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[iamthepulta]

Notes from South Yorkshire Mining Villages, by Melvyn Jones.

- Mines, or Collieries, have existed in southern England since people noticed coal and ironstone - sandstone with hematite nodules and/or a high percentage of hematite in it. There's an interesting record of a monastic grange, the Kirkstead Abby in Lincolnshire, petitioning an estate owner to mine ironstone on his land in 1161 and they proceeded to smelt iron and blacksmith nails for at least a century. - Mines were initially small-scale pit operations, operating for the local area with a crew of 5-6. The development of canals from 1780-1820 kicked off the boom of industrialization, especially in these small pit mines because coal could now be shipped by canal. This allowed more workers to produce more coal, etc.

- During this time we see people begin to be displaced by the industrialization of the loom. There was a family of weavers, noted via census, as moving south when the father and three sons could no longer find work.

- The development of railways and steam engines made canals more or less defunct from 1820-1850, and this is when mining villages began to kick off, due to increased demand from engines and coking coal for steel. Glassworks and coking factories often sprung up inside the town next to the colliery or along the rail lines. Often these towns were already placed - sometimes they still have Old English names referencing original medieval homeowners the towns sprung up around - but they also sprung from convenient areas next to the railway. English geology played nice by stretching from shallow to deep, West to East. So the coal seam was mined easiest to hardest, West to East. - English coal was most prominent from 1850-1930, nationalized 1947.

- Because most housing from 1750-1850 was new and they needed a lot of it, it was essentially block housing units, initially built by the enterprising Lord until around 1840 when companies built them. They weren't always nice, but they usually had gardens, three-five rooms (including kitchen and living area), and a water closet in the back. I also noticed all of them had a allotment garden on the side of the town. This persists until the last town was mentioned, in the far East, made around 1930. Then the map doesn't label allotment gardens. (Also, notably, these were nice houses for the time. Holy shit, they had running water and space for lodgers and additional family members. Like if you were offered a current-day suburbia mcmansion [that quickly disintegrated] in exchange for labor.)

- After 1840 it was usually the mining company that built the housing units and there was little to no control from the Lord who had originally owned the land. I think this was a transition from the mineral rights being turned over to a lease of the land itself, but I'm not sure.

- The housing was still pretty nice for the times; this seems to be a key way to lure people away from other mine sites to the newest one. Even sites that had been built in 1800 usually had some additions over the years to have running water, upgrades to heating, etc. The houses built in 1900 had running water, baths, and indoor toilets. Of course, this comes with the caveat of "if you strike, we kick you out of your homes" which immediately caused problems, all the way back to 1800. Which brings us to the unions:

- This book paints a picture of motion and that's what really clicked for me when we talk about unions. I always wondered why blackleg miners (English term for strike-breakers; the Americans coined 'scab') could be so callused- because ~stand together~ and all that. But these were all migrants. The comparison that came to mind was if you invited several thousand workers from Mexico to work in the same state and paid them pittance wages and they went on strike - which still happens today. It takes more than self-restraint when a crop ends and you're looking for the next job and someone is actively not working that job when people are still flowing in from Mexico, starving, and will take anything. Comparing how small Yorkshire is, how small each mine is, and how all these people are moving to a new town every twenty years as mine conditions changed, adds poignancy too.

#mining #notes #I need to think of a way to convey the violence and desperation that comes through some of these census entries; it's really rough #history #my era #victorian england

[cast300x]

· Heterotopia refers to spaces that exist outside of traditional societal norms, where marginalized or alternative communities can thrive.

· You're combining painting, sound design, and glass to create an immersive experience that explores human grief in relation to these heterotopic spaces.

To further develop the project, consider these ideas:

· Paintings could represent different heterotopic environments, such as abandoned buildings, secret gardens, or mystical landscapes.

· Sound design could incorporate field recordings, ambient textures, or spoken word pieces that evoke emotions and enhance the immersive experience.

· Glass elements could symbolize fragility, transparency, or the beauty of vulnerability, perhaps incorporated as sculptures, installations, or even glass paintings.

Some potential questions to explore in your project:

· How do heterotopic spaces provide solace or refuge for those experiencing grief?

· How can art create a sense of community or shared understanding among individuals processing grief?

· In what ways can sound and visual elements work together to evoke emotions and create a sense of empathy?

Next steps:

1. Develop a clear vision for the overall aesthetic and atmosphere you want to create.

2. Experiment with different painting techniques, sound design methods, and glasswork processes to find the perfect fit for your project.

3. Consider the installation or exhibition space: how will you curate the experience to fully immerse viewers?

Using jigsaw woodboards as your canvas adds an extra layer of meaning to the project.

· Jigsaw woodboards evoke a sense of puzzle pieces coming together, which resonates with the idea of heterotopia as spaces where disparate elements coexist.

· The wooden texture and natural patterns can represent the organic, imperfect nature of human emotions and grief.

· The jigsaw format also implies fragmentation and reassembly, mirroring the process of coping with grief and rebuilding one's life.

Consider these ideas:

· Each woodboard could represent a different heterotopic space or stage of grief (e.g., denial, anger, acceptance).

· Use colors and textures to convey emotions and create a sense of depth and dimensionality.

· Experiment with abstract and representational elements to capture the complexity of grief and heterotopia.

· Consider adding symbols, patterns, or hidden messages to encourage viewers to explore the artwork more closely.

For sound design, I could:

· Create a soundscape for each woodboard or a cohesive soundtrack for the entire installation.

· Use field recordings, ambient sounds, or instrumental pieces that evoke emotions and enhance the immersive experience.

· Incorporate spoken word or whispered phrases that reflect the emotions and thoughts associated with grief and heterotopia.

With glass elements:

· Use glass paint or stained glass techniques to add translucent, shimmering effects to your paintings.

· Create glass sculptures or installations that complement the woodboards and sound design.

· Incorporate mirrored or reflective glass to represent introspection, self-reflection, and the fragmented self.

Incorporating utopian and dystopian elements will add depth and nuance to your exploration of heterotopian landscapes of human grief. Here's how you can integrate these concepts:

Utopian aspects:

· Represent idealized or nostalgic memories of a lost time or place, symbolizing the longing for a perfect world that grief often entails.

· Depict fragments of a utopian landscape, like a serene sky or a peaceful forest, to convey the fleeting nature of happiness and the impermanence of idealized states.

· Use colors and lighting that evoke a sense of warmth, hope, and optimism, highlighting the contrast between the desired utopia and the harsh reality of grief.

Dystopian aspects:

· Portray the dark, desolate, and chaotic environments that grief can create, reflecting the feelings of despair, hopelessness, and disorientation.

· Incorporate industrial, decaying, or post-apocalyptic elements to symbolize the destruction and disintegration that grief can cause.

· Use bold, jarring colors and distorted shapes to convey the sense of discomfort, anxiety, and disquiet that often accompanies grief.

Heterotopian synthesis:

· Combine utopian and dystopian elements in a single piece, creating a sense of tension and contradiction, reflecting the complex, messy nature of human grief.

· Use juxtaposition to highlight the coexistence of opposing emotions and environments, like a beautiful sunset amidst a desolate landscape.

· Experiment with layered, translucent, or reflective materials to convey the blurring of boundaries between utopia and dystopia, reflecting the fluid, ever-changing nature of grief.

By integrating utopian and dystopian elements, you'll create a rich, nuanced exploration of heterotopian landscapes, showcasing the multifaceted, contradictory nature of human grief.

Some specific ideas to consider:

· A painting with a serene sky above a decaying cityscape, symbolizing the longing for peace amidst chaos.

· A soundscape with a gentle melody contrasting with discordant, jarring notes, reflecting the tension between hope and despair.

· A glass installation with delicate, utopian-inspired shapes amidst a backdrop of dark, dystopian textures, highlighting the coexistence of opposites.

To separate dystopian and utopian worlds in your art project, various visual and symbolic elements to create a clear distinction between the two:

1. Color palette:

- Dystopian: dark, muted, and bold colors like greys, blacks, reds, and oranges.

- Utopian: bright, vibrant, and soft colors like blues, whites, yellows, and greens.

2. Textures:

- Dystopian: rough, industrial, and decaying textures like concrete, metal, and rust.

- Utopian: smooth, natural, and organic textures like wood, fabric, and plants.

3. Imagery:

- Dystopian: industrial landscapes, ruins, decay, and desolation.

- Utopian: natural landscapes, gardens, peaceful scenes, and harmonious architecture.

4. Shapes and forms:

- Dystopian: jagged, angular, and geometric shapes like triangles, squares, and circles.

- Utopian: curved, organic, and flowing shapes like waves, leaves, and flowers.

5. Lighting:

- Dystopian: harsh, cold, and artificial lighting like neon or fluorescent.

- Utopian: warm, soft, and natural lighting like sunlight or candlelight.

6. Symbolism:

- Dystopian: symbols of control, oppression, and chaos like chains, bars, and broken glass.

- Utopian: symbols of freedom, hope, and harmony like birds, flowers, and peaceful creatures.

7. Boundaries:

- Use clear boundaries like lines, frames, or borders to separate the two worlds.

- Experiment with blurred or gradient boundaries to represent the transition or overlap between the two worlds.

8. Perspective:

- Dystopian: use a low or worm's-eye view to create a sense of oppression and claustrophobia.

- Utopian: use a high or bird's-eye view to create a sense of freedom and expansiveness.

A worm's-eye view is a photographic or artistic perspective where the camera or viewer is placed very low, often at ground level or even below, looking up at the subject. This technique creates a unique and dramatic effect, making the subject appear powerful, imposing, and even intimidating.

In the context of your art project, using a worm's-eye view for the dystopian scenes could:

· Emphasize the sense of oppression and claustrophobia

· Make the viewer feel small and vulnerable

· Accentuate the harsh, industrial, or decaying elements

· Create a sense of discomfort or unease

Conversely, using a bird's-eye view (looking down from above) for the utopian scenes could:

· Convey a sense of freedom and expansiveness

· Make the viewer feel elevated and empowered

· Highlight the peaceful, natural, or harmonious elements

· Create a sense of serenity and calmness

A summary of the materials needed:

1. Painting:

- Jigsaw woodboards (as canvas)

- Acrylic or oil paints

- Brushes (various sizes and shapes)

- Palette or painting surface

- Water and cleaning materials

[2. Sound Design:

- Audio equipment (e.g., microphone, headphones)

- Sound editing software (e.g., Audacity, Adobe Audition)

- Field recordings or sound effects (e.g., nature sounds, industrial noises)

- Instrumental or vocal elements (optional)]

3. Glass Elements:

- Glass paint or stained glass materials

- Glass surfaces or objects (e.g., glass panels, vases, bottles)

- Adhesives and sealants

- Cutting or shaping tools (e.g., glass cutter, sandpaper)

4. Additional Materials:

- Adhesives (e.g., glue, tape) for combining materials

- Textures and materials for collage or mixed media (e.g., paper, fabric, found objects)

- Lighting equipment (e.g., lamps, LED lights) for installation

- Display materials (e.g., frames, pedestals, shelves) for showcasing your work

Views that convey a sense of disorientation, discomfort, and emotional complexity for heterotopian scenes depicting human grief.

1. Dutch Angle (also known as a canted shot): This view tilts the camera to one side, creating a sense of unease and disorientation, perfect for conveying the emotional turmoil of grief.

2. Eye-Level View: Placing the camera at eye level with the subject creates a sense of intimacy and immediacy, emphasizing the emotional connection and vulnerability of the grieving individual.

3. Slightly Elevated View: Positioning the camera slightly above eye level, looking down on the subject, can convey a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness, common in experiences of grief.

4. Over-the-Shoulder View: This view, often used in dialogue scenes, can create a sense of emotional proximity and empathy, highlighting the complex relationships and emotions involved in grief.

5. Point-of-View (POV) Shot: Using a POV shot can immerse the viewer in the grieving individual's perspective, creating a sense of empathy and understanding.

6. Unsettling Symmetry: Using symmetrical compositions can create a sense of unease and discomfort, reflecting the emotional turmoil and sense of disorientation that often accompanies grief.

7. Unconventional Framing: Experiment with unconventional framing, such as placing the subject at the edge of the frame or using negative space, to convey the sense of disorientation and emotional discomfort.

