a smile for the new year

This little bookcase without many books has been sitting in this location since I moved upstairs in 2016 when Jeanette moved in downstairs. It had been out on the upstairs landing where it accumulated a variety of things, from old lace from grandmother's stuff to Aunt Dora's velvet-cased opera glasses to cups of pens and pencils to old eyeglass cases to miscellaneous parts for massage equipment. And a couple-three books. I thought (without thinking new year's resolution) that it was time to toss the detritus and take care of the good stuff. I picked up one of the books, plain medium blue hardbound, and opened it. It was the 1931 (4th) edition of Enduring passion: further new contributions to the solution of sex difficulties being the continuation of Married love by Marie Carmichael Stopes.

Mrs Stopes's book Married love comes up twice during Downton Abbey: once when Mrs Hughes's familiarity with Mrs Stopes's Married love is used to squelch Edna's tale of being pregnant (Season 4) and again when Anna helps Mary with birth control when she's off for an adventure with Gillingham (Season 5). I don't remember knowing about Mrs Stopes before Downton Abbey but my dad did have some book on married love that he shared at some point in my youth. I remember the book not looking very sensational and this book I came across today does not look very sensational either.

As I thumbed through Enduring passion, I noticed there was a newspaper clipping that had significantly foxed a couple pages in the "The 'change' in women" chapter (that chapter just precedes the one on "The 'change' in men"). The clipping looked a bit like the New York times and is headlined "'Liberty' heading for San Francisco." A production of Austin Strong's play "which has knocked for several years on Broadway's door" was headed for a production in San Francisco, to be produced by Catherine Sibley and Richard Aldrich and perhaps to star Pierre Fresnay (Lafayette), Olivia de Haviland (Mme Lafayette), and Charles Waldron (Washington). Cannot help but think of Hamilton with those characters.

The clipping is missing any date or context but I googled what I had and found the text in the New York times for January 19, 1939. The headlines in the version online are different perhaps indicating varying editions of the paper. The article is in the Amusements section. There is an "L" near the page number which may indicate the Late edition.

All this made me smile. I just turned over the clipping. Oh. The article on the verso is headlined "Birth control rift ended by merger." This turned the smile into a chuckle. That clipping made perfect sense. Now I wish that there was a sign of whose book this had been. Gram and Aunt Dora's folks had both died by 1939. Both Gram and Aunt Dora were widows in the late 1930s. It is possible that the book has not been in the family house all along. It may take longer to clear off that bookshelf than I imagined.

the books I read in 2021

I was about halfway through The overstory by Richard Powers when 2021 began. David Brooks called 2021 "shapeless" on the PBS NewsHour yesterday and I'll agree. With the pandemic limiting travel, you would think that one would get more books read. Not me, in 2021. But these are the books I read, with some comments. A mix of fiction and nonfiction, as usual.

• Zami: a new spelling of my name, by Audre Lorde (1982). Selected by Eric Cervini for his reading group. I read the book but didn't participate in the discussion group.
• The ministry of utmost happiness, by Arundhati Roy (2017). It took me quite a while to get through this book even though I am intrigued by India.
• The girl of his dreams, by Donna Leon (2008). Folks tell me I should read Donna Leon mysteries since I am so in love with Italy. This one didn't grab me. I have read several Camilleri mysteries set in Sicily and enjoyed them much more. It's not that I don't like Venice but Leon's style is more name-dropping than deeply place-centric.
• A legacy by Sybille Bedford (1956, NYRB Classics 2015)
• I have something to tell you, by Chasten Buttigieg (2020). Pretty enjoyable, a quick read.
• Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk (published in Polish in 2007, U.S. paperback 2018)
• On the red hill: where four lives fell into place, by Mike Parker (2019). Listed in one of the brief reviews in the NYTBR. Older gay couple, younger gay couple, mentoring in life.
• Villa of delirium, by Adrien Goetz (published in French in 2017, paperback in English 2020). Read about this in my indexing and quite enjoyed it. Good sense of the soul of a dwelling.
• Invisible man by Ralph Ellison (1952, still in print). Compelling.
• The yellow house by Sarah M. Broom (2019). Set in New Orleans, always a draw for me.
• The Dutch house by Ann Patchett (2019). Another house book. Not my favorite Patchett but good enough.
• When Brooklyn was queer by Hugh Ryan (2019). Quite a treat.
• Becoming Duchess Goldblatt: a memoir (2020). The premise is intriguing and the story well told.
• Italian journey by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (published in German in 1816, Penguin classics 1982). Journal based on his letters from Italy. I really enjoyed this book, especially when he was traveling, not so much when he was arguing with his editor/publisher.
• Alec by William di Canzio (2021). Inspired by Maurice by E.M. Forster, continues the story focusing on Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper that Maurice falls in love with.
• Gay bar: why we went out by Jeremy Atherton Lin (2021). Enjoyable but more of a memoir than a sociological study. I was expecting the latter.
• The bright lands by John Fram (2020). Gripping story that goes a little crazy at the end.
• Art as therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong (2013). This came highly recommended but I found it annoying. The authors emphasized (the title should have clued me in) how art can specifically work therapeutically. Yes, but their approach was specific in saying that such and such an art work could cure or ease a specific condition. Too explicit for me. It reminded me of iconographers who describe every object in a medieval painting and ignore the aesthetics.
• Lights on--clothes off: confessions of an unabashed exhibitionist by Stuart Schwartz (2021)

