Anne Denoon
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annedenoon.bsky.social
Anne Denoon
@annedenoon.bsky.social
2.8K followers 1.2K following 3K posts
Crone, malcontent, lapsed (but twitching) novelist. Posts about art & lit.
Me: https://www.writersunion.ca/member/anne-denoon
My book: Back Flip, a novel about art & the 1960s: https://t.co/m7fQSOo6At or (with reviews) https://tinyurl.com/4dzwzpdp
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annedenoon.bsky.social
Whoops! Somehow deleted this when adding another pile.

Some mass-market memories (after learning of their impending demise.)
A pile of mass-market paperbacks. Another paperback pile.
December 15, 2025 at 2:24 AM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Reprint, 1965, with an essay & afterword. (Don't know how much it was revised from 1948 version.)
Title page of The City & the Pillar. 1965 paperback cover of The City & the Pillar.
December 15, 2025 at 1:24 AM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Gustave Flaubert - #BOTD 1821 - is still eloquently judging you, provincial ladies. 📚
Photo portrait of Flaubert as a young-ish man, seating on a stool or chair in dark frock coat and light trousers. He has a beard and longish hair. His arms are crossed over his chest and he looks annoyed.
December 12, 2025 at 6:22 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
A house with decorative frescos and satellite dishes in #Genoa
[likely not painted on wet plaster, so not true frescos (?) but anyway...]📷by me, 2017

#FrescoFriday #Italy
View of a building with four windows seen over a rooftop. It has an orange stucco facade with painted trompe-l'oeil decorations of scrolls, cornices and vessels in gold and dark orange. There are two satellite dishes on its roof, and several more on adjacent buildings.
December 12, 2025 at 3:45 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
One of my favorites, too! I had this edition, (charmingly) illustrated by the author. Revisiting it now on Internet Archive.
Book cover, ochre ground with red text and grey, red and black illustrations.
December 11, 2025 at 7:47 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Grace Paley, #BOTD 1922

L: Grace Goodside, aged 17 📷Jess Paley/Courtesy Nora Paley
R: Cover of the Collected Stories, 1994 📚
Black and white photo of the head of a young woman wearing a coat and a kerchief tied under her chin, looking skeptically into the camera. Cover of Grace Paley: The Collected Stories, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994. Black & white photo of GP standing in a garden with trees and a crow on the grass. behind her. She is looking at the camera. She has a halo of white hair and wears a skirt, a blouse with a string of beads, and a jacket with pockets, into which she sticks her hands.
December 11, 2025 at 7:16 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
What a profile! (The zebra's isn't bad, either.) 🎨

Lucian Freud
The Painter's Room, 1944
oil on canvas; private collection
A painting of a room with a black and yellow sofa on an orange floor with a plant behind it The walls are blue with a suggestion of clouds. A red garment or blanket and a black top hat lie on the floor. A large zebra's head, red and yellow, is poking through the window on the right.
December 10, 2025 at 7:36 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
San Francisco, from a window at #SFMOMA
📷me, 2019
#WindowsOnWednesday #SanFrancisco
Various tall buildings of different eras and styles, and a street stretching into the distance with pedestrians and traffic, seen from a window on an upper storey of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
December 10, 2025 at 6:30 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Boris Anrep, 1883-1969
Christmas Pudding
floor mosaic, c.1928-33
The National Gallery, London

#MosaicMonday #AlphabetChallenge #WeekXforXmas 🎄🎨
Floor mosaic, 1920s, depicting a brown pudding in orange and silver flames on a silver plate. The background is grey and the tablecloth is white, with a sprig of green at the front. A tondo with holly around its inner edge and a gold-coloured ring with the inscription "Christmas Pudding."
December 8, 2025 at 6:59 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Here I plagiarize my own 2014 Tumblr post* (with some words by #MavisGallant) to enlarge upon an earlier skeet about the adventure of telephoning in #Paris.

