Katherine Keenum

Exhibition alert: An upcoming exhibition, Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (at which viewers can elect to release odors that correspond to the imagery in a painting) set me thinking about how hard it is to evoke smells in words. A Simplified Guide to Using the Fragrance Wheel provides some vocabulary to set you thinking. But if colors are hard, how much harder are aromas to put into words!
 
For more about the Pre-Raphaelite show and other museum olfactory explorations, click here. And for another article on the evocation of smells in art, click here.

I'm rereading the four Fallow Sisters novels I discovered last summer. They're better with each rereading, and here's great news from Liz Williams in an article, How Running a Witchcraft Shop Helps Me Write Fantasy Book: "The Fallow sisters contain elements of me—they are not me, but they are also like people I know. The house in which they live, magical Mooncote, is not my house—but its orchard is my orchard, its beehives are my beehives. I'm definitely not done with it just yet." More to come? Yea!

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Exhibition alert: A show opening at Mass MoCa on August 25, 2024—Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad— combines folklore from Southeast Asia and the Middle East with the immigrant experience and modern technology to explore how people form new identities these days. Flying carpets? Drones. Storytelling Scheherzade? AI. Djinn? A robot. The exhibition spreads out through several galleries so that viewers will experience a kind of narrative as they move through. I'm in the old-fashioned school of fantasy writers who rely on Northern European traditions for inspiration, but I'm eager to come at new stories and new thoughts viscerally in three dimensions.

Blog post alert: Material culture matters in historical and fantasy fiction. Rare survivals of decorative paper cutting by schoolgirls in the 17th century found under floorboards at Sutton House could prompt a telling detail in a story, but it would matter whether you were writing about a curator's discovery, life in the 17th C, or an imaginary world. Particularly for historical fiction, it would be important to know just who had access to such cut-outs in a world where paper was expensive.
 
For three more delightful examples, click here. And for context, click here.

I've just been introduced by our Western Massachusetts public library system to Astrid Sheckels and her Hector Fox books. I can't tell you how delighted I was to come across Ebenezer Moose, shown here, in Hector Fox and the Giant Quest! For many years, my husband and I vacationed at a lake in Maine, where we almost always saw at least one moose and especially loved spotting them in remote marshes. Sheckels' evocation of that landscape is evocative.

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This week, for fantasy work-in-progress, I wondered how—or whether—a couple of characters should be shod for a summer spent on foot. I've borrowed the banner title from Shoes in the Middle Ages because I love seeing its example of bare feet and a possible shoe. It was one of a handful of websites I looked at for the lazy author's approach to research. Two others were Medieval Shoes and Pattens and Cordwainer, Shoemaker, Cobbler?

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What I hate about August is the shortening of long summer evenings. Oh, well, there's still reading by an open window with, if you're lucky, a vase of freshly picked flowers. The work of Tavík František Šimon first came to my attention for his prints of Paris , including Le Petit Restaurant. For many more examples of his work, click here.

Exhibition alert: Shopping and the big Paris department stores are a motif in Where the Light Falls. The emergence of such stores really did have a big impact on 19th and 20th C life. And if you're lucky enough to be in Paris (well, maybe better after crowds for the Olympics clear out), check out the new show at the Musée des Arts decoratifs, La Naissance des grands magasins: Mode, design, jouets, publicité, 1852–1925. It runs through October 13, 2024. The French website has lots of images and also awordless  video that gives a quick glimpse at the sort of objects on display. A short article in Apollo Magazine and a long one in the Guardian provide information in English.

Blog post alert: Maybe Frieseke's parasol isn't quite Brat green, and Kamala Harris's campaign is certainly more energizing than relaxing. All the same, doesn't it suddenly feel like a happy summer? If you can't get out into a garden of your own, visit Barbara Wells Barudy's blog post on Late 19C Women & Gardens & Parasols to enjoy Frederick Carl Frieseke's sunny take on the topic.

At 2:00 PM Sunday, I finished my after-lunch read, The Coldest Case by Martin Walker, and checked my iPad—just in time to see that President Biden will not run for re-election. It seems the right decision. Still, I think doses of genre fiction will be necessary to get me through to November. And Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police, series has the added pleasure of Bruno's Cookbook to illustrate the food that plays a big part in each novel.

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