Back at the start of March I uncovered this cookbook in our overstuffed kitchen shelf. It’s incredibly upsetting, even for something designed in the 60s.
NOBODY WANTS THAT ON A BOOK ABOUT FOOD.
But the original text, I should mention, is from 1939. And when I cracked it open I was surprised to find that the illustrations were incredibly cool.
Look at those lines! So stylized! So energetic! And the compositions!
Turns out the interior artist is one Mathurin Méheut (1882-1958), a French painter I’d never heard of before. When I went searching for more of his work, I found a treasure trove. Méheut had spent two years before WWI working with naturalists at the Roscoff marine biology station—a collaboration that resulted in two enormous volumes of gorgeously-depicted marine life.
And, to my immeasurable delight, both of them are available online via RISD’s library.
I love stumbling on illustrative work like this. It feels so modern! There’s a level of stylization that really reminds me of Jemma Salume’s animal studies.
I also can’t help thinking about the work of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the father-son team known for creating the most exquisite glass models in human history. Their success lay in capturing the shapes and colors of marine invertebrates at a time when methods of preservation typically left specimens looking like so much indistinguishable mucus.
This octopus? GLASS.
This cactus? ALSO GLASS.
Unreal. (And well worth a visit if you ever find yourself near the Harvard Museum of Natural History.)
In the process of writing this post, I learned that Leopold fell in love with marine invertebrates in 1853, when the ship carrying him to America was becalmed for two weeks near the Azores. His wife and his father had just died within a few years of each other. The trip was something of an escape.
I think about him, adrift and grieving in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to do but stand on deck in the night and pay attention.
Hopeful, we look out over the darkness of the sea, which is as smooth as a mirror; there emerges all around in various places a flashlike bundle of light beams, as if it is surrounded by thousands of sparks, that form true bundles of fire and of other bright lighting spots, and the seemingly mirrored stars.
✵
Little wonders all around.
![A complex mind map connecting various names and creative works of nine people, mostly female writers.
The following themes are positioned throughout the page like nodes:
[See Me / Don’t See Me]
[Gardening]
[Queer Relationships]
[Utopia]
[Solitude]
[Fluidity]
[Rhythm]
Ursula K. (Kroeber) Le Guin 1929 - 2018
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" 1988 in Women of Vision
2010: Began [Age 81] Blogging
No Time to Spare (pub. 2017, HMH)
A left-handed Commencement Address, 1983 Mills College
The Wave in The Mind (pub. 2004, Shambhala)
Epigraph: “As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it, and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.” (Woolf to Sackville-West, 1926).
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
1931 Professions For Women
“It is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories."
"The Angel in the house"
Orlando
The Waves
1929 Room of One’s Own
Met Sackville-West in 1922
Gail Godwin (b. 1937)
1977 (NYT) The Watcher at the Gates
12 Short Stories and Their Making (2005, Persea)
Appeared with Le Guin in same publication
“A story larger than my own” Working On An Ending, 2014
"Now I do a lot of lying around. I finally I have accepted that my supine dithering is fertile and far from a waste of time"
Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) <-> Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)
Nigel Nicolson (1917-2004)
Portrait Of A Marriage (1973)
Not to be confused with
Nigel Nicholson -> [Classics] [Reed College]
"The Bright Chimera" R. Rawdon Wilson
Olivia Laing (1977-)
Married Ian Patterson (1948) in 2018 [29 years apart!]
May Sarton (1912-1995)
(At Yaddo) "I hated all the shop talk. I'd rather see people who are carpenters, who are sailors or who work in healthy departments, because then I feel I am learning something about life."
“There is much less anguish and self-doubt. You are much more able to function freely, spontaneously, as yourself."
met Woolf in 1937](https://lucybellwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_5457-scaled.jpeg)
Who among us has not encountered a previously fraught circumstance, only to find that the anxiety, stress, and strain surrounding it has completely dissipated? What a relief. So I’m printing up a batch of glossy, UV-coated 4×6″ postcards to celebrate the sensation. 