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[tourmyholidayholiday]

"Punjab: Where Tradition Meets Modernity - A Journey Through Vibrant Culture and Historical Marvels"

Introduction:

Punjab, the land of five rivers, stands at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, offering a unique blend of rich cultural heritage, religious significance, and dynamic urban centers. In this blog, we will explore the top tourist places in Punjab and delve into the "best tour packages" that promise an immersive experience in this culturally rich and diverse state.

Top Tourist Places in Punjab:

Golden Temple, Amritsar:

The Golden Temple, or Harmandir Sahib, is the holiest shrine in Sikhism. Its resplendent golden architecture and the tranquil sarovar (pond) create a spiritual ambiance that attracts millions of pilgrims and visitors every year.

Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar:

A poignant reminder of India's struggle for independence, Jallianwala Bagh is a historic public garden in Amritsar. The site of the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, it stands as a memorial to the martyrs.

Wagah Border, Amritsar:

Experience the electrifying energy of the Wagah Border ceremony, a daily military ritual that marks the closing of the India-Pakistan border. The synchronized drill and patriotic fervor make it a must-see spectacle.

Anandpur Sahib:

Anandpur Sahib, one of the holiest Sikh cities, is known for the Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib and its association with Guru Gobind Singh. The Hola Mohalla festival celebrated here is a grand display of martial arts and Sikh traditions.

Sheesh Mahal, Patiala:

The Sheesh Mahal, or Palace of Mirrors, is a marvel of architecture in Patiala. Adorned with intricate glasswork, the palace reflects the grandeur of the royal era and is a testament to Punjab's artistic excellence.

Best Tour Packages in Punjab:

Sikh Pilgrimage Tour:

This package is designed for those seeking a spiritual journey through the heart of Sikhism. It includes visits to the Golden Temple, Anandpur Sahib, and other significant Sikh shrines, providing a deep insight into the religious and cultural heritage of Punjab.

Cultural Extravaganza in Amritsar:

Immerse yourself in the vibrant culture of Amritsar with this package that covers the Golden Temple, Jallianwala Bagh, and the Wagah Border ceremony. Additionally, explore the bustling streets and savor the delectable local cuisine.

Royal Patiala Heritage Tour:

Indulge in the regal charm of Patiala with a tour that includes a visit to the Sheesh Mahal, Qila Mubarak, and the Baradari Gardens. Experience the opulence of the erstwhile princely state and delve into its architectural and cultural treasures.

Baisakhi Celebration Tour:

Experience the joyous festival of Baisakhi in the heartland of Punjab. This package includes participation in the colorful Baisakhi celebrations, traditional dance performances, and visits to local farms to witness the harvest festivities.

Amritsar and Dharamshala Combo:

Combine the spiritual vibes of Amritsar with the serene landscapes of Dharamshala with this package. Visit the Golden Temple, Jallianwala Bagh, and then proceed to Dharamshala to explore the Tibetan culture and the residence of the Dalai Lama.

Conclusion:

Punjab, with its vibrant culture, historical significance, and warm hospitality, promises a unique and enriching travel experience. Whether you seek spiritual solace at the Golden Temple, witness the patriotic fervor at Wagah Border, or explore the regal heritage of Patiala, Punjab has something for every traveler. Consider one of the carefully crafted tour packages to make the most of your journey through this dynamic and culturally diverse state. Punjab's blend of tradition and modernity will leave you with memories that resonate with the beating heart of this extraordinary region in India.

[teamtriphobo]

Weekend Wonders in Seattle: Unveiling the Hidden Gems

Introduction:

Seattle, the Emerald City, is a captivating destination for weekend adventurers seeking a blend of vibrant city life and breathtaking natural wonders. Nestled between the snow-capped peaks of the Cascade Mountains and the picturesque shores of the Puget Sound, Seattle offers an array of attractions that cater to every taste. In this guide, we'll explore both popular and off-the-beaten-path attractions, sample mouthwatering cuisine, and embrace the local way of life. So pack your bags, fellow travel enthusiasts, as we embark on a thrilling weekend journey through Seattle.

Visit to plan your trip: https://www.triphobo.com/

Day 1: Exploring the City's Icons

Morning:                        

Start your day in Seattle with a visit to the iconic Pike Place Market, the bustling heart of the city. Indulge your senses as you wander through the maze of stalls offering fresh produce, artisan crafts, and local delicacies. Don't forget to witness the famous fishmongers throwing salmon at Pike Place Fish Market, a true spectacle.

Afterward, make your way to the Space Needle, Seattle's most recognizable landmark. Take the elevator to the observation deck for panoramic views of the cityscape and the surrounding natural beauty. Capture unforgettable photos and marvel at the majesty of the Seattle skyline.

Afternoon:                                 

Head to the Chihuly Garden and Glass, located near the Space Needle. This mesmerizing exhibition showcases the brilliant glassworks of artist Dale Chihuly. Wander through the ethereal installations, where glass sculptures mingle harmoniously with vibrant flora. It's a visual feast for art enthusiasts and nature lovers alike.

Next, immerse yourself in Seattle's rich cultural scene with a visit to the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP). Delve into the worlds of music, science fiction, and pop culture through engaging exhibits and interactive displays. Explore the history of rock 'n' roll, admire iconic movie memorabilia, and unleash your inner geek.

Evening:

As the day draws to a close, embrace the local dining scene. Head to Ballard, a vibrant neighborhood known for its diverse culinary offerings. Savor fresh seafood at Ray's Boathouse or indulge in farm-to-table delights at The Walrus and the Carpenter. End your evening with a stroll along the Ballard Locks, where you can watch boats navigate the complex system of locks while enjoying the serene beauty of the surrounding gardens.

Day 2: Hidden Gems and Natural Beauty

Morning:

Escape the city's hustle and bustle and venture to the serene Bainbridge Island. Catch the Washington State Ferry from downtown Seattle and enjoy a scenic 35-minute ride across the Puget Sound. Once on the island, rent a bicycle and explore its picturesque landscapes, charming boutiques, and local art galleries. Don't miss the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, showcasing regional and national contemporary artists.

Afternoon:

Return to Seattle and head to the vibrant Fremont neighborhood, often referred to as the "Center of the Universe." Visit the Fremont Troll, an eccentric sculpture lurking beneath the Aurora Bridge. Snap a photo with this quirky icon and unravel the neighborhood's bohemian atmosphere as you stroll along the streets lined with unique boutiques and eclectic eateries.

For a touch of nature within the city, visit the Washington Park Arboretum. This urban oasis encompasses 230 acres of meticulously manicured gardens, lush forests, and scenic walking trails. Explore the diverse flora and fauna, and revel in the tranquility that the arboretum offers.

Evening:

Cap off your weekend in Seattle with a visit to Capitol Hill, the city's vibrant nightlife hub. Enjoy a diverse range of bars, live music venues, and bustling restaurants. Unwind at one of the craft cocktail bars like Tavern Law or venture into The Crocodile for live music performances. Experience the city's thriving LGBTQ+ scene at R Place or explore the trendy boutiques and art galleries that dot the neighborhood.

Smart Travel Tips:

Transportation: Utilize Seattle's efficient public transportation system, including buses and light rail, to navigate the city easily. Consider purchasing an ORCA card for seamless travel across multiple modes of transportation.

Weather Readiness: Seattle's weather can be unpredictable, so be prepared for rain at any time. Carry a lightweight waterproof jacket, comfortable walking shoes, and an umbrella to stay dry and comfortable.

Local Cuisine: Sample Seattle's culinary delights, including fresh seafood like salmon and Dungeness crab. Don't forget to try the city's renowned coffee at local establishments such as Starbucks Reserve Roastery or independent coffee shops like Victrola Coffee Roasters.

Stay Hydrated: Seattle's temperate climate may trick you into thinking you don't need as much water, but staying hydrated is crucial. Carry a reusable water bottle to refill throughout the day.

Conclusion:

Seattle offers an enchanting blend of natural beauty, cultural attractions, and vibrant neighborhoods that make it an ideal destination for a weekend getaway. From exploring iconic landmarks to uncovering hidden gems, indulging in local cuisine, and immersing yourself in the local way of life, Seattle has something for every travel enthusiast. So grab your map, venture beyond the tourist hotspots, and let Seattle weave its magic on your weekend journey. Happy travels!

#travel #seattle

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Things to do in Asheville

Things to do in Asheville

Nestled between the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountain ranges is the charming, relaxed and liberal community of Asheville. It is the largest city in Western North Carolina and is a popular place to visit, with many tourist attractions in the city and its picturesque surroundings.

Nicknamed the "Paris of the South" for its attractive architecture, it has a thriving arts and alternative scene, with studios and galleries scattered throughout the city. An abundance of craft breweries and street performers provide a vibrant atmosphere, and there are other things to do in Asheville with some fascinating monuments and museums. If that wasn't enough, Asheville has idyllic gardens and grounds for visitors to tour, while the magnificent mountains and verdant forests that surround it are just a short drive away.

1. Blue Ridge Parkway

Blue Ridge Parkway

Known for its breathtaking scenery and nature, the Blue Ridge Parkway stretches from Virginia to North Carolina. Known as "America's favorite road," the route winds along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with phenomenal views and panoramas to be enjoyed along the way.

In total, the scenic route runs an impressive 755 miles and connects Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Along the way, it passes through lush forests, with sparkling streams and fabulous waterfalls set amidst its pristine, untouched wilderness.

In addition to its many natural wonders, the scenic highway protects a number of important historic sites with charming towns and villages, as well as the Cherokee Indian Reservation, also along its route. Just outside Asheville, you'll find the Blue Ridge Parkway Visitor Center, which features lots of useful information and interactive exhibits about what is the most popular part of the U.S. National Park System.

2. North Carolina Arboretum

North Carolina Arboretum

Just south of the city is the charming North Carolina Arboretum, nestled among the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Sprawling in size, it is home to beautiful landscapes and magnificent gardens, with state-of-the-art greenhouses dotted here and there.

Wandering its picturesque trails is a pleasure, as the sprawling grounds are divided into picturesque sections. While some pretty flowerbeds mimic the patterns of the Blue Ridge Mountains, other areas sit alongside babbling brooks or are dotted with beautiful bonsai trees.

While its quiet trails, sprawling azaleas and fantastic flowerbeds are always gorgeous to explore, winter is an especially magical time to visit. That's when twinkling fairy lights hang among the towering trees, and the arboretum and botanical gardens take on an enchanted look.

3. Biltmore Estate

Biltmore Estate

At the heart of a sprawling estate is the Biltmore House, the largest privately owned home in the United States. Converted into a historic house museum, it is one of Asheville's most popular attractions, with large gardens, stunning architecture and beautiful rooms to explore.

Built between 1889 and 1895 for the incredibly wealthy George Washington Vanderbilt II, the massive mansion is inspired by the charming castles he had seen in the French Loire Valley. As such, many graceful arches and turrets can be seen along with attractive facades, magnificent sculptures and steeply pitched roofs.

The interior is just as dazzling. Decadently decorated rooms, halls and galleries stretch to infinity; in all, there are more than 250 to explore. On top of all this, there's wandering around the glorious grounds, with stables, wineries and hiking trails to be found here and there. To see the best of the Biltmore estate, it's worth a hike or an overnight stay at your hotel, inn or cottage.

4. Pisgah National Forest

Pisgah National Forest

One of the first national forests established in the eastern United States in 1916, Pisgah covers a vast portion of North Carolina, with large swaths around Asheville. Located in the southern Appalachian Mountains, it boasts some truly breathtaking scenery, with enchanting nature everywhere you look.

Hidden among its majestic mountains and endless forests are roaring rivers and sparkling waterfalls for visitors to discover, with divine views to be enjoyed from its highest realms. Amidst its wonderful forests and wilderness areas, exquisite mountain biking and hiking trails make their way, with numerous picnic areas and campsites scattered here and there.

Due to its scenic nature, the Pisgah National Forest is very popular with outdoor enthusiasts. In addition to hiking and biking, you can fish, climb and observe wildlife amidst its forests.

5. Basilica of San Lorenzo

St. Lawrence Basilica Asheville

One of the highlights of the city is the impressive Basilica of St. Lawrence, which is located in the center of the city. Built in 1905, this colossal Catholic church features magnificent Spanish Renaissance architecture and is reputed to have the largest free-standing elliptical dome in North America.