And now it's a week from the beginning of 2022. I am reading Some reasons for travelling to Italy by Australian architect Peter Wilson. Another book that came up in my indexing. The cover illustration is a riff on the Tischbein painting of Goethe in the Campagna. The unriffed-upon painting appears on the cover of the Penguin edition of Italian journey that I read earlier in the year. The Wilson book is full of small illustrations, perhaps a reference to the original 1966 edition of Complexity and contradiction in architecture by Robert Venturi. The book is a real joy to hold and read. And it's Italy.

Wikidata communities of practice

At an LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session this afternoon, Christa Strickler mentioned that Atla (formerly known as the American Theological Library Association) was supporting a new Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice. We art folks have been having sessions of a similar sort for art metadata but have not called it a Community of Practice. I like the term. I googled to see if it was a common name for Wikidata communities of practice. I found the Wikidata page for community of practice. Why be a simple one of those when you can be, as they say in German: praxisbezogene Gemeinschaft von Personen, die informell miteinander verbunden sind und ähnlichen Aufgaben gegenüberstehen

separated at birth: the lady doth not protest

When I saw Lady Rosse, Antony Armstrong-Jones's mother in Season 2 of The Crown, the actress was so familiar but I could not place her. She rides to Westminster Abbey with her son for his wedding to Princess Margaret. As they ride, he excoriates her for not loving him as much as her other son(s).

Checking the credits, I noted the actress's name is Anna Chancellor. Off to IMDb to look at her list of roles. But, of course, she played Lady Anstruther in Downton Abbey. 

Lady Anstruther stops by at Downton Abbey, partly for a tryst with her former employee Jimmy. He is now a footman at Downton Abbey. That is naturally the night that Lady Edith throws the book and her bedroom catches on fire. Lady Anstruther gently tells Lord Grantham that she'll leave before breakfast.

Ladies and abbeys. Both delightfully juicy roles, juicily played by Anna Chancellor.

separated at birth: corner windows

Leesburg, Virginia -- posted in Historic Preservation Professionals group in Facebook by Kelly Whitton; comments included history of building: 1940s/1950s auto shop of some sort updated in the 1980s by architects Ballinger LaRock

Palermo -- Palazzo Alliata di Pietratagliata, second half, 15th century

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Alliata_di_Pietratagliata

separated at birth: Fyodor van der Goes

 

University of Iowa, Main Library Gallery

Hugo van der Goes in the Red Cloister

Emile Wauters

Royal Museums in Brussels

Denver: 1972

In the summer of 1972, Carol and George and Dorothy and I drove straight through from Cleveland to Denver to join the family for a retreat in the mountains outside Boulder. We arrived in Denver early on a bright day. The Gio Ponti building for the Denver Art Museum had just been completed in 1971. Its glass tile façade glistened bright gold in the sunshine. I was smitten. We came back home through Denver a few days later. The skies were gray and so was the building. I am not sure if I have ever seen such an animated façade. This archival photo from a recent article in Architectural Digest is by Wayne Thom. It reminds me of us approaching that golden building with an elliptical entry portal, long before the museum opened for the day.

The Ponti building has now been restored and expanded by the Anna and John J. Sie Welcome Center designed by Machado Silvetti. The welcome center unifies the Ponti building with the Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opening in 2006.

