dotsandfoxes

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pauta saila (1917-2009), owl, 1964-5, stonecut print

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'Blue Heron'. A.J. Casson. 1957.

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I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was built right after the Revolution; before that, people had to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

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Jean Dufy, La fontaine (The Fountain), 1930. Gouache over pencil on paper.

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ᴇᴢʀᴀ ᴊᴀᴄᴋ ᴋᴇᴀᴛs Artwork from his 1962 book The Snowy Day.

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Haidee-Jo Summers, Morning Light in the Studio, 2024, Oil

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you're doing amazing sweetie KPOP DEMON HUNTERS (2025)

bonus:

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pauta saila (1917-2009), owl, 1964-5, stonecut print

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The Allotment Series, 4 pieces, Penelope Williams (2024)

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Spread the word.

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unfortunately i am sincerely interested in how these numbers are going to vary across platforms. gimme that data, dropout, lemme calculate the p-values of that terrifying grant chiro vid and validate my hypothesis re: which platform is most likely to pay strangers to paralyze them

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The time I opened an academic paper titled "parasitoid wasps" and read several sections about thermal temperatures in avalanche flow, wondering when the wasps were going to show up, before realising the file was probably mislabelled. "wow this sounds deadly and to think, the wasps haven’t even attacked yet"

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idk who needs to hear this but if you have been putting something off bc it doesn't need to be done until the end of the month. we are almost done with the teens we are approaching the big numbers (the twenties). that date shall dawn upon you swiftly and without mercy before you know it. psa for everyone except me i got plany off time

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WIP Wednesday

It's definitely not Wednesday by any stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless.

Wilina sits back against the hard back of the seat, staring at the Great Mother’s serene but uncompromising face and feels cold sweat running down her spine. She’s been tired, certainly, and distracted by existing work and the fief and small children and court politics and Baird and Lianne and the court and the Marenites and the Tusaini and even the Rittevons, which she absolutely hasn’t been thinking about, not directly, but apparently has been taking up some portion of her higher brain functions—but also, somehow, she’s been walking around with pieces of a truly enormous mystery in her workbag, for months, and somehow…not doing anything about it. Flipping through the pages, all Wilina can think is that this is like the very bad mystery serial where the investigator keeps getting concussed in the sewers in Rajmuat and each time has to reconstruct his entire process from scratch. (It was supposed to be experimental and also a sort of meta-commentary on the genre and instead it was just terrible.) There’s practically a whole weaving-house of threads here, and every single one of them has been left hanging. By her, Wilina of Queenscove, who was once (unflatteringly) compared to a mongoose (by Chioké) for her inability to let a problem go until she’d bitten its head off.  A rustle of cloth near the front of the sanctuary brings her back to the present, but it’s just the priestesses leaving the chapel and moving on to the next one; the woman in the veil hasn’t moved at all.

Tagging anyone who wants to participate. (If you do want to be tagged, let me know and I'll tag you in by name next week. Possibly even actually on Wednesday!)

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so somerville MA has a bunch of cats competing to be bikepath mayor and

!!!!!!!!

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my ancient mama

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Yoshitsuya II Rabbit Show Exhibition List with details Woodblock Print Date: 1873 Size (H x W): 14.25 x 28 (inches) Publisher: Kiya Sakutaro Seals: Date seal Signature: Ichieisai Yoshitsuya ga (L, R)