While its attractive facade and dazzling red brick are certainly a spectacular sight, entering its cavernous confines is the highlight. Here you'll find a host of sublime statues and stained glass windows, as well as fabulous altars and artwork, all beneath its imposing dome.

An important and impressive landmark, the beautiful basilica also has a couple of charming chapels to visit, as well as a lovely little garden to stroll around in the back.

6. Asheville Botanical Gardens

Asheville Botanical Gardens

Right next to the University of North Carolina at Asheville are some beautiful botanical gardens for you to explore. Popular with locals, students and tourists, they are home to picturesque landscapes, with tranquil paths weaving through the beautiful plants.

Established in 1961, the magnificent gardens cover a large area, with flower-filled meadows that sit alongside a sparkling stream and a wonderful wooded ridge. Dedicated to protecting and preserving the nature of the Southern Appalachians, it features more than 650 species of plants from the wondrous mountain range.

Strolling through the Asheville Botanical Garden is a delightful way to spend a few hours. April through August is the best time of year to visit, as there is an abundance of flowers and plants in bloom.

7. Grovewood Village

Grovewood Village

With numerous artist studios, galleries and museums, Grovewood Village is located right next to the famous Omni Grove Park Inn. Once home to Biltmore Industries, the complex now protects and promotes Asheville's history and artistic heritage, with plenty to see, do and shop for visitors.

In addition to taking tours of the former industrial complex to learn about Biltmore's past as a weaver and woodworker, visitors can stop by its magnificent museum, which features fascinating exhibits on crafts, textiles and looms. Also located here is the Estes-Winn Antique Car Museum, which showcases some brilliant models of classic cars.

After learning all about the history, you can visit some attractive art and craft studios where you can see how jewelry, pottery and sculptures are made, as well as buy some souvenirs. Grovewood Village also has two galleries displaying the works and crafts of local artists.

8. Lexington Glassworks

Lexington Glassworks

Along one of Asheville's trendiest streets is Lexington Glassworks, where you can watch innovative works of art take shape before your eyes. Since opening downtown in 2015, the gallery has wowed visitors with its unique creations and hand-blown glass works.

Mixing traditional and timeless techniques with bold designs and imaginative shapes, the studio's artists skillfully sculpt molten glass, bringing their colorful creations to life. Watching them is truly a pleasure: they carefully hand-blow glass ornaments and chandeliers in front of you.

Because Lexington Glassworks offers visitors a unique combination of "art, community and beer," visitors can also enjoy a local Asheville brew while watching the glassblowers at work. With monthly musical events and concerts, the studio is much more than just a place to pick up some unique souvenirs.

9. Thomas Wolfe Memorial

Thomas Wolfe Memorial

The magnificent Thomas Wolfe Memorial is located in the center of downtown Asheville and is well worth a visit if you have the opportunity. The famed 20th century author spent much of his boyhood in this old home, which he even utilized as the scene for his novel Look Homeward, Angel.

The novel is mostly autobiographical and depicts his life in his mother's boarding house. Despite the fact that his writings gained him recognition and praise, the villagers were so outraged by them that he did not return to town for eight years, and the novel was even banned from the local library.

The writer's boyhood home is now a museum and monument, with many original antiques on display. There are also educational plaques and exhibitions concerning Thomas Wolfe's life, writings, and the house itself.

10. River Arts District.

River Arts District is a cultural district on the banks of the

The River Arts District in Asheville spans along the banks of the magnificent French Broad River. Its formerly derelict and rotting warehouses now accommodate over 200 artists in a diverse range of studios, galleries, and workshops.

It's a highly creative and eclectic space with an astonishing variety of artwork on exhibit, including pottery, photography, glassware, artwork, and furniture. Visitors can take classes from the painters in their workshops in addition to viewing their colorful and chaotic studios.

The River Arts District has transformed dramatically since artists began moving into abandoned buildings in the 1970s; B&Bs, hotels, and even huge hotels have sprung alongside cafes, restaurants, and breweries.

11. Craggy Gardens

Craggy Gardens is a place where you can go to relax and

The lovely Craggy Gardens, tucked in the Great Craggy Mountains, are located to the northeast of the city. They are noted for their amazing floral displays, with June being the most magical season to come. They are named for the craggy rocky outcroppings that dot their gorgeous bounds.

The exquisite gardens, which are made up of three equally spectacular areas and are located more than 1,600 meters above sea level, are mountainous and made up of three equally impressive sections. There are intriguing routes to wander along with amazing views of the Appalachians in its lovely meadows, flower-filled hillsides, and exposed rocky surfaces.

Although many people come to see the pink and purple rhododendrons in June, Craggy's gardens are always vibrant, with plants and flowers flowering all year.

12. Asheville's downtown area

Asheville's downtown area

Downtown Asheville is a bustling yet laid-back atmosphere with enough to see and do, and it's a joy to explore with something for everyone. For its magnificent variety of Art Deco structures, it's been dubbed the "Paris of the South," and it also offers a thriving artistic, cultural, and music scene for visitors to explore.

While walking the Asheville Urban Trail is a great opportunity to see the city's beautiful artwork and architecture-filled streets, there are also interesting historical landmarks and museums in the downtown area. Downtown also has excellent art galleries and craft breweries, as well as a dynamic ambiance thanks to its many street entertainers.

In addition, the city's large artist population has resulted in a plethora of interesting boutiques and beautiful studios to visit. Downtown Asheville is unquestionably one of the most lively and celebratory areas in North Carolina, with a plethora of clubs and music venues.

#asheville #things to do in asheville

[architectnews]

The Island is a nature-inspired Paris home designed around a courtyard garden

Local architect Clément Lesnoff-Rocard has converted a 19th-century house in Paris's La Défense into a contemporary home featuring a double-height dining room that looks onto a central courtyard.

Clément Lesnoff-Rocard named this project The Island as it involved creating an isolated, inward-looking private residence in the midst of the bustling city.

"The project is about finding a way for a family to have its own universal and symbolic wild landscape inside their home," suggested Lesnoff-Rocard, "surrounded by the city but deeply separated from its looming pressure."

Lesnoff-Rocard introduced a double-height dining room as part of the renovation

The Island is located at the end of a small street on the edge of Paris's main financial district, La Défense. The house's traditional architecture stands in contrast to the steel and glass skyscrapers that dominate the district's skyline.

Lesnoff-Rocard's refurbishment, carried out with partner Gil Percal, focused on switching the focus of the spaces away from the street and towards an exotically planted patio garden at the centre of the plan.

The interiors are designed to focus on a patio garden outside

"We decided at the first visit that this house had to be protected from this outer predatory world," the architect added, "turning its back to the street and only looking at itself, its garden and its own qualities, yet to be found."

The building had been extended and remodelled by previous owners, resulting in a muddled sequence of spaces that lacked any form of singular identity.

A combination of wooden and concrete steps lead to a mezzanine

The project involved stripping out many of the existing elements and reordering the space to give it greater cohesion.

The garden and the idea of nature provided the main reference point for The Island's interior design. Many of the forms and materials used evoke natural features or aim to enhance the connection with the outdoor space.

The white-concrete mezzanine curves around the dining space

A double-height glass wall connects the courtyard with the main living areas, providing views of the sky as well as the lush planting.

A curving, white-concrete mezzanine that bridges across the living and dining area is described by Lesnoff-Rocard as "a stratus, a low cloud passing quietly above your head".

One side of this space is lined with a "cliff-like" full-height bookcase, while the grey-green floor tiles are intended to evoke shallow water and the oak dining table recalls a tree.

The lounge area features a cast-concrete bench with cushions so it can be used as a sofa. A timber staircase situated between this space and the dining area ascends to the first floor.

The lounge area features a cast-concrete bench

Where the stairs emerge onto the mezzanine, the white concrete floor is cast to form curved steps that continue the organic theme.

Internal windows look down from the two upper levels onto the living space and a matt-black kitchen below. The glazed wall and glass mezzanine balustrade ensure plenty of daylight reaches these spaces.

Other recent courtyard homes on Dezeen include an inward-facing, cedar-clad home in Salt Lake City designed by American architects Kipp Edick and Joe Sadoski and the House of Many Courtyards in Scandanavia.

Photography is by Simone Bossi unless stated.

Project credits:

Architect: Clément Lesnoff-Rocard Collaborator: Gil Percal General builders: H2J Bat General joinery: RCPM Windows and glasswork: Alufenox Kitchen: Parallels SAS & Armony Cucine Upholstery for 8m sofa: Christophe Lafond Curtains: Galeo Dining table: design Clément Lesnoff-Rocard, joinery Martin Keller

The post The Island is a nature-inspired Paris home designed around a courtyard garden appeared first on Dezeen.

#Architecture – Dezeen

[musesthroughtheages]

[Because I’m the only person in the world who cares this much about Pasco Acalon, and because I’m sure that no one knows what I mean when I say “dance magic” repeatedly, here’s a primer:

Magic in Emelan There are two types of magic in the Emelan/Circle of Magic series: academic and ambient. Academic magic is what most people would think of as traditional fantasy magic. It comes from an internal source, easily identified by mage seekers at an early age, and anyone with the gift can train at any mage school and learn a vast variety of uses for it. It’s well-known and easily quantifiable.

Ambient magic, on the other hand, is a little trickier. In the world of Emelan, it’s rarer and less well-known, and it’s much harder to identify, because the source of the magic is external, and traditional mage-seeking tactics won’t find anything. Ambient magic is power that comes from interaction with a craft, skill, or outside force--examples in the series include but are not limited to: thread/cloth/fiber arts, gardening/plants, metalsmithing, weather/seismic activity, cooking, woodwork, stonework, glasswork, and dancing. Ambient mages are no less powerful than academic mages, but because their power is tied to one specific thing, they are harder to find and even harder to teach. They cannot use magic except through their craft, though the limits thereof may surprise people. Once they are trained, though, they are both exceptional craftworkers and mages with unfathomable potential in their arts.

Dance Magic Pasco is the only known dance mage in the country of Emelan, and this rarity is remarked upon in the book. According to one of the senior members of the Winding Circle Temple, there is magic worked through dancing among the Qidao and Ugurulz people, both of which are far from Emelan, but these examples are described as academic magic--it’s internal and can be worked in several ways, dance being traditional in their culture. Absent a fellow ambient dance mage, Pasco requires both a magic teacher, to teach him the basics of controlling power, and a dance teacher, to give him the tools to use that power at all. 

Just as a thread mage works her power by spinning, weaving, or stitching, a dance mage works their power through steps, movement, and rhythm. Pasco’s body is his mage kit--the physical actions he takes enact the magic he creates.

Powers I’m going to use specific examples from the book to demonstrate what the scope of his abilities are here, so I’m not pulling this out of my ass:

-Pasco has perfect body memory, as remarked upon by his dance teacher. He can remember a dance after only seeing it done once, and with a small amount of practice, he can hit an exact mark on a surface every time.

-Pasco can affect how others perceive him. In one example, he essentially makes himself invisible with a single dance movement. The motion is intended to redirect the viewer’s gaze, and by using it, Pasco made it so anyone looking his way would simply slide their gaze away, without seeing him. I’m extrapolating from this example that he could also direct attention to himself with little effort, as well as affect how he’s seen (alluring, fearsome, handsome, tragic, etc)

-Pasco can affect a wide range of targets. The first example is of him dancing luck into a fishing net, and attracting hundreds of fish to an entire fleet. Someone comments, however, that if he hadn’t focused on the dance’s intent, and instead thought of pretty girls, “he could have called all the girls of Summersea to him, whether they wished to be called or not.” Later in the book, he dances attraction into a net again, this time targeting specific criminals to be caught. His “audience” does not need to see the dance for them to be affected, but he does need to keep his goal in mind at all times.

-Pasco can affect people both emotionally and physically, regardless of their desires or natural laws. The thieves he caught in with his net dance most certainly did not want to be caught, but were compelled to come to where the net was. Likewise, when he lifted his cousins three feet into the air, they stayed at that elevation for hours until the magic was dispelled, and could not be pushed or pulled in any direction.

-as stated before, Pasco’s body is his mage kit. He doesn’t need anything else to enact magic, but his power can be enhanced by the use of existing patterns (a repeated dance, or a dance worked in a grid/pattern like the net), or additions like music or costuming, as is true of any dancer, magic or not.