The Ponti building, now called the Martin Building, is the only building by Gio Ponti in the United States. My appreciation of Ponti's architecture and design expanded significantly in 2018 when I was in Milan and Genoa. Lots of buildings, mostly in Milan. Design objects at the Wolfsoniana in Nervi (on the edge of Genoa) and this wonderful lampshade in the Triennale Design Museum in Monza (just north of Milan):

This memory was enhanced by reading "Opposites Attract" by Ian Volner in the October/November 2021 issue of The Architect's Newspaper.

art with/by/for your neighbors

Two summers ago, Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr and Cassandra Bull co-curated an exhibition in Alfred entitled "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" in which an artist and a community member developed a collaborative work which involved the eventual audience also collaborating. Sam Horowitz and I developed a piece that we called "Time Becomes Us" based on our preparatory conversations. Sam built a wood trough in which we placed layers of natural and artificial materials.

Our object was on display in Cohen Gallery at Alfred University along with the works by other collaborators. Folks were invited to add layers to the initial ones Sam and I had done. We provided a few buckets of clay along with rocks and other objects we found. Some rocks, asphalt chunks, and bricks were collected from the Canacadea Creek behind my house. The Cohen show was up for part of August into the school term. After the show, Sam removed the trough and fired the contents. He's done plenty of experimenting with firing rocks, particularly the shales from this region.

This summer, we took some of the fired detritus of the piece and put it back in the creek bed behind my house.

This afternoon, I came across a video from the American Academy in Rome about their recent Streetscapes series of installations. The works were done by Academy Fellows, partly in response to the pandemic and the desire to have works that could be viewed from the sidewalks around the Academy. The director talks in the video about making the Academy more visible to its neighbors. One of the works -- Novissimo Landscape Goes Silver by Francesca Berni -- looks rather like it might have been mounted in the garden of the Villa Aurelia (one of the buildings of the Academy). Bill and I were lucky enough to stay in the Villa Aurelia when I was in Rome to do NACO training at the Academy.

This is a screenshot from the video. The material looks like soft aluminum foil and makes a fine crinkly noise as it waves in the breeze. How nice it would be to be in Rome and see the installations.

gerundickal or gerundical

I have long enjoyed how some words like picnic or panic get a "k" when you get to the gerund or present participle. That is, Édouard Manet and his friends were picnicking on the grass. You wouldn't want it to be picnicing because that would rhyme with the icing on a cake, not picnicking by a lake.

And then I came across havocked which I really liked. It's the past tense of havoc as in wreaking havoc or "The parade really havocked my trip through town but it was fun to watch."

This morning, I was reading the review by Robert Rubin of Shutdown: how Covid shook the world's economy, by Adam Tooze (Viking), in yesterday's New York times book review. Rubin says "The best we can hope for, [Tooze] argues, is what we in the United States got: disjointed 'subnational' action, crisis management by 'ad-hockery.' (Europe, Tooze writes, is even less capable.)." One does feel like they were havocked by the ad hoc over the past year and a half. But you can take pleasure in twisting words. Without the k, I guess ad-hockery would rhyme with grocery and not with mockery.

sink or swim: words, words, words

Some years ago, I wrote a blogpost entitled "rhymes and homonyms" about watching film credits and the marvelous things you can find there. I specifically noted the credit in the movie "Being Julia" for Loop Group to Sync or Swim. The rhyme in the credit caption and the homophone in the company name were just delightful. I now watch for loop group credits and don't see them very often. Just a handful in the ten years since that cited blogpost. The loop group, by the way, creates the crowd sounds in post-production on a film.

I was rewatching the "Downton Abbey" movie last night. Fade out. Cue the credits. Imagine my surprise to see there, there, was the Crowd ADR credit for Sync or Swim. It will not surprise you to learn that I had to look up what ADR meant: automated dialogue replacement.

This little revisit to Sync or Swim led me to study the distinction between homonym, homophone, and homograph. "Sync" is a homophone but not a homonym. And, besides, "homophony" is apparently only used in music. I was going to use "homophony" in the third sentence of the first paragraph.

P.S. Of course, the next day, I saw a Loop Group credit for The Loop Squad, in season 1, episode 1 of "The Chair" on Netflix. And 38 drivers!

P.P.S. Two months later, I decided to watch the final episode of "Downton Abbey" again (season 6, episode 9) and guess what. The Crowd Artists were Sync or Swim.

