THE FEARLESS READER

Happy New Year 2012

2011-12-31T13:28:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-29T07:11:00.008-05:00

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

2011-08-22T13:09:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-16T10:35:00.005-04:00

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

2011-06-09T09:31:00.001-04:00

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

2011-02-15T11:53:00.001-05:00

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

2011-02-02T10:19:00.001-05:00

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

2010-10-04T09:41:00.001-04:00

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

2010-09-09T10:30:00.001-04:00

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

2010-08-17T07:50:00.004-04:00

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.

Criticism As Though Criticism Matters

2010-08-07T10:58:00.008-04:00

At Huffington Post you can read Anis Shivani's The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers. To whet your appetite, I'll give you the list:

William T. Vollmann
Amy Tan
John Ashberry
Mary Oliver
Helen Vendler
Antonya Nelson
Sharon Olds
Jorie Graham
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jhumpa Lahiri
Junot Diaz
Louise Gluck
Billy Collins
Michiko Kakutani

I, too, have read these writers, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes not. What caught my attention was that her criticisms hit the mark, even of the writers whose books I enjoyed. On the Fearless Reader, I try to feature books that I think are worth your time that you might not otherwise hear about, and that often means books that are not contemporary. (One of my most popular pages has been the one about Anabasis by St. John Persse, published in 1924.)

Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey, and Charles Osborne (1968) was one memorable predessor to Shivani. (Many of us suffered through The Fairie Queen and Moby Dick exactly as this trio described.) It will be interesting to see Shivani's take on underrated writers, upcoming, I'll link to it when it comes online.

Women Who Made The Bauhaus

2010-07-31T10:48:00.001-04:00

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

2010-07-22T13:32:00.003-04:00

"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

2010-07-20T15:43:00.005-04:00

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.

Rudolph Ruzikca Again

2010-07-15T13:39:00.004-04:00

Barges and the interconnecting waterways they traveled made New York into the Empire State. As is often the case, it was an outsider, the immigrant Rusicka who etched unforgettable images of his adopted homeland. As the sturdy barge plys ahead, the waves in its wake are so realistically rendered, you can almost feel their movement.

Rudolph Ruzicka - New York Barge, 1908, The Annex Gallery, Santa Rosa, California.

Wonderland: A Quartet

2010-07-01T10:33:00.001-04:00

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.

Rudolph Ruzicka's Hudson River

2010-06-26T14:50:00.001-04:00

Blackwell's Island In Winter is in the collection of the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Ruzicka (1883-1978) was born in Bohemia and after his family moved to Chicago when Rudoplh was ten years old, he took art lessons at Jane Addams's Hull House.

Brooklyn Bridge

2010-06-25T09:56:00.002-04:00

Rudolph Ruzicka's Brooklyn Bridge (1910) is from the collection of the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University.

Maxfield Parrish

2010-06-18T14:39:00.003-04:00

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

2010-06-08T10:01:00.001-04:00

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

2010-05-27T17:22:00.001-04:00

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

2010-05-15T14:53:00.001-04:00

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

2010-05-08T11:45:00.001-04:00

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.

Charles Fergus Binns In Upstate New York

2010-05-01T10:33:00.005-04:00

Charles Fergus Binns, sometimes called 'the father of American studio ceramics', would never have moved to upstate New York from his native. Worcester, England. if Governor Theodore Roosevelt had not signed the law that created what is now the the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1900. Binns became the first director of the college, a position he held from 1905 until his death in 1934. After a success at the 1893 World's fair at Chicago, Binns had considered moving to the States; a challengin position decided it.

Image: Bottle Vase, 1915, Art Insitute of Chicago.

National Poetry Month

2010-04-16T10:21:00.024-04:00

April is National Poetry Month in the United States. So, in the spite of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, who published a Little Treasury of One Hundred Poets One Poem Each in Japan in June 1887, here are some suggestions (but not 100) of recent books by living poets.

Sin - Ai, Houghton, Miflin: 1986

Next Life - Rae Armantrout, Wesleyan University Press: 2007.

What Travels With Us – Darrell Arnoult, Louisiana State University Press: 2005

Louise In Love - Mary Jo Bang, Grove Press: 2001
A Colour For Solitude - Sujata Bhatt, Carcanet: 2002
Watching The Spring Festival – Frank Bidart, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2008

The World, the Flesh and the Angels - Mary Campbell, Beacon Press: 1989

The Beauty Of The Husband - Anne Carson, Alfred A. Knopf: 2001
Genius Loci – Alison Hawthorne Deming, Penguin Books: 2005
Late Wife – Claudia Emerson, Louisiana State University Press: 2005
Why I Look At Pictures – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peregrine Books: 1990

We Are The Young Magicians - Ruth Forman, Beacon Press: 1993

A Working Girl Can’t Win – Deborah Garrison, Random House: 1998
Green Squall - Jay Hopler, Yale University: 2006
Only Bread, Only Light - Stephen Kuusisto, Copper Canyon Press: 2000
Cool, Calm & Collected Poems - Carolyn Kizer, Copper Canyon Press: 2001
I Apologize For The Eyes in My Head - Yusef Komunyaka, Wesleyan University Press: 1986

What Work Is - Philip Levine, Alfred A. Knopf: 1991
Hare Soup - Dorothy Molloy, Faber & Faber: 2004
Red Shoes - Honor Moore, W. W. Norton: 2005
Tenderness - Joyce Carol Oates, Ontario Review Press: 1996
Wolf Moon - Jean Pedrick, Alicejamesbooks: 1974
Jersey Rain - Robert Pinsky, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2000
Telephone Ringing in The Labyrinth - Adrienne Rich, W.W. Norton: 2006

The Best Of It - Kay Ryan, Grove Press: 2010

Heredity - Patricia Storace, Beacon Press: 1987
The Glass Age - Cole Swenson, Alicejamesbooks: 2007.
Miracle Fair - Wislawa Szymborska, W.W. Norton: 2002
Native Ground - Natahsa Tretheway, Houghton, Miflin: 2006
Green-Shaded Lamps - Cornelia Veenendaal, Alicejamesbooks: 1077
Steal Away - C.D. Wright, Copper Canyon Press: 2002

There is a variety of styles to explore and a variety (although not nearly as much as ideal) in backgrounds. Anne Carson is Canadian, Dorothy Molloy is from the United Kingdom, Sujata Bhatt is originally from India, and Wislawa Szymborska is Polish. Leaving aside the considerable challenges of translation and the relative lack of available editions, I strove for variety of subject matter, looking for something beyond the confessional. The personality that come through the work of Ai (born Florence Anthony) is vivid and unabashed. Sujata Bhatt writes tellingly about the inner life of German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and Mary Jo Bang riffs on the screen persona of actress Louise Brooks. And Natasha Tretheway's Native Guard may prove to be one of the best poetry books ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Suffrage Campaigners In Syracuse

2010-04-08T14:12:00.001-04:00

On the occasion of the 140th anniversary of the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, we remember Lousine Havemeyer (1855-1929), a woman who used her wealth to assemble a great collection of French art for the museum. But Havemeyer was also an ardent suffragist who supported the movement with more than her money. It should be noted that Havemeyer gave her financial support to the radical Natioal Women's Party founded in 1913 by Alice Paul. Havemeyer is pictured here, in 1919, campaigning for suffrage with Vida Milholland as the two are welcomed by a police officer in Syracuse, New York. The two women were part of the Prison Express.

Image credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Old Houses On The Hudson

2010-03-22T15:36:00.001-04:00

In 1916, the year he painted Old Houses On The Hudson, Childe Hassam (1859-1935) was living in New York City. Only three years before Hassam had shown several paintings at the notorious Armory Show there. This charming, sturdy landscape, probably a scene painted near West Point in Rockland or Putnam County on the lower Hudson, preceded the beginning of the artist's famous 'flag series' by just months.

Jell-O

2010-03-15T10:21:00.001-04:00

A patent for Jell-O was granted to Pearle B. Waite of Leroy, New York in 1897. Jell-O, an invention of upstate New York.

The photograph Jell-O (1923) by Paul Outerbridge is in the collection of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

View Of Cauyga Lake Near Ithaca

2010-03-08T07:38:00.003-05:00

View Of Cayuga Lake Near Ithaca (1930) by William Charles Baker is from the collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University. If you visit the sixth floor of the museum, a good idea at any time of year but especially now as the snow begins to melt, you can see just what Baker painted. It's morning in this image of the southern tip of Cayuga Lake, viewed from the eastern shore. If you know your Finger Lakes geology, you know that you are looking at the deep end of the lake. When the glaciers that covered the area retreated to the north as the Ice Age ended, they carved a series of crevices that filled in with water from the melting ice to create a spectacular series of lakes with deep waters in fjord-like settings at their southern end and shallow water between flatlands at their northern heads. Rake your fingers through sand and see how it was done.

The Antoinette Faure Questionnaire

2010-03-01T10:45:00.011-05:00

VANITY FAIR’S PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE:
101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life
Edited by Graydon Carter, illustrated by Risko
New York, Rodale, 2009 920.02 VAN

Antoinette Faure, daughter of French President Felix Faure (1841-1899) , invented or at least codified the parlor game sometimes called 'Twenty Questions.' Another precocious teenager, Marcel Proust, took the quiz at Mlle Faure’s salon twice, at age fourteen and then again at twenty. When he published his answers in The Illustrated Review in 1892 as Salon Confidences as Written by Marcel, the game went public. Proust, who became famous, got the credit. In 1993, the magazine Vanity Fair revived the question game. The attraction of the game, now as then, is that a small set of simple questions can evoke a a great variety of answers.

Vanity Fair has persuaded famous people to take the quiz and the results are predictable - and not. Unsurprisingly, many of the famous turn out to be just as boring as the rest of us, giving predictable answers (most, when asked how they would like to die, say they would prefer not die) burnishing their chosen self-images. There are many variations on the notion that lying to spare one's feelings is admissible, an easy take on a delicate question. Writers Joan Didion and Norman Mailer give long answers, in Didion's case precise and pointed, in Mailer's rambling and self-mythologizing.
Moments of revelation do occur. The beautiful and reticent French actress Catherine Deneuve wants to be reincarnated as a lime tree, an intriguing idea that lingers. Doris Day, known for her reticent roles, when asked what she most regrets, answers: "Most of my marriages." Jane Fonda would change about herself "My inability to have a long term intimate relationship." Most poignantly, the late Senator Edward Kennedy responds to a question about the depth of misery: "Suddenly losing a loved one."

My personal favorite is a philosophical moment. Second City comedian Martin Short, when asked what he most disliked about his appearance, answered "People's reactions to it." As do we all.

To answer the Proust Questionnaire online, visit here:

Along The Erie Canal: Arthur Bowen Davies

2010-02-24T15:16:00.001-05:00

Utica, New York native Arthur Bowen Davies (1863-1928) painted this scene of life along the Erie Canal in 1890. A century later Governor Dewitt Clinton's 'Big Ditch' was declared a National Heritage waterway by the United States Park Service. A great undertaking of public engineering when it was built in the 1820s, it remains so today, and is an inspiration to those developing a highspeed rail system for the Nortrheast.

To learn more, visit http://www.eriecanalway.org.

1970: The Lost Year

2010-02-15T11:18:00.009-05:00

On February 1, 2010, a special Man Booker Prize was announced. According to archivist Peter Strauss, no novels published in 1970 were ever nominated for the prize. And so, this May, the Lost Booker Man Prize will be awarded to fill the gap. In compiling a list of nominees, three judges selected books that have stood the test of time in at least one way: they are still in print. The judges were each born around 1970. Read these novels and then try to guess which one will win!

THE BIRDS ON THE TREES by Nina Bawden New York, Harper & Row: 1970
Family life is colored in shades of grey, and relationships are sometimes fatally compromised. In the Birds on the Trees the nature of parental obsession appears in all its potential neurosis. The characterization, story-telling and structure of the novel are superb.
Toby Flower is a shy boy whose growing pains alarm his parents and get him expelled from school. Charlie and Maggie Flower project their own goals onto their son. Toby leaves home and breaks off contact with his parents, who arrange to have him hospitalized by a psychiatrist who is a friend, without realizing that their son and the psychiatrist’s daughter are romantically involved. Their intervention in the relationship drives the final wedge between parents and child.

THE FIRE-DWELLERS by Margaret Laurence New York, Alfred A Knopf: 1969
"Stacey's state of mind is revealed in a swift-flowing stream of dialogue, reaction, reproach, and nostalgia. . . ." - Atlantic Monthly Magazine
The Fire-Dwellers is an extraordinary novel about a woman who has four children, a hard-working but uncommunicative husband, a spinster sister, and an abiding conviction that life has more to offer than tedious everyday routines. Overwhelmed and exhausted by the responsibilities of raising children, Stacey McAndra has only her intelligence and wit to keep her on an even keel and sometimes it is not enough. Marget Laurence, a vastly underrated Canadian writer, possessed the ability to create characters of palpable individuality.

A FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT by Iris Murdoch New York, Viking Press: 1970
The story begins with the happily married Rupert and Hilda celebrating their wedding anniversary with champagne and a newly installed swimming pool. The somewhat less contented couple Axel and Simon provide a foil. But is this suburban idyll an elaborate facade? Murdoch dismantles their illusions, creating an intricate maze of human entanglements. The novel shows how vanity is an obstacle to happiness.

FIREFLIES by Shiva Naipaul New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1970
Shiva Naipaul created a literary sensation with his first novel but died of heart attack in 1985 at the age of 40.
“The impact of his first novel Fireflies was electric. It was showered with praise and won three prizes," wrote Geoffrey Wheatcroft, former literary editor of The Spectator, where Naipaul's work was ofetn published.
Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of V. S. Naipaul. Shiva described his own life as "defined by three poles that don't meet": his Hindu descent, childhood in the Caribbean, and adult life in Britain. In Fireflies The Khojas are an important Indian family in Trinidad. Mr Khoja is piously enshrined by his flock of quarrelsome sisters while, at the bottom of the pecking order, is a girl who ekes out her living by running a roadside vegetable stall and is the heroine of the novel.

FIRE FROM HEAVEN by Mary Renault New York, Pantheon Books: 1969
Fire from Heaven is the first book in Mary Renault’s trilogy about Alexander the Great . First published in the 1970s, the trilogy has long been viewed as the definitive historical novel of Alexander.
Fire from Heaven covers Alexander’s childhood at his father’s Macedonian court. where he is torn by his parents' struggle for power. Alexander is the son of Philip and Queen Olympias, who hates her husband. His mother allows him to participate in her Dionysian rites, manipulating him even into adulthood. Alexander learns the arts of statecraft and war from his father, but is unable to win his approval. Even when Alexander saves his father's life, Philip refuses to acknowledge it.
Power struggles and the bgeinnings of two great love affairs – Alexander and his army and Alexander and Hephaistion are an intimate and tender counterpoint.

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark New Yorkm Alfred A. Knopf: 1970
Spark's 1970 novel of a woman going mad was called "so stark as to be nightmarish" by The New Yorker. The story follows the last day of Lise, whose fate, while on holiday in Europe, is about to be murdered. Lise has been driven to distraction by her job in an accounting office for sixteen years. She leaves everything behind, assuming the persona of a boisterous, garishly-dressed temptress. Her search for adventure becomes a journey to self-destruction.

THE VIVISECTOR by Patrick White New York, Viking Press: 1970
Patrick White is the paterfamilias of Australian literature. His strong narratives make riveting reading. The title suggests White's vision of the artist's approach to his work. Hurtle Duffield is a painter, but the vision is also White's and the novel is ruthless in its dissection of the artist , who shows early signs of genius. His impoverished family basically sells the boy to a wealthy couple who have a disabled daughter, Rhoda. Hurtle escapes his new family by enlisting in the army and later achieves success as a painter..

White does a convincing portrait of the artist as painter. In particular his ability to capture the difficulty of communication and relationships between the characters. The difficulty of articulation, cruelly reduced to Hurtle's inability even to get any words out when he suffers a stroke, is something that White does very convincingly.

Image Credit: Fireflies At Ochanomizu by Kobayashi Kyochi, from the Robert O. Muller Collection at the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Leslie Ragan

2010-02-08T10:15:00.002-05:00

This poster by Leslie Ragan was made for the New York Central Railroad during the first half of the 20th century, when railroad travel was both common and exciting. Now, as the prospect of high-speed rail service in the United States begins to take shape, it is a good time to think about trains. Urban planners before World War II considered rail to be the most efficient and economical means of travel between destinations five hundred miles - or less - apart.
Image: Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

"I want to make from myself a person."

2010-02-02T09:25:00.007-05:00

HUNGRY HEARTS by Anzia Yezierska
New York, Penguin Books: 1987 (1920) 813.52 YEZ

When Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880-1979) was a student at Columbia University in Manhattan, one of her instructors was the philosopher John Dewey. Yezierska had won a scholarship to study ‘domestic science’, something that the immigrant girl’s sponsors considered practical. In an early burst of the willfulness that propelled her out of New York’s immigrant ghetto, Yezierska used the tuition to study history and literature instead. Like some of the female characters she went on to create in her fiction, Yezierska would go to college, but at the price of exile from her family home. Her crie de coeur, uttered in anguish to her famous professor who eventually became her lover was: “I want to make from myself a person.” As do we all.
Yezierska began writing the stories - and getting them published – that became the book Hungry Hearts in 1920 while still a student. It was her most commercially successful book, establishing her as a writer, in spite of subsequent ups and downs in the male dominated milieu of 1920s New York publishing. Samuel Goldwyn bought the film rights to Hungry Hearts and Yezierska worked on the screen play. The movie was shot on location - unusual for the time - on New York's lower east side and was released in 1922.

The character of Shenah Pessah appears in a number of the stories, her verisimilitude vindicated by the author’s intimate knowledge of the experiences she recreates. In Wings, Shenah works as a janitor in the building owned by her tyrannical uncle, sleeping in the damp basement. John Barnes, a college professor, takes a room temporarily, the better to conduct research on New York’s immigrant population. Through their acquaintance is brief, Barnes opens a window to a new world for Shenah when he takes an interest in her, even though he will return soon to a secure life. Inspired, Shenah musters her courage to demand decent payment from her uncle in Hunger. This time the uncle’s bullying cannot squelch Shenah. “Everybody gets wages in America” she tells him, and leaves to take a factory job, a step up from her bleak life of filial servitude.
By now, you understand the strong autobiographical element in these stories. It is a strength, more than a weakness, because Yezierska understands, as St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, that we have to master o inner resistance to life. “No!” one of her characters cries. “I can’t! I won’t. Do it for me!” Her only answer is silence.
Soap And Water tells the story of a woman who toils in a laundry to pay for her education. She perseveres even when she is humiliated by her more fortunate classmates. “I came because I clamored for more vision, more light. But everywhere I went I saw fences put up against me.”
In My Own People, the young woman, this time named Sophie Sapinsky, is forced to confront her limitations when she takes a dispiriting room in a tenement to have the space to write.

We live in a self-absorbed moment but Yezierska lived in a very different time when the energy to make a life by herself, without the support of a family, was painfully transgressive and lonely. The nervous energy it took make something of her leaps from every page Yezierska wrote. Hectic, direct, demanding, her writing takes the reader and shakes off your indifference.
Persea Books, a small press, has reprinted several of Yezierska's works, including the autobiography Red Ribbon On A White Horse.

Bread Givers: A Novel by Anzia Yezierska New York, Persea Books: 2003 (1925)

Red Ribbon On A White Horse by Anzia Yezierska New York, Persea Books: 1987 (1950
The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection New York, Persea Books: 1979
How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska New York, Persea Books: 2003

Charles Zoller: Winter In Rochester

2010-01-23T14:18:00.007-05:00

Charles Zoller (1854-1934) was a successful furniture dealer in Rochester, NY, also the home of the internationally successful Eastman-Kodak Company. George Eastman House and its International Museum of Photography are home to an extensive collection of Zoller's autochrome pictures. Dennis House in Winter was taken in 1925, years after American photographers had abandoned the medium, largely through the influence of Alfred Stieglitz. As usual, the autochrome can even make mid-winter snow look beautiful.