Limitations I think it’s very plain that while it’s helpful that he doesn’t need any tools besides his physical body, Pasco needs to be able to move in order to do magic. If he’s restrained, he’s screwed.

His very power level, however, also limits him. He needs to be extremely careful when he dances so that his “audience” is not harmed. The hypothetical situation where he calls all the girls in the region to him is very very possible, and I think it’s clear that it would be very very bad. To put it bluntly, that’s some Pied Piper shit, and he takes that responsibility very seriously. He needs control when he dances, both in his focus and in his environment, so barriers/wards are used to keep his power from leaking out where it’s not wanted, and distractions are limited as much as possible.

Additionally, there’s a danger to him in the use of patterns. Any mage can get caught up in repeating a pattern over and over again until they’ve drained themselves without realizing what they’ve done, and a dance mage is no exception. Pasco could easily get caught for too long in a dance and not be able to stop himself until his body and his power entirely give out.

In Conclusion Dance magic is both weirdly specific and disturbingly powerful and I am obsessed with the idea of it and this minor character in a minor series.]

#ooc #(dance magic dance) #c: pasco

[ittybittytatertot]

Batman & The Flying Graysons Ch. 2

Mary and John were not stupid. They looked up the address Batman gave them first. And when they found it belonged to the sprawling estate of the Wayne family, well, suffice to say it was a shock.

And no, they didn’t tell anyone. Who would believe them? At first they didn’t even believe it themselves. Because really, they were supposed to believe playboy trust fund kid Bruce Wayne came back from his studies abroad to dress up as a bat and fight crime? More likely that Batman had a sense of humor.

But a day later came the letters, one for each of the performers and crew of Haley’s circus, stating that the Wayne Foundation was donating the funds to either pay for travel to pre-existing homes or afford Gotham’s steep rent should they choose to remain in the city.

So now Mary and John had to see if this was legit. They left their bags in the hotel and piled themselves and their son into the back of a cab.

None of the pictures online did the Wayne Estate justice. The lawn was more like a miniature forest with immaculately maintained gardens closer to the manor, which was itself a stunning building with marble, brick, and floor-to-ceiling windows. Dick gasped from his seat between his parents, and they couldn’t help but share the sentiment.

“What is this place?” Dick asked with his childish inability to appropriately switch between inside and outside voices.

“We’re visiting a new friend.” John explained, taking his son’s hand. “This is his house.”

“His parents’ house.” Mary said idly, never too distracted—not even by gilded doorframes and marble pillars—for banter.

The door swung open with barely a creak, and they realized instead of a confused butler like they were expecting, they were face to face with Bruce Wayne himself.

Without a tuxedo and the flash of cameras, he looked younger than even the six or so years between him and Mr. and Mrs. Grayson. Even still, it was easy to see they were the same man with his carelessly swept back black hair and laid back posture. His shirt and linen pants probably cost a month’s rent, but the sin of his outrageous wealth could be forgiven by his proven generosity. Everything about his appearance aligned with the Bruce Wayne from the tabloids. All except for his eyes. A sharp, impenetrable blue behind dark bags that could have, if Mary and John didn’t know what they knew, be waved off as the result of some late night debauchery. But Mary and John did know. And when that blue gaze met theirs with recognition, they were sure.

Bruce’s casual expression turned into a professional but pleased smile. “You came.”

“You’re Bruce Wayne.” John said. It might’ve sounded like an accusation if not for the laughter at the edge of his voice.

“I am.” Bruce said, opening the door further to let them in.

Having spent too long sitting still, Dick gleefully wiggled from John’s hold to run into the entrance hall.

“Dickie wait, at least take off your shoes.” Mary called after him, but the small boy was already crashing into a middle-aged gentleman in a suit.

Well, there was the butler.

“Sorry.” Dick said.

“Apology accepted. And if you plan on running in the future, please mind the glassworks. They are quite breakable.” The man said.

“Okay,” Dick agreed, though he was already onto the next interesting thing, which was really everything in the Wayne Manor. There were busts and paintings, sconches and molding, intricate carpets and a stunning chandelier that Mary just knew her son was imagining swinging from.

Though right then, the most interesting thing was the two new people rounding a corner at an excited pace.

“Is it them, Al?” A silver fox of a man asked as he came to a stop, his hand resting on the small of Alfred’s back (so maybe he wasn’t a butler after all?)

The man, who had to be Thomas Wayne, grinned at them. His features were as sharp as his brown eyes were soft, though his towering height and broad build certainly reflected his son.

The woman who came up behind Thomas with an equally bright smile and a bone structure and blue eyes that matched Bruce’s perfectly must have been Martha Wayne.

“No need to linger at the doorway dear, come in. I’m Martha, this is Thomas and Alfred.” She took Mary’s hand in hers, “It is so nice to meet you, despite the circumstances.”

“Indeed. We have visited Haley’s Circus many times through the years. I saw your father on the trapeze in France, marvelous performer.” Alfred said to John.

“I remember that trip.” Thomas said, and it was either Mary’s imagination or he was leaning closer to the British man.

“Me too.” Martha said, the three of them sharing a secret smile before remembering their manners and returning their attention to their guests.

“Oh, and I am so sorry the hotel the Wayne Foundation set you up in didn’t have room for your son. We will make sure our funds go to something more child friendly next time.” Martha apologized.

Dick bounced over from where he’d been investigating the knick knacks lining a bookshelf, “Yes it did! I had my own room and there was a pool with a diving board!”

Their first night at the hotel, Dick had spent hours doing flips off that diving board.

Thomas’s eyebrows knit together in confusion, “Is that right? But Brucie, I thought you said…?”

Bruce scratched the back of his neck, “Well, um. I found them another place and.”

Martha frowned, “Which place? And why didn’t it work out?”

“Not that we’re not happy to have you.” Alfred added for the Graysons’ benefit.

“No, of course we are.” Martha said quickly, “I’m just confused, what’s going on Bruce?”

All eyes turned to Bruce Wayne. Who stared back, looking every bit his 22 years. His gaze flickered rapidly between his three parents faces (the corners of Alfred’s mouth twitching) and then to the Graysons and then back again. “…We’re dating…?”

Mary nearly swallowed her tongue, and John spun to stare with wide-eyed incredulity at the youngest Wayne. Dick looked between all the grown-ups with equal measures confusion and fascination.

Mary and John were not stupid. But Mary, holding onto her husbands wrist like the life support it had always been, was occasionally reckless.

She grabbed Bruce’s arm and gave her best smile (something she’s as practiced at as cartwheels and somersaults), “Yep! We’re dating!”

#i rewrote it #but only like the last part #earth 386 #long post #ficlet #ch: bruce wayne #ch: mary grayson #ch: john grayson #ch: martha wayne #ch: alfred pennyworth #ch: thomas wayne #ch: dick grayson

[travelguideworldtour-blog]

12 Best Places in New York

12 Best Places in New York

Utilize our guide to the nyc attractions you are enjoyable guests or only need to play with tourist and re-visit places that are legendary. We’ve compiled our favourite beaches and areas on the planet, for example amazing parks, art museumsand super markets and historical places.

Historic Huguenot Street

  Historical Huguenot Street can be currently a 10-acre National Historic Landmark District maintaining the 1677 Hudson Valley payoff of Huguenot families that settled into the location seeking spiritual liberty.  The district houses a myriad of tourist attractions and keeps its historical personality that is 19th century, like seven and the 1717 Huguenot Church.  A picnic grove is offered by A tourist centre and shows to the area of diverse collections, for example its own French, and Dutch settlers and native classes.  Draws include several web sites, a copy Munsee native wigwam, and also a burial ground maintaining the remains of the oldest settlers of their region.  Free tours of this historical district can be obtained for people showcasing background information to the milestones of the region.

New York Botanical Garden

The children program is closely tied directly to research workers.  A highlight of this New York Botanical Garden may be your train series, where enthusiasts can take pleasure in trains.  For people who have limited freedom, there can be a train readily available for traveling.

Even the New York Botanical Garden, located on 250 acres at the Bronx, comprises over a thousand plants in temperate, subtropical, and subtropical desert parts of earth.  The gardens have been centered on give gardening classes and conservation and education to many ages, in addition to supplementary classes for adults at botanical example, botany, landscape gardening, and art therapy.

Hudson Beach Glass

Hudson Beach Glass is among the Hudson Valley’s premiere glasswork studios, Both owned and operated by Wendy and John Gilvey, Jennifer Smith, and Michael Benzer as 1987.  As the provider’s key studio has been worked inside a remodeled ice hockey house, demonstration centre and its gallery remains available to the general public around Beacon’s Main Street in just a firehouse centre reachable via the Beacon metronorth rail channel.  Presentations can be viewed by visitors and watch a selection of glass works made by studio designers, for example bits and home items which might be purchased via the art shop of the facility.  Visitors may be involved in glass and glass blowing training courses, emphasizing processes like decoration blowing and glass bead manufacturing.  Public events consist of participation from the yearly Second Saturday Beacon art of the city walk.

Farmers’ Museum

There are screens of fields and farming implements full of legacy livestock.  Educational programs are offered for adults, also for families, school classes.  For a minimal fee, visitors move on horsedrawn wagon rides or can ride the hands.  The memorial has a lot of places where beverage and food are all available .

Even the Farmers’ Museum, at Cooperstown, New York, introduces people with a peek at village and rural life throughout the 19th century.   A number of those items are offered in the gift shop of the museum or at the overall Store.

Empire State Building

Even in line at the lobby can be an adventure by it self, since the ceilings of the lobby are all wonders of art deco murals left in aluminum foliage and 24 karat gold.  Even the 86th floor observation deck is more open, allowing individuals while the deck wraps round the construction to observe most of Manhattan.  Even the floor observation deck has been included, and also on a transparent day visitors can view as much as eighty kilometers off.  The construction has bathroom facilities, gift shops, and restaurants.

As it had been completed in 1931, the Empire State Building was a iconic nyc attraction.   The Art Deco style building can be a vital appeal for visitors to this town that come to gaze from the observation decks in Manhattan.

Sagamore Hill National Historic Site

Sagamore Hill has been the house of American president Theodore”Teddy” Roosevelt at that time it had been developed in 1885 before his death in 1919.  His family obtained vacations that were lengthy also Roosevelt purchased a broad tract of property and experienced this gorgeous Queen Anne structure if he had been twenty years-old.

He spent time and effort while in office, and also your house became famous as”The Summer White House.”  Reservations are advised there’s also a visitor centre which has a museum.

Broadway

Broadway could be your primary theatre district in Manhattan, ny City.  It really is home to professional theatres of 500 seats apiece.

Broadway shows are still an attraction for sailors and tourists; the season.  Broadway includes a tradition of theatre, which peaked from the 1950s and 1960s with shows like Oklahoma and goes back to 1866! , West Side Story, and Fiddler on top drawing rave reviews and also a great number of theatergoers.

Old Westbury Gardens

Old Westbury Gardens delivers educational programming for school classes, kids adults and adults, and also its own grounds are host to summer pop theaters, outdoor music festivals, auto shows, and book signings.  The New York State program is followed by educational programming for school classes, and it’s readily available for classes in the kindergarten.

Westbury House and Also old Westbury Gardens were property and Both the home of John Shaffer Phipps, Also a United States of America steel magnate, along with his wife and 4 children.  The Charles II style house, high in art work and antiques, sits on 200 acres of woodlands, ponds, lakes, and orchards, that admired throughout an tour or is enjoyed.

Antique Boat Museum

Open until October, the Antique Boat Museum grounds are home to the Antique Boat Show and Auction, that attracts ship aficionados.  Every year, a charity regatta is held by the Antique Boat Museum.  With an superb gift shop, videos, along with also slideshows, the Antique Boat Museum can be a mustsee for boat fans.

Even the Antique Boat Museum sits Around 1,500 feet of St. Lawrence River Shore and has Got the largest collection of Classic Ships in United States.  It’s a superb selection of classic canoes, a display that traces the growth of boat construction, also will be offering a peek at the foundation of angling around the St. Lawrence River.

Forest Hill Stadium

A portion of this West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, New York City has been constructed in 1923 and renovated to sponsor diverse events and tennis tournaments.  The West Side Tennis Club is a tennis team together with 38 tennis courts together with bud court, clay-court, Har Tru, along with surfaces.  Additionally, it comes with an Olympic-size pool.  The arena has 14,000 chairs and hosts concerts in addition to ski events.   Throughout its peak popularity, the scene was the place for festivals with such titles as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand, Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, and more.  The scene was the place for its Forest Hills Music Festival.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called The Met, is at the center of New York City, plus it’s among the best and most most-visited galleries around the entire earth.  The Met has two thousand pieces of art spanning and art is represented by it .

