Boot Camp For Cooks

CULINARY BOOT CAMP: Five Days of Basic Training at the Culinary Institute of America. Hoboken, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons: 2006 641.5 CULResidents of Hyde Park and food lovers refer to it affectionately as “the other C.I.A.” Located in a complex of red brick buildings that were built for the St. Andrews Military Academy, in the years after the American Revolution, the Culinary Institute of America overlooks the Hudson River not far from Springwood, the boyhood home of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In an area that boasts more historical sites than you could should a drumstick at, this still constitutes a big deal.
Culinary boot camp is five intensive days of demonstrations, lectures and team cooking that enable self-taught home cooks (and that is most of us) to acquire the scientific framework and supervised practice to get consistent results from your efforts. While I haven’t attended the C.I.A. boot camp, I have toured the cooking school and eaten at the Institute’s restaurants where student chefs cook and serve – and the paying public eats – their creations. It was months after my tour of the kitchen classes before I had the nerve to say again casually that I can cook; I was relieved to see that I shared at least one thing with good cooks: I clean constantly while preparing food thanks, perhaps, to the advice of my father the chemist.

Culinary camp is nothing if not organized. Each day the class divides up into teams that produce a variety of dished using the techniques.Day one introduces the basic flavoring agents (mirepoix, etc.) used in making stocks and sauces, making and using thickening agents such as a roux of butter and flour, and sauteing the use of small amounts of fat with controlled heat . Day two is for soup making, exploring the various thick soups and clear, and the uses of stir-frying and pan frying. Day three is for dry heat cooking methods: roasting, broiling, and grilling, and the introduction of wines. Day four is the day for moist heat cooking methods, from the low heat of braising, steaming and poaching to the high heat of simmering and boiling, and the introduction to developing a menu for a meal. Day five is the final demonstration/exam.

A bonus for students is the evening meal, after a strenuous day of cooking, to relax at a dinner in one of the Institute’s four restaurants. St. Andrews Café serves healthy foods with a menu that includes seared tuna cake appetizer with pickled ginger, pan seared salmon with saffron paradelle swerved with spinach and feta, and a chocolate cake for dessert.
The Escoffier Restaurant, as the name implies, is the place for formal French service and menu. A consomme with truffles and vegetables is followed by a cold salad of lobster, avocado and beets with mango dressing. The entrée is a seared halibut fillet set over a mound of spinach and sauced with in a beurre blanc. For dessert, the cheese course, is a mountain goat cheese from the Loire, served with a red wine.
The American Bounty Restaurant specializes in regional dishes and local ingredients. A fricassee of Maine lobster is served with garlic orzo custard and a Canadian yellow split pea soup made with smoked potatoes and served with chive sticks. Roasted mushroom and swiss cheese strudel is served with braised pumpkin, creamed spinach and lentils.
The last dinner is at the Ristorante Caterina de’ Medici for contemporary Italian cuisine. Thinly sliced tuna in olive oil, capers, green olives, lemon, parsley, red onion and diced jalapeno chilies. Grilled lamb chops rubbed with rosemary and served with caponata (eggplant and tomato). Dessert is a moist fruit upside down cake.

If the book doesn't inspire you to brush up your kitchen skills, look at the photographs of food in preparation. The French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote about sex: "Is not man truly a brute to consider the act that created him brutish?" The idea applies equally to food: if eating is one of life's great pleasures and necessities, what does it mean if we can't find time for cooking and take no pleasure in the task?

Happy New Year 2012

As you may have noticed, recently posts here have been infrequent.  Circumstances are leading this particular F.R. on to other pursuits.  Thank you for your interest and happy reading in the coming year and always.

Miriam Tlali: The Education Of Muriel

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (formerly MURIEL AT METROPOLITAN)

by Miriam Tlali Toronto, Broadview Press: 2004 (1975) FIC TLA

"For some of us must storm the castles, some define the happenings." -Mihloti

"To a person without reasoning powers, Metropolitan Radio was a wonderful place."

