Author Archives: John Cutrone

Aug 15 2021
4 Comments
Feast of the Assumption, Ferragosto, Obon

Sail Across the Water: Obon & Ferragosto

Obon

Here we are now in the middle of August, and in the midst of some of my favorite days each year. This has been the weekend of Obon, the summer festival of Japan that honors the dead. In some prefectures of Japan, Obon is celebrated in July, and in others, in August, always around the 15th. For me, growing up in South Florida, it was August, for that’s when the Morikami Museum, west of Delray Beach, used to celebrate it. It was always hot, and we would smell of pennyroyal, to keep the mosquitoes at bay. There were often thunderstorms in the afternoon, because that’s the typical weather pattern here in summer. But there was something unforgettable about the dark grey sky behind the tall pine trees mixed with the heat and the humidity and the thundering sound of taiko drums, the electric lanterns hung between the trees, and the elevated yagura platform, painted in red and white stripes, around which the dancers would dance their mysterious Obon dances, like the Coal Miners’ Dance, in which the dancers journeyed around the yagura with a shoveling motion, taking a few steps forward and almost just as many back. Their progress around the yagura was always very slow and languid: the rhythm of late summer.

At nightfall, fireworks, and then the setting sail of hundreds and hundreds of floating lanterns on the water: these are the ancestors, returning home as the festivities conclude, home to their distant shore.

I seem to have an affinity for any holiday / holy day that connects us to those who have passed. Cemeteries and church yards do not bother me and I talk to my beloved dead on a daily basis, which all may have a lot to do with the way I was raised. The dead never seem very far away. Just a slight shift in manifestation; but these people are all still very much part of my daily life.

And so I love Dia de Muertos, which has grown so popular, and I love Obon, which is not quite as popular, but which serves a similar purpose. The Fifteenth of August also brings my maternal grandmother’s birthday, and since she was born on this day, the Feast of the Assumption, my great grandparents named her Assunta. American neighbors sometimes called her Susan or Suzy, but that just never sounded quite right to me in naming a small, feisty Italian woman who spoke broken English. Grandma always was Assunta, or, as Grandpa would call her, Assu. The traditional meal for the day in their old village in Lucera––a tradition my grandparents brought to the States when they moved here––is a late summer recipe made with cucuzza longa, a long edible gourd that is simmered with egg, parmesan, and parsley. It can be made with zucchini, too. Sound intriguing (especially at this annual time of zucchini abundance)? Click here for the recipe.

The Feast of the Assumption, which marks the ascent of the Virgin Mary body and soul into Heaven, marks other days, as well: this is the time of the great Italian summer holiday known as Ferragosto. The waters at Ferragosto are blessed by priests and so most Italians close up shop and head to the sea, some to soak their aches and pains in the blessed waters and others just to swim or float or get a suntan. One thing is certain: work is not a priority in the middle of August. There are more important things to do, and more important connexions to maintain.

Please save an upcoming date with me!
August 24 brings a great celebration with an odd name: it’s the Bartlemas Wayzgoose, and I’ll be hosting the online, virtual Library Wayzgoose Festival for the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University Libraries. It’s a video event full of good stories and great music. The Bartlemas Wayzgoose is an old printers’ celebration that comes about every 24th of August with the waning summer. My featured guest is activist letterpress printer Ben Blount of Evanston, Illinois, with a special Wayzgoose Concert by the wonderful Jay Ungar & Molly Mason, the Grammy Award winning musicians famous for their song “Ashokan Farewell” from the Ken Buns documentary The Civil War. Perhaps we can add that to the soundtrack of summer, too. Lots of great Wayzgoose fun is in store for you. The video premiere will be at www.jaffecollection.org and at the Jaffe Center’s Vimeo Channel, too, and at the Facebook pages of Convivio Bookworks and the Jaffe Center for Book Arts (essentially, we’re making it really hard for you to miss). The premiere is on Bartlemas night, Tuesday August 24th, at 7 PM Eastern Daylight Time, with video available anytime after that, from wherever you are in the world. I think you’ll really love it. I’ll be posting more about it as Bartlemas approaches, so watch the blog and our social media pages at Instagram and Facebook (@conviviobookworks).