*possibly already read by every one of my eight followers there.
Photo of a young man on a phone in a Paris booth. [Fernand Raynaud’s] sketches such as the one in which the Parisian tries to call the suburb of Asnieres and finds it so hopeless that he finally places the call through New York were within a hairline of possibility. De Gaulle had declared the telephone to be “un gadget” (defined in the Petit Robert dictionary as “objet ménager amusant et nouveau”), and investment in telephone equipment was out of the question until after his retirement. - Mavis Gallant in “Paris: The Taste of a New Age” from Paris Notebooks This helps to explain the mysterious vagaries of Parisian telephones as I experienced them in the 1960s and even the 1970s. Back then, public phones seemed to function only sporadically and apartments came with their own historically attached numbers and instruments, listed (if at all) under the name of some long-departed owner or tenant. Legend had it that obtaining a new number, under one’s own name, would take years, if not decades. [Photo: Jean-Pierre Léaud in Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, 1968]
December 8, 2025 at 5:54 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Leaving the Louvre on a foggy winter day.
#Minox📷 by me, 1978.

Exiting the Cour Carrée via the Porte des Arts.
[The 2025 heist site is just on the right outside the arch.]

Le Pont des Arts (under scaffolding in photo) leads across the Seine to L'Institut de France.

#Louvre #Paris #1970s
A blurred black and white photo of a tall, arched portal at the Louvre, with open iron gates, two lanterns and two cement bollards. Four figures have just passed through it onto the quay. A bare tree and some lampposts, the Pont des Arts (under scaffolding) and, across the river, the cupola of l'Institut de France.
December 7, 2025 at 6:27 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Jane Freilicher (1924-2014)
Cat on Velvet, 1976
oil on canvas
📷Tibor de Nagy Gallery
#Caturday #AlphabetChallenge #WeekWforWindows🎨
A painting of a window through which a cityscape is seen. On the windowsill are two containers with foliage (one looks like forsythia), a small statue of a female torso on a cubical pedestal, and a cat lying on a red velvet pillow.
December 7, 2025 at 2:00 AM
annedenoon.bsky.social
For #ThingThursday:
yet another #stereopticon card of 1900-ish #Toronto.

Metropolitan Church and St. Michael's Cathedral
from the intersection of Queen Street East and Church Street.

Both are still standing, but the same perspective is impossible to recapture on current Street View.
Stereopticon card, 1900-05, with two images of churches in downtown Toronto (Metropolitan Methodist in the foreground and St Michael's Cathedral in the background). Many wires overhead, a pedestrian and two vehicles (possibly horse drawn) on the street.
December 4, 2025 at 4:15 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Janice Biala (1903-2000)
Snow in the Countryland
1976, oil on canvas
📷Tibor de Nagy Gallery

