Friday Frivolity no. 36: A Trip to an Elbow

Cape Girl Summer, Wilfred Owen, berry-picking, and conch pearls

This is an installment in the section Friday Frivolity. Every Friday, you'll get a little micro-essay, plus a moodboard, 3 things I'm currently in love with, words of wisdom from what I've been reading lately, a shimmer of poetry, a "beauty tip," and a question to spark your thought.

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A Trip to an Elbow

Summer in Boston means the Cape, that ragged, curving promontory that juts out from Massachusetts like an arm, elbow level with shoulder, fist curled in a rather pugilistic stance, as though it were defending our fair state, though whether from pirates or Leviathans, from the too strong tempests and tantrums of the sea, or from our cousins across the pond (still wary, perhaps, 250 years later, of a repetition of the old brawl, and keeping herself in good shape and a ready attitude for it) remains to be seen.

Cape Cod takes its name from an abundance of that piscine specimen. Originally calling it “Shoal Hope,” Bartholomew Gosnold and his crew changed their minds (and for the better, I say, for “Let’s go to the Shoal this weekend” doesn’t have quite the same ring) when their ship was mobbed by an immoderately large cod greeting party. But alas, though the name remains with the place, the good creatures who lent the name do not: overfishing has depleted the cod population to a tenth of its former levels, although thankfully the cod who remain are still kind enough to sacrifice the material portions of their selves (let us say nothing of the spiritual) for the tasty delight of fish and chips.

Fish and chips—or in my case, scallops and onion rings—no sooner than June arrives and the memory of that taste reappears on my tongue, churning the salivary glands into motion and bidding me to endure the more than two hours’ drive eastward, as well as the excruciating traffic that accompanies it. For whatever reason—for our driving or for Dunkin’ or for our calling a roundabout a “rotary”—God has cursed us Bostonians with good weather during the week, when it can only be enjoyed by vacationers, retirees, and the unemployed, and clouds, cold, drizzle, or outright lightning and thunder on the weekends. However, this year we were in luck. Finding ourselves with an unoccupied Thursday—a Thursday that coincided, of course, with the aforementioned good weather—we set out under the auspices of the sun, Massachusetts showing off her bicep in the estival dazzle, happily demonstrating that she could still flex her old and weathered muscles.

There are many towns on the Cape, and each has its own flavor and peculiar charm. Provincetown, the fist, is probably the most well-known, for its preponderance of artists and gays. Hyannisport, in the fleshier part of the arm, is famous for being the location of the Kennedy Compound, where the Kennedy clan, I hear, still summer, gathering to sail and walk along the shore and maintain what is left of the magic of Camelot. Driving along, we passed through Sandwich but didn’t eat it—ditto for Mashpee (less appetizing-sounding). The Sagamore Bridge, stretching across the Cape Cod Canal with its 1930s typography, was successfully traversed, and then I really felt at last that old feeling I always get when entering the Cape, of sand and sun, of salt and sea, of endless, eternal summer.

What can compare with the charm of a Cape house? The steeply peaked roofs, the grey, weathered shingles, the neat little windows with their neat little shutters, the white picket fences or the low, rustic wooden ones, the white lampposts and the iron mailboxes perched on their white mounts, an abundance of hydrangeas blooming in thick clusters, blue and purple and pink and white, in the front gardens, the green lawns and bushes setting off the tidy appearance of the homes—it all seems to have been here since time immemorial, enduring summer after summer, keeping this little seaside corner of the world from the taint of ugliness, the vicissitudes of time, or any ghastly alterations in the fashions of house-building.

Growing up, my parents’ favorite town on the Cape was always Chatham, where our first stop was always Chatham Fish & Chips, tucked away on Old Harbor Road. Sitting outside on the patio by a thrill of pink hydrangeas, you could fatten yourself up for the sharks with a platter of seafood, fries, onion rings, coleslaw and tartar sauce. Chatham is right at the elbow—the bony part, not the soft, inner flesh, and its Main Street has not lost its picturesque quaintness over the years. Free parking by the rotary (do not utter to a Bay Stater the terms “roundabout” or “traffic circle”) is the perfect launchpad for exploring Main Street.