-Between Two Worlds

The store that sells furniture and electronics on the hire-purchase system is a small world unto itself, but is also a microcosm of South Africa under apartheid. Muriel, a young black woman from Soweto, shuttles between the mixed-race world of her job there and her home with her husband and their baby in the segregated township. Mixed-race does not mean integrated, a fact underlined for Muriel by the problem of the bathrooms, for no one wants to share one with her at the office.
Metropolitan Radio, with its different standards for black and white customers, carried to the absurd in its segregated filing system, is a constant goad to Muriel's conscience. Yet she is so efficient that her duties expand from 'helper' to sales agent, where her task is to sell items on the lease-to-own plan at ruinous interest rates to the unsuspecting. Her boss, Mr. Bloch, accuses her of "educating" the African customers by explaining what their purchase agreements mean. Soon the lorry drivers stage a protest, refusing to repossess appliances from their Soweto customers.
In spite of indignities, Muriel looks forward to work each day. A job, with its promise of freedom, is a prize for a woman. After six days spent at home caring for her sick child, Muriel returns eagerly to work only to find herself locked out by the other employees who are afraid they may catch something from her. Finally, when she is asked to make the morning tea, Muriel decides to resign, a decision supported by her husband whose job at a technical college is very much like hers. When she hands in her letter of resignation, Muriel and Mr. Bloch have a painful exchange. He refuses to accept the letter, asking, "But why, why should you want to leave? You are happy and healthy and fat." To which Muriel replies, "I am fat because I eat the wrong type of food; not because I am happy."
Then the ever vigilant Security Police visit Muriel at home. Her niece from the newly independent nation of Botswana has requested permission to visit Muriel for the holidays, necessitating an investigation to assure the authorities that the young girl is not a threat to the South African republic. This comes as no surprise to Muriel, but when she has to explain the incident to her coworkers their questions reveal their ignorance of a system that operates in their name. Muriel reflects that a good measure of inequality is how much more she understands about the divisions among white groups than they understand about black living conditions.
In the end, Muriel finds the courage to leave Metropolitan Radio. Though her future prospects are uncertain, she looks at her letter of resignation and thinks, "I remembered the resignation note I had once written, after so many false starts, wavering, uncertain, and compared it to that final one. My handwriting had never looked so beautiful. I had at last decided to free myself of the shackles which had bound not only my hands, but my soul." It is 1964, the year that Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in Johannesburg. If a white person receives the heart of a black person, Muriel wonders, what racial group do they belong to? And what is the point of the voting rights she has been given in a far-off land where she has never lived? Muriel, with her university education, is replaced at Metropolitan Radio by a sixteen year old white girl who will be paid three times more than Muriel earned because Africans have " a lower standard of living."

It took eleven years and several rejections before Miriam Tlali found a publisher for Between Two Worlds. Tlali began to write in 1964, when she quit her job to care for her sick mother-in-law. Apartheid was at its most virulent and Tlai had just been removed from her native township. In spite of extensive editing to make the book commercially viable, it offended the Censorship Board and the book was banned. Even the title was considered too controversial with its hints of conflict in a segregated society so, for a time, the book was called Muriel At Metropolitan. In her introduction to this new edition, Tlali writes that she is pleased that her mother was able to see her first book in print, in spite of all discouragements. When the book was published in an unexpurgated version in London in 1979, Tlali became the first black woman to publish outside South Africa and the book was hailed as a classic.

Miriam Tlali was born in 1933 at Doornfontein Johannesburg. She attended the University of Witwatersrand until it was closed to blacks during the darkest days of apartheid. Typing and bookkeeping skills enabled her to earn a small living. After the success of her first novel, Tlali was invited to the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978. After returning to Africa, she continued writing. Her other major works are Amandla (1980) and Mihloti, or Tears (1984) and Soweto Stories (1989).

Miriam Tlali now edits Straight Ahead International, a literary magazine for women.

Sonnenberg Gardens

Sonnenberg Gardens is located  in Canandaigua, south of Rochester, New York.  At the time Charles Zoller took this photograph (sometime between 1907-1932) it was still possible to see the head of Canandaigua Lake to the south.  The mansion was built as a summer home for wealthy banker E.E. Thompson of New York City in 1887.  For the convenience of his many guests, Thompson paid for a state of the art railroad station to be constructed in the small city ion western New York.