Radiance Of The Ordinary World

2010-01-16T10:28:00.006-05:00

RURAL JAPAN: RADIANCE OF THE ORDINARY
By Linda Butler Washington, DC Smithsonian Institution Press: 2002 952.048 BUT

The photographs in Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary are visual correspondences to moments, just as haiku are correspondences in words. Surprising and lovely images of remote country towns in the snow, especially one of a snow-covered pagoda at Yamagata-ken rising among trees is silently moving. Like the makers of ukiyo-e prints, much of Butler’s work is organized around the atmospherics of weather, as in Spring Rain where drops of water clinging to bare, dark bark appear like so many pearls on a string. The smooth worn ripples of Earthen Floor are evidence of passing time through the passing of countless feet.. In Swimming Carp, these fish that symbolize fortitude and longevity, are captured in a singular moment, as the fish glide through still water that mirrors the silhouettes of trees upside down on its surface become emblematic of timelessness. The effect is created of carp swimming in the sky, a magical sight.
Butler also makes it possible for us to see the material culture of Japan both as beauty and as useful. Yamagata captures the now rare sight of women wearing traditional straw raincoats that protect against the wetness of snow. With the advent of waterproof fabric, these coats are only made for dolls. The conviviality in a picture of a tofu roast that Butler attended will look familiar to Americans who have been to a chicken barbecue. The people who roast bricks of tofu on sticks wear face masks to screen out the smoke. Backlit radishes, or daikon, look like chubby bolts of lightening or surreal tube lights. We see the Bamboo Wisks, that Butler explains are for use in the tea ceremony, arranged for storage in a box of square boxes, giving them the appearance of geometrically ordered wildflowers or some new variety of shadowbox.
Linda Butler has been a frequent visitor to Japan since her students days, spending the year 1967-1968, volunteering at a school at a school for disabled children near Kyoto. When Toyota built an auto plant near her home in Kentucky, Butler became friends with several of the Japanese workers who arrived there. She has experienced all four seasons in Japan, spending much of her time in the northwest part of the main island of Honshu. She writes, in the introduction, of her longtime friendship with the Fujitas, a family she met during a rice harvest.

Butler is also the author of books on such disparate subjects as the Three Gorges Dam Project in China, Quaker architecture and design, and Italy.

Alice R. Glenny

2010-01-09T07:33:00.001-05:00

Alice Russell Glenny (1858-1924) was an American printmaker whose work was inlcuded in the prestigious collection Les Maitres de l'Affiches (Masters of the Poster). The collection was assembled in Paris, france by Jules Cheret. She designed this poster orginally for the May 8, 1895 edition of the Buffalo Courier Evening News.

Best Books Of 2009 & A Few Comments

2009-12-31T11:04:00.007-05:00

Fiction & Poetry:

Too Much Happiness – Alice Munro, New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
Little Bird Of Heaven – Joyce Carol Oates, New York : Ecco Press, c2009.
A Village Life – Louise Gluck New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009.
Brooklyn – Colm Toibin, New York : Scribner, 2009.
Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel, New York : Henry Holt and Co., 2009.
The Believers – Zoe Heller ,Toronto : A.A. Knopf Canada, 2009, c2008.
Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements And a Play by Rita Dove, New York, W.W. Norton & Co.:2009

Other:
Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown by Jennifer Scanlon, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009
Knossos & The Prophets of Modernism by Cathy Gere, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press: 2009.

The Third Mind: American Artists Confront Asia by Alexandra Munro, New York, Guggenheim Museum: 2009.

Any year that brings a new book by Alice Munro is a good year for fiction. Munro's work always surprises and satisfies. Joyce Carol Oates continues as the most inclusive chronicler of contemporary American lives. Both are indispensable writers. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has attested to Oates’ centrality: how, without fanfare or self-congratulation, she has consistently explored the issues of sex, race, and class in a time of ferment. Munro, a universalist, has quite simply become the most deservedly admired writer in hte world. How curious it it that the two were born a few hundred miles apart, children of rural backgrounds who became able, imaginatively, to encompass entire worlds.

In the 1994 film Immortal Beloved, a biography of Ludwig van Bee thoven, a black violinist appeared briefly. Was this character based on historical facts or an inspired instance of colorblind casting? Out of such a y pearl grew Sonata Mulalittica by poet Rita Dove, a classically trained cellist.
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, son of a self-styled 'African prince was a real person and Dove’s book-length narrative is her most ambitious work ever. In Sonata Mulattica ,She connects music "and what it does to those / who make it, whom it enslaves " Among their number are Bridgetower's vain , canny father, a personal assistant to Prince Esterházy. who uses his charm and his son’s talent to conquer the concert halls of France and,the court of England's King George III.The parallels that Dove finds between Beethoven and young Bridegtower are striking: both were musical prodigies, exploited by fathers who used their sons to get fame and fortune, both passionate about music and women. Their paths cross in Vienna in 1803 as Bridgetower premieres Beethoven's daunting sonata a month later, Beethoven is 33, successful, losing his hearing, and frustrated in love. But Bridgetower, as a child, had been sold to the Prince of Wales by his greedy father, a hidden wound. The violin sonata brings them together but Beethoven's power to undo Bridgetower's promising career with a stroke of his pen comews after a misunderstanding and Beethoven altered the sonata’s dedication to Rudolph Kreutzer, consigning Bridgetower to obscurity.

Books that make us reconsider things we thought we knew are memorable occasions. Scanlon, Gere, and Munro do this with their very different subjects.

Charles Lesueur: La Cuisine

2009-12-16T16:23:00.004-05:00

We made our first acquaintance with the French travel writer Charles Lesueur back in August when he visited Lake Champlain. Here is a watercolor drawing of a person cooking below deck on a canal boat, possibly on the Erie Canal. Opened during Lesueur's eleven year journey around the United States, the Erie Canal, an impressive feat of engineering for a young nation, quite probably attracted the curious Frenchman's attention. And he was there before his more famous compatriot, Alexis de Toqueville.

Louis Lozowick: Central Park In The Snow

2009-12-03T07:50:00.003-05:00

Technically, it's not winter yet and there's no snow in New York. But it is Christmastime, a holiday that looms large in New York City, when stores outdo themselves with lavish window displays, huge inflatable cartoon characters float down Fifth Avenue, courtesy of Macy's at 34 th Street and real reindeer may make an appearance at Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes.
Print maker Louis Lozowick (1892-1973) was born in the Ukraine when it was still part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated to the United States at age fourteen and studied art at the National Academy of Design. He traveled widely and lived in New Jersey. Lozowick was greatly influenced by Constructivism and other avant-garde movements of his time. There is also a charming whiff of japonisme in his Central Park of 1940.

Image: Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Ashokan Reservoir

2009-11-24T10:44:00.005-05:00

The Ashokan Reservoir, located in Ulster County, NY, is now included in the eastern portion of the Catskills State Park. It was originally created as part of the system that supplies the metropolitan New York City area with drinking water.

Zulma Parker Steele (1881-1979) was an artists better known for her pottery than for her painting. This version of Ashokan Reservoir is one of several views that Steele created during her time at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in nearby Woodstock.

The Group Of Five, circa 1875

2009-11-16T10:41:00.015-05:00

“Ah! We were not easy to provide for and the restaurants of Paris no doubt remember us. We often changed our meeting place. Sometimes it was at Adolphe and Pele, behind the Opera; sometimes in the square of the Opera Comique; then at Voisin’s whose cellar could meet any emergency and reconcile all tastes. We were wont to sit down to table at seven o’clock, and at two o’clock we had not finished. Flaubert and Zola dined in their shirtsleeves; Tourgeneff lounged on the divan; the waiters were turned out – a needless precaution since Flaubert’s “roar” could be heard from roof to cellar of the house – and we talked literature…” – Alphonse Daudet

“We kept the best of ourselves for those meetings. One would think to himself: I shall tell them this; or else; I shall read that page and take their advice on it. No truckling, no civility! Neither pupils nor masters, but comrades, respectful to the other men, warming themselves in the reflection of their glory and proving by their choice in our profession there is something else besides money and vanity.” – Alphonse Daudet

You could say there were five of them plus the ghost of a sixth. The five were Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896), Ivan Turgenev(1818-1883), and Emile Zola (1840-1902). The sixth man in the group was the late Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870), brother of Edmond (1822-1896). During their adult lives the Goncourt Brothers were rarely apart, writing books and editing journals together, a unique collaboration that was ended by Jules' death from venereal disease (read: syphilis). Daudet and Flaubert died from the same cause. So did many others, famous and forgotten from the 19th century.

The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts (1881) offers a window into the prevalence of venereal disease and the havoc it brought to families and personal relationships. The very next year Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People, a play devoted to the havoc that daring to write about a common but tabooed subject brought to his life. So there were other ghosts at the table than just one missing brother, though that is another story.

The group first got together on April 14, 1874. They shared a frustration with the state of literature, with the popularity of melodrama. They shared the practice of close observation, of a new naturalism in fiction writing. Critics disdained their writing, finding their characters often contemptible and failing to realize that, particularly in the case of Flaubert, the author shared their estimation of his flawed creatures. Reading their works together is an experiment worth the effort, each one enriching the next. One final ghost in the room is the relative lack of available translations of Edmond de Goncourt's work. I offer these two brief quotes in place of more. "A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."
"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

Alphonse Daudet Letters From My Windmill, translated from the French by Geroge Burnham Ives, New York, Putnam’s Sons: 1903 (1869) FIC DAU

Alphonse Daudet Tartine Of The Alps London, Dent-Dutton: 1969 (1880) FIC DAU

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life, translated from the French by Frances Steegmuller, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1993 (1857)FIC FLA

Gustave Flaubert Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, translated from the French by Jacques Barzun New York, New Directions: 1954 (18-? ) 847 FLA

Ivan Turgenev The Torrents Of Spring, translated from the Russian by David Magarshack, London, Hamilton: 1959 (1872) FIC TUR

Emile Zola Therese Raquin translated from the French by Leonard Tancock, New York, Penguin Books: 1962 (1867) FIC ZOL

Image: Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot - The Windmill, before 1875, Louvre Museum, Paris.

A Bridge Across The Hudson

2009-11-12T08:07:00.002-05:00

There aren't very many bridges across the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. My guess is that Louis Lozowick's 1940 print Bridge Across the Hudson may be the Bear Mountain Bridge - not far from High Tor. In any case, this comes from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

High Tor: Up The Hudson

2009-11-02T11:14:00.005-05:00

HIGH TOR (in Four Verse Plays)
By Maxwell Anderson New York, Harcourt, Brace & World: 1959 812 AND

High Tor, the place, is just south of Haverstraw on the west bank of the Hudson, where the river is at its widest. Drenched in back story, it was Henry Hudson’s resting place on his way down the rover in 1609, after giving up his dream of finding a Northwest Passage. Here the eponymous traitor Benedict Andre met with Major Andre to plot the betrayal of West Point during the American Revolution. Here the fictional Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years.
“Torr” is an old English word for a rocky peak.

High Tor, a play in verse, dates from 1937. Anderson, who lived nearby, was aware of the renewed interest in American history, as embodied in the national government’s support of writers producing the WPA Guides to the States. From his home on South Mountain Road, he watched as the mountain’s owner, Elmer van Orden, resisted pressure to sell so that it could be quarried for stone, a job creator during the Great Depression. Van Orden died in 1943, and only then did the county step in to purchase High Tor for the Pallisades Interstae Park. In light of our current environmental problems, High Tor, the play, commands our renewed interest.
The Catskill Mountains possess magical properties, usually blue and purple, they attract wispy clouds of vapor even on sunny days. Against this backdrop Anderson created a fantastic comedy in verse. His protagonist is Van van Dorn, the man who owns the mountain that developers covet, and his fiancée Judith, who sees the price for the mountain as their fortune.

“They want to chew the back right off this mountain, the way they did/across the clove there. Leave the old palisades/ sticking up there like billboards, nothing left/ a false front facing the river”, van Orden tells Judith.
In response to Judith’s reminder that $10,000 is being offered, van Dorn says:
“Well, it’s Federal money/ Damn stiff evaporates. Put it in a sock/ along with mothballs, and come back, next year,/ and there’s nothing left but the smell.”
Art Biggs is a double-dealing developer who connives with Judge Skirmerhorn to push the deal through. Van Dorn sees portents of environmental destruction in the storms and the lightening that swirl around the mountain after the judge serves him with a court summons.Complications ensue after a bank robbery in a nearby town, when the robbers take refuge on the mountain and van Dorn is trapped there by a rockslide. A busy night ensues.

A master of the unlikely beginning, after graduating from the University of North Dakota, Anderson (1888-1956), moved to New York City where he wrote for the prestigious New Republic. His first play managed only 12 performances before closing, but Anderson went on to dominate the American theater for more than a quarter of a century with such plays as What Price Glory?, Key Largo, Knickerbocker Holiday, Winterset, Lost In The Stars, and Anne of the Thousand Days (like High Tor, a verse play). From Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks, Anderson absorbed the charm of setting your play far from home. For his own home in the Catskills of Rockland County, where he did most of his writing, he installed a sprinkler system on the roof, convinced that he did his best writing to the sound of rain.

Up The River: George Bellows

2009-10-21T08:00:00.001-04:00

As part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's journey up the Hudson River, here is a painting by George Bellows, known for his gritty portrayals of urban scenes, made in 1908 to commemorate the 300th anniversary: Up the Hudson, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Turner To Cezanne IV: Claude Debussy

2009-10-16T07:03:00.009-04:00

“However real one’s sufferings are, they look rather quaint and dramatic on paper. Anyway the best thing is not to take all these hardships too seriously. They support what I might call the Cult of Desire. And when all’s said and done, desire is what counts.

The composer whose music is associated with ‘Impressionism’, a term borrowed from the visual arts, was a man who preferred the Symbolist style of painting. Also confounding our expectations, though we now find sublime beauty in his compositions, Debussy strove for modernism, for a new way in music.
Achille Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was one of five children, born in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to a family that lived upstairs over the family china shop. At one point, financial difficulties led to three of the siblings being parceled out to relatives, creating a distance that was never entirely bridged in later life.
Achille, as the boy was then called, began piano lessons by accident but displayed sufficient talent that he enrolled at the Conservatoire de Paris at age ten. He would back into the prestigious Prix de Rome the same way at eighteen. By then, the young man was wrapped up in his first love affair with a wealthy married woman, fourteen years his senior, and he had no desire to leave Paris for two years study in Rome. “Here there is no tomorrow; everything falls asleep” Franz Liszt had opined a few decades earlier, and Claude agreed.
The resulting prize composition, La Damoiselle elue (text by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) with its innovative harmonies appealed to a large audience but the young composer chose to turn his back on professional success, living in poverty and relying on the kindness of his friends.
Now Debussy perfected his literary style, frequently and compellingly quoted by Roberts, using letters to wring financial support from the well-to-do. To his Roman benefactor, he wrote: “First of all please forgive me for taking so long to send news of your poor little musician. The first reason is a cold, an Italian one which became French, but whichever, the mother of all colds.” And to his friend Rene Peter (1893): “When you come on Sunday try to be extremely rich, because if I don’t pay my rent, people (or something resembling them) will hang furiously on my doorbell!”
Given Debussy’s love of words, it is understandable that his early works include exquisite songs, setting the works of several of France’s finest poets including Pierre Louys (Chansons de Bilitis) and Paul Verlaine (Fetes galantes). However the 1890s were a time devoted to perfecting his opera Pelleas et Melisande, not performed until 1902, when it received a lukewarm reception from critics and a public not yet ready for vocal lines that soared independently of the melodies.
In contrast, his tone poem La Mer (1905) was an immediate and immense success. “The sea has been very good to me, and has shown me all of her moods, “he exulted. At the same time, Debussy’s ill-conceived marriage to the naïve and gentle young Lily Texier disintegrated under the combined weight of his moods, his infidelities, and the couple’s financial struggles. It is then, perhaps to be expected that the most stable liaison of Debussy’s life was with Emma Bardac, a woman of means with whom he became parent to his adored daughter Claude-Emma (nicknamed Chouchou), born in 1905, before her parents were freed from their other entanglements. It was typical of Debussy’s self-justifying way that he broke the news of their separation to Lily in a letter, telling her he wanted to be alone when he was already with Emma. “An artist is in the main a detestable interior kind of man, and perhaps also a deplorable husband,” he wrote.
A taciturn man who could be extremely charming when he extended himself, his irony was hard to miss. A sensualist who often lacked the material means to gratification, he used words to manipulate others to get what he wanted. Debussy’s letters are sui generis and while Roberts includes lengthy excerpts, their literary quality and interest does nothing to impede the narrative flow. The book is a model of musical biography, blending the life and the music without making unwarranted connections between the two. And at a mannerly two hundred and some pages, there is no resemblance between a biography and a doorstop.
Debussy died of cancer at fifty-six, only months before the Great War ended. He was spared what might have been the greatest blow: Claude-Emma died in a diphtheria epidemic the next year, at fourteen.

Paul Roberts is a British pianist who has made several recordings of Debussy’s piano music and is also author of the book Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy

CLAUDE DEBUSSY by Paul Roberts London, Phaidon Press: 2008 BIO DEB

And listen to the music:

Nancy Allen, harp, et al: Music of Ravel and Debussy, Angel EMI Classics, GS ALL MRD A78 CD
Dawn Upshaw, vocal, et al: Music of Light, Nonesuch D UPSH VL U12 CD
Veronique Gens, vocal, etal: Chansons de Bilitis, Virgin Classics V GENS NE G21 CD

Georg Solti, conductor, Chicago Symphony: Prelude A L'Apres-midi d"un Faune, La Mer, Trois Nocturnes, London Records EA DEBU NOC S82 CD

Charles Dutoit, conductor, L'Orchestre symphonic de Montreale: Pelleas et Melisande, London Records,

Charles Dutoit, conductor, L'Orchestre de symphonie de Montreale: Pelleas et Melisande, London Records, B DEBU PM A22 CD

Henriette Henriot

2009-10-08T10:03:00.002-04:00

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Just in time for the opening at the Everson Museum of Art of Turner to Cezanne: Masterpeiecs from the Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales (9 October 2009 - 3 January 2010), here is another of the dozen paintings of the actress Henriette Henriot made by Pierre-Auguste Renoir during the years 1874-1876. This is titled simply The Actress. It is the mostly obviously Impressionist of Renoir's portraits of Mlle. Henriot.

Turner To Cezanne III: La France Profonde

2009-10-01T13:48:00.009-04:00

They call it La France Profonde, that intense emotional bond of its people with the land that is France. For Americans, the song America the Beautiful provides a useful analogy. Several impressive French landscapes from the collection of the Davies Sisters, Gwendolyn and Margaret, are included in Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales, a special exhibition that opens at the Everson Museum on 9 October.

Recommended Fiction:

The Wanderer - (Le Grand Meaulnes) – Alain Fournier, translated from the French by Lowell Bair, with an afterword by John Fowles, New York, New American Library, 1953 (1913)

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, Chelsea Green Publishers, White River Junction, VT: (2005) 1953 843.912 GIO
Letters From My Windmill – Alphonse Daudet, in Alphonse Daudet, translated from the French by George Burnham Ives, New York, G. P. Putnam & Sons: 1903 (1869) FIC DAU

Alain-Fournier wrote his incomparable novel of growing up in the countryside just one year before he was killed in the fighting of World War II.

Jean Giono's fable-like story of a lonely shepherd who plants trees in his abandoned valley, turning it into an Edenic garden, prefigures the ideas that the ecological movement would embrace decades later.

Alphonse Daudet's Letters are the work of a man who moves from Paris as he recounts his explorations in the provinces to his Parisian friend. Originally published as a series of articles in the newspaper Le Figaro.