However many times I encounter the same façades, however many times I wander into the same stores, it’s always a treat to see the work of local artists in the art galleries, to grab an ice cream to cool off from the summer heat, to walk away from Uncommon Thrift, an antiques shop staffed by volunteers from nearby St. Christopher’s, with some new treasure, like the old Nichols & Stone rocking chair my father bought for me last summer. Somehow he had squeezed it into the back of our little car, somehow he had squeezed it out, and perhaps it was some kind of Cape magic that had enabled him to do so.

Walk along Main Street long enough and you will reach Lighthouse Beach. Though its twin, Nauset Light, which was moved a century ago to Eastham and has since attained the fame of adorning the Cape Cod Chips packet, is the Cape’s most renowned lighthouse, and though I concede that the Three Sisters have their threefold charm, I prefer no other lighthouse to Chatham Light when the sunset is streaked out behind it in glorious colors of flame and purple.

And the beaches themselves and the sea—as Virginia Woolf said of clouds, “if I could describe them I would.” The water is very clear and pure, lying upon the sand like a transparent cloth. Its folds ripple and crease, reflect striations of light over the fine, tan sand-grains. Gradually it darkens to a deep cerulean in the distance and would almost merge with the sky, were it not for the thin bar of sand at the horizon, layered over with thin green beach grass. The sky and the sea and the sand extend forever—neither to the left of you nor to the right will you find their limit. The single white sail of a boat floats serenely over the blue, and the sail’s reflection sparkles and glimmers in the water, sending out myriad diamonds and crystals. The clouds are a light, white gossamer, themselves sails in the sea of the sky, and they give me the feeling that summer will never end.

But the beauty of the sea—its fresh, inviting appearance, its achingly clear acres of blue—is a lie. First of all, the water is treacherously cold. Keep your feet in the water for ten minutes and you will probably find yourself having to amputate the appendage now grown useless in its glacial freeze. Then there are the sharks. Right away when you arrive at the beach, you will see large shark warning signs informing you of the presence of great white sharks hovering somewhere menacingly in the water. These signs are helpfully accompanied by vaguely threatening pictures of said great white, jaws opening to reveal unsettlingly pointy teeth, and even more helpful captions about downloading the “sharktivity app” and calling 911 in case of “severe bleeding.”

If the threat of bleeding to death in hyperborean waters is not enough to put you off from swimming, further warnings enumerate a litany of additional dangers: strong rip currents; heavy surf; “dangerous marine life.” No wonder my father was so alarmed when my mother and I were taking pictures of each other with his phone right by the waves, fearing that it would be lost in a squall and sink to a grave from which its body could never be exhumed. For those used to the milder waters of the Pacific: beware. West coast living is easier, it seems, not just on land but at sea.

And yet I would not give up my eastern seashore for anything in the world. Freezing though the waves may be, shark-infested more often than not, apt to be found in an irksome mood, I love it nonetheless and will probably continue to love it to the end of my days.

Meditating on it has made me realize that with a keen eye and a curious mind, you can travel wherever you are. You need not be jetting off to the Himalayas or sailing across Lake Como. All you need are the awareness that results in close observation, the capacity for wonder, and the willingness to explore. Bring these along with you wherever you go, and the world will open up to you, almost as splendid and capacious as the maw of a great white shark.

Anna Darrow

of Food Hag has just published a wonderful guide to the Cape if you are looking to travel there. I also love Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, an interesting and very thorough account of the Cape in the mid-1800s, when it was far less crammed with tourists.

Mood Board of the Week

1. Winslow Homer, Berry Pickers (1873): American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910) captures the delights of summer in this watercolor of seaside berry-picking. The subjects, all children, bend down in the low brambles with their metal pails, every head shielded from the sun by a summer hat. I like to imagine they’re tasting as they go.

2. Giuseppe Gentile, Maria Callas, and Pier Paolo Pasolini on the set of Medea (1969): I’ve been translating Euripides’ Medea, probably one of my favorite Greek tragedies because of the complexity of Medea’s character and the way that readers can empathize with her in spite of some of her more… questionable actions. Famed opera singer Maria Callas became closely associated with the character of Medea because of her starring role in Cherubini’s 1797 opera based on the Greek tragedy. In a fascinating case of life imitating art, Callas could relate to Euripides’ heroine and his tale of a woman scorned: the day after she agreed to do this film, her first and only, her lover, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, married Jackie Kennedy. This behind-the-scenes image is very funny to me because of the contrast between Pasolini’s obviously 1960s, brightly, zanily patterned swimming trunks and Medea and Gentile’s historical getup.