"Along with 17 other structures across the 50-acre property, the estate boasts nine formal gardens representing many cultures and historic periods including 12th-century Asia, 4th-century Rome and the French Renaissance. A 20-acre arboretum of rare and exotic trees, plants and unique landscapes stretches across the grounds, while a Lord & Burnham wood-and-glass greenhouse complex of the Victorian period features varieties of orchids, succulents, tropical plants and flowers, as well as vegetables." -  Finger Lakes Visitors Connection.

Summer Fun

Ontario Beach was once known as the 'Coney Island of the West', western New York that is.   Nicely situated at the north end of  the city of Rochester, where the Genesee River emptied into Lake Ontario, Ontario Beach  was a summer getaway for city dwellers.   A stroll along the boardwalk and through a reconstructed Japanese village was a genteel entertainment but nearby were stunt shows, bars, casinos and cheap hotels.  The indefatigable photographer Charles Zoller chose to snap the unbuttoned side of summer.

Image: Charles Zoller - Ontario Beach Park, 1910, George Eastman House.

Tarjei Vesaas: The Ice Palace

THE ICE PALACE by Tarjei Vesaas, translated from the Norwegian Is- slottet by Elizabeth Rokkan

Los Angeles, Sun & Moon Press: 1991 (1963) FIC VES

"It was really only afternoon, but already dark. A hard frost in late autumn. Stars, but no moon, and no snow to give a glimmer of light - so the darkness was thick, in spite of the stars. On each side was the forest, densely still, with everything that might be alive in there at the moment."

This masterly mood setting begins The Ice Palace, an impressive marriage of imagery and psychological complexity. The story of a brief but enduring bond between two eleven year old girls, it makes the case for never-ending swirl of live-giving forces and destruction. The plot is presented relatively straightforwardly to the reader, but where it takes the characters is uncertain and full of suspense.

Siss is a happy child, beloved by her family and happy with her classmates; Um, a shy girl, has come from away to live with her aunt after her (unwed) mother's death and remains awkwardly aloof at school. Their characters are completely convincing; their creator never commits anachronisms, as adults are prone to do when writing about children.

On her way to their first visit, Siss is keenly aware that something is about to happen that will be different from any friendship she has experienced before. The girls circle each other gingerly, alternating between childish games and whispered confidences. Um remarks mysteriously that she wonders whether she will ever get to heaven, then retreats, frightened by her own eagerness. As adults, we may guess that she has been the target of unkind remarks about her out of wedlock birth. The next day when Siss arrives at school, she discovers that Um is not there.

It is to the ice palace that the class has talked about visiting that Um is drawn. The Nordic winter in this land of mountains and rivers throws up huge plumes of water from falls that freeze in the sub-zero temperatures, becoming fantastic labyrinths of ice, mazes of irregular trails and caves that last until the spring melts them away. Feverish with anxiety, Um wanders about, determined to get "in" to this house of ice. Suddenly, her eyes are startled to meet other eyes: "A fish moving as fast as an arrow, as if making straight for her eyes. She shrank aside, forgetting that there was ice between them. There was a stripe of grey-green back, then a jerk to one side and the sight of something moving toward her."

We understand that Um is lost, long before the frantic villagers begin their determined search for the girl. Siss insists on accompanying the searchers, protesting that she knows something, but her youthful inexperience renders it impossible for her to express it in words and the adults wonder if she is hiding something. Long after the search is exhausted, Siss returns again and again to the falls; in her solitary searching, she learns things that she could, but will not, ever reveal. Finally, she understands that the duty to keep on living is not a disloyal act, watching as a large bird of prey diving again and again at the ice palace. "He was bound fast here, the prisoner of his own freedom, unable to give up. What he saw confused him." In a final gesture of reconciliation, Siss returns to the falls with her classmates in early spring. Vesaas, a poet of reticence, creates a memorable tale of dawning adolescence and the gradual awakening to the erotic source of life.

Tarjei Vesaas was born in Vinje, Norway in 1897 and died in 1970. As a young man, he traveled abroad to many countries, including Italy, Belgium, France and Austria, before Germany occupied Norway in 1940. Vesaas married the poet Halldis Moren and they had a daughter, Guri, born in 1939.

Image: The Grotto at Mancour, Mallorjca by William Degouve de Nuncques (1901), Royla Museum of Art, Belgium.