Recommended Films:

The Gleaners And I – Agnes Varda FRE 309.894 GLE
Jean de Floret FRE 791.43 JEA
Manon of The Spring FRE 791.43 MAN

Both Jean de Floret and Manon of the Spring are based on novels by Marcel Pagnol; the films were directed by Claude Berri. Bothe films are set in Provence, after the end of World War I, and the plots deal with the hardships of making a living in the visually beautiful French countryside.

A modern essay on the same theme, in The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda creates a visual essay on gleaning, an ancient agricultural practice, by taking to the road with a camcorder. Varda has said that through filming she came to feel a kinship between her creative process and the work of the people she met. Most people only know of gleaners from Millett's iconic painting The Gleaners (1857). Peasants in rural France have long followed the path of the fall harvest, surviving on the remains of crops that were too small to be swept up by farmers. Varda found many who still practice this humble task, whether digging up potatoes near Lyon or picking apples in Provence.
Through Varda's lens we can imagine contemporary gleaners as critics of consumption and waste in an affluent society. We see a chef who salvages food for his elegant restaurant, a homeless biologist who teaches literature for free, and a man who has lived off trash for ten years. And in a redeeming moment of pure delight, Varda unearths a heart-shaped potato.

William de Leftwich Dodge

2009-09-22T09:09:00.004-04:00

Murals by William de Leftwich Dodge (1867-1935) decorate many public buildings: the Onondaga County Court House in Syracuse, NY; City Hall in Buffalo, NY; the State Capitol Building in Albany, NY; and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

After a life of international travel, Dodge and his wife, Francesca, built a home in Setauket on the north shore of Long Island. Their dream house, in the Greek Revival style, they called Villa Francesca. In this painting, along with Francesca Dodge, notice the iris and roses of spring. In the center of the fountain, Pan plays his flute as the gargoyles spray jets of water at his feet. An idyll indeed.

Stepping In the Fountain At Villa Francesca, c. 1916, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Did The Beatles Destroy Rock and Roll?

2009-09-15T13:49:00.011-04:00

HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK ‘N’ ROLL :
An Alternative History of American Popular Music
By Elijah Wald New York, Oxford University Press: 2009 81.64 WAL

Vibe, and Spin are gone: Rolling Stone is in trouble. Say goodbye with no tears. The popular music press, broadly defined, is a story told by men, for other men.

“It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music that is rarely true. The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio. And it is not just historians. The people who choose to write about popular music, even while it is happening, tend to be far from average consumers and party goers and often despise the taste and behavior of their more cheerful and numerous peers.” (Wald)
Some men who make their livings playing music understand this. Bandleader Vincent Lopez, in 1924: “The success of the public ballroom depends on whether it is favor with the women patrons.” And Little Milton in the 1990s: "Basically, for every woman that comes, you can figure that she’s going to have at least three men to follow that one woman." Elijah Wald, man though he is, is also an iconoclastic chronicler of the music scene. His choice of title grabs the reader, but though it is the end point of his tale it is not deceptive. Wald builds an alternativ e narrative of 20th century popular music that is fascinating and persuasive.
The craze for ragtime (a two beat music) arrived shortly after commercial recording, capturing and disseminating a new era in sound. The switch to a four-beat based music and the new respectability of public dancing let a thousand dance bands flower. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (all white) played to the popular prejudice that the new style was the product of untutored inspiration, as did James Reese Europe and “His Superior Colored Musicians.” Eubie Blake: “Europe’s orchestra was filled with readin’ sharks. The popular 1910s dance tea, of Vernon and Irene Castle brought Europe’s band to the concert hall with them.
It was John Philip Sousa who coined the term “canned music”, so great was his frustration at the lack of a system for collecting royalties from the sale of the early cylindrical recordings of his marching band. In general, these early recordings were made by journeymen musicians, not stars and this was accepted as a good thing at a time when sheet music sales were an important source of musical income. If a tune became too closely associated with one performer, others would not need the sheet music to play it and the audience wanted live music (and dancing) as a primary form of entertainment.
Wald is always careful to take account of what audiences were listening )and dancing) to, and what cross-influencing went on among musicians. His book is an antidote to Kierkegaard’s maxim that we live life forward but understand it backwards. This leads him to a reappraisal of the Paul Whiteman Band of the 1920s, that commissioned and premiered Rhapsody In Blue. Wald tells his story forward, not slant.
The rise and fall of the big bands can be understood in terms of economics. During the Great Depression when all work was scarce, musicians banded together and toured widely, working for meager wages and performing constantly. After World War II ended, plentiful jobs and higher wages made big bands less profitable and less attractive.
Mitch Miller, a prolific record producer in the 1950s, made Columbia Records into the top seller of popular hits through an eclectic selection of musical sources, from folk, blues, hillbilly, and Latin and African music, which he then assigned to a very carefully and narrow selection of artists and studio musicians. One amusing bit of information is that “Come On-A My House”, Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 novelty hit was written by Ross Bagdasaran who would go on the create the group Alvin & The Chipmunks
The title is only a small part and the penultimate one at that, but Wald’s larger points, reiterated throughout the decades of changing musical styles are that working bands have always been required to play a range of music to please live crowds than recording artists and that while the Beatles borrowed from black musicians, as Paul Whiteman had four decades earlier, the result was not the same. Where Whiteman’s arrangements led to a greater appreciation of black music in the 1920s, in the 1960s white music became ‘progressive’ and black music was relegated to a narrow corner, known successively as soul, disco, and hip hop. And just before the Beatles took America by storm, girl groups and female songwriters had been achieving unprecedented success. a sign that times were changing.

Notice that How The Beatles Destroyed Rock And Roll is published by Oxford University, also publisher of Dusty: Queen Of The Mods, another recent unconventional and rewarding book on popular music. If these two books represent a trend, it is a welcome one.

Edward Steichen At Lake George

2009-09-08T09:08:00.002-04:00

Photographer Edward Steichen shot The Big White Cloud Over Lake George in 1903. It and numerous other works by Photo-Secessionists are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Turner To Cezanne II: The French 'Paysage'

2009-09-01T13:33:00.011-04:00

FRENCH LANDSCAPE AND THE MODERN VISION by Magdelana Dabrowski New York, Museum of Modern Art: 2000 758.144 DAB

The period of 1880-1920 in France saw familiar landscapes, both urban and rural become a subject of intense scrutiny from painters and photographers (armed with the latest invention - the camera). As more and more people migrated to cities for work and the national government embarked on an aggressive program of road and railroad building, people from the cities were able to vacation in the country. No museum in the United States has a collection better suited to illustrating the relationship between the painted landscape and the photographic one.

THE FAUVE LANDSCAPE by Judi Freeman New York, Abbeville Press: 1990 758.109 FRE

Also the product of a museum exhibition, The Fauve Landscape originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The time period is narrow, about 1904-1908, but the artists ranged widely in search of subject matter, throughout France and Belgium, an invading army -armed with paint brushes instead of weapons. Lush, high-voltage colors applied to canvas with brio, and it was the bright colors and the vehemence of their application that earned these artists their nickname that translates as 'the wild ones.'

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography by Graham Robb

New York, W. W. Norton: 2007 944 ROB

"I was brough up in an age when the French, still more or less ignorant of their own country, had not yet begun to travel." - Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954)

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that we live life forward but understand it backward. Graham Robb inverts this notion to reveal how recently the France we think we know came into existence.

In the first millennium the place then known as Gaul was divided in two, between the land of Oc and the land of Oil, depending on how people pronounced the word 'yes', the division corresponded roughly to the influence of the Franks in the north and west and that of the Romans, followed by the Burgundians, in the south. People worked the land differently and raised different crops: in the north there were open fields, in the central area were woods, and in the south people favored a patchwork of fields enclosed by hedges and paths.

Rural France, which was most of it until the 20th century, had two seasons: the season of labor and the season of idleness. The calculus of caloric expenditure determined how people went about their work and moved from place to place. Isolationism proved to be a good strategy for keeping scarce resources, especially precious food, at home, so there was little interest in commerce. During the long winter season people huddled together, even including their animals, doing as little as possible to conserve heat and food - hibernation, Robb calls it. For centuries it was left to pilgrims, peddlers, beggars, and bandits to roam the poorly charted countryside. When Sir Walter Scott published his novel Quentin Durward (1823) his invented descriptions of the charms of the Loire Valley brought tourists there. The well to do lived in the bourgs, or cities. The enterprise of smugglers kept borders porous and spread some small wealth to the countryside as a result.

Families organized themselves around basic necessities in ways that the middle classes found embarrassing and distasteful, explaining the blank spots in official histories. Marriages were only formalized when needed to legitimate children, giving rise to the maxim "A woman gives birth after three months, but only the first time." Youngsters were often dispatched on their own to the city, where they earned their keep as servants, prostitutes or pimps to the rich. When hospitals began to be built during the 19th century, their construction often included a tour d'abandon, a revolving barrel that allowed parents to abandon their babies with no questions asked.

How difficult was it, to get around in the Ancien Regime? Louis XIV, the Sun King and instigator of grand infrastructure programs, including the laying out of royal boulevards, never traveled without his own crew of road-menders. Though the rich traveled by coach, it was not unusual for an unlucky passenger to be thrown from a coach as it hit a bump. The poor traveled by foot or, if they were lucky, might have the use of a dog cart. Pilgrimages were the only tourism that most people got to experience, which explains the revelry and bartering that accompanied the praying, and the attempts of the Church to suppress them.
Like transportation, communication was slow and laborious and contributed to the patchwork of place and identity. Robb dubs novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) his "century's greatest expert on gossip and pre-industrial communications" for his theory that gossip traveled cross country at nine miles per hour.

Following the French Revolution, the new central government divided France into 91 administrative departements, small enough so that citizens could travel to their government offices in a single day. It also created the post of national Inspector of historic monuments to foster a sense of national pride. Prosper Merimee (1803-1970), author of Carmen, held the post from 1834 to 1852, spending three full years on the road. Thanks to his efforts, Vezaley, Saint-Denis and Strasbourg Cathedral were saved from the wrecking ball.

Robb is entertaining as he explains the recent origins of 'ancient' traditions. La Cuisine barely existed until economic development invented it to promote local foodstuffs. The Tour de France, a formal event since 1903, merely ratified what amateurs had been doing for decades. Millions had been liberated from the confines of their villages by the invention of this cheap "mechanical horse." If you owned a bicycle, Robb reminds us, you could broaden your search for work or a mate, "which is why the bicycle has been credited with increasing the average height of the French population by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations."

The nation's school system, under the Third Republic, sought to eradicate illiteracy. Smarting from a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Germans in the War of 1870, the government also used the schools to force children to give up their local patois and to learn standard French. The draconian program has been called "interior colonization" as humiliation and corporal punishment were routinely used.

Illustrations in order of appearance: Longivy: Le Soir; Le Crachin, Morgat; Le travail aux Champs.

These illustrations and more by Henri de Riviere (1864-1951) are available at the website http://www.henri-riviere.org/

Early Morning In Buffalo

2009-08-26T08:28:00.001-04:00

In 1910 the Photo Secession group founded by Alfred Stieglitz organized an International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at what was then called the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The careful selection of 600+ photographs was Stieglitz's bid for recognition of the medium as an art form.

Image: David Bonnar's Early Morning In Buffalo (1921) @ Project Gutenberg is reprinted from Pictorial Photographs of 1920.

An American Artist In Tokyo

2009-08-15T08:21:00.000-04:00

AN AMERICAN ARTIST IN TOKYO
By Michiyo Morioka Seattle, WA, The Blakemore Foundation-University of Washington Press: 2007 709.2 MOR

Frances (Wismer) Blakemore (1906-1997) was born in Illinois, the daughter of German immigrants. Her mother had been an art teacher, her father ran a successful restaurant business. When George Wismer won eighty acres in a lottery, the family moved to Spokane, Washington. Frances worked her way through the university, so it took her ten years to earn her degree in art, but she also used the time to get commissions for commercial art work that led to her involvement in the Northwest Printmakers Association, gaining exposure for her art. After her graduation in 1935, France surprised her family for marrying a graduate student of literature, Glenn Baker. It was Glenn’s facility in languages that took them to Japan on a ‘honeymoon’ that lasted for five years.
The young couple lived in Tokyo, where the fashion-conscious Frances drank in the beauty of traditional Japanese textiles and ceramics, as well as continuing to explore new ways of print-making. Japanese bath was an elegant version of a traditional custom. Purse-Seiners is a cubist print of fisherman working with their nets, a style she had employed since her school days. The worsening tension between Japan and the United States led Frances to sail for Honolulu in July of 1940. She was still there when the Pearl Harbor attack took place.
During their years in Japan Frances had become fluent in Japanese and immersed herself in the culture. She had seen the political situation from the inside and was torn by her sympathy for the Japanese people, most especially for her close friends. She went to work for the Office of War Information as a result of all these experiences and her propaganda leaflets are not only artistically accomplished they reflect her respect and understanding of the consequences of war for ordinary citizens.
Eager to return to Japan when the war ended, the Blakes were exceptional candidates for the Army of Occupation. Frances was devastated to find that all her Japanese friends had disappeared without a trace. Her art work at the time illustrates the cultural clash: while Jeeper’s Japan attempts to educate the Americans about local customs and practices, it also shows the terrible toll taken on the Japanese people. When players seem a bit off key, They’re absorbing calories vicariously shows a night club scene where Americans dine and dance while the Japanese musicians are gaunt and pale. A sharp observer of the complex social relations between American personnel and their Japanese ‘hosts’, she portrayed awkward Americans encountering the impeccable manners of the Japanese.
Typist At Work is a picture of a second generation Japanese American woman who returned to work on the Allied reconstruction of the country. The cartouche in the upper left corner contains the word ‘Democracy’. The smokestack seen through the window is a sign of new industry,
After marrying her second husband, an American attorney, Thomas Blakemore, in Japan, Blakemore continued to experiment with the various trends in art. For many years then Blakemore was involved in a modern art gallery in Tokyo that became internationally respected. She returned to Seattle, due to her husband's’s ill health, spending her last decade there.

The Fearless Reader Art Gallery

2009-08-13T15:35:00.002-04:00

It's a new feature, sort of. You may have noticed that, in recent months, art works with a connection to New York State have appeared here. Now, the complete art gallery is available at a click. Just look at any one of them and click on the ART GALLERY link at the bottom of the post...and all of them will appear, in the order they were posted.

Lake Champlain

2009-08-08T08:40:00.001-04:00

The Frenchman Charles A. Lesueur (1778-1846) painted this watercolor of Lake Champlain on August 17, 1816, while traveling in the northeastern United Sates. Two decades before Alexis de Tocqueville, Lesueur crossed the Atlantic to see how things were going in the former French colony known as the Louisiana Purchase. The Album of Views of the United States from 1817 to 1836 includes scenes from many points up and down and around the greater Mississippi River basin.

Images from the collection of the Museum of Franco-American Cooperation, Blerancourt, France.

Turner To Cezanne: A Guide To The Impressionist Landscape

2009-08-01T10:27:00.015-04:00

Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales will be on display from 9 October 2009 to 3 January 2010 at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York. This is the first of a series of articles relating to the art and artists in the exhibition.

A GUIDE TO THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE: Day Trips from Paris to Sites of Great Nineteenth Century Paintings
By Patty Lurie Boston, Little, Brown and Company: 1990 758.144 LUR

It’s not easy to remember from this distance in time that the early French Impressionists were regarded as a bunch of lunatics, unable to paint a subject straight. Painting outdoors, painting quickly, painting the homely scenes of land, water, and sky before them, they produced works that affronted sensibilities accustomed to painstakingly worked visions of literary and historical allusion.
Author Patty Lurie’s inspired idea to follow the trail of these artists from the English Channel, up the Seine and along the Oise and the Loing Rivers, gives the book its organizing principle. Placing works of art next to photographs taken by the author and by Bertrand de Chasuvigny, what is more surprising than signs of modernity encroaching on beloved images is the verisimilitude that the Impressionists achieved with their fracturing of realist technique.
Alfred Sisley’s views of Marly, just northwest of Paris are those of one who lived there, familiar with the movement of light across buildings and down in streets through days and years. He juxtaposed warm and cool colors to admirable effect. Sad then, to realize that these works did not bring the artist commercial success.
For those who are only familiar with Pontoise through the works of Pissarro, Morisot, and Ceanne, it may come as a surprise that the town is a suburb of Paris. Thanks to the Impressionists, Pontoise lives in the imagination as a bucolic retreat saturated in greens. Pontoise was where Berthe Morisot moved away from the Barbizon style toward Impressionism. Next to arrive was Pissarro, who then persuaded Cezanne to visit. Where Morisot painted the light of early morning, Pissarro turned his back on the River Oise to focus on the hillside houses by the old road.
Argenteuil, Monet’s refuge from the Franco-Prussian War became the quintessential Impressionist town. The trains, boats, and bridges of Monet’s Argenteuil paintings hint at the industrial suburb that it became in the 20th century. Monet’s sweeping views of the Seine are now interrupted by office buildings in the distance.
Honfleur and Trouville on the Nomany coast are still the seaside resorts that they were in the 1870s and the ghosts of Monet and Eugene Boudin would not be lost for long if they could return. Lurie even managed to find s group of cows who appeared familiar with Boudin’s Seven Cows In A Meadow, Stormy Sky, c. 1881-1888.
For those fortunate enough to be able to use this volume as a travel guide, Lurie includes maps, directions and walking and transportation information.

Charles Zoller

2009-07-22T14:23:00.002-04:00

Charles Zoller (1854-1934) was a successful furniture dealer from Rochester, NY. home of the Eastman-Kodak Company. He was one of the earliest Americans to use the autochrome color process - 1907 - and an accomplished amateur photographer. Seaside Resort, from the International Center for Photography in Rochester is undated and the location is, as yet, unverified. A perfect summer image.

Morocco

2009-07-15T10:16:00.016-04:00

"Husbands in our country are born with an instinct for betrayal."

If most readers know anything of Morocco, it is the bizarre erotic fantasies of American expatriate Paul Bowles's 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky. In stark contrast is the first novel written by a Moroccan woman (and in Arabic rather than the colonial French) to be translated into English. The Year of the Elephant explores a classic literary theme: the uneasy interplay between local traditions and global modernism. Abouzeid examine this patriarchal society's devaluation of women through themes of work and of the difficulties of male/female relationships. Here and in The Last Chapter, Abouzeid draws parallels between individuals struggling for independence with the forces of prejudice and poverty and the struggles of Morocco to create a place for itelf in a world largely shaped by outside forces. History is always a silent mover in her writing which is spare but not doctrinaire.

Leila Abouzied (b. 1950) is the daughter of an interpreter for Morocco's former colonial government. A university graduate in London, Abouzeid has worked as a radio and television journalist before turning to writing full time in1992.

Dr, Fatema Mernissi (b. 1940) is a sociologist who grew up in the harem of a Moroccan household during the 1940's and early 1950's, a world in which the family employed a doorman to prevent the women from leaving the house without permission from their husbands, a world of extended families living under one roof. Dreams of Trespass is often poetic in its descriptions of this claustrophobic family life, making the reader feel the sensations of light, heat, tart and sweet, that leaven the boredom of daily life. A graduate of the Sorbonne and former consultant to UNESCO, Mernissi currently teaches at Mohammed V University in the Moroccan capital city of Rabat.For a richer appreciation of these literary works, French writer Annette Solyst's book Morocco is an enjoyable and colorful introduction to the history and geography, art and architecture, local foods and customs.