3. Chloé Spring/Summer 2004: In 2003, stylist Bay Garnett took a banana-print top she had found at a flea market for a few pounds and put it on Kate Moss for an issue of British Vogue. Phoebe Philo, then the creative director of Chloé, evidently read that issue, because an almost exact replica of that top appeared on the Spring 2004 runway, along with variations on the banana-print theme: a short dress, a cut-out bodysuit. This proves the old adage, that great artists steal. You can Garnett herself tell the story in this video.

   

   Kate Moss styled by Bay Garnett, photographed by Jurgen Teller

4. Intertitle from Claire’s Knee (1970): Éric Rohmer is the perfect filmmaker to watch in the summer. There’s La Collectionneuse, of course, with Haydée Politoff sauntering along the beach in the south of France in her yellow bikini, A Summer’s Tale, The Green Ray. But I have a soft spot for Le genou de Claire, a movie about desire and the way that it can center around something so strange and so specific, like touching a knee. The film’s events take place over the course of a month, from June 29 to July 29, and these little intertitles handwritten in blue ink like diary entries preface the events of each day, somehow capturing so perfectly the way long summer days just seem to float by, one after another, without a care in the world.

   

   Claire's Knee (1970)

5. Yasmeen Ghauri by Walter Chin for Vogue Deutsch in 1993: I love the way Ghauri is styled in this editorial, barefoot, wearing lots of large statement jewelry, her hair long and messy and wild, here adorned with whimsical jeweled turtles. Though her stunning, symmetrical features may be hard to replicate, the laidback summer vibes may be not.

6. Conch pearls, photographed for Cayman Pearl Company: This week, while flicking through the pages of a book called Pearls: A Natural History (2001), I came across a little picture of a beautiful pink gem, accompanied by the caption “This magnification of a conch pearl shows the flamelike pattern known as chatoyancy.” I was immediately entranced and had to know more. It turns out that conch shells can also produce pearls, though these pearls are much, much rarer. Unlike oyster pearls, they are non-nacreous, much harder and tougher, and display a flamelike pattern due to the arrangement of their prismatic crystals. The most coveted of these are the pink ones, and it’s easy to see why.

7. La Piscine (1969): If you’re looking for the perfect summer aesthetic, look no further than Jacques Deray’s tale of sexual tension and jealousy on the Côte d’Azur. The chemistry between Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, who once had a passionate relationship, is undeniable, and young Jane Birkin provides summer fashion inspiration for days.

   

   La Piscine (1969)

8. Alexandra de Steiguer, Engaging the Oceanic (2023): Photographer Alexandra de Steiguer (1966–) spent nine years working aboard traditionally rigged ships, going on long voyages to “find peace, inner strength, and wonder” on the waves and studying marine biology and oceanography. Though she now lives in a small, solar-powered cottage in the woods of New Hampshire, every winter she moves to the Isles of Shoals, their sole resident and caretaker. Her images of the desolate, winter-swept landscape, of Arctic sea smoke and dark black rocks, old shacks standing alone in a wild, treacherous world, are haunting. This image—the black and white, the sea and the rocks, the lone woman looking out into the distance—reminds me of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, and there is a certain serenity in it that I love.

   

   Alexandra de Steiguer, from Isles of Shoals

9. Fatima Karashaeva, Girl Reading Book (2024): Fatima Karashaeva is a Russian-Canadian painter who currently lives in Montréal. Inspired by Impressionism and 20th-century naturalism, she primarily paints portraits, and I love the naturalistic effect of the light here, the way the girl’s face and hand is shaded, the hand resting atop a (very relatable) heap of books, the bottom of her skirt transparent and casually revealing glimpses of her skin beneath. I did a post back in November where the mood board was solely images of people reading, and I’d definitely include Karashaeva’s painting in a larger iteration!

