works that make you feel happy. There is a level of complexity in the music that your brain can grasp immediately.
The Two of Us
It’s so simple, in the end, it’s so raw and so sweet: to know one another and to love one another, this is what will wake us from the hypnosis.
Magpies Mix Tape: Big Ears
I wanted to put together a playlist that was a bit of what you might hear if you had tuned into one of my broadcasts. I hope you find a few things you’ve not heard before – maybe a surprise or two.
A Recipe for Remy’s Soup, (and why I love the movie Ratatouille)
But this film is about more than food, it’s about the desire to create, and food just happens to be Remy’s medium
Film: The Mill Where Time Stood Still
This mill is not only the last standing Klotz mill, it is the last of its kind. Its doors were closed in 1957, and today it stands remarkably intact: 48,000 square feet of mill floor, 360 twisting, winding, and spinning machines, steam and drying chambers, and tons of parts and accessories – left exactly as…
This is a Bird Dog: Flash Fiction
I have been alone, I have been afraid. I have had few moments of love and warmth, but I have poured myself into them completely. There is no wise love.
My Pop Life: A Salty Dog – Procol Harum
Following the death of Gary Brooker at the age of 74 last week, I feel compelled to pay tribute to his finest song, or perhaps his second finest song. Obituaries have been full of praise for the songwriter and lead vocalist of Procol Harum, concentrating on his first celebrated hit single A Whiter Shade Of…
What is the use of talking? (Letter from the editor, April.)
What is the use of talking? I’ve been thinking about this so much, though in my head it’s not just talking, it’s any manner of creating. Any manner of recording what you see and feel, of capturing moments of your lives and dreams, or the lives and dreams of the people in your head.
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MARCH
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.
Kevin Specht: Strangers
The recurring faceless figures that can be found across his paintings attest to the felt anonymity of the system we are all a part of.
The ANEW Artists’ Alliance, a Group Show
“If all the people in the world did art, a lot of the problems would be solved…”
The Industrial Art of Krupp Stahlwerks, 1912
Two days later he called me and told me he had something I would like to see, so I arranged to meet him. He had a large brown envelope with only a date on it: 1912.
My Pop Life: The Right Thing to Do – Carly Simon
I’ve often wondered in subsequent years whether a career in acting was The Right Thing To Do. I have a complex relationship with my ghost career as a barrister, and often peek over to see how he’s doing.
Gordon Parks’ The Restraints, Open and Hidden
The way Parks presents his subjects, with so much affection and clarity, we feel that we love them, and this brings home the realities of fear and injustice in a new and powerful manner.
Happy Birthday, Nina Simone
“I feel what they feel. And people who listen to me know that, and it makes them feel like they’re not alone.”
Movies of Local People
The footage is beautifully relentless, streams of people in different cities leaving work and school, streams of people smiling at the camera. You wonder about all the thoughts in their head. The fears and loves and worries. You wonder about their lives before and after this moment.
Why I Love: Re-reading Books. And a recipe for Jane Austen’s White Soup
To me, re-reading a story you’ve loved, after a distance of a few years or even decades, is delicious. (And so is this soup!)
Truffaut & Bazin & Renoir (why I love their love for one another)
In his introduction, Truffaut warns, “No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, detachment, or equanimity. André Bazin and Jean Renoir have meant too much to me for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately.”
Letter from the Editor: March
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of creating something important. Been thinking about what it means to create, and how we define important. During the pandemic our definition of “essential” underwent constant revision, and I think the revision is ongoing.
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FEBRUARY
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.
Peter Ydeen: Easton Nights
The night has its own visual rules, its own color wheel, and its own ethereal presence. Here, in the small hours, the world we see as mundane, cascades into dream.
Short Film: Coal’s Kingdom
In our last issue we posted a tribute to artist Harry Sternberg, by Marc Reed. In the essay, Reed wrote, “Seventy years after Sternberg marveled at the industrial might of Bethlehem Steel, I was there marveling at its decay.” Sternberg also chronicled the power of “King Coal,” and Reed visited coal country decades later to…
Island of Star-Crossed Lovers
“They would only need a little bread to eat; and even if there was only enough for one of them, he would give her the whole piece. What was the point of wanting anything else? Was there anything in life worth more than that?”
Ikiru (and why I love it)
In English “Ikiru” means “to live,” and for the rest of the film Watanbe examines what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, and what makes being alive valuable to him.
My Pop Life: Do What You Gotta Do – Nina Simone
Daunting, difficult, mysterious and magnificent, she defies easy category or glib biography, but she has touched me over and over since 1976 when I first heard her.