A number of its popular works involve musical instruments, antique arms and armor, photography, American and contemporary art, and European specialists, including pieces by Picasso, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya, El Greco, Delacroix, Degas, Renoir, Gaugin, Cezanne, and Monet.  The memorial, which was available guided tours and educational programming and has created connections.  The Cloisters is at Manhattan and it is really just a repository and exhibit place for sculpture, decorative arts, and design.

Brooklyn Botanical Garden

A conservatory comprises a bonsai garden that is related.  The Shakespeare Garden imitates a English cottage garden, and also the Cranford Rose Garden hosts over a million species of roses and comprises over plants.  The Children’s Garden will be the earliest in the Earth, and it’s widely utilized by youngsters from the area to develop fresh fruit and veggies.  You can find plants in blossom inside and outside all year round, and also the garden boasts extensive programming.

Even the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, that sits at the center of one of New York’s five boroughs, can be actually really just a joy to local visitors and residents.  It’s famous for its Japanese Garden it comprises 2 dozen flowering rock lanterns, a Shinto shrine bridges, and even trees.

See more articles about New York!

Best Places in New York City – Weekend Getaways

12 Best Places in New York

#Best Places in New York

[rhetoricandlogic]

The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery By Catherynne M. Valente

Issue #200, Special Double-Issue

, May 26, 2016

AUDIO PODCAST

EBOOK

(Finalist, Eugie Foster Memorial Award, 2017)

When my father, a glassblower of some modest fame, lay gasping on his deathbed, he offered, between bloody wheezings, a choice of inheritance to his three children: a chest of Greek pearls, a hectare of French land, or an iron punty. Impute no virtue to my performance in this little scene! I, being the youngest, chose last, which is to say I did not choose at all. The elder of us, my brother Prospero, seized the chest straightaway, having love in his heart for nothing but jewels and gold, the earth’s least interesting movements of the bowel which so excite, in turn, the innards of man. Pomposo, next of my blood, took up the deed of land, for he always fancied himself a lord, even in our childhood games, wherein he sold me in marriage to the fish in the lake, the grove of poplar trees, the sturdy stone wall, our father’s kiln and pools of molten glass, even the sun and the moon and the constellation of Taurus. The iron punty was left to me, my father’s only daughter, who could least wield it to any profit, being a girl and therefore no fit beast for commerce. All things settled to two-thirds satisfaction, our father bolted upright in his bed, cried out: Go I hence to God! then promptly fell back, perished, and proceeded directly to Hell.

The old man had hardly begun his long cuddle with the wormy ground before Prospero be-shipped himself with a galleon and sailed for the Dutch East Indies in search of a blacker, more fragrant pearl to spice his breakfast and his greed whilst Pomposo wifed himself a butter-haired miller’s daughter, planting his seed in both France and her with a quickness. And thus was I left, Perpetua alone and loudly complaining, in the quiet dark of my father’s glassworks, with no one willing to buy from my delicate and feminine hand, no matter how fine the goblet on the end of that long iron punty.

The solution seemed to me obvious. Henceforward, quite simply, I should never be a girl again. This marvelous transformation would require neither a witch’s spell nor an alchemist’s potion. From birth I possessed certain talents that would come to circumscribe my destiny, though I cursed them mightily until their use came clear: a deep and commanding voice, a masterful height, and a virile hirsuteness, owing to a certain unmentionable rootstock of our ancient family. Served as a refreshingly exotic accompaniment to these, some few of us are also born with one eye as good as any wrought by God, and one withered, hardened to little more than a misshapen pearl notched within a smooth and featureless socket, an affliction which, even if all else could be made fair between us, my brothers did not inherit, so curse them forever, say I. No surprise that no one wanted to marry the glassblower’s giant hairy one-eyed daughter!

Yet now my defects would bring to me, not a husband, but the world entire. I had only to cut my hair with my father’s shears, bind my breasts with my mother’s bridal veil, clothe myself in my brothers’ coats and hose, blow a glass bubble into a false eye, and think nothing more of Perpetua forever. My womandectomy caused me neither trouble nor grief—I whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone! But, since such a heroic act of theatre could hardly be accomplished in the place of my birth, I also traded two windows for a cart and an elderly but good-humored plough-horse, packed up tools and bread and slabs of unworked glass, and departed that time and place forever. London, after all, does not care one whit who you were. Or who you are. Or who you will become. Frankly, she barely cares for herself, and certainly cannot be bothered with your tawdry backstage changes of costume and comedies of mistaken identity.

That was long ago. So long that to say the numbers aloud would be an act of pure nihilism. Oh, but I am old, good sir, old as ale and twice as bitter, though I do not look it and never shall, so far as I can tell. I was old when you were weaned, squalling and farting, and I shall be old when your grandchildren annoy you with their hideous fashions and worse manners. Kings and queens and armadas and plagues have come and gone in my sight, ridiculous wars flowered and pruned, my brothers died, the scales balanced at last, for having not the malformed and singular eye, neither did they have the longevity that is our better inheritance, fashions swung from opulence to piousness and back to the ornate flamboyance that is their favored resting state once more.

And thus come I, Master Cornelius Peek, Glassmaker to the Rich and Redolent, only slightly dented, to the age which was the mate to my soul as glove to glove or slipper to slipper. Such an age exists for every man, but only a lucky few chance to be born alongside theirs. For myself, no more perfect era can ever grace the hourglass than the one that began in the Year of Our Lord 1660, in the festering scrotum of London, at the commencement of the long and groaning orgy of Charles II’s pretty, witty reign.

If you would know me, know my house. She is a slim, graceful affair built in a fashion somewhat later than the latest, much of brick and marble and, naturally, glass, three stories high, with the top two being the quarters I share with my servants, the maid-of-all-work Mrs. Matterfact and my valet, Mr. Suchandsuch (German, I believe, but I do respect the privacy of all persons), and my wigs, my wardrobe, and my lady wife, when I am in possession of such a creature, an occurrence more common and without complaint than you might assume, (of which much more, much later). I designed the edifice myself, with an eye to every detail, from the silver door-knocker carved in the image of a single, kindly eye whose eyelid must be whacked vigorously against the iris to gain ingress, to the several concealed chambers and passageways for my sole and secret use, all of which open at the pulling of a sconce or the adjusting of an oil painting, that sort of thing, to the smallest of rose motifs stenciled upon the wallpaper.

The land whereupon my lady house sits, however, represents a happy accident of real estate investment, as I purchased it a small eternity before the Earl of Bedford seized upon the desire to make of Covent Garden a stylish district for stylish people, and the Earl was forced to make significant accommodations and gratifications on my account. I am always delighted by accommodations and gratifications, particularly when they are forced, and most especially when they are on my account.

The lower floor, which opens most attractively onto the newly-christened and newly-worthwhile Drury Lane, serves as my showroom, and in through my tasteful door flow all the nobly whelped and ignobly wealthed and blind (both from birth and from happenstance, I do not discriminate) and wounded and syphilitic of England, along with not a few who made the journey from France, Italy, Denmark, even the Rus, to receive my peculiar attentions. With the most exquisite consideration, I appointed the walls of my little salon with ultramarine watered silk and discreet, gold-framed portraits of my most distinguished customers. In the northwest corner, you will find what I humbly allege to be the single most comfortable chair in all of Christendom, reclined at an, at first glance, radical angle, that nevertheless offers an extraordinary serenity of ease, stuffed with Arabian horsehair and Spanish barley, sheathed in supple leather the color of a rose just as the last sunlight vanishes behind the mountains. In the northeast corner, you will find, should you but recognize it, my father’s pitted and pitiful iron punty, braced above the hearth with all the honor the gentry grant to their tawdry ancestral swords. The ceiling boasts a fine fresco depicting that drunken uncle of Greek Literature, the Cyclops, trudging through a field of poppies and wheat with a ram under each arm, and the floor bears up beneath a deep blanket of choice carpets woven by divinely inspired and contented Safavids, so thick no cheeky draught even imagines it might invade my realm, and all four walls, from baseboard to the height of a man, are outfitted with a series of splendid drawers, in alternating gold and silver designs, presenting to the hands of my supplicants faceted knobs of sapphire, emerald, onyx, amethyst, and jasper. These drawers contain my treasures, my masterpieces, the objects of power with which I line my pockets and sauce my goose. Open one, any one, every one, and all will be revealed on plush velvet cushions, for there rest hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful eyes ever to open or close upon this fallen earth.

No fingers as discerning as mine could ever be content with the glazier’s endless workaday drudge through plate windows and wine bottles, vases and spectacles and spyglasses, hoping against hope for the occasional excitement of a goblet or a string of beads that might, if you did not look too closely, resemble, in the dark, real pearls. No, no, a thousand, million times no! Not for me that life of scarred knuckles whipped by white-molten strands of stray glass, of unbearable heat and even more unbearable contempt oozing from those very ones who needed me to keep the rain out of their parlors and their spirits off the table linen.

I will tell you how I made this daring escape from a life of silicate squalor, and trust you, as I suppose I already have done, to keep my secrets—for what is the worth of a secret if you never spill it? My deliverance came courtesy of a pot of pepper, a disfigured milkmaid, and the Dogaressa of Venice.

It would seem that my brothers were not quite so malevolently egomaniacal as they seemed on that distant, never-to-be-forgotten day when our father drooled his last. One of them was not, at least. Having vanished neatly into London and established myself, albeit in an appallingly meager situation consisting of little more than a single kiln stashed in the best beloved piss-corner of the Arsegate, marvering paltry, poignant cups against the stone steps of a whorehouse, sleeping between two rather unpleasantly amorous cows in a cheesemaker’s barn, I was neither happy nor quite wretched, for at least I had made a start. At least I was in the arms of the reeking city. At least I had escaped the trap laid by pearls and hectares and absconding brothers.

And then, as these things happen, one day, not different in any quality or deed from any other day, I received a parcel from an exhausted-looking young man dressed in the Florentine style. I remember him as well as my supper Thursday last—the supper was pigeon pie and fried eels with claret; the lad, a terrifically handsome black-haired trifle who went by the rather lofty name of Plutarch—and after wiping the road from his eyes and washing it from his throat with ale that hardly deserved the name, he presented me with a most curious item: a fat silver pot, inlaid with a lapis lazuli ship at full sail.

Inside found I a treasure beyond the sweat-drenched dreams of upwardly mobile men, which is to say, a handful of peppercorns and beans of vanil, those exotic, black and fragrant jewels for which the gluttonous world crosses itself three times in thanks. Plutarch explained, at some length, that my brother Prospero now dwelt permanently in the East Indies where he had massed a fabulous fortune, and wished to assure himself that his sister, the sweet, homely maid he abandoned, could make herself a good marriage after all. I begged the poor boy not to use any of those treacherous words again in my or anyone’s hearing: not marriage, not maid, and most of all not sister. Please and thank you for the pepper, on your way, tell no one my name nor how you found me and how did you find me by God and the Devil himself—no, don’t tell me, I shall locate this lost relative and deliver the goods to her with haste, though I could perhaps be persuaded to pass the night reading a bit of Plutarch before rustling up the wastrel in question, but, hold fast, my darling, I must insist you submit to my peculiar tastes and maintain both our clothing and cover of darkness throughout; I find it sharpens the pleasure of the thing, this is my, shall we say, firm requirement, and no argument shall move me.

Thus did I find myself a reasonably rich and well-read man. And that might have made a pleasant and satisfying enough end of it, if not for the milkmaid.

For, as these things happen, one day not long after, not different in any hour or act than any other day, a second parcel appeared upon my, now much finer, though not nearly so fine as my present, doorstep. Her name was Perdita, she was in possession of a complexion as pure as that of a white calf on the day of its birth, hair as red as a fresh wound, an almost offensively pregnant belly, and to crown off her beauty, it must be mentioned, both her eyes had been gouged from her pretty skull by means of, I was shortly to learn, a pair of puritanical ravens.

