Book of Days | from convivio bookworks

Mar 24 2023

Feast of the Annunciation, Lady Day, Wayzgoose

Waffles & Wayzgoose

That’s Patty Larkin and Jennifer Farrell in the pictures above with me. We are the cast of characters that make up the online Belated 2022 Library Wayzgoose Festival that gets its World Premiere on Saturday evening, March 25, 2023 at 7 Eastern at the website of the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Here’s your invitation to join us: Just CLICK HERE at 7 Eastern on Saturday… or, for that matter, any time after, too. Meanwhile, here’s the Official Trailer:

Jennifer Farrell is the proprietor of STARSHAPED PRESS in Chicago. No one prints like Jen does. And Patty Larkin is one of my favorite singer/songwriters. She’s been recording for decades, and her music has accompanied me, in the way that strange things sometimes still happen, through all my book arts career. I’ve been immersed in filming, interviewing, editing, and more for this project for months now, and especially in the last few days. The good news? I still love it. I think you will, too, so please join us for the premiere this Saturday if you can.

I chose the new date for the belated Wayzgoose broadcast because it is another quirky day in the round of the year, much like the traditional date for a typical Wayzgoose celebration (the 24th of August, St. Bartholomew’s Day). I could explain it here, but I’m not going to. Here’s what I’d prefer you do: Watch the Wayzgoose; I’ll explain it all there. Before you sit down to watch at 7 PM Eastern on Saturday, make yourself and for all those who are watching with you a steaming plate of waffles. Serve them up with butter and maple syrup, or make yourself a nice sandwich of waffles and vanilla ice cream. Then turn on your computer, go to jaffecollection.org, click the start button on the Wayzgoose video that will be loaded there by then, then tuck into those waffles as you watch. All will be revealed within the first few minutes and you will find yourself well connected to the seasons and the round of the year and with a general understanding of why a Wayzgoose usually happens at Bartlemas and why we eat waffles on the 25th of March, which is Lady Day: the Feast of the Annunciation. Then sit back and enjoy the show.

COME SEE US! Find us on Saturday April 1 at JOHAN’S JOE in Downtown West Palm Beach from 7 AM to 3 PM for a little Springtime Market that Johan’s Joe and Convivio Bookworks are hosting together. We had a Christmas Market at Johan’s last December and it was so much fun and we met so many wonderful people, we’ve decided to collaborate again for Easter. We’ll have all our handcrafted goods for spring and Easter there from Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine.

After Easter, find us at Lake Worth’s Second Annual TACO FIESTA at Bryant Park (Lake Avenue at the Lake Worth Lagoon) on Saturday April 22 from 3 to 9 PM. It’s a free family event celebrating all things taco, and we’ll be there with a large selection of artisan goods, mostly from Mexico, and lots of my mom’s hand embroidered tea towels, too. Viva Lake Worth Beach!

SAVE ONLINE! At our online catalog, save $10 off your purchase of $85 or more, plus get free domestic shipping, too, when you use discount code BUNNY at checkout. It’s our Zippin’ Into Springtime Sale, good on everything in the shop, now through Easter (and probably a bit beyond, too). CLICK HERE to shop! And don’t forget to use discount code BUNNY at checkout if your order is $85 or more.

Mar 19 2023

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Equinox, Lent, Mothering Sunday, Spring, St. Joseph's Day, Wayzgoose

It’s Laetare Sunday, and Mother’s Day in the UK, Father’s Day in Italy

It’s Midlent: The Fourth Sunday of Lent, and halfway through our Lenten journey we get a Sunday whose color is rose, the color of joy, rather than penitent purple. A little break, a small reprieve, in celebration of being midway through. The day is called Laetare Sunday, a name derived from the first few words of the Mass for this day, in Latin: It is Isaiah 66:10: Laetare Jerusalem (“Rejoice, O Jerusalem”). It’s the day when folks in the United Kingdom honor their mothers: Mothering Sunday, they call it. And this year, Laetare Sunday happens to fall on St. Joseph’s Day. San Giuseppe, sacred to Italy, where today is Father’s Day, in honor of the saint who was foster father to Jesus.

