Weekend Pop-Up Clearance & Garage Sale

First three weekends in October, 10am – 4pm
Saturday & Sunday 1st & 2nd, 8th & 9th, 15th & 16th
@ 424 Victoria St, North Melbourne

30-80% off all ORLANDO AND IVY floor stock
Many items at or below cost price.
Including: Moleskines, Clairefontaine & Rhodia, Lamy Pens, Third Drawer Down, TMOD, plus lots of other quality & local usable art & design ranges, stationery, books & magazines.

Plus:

• High quality antique & vintage furniture & home wares.
• New, nearly-new & pre-loved contemporary furniture & home wares.
• Commercial, boutique shop fittings in excellent condition.
• Garage sale bargains – pre-loved & new from people with great taste.
• A nearly-new Amsterdam Electra black ladies’ bicycle with rear basket.

Cash, Eftpos, Visa & Mastercard all accepted.

Large & multiple purchase discounts negotiable.
No holds, lay-by, returns or exchanges. First come, best dressed.

We’re thrilled to announce that our first Showcase artist, Sarah Hudson has had her exquisite Porcelain Bamboo Sake Set featured in the Right Now section of Belle magazine. A huge congratulations to Sarah, and we’re absolutely thrilled to be stocking her very fine porcelain work here. You can click here to read her full profile & see the Porcelain Bamboo Sake Set range.

The latest Showcase cab off the rank is Melbourne-based stencil artist, Nicole Tattersall. Click here to read her profile.

And of course, Designed in Brunswick‘s work is going gangbusters and getting phenomenal press all around town. Click here for their work & profile.

Ben Jonson was Shakespeare’s contemporary, friend and rival poet/playwright.  Not an easy thing to be I’d imagine. Especially when Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek”! This poem makes me smile and fills me with joy every time I read it. For one artist to celebrate another in such a manner is no small wonder, but to sing the praises of the “Sweet Swan of Avon” as a poet who “was not of an age, but for all-time!” is the height of glorious generosity and humility. I’ve also tacked on the end here a song from Cynthia’s Revels, to give you an idea of Jonson’s very proper, classical, and elegant persona. This song is about heartbreak and is a fitting description perhaps of the difficulty the poet had in his own life with melancholia and depression  – he described himself as a broken compass, unable to complete the full turn.

To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ;
While I confess thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
‘Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise ;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right ;
Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance ;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron ; what could hurt her more ?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin: Soul of the age!
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare rise ! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room :
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportioned Muses :
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names : but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage : or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time !
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm !
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines !
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please ;
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature’s family.
Yet must I not give Nature all ; thy art,
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet’s matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion : and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil ; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame ;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn ;
For a good poet’s made, as well as born.
And such wert thou ! Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakspeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well torned and true filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandisht at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced, and made a constellation there !
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower, yet, O faintly, gentle springs!
List to the heavy part the music bears,
‘Woe weeps out her division’, when she sings.
Droop herbs and flowers;
Fall grief in showers;
‘Our beauties are not ours:
O, I could still,
(Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,)
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is, now, a wither’d Daffodil.

Ben Jonson

Love is always worth celebrating. And I really needed no excuse to share three  of my absolute favourite poems on love with you. As the Bishop of London said, “Every wedding is a royal wedding”. Indeed, every love is royal in this sense.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixéd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

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Carry Her Over the Water

Carry her over the water,
And set her down under the tree,
Where the culvers white all days and all night,
And the winds from every quarter,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.

Put a gold ring on her finger,
And press her close to your heart,
While the fish in the lake snapshots take,
And the frog, that sanguine singer,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.

The streets shall flock to your marriage,
The houses turn round to look,
The tables and chairs say suitable prayers,
And the horses drawing your carriage
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.

W.H. Auden

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A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

John Donne

Christina Rossetti was the younger sister of her more famous poet-painter brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She was an Anglican and Adventist, a theologian, a feminist, and a great religious poet. Her most famous poem is Goblin Market – a fantastical romantic vision. Passing Away – which I think may be her best – is an extraordinarily erotic spiritual poem. Her ecstasy is apparent.
(But not so much in the image which Dante painted of the Annunciation with Christina as his model. That is one decidedly unimpressed Mary. Perhaps she was hoping for a little more direct intervention from God…)

Passing Away, saith the World

Ecce Ancilla Domini

Here is the wonderfully light but profound Advice by Robert Crawford. It might just as well be called, The Creative Thinker’s Manifesto, or even, The Way of The Artist. I have a suspicion that it might even be the ultimate key to a happy life. I hope they’re teaching this in schools these days.

Advice

When you are faced with two alternatives

Choose both. And should they put you to the test,

Tick every box. Nothing is ever single.

A seed’s a tree’s a ship’s a constellation.

Nail your true colours to this branching mast.

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The Poetry Festival Continues tomorrow and we’re tweeting: #poetryfestival @mingzhuhii & @nickcog.

Continuing the theme of poets with a rather plebeian bent, this is  John Clare‘s most famous poem. Here is a poet who bears all his pain and humiliation on his sleeve. And here is a poet who is truly heroic in the face of his illness. Simple and direct is best for this job. I think we can all empathise deeply with such crisis – the fear, confusion and sense of loss – even if we have never suffered from mental illness. The final stanza is beautiful in its hopefulness and in the sense of longing for rest, peace and freedom from the confines of both the asylum and his interior suffering.

Written in Northampton County Asylum

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss’d

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod—
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept—
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,—
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.

John Clare

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The Poetry Festival Continues tomorrow and we’re tweeting: #poetryfestival @mingzhuhii & @nickcog.