even*cleveland: a strange bird

a strange bird

At home, the bride was making preparations for the wedding feast, to which she had the sorcerer's friends invited. Then she took a skull with grinning teeth, adorned it with jewelry and with a wreath of flowers, carried it to the attic window, and let it look out.

When everything was ready she dipped herself into a barrel of honey, then cut open the bed and rolled around in it until she looked like a strange bird, and no one would have been able to recognize her. Then she walked out of the house.

Underway some of the wedding guests met her, and they asked, "You, Fitcher's bird, where are you coming from?"

"I am coming from Fitcher's house."

"What is his young bride doing there?"

"She has swept the house from bottom to top, and now she is looking out of the attic window."

Finally, her bridegroom met her. He was slowly walking back home, and, like the others, he asked, "You, Fitcher's bird, where are you coming from?"

"I am coming from Fitcher's house."

"What is my young bride doing there?"

"She has swept the house from bottom to top, and now she is looking out of the attic window."

The bridegroom looked up. Seeing the decorated skull, he thought it was his bride, and he waved a friendly greeting to her.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, 'Fitcher's Bird'

Illustration: Maurice Sendak: "You Fitcher's feathered bird, where are you from?" from The Juniper Tree and Other Tales From Grimm, translated by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell.

Also: Cindy Sherman's version.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

a strange bird

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