Dinner: The Civilized Ritual

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a film by Luis Bunuel: Image from www.filmforum.org

Breaking bread together is a nourishing ritual in many ways. It is not only vitamins and minerals that are lost by consuming fast food. After digesting these rich books and movies, you may think the epithet 'fast food' is an oxymoron.

MUCH DEPENDS ON DINNER

by Maragert Visser Collier Macmillan, Toronto: 1986 394.12 VIS

"Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner." (George Gordon, Lord Byron)

Imagine an ordinary dinner as the key to civilization. Visser does, and assembles her narrative as a hypothetical universal meal with chapters devoted to each of its components. Corn, the 'nourishing mother' from North America has many uses and is easy to store. Salt, the only rock humans eat, has preservative powers that spurred travel and immense fortunes. Butter was a product of agricultural societies and made possible the glories of French cuisine. Chicken accompanied the knife and fork revolution to the table in the 16th century Europe. Rice, staple for half the earth's population, can be grown in both dry soil and water. Lettuce is the original fast food; eaten raw, it resists processing. Olive oil comes from a tree, beloved by the Mediterraneans for its tenacious search for moisture. Lemon juice is prized for its ability to intensify other flavors and the bright yellow nippled fruit is extremely attractive. And so, through the ordinary daily dinner, Visser illustrates much about how we got to be as we are.

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (LE CHARM DISCRET DE LA BOURGEOISIE)

A film by Luis Bunuel, with Stephane Audran, Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, et al France: 1972 VC & DVD 791.43

Centorius interruptus. The master surrealist turns his magnifying glass on the middle class at table. A group of friends attempting to share a civilized meal is repeatedly interrupted. It's the wrong night, the hosts try to escape from their guests, there's an army camped out in the dining room, the restaurant where they take refuge is a stage play, and one of the guests is a drug-running South American diplomat on the lam. A satire of the highest order.

TAMPOPO by Juzo Itami, with Nobuko Miyamoto, et al Japan: 1986 VC &DVD 791.43

Tampopo is a young widow struggling to support her little boy by work at her Tokyo noodle shop. The restaurant attracts all kinds of characters as customers. Goro is a stetson wearing truck driver who fancies himself a cowboy. Pliskin drinks hard in the Russian tradition. An itinerant noodle maker sporting a beret is obsessed by the intricacies of classic French cuisine. A sinister man in a white suit and his girlfriend perform erotic rituals with food. Imagine a French New Wave film in Japanese and - voila! - you have Tampopo.

Time Capsules

THE WORLD ON SUNDAY: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper

Nicholson Baker & Margaret Brentano New York, Bulfinch Press: 2005 FOLIO 071.471 BAK

As libraries become pressed for space, storage is a problem, and the unthinkable is contemplated: get rid of something. New technologies make disposal seem attractive even as they hold out the promise of increasing storage capacity. Baker and Brentano (they are married) have devoted their combined talents to saving works on paper from the dustbin - and they know their history. When the British Library decided to sell one of the few remaining complete bound copies of The New York World, the couple moved quickly to raise the $150,000 needed. They turned themselves into a nonprofit organization and rented space in an abandoned mill in Rollinsford, New Hampshire. Here they sheltered and preserved their precious cache while they searched for a permanent home and a way to share the treasure they saved. This marvelous, over-sized volume is one result.

The New York World, the first great modern newspaper, was created by an enterprising Hungarian immigrant. Joseph Pulitzer made his fortune with what he modestly called "the greatest newspaper on earth." Ironically, Pulitzer was losing his eyesight during the years (1898-1911) when The World was revolutionizing the look of newspapers by its bold use of color. With the introduction in 1898 of high-speed color lithography, Pulitzer's genius was to use the Sunday paper to fill a day of rest with marvels of graphic journalism. In its heyday, The World on Sunday sold more than half a million copies of each issue.

Some stories sound a familiar note. From 1899, muckraker Charles Green Bush profiles "The New Crop of United States Senators - Large Purses And Little Men." And on March 11, 1901, the President of Yale received front page coverage for a speech warning "We shall have an emperor in Washington within twenty-five years unless we create a public sentiment which, regardless of legislation, will regulate the trusts."