Summer Sale!
At our online shop, our Summer High Five Sale continues: All summer long, use discount code HIGH5 at checkout for $5 off your purchase of $35 on everything in the shop. Take it to $50 and earn free domestic shipping, too. Click here to shop! Our favorite new thing in the shop? Millie’s Tea Towels, embroidered by hand by my mom Millie, under our new Linens & Textiles category.

Image: Lanterns sailing across the water on Morikami Pond.

 

Aug 11 2021
Summer

Dog Days are Over

One of the best things about summer, if you ask me, is that it comes with an automatic soundtrack––it does in my head, at least. It has its beginnings with Kate Bush dancing through my head and singing “The Sensual World” on Bloomsday, June 14, and soon progresses to Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on St. John’s Eve and St. John’s Day (June 23 & 24). On the Fourth of July the song by the same name by X pops into my head, along with John Philip Sousa and the bit of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture that includes the cannon. And then any number of old Shaker spirituals come to me on the Sixth of August as we celebrate the Arrival of the Shakers in America.

And now, on August 11, Sirius, the Dog Star, ends its annual period of rising and setting with the sun. This heliacal rising and setting has been going on since the Third of July. The Ancient Greeks, watchers of the sky and namers of the constellations, observed this and deduced that Sirius, shining as brightly as it does, was amplifying and contributing to the heat of the sun, making these days the hottest of the year. We know now that Sirius has nothing to do with that heat, but legends have long legs, don’t they?

What does this have to do with summer soundtracks, then? Well, in London in the summer of 1998, a woman named Florence Welch rode her bicycle each day past an enormous illuminated sculpture installed at London’s South Bank. The sculpture, an arc of giant illuminated perspex and aluminum letters, was by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. It’s message: Dog Days are Over.

Florence Welch would go on to form a band called Florence + the Machine, and eventually they would record a song called, you guessed it: Dog Days are Over. You probably know it. The song was inspired by the sculpture. Florence is quoted as saying, “It’s a reference to the dog star, Sirius. When it was closest to the Earth, all the animals would get languid and sleepy. When it moved away, they’d wake up.” She may not have the details quite right, but she’s got the gist of the matter… and I rather like the vision of sentient beings being languid and sleepy for 40 days or so each summer, then suddenly awakening.

All to say that this is how Dog Days are Over by Florence + the Machine fits into the soundtrack of summer that lives in my head. I share it with you each year around this time… and now you know why. I picture happiness hitting me like a train on a track and I picture those very blue women beside me as I sing the song each summer. One of those blue women reminds me of our cat Haden’s veterinarian… and then I picture Dr. Irma Morales as a back up singer for Florence Welch, clapping her hands: one-two/three.

What can I say? My mind drifts and wanders. It has always done this, since I was a boy. But this same mind fills my summers with music––even beyond the constant and deafening mid-August buzzing of Florida cicada song––and that’s not so bad, is it?

Please save an upcoming date with me!
August 24 brings a great celebration with an odd name: it’s the Bartlemas Wayzgoose, and I’ll be hosting the online, virtual Library Wayzgoose Festival for the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University Libraries. It’s a video event full of good stories and great music. The Bartlemas Wayzgoose is an old printers’ celebration that comes about every 24th of August with the waning summer. My featured guest is activist letterpress printer Ben Blount of Evanston, Illinois, with a special Wayzgoose Concert by the wonderful Jay Ungar & Molly Mason, the Grammy Award winning musicians famous for their song “Ashokan Farewell” from the Ken Buns documentary The Civil War. Perhaps we can add that to the soundtrack of summer, too. Lots of great Wayzgoose fun is in store for you. The video premiere will be at www.jaffecollection.org and at the Jaffe Center’s Vimeo Channel, too, and at the Facebook pages of Convivio Bookworks and the Jaffe Center for Book Arts (essentially, we’re making it really hard for you to miss). The premiere is on Bartlemas night, Tuesday August 24th, at 7 PM Eastern Daylight Time, with video available anytime after that, from wherever you are in the world. I think you’ll really love it. I’ll be posting more about it as Bartlemas approaches, so watch the blog and our social media pages at Instagram and Facebook (@conviviobookworks).