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. The beauty of the Pacific Northwest: This New Englander has found herself flung across to the other end of the country and, against her expectations and preconceived notions (a result primarily of ignorance), fallen in love. The weather is so temperate here, the landscape so green and big and bountiful, teeming with life. Hummingbirds, mountains, wildflowers, apples and berries growing spontaneously like little delights nature makes in her free time, for the fun of it—who could not help being thoroughly charmed?

   

   from the Atlantic to the Pacific—beautiful Cannon Beach

2. Taking walks with other people: Due to circumstances and a solitary nature, I have become accustomed over the past few years to walking alone, and I never minded it, for I loved the opportunity for reflection, meditation, pondering, and mind-wandering that a solitary walk provided. Not only could I follow my feet into some strange by-lane or amble further down this street or that street than the customary route allowed, but so too could my imagination ramble over sundry musings and consort with itself, going deeper into that thicket of self that lies too often unexplored. However, the past few months have entailed fewer walks alone and more walks with others, and I have found that a walk is a good stimulus for conversation and—especially when the weather gets nicer—a fun and free way to spend meaningful quality time with the people you care about.

3. Reading more on Substack: I feel guilty admitting this as a Substack writer, but until recently, I hadn’t really embraced the breadth and diversity of writing there is to read here on Substack. Somehow it just felt too overwhelming—scrolling through my feed, I was met by so much content, all jumbled up together, and it was easier to just click out and go elsewhere. However, I realized a) because people can write about literally anything on Substack, you can find so many more interesting things to read here and b) I was doing a disservice to all the very talented, hardworking people who post their work (often for free!) on this platform. Here are a few pieces I enjoyed this week:

   1. “We Love Potential Too Much” by

      Chris Jesu Lee
      at Salieri Redemption: Chris Jesu Lee writes about coming to the end of rewriting his latest novel draft and the feeling of dread that accompanies it. While being in the middle of something can be exhilarating for its pure potential, arriving at the finish line—hard, final, solid—takes us into the less rosy realm of reality, and so we’re always chasing after the next arena of potential: “We work hard to build the lives we want, only to become dissatisfied because we keep needing for there to be some great next.” As someone with an embarrassing number of unfinished projects lying around, I can relate. But I’m trying to remind myself of the growth that lies on the other end of the finish line.

   2. “Cézanne Summer!” by

      Nicole Miras
      at The Crossroads Gazette: I always find it so fascinating to read about artists’ lives, and here Nicole Miras delves into the history of Cézanne’s family estate in Aix-en-Provence, where the painter spent many a childhood summer. He would return often in adulthood to recapture the summer delights, the peace and the restorative powers of the countryside, especially when he needed to recover from the hubbub of the city or the sting of rejection. Forget about hot girl summer—a Cézanne summer sounds pretty close to perfect.

   3. Note by

      Henry Begler
      : There’s been a lot of discourse on Substack lately about contemporary literature, the state of the publishing industry today, and the supposed disappearance of the literary man. Henry Begler hits on a different angle and—I think—gets closer to the truth: “hardly anyone I know in real life reads or writes extensively.” But because of Substack, we’re starting to see the emergence of a new literary community, where people can get together and share their honest opinions about books. I’m really excited to see what more will come from this scene!

Words of Wisdom

“When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.”

— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers is Dickens’ first significant work, published in serialized form over a 20-month period from 1836 to 1837, when Dickens was only 24-25. Mr. Pickwick, the Papers’ eponymous hero, involves himself in a rather unfortunate misunderstanding with his landlady, the widowed Mrs. Bardell, who brings a lawsuit against him “for a breach of promise of marriage” with damages of £1500. Mr. Pickwick and his solicitor try to sort this out. In the process, the honest and forthright Mr. Pickwick encounters several of the slimy, shady, unscrupulous specimens who represent and uphold the legal system. It is one such specimen from whom this sinister inward laugh emanates.

Indeed, Dickens himself was no fan of the legal world and those who dealt in its shadowy operations. Like David Copperfield, he got his start at a law office, working as a junior clerk before becoming a court reporter. Bleak House famously begins with a description of thick fog drifting down the streets of London, blanketing the city, drifting into every corner, obscuring everything from sight. The origin of all this fog? The Court of Chancery, of course.