Other stories take a novel approach to the news. George Luks, who later became known as a painter of the 'Ashcan School', illustrates the recently named "The Persecution Mania". "The American Sky-Scraper Is A Modern Tower of Babel" (1898) portrays life in tall buildings as a game of chutes and ladders. "The Astor Real Estate" (1899) reveals a big-city fortune on the page as though it were sheet music. The railroad magnate's holdings unroll as cross-sections of land and buildings like notes on a stave - from the Waldorf Astoria to vacant lots above Central Park. And we see what happens in one day in the life of a city in "The Busiest Hour On Earth" (1906). Among other tantalizing pieces of information, we learn that between 6 and 7 PM New Yorkers take 123,000 subway rides, make 32,000 telephone calls, cash checks worth $120,000, and welcome 650 out-of-town visitors.

And some stories are just plain (colorful) fun. Of course, there are cartoons like the Yellow Kid, along with lesser known cuties the Laughable Looloos and the Roly Polys. The World pioneered a technique that enabled readers to transfer images from the page (with the help of vinegar) to their Easter Eggs (1902). And in a frenzied burst of fancy, "The Kite-Flying Craze And What May Come Of It", Walt McDougall uses the exploding string theory of cartooning to reveal an airborne Brooklyn baby, a billboard painter floating to work, Manhattanites hanging pails of beer from kite lines, and a platoon of commuters from New Jersey descending from the skies.

The World ceased publication in 1931 and exists today mostly as a memory or on microfilm. As new media today cause newspapers to re-evaluate their mission, this book suggests the heretical idea that fewer photographs and more artwork could be a novel idea whose time has come (again).

Image: Louis Biedermann, cover for The Sunday World, 1907.

Hastings-On-Hudson

Another print by Rudolph Ruzicka (1883-1978).  This deserted landscape was made with a variety of tools:  a burin for the basic lines, then a knife and then an electric router.  It was originally published by Merrymount Press.

 

Plank Road

Ah, new technologies. How quickly they come and go, and how often they are oversold. In the late 1840s, American investors rushed to finance plank roads, or 'corduory roads' as they were sometimes called. Opening the interior of the United States to agriculture required cutting down entire forests of trees, making logs and boards a plentiful supply of road-building material.
The first plank road was built from North Syracuse, New York, running north and south, to transport salt from nearby Onondaga Lake and other goods.

Then the railroads came, and money evaporated quicker than you could yell "Timber!"

Peter McCord - Beginning Of The Old Plack Road, c.1906, New York Public Library

Charles Zoller And Charlie Chaplin

I haven't been able to discover where and how Charles Zoller, a successful furniture dealer and accomplished amateur photographer from Rochester, New York, took this autochrome of actor Charlie Chaplin in his guise at the Little Tramp. Chaplin debuted the character onscreen in 1914, by which time Zoller had gained a national reputation with his hobby.

Women Who Made The Bauhaus

BAUHAUS WOMEN by Ulrike Muller, Ingrid Radewaldt, & Sanrda Kemker, Paris, Flammarion: 2009 709.43 MUL

Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus was famous for combining fine arts and crafts in exuberant new ways. Who knows how it would have continued to develop if the National Socialists had not closed it down in in 1933 and Gropius and others had not had to flee the country? And they were the lucky ones. Otti Beger, Friedl Dicker, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher and others were not. But the works survive, and in this new book, originating in Germany, a fascinating tale of female accomplishment is finally assembled in one place.

Although it was not the intention of the founders, almost from its beginnings, female applicants to the Bauhaus school were at least fifty per cent. They were not allowed to be teachers, with a few exceptions, and the solution to the 'lopsided' enrollment was to push them into the fibre arts, which promptly became the best money maker for the Bauhaus workshops. Talk about an alarming success.

Thankfully, some of the students/artists have become well known even without the full support of their Bauhaus colleagues. Photographer Florence Henri, metalsmith Marianne Brandt and the experimental theorist Lucia Moholy (Nagy).

Summer At The Seashore

"The sea was meant to be looked at from the shore as the mountains from the plain." - James Russell Lowell

The word "seascape" first appeared in Webster's Dictionary in 1864.

(Waves from the Jantzen Photo Archive)

Nothing else that summer offers can match the delight of a visit to the sea shore. The sound of the waves, the smell of the salt, the cries of the birds stir the imagination even before the ocean comes into view. To reach the water's edge, where the worlds of solid and liquid meet, is to arrive at the place where life started. The kingdoms of Neptune (the sea) and Gaia (earth) meet and overlap on the tidal flats and in the salt marshes.