Unlike many of its neighbors, Morocco was never part of the Ottoman Empire, only subjected to Spanish and French incursions late in the 19th century that resulted in a joint Protectorate signed in 1912, that ended the Sultan's resistance movement. The Casablanca Massacre of 1954 re3ignited the independence movement, which Zahra, in The Year of the Elephant, takes part in. Independence came in 1956, with the Moroccan Royal Family participating in the struggle. While the French acted as colonial administrators, they boasted that they were training future leaders for the country, but at the time of independence there were only forty college graduates and none of them were women. Indeed, only six women had secondary school diplomas. For tactical reasons, the French had not encouraged a move away the traditions of the local dynasties. Thus, they built a modern infrastructure of cities and roads, but did not foster an education system.

The multi-colored arabesques of the glazed pottery of Fez, , the souks of Marrakech with its spices and foodstuffs are the products of their unique geography, located on the northwest tip of Africa, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, a land of coastal plains, separated from the Sahara desert by the Atlas Mountains.

THE YEAR OF THE ELEPHANT by Layl Abuzeid, translated by Barbara Parmenter Austin, University of Texas Press: FIC ABU

THE LAST CHAPTER by Leila Abu Zayd, translated by Leila Abuzeid & John Liechety Cairo, American University Press: 2000 FIC ABU

DREAMS OF TRESPASS by Fatema Mernissi Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley: 1994
964.008 MER

MOROCCO b y Annette Solyst New York, Barnes & Noble Books: 2000 916.4 SOL

Leon Dabo: Evening On The Hudson

2009-07-08T14:47:00.001-04:00

Evening on the Hudson by Leon Dabo, 1909, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Putting Parsley Around A Pig

2009-07-01T10:49:00.006-04:00

A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL by Dolores Hayden

New York, W. W. Norton: 2004 307.76 HAY

You are looking at an aerial photograph of a golf course in Palm Desert, California. The 'parsley' is the pink foliage that protects golfers from seeing the ugliness of the surrounding area. "Putting parsley around a pig" is a term used to describe how developers disguise bad projects.

Architect and historian Dolores Hayden's field guide to development run amok, illustrated by Jim Wark's aerial photography makes appalling, and, at the same time, humorous reading - gallows humor, that is. Who knew that urban planners were such a zany bunch? Maybe it's to keep from weeping at the desecration of the landscape, the trash buildings that sprout relentlessly, and the unintended consequences of well-meaning programs and subsidies, all of which Hayden lays out in her useful introduction.

But you will remember what you've read because of the nicknames. Zoomburbs are suburbs that grow even more metatastically than Boomburbs. They are filled with Tract Mansions and Starter Castles and for the less well-to-do there are Snout-Houses (pigs get little respect from planners), those disorienting rows of garages jutting out from the houses that are barely visible behind them. New gated communities are Privatopias and for those who like their money and their homes old, there are Valhallas, charming old towns that attract the new rich, who proceed to engulf what first attracted them with...you guessed it...Tear-Downs and Starter Castles. And for your home away from home, there's the Rural Slammer, should you be unlucky enough to go to one of those new prisons.
Commercial developments have their own terms of art. In this lingo, a Duck is a building that looks like what is being sold within, as in the lemonade stand in the shape of a lemon. Billboards are known as Litter On A Stick. And Ground Cover is not pachysandra but, rather, easily bulldozable large scale buildings like self-storage colonies.

And then there are the acronyms. Most of us are familiar with NIMBY, meaning 'not in my back yard.' Add to that LULU, a locally unwanted land use with consequences unforeseen when it was approved, and TOAD, a temporarily obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site. Anyplace experiencing hard economic times will be home to many TOADs.
If, after reading A Field Guide To Sprawl, you want to find out more, visit http://www.doloreshayden.com/.

Syracuse China

2009-06-22T19:34:00.005-04:00

Magazine advertisement for Syracuse China, 1919.

Happy 400th Birthday, Hudson River

2009-06-15T13:15:00.007-04:00

CHRONICLES OF THE HUDSON: Three Centuries of Travelers' Accounts edited by Roland Van Zandt New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press: 1971 917.473 VAN

From the first visit by a European, Florentine explorer Verrazano in 1524, the 'River of Steep Hills' has awed visitors. Henry Hudson's navigator, Robert Juet, described sailing up its uncharted waters in 1607 as "pleasant with Grasses and Flowers, and Goodly trees." In the 18th century, naturalist Peter Kalm came to stay with Benjamin Franklin for two years, on a mission to collect herbs and tree specimens for the Swedish Royal Academy.After the Revolution, the river became a flowing highway to the west with the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton and the opening of the Erie Canal, connecting the river to the Great Lakes. Making a triumphal return visit from France 1824, war hero General de Lafayette sailed up the river for five glorious days. At West Point the cadets lined up on the shore, as if by magic, to greet him. At Troy the young ladies of the Emma Willard School recited an ode composed for the occasion. In between these events, the general stopped at the country seats of the valley's landed gentry.The new century brought British visitors everywhere in the valley, perhaps drawn by the stinging rejection administered to their amour propre by their former colony. Fanny Kemble's stage career began by accident in 1832 when the stagecoach she was riding in overturned, leaving her stranded with an injured aunt to care for. Kemble earned money by giving readings from Shakespeare as she traveled and writing a wildly successful book about her exploits, Journal of a Residence in America. Social commentator Harriet Martineau got a book out of her trip - Society in America - and the enmity of some of her hosts for her early and outspoken support for the abolition of slavery.A continuing thread in narratives of the river is the search for its source. In 1836, Governor William L. Marcy ordered a geological survey of the state. Surveyor William Redfield recorded his explorations, in the process climbing and naming the highest Adirondack peak as Mount Marcy and discovering the head of the Hudson at Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, a lake in the shape of a teardrop. It was left to a dedicated outdoors man, Charles Fordham, to canoe from that point down the rapids to Glens Falls in 1880.There are dissenters in any crowd. When the French composer Jacques Offenbach toured the valley in 1876 he barely noticed the river, so wrapped up in his own petty travails that he made no mention of the splendors spread before him. The acerbic Henry James, revisiting his home after decades abroad, penned these sour words in The American Scene (1907), in response to the breathtaking train ride up the east side of the Hudson from New York to Albany, "It has taken our ugly era to thrust in the railroad at the foot of the slope."Editor Roland van Zandt has assembled an intriguing anthology, with many period illustrations.

HUDSON RIVER LANDINGSby Charles Wilstach Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill: 1933 974.7W Paul Wilstach (1870-1952) was an avid traveler and researcher, and an exemplary writer, marrying history and geography seamlessly. For many years Wilstach lived as close to the Library of Congress as he could get. An early contributor to National Geographic Magazine, Wilstach also published several books, including an edition of the letters of Thomas Jefferson, as well as several plays that were produced on Broadway. He brought his trademark curiosity to the writing of Hudson River Landings.Human and natural history interweave throughout the story. River tides led the early European explorers to believe they had found a passage to the Orient, thus luring even more boatloads to head west in search of the east. At West Point the revolutionaries blocked British passage up the Hudson, stretching chains across the river that were forged from locally mined iron. The river's restless kinetic energy inspired innovations in transportation and energy that opened up a continent.Wilstach introduces us to the Livingstons. one of the greatest, and most numerous, of the valley's manorial families. The first (of four) Robert Livingstons was granted a patent by England's King George II to 160,000 acres extending from the Massachusetts state line west to the Hudson River in what is now Dutchess County. The year was 1686, the same year that the British settled at Fort Orange (Albany). A refugee from England's 'Glorious Revolution', Livingston had the good fortune to speak Dutch, the language of the upper Hudson's first settlers. This gave him a leg up on the competition that Livingston put to good use, marrying into the wealthy Schuyler family and adding their vast acreage to his own. The next Robert Livingston, a pro-British sympathizer but a prudent patroon, signed the Declaration of Independence. The British responded by sailing an extra forty miles of the Hudson to burn down his home at Clermont, after they finished sacking the city of Kingston.The fingerprints of the Dutch system of land patents and patroonship that Wilstach describes are still evident today. From Van Cortlandt Manor in the lower Hudson, to that of the van Rensselaers in the capital district, their names and the names they gave to things remind us that the valley was Dutch before it was English.

PHANTOMS OF THE HUDSON VALLEY by Monica Randall Woodstock, NY, Overlok Press: 1995 779.474 RAN

Ninety miles north of Manhattan, near the town of Rhinecliff, stands the ruin of a remarkable house. Wyndcliff, the probable inspiration for the catchphrase "keeping up with the Joneses", was built in 1852 for the wealthy Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones. Her niece, Edith Wharton, decsribed it in her autobiography A Backward Glance this way: "I was obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granite exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home."Most people first encounter the Hudson Valley in the pages of Washington Irving's The Headless Horseman Of Sleepy Hollow. Painters and psychics have long been drawn to its otherworldly atmosphere. The rich built homes that evoked the country seats of European royalty, a castle on the Rhine or a chateau on the Loire. In an endless loop of imitation the Vanderbilts at Hyde Park and the Livingstons at Barrytown created new world versions of Versailles that, in turn, became the models for Hollywood producers of costume pictures like Marie Antoinette. Each home has its own personal history and some even have resident ghosts.Villa Lewaro in Dobbs Ferry was built for the first black millionaire in America. Sarah Breedlove was born in Louisiana, the child of former slaves. Married at fourteen, she was widowed at twenty when her first husband was lynched by a white mob. Breedlove became Madame C. J. Walker, marketing her hugely successful line of hair products designed for black women. It was unprecedented for a black person to buy property in Westchester County in 1916 when Walker moved there. While her new home was under construction, Walker took her petition to President Wilson in Washington demanding the end of lynching.On a narrow island by the east shore near Fishkill, a replica of a medieval castle perches, complete with a moat and a drawbridge. Francis Bannerman was a Scottish immigrant; his wife was a psychic who believed she had been Queen Elizabeth I in a previous life. Together, they bought Pollopel Island in 1900 for $1500 and built 'Bannermans' Castle'. Although he collected munitions as a hobby, the quixotic, wealthy Bannerman worked tirelessly for world peace. In 1920 there was a fire and explosion at the castle and it has stood abandoned for decades. Purchased by the New York State Department of Parks & Recreation in 1964, it awaits an uncertain future, a memorable sight if you take the Amtrack Hudson River Line train from Albany to New York.If the romance of the past lives anywhere, it lives here among the crouching gargoyles, crumbling turrets, moldering leather bound books, abandoned gardens and weed-cracked swimming pools. Photographer Monica Randall's sepia-toned pictures capture the lonely decline of its once splendid residences.Visit http://www.hudsonvalleyruins.org/for more information.

Images:

1. James Bard - The Hudson Valley Steamboat Rip Van Winkle, 1854, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2. Unidentified photographer - Wyndcliffe in Better Days, reproduced in Phantoms of the Hudson Valley.

Frederick Edwin Church: Olana in Winter

2009-06-08T09:48:00.003-04:00

2009 is the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that now bears his name. Many commemorative events are planned. To find out more, visit http://www.ny400.org/.

Frederick Edwin Church View from Olana in the Snow, c. 1871, Colby College Art Museum, Maine.

Miss Don't Touch Me

2009-06-01T10:16:00.000-04:00

If you think graphic novels are poor cousins to the real thing or intended for adolescents, you will be surprised by this first English translation of Hubert (author) and Kerascoet (illustrator). Originally published as two separate works, The Virgin In The Bordello and Blood on Their Hands, this tale of Paris in the 1930s is full of mystery, charm and sophistication.
A faceless murderer, "The Killer of the Dances" is on the loose, preying on the newly minted working girls of the postwar era who frequent dance halls and pleasure palaces with their new found freedom and pocket money. Among them are Blanche, a timid, hardworking orphan and her fun loving friend Agathe, who share a tiny flat as they eke out their living as maids. It is the iconoclastic Agathe who remarks that the Church must be happy to have a killer illustrating their sermons for them.

When Agathe is killed by a stray gunshot from the next flat, a distraught Blanche cannot convince the police or her employer that a crime has been committed. They dismiss it as a suicide and Blanche is fired from her job.

Desperate to find work, Blanche is hired at the Pompadour Hotel, actually a house of prostitution, where she wears the black and white uniform of a maid but is forced to fend off the advances of the customers, including the Chief of Police - hence the nickname Miss 'Don't Touch Me.'
The delicious plot unfolds with realistic touches; the girls are taken in a paddy wagon for mandatory medical tests and the great chanteuse Josephine Baker makes an appearance, helping Blanche on the trail of the killers. At one point, upon discovering a tunnel that leads to an old convent cellar where the killers hide, Josephine touches a drop of blood on the stone floor, commenting, "I'd be surprised if this were the blood of Christ."
The illustrations are witty and knowing about traditions in French art, too. Street scenes evoke the works of Manet and Caillebotte, dramatic moments borrow the palette of the Fauves, and the characters are tart, saucy, and soo familiar looking. Madelene Mommepuy and Sebastien Cosset work together as the illustration team known as Kerascoet. They adopted as their signature the name of Mommepuy's home town in Brittany.

MISS DON’T TOUCH ME by Hubert & Kerascoet, translated from the French by Joe Johnson (originally published in French as La Vierge du Bordel and Du Sang sur les Mains). Paris, Dargaud: 2007 745.1 HUB

John Marin And The Fulton Chain Of Lakes

2009-05-27T13:34:00.002-04:00

John Marin (1870-1953) was known for his abstract style of landscape painting. He had already had a solo show at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291 (in 1909) when he painted this picture.

The Fulton Chain, as it is called, is really one long lake perforated by a series of straits. It is located in the Adirondack State Park, New York.

The Fulton Chain of Lakes, 1912, Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine.

The Glass Age

2009-05-15T14:11:00.004-04:00

THE GLASS AGE by Cole Swensen, Farmington.ME, Alicejamesbooks: 2007 811.54

Did you know that in Middle English, windows were called 'wind eyes'? Cole Swensen's poems in The Glass Age (Alicejamesbooks: 2007) are so full ideas that their forms disappear, much as glass disappears as you look through it. In short:

book as perfect metaphor for i ts subject.Technically, glass is an amorphous solid, usually made from humble substances like ash or sand. It took centuries for humans to perfect the marvel of a glass that you can see through. Partisans of the early Alexandrians and the 16th century Venetians claim credit for the invention of clear glass; more certain is that the Persian polymath known as Alhazen (965-c.1039) disproved the ancients' belief that light is a ray that flies out from the eye to an object. Was it, Swensen wonders, the infidelity of early windows that made the distortions of art "worthy of framing." Among Swensen's pantheon of painters, windows are everything from metaphor to obsession. As you can see in Robert Campin's Portrait of the Madonna, once the view is framed by a window, the temptation to paint landscapes will become irresistible ("windows bring us back/ but not to us"). Swensen, herself, possesses the zeal of the believer when she writes, "The space in paintings is not paint: it is space." For Swensen, glass, like canvas, is no mean flat surface - it is means to prestidigitation. And so it appeared to the throngs of visitors to the Crystal Palace, erected for London's International Exposition in 1851. Designed by landscape gardener Joseph Paxton, its acres of trees and fountains, tempt Swensen to posit "The origin of all architecture in the greenhouse..." Cole Swensen, a frequent translator of French poetry, makes the Impressionist Pierre Bonnard the center around which the other artists orbit. She knows that the artist liked to paint by the light of a north window, finds cinematic qualities in his work in the wake of his friendship with the Lumiere Brothers at the time of their historic film of the train arriving at La Ciotat, and analyzes his paintings of windows as " stand(ing) in the way, not framing the view, but cutting it in two, thus framing not our view, but our awareness of viewing." She even mines playwright Alfred Jarry's obscure Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll for praise of Bonnard's ability to fix pure light on canvas.No one who loves windows, much less the very idea of them, can fail to find fascination in the Danish painter Wilhlem Hammereshoi's windows opening on windows,doors opening to other doors. and shadows of window panes superimposed on floorboards. To Swensen, Hammershoi is a conundrum, "alone in a house with light/ built his house rely of doors."
Guillaume Apollinaire sounds a kindred note in Les Fenetres, his introduction to the catalogue for the 1913 exhibition of Robert Delaunay's Windows On The City.
Reading The Glass Age you enter a world of dreams or, as Swensen calls them, "walking rooms."

1. Adrien Chancel - Drawing for an Atrium for a Capital City, 1877, Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
2. Robert Campin - Portrait of the Madonna, 1435, Prado, Madrid.

3. Pierre Bonnard - Open Window at Vernon, Museum of Fine Arts, Nice.

Gustave Baumann In Wymong County, New York

2009-05-12T18:58:00.002-04:00

Gustave Baumman (1881-1971) was born in Magdeburg, Germany and died in Sante Fe, New Mexico. During the 1910s, the print maker summered in upstate New York

Anarchists!

2009-05-02T10:06:00.004-04:00

THE DYNAMITE CLUB: How A Bombing In Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited The Age Of Modern Terror
by John Merriman Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2009 363.325 MER

The heyday of anarchism ended with the beginning of World War I. During the years 1880-1914, attacks in sixteen countries, including the attempted bombing of the Paris Bourse (stock exchange), Greenwich Observatory (in protest against the enforced regularization of time schedules), and the assassinations of the president of France, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and, in 1901, the execution of President William McKinley in Buffalo horrified the world.
The “dynamite club” as fearful bourgeois Parisians dubbed it was, in the event, not a well-organized group, but merely a small number of individuals who accepted the same rationalizations for violence to ameliorate the desperate living conditions of the poor in rapidly industrializing societies. More often working in isolation from one another than in any kind of disciplined formation, they terrorized millions.
Anarchists became locked in a push-me pull-you battle with the authorities. Every time that governments responded with massive force, that created new martyrs and inspired fresh recruits. Merriman details the life and trial of one Emile Henry, a talented and conscientious young man, stymied at every turn in his life, who turns to dynamite.
Though remembered today as the designer who gave shape to modern Paris with its grand boulevards, Baron Georges Haussmann’s commission from Emperor Napoleon III involved not only fostering the free flow of commerce, but isolating poor neighborhoods, likely to be the sites of social unrest in the growing city.

The Dynamite Club makes fascinating reading, wearing its meticulous research gently, and it is to Merriman's credit that he allows the reader to draw parallels with current events if they choose to. As for the Anarchist movement, it lost steam when competing events and social forces drew its energies elsewhere. In the event, the actions of the authorities were just as violent and irrational, and not always very useful, which brings us to...

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY by G. K. Chesterton

New York, Dodd-Mead: 1958 (1908) FIC CHE

Written in 1908, The Man Who Was Thursday is Chesterton's best novel. Orson Wells admired '"its shamelessly beautiful prose." It would be a mistake to overlook it because its "subject"seems dated. Gabriel Syme is rather poetic sort of detective. Nevertheless, his mission is to infiltrate the European Dynamiters, a shadowy Anarchist group that is surely up to no good. His counterpart is Lucien Gregory, a poetic bomber.

The novel takes its name from the aliases of the anarchists: each man is known only by a day of the week and, when Syme gets himself elected to the group, he becomes "Thursday." In a nice bit of irony, Syme has joined the High Council of Anarchists, an organization of the supremely unorganized. Satirizing the frenzy of fear set off in London by refugee communities (then, from continental Europe) was a daring thing to do a century ago and may be again today, giving fresh impetus to the story. One feature that dates the novel in a charming way is the naming of the individual chapters. Chesterton makes you want to keep reading; who could resist "In Which the Crooks Chase the Police"?

The novel has been called a book of Revelation, as one after another, disguises fall, astonishingly.

Image: La Bande a Bonnot, from the collection of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilization, Paris

Letchworth State Park

2009-04-23T10:29:00.003-04:00

G. W. O'Grady - Letchworth State Park, c. 1915, autochrome, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

National Poetry Month

2009-04-15T14:31:00.006-04:00

Watching The Spring Festival by Frank Bidart Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2008 811.54 BID
Although Bidart’s poetry is laced with cultural references from the popular culture, (Marilyn Monroe, Home On The Range) to classical ballet and 8th century Chinese verse, it is always elegant. As befits his various subjects, Bidart meditates on how differently art is experienced at different times and places.