#AlphabetChallenge #WeekWforWindows #WindowsOnWednesday 🎨
An oil painting by Janice Biala of a window with white and blue curtains drawn back on either side, through which a snow-covered yard and three spindly potted plants can be seen. The palette is white, blue grey, brown and green.
December 3, 2025 at 2:58 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
What I'm wearing to the BlueSky Christmas party:
Luisa, Marchesa Casati, Paris, 1922, in a costume designed by Léon Bakst, "Queen of the Light."
December 3, 2025 at 1:03 AM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit.
A mother rabbit and three of her children make their escape across some clovery grass.
December 1, 2025 at 2:42 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Follow the ⬅️ to lose some time at the #Osteria in #Ostuni.
#AlphabetChallenge #WeekVforVowels #Italy
A whitewashed building with several windows, black iron railings, and a door opening onto a balcony with foliage growing beneath it. On a wall at the lower right is an oval orange sign saying Osteria del Tempo Perso (Restaurant of Lost Time) with an arrow pointing to the left.
November 30, 2025 at 4:02 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Narrator: ❄️They did NOT miss it.❄️
View of a tree trunk and a snowy street with car tracks, seen through a window. It's a colour photo but looks like a black and white one.
November 30, 2025 at 3:44 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Is it Penitence, or just heartburn?
A man in a loincloth, apparently in pain. Pontormo, Penitent St Jerome, 1525–1528, Landesmuseum, Hanover.
November 28, 2025 at 7:58 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
L: the Lafayette Hotel café, by Berenice Abbott.
R: Powell describes the Julien waiters in The Wicked Pavilion.
📚 #DawnPowell #GreenwichVillage #BereniceAbbott
Interior of an old-fashioned restaurant with mirrors, globe lamps, a tiled floor, marble-topped tables with a chess or checker board on one of them. Customers seated at the tables and a black-coated waiter in the background. Photo by Berenice Abbott. The Julien waiters were forthright self-respecting individuals who felt their first duty was to protect the cafe from customers, their second to keep customers and employers in their proper places. The fact that only two of the marble-topped tables were occupied was a state of business perversely satisfactory to these waiters, who had the more leisure for meditation and the exchange of private insults. A young Jersey-looking couple peered curiously in the doorway looking for some spectacular rout that would explain the place's cosmopolitan reputation, then drew back puzzled at seeing only two patrons. Karl, the Alsatian with the piratical mustaches, turned down a chair at each of his three empty tables, indicating mythical reservations, folded his arms again and stared contentedly at the chipped cupids on the ceiling. The more excitable Guillaume, given to muttering personal comments behind his patrons' backs, flapped his napkin busily as if shooing out flies, and shouted after the innocent little couple, "Kitchen closed no, nothing to eat, kitchen closed."
November 28, 2025 at 6:54 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
First editions of Marshall's novels, Presently Tomorrow (Little, Brown, 1946) & Lovers and Strangers (Lippincott, 1957). Both US-published & out of print. A bookplate with (perhaps?) her parents' names in PT.

Bought when prepping for the interview, they cost more than what I was paid for the piece.
Two hardcover books, one with a beige and black cover, the other with a pink, blue and black one. A colored Ex Libris bookplate showing a monk reading a manuscript, with the names Douglas & Helen Marshall handwritten on it in black ink.
November 28, 2025 at 6:36 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Dawn Powell, #BOTD 1896, at the Lafayette Hotel.
📷 Genevieve Naylor

Two of her best New York novels revolve around cafes:
in The Wicked Pavilion (1954) she calls it the Café Julien, and in The Golden Spur (1962), the book title is the name of the watering hole where all the characters intersect.
A middle-aged woman with short hair and dark lipstick, seated at a table in a restaurant, looking up with a quizzical expression. Black and white photo of Dawn Powell at the Lafayette Hotel, New York, 1950s, by Genevieve Naylor.
November 28, 2025 at 4:38 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Here is the piece if anyone is interested & can decipher these scans (sorry about the perfunctory ALTs): 📚
An article by Anne Denoon about the Canadian writer Joyce Marshall from Books in Canada, Summer 1994. An article by Anne Denoon about the Canadian writer Joyce Marshall from Books in Canada, Summer 1994. An article by Anne Denoon about the Canadian writer Joyce Marshall from Books in Canada, Summer 1994. An article by Anne Denoon about the Canadian writer Joyce Marshall from Books in Canada, Summer 1994.
November 28, 2025 at 4:06 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
Joyce Marshall, #Canadian writer & translator, #BOTD 1913
📷by Lois Harrison, c. 1957

When I interviewed her in 1994 for Books in Canada, the published piece began: "I don't want this article to be about old age," Joyce Marshall told me in our first conversation, "or about a 'neglected' writer."
A black & white photo of a woman in semi-profile, wearing a buttoned-up light-coloured blouse. She has short hair and holds a cigarette in her right hand.
November 28, 2025 at 3:43 PM
annedenoon.bsky.social
A riposte to the waxing moon, because I missed the beautiful crescent earlier this week.

A youthful goddess (Diana?) holding a crescent moon.
Bas-relief, 1447, by Agostino di Duccio
Chapel of the Planets, in Il Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini.
A honey-coloured bas-relief, 1447, of a young goddess or nymph with long hair flying out, wearing a diaphanous classical garment and a robe that balloons in a circle behind her. She strides forward, holding a large crescent moon before her. Artist: Agostino di Duccio.
November 28, 2025 at 1:44 AM