LIFE AND DEATH OF A SALT MARSH
by John & Mildred Teal Boston, Atlantic-Little brown: 1969 500.9 TEA

Along the Atlantic coast, microcosms of life' beginngings - tidal marshes - come and go each day with the tides. At low tide sea oats and spartina grasses bend before the breeze. The admixture of salt and water and grasses creates a pleasant, recognizable aroma. When the resulting peat bogs are disturbed by digging or filling, or used a s a dump, the smell becomes odoriferous: like rotten eggs.
About fifty thousand years ago when the Laurentide Glacier retreated to the north from whence it had come, it left behind piles of rocks, sand and gravel that we have given odd names: moraines; drumlins; eskers. When European settlers arrived in North America, they naturally preferred to cultivate the fertile marshlands near the shore when they could. Tilling the rocky soils of New England was hard work but, so too, was keeping the persistent tides at bay. Having set themselves down in the path of the Atlantic Flyway, the settlers also began hunting the myriad shore birds.
Marshes, watery already, often have rivers running through them, called 'guzzles.' They are drainage rivers created by the tides, bringing fresh water to the sea. Salt determines the ecology of the marshes, as only certain hardy plants thrive in these conditions. Spartina is one such grass, an annual above the water and a perennial below. Cranberries grow well in the peaty bogs and blue beach plums (prunus maritima) root in the rills made by the wind on the sand dunes. Since colonial times there has been a cottage industry making jams and jellies from the fruits. Visit http://www.beachplum.cornell.edu/ for information about efforts to preserve the beach plum and its habitat.
The animals that live in the marsh adapted to cope with widely varying conditions in their habitat. Salinity, extreme fluctuations in temperature, and exposure are their facts of life. Tide pools are home to blue crabs that borrow into the mud at low tide. along with sheepshead, marsh minnows, insects, and algae that live on the surface of the water.
Dumping and the effects of mosquito control have diminished the coastal marshes, as has the filling in of marshes to make more space for settlement in attractive locations. A large portion of Boston's Back bay was created by slicing off the top part of beacon Hill. Moving earth around has contributed to the silting in of coastal inlets.

John Teal was an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Center. Mildred Teal was a naturalist and writer. Together they bring a poetic sense to scientific explicati

Sunny Day on The Marsh, Newburyport, 1860s by Martin Johnson Heade

THE LIFE AND WORKS OF MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE

by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. New Haven, Yale University Press: 1975 759.13 STE

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) was the painter-poet of the marshes. More than one hundred of his paintings of them survive today, many of them with dates approximate as he produced them so feverishly. Typically the paintings are about twice as wide as they are long, creating a powerful sense of this uniquely horizontal landscape. Human figures, usually located in the foreground, bear witness to the virtues of outdoor life and suggest an ecological relationship between humans and the rest of creation. A keen observer of the natural world, Heade knew and portrayed the restless dance of clouds and sun, the misty seaside air, and the colorful permutations they made on the land.

Heade fell in love with the marshes of Newburyport, Massachusetts on his first visit in 1862. Like Claude Monet he made a series of paintings of haystacks; unlike the Frenchman, Heade's are real agricultural objects and not just occasions to study reflected light. Heade also made a series of drawings of nearby Plum Island River (1867-68) that are outstanding examples of draughtsmanship. With only charcoal and the three classic chalk colors (red, white, and black) he captured water, sky, and birds taking flight.

Wherever he went from then on, Heade sought out marshes, from northern New Jersey to Florida, where he finally settled in St Augustine. Nothing quite equals the serene, meandering brooks of New England: for Heade what came after was merely ponds and puddles.

Sunlight and shadows: Newburyport Marshes by Martin Johnson Heade

Ontario Beach Park

The furniture dealer-turned-photographer Charles Zoller captured this surreal kiosk on the south shore of Lake Ontario during the summer of 1910. Zoller had begun to experiment with autochromes only three years earlier.

Image credit: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

Wonderland: A Quartet

A GARDEN ON EARTHLY DELIGHTS by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1967.

EXPENSIVE PEOPLE by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1968.