First Hand by Linda Bierds G.P. Putnam’s Sons: 2006 811.54 BIE
Bierds is unusual among her peers for writing poetry that is about many things, but hardly ever herself. Her technical skill makes possible an ease in writing about such disparate moments as Archimedes at the moment of “Eureka!”, ancient experiments with the buoyancy of water, and the young Benjamin Franklin standing in a pond, considering his shadow. Her poems are delightful.

Small Gods Of Grief by Laure-Anne Bosselaer BOA Editions: 2001 811.54 BOS
Laure-Anne Bosselaar (b.1943) grew up in Belgium, moved the the United States in 1987, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A book of her poems, Small Gods Of Grief, from which these selections are quoted, was published by BOA Editions, Rochester, NY, in 2001 and received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Prize for that year. Bosselaar also translates poetry, from English to French and from Flemish to English. Great Gullet Creek was also published online by WebDelSol.com in Posse Review.

The Palace Of Ashes by Sherry Fairchok
University Press of New England: 2002 811.6 FAI
A native of 100 years of Pennsylvania coal mining, Fairchok moved to Syracuse during her early childhood and attended Syracuse University where she won the Whiffin Prize. Her keen attention to the variety of the natural world may surprise those who know only the destructive effects of mining, which gives the collection its title.

Green Squall by Jay Hopler Yale University Press: 2006 811.6 HOP
Hopler happened to be the 100th winner of the Yale Younger Poets award, chosen by the formidable poet Louise Gluck. Although his poetry rarely breaks out of the narrow confines of his own imagination, it is very entertaining. A sense of humor mitigates the relentless self-awareness.

The Glass Age by Cole Swensen Alicejamesbooks: 2007 811.54SWE
The Glass Age, Swensen’s tenth book of poetry, achieves unity through her affinity with the paintings of the French artist, Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard liked to paint views seen through a framing window and Swensen explores how her poems do something similar. From there, she circles out to a consideration of the ways glass has been used in various arts. A thought-expanding collection.

Native Guard by Natasha Tretheway Houghton, Mifflin:2006 811.6 TRE
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer prize, and with good reason. The child of an illegal (in 1966) marriage between a black woman and a white man, Natasha Tretheway grew up in the South, but learned as an adult about the Louisiana Native guards, a brigade of black soldiers who fought bravely on the union side in the Civil War. Her poetry is infused with these richly suggestive materials; her technical and stylistic abilities are nearly unbeatable.

Cayuga Lake

2009-04-13T13:16:00.002-04:00

William H. Rau (1855- 1920) was the official photographer of the 1904 World's Fair, held at St. Louis, Missouri. Born in Philadelphia, Rau took this photograph near Cayuga Lake while on board a train, when he was the official photographer for the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

William H. Rau - Bluff On Cayuga Lake from the train, 1895, Museum Of Modern Art-NYC. Albumen silver print from a glass negative.

On The Road With 100 Boots

2009-04-01T09:18:00.003-04:00

100 BOOTS by Eleanor Antin, Philadelphia, Running Press: 1999 (197-) 779.092 ANT

With the arrival of spring, our thoughts turn to getting out and looking around. That may be why, in March 1971, the artist Eleanor Antin began a project that became a picaresque novel in postcards – 100 Boots.
Antin (b. 1935) was living in southern California at the time; she bought one hundred boots at an Army Navy Surplus store with no clear purpose in mind. But, lined up in pairs, they began to hint at latent possibilities. Soon Antin was photographing the boots, arrayed in pairs and lines in various settings. She captioned the pictures to suggest a narrative and began sending the resulting postcards (51 in all) to approximately 1,000 people she had met in the art world. Some were baffled when they began receiving the semi-regular missives; others were intrigued.
Between March 1971 and July 1973 the boots crossed the country from California to New York They began their odyssey in a conventional way, shopping at a grocery store, attending church, visiting the bank, and attending a drive-in movie. Antin took their very first group photo on the beach at Del Mar, California.
Soon the boots were walking about their generation, they got political. They joined demonstrations, committed trespasss and civil disobedience, and finally had to hit the road. Along the way they dabbled in the back-to-nature movement in the Sorrento Valley, once memorably passing a flock of geese headed in the other direction. Huddled under a bridge, the boots resembled so many black leather hobos and after crossing the La Jolla Desert on foot, in September they definitively headed east by hopping a train.
After various adventures, the boots arrived in New York City in May, 1973, like generations of immigrants, on the ferry. Disembarking, they became tourists, crossing Herald Square, strolling through Central Park, and entering the Egyptian Garden where they circled around a belly dancer.

And then, just as Antin had hoped, the boots marched triumphantly into the Museum of Modern Art, where they were given their own room, making their creator one of a mere handful of women to receive a solo show at MOMA in the 1970s. For, all along, Antin had been looking for a way to circumvent a system that was inhospitable to women. Conceptual art, which places the idea before the aesthetic execution, was a likely tool for a subversive moment. Credit (or blame, depending on your viewpoint) for initiating conceptual art if usually given to the surrealist Marcel Duchamp for his 1917 creation of "R. Mutt."

Arthur Wesley Dow In Hastings, New York

2009-03-23T10:52:00.001-04:00

Forked Road - Hastings, New York was photographed sometime between 1895-1910 by the artist Arthur Wesley Dow.

During those years, Dow taught art at Pratt Institute and Columbia University, both in New York City and also conducted a summer school in his hometown of Ipswich, Massachusetts. How he came to be in upstate New York, I have yet to discover.

The photograph was made using the cyanotype process that takes its name from the cyan color (Prussian blue) of the finished print (in the collection of the San Francisco museum of Fine Arts).

From Museum To Book

2009-03-14T11:04:00.006-04:00

MARIE ANTOINETTE: Styling the 18th Century Superstar

by Jeffrey C. Mayer Syracuse, Syracuse University Press: 2008 391.009 MAY

MARIE ANTOINETTE: The Portrait of an Average Woman

by Stefan Zweig New York, The Viking Press: 1933 BIO MARIE

Three years ago the young director Sophia Coppola brought out a lavish, but historically inaccurate, film on the life of France's most notorious monarch, Marie Antoinette. Now fashion designer Jeffrey C. Mayer has created a fashion tableau/museum exhibition hung on the same peg. It is all gorgeous fun but, sadly, there is very little that either has to do with the real woman. Interestingly, the best biography of the little Austrian girl who became the Queen of France is still Stefan Zweig's 1933 volume Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman.

ONLY AN ARTIST: Adelaide Alsop Robineau American Studio Potter
by Thomas Piche, Jr. & Julia A. Monti Syracuse, Syracuse University Press: 2008 738. 092 ROB

"Craftsmanship like Mrs. Robineau's is a blending of precious qualities - of knowledge, skill, judgment, taste and, above all, a sense of beauty. She had all that pottery needs." - Royal Cortissoz, obituary published in the New York Herald Tribune, 24 February 1929.

As a young woman, Adelaide Alsop was steered toward china painting, an occupation considered suitable for artistic young ladies at the turn of the century, even though she had studied painting with William Merritt Chase and ceramics at university.She was fortunate in her husband, Samuel Robineau, a Frenchman who had made money in wheat farming but wished to cultivate his interest in antique porcelains. Soon after their marriage in 1899, he helped her to found Keramic Studio, a journal that proved influential in promoting grand feu (high-fired) porcelain and the aesthetic theories of Arthur Wesley Dow. Mrs. Robineau also advocated using "conventionalized" imagery in pottery, by which she meant that the subject of a piece "so long as its individual characteristics are made subservient to the general effect" would be successful.
Adelaide Robineau's first New York show in 1905 attracted the favorable attention of the Tiffany Studio.Although her work fits most comfortably within the genre of Art Nouveau, Robineau reported enthusiastically on the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et des In dustriels Modernes in Paris on the triumph of the new Art Deco style. Her own work achieved greater simplicity as time passed. Urn of Dreams (1921) suggests a window through which the future comes.
Like many women, Robineau's influence has been under reported. Her works speak for her.

Robert Reid At The Smithsonian

2009-03-08T09:30:00.003-04:00

One of the most popular paintings in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art is The Mirror (1910) by Robert Lewis Reid. Reid's connection to upstate New York came at the end of his life, although he was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
He studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston, the Art Students' League in New York, and the Academie Julian in Paris. Reid received several public commissions, from the "White City" in Chicago in 1893 to the Library of Congress.

While The Mirror is typical of Reid's work for its bold palette, the Japanese screen give the painting more bite than Reid's often sentimental work.

Robert Reid died at a sanitarium in Clifton Springs, NY, after he suffered a delibilitating stroke.

Dusty Springfield: Her Brilliant Career

2009-03-01T08:45:00.005-05:00

DUSTY!!! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS
By Anne J, Randall Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2009 782.421

It says something about our priorities that, when it comes to singers, few books add anything to the experience of listening to the music. Annie J. Randall is a university musicologist who has written about Puccini’s operas, and particularly The Girl Of The Golden West. That said, Dusty: Queen of the Postmods is mercifully free of ugly jargon, for the most part.
Dusty Springfield (1939-1999) was the greatest British pop vocalist of the 20th century, her stature more difficult to apprehend because she was a woman in a profession notoriously inhospitable to women. Randall doesn’t so much deconstruct the standard mythography of Dusty Springfield as she dismantles it and makes its irrelevance visible. The story goes like this: Springfield began life as a homely middle-class Irish Catholic girl named Mary O’Brien who, through an act of will, became the larger than life star known as Dusty Springfield. Her fears that revelations about her personal (sexual) life would destroy her career led to drink, drugs, and suicide attempts, nearly destroying her career.
Dusty Springfield has not been lucky in her biographers. Vicky Wickham, a contemporary and also her last manager, has an unaknowledged but obvious grievance and a lamentable way of introducing swathes of dialogue that she could not possibly remember or have had access to. The young Lucy O’Brien does a diligent job but commits anachronisms of attitude that a diligent editor would have corrected.
Dusty came from a musical family, but it was her older brother Dion (Tom) who was supposed to be the success; as soon as she joined his folk trio, The Springfields, she overshadowed him. When she left the group at the height of its popularity in 1963, one British newspaper simply headlined the inevitable move as “Dusty Does It!”
The music of black America was an important part of the Mod subculture in 1960s Britain. In the recent movie Cadillac Records, story of the fabled Chess label in Chicago, it is 1963 when a group of young Mods arrive at the door to pay their respects to Muddy Waters: they are the Rolling Stones.
That many of the men Springfield worked with found her “difficult” should not be accepted at face value. A pretty, intelligent, woman who knows what she wants and is determined to get it from herself, and also from those around her, is difficult by definition. So much the worse for her if she appears less than charmed by their attentions.
Her motto in the recording studio was “Anything won’t do!” Later in life, Dusty herself spoke guardedly about the condescension she experienced when she took an active role in shaping her accompaniment. In today’s terms, Springfield was the co-producer of her recordings but she acknowledged poignantly that, not only was she unable to receive credit from her male coworkers, but it would also have been unacceptable to the public – and she wanted to be liked. Though her biographers describe the emotional toll that concealing her sexuality took, they underrate the psychic pain involved in concealing the extent of her talents. We all crave recognition but it was Dusty’s burden to be talented at a time when recognition could .be dangerous.
Derek Wadsworth, trombonist with Dusty’s 1960a backing group, the Echoes, and one of her producers, describes how Springfield recreated the standard vocalist’s instrumental accompaniment of the post-war era, bringing the rhythm section forward to define the arrangement and reframing the brass section to comment on the action, admitting that he had never encountered such working knowledge in a vocalist before.
Yes, she was a spotty, glass-wearing, awkward adolescent and her emotional pain was intense, but her determined self-transformation into a young woman of remarkable presence is often noted as there if there were some unspecified neurosis involved in making the best of yourself
This is a singer who at age twenty-four rose like a meteor to the pinnacle of the pop music world, so protean that listeners had trouble deciding if she was male or female, black or white. Brian Epstein, famous as the manager of the Beatles once said (1967) that his unfulfilled ambition was to manage Dusty Springfield.
Randall compares Dusty’s 1965 Sounds Of Motown Special on British television’s Ready Steady Go to the Beatles’ first appearance on America’s Ed Sullivan Show. Dusty had appeared at the Brooklyn Fox Theater in September 1964 on the bill with Martha & the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Ronettes, bringing the idea for the progra m home with her.
Randall’s chapter Soul+ Melodrama+ The 1960s Pop Aria is a br illiant work of detection and synthesis, and reason enough by itself for the book. Springfield attended Catholic schools where she was exposed to the style of presentation handed down through opera and silent films from the great melodramatic stage actors of the 19th century, such as Sarah Bernhardt. In a series of pairings of photographs of Springfield singing the Italian pop aria You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me with images from stage performances by Bernhardt, et al, we see how the singer achieved a synthesis of European and black American ways of gesture as well as vocalizing that should cause a major shift in the criticism of popular music.
Popular music owes much of its vitality to people who are not privileged white males. But criticism of America’s most vital musical genres has been almost completely in the hands of the group least responsible for creating them. To offer just one notorious example, the respected Robert Christgau referred in a 1969 Esquire Magazine column to James Brown, without irony, as being “uppity.”
Randall reappraises the 1968 album, Dusty In Memphis, considered one of the best pop soul releases ever, illuminating Springfield’s dissatisfaction with the finished product. The male critical establishment claims that Springfield failed to understand the perfection of the album. Randall sees a musically intelligent artist, experiencing a loss of control in the recording process. While the record is a gorgeous thing in itself, it constricts the singer to a single note: vulnerability. Springfield’s driving chest tones and infectious sense of rhythm are absent, shoehorned into a conventionally feminine persona. Some of the sidemen – the reknowned ‘Memphis cats’ – that producers Jerry Wexler paired Springfield with, felt free to express their queasiness about working with a rumored lesbian. . After following Randall’s detective work through the chapter Dusty’s Soul Dream, you can almost hear the album Springfield hoped to make The irony here, as later when Springfield moved to the States for several years, is that the place where she thought she would find greater freedom, failed to deliver.

Letchworth Park By Jane Berry Judson

2009-02-22T09:55:00.001-05:00

Jane Berry Judson (1868-1935) was born in Castile, a small town on the western edge of what is now Letchworth State Park. When Judson was growing up in western New York State, the area was the private thousand acre estate of William Pryor Letchworth, home to a spectacular gorge with three of the steepest ribbon waterfalls in New York.

Buddy Bolden: "The Best And the Loudest"

2009-02-15T08:50:00.001-05:00

COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER by Michael Ondaatje
New York, Vintage International: 1996 FIC OND

Buddy Bolden and the 20th century arrived on the New Orleans music scene - not yet defined as jazz - at about the same time. Later musicians like Louis Armstrong and Freddie Keppard recognized Bolden's accomplishment and gave it a name but Bolden, with his cornet and his band, led the way.

Bolden (1877-1931) live a short, intense life, suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of thirty-one, and was confined to the East Louisiana state Hospital at Jackson for the rest of his life. He was a barber by day, not perhaps the safest occupation for a man with an excess of temperament in a hostile world with a razor in hand. By night, Bolden made music in clubs and 'houses', maintaining his energy with the injudicious imbibing of whiskey. His patron Tom Pickett, "King of the District", published a yearly directory of services offered to men and where to find them. Bolden also published a local newspaper called The Cricket, filling it with the stories people told him while under the towel or under the influence.
The hard information about Bolden's life is minimal, but Michael Ondaatje's prose poem of a novel offers a convincing attempt at Bolden's truth. (A native of Sri Lanka and longtime resident of Canada, Ondaatje is best known for his novel The English Patient.) He has Buddy's wife Nora Bass, a former prostitute, think about his haunted aspect, "When they were alone together it was still a crowded room." When Bolden falls in love Jaelin Brewitt, the wife of a friend, and disappears for two years, Ondaatje has her husband Webb, a police officer, follow his intuition to discover Bolden in a bathtub. The real life character, E. J. Belloq, photographer of the underside of New Orleans life, makes an appearance but respectable New Orleans barely exists except as customers seeking out carefully disguised pleasures in an America forever protesting its innocence.

ONdaatje reveals that the seed for Coming Through Slaughter planted itself in his mind when he read "Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade...". It was April, 1907, while Bolden was playing with Henry Allen's Brass Band in a street parade that he had a fit and was taken to jail. Two months later a judge committed Bolden to the asylum where he lived for another twenty-four years. It is painful to think about those years, locked in a place with no black staff and little communication between blacks and whites. Ondaatje reminds us that the mortality rate at the asylum was ten per cent a year, appalling but similar to what awaited Bolden's friends on the outside. "You removed yourself from the twentieth century game of fame, the rest of your life a desert of facts."

From The Craftsman

2009-02-09T09:32:00.003-05:00

A design featured in The Craftsman from May of 1906, the magazine published in Syracuse, NY, by Gustave Stickley. - Image from the digital collection of the New York Public Library.

"Must I Sit And Sew?"

2009-02-01T12:45:00.011-05:00

LYRICS OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

by Eleanor Alexander New York, New York University Press: 2001 928.1 ALE

“I was a timid, scared, rabbit sort of a child, but out of desperation I learned to fight.” -

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson

"Because you love me I have much achieved,Had you despised me then I must have failed,But since I knew you trusted and believed,I could not disappoint you and so prevailed. " - Paul Laurence Dunbar, Encouraged (1913)

The marriage of two writers leaves more written traces of itself than other marriages. So it was with the marriage of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and journalist Alice (Ruth Moore) Dunbar Nelson (1875-1906). Their union, like others, was both a personal relationship and a creation of the larger society they inhabited, as Eleanor Alexander's book sensitively demonstrates.

He was a young Negro poet from a small town in Ohio, whose brief career (ended by a premature death from tuberculosis at age thirty-three) was meteoric and even unprecedented at the time. Oak And Ivy, published in 1892 attracted the attention of James Whitcomb Riley, one of the most popular poets of the day. She was the daughter of a Creole seamstress in New Orleans, who graduated from college, became a teacher and also published a volume of poetry at twenty (Violets and Other Tales). Both of them were the children of former slaves.

The young Alice was a celebrated belle of black New Orleans society when Paul saw her picture in the newspaper and began a courtship by correspondence. The two eloped: in the event their marriage was brief, passionate, tragic, and brutal. Paul drank heavily and beat her. Alice left him, but eventually forgave his cruelty. Talented people are often stifled by convention, but these two had been grievously harmed by prejudice. Their hopes and fears clouded the air between them.

When Paul died, no one told Alice: she read about it in a newspaper while riding a streetcar in Washington, D.C. Alice remarried (twice) and became a mover of history. She was the organizer for the Middle Atlantic States in the women's suffrage campaign in the 1910s and in 1924 took the campaign to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to President Warren G. Harding himself.

And of course, you can read their own words.

GIVE US EACH DAY: The Diary Of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, New York, W.W. Norton: 1984 DUN

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, Charlottesville, University Of Virginia Press: 1993 811.4 DUN

St. George And The Dragon

2009-01-29T14:46:00.004-05:00

A tile made by Henry Chapman Mercer in 1913 for the Inglenook in the Frank Garrett house in Syracuse, NY, depicting St. George and the Dragon.

And A Parrot Named Alex, Too!

2009-01-15T14:04:00.014-05:00

THE DANGEROUS JOY OF DR. SEX AND OTHER TRUE STORIES By Pagan Kennedy Santa Fe, SFWP: 2008 818.54 KEN

Just in time for a newly revised edition of the 1970s bestseller The Joy Of Sex, we have Pagan Kennedy's new book and Ariel Levy's review of it in The New Yorker (January5, 2009).
In The Dangerous Joy Of Dr. Sex And Other True Stories, Dr. Alex Comfort, author of the original Joy Of Sex, leads novelist Pagan Kennedy's cast of real characters.
Alex Comfort (his real name), published The Joy of Sex in 1972, a book that shaped the attitudes of a generation, along with another 1970s classic Our Bodies, Ourselves (produced by the Boston Women's Health Collective). For the implications of the contrast between these two approaches to sexuality, Levy's article is the one to read.