By the by, I wonder that serialized novels are not more popular on Substack. It seems that something similar to the way most of Dickens’s novels first appeared as installments in magazines or newspapers would occur on Substack, but other than John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, I haven’t really heard of any—and certainly not any that have achieved the fraction of the popularity Dickens’s novels garnered in his day. That’s a shame, because serializing a novel through a newsletter seems like something that would combine the success and popularity of fanfiction with the creative freedom that makes Substack so appealing.

Poetry Corner

“From My Diary”

Leaves
Murmuring by myriads in the shimmering trees.
Lives
Wakening with wonder in the Pyrenees. 
Birds
Cheerily chirping in the early day.
Bards
Singing of summer, scything thro’ the hay.
Bees
Shaking the heavy dews from bloom and frond.
Boys
Bursting the surface of the ebony pond.
Flashes
Of swimmers carving thro’ the sparkling cold.
Fleshes
Gleaming with wetness to the morning gold.
A mead
Bordered about with warbling water brooks.
A maid
Laughing the love-laugh with me; proud of looks.
The heat
Throbbing between the upland and the peak.
Her heart
Quivering with passion to my pressed cheek.
Braiding
Of floating flames across the mountain brow.
Brooding
Of stillness; and a sighing of the bough.
Stirs
Of leaflets in the gloom; soft petal-showers;
Stars
Expanding with the starr’d nocturnal flowers.

—Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) based this poem on his memories from the summer of 1914, when he was staying at the Villa Lorenzo in the French Pyrenees with the Léger family. Unable to afford university, he had spent the past few years working as a Vicar’s assistant and attending classes at the local University of Reading, before becoming a private English tutor, the position for which he went to live with the Légers. There he was introduced to a new circle of artists, musicians, academics, and poets, a wonderful opportunity for a budding poet. However, he would soon have to give up this idyllic life, for WWI had just begun, and Owen would enlist in October 1915. Like his early influence John Keats, he would die at just 25, killed in action one week before the end of the war in 1918, though not before penning several lasting poems.

It’s possible that “From My Diary” was composed in 1917 when Owen was at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh being treated for shell shock, where he would meet Siegfried Sassoon, the other great poet of WWI, and be encouraged to revisit his dreams and experiences through poetry. Perhaps reliving these idyllic summer days in the Pyrenees soothed and comforted him, reminding him of simpler days of peace and tranquility. Each couplet presents a vivid image from that summer, starting with a word that appears like title of the couplet, then following it up with a longer line completing or elaborating on that idea. I love the way that the first and third lines of each quartet present a half-rhyme, often unexpected, like “Flashes” and “Fleshes,” “A mead” and “A maid,” “Braiding” and “Brooding,” and you can rarely predict where Owen will take that word in the next line. In contrast, the end words of the second and fourth lines are neater, more exact rhymes, lending a sense of closure to each quartet.

I love the vividness of the imagery here, which Owen brings out through his careful attention to the sounds of words—“Murmuring by myriads,” “warbling water brooks.” There is no need to settle on any one image here, no need to philosophize, search for a deeper meaning, or expand anything—the “maid” (Nénette Léger), for example—into a larger story. Like a summer butterfly flitting among the flowers, the poet goes from one impression to another, drawing out the nectar of each sweet moment.

Beauty Tip

Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries (ca. 1813)

Go berry-picking! I went for the first time last weekend and discovered that blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries come not in one variety but several, tasted a boysenberry for the first time, and stained my fingers and mouth with the beautiful sticky deep reddish-purple of berry juice, understanding why Victorian ladies used it to color their lips and lend a blush to their cheeks. Also, I never knew before that berries could be so filling, that those little jewel-like orbs could provide so much sustenance. I was reminded of Sylvia Plath’s “blood sisterhood” of “Blackberries / Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes / Ebon in the hedges, fat / With blue-red juices” and Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking,” though thankfully no “rat-grey fungus” has yet appeared on our cache.

Lingering Question

What more than anything says “summer” to you?

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Dear Readers, this one ended up very long, but I had a lot of fun writing the little essay at the beginning, and I hope you had fun reading! If you enjoyed, please like this post, subscribe to Soul-Making for more, and leave a comment—it always means a lot to me to hear from you.

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Friday Frivolity no. 2: Orchid Woman Summer