I apologize for not writing more this past week, when we honored St. Patrick, of course, and one day before that, St. Urho, whom the Finns know as the saint who drove the grasshoppers out of Finland. Either St. Urho has not gotten as much publicity as Patrick, or he is completely fictional: we’ll leave that up to you. Of St. Joseph, though, we can be certain, and we can be certain, too, that it is a day to find a good Italian bakery and some zeppole to enjoy with your after-dinner espresso tonight. We Italians consume zeppole in great quantities on this day, and there is nothing quite like being in an Italian bakery on this feast day and witnessing the rolling racks filled with zeppole: delicately light pastries filled with custard and garnished with cherries, or their lesser known cousins, sfinci, the same delicate pastry filled not with custard but with sweet ricotta, like cannoli. These things make us swoon this one day each spring. We are a dramatic, operatic people and the Festa di San Giuseppe is one of our annual highlights (and surprise: it revolves around food).

And by Monday it will be spring by the almanac: Balance comes to this old earth Monday, March 20, at 5:24 PM Eastern. Day and night roughly equal from North Pole to South, for just a short time, and then our Northern Hemisphere days grow longer than our nights as we make our way toward the Midsummer Solstice of June. The constant rearrange, so subtle we barely perceive it until we sit back and ponder it in the blocks of time we call seasons. These things will never cease to amaze me.

It was last summer that we were going to have our annual Wayzgoose at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts –– an online video event featuring the fabulous letterpress printer Jennifer Farrell of Starshaped Press in Chicago with music by singer/songwriter and recording artist Patty Larkin and me as host –– but Patty Larkin suffered a terrible accident before we could film the Wayzgoose last summer. It was obvious to me that we had to wait for Patty to recover. “No Patty Larkin, no Wayzgoose.” She had a long road ahead of her, but she did it. Patty’s been touring again, and earlier this winter, she recorded her Wayzgoose concert for us. In the meantime, I recorded my interview with Jen Farrell, and still these past few weeks I’ve been filming and editing, and the last edits will be coming at a more furious pace these next few days, all so we can have the Wayzgoose ready for its March 25 World Premiere. Won’t you join us? You can watch from anywhere in the world, and if you join us at 7 Eastern on Saturday, you’ll be part of a worldwide wave of viewers celebrating good print and good music. Click here to learn more and to watch on Saturday at 7. (The premiere takes place at the Jaffe Center’s website.)

I have a suggestion for your Saturday viewing party: Fix yourself and for those watching with you a steaming plate of waffles. I’ll explain why at the Wayzgoose. The Wayzgoose traditionally falls on Bartlemas, St. Bartholomew’s Day –– a very quirky day in the Round of the Year if ever there was one. And when it came to rescheduling this Wayzgoose, I chose the 25th of March for similar reasons. Trust me: make the waffles, serve them with maple syrup or with ice cream, then sit down with us at 7 on Saturday evening to watch. You’ll love the work of Jennifer Farrell and Patty Larkin’s concert will have you beaming… and you will appreciate the waffle connexion.

So many good wishes for you this day and this coming week!
John

COME SEE US! Find us on Saturday April 1 at JOHAN’S JOE in Downtown West Palm Beach from 7 AM to 3 PM for a little Springtime Market that Johan’s Joe and Convivio Bookworks are hosting together. We had a Christmas Market last December and it was so much fun and we met so many wonderful people, we’ve decided to collaborate again for Easter. We’ll have all our handcrafted goods for spring and Easter there from Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine.

Images: Zeppole and sfinci, above. The zeppole are more popular; the sfinci at this bakery are identified by green candied cherries. Top: “Stasera Zeppole” translates to “Tonight Zeppole.” The photograph of a baker’s storefront window was taken by Giovanni Dall’Orto in Syracuse, Sicily.

Mar 08 2023

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Holi

Holi Hai

It is Holi today, the Hindu Festival of Colors. A festival of spring and a time, like so many other significant days in so many cultures, to make wrongs right and to make amends. In springtime, no less. How appropriate, at this time of new beginnings: We are just a couple of weeks shy of the vernal equinox and the renewal of life and Earth’s abundant green is not far beyond. I am not the sort of person who holds grudges, but if I did, this is the time I would seek to set those things aside and to start fresh.