Alex Comfort began his career as anything but a Casanova. His choice of a career in medicine was not obvious: he had blown four fingers off his left hand during an adolescent experiment involving sugar, sulfur, and saltpeter. At Cambridge University, Comfort maintained his virginity almost to the end, when he met two girlfriends, Ruth and Jane. Jane was an explosive character herself, but the quiet Ruth confessed her feelings for the skinny young man first and the two married in 1943.
Eventually Alex and Jane commenced an affair, stimulated, so to speak, by Ruth’s quiet personality. After exploring sexuality with the thoroughness of a scientist, Comfort produced the book that he originally called Doing Sex Properly. When it was finally published after several years of research (!), the title had morphed into a word play on the Rombauer family’s classic Joy Of Cooking.
Fame imploded Comfort’s double life, ironically for a man who advocated defying the conventions. Divorced from Ruth and married to Jane, Comfort moved to California, lured by its reputation for sunny hedonism. But Comfort, the scientist, wanted to be taken seriously and for this reason he eventually returned to Britain. Looking for a worthy project and aware of his own advancing age, Comfort took on the problem of ageing and “ageism.” The heady years in California may have contributed to his tendency to wishful thinking. Surely, Comfort argued that, if prejudice and discrimination were ended, people would live much longer. But, felled by a series of strokes, Alex Comfort was wheelchair-bound by the time Pagan Kennedy interviewed him.

Comfort's book has dated badly. His off-handed sexism and his lack of empathy for homosexuality are only two of the most glaring lacunae. There is something juvenile about his concoction of French names for various sexual practices and, like most converts to a beleaguered cause, he became a zealot.
A scientist of a different kind is Amy Smith, an instructor at MIT, who has designed medical equipment and labor saving devices to help people in poor countries better their communities. Devices to test and filter water and a phase-change incubator that will allow doctors without reliable electricity to culture bacteria can decrease mortality and provide a better standard of living. Smith once taught a seminar on the uses of duct tape: how to make a hammock, a kaleidoscope and a full suit of armor, while at the same time reminding Kennedy that the lowly tape is beyond the means of third world peoples.
There is another Alex here, too. A parrot who was been taught for 27 years by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, using the model/rival technique she designed at Brandeis University. Alex has learned spelling, addition and subtraction, among other subjects. By teaching Alex to become the best educated parrot on the planet, as Kennedy calls him, Pepperburg has pushed the boundaries of our understanding of intelligence and also of our commonality with other species.

Kennedy the novelist explores these scientific characters with relish, following their trains of thought to find out what makes a puzzle an attractive project.

Early Autos

2009-01-11T13:18:00.001-05:00

The New York Public Library is home to an outstanding online collection of digital images from its holdings. The one at left is the program cover for the Fifth Annual Banquet of the Syracuse Automobile Club, held in 1907!

Explore the collection at http://www.nypl.org/.

Fictional Worlds: 2008

2009-01-01T14:03:00.002-05:00

SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM by Uwem Akpan (Little, Brown)

Uwem Akpan first came to the attention of American readers in a New Yorker Special Fiction issue. A Jesuit priest from Nigeria, Akpan writes about life in western Africa in eloquent prose; his ability to make the reader stay with stories of sadness, deprivation, and terror, many of them witnessed through the eyes of children, is matchless.

Ex-Mas Feast is especially poignant reading at the holiday season, as we listen to the child narrator watch his dream of attending school sacrificed to his family's need to buy food. Jigana's twelve year-old sister Maisha earns the family's livelihood by prostitution, but it is cannot stretch far enough to pay for school books. In Luxurious Hearses a Muslim boy finds, after being attacked by his neighbors, that the only people who will help him are of another faith, in this faith-torn country. The title story makes out of the unimaginable horror of the Rwandan genocide a searing work of fiction about a girl and her little brother whose parents are forced into unspeakable choices. Say You're One Of Them makes other fiction seem pale and pointless by comparison.

THE NIGHTGALES OF TROY by Alice Fulton (W.W. Norton)

For many readers, Alice Fulton's linked stories about a family living through the 20th century in Troy, New York may seem like messengers from another country. Set in a once wealthy Northeastern city, home to scientific innovations that made the 'American Century' possible, the setting has a down-at-heel, ready made poignancy. Fulton's fictional Garrahans are buffeted by the currents of large events, their lives bobbing up and then down. Mamie, her sister Kitty, and her three daughters, Charlotte, Edna and Dorothy, and granddaughter Ruth, are neither as confident nor pristine as they appear to be.

When Dorothy locks her sister out on the roof of their house, Edna intuits the uncertainties in store for them, caught between fright and shame to be rescued by the neighbors. Dorothy is a schizophrenic, repeatedly hospitalized and subjected to the latest treatments and medications ("Sunnyside"). Ruth, a professor, becomes an expert on Herman Melville, himself a onetime resident of the 'Collar City' and a sometime depressive. Fulton brings a poet's carefulness with words to her first collected stories.

MOUNTAINS PAINTED WITH TURMERIC by Lila Bahadura Chettri, translated by Michael J. Hutt, New York, Columbia University: 2008 (1957) FIC KSH

"The sun's yellow rays fell on the next range of mountains, and they looked as if some artist had painted them with turmeric."

A modern novel made in the antique form of the pastoral, Mountains Painted With Turmeric is a tale of life in the isolated, mountainous state of Nepal, beautifully rendered in English, it arrives with additional materials that help situate its time and place for western readers. Its story is famous among Chettri's countrymen: Dhane struggles to make a life for his family, but poverty leads to calamity and the family is finally banished from their village If this were all, it would be a bleakly realistic novel but the pastoral form, though inclined toward the romantic, frees the author to express the poetry of ordinary existence, as in his descriptions of natural surroundings; "the autumn could not bear to see the moon smiling like this, unveiled." Later, Chettri describes winter as "determined to ruin the whole lovely garden that autumn had prepared." This beautiful work may be difficult for us to read, with our assumptions of individual power over events, but it is the mark of the author's achievement that, in spite of our biases, his characters live for us.

ONE MORE YEAR by Sana Krasnikov (Spiegel & Grau)

Nominated for the National Book Award, One More Year is also a story collection, this one about recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. One of the characters, Ilona, tells another, "To make it here, you have to want to be here." Krasnikov's characters have come here out of desperation; what they really want is to go home. In the opening story, Maia in Yonkers, a woman whose husband was murdered back home, is reviled by her teenage son for trying to make a new life somewhere else. Better Half, through the character of Anna, a waitress, dramatizes this tension, too. Anna marries an American man in order to obtain a green card, yet even after he hits her and she brings charges against him, Anna takes him back. Just as we find no resolution for the character of Anna, the cumulative effect of these stories brings no final clarity

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH by Jhumpa Lahiri (Alfred A. Knopf)

Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book (also a collection of stories) Interpreter of Maladies. To say that this new collection is something different is no criticism of either book. Although Lahiri has written about Bengali immigrants (she is one herself), in this new collection she turns her pen to characters who find themselves oddly at home in their adopted New England. Lahiri's immigrants are among the successful ones, well-educated and prosperous, yet a certain pessimism permeates the lives of people who long for another culture. Only Goodness, a novella really, is pre-eminent among these stories. Sudha, a happily married graduate student welcomes her beloved brother Rahul, a dropout from Cornell University, into her home, but his downward emotional spiral endangers her marriage and, ultimately, threatens the life of her baby son. For Rahul, the coexistence of the new ways and the old is irreconcilable.

THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE by Salmon Rushdie (Random House)

Other times and other places are familiar to readers of Salmon Rushdie's fiction, and so they are here in this delightful fable of 16th century Florence. It is long, but its structure is more coherent than some of Rushdie's other novels. Whether the reader accepts the author's rather facile definitions of Eastern and Western culture depends on a willing suspension of belief. If you can imagine a story encompassing the Mughal Empire and Renaissance Florence, pirates and princesses, Eros and commerce, then dive in. Rushdie, the presenter of ideas, makes a case for the existence of two very different versions of the Renaissance; Rushdie, the novelist, creates not one but two enchantresses. The plot is impossible to summarize in a short space and those who prefer verisimilitude in fiction will put the book aside long before Machiavelli or the Medici clan make their appearances here.

Hearing Jazz

2008-12-01T18:16:00.005-05:00

THE JAZZ EAR: CONVERSATIONS OVER MUSIC
By Ben Ratliff New York, Times Books: 2008 781.6509 RAT

If you think musicians are taciturn or inarticulate, this small book will make you think again. As a jazz critic for the New York Times for the past dozen years, Ben Ratliff’s interviews with a variety of jazz musicians, including Pulitzer Prize winner Ornette Coleman, have afforded him - and his readers - privileged access to their thoughts about music. Ratliff’s idea to structure his interviews around listening to and talking about music that interests the musicians has produced some surprising results.
I read the introduction; you are free to skip it and I suggest that you do. Ratliff’s explanation of his method and his reasons for choosing it are redundant, smack of dime store psychology, and over all hovers a whiff of self- congratulation that adds nothing to the reader’s experience.
Saxophonist Wayne Shorter leads the interview away from his well-known interest in film scores to the rhapsodic orchestral work, The Lark Ascending, by English symphonist , Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Guitarist Pat Metheny’s improvisational acumen has been obscured for many listeners by his facility at creating melody and exploiting the sound effects made possible by recording technology, and all this on an instrument that some jazz musicians regard as a secondaryplayer in the evolution of jazz. It is not unusual for a practicing musician’s tastes to be more eclectic than those of his audience. Metheny’s fondness for country music comes from his Missouri childhood, but it was a live recording of Miles Davis playing Seven Steps to Heaven that convinced the eleven year Metheny that he wanted to play jazz. After a large commercial success with American Garage in 1979, Metheny spent time with the Brazilian composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim. A hero to academic jazz students everywhere, Metheny remains unimpressed by the results of jazz education. Jazz, for him, is “this completely invented language that happens to line up perfectly”, hence his enthusiasm for a saxophone thrown-down between a young Sonny Rollins and the master, Coleman Hawkins, in 1962.
Rollins, one of the greatest living improvisers in jazz, is reputed to be erratic and moody and is known to have wrestled with a drug problem early in his caree. Here we find him to be a focused musical thinker and genuinely modest about his musicianship. “I look at all that from the inside, so you’d probably have to ask someone else about that” is his response to a question about a recent performance. In his remarks on recordings by Fats Waller, Lester Young, and especially Billie Holiday, the warmth of his appreciation shines through. About Holiday's last recording, Lady in Satin (1958), which shows her voice in diminished force, Rollins emphasizes, "I was right there with her until the last note!"
Ornette Coleman remains inscrutable even as he touches on Jewish rabbinical singing, Charlie Parker’s compositions, and folk music from Central Asia – Kyrgystan – to be exact. Generous but pessimistic is about as close at Ratliff gets to this master.
Maria Schneider has managed the difficult feat of keeping a large jazz orchestra together and gainfully employed for more than a decade, yet her beautifully crafted compositions seem to be pulled farther and farther from what a large audience would understand as jazz. Her admiration for Miles Davis’s collaboration with arranger Gil Evans is well known, her love for the music of Frenchman Maurice Ravel is something she shares in common with many jazz musicians, including Branford Marsalis (also interviewed by Ratliff), but her enthusiastic explication of the wonderfulness of the Fifth Dimensions’ recording of Up, Up, And Away is her favorite metaphor for flying, a notion that is a recurring theme in her music.
Exiled Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes is a man whose life has had to accommodate the upheavals of 20th century history, yet has made a productive career wherever he went. Born in 1918, only thirty years after slavery was abolished in Cuba, Valdes attended Havana’s Conservatorio Municipale, established for talented but impoverished students and graduated in 1943. He became the house pianist at the Hotel Tropicana in Havana, frequented by the wealthy and by foreign tourists. Here Valdes learned to incorporate the bata, a drum used in sacred music of the west African Yoruba into dance music, a move that was controversial at the time, but is now the rhythmic backbone of Afro-Cuban jazz. Here Valdes also played on Nat King Cole’s Cuban sessions. Valdes, along with the eminent bass player Israel “Cachao” Lopez and Orestes Lopez, invented the mambo in the 1950s. Valdes married and had five children, including pianist Chucho Valdes. After the Revolution of 1960, Valdes fled to Mexico, then Spain, and ultimately landed in Stockholm, Sweden, where he has lived since 1963. Liker many Cubans, he had expected the turmoil to last only a few years, but found himself unable to return home.
Valdes’ life on this side of the caesura has grown to include a new family, decades spent playing in hotel lounges and an easy comfort with versatility. Another Cuban exile from a younger generation, saxophonist Paquito d’Rivera, drew Valdes back to the recording studio in 1994 and in 2000, Valdes was one the stars of Francesco Trueba’s acclaimed documentary about Latin Jazz, Calle 54. A generous musical taste encompasses Jerome Kern, Art Tatum, Frank Sinatra, and the piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Image: Stompin' At the Savoy by Romaire Bearden (1974) at Christie's New York.

Two Out Of Chile

2008-11-15T09:56:00.004-05:00

WIDOWS by Ariel Dorfman, translated by Stephen Kessler
New York, Seven Stories Press: 2002 863.DOR

TO DIE IN BERLIN by Calors Cerda, translated by Andrea G. Labinger
Pittsburgh, Latin American Literary Press: 1999 (1993) 863 CER

The overthrow of the Allende government of Chile on 11 August 1973, like many horrific events, has beget some outstanding literature. Of the two authors at hand, Ariel Dorfman is much the better known, but that may be a simple result of Cerda living out his exile from his homeland in Europe.
Dorfman, who was imprisoned after the coup by the Pinochet dictatorship, recently gave a speech to the Modern Language Association about the vicissitudes of preserving freedom, titled The Homeland Security Department Ate My Speech. Typical of Dorfman's work, it was a literary exercise that poked fun at intellectuals who take themselves too seriously while, at the same time, dealing with painful issues. According to reports, if the test of a good mind is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas at once, the MLA members mostly failed.

Not so Widows, a novel that began life as a poem, and then grew into a play. When your subject matter includes the bodies of men washing up on the ocean's shore, their faces rendered unrecognizable by torture, it is perhaps necessary to employ a distancing device. So Dorfman sets Widows in Greece circa 1942 (the year Dorfman was born). The story is told through the eyes of a Danish man, who is eventually picked up by the Nazis and disappears. To women goes to unbearable burden of remembrance in this powerful short novel.

Carlos Cerda (1942-2001), like many supporters of the elected President, Salvador Allende, went into exile after the coup. One of many "boomerang" writers, so named because they returned to Chile after freedom of the press was restored, Cerda moved first to neighboring Colombia and then lived in East Berlin, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy. Winner of several literary prizes, Cerda died of cancer just before he was scheduled to speak at the first International Book Fair to be held in Santiago.

To Die In Berlin follows the lives of several characters exiled in Berlin, especially a former senator, Don Carlos, a man doubly exiled by his inability to speak German, and his watchful neighbor, a young ballet dancer named Leni. Don Carlos has used his diplomatic skills to help other exiles wishing to travel but his dying wish, to return home, is thwarted by the German authorities.

Leni also observes the charade of exiles Lorena and Mario, whose marriage is dying, as they attempt to create a semblance a family togetherness for their parents who are just arrived from Chile. Just as they hide the fact that Mario is living with another woman, the parents have concealed their desperate financial situation. In the end, Lorena is exiled once again, moving alone to West Berlin to get a job that can support the family.

Two short, memorable novels that deal with recent political events without trivializing or propaganda.

Versailles: The Most Beautiful Park In The World

2008-11-01T08:31:00.000-04:00

Site plan from www.lib.utexas.edu

Nelson Rockefeller, II, had two loves: art and world peace. In 1924, in the aftermath of the 'Great War', he determined to use his wealth to save France's endangered treasures. The Rockefeller fortune financed the restoration of the medieval fortress of Fontainbleau, the cathedral at Reims, and the royal seat of Versailles, site of negotiations that had midwived the birth of the American republic.

VERSAILLES: A GARDEN IN FOUR SEASONS

by Jacques Dubois & Jean d'Ormesson Paris, Vendome Press: 1979 779.443 FOLIO

It began its existence as a modest hunting lodge for French monarchs in 1623. Under Louis XIV, the Sun King, it became a monument to the wedding of royal splendour with good government. His advisers wanted Louis to make the Louvre Museum in central Paris his royal residence, but the farsighted monarch chose instead an unhealthy swamp with no view and almost no water, and unleashed the best artisans of the day to create a paradise on earth. Hydraulic pumps, cascading conduits, and collection ponds supply the myriad fountains in a system that is still working today. The fountains, which were only turned on when the king was in residence, are turned on one Sunday each month and photographer Jacques Dubois was there to capture their magic at every hour and season.

VERSAILLES GARDENS: SCULPTURE & MYTHOLOGY

by Jacques Girard Paris, Vendome Press: 1985 730.944 GIR

The Versailles gardens are dedicated to the Greek god Apollo, nature's sovereign. The Olympian deities are everywhere in this most fully realized sculpture garden since antiquity.

War interrupted Louis XIV's plans to grab more water for his fountains from the neighbors, so he employed an army of sculptors to create tableaux to entertain visitors. Louis even wrote his own tour guide to the gardens.

Classical allusions provided a wealth of ready made material for artists. Modeled in marble, bronze, and lead, the statues illustrate the seasons, the elements, and the four temperaments. (The Four Temperaments were first devised by Hippocrates (c.450 BCE) as a way of understanding human personality through analogy with the elements of nature.)

At sixty, the king was smitten by the high spirits of the young Duchess of Burgundy, and ordered his sculptors to produce child-god statuary embodying the renewed royal joie de vivre. Masters represented include Francois Girardon's graceful works, the pure lines of Jean-Baptiste Tubi, and vivid movement in the characters of Etienne le Hongre.

ANDRE LE NOTRE: GARDEN ARCHITECT TO KINGS

by Helen M. Fox New York, Crown: 1962 712.5 FOX

He was the third generation in his family to garden when the king honored Le Notre's work with its own coat of arms. "Three snails and a head of cabbage - but I must not forget my spade for it is due to my spade that I am the recipient of all the kindnesses with which your majesty honors me." King and commoner shared a mutual love of gardens and architecture.

A modest man, Le Notre (1613-1700) read Descartes for inspiration and attempted to reflect the philosopher's ideas in his three decades of landscape design at Versailles. And with what glorious results. Broad terraces facilitated the flow of water and provided breathtaking vistas. Parterre gardens, with their strict geometric forms, employed plants as furniture - hence the movable potted palms and the orangeries. Ponds and fountains were laid out on a series of axes that permitted garden viewing from inside the palace. Le Notre would also use this device to great effect to project the central axis of the Tuilleries in Paris out to the Arc de Triomphe.

So influential was Le Notre's Versailles that princes everywhere flattered the King by imitating his garden.

LES PLAISIRS DE VERSAILLES

by Marc-Antoine Charpentier Paris, Erato: 1996 compact disc D/CHAR

Although most of his works were composed for the church, Charpentier (1643-1704) created operatic diversions for Louis XIV and his guests. Among the musical pleasures on this cd, Music and Conversation personified debate which is more essential to pleasure. Pastoraletta is a diminutive work for a chorus of shepherds and Airs and Senses are duets inspired by the popular Spanish drama El Cid.

For more information, visit the official website http://www.chateauversailles.fr/ You can read about recent acquisitions and renovations - in English or, if you want, practice your French, bonne chance!