It would seem that my other brother, Pomposo—you remember him, yes? Paying attention, are we?—was still in the habit of marrying unsuspecting girls off to trees and fish and stones, provided that the trees were his encircling arms, the fish his ardent tongue, and the stones those terribly personal, perceptive, and pendulous seed-vaults of his ardor, and poor, luckless Perdita had taken quite the turn round the park. Perhaps we are not so divided by our shared blood as all that, Pomposo! Hats off, my good man, and everything else, too. Well, the delectably lovely and lamentable maid in question found herself afflicted both by Little Lord Pomposo and by that peculiar misfortune which bonds all men as one and makes them brothers: she had a bad father.

Perdita told me of her predicament over my generous table. She spoke with more haste than precision, tearing out morsels of Mrs. Matterfact’s incomparable baked capon in almond sauce with her grubby fingers and fumbling it into that plump face whilst she rummaged amongst her French pockets for English words to close in her tale like a green and garnishing parsley. As far as I could gather, her cowherding father had, in his youth, contracted the disease of religion, a most severe and acute strain. He took the local clergyman’s daughter to wife, promptly locked her in his granary to keep her safe from both sin and any amusement at all, and removed a child from her every year or so until she perished from, presumably, the piercing shame of having tripped and fallen into one of the more tiresome fairy tales.

Perdita’s father occupied the time he might have spent not slowly murdering his wife upon his one and only hobby: the keeping of birds of prey. Now, one cannot fault the man for that! But he loved no falcons nor hawks nor eagles, only a matched pair of black-hearted ravens he called by the names of Praisegod and Feargod (there really can be no accounting for, or excusing of, the tastes of Papists) which he had trained from the egg to hunt down the smallest traces of wickedness upon his estate and among his children. For this unlikely genius had taught his birds, painstakingly, to detect the delicate and complex scents of sexual congress, and the corvids twain became so adept that they were known to arrive at many a village window only moments after the culmination of the act.

Now you have taken up all the pieces of this none-too-sophisticated puzzle and can no doubt assume the rest. My brother conquered Perdita’s virtue with ease, for no such dour and draconian devoutness can raise much else but libertines, a fact which may yet save us from the vicious fate of a world redeemed, and put my niece (for indeed it proved to be a niece) in her with little enough care for anything but the trees and the fish and the stones of his own bucolic life. No sooner than he had rolled off of her but Praisegod and Feargod arrived, screeching to wake the glorious dead, the scent of coupling maddening their black brains, and devoured Perdita’s eyeballs in a hideous orgy of gore and terribly poor parenting. Pomposo, ever steadfast and humbly responsible for his own affairs, sent his distress directly to me and, I imagine, poured a brimming glass of wine with which to toast himself.

“My dear lady,” said I, gently prying a joint of Mrs. Matterfact’s brandied mutton from her fist, hoping to preserve at least something for myself, “I cannot imagine what you or my good brother mean me to do with a child. I am a bachelor, I wish devoutly to remain so, and my bachelorhood is only redoubled by my regrettable feelings toward children, which mirror the drunkard’s for a mug of clear water: well enough and wholesome for most, he supposes, but what can one do with one? But I am not pitiless. That, I am not, my dear. You may, of course, remain here until the child... occurs, and we shall endeavor to locate some suitable position in town for one of your talents.”

Ah, but I had played my hand and missed the trick! “You misunderstand, monsieur,” protested the comely Perdita. “Mister Pompy didn’t send me to you for your hospitalité. He said in London he had a brother who could make me eyes twice as pretty as they ever were and would only charge me the favor of not squeezing out my babe on his parlor floor.”

Even a thousand miles distant, my skinflint family could put the screws to me, turn them tight, and have themselves a nice giggle at my groans. But at least the old boy guessed my game of trousers and did not give me up, even to his paramour.

“They was green,” the milkmaid whispered, and the ruination of her eye sockets bled in place of weeping. “Like clover.”

Oh, very well! I am not a monster. In any event, I wasn’t then. At least the commission was an interesting enough challenge to my lately listless and undernourished intellect. So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales. I sewed the spheres myself with thread of gold into her fair face, an operation which sounds elegant and difficult in the telling, but in the doing required rather more gin, profanity, and blows to the chin than any window did. When I had finished, she appeared, not healed, but more than healed—sublimated, rarefied, elevated above the ranks of human women with their filmy, vitreous eyes that could merely see.

I have heard good report that, under another name, and with her daughter quite grown and well-wed, Perdita now sits upon the throne of the Netherlands, her peerless eyes having captivated the heart of a certain prince before anyone could tie a rock round her feet and drop her into a canal. Well done, say all us graspers down here, reaching up toward Heaven’s sewers with a thousand million hands, well done.

Now, we arrive at the hairpin turn in the road of both my fortunes and my life, the skew of the thing, where the carriage of our tale may so easily overturn and send us flying into mud and thorns unknown. Brace your constitution and your credulity, for I am of a mind to whip the horses and take the bend at speed!

It is simply not possible to excel so surpassingly as I have done and remain anonymous. God in his perversity grants anonymity to the gifted and the industrious in equal and heartless measure, but never to the splendid. Word of the girl with the unearthly, alien, celestial eyes spread like a plague of delight in every direction, floating down the river, sweeping through the Continent, stowing away on ships at sea, until it arrived, much adorned with my Lady Rumor’s laurels, at the palazzo of the Doge in darling, dripping Venice.

Now, the Doge at that time had caused himself, God knows why or by dint of what wager, to be married to a woman by the name of Samaritiana. Do not allow yourselves to be duped by that name, you trusting fools! Samaritiana would not even stop along the side of the road to Hell to wrinkle her nose at the carcass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though it save her immortal soul, unless He told her she was beautiful first. Oh, ’tis easy enough to hate a vain woman with warts and liver spots, to scorn her milk baths and philtres and exsanguinated Hungarian virgins, to mock her desperation to preserve a youth and beauty that was never much more enticing than the local sheep in the first place, but one had to look elsewhere for reasons to hate Samaritiana, for she truly was the singular beauty of her age. Black of hair, eye, and ambition was she, pale as a maiden drowned, buxom as Ceres (though she had yet no issue), intoxicating as the breath of Bacchus. Fortunately, my lady thoughtfully provided a bounty of other pantries in which to find that meat of hatred fit for the fires of any heart.

She was, quite simply, the worst person.

I do not mean by this to call the Dogaressa a murderess, nor an apostate, nor a despot, nor an embezzler, nor even a whore, for whores, at least, are kindly and useful, murderers must have some measure of cleverness if they mean to get away with it, apostates make for tremendous company at parties, despots have a positively devastating charisma, and, I am assured by the highest authority, which is to say, Lord Aphorism and his Merry Band of Proverbials, that there is some honor amongst thieves. No, Samaritiana was merely humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, morally conservative, and incapable, to the last drop of her ruby blood, of admitting that she did not know everything in all the starry spheres and wheeling orbits of existence, and this whilst believing herself to possess all of these that are virtues and eschew all that are sins. Can you envisage a more wretched and unloveable beast?

I married her, naturally.

The Dogaressa came to me in a black resin mask and emerald hooded cloak when the plague had only lately checked into its waterfront rooms, sent for a litter, and commenced seeing the sights of Venice with its traveling hat and trusted map.

Oh, no, no, you misapprehend my phraseology. Not that plague. Not that grave and gorgeous darkling shadow that falls over Europe once a century and reminds us that what dwells within our bodies is not a soul but a stinking ruin of fluid and marrow and bile. The other plague, the one that sneaks on nimbly putrefying feet from bedroom to bedroom, from dockside to dinner party, from brothel to marital bower, leaving chancres like kisses too long remembered. Yes, we would have to wait years yet before Baron von Bubœ mounted his much-anticipated revival on the stage, but never you fear, Dame Syphilis was dancing down the dawn, and in those days, her viols never stopped nor slowed.

That mysterious, morbid, nigh-monstrous and tangerine-scented creature called Samaritiana darkened my door one evening in April, bid me draw close all my curtains, light only a modest lantern upon a pretty lacquered table inlaid with mother of pearl which I still possess to this day, and stand some distance away while she removed her onyx mask to reveal a face of such surpassing radiance, such unparalleled winsomeness, that even the absence of the left eye, and the mass of scars and weals that had long since replaced it, could do no more than render her enchanting rather than perfect.

It would seem that the Dogaressa danced with the Dame some years past. Her husband, the Doge, brought her to the ball, she claimed, having learned the steps from his underaged Neapolitan mistress, though, as I became much acquainted with the lady in later years, I rather suspect she found her own way, arrived first, wore through three pairs of shoes, departed last, and ate all the cakes on the sideboard. But, as is far too often the case in this life ironical, that mean and miserly soul found itself in receipt of, not only the beauty of a better woman, but the good fortune of a better man. She contracted a high fever owing to her insistence upon hosting the Christmas feast out of doors that year, so that the gathered noblility could see how lovely she looked with a high winter’s blush on her cheeks, and this fever seemed to have driven, by some idiot insensate alchemy, the Dame from the halls of Samaritiana forever, leaving only her eye ravaged and boiled away by the waltz.

All was well in the world, then, save that she could not show herself in public without derision and her husband still rotted on his throne with a golden nose hung on his mouldering face like a door knocker, but she had not come for his sake, nor would she ever dream of fancying that it was possible to ask a boon of that oft-rumored wizard hiding in the sty of London for any single soul on earth other than herself.

“I have heard that you can make a new eye,” said she, in dulcet tones she did not deserve the ability to produce.

I could.

“Better than the old, brighter, of any color or shape?”

I could.

She licked her lily lips. “And install it so well none would suspect the exchange?”

Perhaps not quite, not entirely so well, but it never behooves one to admit weakness to a one-eyed queen.

“You have already done me this service,” said she to me, loftily, never asking once, only demanding, presuming, crushing all resistance, not to mention dignity, custom, the basest element of courtesy, beneath her silver-tooled heel. She waved her hand as though the motion of her fingers could destroy all protestation. The light of my lantern caught on a ring of peridot and tourmaline entwined into the shape of a rather maudlin-looking crocodile gnawing upon its own tail, for she claimed some murky Egyptian blood in the dregs of her familial cup, as though such little droplets could mark her as exceptional, when every dockside lady secretly fancies herself a Cleopatra of the Thames.

“Produce the results upon the morrow! I will pay you nothing, of course. A Dogaressa does not stoop to exchange currency for goods. But when two eyes look out from beneath my brow once more, I will present you with a gift, for no particular reason other than that I wish to bestow it.”

“And if I do not like your gift, Clarissima?”

Puzzlement contorted her exquisitely Cyclopean visage, causing a most unwelcome familial pang within my breast. “I do not take your meaning, Master Peek. How could such a thing possibly occur?”

There is, it seems, a glittering point beyond which egotism achieves such purity that it becomes innocence, and that was the country in which Samaritiana lived. In truth, had she revealed her gift to me then, or even promised payment in the usual manner, I might have refused her, just to experience the novel emotion of rejecting royalty—for I am interested in nothing so much as novelty, not love nor death nor glass nor gold. Something new! Something new! My kingdom for something new! But she caught me, the perfumed spider, wholly without knowing what she’d done. I did indeed take up her commission, and though you may conclude in advance that this recounting of the job will proceed according to the pattern of the last, I shall be disappointed if you do, for I have already told you most vividly that herein lies the skew of my tale.

For the sake of the beautiful Dogaressa, I took up my father’s battered old pipe and punty. I cannot now say why; for a certainty I owned better instruments by far, and had not touched the things in eons except to brush them daintily with a daily sneer. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality seized me; perhaps I despised her too much even then to waste my finer appliances on her pox-punched face, in any event, I cannot even say positively that the result blossomed forth from the tools and not some other cause, and I fear to question it now. I sank into the rhythm of my father and grandfather and his before him: the dollop of liquid glass, the greatbreath of my own lungs expelled through the long, black pipe, the sweet pressure and rolling of the globule against the smooth marver stone, the uncommon light known only to workers of glass, that strange slick of marmalade-light afire within crystal that would soon ride a woman’s skull all the way through the days of her life and down into her tomb.