THEM by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1969.

WONDERLAND by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1971; revised edition published by Modern Library, New York: 2006.

"It seems to me that the greatest works of literature deal with the human soul caught in the stampede of time, unable to gauge the profundity of what passes over it, like the characters of Yeats who live through terrifying events but cannot understand them; in this way history passes over most of us. Society is caught in a convulsion, whatever of growth or of death, and ordinary people are destroyed. They do not, however, understand that they are 'destroyed.' " - excerpt from an interview by Joyce Carol Oates

"Future archaeologists equipped with only her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America."
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from a review of them.

Only in retrospect have four novels published between 1967-1971 by Joyce Carol Oates become known as the ' Wonderland Quartet." All four were nominated for the National Book Award and them won the prize in 1970. The author was only thirty-two at the time.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would probably agree that Joyce Carol Oates is the most obvious American writer now living who deserves to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The lives of women and the distortions of class are consistently present in her work in ways none of her male contemporaries match and seldom attempt. Uneasiness among critics concerning her productivity may be a proxy for these thornier issues.

The Wonderland Quartet came in a rush, beginning three years after Oates published her first novel. The settings are rural upstate New York and the city of Detroit.

A Garden Of Earthly Delights is the story of young Clara Walpole who attempts to escape the poverty and constrictions of small town life by running away with Loury, a drifter, who deserts her when she becomes pregnant. In a bid to gain control of her life, Clara seduces a married man into believing that he is the father of her child. Although he buys her a car and teacher her to drive, Clara is exhausted by her daring. (In a subsequent novel, them, Oates has a character think: "A woman in a car only appears to be in control.") Eventually, she passes on her alienation to her son.

Expensive People examines how the Everett family becomes part of the upper middle class and its uneasy relationship to its origins played out in the obsession of son Richard to avenge his mother's deceptions. Natashya Romanov is a glamorous, successful novelist whose assumed name is her attempt to erase her working class background. (In a wink to the reader, Oates attributes one of her own stories - The Molester - to Natashya.)

"because we are poor/ Shall we be vicious?" is the epigraph Oates chose for them; it comes from the Elizabethan revenge drama, The White Devil. The race riots in 1960s Detroit becomes the maelstrom that tears the Wendall family apart. Through them, the novel chronicles the declining fortunes of industrial cities and the working class families who achieved prosperity there in post-war America. Maureen is a bookish girl yearning for education but, lacking resources, she turns to prostitution. Jules Wendall, made an accidental celebrity by the riots, sees an opportunity to make money from the destruction.

And the final novel, Wonderland, has been described by critic Elaine Showalter as the surrealistic version of the quartet, beginning during the Depression of the 1930s and ending in the 1960s. In its original version, Oates ended Wonderland ambiguously, with a man and a woman adrift in boat on Lake Ontario, but later revised the novel when, as she described it, she was mentally able to get the woman out of that boat.

Image credit: Joyce Carol Oates, 2009, Getty Images, Los Angeles.

Maxfield Parrish

In honor of Fantasies & Fairytales, an exhibition of the works of Maxfield Parrish, now on display at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, here is a poster that the young Parrish designed for a show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia where he studied art.

Mary Louise Stowell

Mary Louise Stowell (1861-1930) was a native of Hormell , New York, in southern Steuben County. She studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at his reknowned Summer School of Art in Ipswich, Massachusetts in ..... She later lived in Rochester where she taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This poster for The Bookman was included in Les Maitres de l'Affiches, a subscription sereis that ran from December 1895 to November 1900, pulbished by Imprimerie Chaix of Paris, France.

Margaret Bourke-White At Cornell

A lesser known fact about the photo-journalist Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) is that she was at Cornell University in 1926. This photo is from the collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Buffalo: 1901

Evelyn Rumsey Cary created this poster for the Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York in 1901.

Image: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY>

Coles Phillips For Oneida Silversmiths

Coles Phillips (188-1927) was an American artists and illustrator who, like Maxfield Parrish, often turned out engaging advertisements. Here is a 1920 advertisement for the Oneida Silversmiths in Phillips's popular 'fade-away' style. Details of the human figure are left out but the viewer's eye fills them in, in a clever version of tromp l'oeil.

Image: courtesy of the Society of American Illustrators.