"The River That Flows Two Ways"

2008-10-01T13:06:00.001-04:00

BEFORE ALBANY: An Archaeology of Native-Dutch Relations in the Capital Region 1600-1664. By James W. Bradley, Albany, University of the State of New York: 2007 974.743 BRA

Archaeologist as historical detective, that is how James Bradley approaches this story of the material reality that still exist under present-day upstate New York. The Mahicans were foragers and fishers, living on the rich soil of the Hudson River flood plain south of Troy. The Mohawks (or people of the flint), much better known today, were the eastern-most members of the Iroquois Nations. The major Mohawk settlements were situated in Montgomery County, about thirty miles west of Albany. Although the two groups were reputed to be long time enemies, it appears, writes James Bradley, that their relations were cordial before the appearance of European traders and settlers. The river and its resources had been a source of cooperation among tribes for centuries.
Moving on to the Dutch Republic, where the population of Amsterdam tripled between 1600 and 1650, the end of hostilities with Spain enabled the Dutch to turn their energies to trade and exploration of the route across the North Atlantic to the New World. Bradley uses artifacts from sites on both sides of the Atlantic to demonstrate the growth and importance of trade. For native people the use of brass and iron quickly passed from novelty to necessity, as they established steady contacts with the Europeans.
However those relations changed drastically under the pressure of settlement. The New Netherland Corporation that settled Manhatta after 1624, was bankrupt by 1639. Rensselaerwijck, run by Killian van Rensselaer, diversified from fur trading to farming for export, but even after the establishment of Fort Orange at Albany, competition was fierce, allies were sought and native peoples began to resist the turmoil caused by the imported concept of private land ownership, not to mention the attentions of proselytizing Christian missionaries. The 1640s were the decade when trade became secondary to political arrangements in maintaining alliances.

As native peoples became dependent on new tools, this undermined their traditional way of life, as did new (European) diseases and the introduction of alcohol. The 1650s saw the first of many Anglo-Dutch wars in North America. Although the Dutch (notably Arent van Curler) had made efforts to deal fairly with native peoples, their presence still caused stress. By 1664, although Beaverwyck was an established and prosperous community and the Mohawks had made treaties with them, most of the Mahicans had decided to leave their traditional settlements and move elsewhere.
Bradley urges us to see in these relationships the origins of many ideas we now accept unquestioningly: “We still value hard work and making money. Community remains fundamentally important to us, even if the definition of it continues to change. Tolerance – the need to get along, to live together even when we don’t like each other – is still one of our core values.”

Before it was named for Henry Hudson, the river was Muhheakunnuk, meaning 'great waters constantly in motion, owing to the tides. One of the world's great rivers, the Hudson has its source in a small lake on the side of a mountain in the southwestern Adirondacks. From there it winds it way east to Albany where the Atlantic tides make their presence felt and the river turns south, heading for its outlet at New York Bay. Two hundred miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, the force of its movement has dug a trough on the ocean floor.

Rolf Jacobsen:Norwegian Modernist

2008-09-15T10:34:00.004-04:00

If Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994) had come from some larger country than Norway, his poetry would be reprinted everywhere. As it is, he is better known in Europe than in North America. Born in 1907, two years after Norway and Sweden separated amicably, by this timing we are reminded how arbitrarily we privilege nationalism and identity in our organizing schemes.
Jacobsen's writing possesses warmth but is never sentimental, it has pathos without bathos, and his strong feeling for nature includes a generosity towards humans in the landscape. Interestingly, this trait is often represented by the things that humans build. Exploratory poems about light poles, telescopes, and sewing machines hint at a questioning and good humored temperament (Where Do The Streets Go ? and Are They waiting For a Star?). In The Buses Long to go Home, Jacobsen likens the maneuvers of the buses to the behavior of the hippopotamus.

A modernist master, Jacobsen's later poetry was more skeptical in tone, as he observed a growing preoccupation with material things.

"The moon thumbs through the book of the night.

Finds a lake on which nothing's printed.

Draws a straight line. That's all it can do.

That's enough.

A thick line. Right to you.

Look!"

- Look by Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Robert Hedin

THE ROADS HAVE COME TO AN END NOW: Selected & Last Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Robert Bly, Roger Greenwald, & Robert Hedin Port Townsend, WA, Copper Canyon Press: 2001 839.821 JAC

THE SILENCE AFTERWARDS by Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Roger Greenwald

Princeton University Press: 1985 839.821 JAC

Waiting For the Barbarians

2008-08-15T13:36:00.009-04:00

THE TARTAR STEPPE by Dino Buzzati, translated by Stuart C. Hood

Boston, David R. Godine: 2005 (1938) 853.912 BUZ

"One September morning Giovanni Drogo, being newly commissioned, set out from the city for Fort Bastiani; it was his first posting."

Without the background details of local geography, civil society, or personal life, we are forced to identify with Giovanni Drogo. He is our Rorscharch test, a protagonist who moves through a landscape that, for all its solid physical aspects, seems vague and even menacing in its lack of meaning. As Drogo makes his way to the fort, Buzzati hints at tales of medieval knights in search of the Grail but this is modern day Europe and there are no pleasant surprises in store.

As it turns out, Drogo will never be tested as knights were, for his lot is to spend years of idle alertness, suspended in a state of waiting for an enemy who never appears. All the young officer knows for certain is that an army was sent to battle on the Asian steppes years ago; surely they will return.

At first consumed with schemes to get himself transferred back to the city, Drogo is gradually consumed by the atmosphere of lassitude on the northern front. Drogo understands immediately that a spell has been cast over the soldiers at the fort and that a sane person would leave. Yet when he is offered a medical dispensation by the military doctor, he refuses. Thirty years of waiting for a moment of glory to give meaning to his endless monotony end with the prospect of a real war - or possibly just another mirage.

The Tartar Steppe has been compared favorably with the novels of Franz Kafka and it is easy to see why from the above synopsis. Yet the writing is so precise, yet evocative, that suspense remains even on a second reading. Buzzati understands the psychological mechanisms that ensnare his character, but understands that they trap us, too. Published in 1938, as war in Europe threatened, Buzzati's fable is as close to timeless as a story can be. Like Anabasis by the Frenchman St. John Persse, published earlier in the decade, The Tartar Steppe suggests that when illusions collapse they retain a hold on us more tenacious than that of any fallen empire.

Chinese Poetry

2008-08-01T10:31:00.001-04:00

THE MOUNTAIN POEMS OF MENG HAO-JAN, translated by David Hinton Brooklyn, Archipelago Books: 2004 895.113 MEN

Meng Hao-Jan (689-740) is revered as the first great Chinese poet. Living at the time Buddhism became popular in China, Meng's followers admired his life of solitary wandering for its faithfulness to 'The Way'. Tao, or The Way, is a cosmology of the natural world that is manifest in all living things, the 'ten thousand things' that first formed out of emptiness. For the Chinese then, rivers and mountains are a means to contemplate the origin of all things, being similar to the western idea of wilderness.Meng's poetry is similar to our Imagist landscapes in its clarity and succinctness. His imagery echoes the style of Chinese landscape painting. Unsurprisingly, the (sometime) imagist poet Ezra Pound based his Ideogrammic Method on his understanding of Chinese characters learned from the work of Ernest Fenellosa, an American orientalist.The poems are translated as a series of unrhymed couplets; the longest poem is sixteen lines. Within this framework, many things happen. Autumn Begins, the first poem in the collection, appears similar to Japanese haiku in its brevity but, as the reader moves on, a narrative thread asserts itself. This is not a poetry of snapshots or moods per se. Meng sometimes addresses his readers directly, as in 7/7 in a Strange Village, asking us: "Who can bear those star river distances?" ( a reference to the Milky Way). Things are given names that express their lived experience: Thought-Essence Monastery; Grand-View Mountain; Peak-Light Tower.Meng's solitude was not total; along with frequent addresses to the reader, his poems recount numerous visits to friends, other poets, renowned sages, recluses, and fishermen. He even tells of traveling to the capital to advise government ministers. This translation by David Hinton is the first time that an entire volume devoted to Meng's work has been assembled in English from some 270 surviving poems. Hinton has also translated the four major works of Chinese philosophy.

THE SILK DRAGON, translations from the Chinese by Arthur Sze

Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press: 2001 895.11 SZE

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE by Arthur Waley

New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1941 891 WAL

Arthur Sze is a second generation Chinese-American who speaks Mandarin Chinese, a dialect far removed from that of classic T'ang Dynasty poets (7th through 10th centuries). In his introduction to The Silk Road Sze offers a fascinating walk through the process he follows in making translations from hanzi, the rectangular blocks arranged into vertical columns, into a language based on the Latin alphabet. The reader's enjoyment and comprehension of these poems is increased, as is appreciation for poetry in general. Sze is particularly interesting on his efforts to convey the rhythms of the original poems.

Arthur Waley (1889-1966) was a noted British Sinologist whose translations are still respected and of such good quality that they are considered poems in their own right. It is, in no small part, thanks to Waley that we have Chinese poetry available to us. Waley became fairly fluent in both Chinese and Japanese without ever traveling to Asia.

Both Sze and Waley include in their collections poems by T'ang masters Li Po (701-762) and Tu Fu (712-770), along with Po Chu-I (772-846), one of my personal favorites. Sze's translation "A Question for Mr. Liu" is relatively brief, but characteristically pithy. The personal fates of these poets are also noteworthy. Li Po tried and failed many times to pass the examination that would have allowed him to become a scholar/bureaucrat at the Chinese Imperial Court. His failure resulted in a life of poverty and exile, despite his great gifts. According to legend, the romantic Tu Fu leaned out of a boat one evening to embrace the moon and fell overboard and drowned.

AUTUMN WILLOWS: Poetry by Women of China's Golden Age

translated by Bannie Chow & Thomas Cleary Ashland, Oregon, Story Line Press: 2003 895.113 AUT

Most westerners have vague notions about the historic oppression of Chinese women, much as they did a generation ago about western women. Autumn Willows offers evidence of an alternative tradition of truth-telling and even protest. Many of the women who wrote poetry during the T'ang period were priestesses at court like Li Ye and Yu Xuangji, with access to more education than ordinary women. Li Ye's poem "Eight Superlatives" gives a sense of familiarity that speaks across centuries.

"Furthest and nearest are east and west;

Deepest and most shallow

Are pure clear valley streams.

Highest and brightest are the sun and moon:

Closest and most distant are husband and wife."

Illustration: Lady Under A Gnarled Pine Tree, Ming Dynasty, is in the Collection of the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C>

Little Giants

2008-06-02T14:02:00.014-04:00

It's black and white, beloved and endangered. Millions of children around the world have cuddled a stuffed one and many lucky ones have seen one in person. It is the Giant Panda, found only in the remote mountain provinces of southwestern China, the same provinces recently devastated by an earthquake.

At best guest, there are 1600+ pandas left in the world, about 200 of them in captivity, and approximately half of those live at the Chengdu and Wolong Panda Research Centers, located near the earthquake's epicenter. Chengdu is a large city, but Wolong is a small village about seventy-five miles northwest of Chengdu, reachable by narrow mountain roads.

Lu Zhi was a young zoologist when she began research on pandas at Wolong in 1985. At the time, no one knew the size of the panda population, but it was obviously shrinking rapidly. Outposts, at first rudimentary, had to be established on the panda's home territory so that a census could take place and panda habits could be monitored and understood.

Because pandas live quietly in the remote ranges of the Himalayas, most of what we know has been learned in only the past two decades, as zoologists have studied pandas in their natural habitat. This remoteness also explains the dearth of panda images in traditional Chinese arts: because humans seldom saw pandas, they rarely made images of them.

It became clear in the 1980s that the panda population had dwindled to such a dangerously low number, that unless humans helped them to breed in captivity, the panda gene pool was at the brink of extinction for the species.

Most human encroachment has not been malicious, rather it has come through farmers cultivating the fertile lands in China's valleys to feed an expanding human population, thus pushing the vegetation-loving pandas ever higher into the mountains in search of bamboo, the mainstay of their diet. Add to this the problem of periodic "die-outs" of bamboo species every few decades, and there are periods when pandas starve for lack of adequate nourishment. In captivity, we have now discovered that pandas will happily eat carrots, beets, pears, apples, and sweet potatoes, if offered to them, thus increasing their weight and stamina.

The myth that pandas have trouble reproducing has been re-evaluated. A panda mother may give birth to one or two cubs, but in the wild, lacking the nutritional resources to care for two, a panda mother must perform triage on her newborns, choosing the healthier one to live and leaving the other to die. At research centers, humans have devised strategies to help the mothers to raise two healthy cubs at once, including bottle feeding and "cub swapping" which lets each cub be with its mother for twelve hours out of twenty-four while the other is cared for by humans. It is not by chance that Wolong refers to each year's crop of cubs as its "class" at "Wolong Panda Kindergarten". On the basis of panda research, twenty-four hour daycare is a great idea. But such knowledge was gained with diffiuclty, as inital efforts to raise cubs in captivity failed miserably.

Two years ago, in preparation for this summer's Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government chose baby Xing Xing from Wolong to be its official panda mascot. In the wake of the earthquake of May 12, eight two year-old classmates of Xing Xing were flown to safety in Beijing, to make a six month long "Olympic visit" while their badly damaged home at the Wolong Center is rebuilt. That's eight pandas from a class of sixteen cubs born in 2006 - a record to be proud of, and one not believed possible a mere two decades ago.

GIANT PANDAS IN THE WILD: Saving an Endangered Species

by Lu Zhi, with George B. Schaller New York, Aperture Foundation: 2002 599.789 ZHI

Do You Know Where You Are?

2008-05-31T11:59:00.001-04:00

It looks like the rose garden at Thornden Park in Syracuse, New York.
It is a photograph of Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France.

Departure Sickness: Gabrielle Roy

2008-05-13T20:07:00.012-04:00

www.dogpile.com
A Midwestern landscape, flat farmlands overlaid by a grid of endlessly repeating squares: a place familiar from the novels of Willa Cather. But the land ignores political boundaries: draw a line straight north and you will reach Manitoba - and Gabrielle Roy, one of Francophone Canada's foremost writers.

Topophilia, a term coined by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan to describe an altruistic love of the natural world, without possessiveness or patriotism, permeates Roy's fiction and the cosmology her characters understand as the heart of the universe. At the center of Street Of Riches and The Road Past Altamont is Christine, a remarkable young girl as she comes to awareness of the larger world.

Suburban Winnipeg in the 1920s was far removed from the cosmopolitan eastern cities in the days before automobile travel became common, and the train is almost a character in these stories of Midwestern life. Edouard is an officer for the federal government's Department of Colonization when he and his wife Eveline are posted to Manitoba. Away from her native Montreal, Eveline feels trapped, her wanderlust stifled by the care of a large family. Such a woman would tell her daughter, "what died last in the human heart must be the liking for freedom."

But a length of fine navy fabric seen in a store window inspires Eveline to take Christine on an impromptu train trip to visit her husband's siblings, who haven't heard from Edouard in years. "If God affords me the means to make enough money to leave, it's because he wants me to go," Eveline tells her daughter. The journey is a revelation to the little girl, the farther they travel the younger and more carefree her mother becomes; the reverse trajectory happens on the way home. "Probably I wanted to hold captive those I loved, but I wanted them happy in their captivity, " Christine reflects later, a sentiment shared by children everywhere. And yet, she thinks, "Upon her face, her memories were like birds in full flight." This theme is taken up again in The Road Past Altamont when the adult Christine drives her mother, homesick for the hills of her native Quebec, across the prairie to see the only mountains in southern Manitoba.

Some losses prove irretrievable. Alicia, Christine's sister, drifts away into a world where her family cannot follow. Hours spent alone weaving braids of flowers, followed by a retreat to the attic, where Alicia pelts passersby by with flower petals from her solitary perch. "See!" she whispers to Christine, pointing to some little oak trees, "They look like conspirators wrapped in their long black coats."

When Alicia no longer knows anyone, the family is forced to put her in a hospital, where she finally recognizes Christine, who is anguished by such elation: "Was it not a thing to marvel at? returning to life, Alicia's soul first of all found joy!" But Alicia dies a few months later.
The Road Past Altamont is a collection of novellas that introduce us to Christine at times both before and after the events of Street Of Riches. At age six, Christine spends a summer with her grandmother, marveling at the old woman's creativity in fashioning a doll from remnants and when the grandmother, grown frail, comes to live with Christine's family, she teaches Christine "a little about life and all the successive beings it makes of us as we increase in age."
Another encounter with an elderly neighbor, Monsieur Saint-Hilaire, leads Christine, now eleven, on an expedition to Lake Winnipeg where the girl unexpectedly finds herself in the role of caretaker. "And so we lived, rather like everyone else on the face of the earth, I imagine, little satisfied with the present, in constant expectation of the future, and often in regret for the past."

Gabrielle Roy (1909-1983) was the youngest of eleven children. Her father, a

Canadian Immigration Officer, was fired for political reasons from his job in 1915, precipitating a family financial crisis. Roy became a teacher, but also pursued an acting career, saving enough money to study acting in Europe. The bilingual Roy became a correspondent for a hometown Winnipeg newspaper and, in 1939, returned to Canada, but settled in Montreal where her investigations of the effects of economic development on the urban poor convinced her

that a novel about the working class neighborhood of Saint-Henri was waiting to be written. Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute), published in 1945 won the Governor General's Award and sold 750,000 in the U. S. That same year. Roy married a doctor and moved again to Europe for a time; her peripatetic life was mirrored in a fictional world that moves easily between psychological realism and poetry, the urban and the pastoral, from enchantment to sorrow and back.

THE ROAD PAST ALTAMONT (La Route d'Altamont) by Gabrielle Roy, translated by Joyce Marshall

Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press: 1993 (1966) FIC ROY

STREET OF RICHES (Rue Deschambault) by Gabrielle Roy, translated by Harry Binsse

Lincoln, University of Nebraska: 1994 (1955) FIC ROY

Illustrations by Walter J. Phillips, Canadian artist, courtesy of http://www.sharecom.ca/phillips/default2.html

Pictures At A Revolution

2008-05-01T13:33:00.003-04:00

PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION by Mark Harris

Penguin Press: 2008 791.4309 HAR

The year is 1967 and the place is Hollywood. The American movie industry, still reeling financially from the advent of network television in 1951, is also experiencing competition for prestige from foreign films.

Mark Harris, a columnist for Entertainment Weekly, uses the year's five Oscar nominees for Best Picture as a vehicle for exploring the changes buffeting the major studios. Harris intercuts between the five stories cinematically and, in the event, his method works extremely well to create suspense in a narrative whose outlines are already known. His thesis is succinct: from the making of these five films we can see a new Hollywood begin to take shape, the one that we know today.

Most obviously old among the nominees is Doctor Doolitte, a musical based on a children's story of a kindly veterinarian who has the ability to talk to animals. Following the successes of My Fair Lady and The Sound Of Music, Hollywood executives had reason to hope that another vehicle starring Lady's Rex Harrison would be a guaranteed hit. Instead, it was a debacle that almost brought down the mighty 20th Century fox Studio. Rex Harrison was an egotist and a drunkard, and with his wife, actress Rachel Roberts, brawled and engaged in outrageous behavior on three continents during filming. As for the tribulations of the composers, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, Harris reminds us that their bittersweet love song When I Look In Your Eyes was sung by Harrison to a giraffe.

The young Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier appeared in two of the year's nominated pictures, Guess Who's' Coming To Dinner? and In the Heat Of the Night. In the first, Hollywood attempted to deal with the issue of interracial relationships through a family romance about liberal parents and their daughter, whose fiance provides an unexpected test of their tolerance. Conceived as a vehicle for the duo of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the picture's filming was complicated by their personal relationship and Tracy's terminal illness (this was last movie).

Predictably, Sidney Poitier's character, a physician, had to fit the stereotype of the perfect (read: sexless) Negro.

Poitier also starred in the year's Best Picture winner, In The Heat of The Night, with Rod Steiger who would win the Best Actor award for his performance in this suspenseful story of murder in Mississippi. Virgil Tibbs is a black man stranded in a small town, pulled in by the sheriff as an obvious suspect, only to reveal himself as a police detective from Philadelphia. Sheriff Bert Gillespie reluctantly agrees to work on the case with Tibbs and the two men stumble through their cultural assumptions to solve the crime and reach a point of mutual respect. So volatile was the national situation in the midst of the Civil Rights movement that Poitier insisted that director Norman Jewison find a film location north of the Mason-Dixon Line (eventually filming took place in Sparta, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis.)