The work was done; I fashioned two, an exquisitely matched pair, in case the other organ required replacement in the unseen feverish future. Samaritiana, in, so far as I may know or tell, the sole creative decision of her existence, chose not one color for the iris but all of them, dozens of infinitesimal shards chipped from every jewel in my inventory: sapphire, jade, emerald, jasper, onyx, amethyst, ruby, topaz. The effect was a carnival wheel of deep, unsettling fascination, and when I sewed it into her flesh with my golden thread she did not wail or struggle but only sighed, as though lost in the act of love, and, though her faults were called Legion, they were as yet unknown to me, thus, as my needle entered her, so too did my fatal softening begin.

The Dogaressa departed with her stitching still fresh, leaving in her wake but three souvenirs of our intimate surgery: one gift she intended, one she did not, and her damnable scent, which neither Mrs. Matterfact nor Mr. Suchandsuch, no matter how they scrubbed and strove, could remove from the premises. I daresay, even this very night, should you venture to my old house on the High Street and press your nose to its sturdy bones, still yet you would snatch a whiff of tangerine and strangling ivy from the foundation stones.

The gift she intended to leave was a lock of her raven hair, the skinflint bitch. The other, I did not perceive until some weeks later, when I adjourned to my smoking room with a bottle of brandy, a packet of snuff, and a rare contemplative mood which I intended to spend upon a rich, unfiltered melancholy as sweet as any Madeira—for it is a fact globally acknowledged that idle melancholy, like good wine, is the exclusive purview of the wealthy. To aid in my melancholy, I fingered in one hand the mate to the Dogaressa’s harlequin eye, rubbing my thumb over that strange, motley iris, marveling at the milky sheen of the sclera, admiring, unrepentant Narcissus that I am, my own skill and artistry. I removed my own, ordinary, unguessable, nearly flawless glass eye and held up the other to my empty socket like a spyglass, and a most thoroughly stupendous metamorphosis transpired: I could seethrough the jeweled lens of that artificial eye! Truly see, without cloud or glare or halo—ah, but what I saw was not the walls of my own smoking room, so tastefully lined with matching books chosen to neither excite nor bore any guest to extremes, but the long peach-cream and gold hall of the palazzo of the Doge in far-distant Venice! The chequered black and white marble floors flowed forth in my vision like a houndstooth river; the full and unforgiving moon streamed glaucous through tall slim windows; painted ceilings soared overhead, inlaid with pearl and carnelian and ever-so-slightly greyed with the smoke of a hundred thousand candles burnt over peerless years in that grand corridor. Women and men swept slowly up and down the squares like boats upon some fairy canal, swathed in gowns of viridescent green cross-hatched with silver and rose, armored in bodices of whalebone and opal, be-sailed in lacy gauze spun by Clotho herself upon the wheel of destiny, cloaked and hooded in vermillion damask, in aquamarine, in citron and puce, their clothing each so splendid I could scarce tell the maids from the swains—and thus looked I upon a personal paradise heretofore undreamt of.

But there were worms in paradise, for each and every beauty in the Doge’s palace was rotting in their finery like the fruit of sun-spoiled melons within their shells. Their flesh putrefied and dripped from their bones and what remained turned hideous, sickening colors, choleric, livid, cyanic, hoary, a moldering patina of death whose effusions stained those bodices black. Some stumbled noseless, others having replaced that appendage with nostrils of gold and silver and crystal and porcelain, and others, all hope lost, sunk their visages into masks, though they could not hide their chancred hands, the bleeding sores of their bosoms, the undead tatters of their throats.

Yet still they laughed, and spoke animatedly, one to the other, and blushed in virtuous fashion beneath their putridity. Such is the dance of the Dame, who enters through the essential act of life, yet leaves you thinking, breathing, walking whilst the depredations of the grave transact upon your still-sensate flesh, making of this world a single noisy tomb.

My breath would not obey me; my heart ricocheted amongst my ribs like a cannon misfired. Was it truly Italy I saw bounded in the tiny planet of a glass eye? Had I stumbled into a drunken sleep or gone mad so swiftly no asylum could hope to catch me? I shot to my feet, mashing the eye deeper into my socket until stars spattered my sight—closer, look closer! Could I hear as well? Smell? Taste the tallowed air of that far-off moonlit court?

I could not. I could not hear their footsteps nor inhale their perfume nor feel the fuzzed reek of the mildewed canals on my tongue nor move of my own volition. I apprehended a new truth, that even the impossible possesses laws of its own, and those unbendable. I could only observe. Observe—while my vision lurched forward, advancing quickly, rocking gently as with a woman’s sinuous gait. Graceful, slender arms extended as though from my own body, opening with infinite elegance to embrace a man whose head was that of a Titan cast down brutally into the pit of Tartarus, so wracked with growths and intuberances and pulsating polyps that the plates of his skull had cracked beneath the intolerable weight and shifted into a new pate so monstrous it could no longer bear the Doge’s crown, which hung pitifully instead from a ribbon slung round his grotesque neck. Those matchless arms which were not my own enfolded this hapless creature and, encircling the middle finger of the hand belonging to the right arm, I saw with my altered vision the twisted peridot and tourmaline crocodile ring of the Dogaressa Samaritiana.

I cast the glass eye away from me, sickened, thrilled, inflamed, ensorcelled, the fire in my midnight hearth as nothing beside the conflagration of curiosity, horror, and the beginnings of power that crackled within my brain-pan. In that first moment, standing among my books and my brandy drenched in the sweat of a new universe, an instinct, a whisper of Truth Profound, permeated my spirit like smoke exhaled, and, I confess to you now, all these many years hence, still I enshrine it as an article of faith, for it was with breath that God animated the dumb mud of Adam, breath that woke Pandora from stone, breath that demarcates the living and the dead, breath with which we speak and cry out and divide ourselves from the idiot kingdom of animals, and breath, by all the blasted saints and angels, with which the glassblower shapes his glass! The living breath of Cornelius Peek yet permeates every insignificant atom of his works; each object broken from his punty, be it window or goblet or cask or eye, hides the sacred exhalations of his spirit co-mingled with the crystal, and it is this, it is this, I tell you, that connects the jeweled eye of the Dogaressa with the jeweled eye in my hand! I dwell in the glass, it cannot dispense with me any further than it can dispense with translucency or mass, and therefore it carries the shard of Cornelius whithersoever it wanders.

Let us dispense with a few obnoxious but inevitable inquiries into the practicality of the matter, so that we may move along past the skew. How could this mystic connection have escaped my notice till now? It is only sensical: Perdita vanished away to the Netherlands with both marvelous eyes, and no window nor goblet nor cask is, in its inborn nature, that organ of sight which opens onto the infinite pit of the human soul. Would any eye manufactured in the same fashion result in such remote visions? They would indeed, my credulous friend. Does every glassblower possess the ability to produce such objects, should he but retain one eye whilst selling the other at a fair price? Ah, here I must admit my deficiency as a philosopher, for which I apologize most obsequiously. It cannot be breath alone, for I made subtle overtures toward the gentleman of the glassmen’s guild and I can say with a solemn certainty that none but Master Peek can perform this alchemy of sclera and pupil. Why should it be so? Perhaps I am a wizard, perhaps a saint, perhaps a demiurge, perhaps the Messiah returned at last, perhaps it owes only to that peculiar rootstock of my family which grants me my height, my baritone, the hairiness of my body. Grandfather Polyphemus’s last gift, lobbed down the ancestral highway, bashing horses as it comes. I am a man of art, not science. I ask why Mrs. Matterfact has not yet laid out my supper oftener than I ask after the workings of the uncluttered cosmos.

Thus did I enter the business of optometry.

When you have placed a mad rainbow jewel in the skull of a Dogaressa as though she were nothing but a golden ring, a jewel which drove the rotting men of Venice insane with the desire to tie her to a bridge-post and stare transported into the motley swirling colors of the eye of God, lately fallen to earth, they began to say, somewhere in Sicily, advertisement serves little purpose. I opened my door and received the flood. It is positively trivial to lose an eye in this wicked world, did you know? I accepted them warmly, with a bow and a kerchief fluttered to the mouth in acute compassion, a permanently sympathetic expression penciled onto my lips in primrose paint—for that moth-eaten scab Cromwell was finally in the grave, where everything is just as colorless and abstemious and black as he always wished it to be, so full of piss and vitriol that it poisoned him to the gills, and Our Chuck, the Merry Monarch, was dancing on his bones.

Fashion, ever my God and my mother, took pity upon her poor supplicant and caused a great miracle to take place for my sake—the world donned a dandy wig whilst I doffed my own, sporting my secret womanly hair as long and curled as any lord, soaking my face in the most masculine of pale powders, rouges, lacquers, and creams, encasing my figure, such as it ever was, in lime and coral brocade trimmed in frosty silver, concealing my gait with an ivory cane and foxfurred slippers, and rejoicing in the knowledge that, of all the men in London, I suddenly possessed the lowest voice of them all. So hidden, so revealed, I took all the one-eyed world into my parlor: the cancerous, the war-wounded, the horse-kicked, the husband-beaten, the inquisitor-inquisited, the lightning-struck, the unfortunately-born, the pox-blighted, and yes, the Dame’s erstwhile lovers, for she had made her way to our shores and had begun her ancient gambols in sight of St. Paul’s. And for each of these unfortunate angels of the ocular, I fashioned a second eye in secret, unknown entirely to my custom, twin to the one that repaired their befouled faces, with which I adjourned night by night to a series of successive smoking rooms, growing grander and finer with each year, holding those orbs to the light and looking unseen upon every city in Christendom, along with several in the Orient and one in the New World, though it could hardly be called a city, if I am to be honest. And Venice, always Venice, the first eye and only, her eye, gazing out on the water, the moonlight, the dead.

In this fashion, I came to know that the Doge had died, succumbed to the unbearable weight of his own head, long before Samaritiana appeared on my night-bestrewn doorstep, the saffron gown she wore in the moonlight, and every other in her trunk, torn violently, soaked with bodily fluids, rent by the overgrown nails of the frenzied rotting horde who had chased her from the palazzo through every desperate alleyway and canal of the city, across Switzerland and France, in their anguished longing to touch the Eye of God, still sewn into the ex-Dogaressa’s skull, to touch it but once and be healed forever.

But of course I aided the friendless and abandoned Good Samaritiana as she wept beside her monstrous road. Oh, Clarissima, how dreadful, how unspeakable, how worthy of Mr. Pepys’ vigilant pen! I shall have to make introductions when you are quite well again. I sent at once for a fine dressmaker of my acquaintance to construct a suitable costume for the lady and save her from the immodesty of those ragged silken remnants of her former life with which, even then, she attempted to cover her body with little enough success that, before the dressmaker could so much as cross the river, I learned something quite unexpected concerning the biography of Samaritiana, former queen of Venice.

She was quite male. Undeniably, conspicuously, astonishingly, fascinatingly so.

I called up to Mrs. Matterfact for cold oxtongue, a saucer of pineapple, and oysters stewed in Armagnac, down to Mr. Suchandsuch for carafes of hot claret mulled via the latest methods, and listened to the wondrous chimera in my parlor tell of how that famous Egyptian blood was not in the least of the Nile but of the Tiber, on whose Ostian banks a penniless but beautiful boy had been born in secret to one of the Pope’s mistresses and left to perish among the reed-gatherers and the amber-collectors and the diggers of molluscs.

But perish the lad did not, for even a grass-picker is thoroughly loused with the nits of compassion, and the women passed the babe one to the other and back again, like a cup of wine that drank, instead, from them. Now, it is well known to anyone with a single sopping slice of sense that the Pope’s enemies are rather like weevils, ever industrious, ever multiplying, ever rapacious, starving for the chaff of scandal with which to choke the Holy Father and watch him writhe. They roved over the city, overturning the very foundational stones of ancient Rome in search of the Infallible Bastards, in order, not to kill them like Herod, but to bring them before the Cardinals and etch their little faces upon the stained glass windows as evidence of sin. My little minx, having already long, lustrous hair and androgyne features more like to a seraph than a by-blow son, found it at first advantageous to effect the manners and dress of a girl, and then, when the danger had passed, more than that, agreeable, even preferable to her former existence. Having become a maid to save her life, she remained one in order to enjoy it. Owing to the meager diet of the Tiber’s tiniest fish, little Samaritiana never grew so tall nor so stout as other boys, she remained curiously hairless, and though she escaped the castrato’s fate, her voice never dipped beneath the pleasing alto with which she now spoke, nor did her organ of masculinity ever aspire to outdo the average Grecian statue, and so, when the Doge visited Ostia after the death of his first wife, he saw nothing unusual walking by the river except for the most beautiful woman in the Occident, balancing a basket of rushes on her hip with a few nuggets of amber rolling within the weave.

