Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2022 i Siegfried

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Dear Reader,

“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”Betsy-Tacy and TibMaud Hart Lovelace Is there a season more suffuse with nostalgia and memory than summer? Each time I lie on dry grass, hear ice cubes in a glass of lemonade, or watch the play of sun across hot tarmac I am young again. I am under an apple tree in my grandparents’ backyard. My grandmother’s graceful, tanned hands are coaxing my freckled chubby ones to hold aluminum knitting needles with the ease that comes so naturally to her. Later I wander into the cool of their 1950s basement to watch my grandfather at his workbench. Together we build a birdhouse and paint it with leftover blue house paint. The word…

1 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

THE GREAT GATSB

“My new novel appears in late March: The reaat atsbyy It represents abouat a year’s work and I think it’s abouat ten years better than anything I’ve doney" A Sad & Lovely Thing COVER ART & THE GREAT GATSBY Ninety-seven years have passed since The Great Gatsby, the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald said was “about ten years better than anything [he’d] done” before, was published in 1925.1 He was not wrong; its place in the Western canon is undisputed. The Great Gatsby has been published in hundreds of editions (and now that it is in the public domain in many countries, this number will increase exponentially). These editions have tried to visually interpret Fitzgerald’s deceptively simple story in dozens of pieces of cover art. Arguably, none have been as successful…

27 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Thee Solitary Summer

“I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life.” Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, on August 31, 1866, to British businessman Henry Herron Beauchamp and Australian-born Elizabeth Weiss Lassetter. The family returned to England when Elizabeth was three. Von Arnim grew into an intelligent and musically gifted young woman: she studied music, the organ in particular, at the Royal College of Music, London. At twenty-two, while she considered a career in music, her parents organized a tour of Europe to find their daughter a husband. In Rome she met newly widowed Prussian aristocrat Graf Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin. Taken by Elizabeth’s charm and talent — he would have her play the organ for Franz Liszt’s daughter —…

38 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

References

Editor's Letter “nostos, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2022, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/128481. Accessed 15 June 2022. “-algia, comb. form.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/233781. Accessed 15 June 2022. “nostalgia, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/128472. Accessed 15 June 2022. Poetry Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Before Summer Rain.” allpoetry.com. https://allpoetry.com/ Before-Summer-Rain Thomas, Edward. “Adlestrop.” poetryfoundation.org. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53744/adlestrop Introduction to The Great Gatsby 1 Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Andrew Turnbull, OK Publishing, 2017, p. 602. https://read.amazon. ca/kp/embed?asin=B-074MG2LVS&preview=new-tab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_ dp_K8WP1ED49P0790ATDWYP 2 Scribner, Charles III. “Celestial Eyes: From Metamorphosis to Masterpiece.” Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. LIII, no. 2, 1992, p. 141. https://www.scribd.com/doc/254399107/ Celestial-Eyes-From-Metamorphosis-to-Masterpiece 3 ---. “Celestial Eyes: From Metamorphosis to Masterpiece.” Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. LIII, no. 2, 1992, pp. 142–3.…

4 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Siegfried in Summer

Siegfried in summer is the expectancy of morning. You eat yesterday’s biscuits in the cool, before the heat rises and dust settles. The day will be long; anything could happen. Siegfried in summer is berry picking and hot dog eating, sticky fingers and heat-dampened necks. It is the chlorinated outdoor pool and the tinkling ice cream truck as it winds through suburban streets. Or else it is long days at the beach, coming home sun-tired and sandy, washing your hair in tepid water and leaving it wet as you sleep. Summer is for reading. You lose yourself to James Salter, Raymond Chandler, The Virgin Suicides, and Brideshead Revisited. Later you emerge from the pages with your vision blurred and your innocence lost. Like a long baseball game in August, summer…