The Graduate, Mike Nichols' eagerly awaited debut as a movie director, was based on a novel that had been written four years earlier, a time lapse of mammoth proportions in 1960s pop culture. It seems clear from Harris' narrative and the recollections of those involved, especially actor Dustin Hoffman, that the people who made The Graduate were as surprised as everyone else by the film's iconic success. Charles Webb's novel was a moralistic tale of youthful disillusion with the adult world ("I have one word for you: plastics") but the movie is an amoral melodrama where having an affair with your girlfriend's mother or running off with your girl after she has taken vows with another man are (at least ambiguous) triumphs.

But Old Hollywood met New with Bonnie And Clyde. This was the first movie that Warren Beatty really wanted to make, but the young leading man couldn't get the Hollywood establishment to take him seriously. Robert Benton and David Newman were writers ar Esquire Magazine in 1963 and both were also admirers of French New Wave cinema, especially Francois Truffaut's ousider romance Jules And Jim, recently released in the States. Benton had grown up in a small town in east Texas and, when he read a book about Depression-era outlaws, he remembered that his father had told him about attending the funeral of two long-forgotten bank robbers - Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The two men collaborated on a screen treatment that they sent to their idol Truffaut, who loved it. But he was busy with other projects and passed it on to his friend Jean-Luc Godard. Godard wanted to make Bonnie And Clyde, but shoot it in New Jersey and with Elliot Gould as Clyde. Meanwhile, Newman and Benton had enlisted Beatty, who endured four years of Herculean challenges to get the picture made. The studio executives didn't understand Bonnie And Clyde even when they saw the (impressive) finished product, and "dumped" the picture. Critical kudos from Europe, particularly England, resurrected the picture's fortunes and made it an unprecedented success. Several fingers are needed to enumerate the taboos that fell, or were severely shaken, by Bonnie And Clyde, including presentation of sexual ambiguity and the stylized but stark depiction of violence on the screen.

Agnes Varda & Jacques Demy

2008-04-13T18:37:00.000-04:00

Francoise Dorleac and Catherine Deneuve in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) a film by Jacques Demy. Image from http://www.taoyue.com/

Two filmmakers, one a realist and the other a romantic, one marriage, and memorable films: the ingredients for a fairytale. Agnes Varda (b. 1928) and Jacques Demy (1931-1990) sometimes worked together and sometimes not, they were both offspring of the post-war movement in French cinema known as the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). They shared certain preoccupations: with psychological realism, parallel plotlines, and recurring characters from film to film; their works often influenced or commented on each other. Both achieved their first successes in the heady days of the early 1960s, Demy with Lola (1961) and Varda with Cleo From 5 To 9 (1961).

Agnes Varda was born in Brussels, Belgium to a French mother and a Greek father. She studied psychology, literature, and art history in turn at university until she discovered photography in a course at night school. Her first film La Pointe courte (1955) was based on a short story by William Faulkner; her cinematographer was Alain Resnais who soon directed the landmark film Hiroshima, Mon Amour in 1959.

Varda began her own production company, Cine Tamaris, in the 1970s to get the freedom to make films like One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), the story of two young women negotiating the currents of sexual freedom and feminism at a time when abortion was illegal in France. Varda also wrote the dialogue for Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 succes de scandale, Last Tango In Paris.

Varda's films often explore life's difficulties through the experiences of marginalized people.

Jacques Demy fell in love with Hollywood movies as a child and left his hometown of Nantes to study cinematography in Paris. There he met Francois Truffaut and acted in Truffaut's classic film The 400 Blows (1959). Demy also became friends with a young jazz pianist, Michel Legrand, who would compose gorgeous scors for several of Demy's films. Music was a common thread in the movies of Demy and Varda.

Demy's first critical success with Lola was followed in short order by The Seven Deadly Sins and Bay Of Angels. In 1964, he achieved a popular success and lasting fame with his most beloved film The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg. A maker of modern fairy tales, Demy balances sweetness with acute sensitivity to psychological verity.

LOLA

Jacques Demy, director Fox Lorber Home Video 1961 VC FRE 791.43 LOL

Demy called Lola a "musical without music." Shot on location in black and white, this may be Demy's tribute to the New Wave. The film bears the imprint of a Demy trademark, grounding in a specific place, here the rough, bustling Atlantic port city of Nantes. Lola, played by the luscious Anouk Aimee, is a cabaret singer who has waited for her lover Michel for seven years while he is away in America to make his fortune. Faithful in her own fashion, Lola has had affairs with visiting sailors and allowed herself to be courted by her childhood friend Roland (Marc Michel). Her choices embody the never-ending tension between freedom and fate. In the end, Lola drives off with Michel and their child, leaving behind an embittered Roland. Through the presence of other characters, a teenager and a middle aged woman, Demy hints at other choices Lola could have made.

Cherbourg Harbor, Jacques Bouyssou

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (LES PARAPLUIES DE CHERBOURG)

Jacques Demy, director; Agnes Varda, screenwriter Fox Lorber Home Video 1964 VC FRE 791.43 UMB

Is it a pop opera, an operetta, or a musical? No matter, because The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a collaboration between Demy, Varda and composer Michel Legrand, is a lyrical tale of thwarted young love.

The year is 1957 and the French & Algerian war is about to disrupt French society just as Vietnam would soon do to the United States. Seventeen year-old Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve, at her most luminous) helps her widowed mother run an umbrella shop in this rainy city on the Pas de Calais. Her beau Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) is an auto mechanic who has just been drafted into the Army for two years to Algeria. Their parting at the train station, a ballet of heartbreak, is the film's defining moment.

Left alone, Genevieve discovers that she is pregnant and, bowing to social pressure, she marries Roland (Marc Michel), a handsome diamond merchant who loves her. Roland, reappearing from Lola, gets the girl this time, but he is her reluctant second choice. Seven years pass and the lovers meet again, by chance. Both are now married and irrevocably lost to each other, but they silently acknowledge their love. Demy's most popular film, beautifully restored, remains haunting.

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (LES DEMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT)

Jacques Demy, director Fox Lorber Home Video 1967 VC FRE 791.43 YOU

The second musical from Demy & Legrand is as sunny and bright as the small, sleepy coastal town of Rochefort. The Young Girls Of Rochefort is Demy's love letter to Hollywood musicals, and it comes as no surprise to see Gene Kelly as Andy Miller, a visiting American pianist. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael famously got it wrong when she panned the film as derivative; this delightful confection is sui generis.

From the moment when the carnival trucks roll into town and erupt onto the square with dancers in dazzling whites and candy-colored pastels, we are drawn into a magical world of color and choreography, our disbelief suspended. When the genial young carnies lose their girlfriends to a pair of local sailors, they sing, "They call us carnies, but poets are what we are." As Etienne, George Chakiris (Bernardo in the film version of West Side Story) dances out of reach of gravity, described by Stephanie Zacharek as a "hipster gazelle."

The boys are not lonely for long. Around the corner is a school of music and dance run by two sisters, a modern day Snow White and Rose Red. Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and Solange (Francoise Dorleac) introduce themselves: "We're a pair of twins, born under the sign of Gemini/who love catchy tunes, silly puns, and repartee," creating a force field of tension and flirtation between them. It is made poignant when one knows that the two were sisters in real life and that Dorleac was killed in an automobile accident a few months after filming was completed.

Solange, who dreams of going to Paris to play her concerto for Andy Miller, will be found by her prince, a charming symbol of enlightened masculinity in his immaculate lavender sport jacket. It is the cooler Delphine who will throw caution to the wind to run off with the carnival in the end. The great actress Danielle Darrieux, the twins' mother, will be reunited with her long lost love, making a satisfying whole to the story.

CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (CELO DE 5 A 7)

Agnes Varda, director, screenwriter Home Vision Cinema 1962 VC FRE 791.43 CLE

Two fateful hours in the life of Cleo Victoire (Corinne Marchand), a pretty young pop singer as she waits to hear the results of her test for cancer. The story is told in real time, a device made famous by Fred Zinneman in High Noon. In that time, Cleo will grapple with the idea of her death - if not now, then someday. Wherever she goes, Cleo is shadowed by Death, personified. A fortune teller who reads the Tarot cards to her looks like a cadaver, trying on new hats, Cleo muses that, "The black one suits me very well," and she watches a funeral procession pass beneath a sign that reads "Here's to good health!" If filmmaker Varda believed in such symbols, the movie would be unbearable, but her approach is "expressionistic, it distorts the world, it shows it froma particular standpoint." (Varda) As often happens in films by Varda and Demy, parallels proliferate as Michel Legrand appears as Bob, a good-natured night club musician and Marchand, who portrayed a chorus girl in Lola now fronts the band.

In the end, when Cleo receives ambiguous encouragement from her doctor she erupts with pent-up energy, assuring her boyfriend Antoine, "We have all kinds of time." The camera pulls back, isolating the pair in the hospital garden out of time or, as critic Roger Tailleur neatly puts it: "Cleo...from here to eternity."

AGNES VARDA'S VAGABOND (SANS TOIT NI LOI)

Agnes Varda, director Home Vision Cinema 1985 VC FRE 791.43 VAR

The body of a young woman is found frozen to death in a ditch by the side of a country road. From this beginning, Varda as narrator interviews the people who encountered this female drifter in the weeks before her death. It becomes apparent that no one really knew Mona or her origins, allowing them to project their own feelings onto her. As played by Sandrine Bonncuire, one of France's most esteemed actresses, Mona is beautiful and aloof, wandering aimlessly through the long rural winter. By retracing Mona's path, Varda compels us to see how tenuous an individual's hold on civilized life is. As an outsider, Mona "provokes self-examination and doubt in the minds of those who belong."

Vagabond employs a favorite Varda device in parallel plotlines. Mona make two female 'friends', Madame Landier, a retired professor and Yolande, a young housekeeper. She takes two lovers, David a fellow wanderer who is unable to keep her and Assoun, who rejects her because of his need to be accepted by his peers. Then there is the Goatherd, a man who rejects society yet has a family, a choice that may not be open to an independent woman in a man's world. The question hangs over this last, bitter falling out.

LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE (THE GLEANERS AND I)

Agnes Varda, director Home Vision Cinema 2000 VC FRE 791.43 LES

Varda creates a visual essay on gleaning, an ancient agricultural practice, by taking to the road with a camcorder. Varda has said that through filming she came to feel a kinship between her creative process and the work of the people she met. Most people only know of gleaners from Millett's iconic painting The Gleaners (1857). Peasants in rural France have long followed the path of the fall harvest, surviving on the remains of crops that were too small to be swept up by farmers. Varda found many who still practice this humble task, whether digging up potatoes near Lyon or pickig apples in Provence.

Through Varda's lens we can imagine contemporary gleaners as critics of consumption and waste in an affluent society. We see a chef who salvages food for his elegant restaurant, a homeless biologist who teaches literature for free, and a man who has lived off trash for ten years. And in a redeeming moment of pure delight, Varda unearths a heart-shaped potato.

Lulu/Louise

2008-02-28T14:51:00.022-05:00

LOUISE IN LOVE by Mary Jo Bang

New York, Grove Press:2001 811.54 BRO

LULU IN HOLLYWOOD by Louise Brooks

New York, Alfred A Knopf:1982 BIO BRO

PANDORA'S BOX, a film by G. W. Pabst, starring Louise Brooks

Videocassette: 1929 VC 791.43 PAN

LULU IN BERLIN

Videocassette, Kino On Video: 1987 VC Brooks

It is impossible to read Mary Jo Bang's verse-novel Louise In Love without thinking of the iconic film actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985). Just as Brooks invented for herself the persona of 'Lulu", Bang has invented a character who is and is not what viewers imagined Brooks to be.

Bang's dramatis personae include Louise, young and worldly, her solitary sister Lydia, and her elusive lover Hamilton Gordon (nickname: Ham). Also appearing are characters borrowed from the inventions of others: Mrs. Dalloway, from Viriginia Woolf, the goddess Ishtar from ancient Babylonian myth, and the French surrealist poet Yves Tanguay appears, "walking a panther." A series of lyric poems, Louise In Love includes more dialogue than one might expect to find in this form, but Bang blends it and bends the form to accommodate it expertly.

The personality of Louise, as Bang inmagines her, is a worthy o heroine, combining disparate traits of formality, playfulness, and iconoclasm. She is vast, she contains multitudes.Individual poems often have the energetic brashness associated with Hollywood (Here's a Nice Word: Prettiplease or You Could Say She Was Willful, But Compared To What?) Much as Louise Brooks, the actress. did much to create a naturalistic style of acting for the screen, Bang reinvents the uses of rhythm for the contemporary poem, mixing invented words with traditional iambic pentameter. "A hive hum ongoing in the hear ear" is merely one instance of Bang's obvious affinity for the aural aspects of poetry.

Mary Jo Bang was born in St. Louis and studied photography in London. She has been poetry editor for Boston Review since 1995.

Nothing from above should suggest that if you haven't read Lulu In Hollywood you won't enjoy Louise In Love, but Brooks' book is arguably one of the best ever written about the film world so give yourself the pleasure. When Brooks' life was at a low point in the 1950s, she was persuaded to move to Rochester, New York, by the film curator at George Eastman House, James Card, who helped her to reinvent herself as a writer on film. The admiring notice that her writing attracted led to a revival of interest in her film career.

Brooks was the daughter of a Midwestern lawyer and a pianist mother whose frustration were epitomized by her definition of children as "squalling brats.". Brooks began her artistic career as a dancer, first with Ruth St. Denis and then in New York with the Zeigfeld Follies, where she was discovered by producer Walter Wanger who brought Brooks to Hollywood in 1925. It is a token of her daring that in 1929, in spite of film stardom and a Paramount Pictures contract, Brooks decamped to Europe to work with the expressionist director G. W. Pabst in Germany. Pandora's Box (1929) from the same play by Frank Wedekind that inspired Alban Berg'a opera Lulu was the part of a lifetime for Brooks, and the origin of her nickname. In the year before she died, Louise Brooks was interviewed by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll for their documentary Lulu In Berlin. Her unique personality and intelligence enrich its 50 minutes with invaluable film memories.

Learning From Bernard Rudofsky

2008-01-11T14:24:00.001-05:00

STREETS FOR PEOPLE: A Primer for Americans by Bernard Rudofsky Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company: 1969 711.74 RUD

"It simply never occurs to us to make streets into oases rather than deserts. In countries where their function has not yet deteriorated into highways and parking lots, a number of arrangements make streets fit for humans..."

The quote above comes from Architecture Without Architects, but it describes the book at hand. A native of Vienna, Bernard Rudofsky (1905-1988) lived in many cities during his long life (Constantinople, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, New York, and assorted towns in Italy) and pursued many vocations (architect, engineer, historian, teacher).

This spring the Getty Museum in Los Angeles will mount an exhibition Learning from Bernard Rudofksy (http://www.getty.edu/visit/exhibitions/future.html). If you can't get to Los Angeles, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Like Jane Jacobs' Life and Death of American Cities with which it book-ended the decade, Streets for People helped change how we evaluate our built surroundings.

Beginning with Francis Guy's 1810 painting Winter, Center and Frost Streets, Brooklyn, Rudofsky reminds us how a great city changes over time. The early Dutch settlers brought their municipal canals to New Amsterdam by 1676 they were being filled in. Then the grid plan was imposed on the island and "shaved (it) down to its water level" in James Fennimore Cooper's memorable phrase.

Looking after the city's streets was left to the residents; their governors admonished them to install lights outside their homes to provide for travelers. Such lack of administration led to outhouse wastes channeled into the streets, roaming livestock, and even marauding pigs knocking unwary pedestrians into the mud. Things had improved, but not that much, when Frederick Clemson Howe was sent abroad to study municipal ownership of civic amenities in 1912. He concluded that "The city has neglected the people and the people have neglected the city." Conditions were similar in Boston, as described by Mayor Josiah Quincy in 1823 where, "for the first time on any general application, the broom was applied to the street." Clearly, the American street could be a very unpleasant place. Rudofsky pauses here to note that, at the same time, the thrift Swiss employed convicts to keep their streets immaculate.

Leonardo da Vinci is proposed as the first to propose a modern solution for the problems of streets: a design for separate streets for pedestrians and vehicles. Which brings us to the semita, or sidewalk, invented by the Etruscans of southern Italy and borrowed by the Roman Empire. It began as a series of raised steps crossing the traveled way, a kind of ancient speed bump.

A further improvement was the portici, or arched public walkways, (pictured at left) that date from the 12th century when the University of Bologna was founded (the oldest university in the western world). Professors used the covered walkways to conduct their classes, as they had not yet invented offices. The portico proved so congenial to human activity that, to this day, the city administrations requires any plan for new construction to include them and flower shops and cafes are among the amenities that flourish in their welcoming atmosphere. When the Englishman John Evelyn, visited Bologna in 1745, he wrote home enthusiastically that "one may pass from house to house without being exposed to rain or sun." Pause for a moment to regret the demise of the breezeway in American domestic architecture, replaced by the more expensive, less energy-efficient, and depressingly ugly 'mud room.'

Italy earns high praise from Rudofsky for its civilized street life. Consider a country where street names identify their salient features (such as whether they are narrow or wide, level or inclined, crooked or straight, shaded by trees, or follow a waterway). The people in this photo are voluntarily cleaning their street as part of their daily routine.

Milan's Galleria, the mother of all shopping malls, was inaugurated in 1867 with two covered streets laid out in the shape of a cross and owned by the city. Even in the age of air conditioning, it is still the coolest place to be found. Henry James, no proponent of change, enthused about it. "There is no better way of taking in life than walking the streets." And it was here that Ernest Hemingway's lovers whiled away the or vacation in A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Walls left over from medieval fortifications were put to good new use as promenades,on the island of Palma Majorca a practice that New Yorkers copied by strolling the ramparts of the Croton Reservoir on Sundat afternoons. And in 1967, the Tuscan town of Lucca hosted the first International Exhibition of City Walls to spread news of the practice.

There is also the pont-maison, (literally a bridge-house), as the French call it. The most famous example may be the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, whose graceful arches are home to expensive jewellery shops. Throughout Italy and Greece these floating flats provide shade to the streets, also functioning as flying buttresses that help support nearby buildings during earthquakes.

Walking often involves the climbing of steps, a salutary habit for maintaining a sense of balance, especially as people grow older. Rudofksy points out that the Campidoglio in Rome with its 124 steps divided into five flights has no bannisters, yet rarely does anyone fall there unless pushed. Compare this to the experience at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan when it was remodeled in the 1960s: the addition of a mere three steps led to twenty-nine accidents within months.

If we think that we are the generation that discovered the health benefits of walking, think again. Back in 1923, Dr. Alvah H. Doty wrote in his best-selling book Walking For Health that "It would be difficult to conceive of a simpler and more effective protection against undue internal blood pressure than walking, both for its simplicity and effectiveness." Doty went on to lament that walking was not sufficiently appreciated by his fellow Americans because it is not expensive or complicated enough. Rudofsky, the urbane European, chalks it up to our lingering puritanism: most of our parade holidays are reserved for times of bad weather (think: Thanksgiving and St. Patrick's Day).

At a moment when the rising cost of all petroleum products is pushing us to think of alternative ways of moving about, Streets For People offers a variety of solutions that are already proven to work. Also, Rudofksy's graceful prose makes reading a pleasure.

Illustration credits:

#1 - Street Shopping In Osaka (author photo)#2 Francis Guy Center & Frost Streets, Brooklyn, 1810 (I. N. Phleps Stokes Collection, New york Public Library)#3 - Via Saragozza, Bologna (author photo)#4 - Andalusian Town (author photo)#5 - Milan Galleria (author photo)