I had a work meeting last week with Pranoo Kumar, who runs a fantastic book store in West Palm Beach called Rohi’s Readery. Pranoo had read a story for the Stay Awake Bedtime Stories series that I host, and she chose to read a book about a girl who has two dads. But it is a state university I work for, in Florida, and Pranoo’s story made people in the administration building nervous. The governor here likes to throw the word freedom around and that’s all well and good if your views align with his, but mine, most certainly, do not. Nor do Pranoo’s, nor most of the people I know, as we all watch one of our most basic and essential rights –– the freedom of speech –– erode away under restrictive state policies that even a year ago I never thought I’d witness here in the USA. Without getting too far off track and without being too critical of the current government of the State of Florida (for if I am and if a recently proposed piece of legislation passes, I’d have to register my blog with the state for writing critical commentary about the government), I’m writing this admittedly not very positive paragraph just to set the scene, which is this: John, going to Rohi’s Readery last Wednesday, to meet Pranoo for the first time and to break the news to her that we won’t be able to broadcast her reading for our series.

Fast forward ten minutes: Pranoo and I hit it off and I feel like I’ve got a new best friend or sister, and I bought a stack of wonderful books from her shop. And Pranoo invited me to the Holi celebration she had been planning in West Palm Beach, right outside her shop, on Saturday. So on Saturday afternoon, I went.

If you’ve never been to a Holi celebration, all I can say is you need to find one and you need to go. It is so utterly joyful, this celebration of love and spring, especially when the colored chalk dust starts flying. Everyone is absolutely beaming. How could they not be? I watched as a few hundred adults suddenly became kids again, while the kids around them welcomed their parents’ and grandparents’ brief return to childhood with open arms. The music, the dancing, the bursting colors … it was wonderful, all of it. And perhaps this was Pranoo’s way of making the wrongs that are being heaped upon us here in this place right. We met, I broke the bad news to her, we commiserated, and then we began making plans for helping all kinds of kids –– black or white, queer or straight, able bodied or disabled, kids of any sort –– find their voices. What will come of our partnership, I do not know, but I am excited to see what develops. We made amends for things beyond our control. We chose to be light bearers in dark times. And then we celebrated the arrival of spring with exploding colors. Pranoo and the things she does for our local community help me feel encouraged again. Here are some pictures. And as Pranoo told me, “Holi Hai!”

Top photo: My new friend, Pranoo Kumar, after the color celebration on Saturday. The three photos at the end of today’s post are also scenes from the celebration in West Palm Beach on Saturday. I met the guy in the blue shirt as I was walking back to my truck. His complete happiness stopped me in my tracks, and I asked him if I could take his picture. He said yes. I’d bet my bottom dollar no one who walks the halls of the State Capitol in Tallahassee is as full of joy as he.

COME SEE US!
We’ve got two springtime pop-up shops in the works, and maybe even a third (the Art and Flavor festival at Hatch 1121 here in Lake Worth on Saturday March 18). At each, you’ll find our full selection of handcrafted artisan goods for Easter and Springtime from Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine, plus a few other surprises, too.

Find us first at the DELRAY BEACH ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE & FESTIVAL in Downtown Delray Beach this Saturday, March 11. The parade, I think, begins at noon, but our Convivio Bookworks tent will be at Old School Square, 51 North Swinton Avenue, from 1 to 7 PM. And on Saturday April 1, we’ll be at JOHAN’S JOE in Downtown West Palm Beach from 7 AM to 3 PM for a little Springtime Market that Johan’s Joe and Convivio Bookworks are hosting together. We had a Christmas Market last December and it was so much fun and we met so many wonderful people, we’ve decided to collaborate again for Easter.

Meanwhile, at our online catalog, save $10 off your purchase of $85 or more, plus get free domestic shipping, too, when you use discount code BUNNY at checkout. It’s our Zippin’ Into Springtime Sale, good on everything in the shop, now through Easter (and probably a bit beyond, too). What’s new? Some great new handcrafted artisan goods for Easter from Germany, plus a new supply of real pysanky eggs and wooden crucifixes from our friend Kyrylo Cherniak in Ukraine. It took almost a whole year for him to gather these things from the artisans he works with throughout Ukraine, and it is our deep privilege and honor to bring them to you. Kyrylo, so far, is safe and as well as can be. And some new paper mache egg containers and splint wood baskets just arrived from Germany, too, and how about a German nutcracker that happens to be a leprechaun for St. Patrick’s Day? We’re about to load about two or three dozen new hand embroidered tea towels made by my mom onto the website, too. Millie’s Tea Towels: you love them, and Mom loves making them for you! CLICK HERE to shop! And don’t forget to use discount code BUNNY at checkout if your order is $85 or more.