Detail Diary, Vol #23

Red, gold, and the tranquil blues of dissolving heavens

November 2024

Dear friend,

There are still colors slipping through the cracks of winter’s descent, and in my Detail Diary, all of November’s ripening to look back on. Flame tones, warm gold, the full moon, vivid magenta. Also some travel color. Jackdaws, rooks, long-tailed tits; red admiral; ferns.

Before I give you the Details, I have a few announcements, or rather invitations:

1. Join the Green Places chat

2. Listen to new voiceovers on past posts

3. Read a Rilke poem

Chat

Substack is a platform of many facets. In addition to the email newsletters/posts and my web archive, there are ways to mingle with other readers and writers on the app or web version of Substack. That includes the Notes feed where I post my Detail Diary on a daily basis, and also the subscriber chat thread. Unlike Notes, this is exclusively for subscribers of Anne of Green Places.

As an experiment, I decided to activate this chat earlier this week, so if you want to introduce yourself and chat with us about places and plants, just click on the image below and reply to my first thread! I’d so love to hear from you!

If you run into problems getting to the chat, feel free to reply and let me know! If you want to access the chat later from the app, it lives in the speech-bubble button in the menu at the bottom.

Listen

You may have noticed that I started including voiceovers for my longer posts earlier this year. This is an outgrowth of my own love for audio, which has flourished ever since I discovered the parallel dimension of extra reading and learning it allows me to slide into my daily life. If you also like audio, I hope this makes it easier to enjoy my posts from a practical standpoint.

Sound is also important in my work. I write both poetry and prose in large part for the sound of it. So, although I have no vocal training and am not even an amateur-level performer, my poetry practice has helped me learn to think of myself as a reader-out-loud. Hopefully my cadence is soothing without putting you to sleep!

I recently decided to add voiceovers to some of my older posts as well. Whether or not anyone has time/desire to go back and listen, recording my posts is, for me, a delightful little sojourn across the waters of my words. If you would like to check them out, below are a few of those old favorites out loud. I’ll continue to add to them!

The garden and the glacier (September 2023)

Visions from the field: Three days in the Alps (October 2023)

Blurred lines: Street art of Grenoble (Dec 2023)

All the plants in the Alps (Jan 2024)

There may be branching: The Tree of Life (Feb 2024)

Poem

I read this excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Pilgrimage (part of The Book of Hours) this week and found that it fit perfectly in leaves of my Detail Diary.

from The Book of Pilgrimage

And you will inherit the greens
of bygone gardens and the tranquil blues
of dissolving heavens.
And, dropping through a thousand days, the dews,
and the many summers proclaimed by suns, 
and the louder springs of sorrow and splendour
as a young girl sets down in her many letters.
You will inherit autumns spread like splendid robes,
in remembrance of poets,
and all winters, like countries long forsaken,
will grow quiet beside you, nestling close.

Translated by Martyn Crucefix

And now, finally, the Details.

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Here is your usual reminder that this post is best viewed on the web or in the Substack app. (From email, click on the title of the post or “Read in app.”) Clicking on a Note will also take you to the browser/app to see its full text and additional photos. (If you’re in email and only see one photo per Note, chances are there are more.)

For an introduction to my Detail Diary, see here, or peruse past volumes.

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Want to play guess the city from six photos? The answer is in the footnotes¹; feel free to reply or comment with your guess and/or your success :)

The colorful place below is 59 Rivoli, or the “Aftersquat,” occupied by 30 artist studios in the spirit of counterculture (it was once an illegal squat in an abandoned building but thanks to tourist attention was legalized in 2006).

Within two days of that note I received newsletters about magenta from The Gusset and The Colour Newsletter (unfortunately the bit about magenta ink made from pokeweed is just below the paywall, but the ink itself is on display at the top of the article).

So you can see the troubling and hear the long-tailed tits twee-ing in the tree above:

1. It’s Brussels! I day-tripped there from Paris. The whole city smelled like sugar.