1 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Shoeless Joe

I swear the stars have moved in close enough to evesdrop as I sit in this single rickety bleacher that I built with my unskilled hands, looking down at Shoeless Joe Jackson. A breath of clover travels on the summer wind. Behind me, just yards away, brook water plashes in the darkness, a frog shrills, fireflies dazzle the night like red pepper. A petal falls. “God, what an outfied,” he says. “What a left field.” He looks up at me and I look down at him. “This must be heaven,” he says. “No. It’s Iowa,” I reply automatically. But then I feel the night rubbing softly against my face like cherry blossoms; look at the sleeping girl-child in my arms, her small hand curled around one of my fingers; think…

1 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

ADLESTROP

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—The name, because one afternoonOf heat the express-train drew up thereUnwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.No one left and no one cameOn the bare platform. What I sawWas Adlestrop—only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass,And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,No whit less still and lonely fairThan the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sangClose by, and round him, mistier,Farther and farther, all the birdsOf Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.…

1 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Before Summer Rain

Suddenly, from all the green around you, something-you don’t know what-has disappeared; you feel it creeping closer to the window, in total silence. From the nearby wood you hear the urgent whistling of a plover, reminding you of someone’s Saint Jerome: so much solitude and passion come from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide away from us, cautiously, as though they weren’t supposed to hear what we are saying. And reflected on the faded tapestries now; the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long childhood hours when you were so afraid. Summer ShowerAlfred Sacheverel Coke 1875–1899 Wash and Graphite on Card…

1 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Shoreline

We have awakened next to a silver-tongued river. In the night, the high bank on the opposite shore loosened its stone in raucous tumbles. By then the rains had abetted, leaving the air crystalline and ready for sound. The shoreline is deep with wet, smooth rocks in prehistoric colours. My companion and I roam like an accordion, unfolding from each other across the beach, returning with stones to share. Two eagles gyre overhead. (Local residents building a fire near the beach tell us that feathers are plentiful upstream.) Yesterday there was a spirit bear near our camp. Will we see its elusive white shadow bend over the straight road we travel today? We eschew cameras in favour of eye-lit memory; to travel this way leaves your hands open for another’s.…

1 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer was born in Boston in 1836. In 1854, he apprenticed to a Boston lithographer. Soon after, his first illustrations appeared in Harper’s Weekly, for which he travelled as an artist-correspondent during the American Civil War. In 1866, Homer took a ten-month trip to Paris and the French countryside, adopting for a time an impressionist palette before creating a personal style that bridged realism and symbolism. The 1870s saw Homer continue his mastery of oil paint, beginning to also work in watercolours. By the early 1880s, driven by a desire for solitude, the artist settled in England at Tynemouth on the North Sea, where he began depicting the strenuous lives of local inhabitants, particularly the women. By the time he returned to New York, his art had been indelibly…

1 min

Siegfried|Summer 2022

Art References

Front Cover: Holmgren, R. John. “Three Divers Fly Off!” Art Deco Flapper Vintage Illustration. https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/191754633/three-divers-fly-off-art-deco-flapper?ref=yr_purchases Purchased here: https://twitter.com/that_tick/status/1377718569895669764/photo/2 Homer, Winslow. East Hampton Beach, Long Island, Oil on Canvas. 1874, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.157923.html Dücker, Eugen. On the Beach, Oil on Panel. 1916, private collection. https://artvee.com/dl/on-the-beach-20 Sorolla, Joaquín. On San Sebastian Beach, Oil on Canvas. 1900. https://www.wikiart.org/en/joaqu-n-sorolla/on-san-sebastian-beach-1900 Homer, Winslow. On the Stile, Watercolour, Gouache, and Graphite on Wove Paper. 1878, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.89667.html Fisher, Harrison. “Close to Shore,” Postcard. 1915. https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/154690500/sailboats-in-the-distance-vintage-art?ref=yr_purchases Homer, Winslow. Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), Oil on Canvas. 1873–1876, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.30228.html –Coke, Alfred Sacheverel. Summer Shower, Brush, Black and Gray Wash, and Graphite on Wove Card. 1875-1899, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/86042/summer-shower The Great…

4 min