Magpie Mix Tape: Songs of Freedom
“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: NO FEAR! I mean really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life. No fear. Lots of children have no fear. That’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it, but it something to really, really feel. Like a new…
Burns Night (and vegetarian haggis)
Some very brief thoughts on the poetry of Robert Burns, and a recipe for vegetarian haggis
Letter From the Editor: February
My insomnia thoughts turned to the idea of making the world by creating, and of all the ways we make worlds, continually and subconsciously, in our waking lives as well as in our dreams.
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JANUARY
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.
Paintings Found Through Painting
“I like the pictures to push and pull at their perimeters, the ghostly presences within them bound in a landscape I could not have imagined when I first began the painting.”
Things Were Never Normal
This exhibition highlights “third spaces”: components of an area’s social infrastructure, communal spaces outside of home and work such as taverns, church picnics, diners, restaurants, and movie theaters—sites where we might gather, if we could agree.
Chicken Castle
These observations and the pictures taken from them don’t speak in specifics, but when you are in a place where people, over time, have been able to imprint parts of themselves on the built environment, you can feel the city speaking to you in some way, though the language is only partly translatable or transferable.
Harry Sternberg: Coal and Steel
This post is a tribute to the work and passion of an artist I almost missed…Seventy years after Sternberg marveled at the industrial might of Bethlehem Steel, I was there marveling at its decay
My Pop Life: The Night – Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
“I think I then immediately boxed my heart away and tightened the great padlock over my chest so that I couldn’t feel anything that would undermine or dissolve me…”
Francis Bacon: The Essays
“I doe now publish my Essayes; which, of all my other works, have been most Currant: For that, as it seems, they come home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes.”
Gleaning: Wasteland & The Gleaners and I
Both films are about excess and waste, beauty and love. They are about the strength and fragility of people – in body and spirit.
Letter from the Editor: January
We’re all gleaners, finding beauty and meaning and sustenance in the unlikely, the odd, the overlooked. We’re all magpies, lining our nests with beauty where we find it.
A New Business Plan
And “business as usual” will be benevolence, cheer, and generosity of spirit the whole year long.
Syllabub Cookies
Suffice to say that Syllabub, sometimes a drink, sometimes a desssert, is a very very old recipe. It’s the sort of thing Old Fezziwig would serve at his holiday party in A Christmas Carol. It’s the sort of thing David Copperfield would serve at his bachelors’ dinner party, the party which resulted in the best…
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DECEMBER
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. We’re really honored this month to share photography from Paris, art from Ottawa, a brilliant article written in Tokyo about a Ugandan record label, along with beautiful poetry, memoir, and more.
Frédéric Carrayol: Lost Images From the Sink
This craftsman, as he likes to define himself, photographer and shooter, freezes a free and wild nature with the sandstone of his wanderings across the continents. Then he returned it on paper with coffee toning, complex emulsions and rare treatments.
Featured Artist: Sharon VanStarkenburg
My work is blasphemous: I take symbols of proper, normative femininity and make them transgressive within contexts in which the female protagonists resist and reinvent their meanings.
Decentering the electronic underground – The fearlessly experimental sound of Nyege Nyege Tapes
Pure dedication to putting out the most diverse, cutting edge, experimental music currently bubbling out of the African underground…or anywhere else for that matter
Fiction: Everybody Plays the Fool
The lights flicker and I fall to the ground in the tolling darkness.
My Pop Life: All Along The Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
“It was a terrifying record, an exhilarating record, it was everything I ever hoped to be, everything I feared, a prophet crying in the wilderness”
Breaking Away & Seamus Heaney
It’s deceptively spare and simple in a manner that hides a genius of elegance and grace, which places it in the tradition of Ozu or Rohmer.
Why I Love: Little Fugitive
Francois Truffaut: “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie The Little Fugitive.”
Thinking Makes it So: Platon Karataev and Epictetus
The harder his position became and the more terrible the future, the more independent of that position in which he found himself were the joyful and comforting thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him
Double-crusted Savory Pie (Vegetarian)
A perfect vegetarian holiday meal. It’s hearty and flavorful, and it has real center-of-the-plate, star-of-the-meal attention-grabbing qualities.
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NOVEMBER
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.
An Interview with Carmen Cartiness Johnson
“I am concerned about getting the idea on canvas. So I just go with the flow.”
My Pop Life: Help! by The Beatles
They were at the height of their power, where they would stay for another 4 years. I was at the depths of my weakness, and forever afterward lived in fear of repeating it. I built my heart’s castle wall from the mud of Selmeston village. I wouldn’t start to unravel it until I was in…
Katherine Minott: Finding My Scissors
With collage, all things are possible. In this surreal realm of juxtaposition and fantasy, new worlds are born.
