Trawling the internet, researching libraries and databases, and occasionally from material sent to me, I discover things I did not know much about, or indeed at all! There can be more than one Discovery of the Day.
Some would say I have been idling away this early Saturday morning in Leicester (UK), by chance finding myself using Twitter to try to connect up Rosemary Sutcliff‘s favourite instrument, a national radio programme transmitting from Leicester at the moment, former Prime Minister’s press spokesperson Alistair Campbell and National Libraries Day. To absolutely no effect at all … read from the bottom to follow the (one way!) conversation.
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
Writing in The Independent newspaper in the UK after Rosemary Sutcliff‘s death in July 1992, writer Penelope Lively recalled a visit in the early 1970s to Rosemary’s house Swallowshaw, in Sussex.
… I remember looking at (her) hands and wondering – idiotically – if she could hold a pen. Of course she could, in a wonderfully idiosyncratic and innovative way, writing almost upside down, it seemed, and she drew them her dolphin logo and a great flowery signature, in their cherished Charles Keeping-illustrated hardbacks.
Source: The Independent, July 31, 1992, p24
I discovered from a search for <The Lantern Bearers> (the title of one of Rosemary Sutcliff‘s bestselling and award-winning historical novels) that there was an American painter of distinction, Maxfield Parrish, who made a work called The Lantern Bearers. It was created originally, in 1908, as a frontispiece for the December 10, 1910 issue of Collier’s magazine.
A press release from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art quoted its director Don Bacigalupi in July 2010: “The detailed representational style juxtaposed with a flat, almost medieval sky create spatial ambiguities that are most interesting. This work has a stage-set, dream-world quality that is compelling.” Hmmm…
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 