“But surely, Clarissima,” mused I, savoring the tart song of pineapple upon my tongue, “a bridegroom, however ardent, cannot be so easily duped as a vengeful Cardinal! Your deception cannot have survived the wedding bower!”

“It did not survive the engagement, my dear Master Peek,” Samaritiana replied without a wisp of blush upon her remarkable cheek. “Oh, mistake me not, I do so love to lie—I see no more purpose in pretending to be virtuous in your presence than I saw in pretending to be fertile in his. But there could be no delight in a deception so deep and vast. It would impair true marriage between us. I revealed myself at Pentecost, allowing him in the intensity of his ardor to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until I stood clad only in honesty before His Serenity and awaited what I presumed to be my doom and my death. But only kisses fell upon me in that moment, for the Doge had long suppressed his inborn nature, and suffered already to get upon his departed wife the heirs he owed to the canals, and though my masquerade, you will agree, outshines the impeccable, he would later say, on the night of which you so confidently speak, that some sinew of his heart must always have known, since first he beheld me with my basket of amber and sorrow.”

I did not exchange trust for trust that night among the oysters and the oxtongue. I have a viciously refined sense of theatre, after all. I made her wait, feigning religion, indigestion, the vicissitudes of work, gout, even virginity, until our wedding night, whereupon I allowed Samaritiana, in the intensity of her ardor, to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until at last all that stood between us was the tattered ruin of my mother’s ancient bridal veil, and then, not even that.

“Goodness, you don’t expect me to be surprised, do you?” laughed the ex-Dogaressa, the monster, the braying centaur, the miserly lamia who would not give me the satisfaction of scandalizing her! That eve, and only that eve, under the stars painted upon my ceiling, I applied all my cruellest and most unfair arts to compel my wife to admit, as a wedding present, that she had not known, she had never known, never even suspected, loved me as a man just as I loved her as a woman, and was besides a brutal little liar who deserved a lifetime of the most delectable punishment. We exchanged whispered, apocryphal, long-atrophied names beneath the coverlet: Perpetua. Proteo.

Samartiana treated me deplorably, broke my heart and my bank, laughed when she ought to have wept, drove Mrs. Matterfact to utter disintegration, kept lovers, schemed with minor nobles. We were just ferociously happy. Are you surprised? I, too, am humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, a liar and a cad. He was like me. I was like her. I had, after all, seen as she saw, from the very angle of her waking vision, which in some circles might be the definition of divine love. I have had wives before and will have again, far cleverer and braver and wilder than my Clarissima, but none I treasured half so well, nor came so near to telling the secret of my smoking room, of the chests full of eyes hidden beneath the floorboards. Samaritiana had her lovers; I had my eyes, the voyeur’s stealthy, soft and pregnant hours, a criminal sensorium I could not quit nor wished to.Yet still I would not share, I held it back from her, out of her reach, beyond her ken.

The plague took her in the spring. The Baron, not the Dame. The plague of long masks and onions and bodies stacked like fresh-laid bricks. I buried her in glass, in my incandescent fury at the kiln, for where else can a man lose his whole being but in a wife or in work? These are the twin barrels in which we drown ourselves forever.

It soon came to pass that wonderful eyes of Cornelius Peek were in such demand that the possession of one could catapult the owner into society, if only he could keep his head about him once he landed, and this was reason enough that, men being men and ambition being forever the most demanding of bedfellows, it became much the fashion in those years to sacrifice one eye to the teeth-grinding god of social mobility and replace it with something far more useful than depth perception. Natural colors fell by the wayside—they wanted an angel’s eye, now, a demon’s, a dryad’s, a goblin’s, more alien, more inhuman, less windows to the soul than windows to debauched and lawless Edens, and I, your servant, sir, a window-maker once more. I cannot say I approved of this self-deformation, but I certainly profited by the sudden proliferation of English Cyclopses, most especially by their dispersal through the halls of power, carrying the breath of Peek with them into every shadowy corner of the privileged and the perverse.

I strung their eyes on silver thread and lay in a torpor like unto the opium addict upon the lilac damask of my smoking room couch, draping them round and round my body like a strand of numberless pearls, lifting each crystal gem in turn to gaze upon Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Muscovy, Constantinople, Zurich—and Venice, always Venice, returning again and again, though I knew I would not find what I sought along those rippling canals traveled by the living dead. It became my obsession, this invasion of perspective, this theft of privacy, the luxurious passivity of the thing, watching without participating as the lives of others fluttered by like so many scarlet leaves, compelled to witness, but not to interfere, even if I wished to, even if I had liked the young Earl well enough when I installed his pigment-less diamond eye and longed to parry the assassin’s blade when I saw it flash in the Austrian sunset. I saw, with tremulous breath, as God saw, forced unwilling to allow the race of man to damn or redeem itself in a noxious fume of free will, forbidden by laws unwritten not to lift one hand, even if the baker’s boy had laughed when I offered him a big red eye or a cat-slit pupil or a shark’s unbroken onyx hue, any sort, free of charge, even the costliest, the most debonair, in honor of my late wife Samaritiana who in another lifetime paid me in hair, not because she would wish me to be generous but because she would mock me to the rafters and howl hazard down to Hell, begging the Devil to take me now rather than let one more pauper rob her purse, even if I saw, now, through his eye, saw the maidservant burning, burning in the bakery on Pudding Lane, burning and screaming in the midnight wind, and then the terrible, impossible leap of the flames to the adjoining houses, an orange tongue lasciviously working in the dark, not to lift one hand as what I saw in the glass eye and what I saw in the flesh became one, fusing and melding at last, reality and unreality, the sight I owned and the sight I stole, the conflagration devouring the city, the gardens, and my house around me, my lovely watered ultramarine silk, my supremely comfortable chair stuffed with Arabian horsehair, my darling gold and silver drawers, as I lay still and let it come for me and thee and all.

I did not die, for heaven’s sake. Perish the thought! Death is terrifically gauche, don’t you know, I should never be caught wearing it in public. I simply did not get up. Irony being the Lord of All Things, the smoking room survived the blaze and I inside it; though the rafters smoked and blackened and the walls swelled with heat like the head of a Doge, the secret chambers honeycombing the place contained the inferno, they did not stove in nor fall, save for one shelf of books, the bloody Romans, of all things, which, in toppling, quite snapped both my shinbones beneath a ponderous copy of Plutarch. Mrs. Matterfact and Mr. Suchandsuch fought valiantly and gave up only the better part of the roof, though we lost my lovely showroom, a tragedy from which I shall never fully recover, I assure you. And for a long while, I remained where the fire found me, on the long damask couch in my smoking room, wrapped in lengths of eyes like Odysseus lashed to the mast and listening to all the sirens’ mating bleats, still lifting each in turn and fixing it to my empty socket, one after the other after the other, and thus I stayed for years, years beyond years, beyond Matterfact and Suchandsuch and their replacements, beyond the intolerable plebians outside who wanted only humble, honest brown and blue eyes again, their own mortal eyes, having seen too much of wildness. And what, pray tell, did I do with my impossible sight, with my impossible span of time?

Why, I became the greatest spy the world has ever known. Would you have done otherwise?

Oh, I have sold crowns to kings and kings to executioners, positions to the enemy and ships to the storm, murderers to the avenging and perversities to the puritanical, I have caused ingenious devices to be built in England before the paint in Krakow finished drying, rescued aristocrats from the mob and mobs from the aristocracy by turns, bought and traded and brokered half of Europe to the other half and back again, dashed more sailors against the rocks than my promethean progenitor could have done in the throes of his most orgiastic fever-dream. I have smote the ground and summoned up wars from the deeps and I have called down the heavens to end them, all without moving one whisper from my house on Drury Lane, even as the laborers rebuilt it around me, even as the rains came, even as the lane around it became a writhing slum, a whore’s racetrack, a nursery rhyme.

Look around you and look well: this is the world I made. Isn’t it charming? Isn’t it terrible and exquisite and debased and tastefully appointed according to the very latest of styles? I have seen to every detail, every flourish—think nothing of it, it has been my great honor.

But the time has come to rouse myself, for my eyes have begun to grow dark, and of late I spy muchly upon the damp and wormy earth, for who would not beg to be buried with their precious Peek eye, bauble of a bygone—and better—age? No one, not even the baker’s boy. The workshop of Master Cornelius Peek will open doors once more, for I have centuries sprawled at my feet like Christmas tinsel, and I would not advance upon them blind. I have heard the strange mournful bovine lowing of what I am assured are called the proletariatoutside my window, the clack and clatter of progress to whose rhythm all men must waltz. There is much work to be done if I do not wish to have the next century decorated by some other, coarser, less splendid hand. I shall curl my hair and don the lime and coral coat, crack the ivory cane against the stones once more, and if the fashions have sped beyond me, so be it, I care nothing, I will stand for the best of us, for in the end, the world will always belong to dandies, who alone see the filigree upon the glass that is God’s signature upon his work.

After all, it is positively trivial to lose an eye in this midden of modernity, this precarious, perilous world, don’t you agree?

#Catherynne M. Valente #The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek #Or #The Luminescense of Debauchery #short story #actually long story

[ghostofthering]

Worship with Both Hands

Over the years, Bakura had become indefinitely used to their visits to Luxor. It happened, perhaps once or twice a year. Malik would be needed for clan business, or so he would say, and yet so much of the visit would be taken up with reunion. With family. With Malik throwing his arms about his sister’s waist, and the strong clasp of Rishid’s hand in Malik’s. It was a family matter.

Bakura felt distant from it. The soft-voweled arabic, strange on his ears, and the familiar heat of a Kingdom that had long crumbled. 

With Malik away on business, or reuniting with his siblings, Bakura found he had little to do. The sands outside were the same as ever, but the sun burned quickly in his skin, he looked out of place, and he didn’t speak the language. Instead, he spent his time wandering the Ishtar family home.

Strange to be somewhere so royal. Lush well-fed garden, the palatial gleam of white-washed walls, and glasswork, lazuli-blue, and lapis-green, in faience-patterns framing doorways, and shuttered windows. Mornings spent spent wandering the cool hallways, and afternoons spent lounging absently by the pool in the atrium.

It was strange how much one could long for evening, when Bakura would catch Malik’s mouth with his teeth, kiss him like the long suffusing warmth of sunset. The quiet way missing someone turned into touch, and laughter.

So yes -- Bakura had grown used to Luxor, and it’s place in his life. Was pleased by it, as much as quietened by it. It was important to Malik, and in its own way, important to Bakura. However, the days were still long, still hot, still cramped with boredom, regardless of how opulent the home was.

And never let it be said Bakura could not be self-sufficient.

Today, he had managed to not only scale most of the house without either leaving the property, or using stairs, but he had also found a cache of treasure, safely stored in Rishid’s office, and was now inspecting the gold within with hungry attention. Of course, there was no need to steal from Malik’s family, no need to offend, Bakura only meant to look.

Only look. Every intention to carefully return the find to its home, and replace each lock. Making it look like he’d never even been there was as much a challenge as the initial break-in.

Only look, but Bakura recognized the heavy shape in his hands. The gold eye of wadjet. The careful angles of the horus crown. Atem’s crown. Crowned to a peace that still drew a gush of hate and blood from Bakura’s chest. He stared at it, holding it gingerly in his fingertips.

No, not the same-- the wings were gone. Bakura held the crown in one hand, and rummaged through the treasures, and found the horus wings entirely absent. A low considering hum rumbled through Bakura’s throat, shifting about on the floor, still tightly holding the crown.

He had meant to only look, but- gathering the crown up under his shirt- that felt like an ambitious thing to ask of a Thief King. Carefully returning the office to its prior state, heart beginning to thunder in his ears, Bakura backpaced to his room with Malik, and only once that door was safely shut, did he pull the crown out once again.

Lying across the bed, crown held aloft, Bakura stared at it with hungry eyes until the deep amber of late afternoon turned ruby-like as the sun was swallowed into the mountain ranges. Malik would be home soon, and the gold was a little warm, a little cool, a little heavy in Bakura’s hands.

#scarsofra #worship with both hands #starter

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Empire Glassworks Sunshine Garden Small Hand Pipe

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Stained glass refraction

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