Is 20th century “classical” music really that difficult?
(And Magpies Mix Tape) Firstly, a confession. I am not a musicologist and I cannot play any of those serious woodwind, brass or stringed orchestral instruments. However, I listen to a huge range of what always ends up being called Classical Music, even though that term really describes music written in the period from around…
Chekhov’s Gooseberries & The Student
He went on eating greedily, and saying all the while: ‘How good they are! Do try one!’ It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
Wildflowers in the Fall
The scenes of fall wildflowers seem accidental, and because we’re often alone with them, more intimate.
Fiction: In the Weeds
They’re not meant to last very long, these votives, these penny candles.
My Pop Life: The Carnival is Over by The Seekers
“Most of my traumatic moments, my lonely moments, my brave moments have been hidden inside my personal soundtrack. The music made it all bearable.”
Why I Love: Melody
I could imagine the filmmakers watching the dailies and brimming over with gladness that they’d captured the shots they’d captured, and then adding just the right soundtrack, editing it perfectly, and sitting in the dark, full of joy, watching the finished movie.
Gateau chipolata
“L’intérieur du gateau doit rester moelleux.” Says my cook book. Oh yes, say I, the interior of the cake should stay soft!
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OCTOBER
Featured Artist: Julia Soboleva
Julia Soboleva’s images seem to come from another world, a world that lures you in, ominous and irresistible. The light is different here: eerie, but so beautiful, glowing through cracks in the darkness.
Homage to Manhatta
The rediscovery of an old film by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler inspired me to watch the view every morning with anticipation. Sometimes the old, dirty windows in the office further embellished the buildings with new and ethereal qualities of light. Each day, the weather and changing seasons brought a new discovery to what I…
Starling Arcadia
“We cling to narratives of our association with a local ecosystem, and want to believe that we fight as hard as we can against that ecosystem’s eventual disappearance under a light-blotting alien invasion as if it were our own lives and works at stake. Part of that may be delusory – this ecosystem is not…
Why I Love: Diary of a Country Priest
Such a strange film, so beautifully full of questions and doubts. In the end “What does it matter? All is grace.”
An Artist Abroad: A Trip to Venice and Paris
Memories of a trip to the Venice Architecture Biennale and Parisian cafés and museums. And some thoughts on travel in a time of Covid.
Flash Fiction: Hallelujah
The sky on one side stayed bright as day, but along the other it was dark and purpling like a bad bruise. The trees were caught up in the glow, but their leaves were all turned upside down, stark and white against the dark sky. The weather was coming, it was coming fast.
Hip Hop Pop Art: Sari Lennick
Sari Lennick’s bright vibrant collages combine pages from art school aesthetic theory texts with iconic irreverent hip hop and pop song lyrics.
Why I Love: You (Letter to a Relative)
“I feel I’ve done so little to show you the way. You’ve always been able to find it on your own”
Why I love: William Carlos Williams (on his birthday)
His work and his career as a writer seem to embody so much of what I value in art: a desire to shape the way you see the world around you through creativity, but always grounded in an appreciation of the ordinary, the every day. His writing and his thoughts on the writers of his…
SEPTEMBER
Featured Photographer: Patrick Joust: Inside/Outside Light.
Patrick Joust’s urban photography seems to capture a moment between night and day and a place between spaces humans have made.
Featured Artist: Raynard (Tawma) Lalo
Raynard Lalo (whose Hopi name is Tawma, meaning “singer”) has been creating traditional kachina carvings since the age of 15.
My Pop Life: Step, by Vampire Weekend
My look back at an eventful, dysfunctional, random musical life.
Fiction: Moving Day
The sixth trip up the stairs I see them. Sometimes you can go the whole day without seeing anyone, and I thought it was going to be like that. Little did I know.
Magpie Mix Tape: Lack of Knowledge About Birds
A selection of songs chosen with a lack of knowledge of birds, but a wealth of knowledge of music.
Food: Eggplant Tian and memories of Provence
Memories of a perfect summer solstice in Provence, and an unforgettable eggplant dish.
Film: Atget, Renoir, Rohmer as fan-boy, and watching through windows
Joyfully forming grand theories, talking about them with a friend, and building on them as the days go along.
American Mythologies, #4: The Catcher in the Rye is a sophomoric over-rated novel about teen angst
Over the years, our ideas of what the novel is about have taken on a life of their own, so that now they seem more real in some ways than the original story, and they bear little relation to it.
Letter from the Editor
Hello, fellow magpies! Thank you for taking the time to read our magazine. Here is the beautiful September issue of Tidings of Magpies. In some ways this is an apology, or at least an explanation. For this, our second issue, I contacted a lot of people I admire and asked if they would share their…
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