Summer Sale!
At our online shop, our Summer High Five Sale continues: All summer long, use discount code HIGH5 at checkout for $5 off your purchase of $35 on everything in the shop. Take it to $50 and earn free domestic shipping, too. Click here to shop! Our favorite new thing in the shop? Millie’s Tea Towels, embroidered by hand by my mom Millie, under our new Linens & Textiles category.

 

Image: Dog Days are Over by Ugo Rondinone. Perspex, neon, translucent film, and aluminum, 1998. For context as to what Florence Welch saw each day as she bicycled past, Rondinone’s illuminated sculpture is about 25 feet wide x 11 feet tall.

 

Tagged
Aug 06 2021
Arrival of the Shakers in America, Book of Days Calendar, Summer

Chosen Land, or Your Convivio Book of Days for August

A few days late letting you know about your Convivio Book of Days calendar for August, but, nonetheless, here it is, a printable PDF as usual, and a fine companion to this blog. Our cover star for the month is an 1867 painting by Winslow Homer, called Haymakers. As I mentioned in a Convivio Dispatch from Lake Worth just the other night, Homer’s painting reminds me of being a printing intern at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine back in the late 90s, for there were many days when I was not in the Dairy Cellar printing but rather in the garden weeding, or out in the fields, helping to bring in the hay. We’d load the bales onto the hay wagon, ride the wagon to the big red barn, and there, I would get to do my favorite thing: look up at the ceiling and at all those beautiful wooden boards, nailed in place in 1830, nearly half a century before Winslow Homer painted his haymaking scene. Looking up from inside, that barn looked to me for all the world like a vast cathedral, one filled with the sacred smell of animals and newly cured hay, sunlight streaming in on slanted rays through small clear windows.

I’d go home later each haymaking day with a stuffy nose and the worst sinus headache. A little too much hay. But I’d do it again if I could.

And here we are, at the Sixth of August: one of the most important days of the year in the Shaker calendar. I’ve heard it called Landing Day, but Brother Arnold and Sister June and Brother Andrew there at the Community, they always call it the Glorious Sixth, this annual summer occasion that marks the day in 1774 when the founder of the Shaker movement, Mother Ann Lee, arrived in New York Harbor after setting sail from England. Mother Ann was following a vision from on high that told her to bring her small band of followers from Manchester to the New World, and so she took that leap of faith. The passage was not smooth, and there is a tale of a great storm that roared up and caused a plank to tear loose from the ship, and the ship began taking on water, but Mother Ann had another vision that night, one of an angel telling her to be not afraid, all would be well, and then another great wave crashed upon the ship and forced the loosened plank back into place. The ship stopped taking on water, the storm quelled, what water was taken on was pumped out, and Mother Ann and her followers arrived in safety and began their quiet work. Work that continues to this day at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, the place they call Chosen Land.

My friends there will be first and foremost in my mind today, and especially at sunset, when they will celebrate with song and prayer this special day. Blessings on them, and on us all.

SUMMER HIGH FIVE SALE
Here in our neck of the woods, my mom, Millie, has been embroidering each and every day and is anxious to get back to it when she’s not. She’s having a ball making Millie’s Tea Towels, and they’ve turned out to be a big hit! Each one is embroidered by hand by my Mom, and since we introduced them last month, she’s made a few new collections that you’ll find now at our website: in addition to the original Baking Day, Kitchen Wisdom, and Java Jive collections, there are new collections of flour sack tea towels for beachgoers, for campers, for wine lovers, and a new seven towel set––one for each day of the week––all about PIE (one of our favorite things).

All summer long, use discount code HIGH5 at checkout for $5 off your purchase of $35 on everything in the shop. Take it to $50 and earn free domestic shipping, too. Click here to shop! You’ll find Millie’s Tea Towels under our new Linens & Textiles category.

Mom gets the full amount of each sale of her embroidered tea towels; it makes me very happy to see her happy in this new venture and that’s what matters to me (plus it pretty much takes her a whole day to embroider each towel!). That’s my mom in the photo you’ll see when you start shopping, in a fishing boat, circa 1950. Seeing that picture is reason enough to click.

 

Image: “Haymakers” by Winslow Homer, which also happens to be the cover star for this month’s Convivio Book of Days calendar. Oil on canvas, 1867 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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