Anne Durham, Lady Flintshire

I was watching a clip from Maurice in which Clive and his fiancée are talking to Maurice on the telephone. Clive is played by Hugh Grant and Anne is played by Phoebe Nicholls. I had watched Maurice not too long ago as well as a few times over the years since it was made in 1987. I hadn't made the connection of this with a recent role played by Phoebe Nicholls. She is also Susan, Lady Flintshire, mother of Lady Rose, niece of Violet, the dowager countess of Downton Abbey. The ingenue becomes the odious mother. Her depiction of the odious mother is quite delicious but I'd be happy to leave her alone at the London house.

war is not the answer

There was a roundtable discussion on the AU campus yesterday afternoon on "9/11 and Afghanistan: twenty years after." The panelists were a senior history professor, a veteran who served in Afghanistan and is now the director of the Military Aligned Program at Saint Bonaventure University, a junior history professor who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and a psychologist who was in Junior ROTC in high school. The panel was rather weighted toward military service, terrorism, veteran services, patriotism, American international operations, ineffective Afghan forces, and the messy departure from Afghanistan. Thoughts of the late 1960s efforts to get ROTC off campus were roiling in my brain, along with how there is now a military office on campus. I was feeling quite stressed (though of course I was also experiencing plenty of privilege sitting in a library meeting space on a sunny afternoon). The last question was "was the Afghan incursion worth it?" A veteran in the audience answered in the affirmative and talked about women's freedom, schools, and other good things that had happened. It is good that some of the Taliban tyranny of the 1990s ended but twenty years of costly and destructive warfare can't be the best method for achieving such social change.

Today's Environmental Studies speaker was K. Neil Van Dine on "Water and sanitation in Haiti." His group, Haiti Outreach, works with communities to get a sustainable water supply and sanitation. Many groups have helped with various relief efforts in Haiti but few have helped build the systems needed to manage and maintain the infrastructural improvement. Upwards of 500 communities, mostly rural, have received help from Haiti Outreach which builds community support before any well drilling happens. Van Dine noted that the UN/WHO Global Goal for Sustainable Development is for the water supply to be within a thirty-minute round trip. It's hard for us to imagine anything other than light switches, water faucets, and flushing toilets. But just think if the billions of dollars and hours of effort expended in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of Vietnam and Korea and elsewhere, had been spent on sustainable development.

The Haiti talk will be posted on the Environmental Studies Speaker Series at AlfredU YouTube channel.

Thanks to the Friends Committee on National Legislation for the "WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER" bumper sticker.

Lady Hamilton

 Maybe you had to be there. Matthew had his nineteenth-century dinner one evening in the mid-late 1970s in Pittsburgh. There were a couple dozen of us: grad students in art history, librarians, professors. The table stretched through the double doors between his living room and dining room. Several courses were served. I was costumed as Thomas Eakins. I don't remember who Dorothy dressed as. Julie came as Lady Hamilton, in a gauzy confection of white fabric. I so enjoyed meeting Lady Hamilton.

"In Rome I was glad to study: here [in Naples] I want only to live, forgetting myself and the world, and it is a strange experience for me to be in a society where everyone does nothing but enjoy himself. Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here as English ambassador, has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations -- standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress. The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does. In her, he has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere. This much is certain: as a performance it's like nothing you ever saw before in your life. We have already enjoyed it on two evenings. This morning Tischbein is painting her portrait." (J.W. von Goethe, Italian Journey, translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, Penguin classics, 1970, page 208)

When I first read this paragraph an hour or so ago, I was smitten by the memory of the Pittsburgh dinner and Julie as Lady Hamilton. As I type it, the description of the tableaux vivants sounds rather like inappropriate behavior by older white men. Last night's group discussion was on "The new Puritans" from the October issue of The Atlantic. Maybe it's time to re-read The volcano lover by Susan Sontag.

soundscapes / sound escapes

 Composer R. Murray Schafer died on August 14 and the obituary in the New York times talks a good deal about his thinking and writing, and composing, on the sounds of the environment. The soundscape.

The new academic year has begun and the village of Alfred has filled again with students and their vehicles. There's a house across the street and up a ways which has a sign calling it "Hick House." It also has a coterie of large pickup trucks with their engines set to be way noisier, and smokier, than necessary. One or more of the pickups also have a panoply of horn sounds, including a diesel train which is a bit startling since it sounds like the train is just outside the door. I like trains so it's a bit amusing. So far, I haven't heard it at two in the morning.

Thinking about the noisy trucks and horns after reading the obituary and Schafer's thoughts on how noises change our environment, I wonder how many birds and other wildlife have moved deeper into the woods or off to another area entirely. There was considerably more evidence of wildlife in the village during the early days of the COVID lockdown, a year and a half ago.

Out behind my house, I can hear the creek and birds, and sometimes the rustle of a woodchuck as it whizzes back to the burrow. Not so much on the front porch.

just don't call it critical theory

Critical race theory is getting bashed these days so I don't want to say this post is about critical feminist theory. Nonetheless, I just listened to most of the keynote address by Lauren Klein at the 2021 LD4 Conference on Linked Data. I was thoroughly heartened by her statement that working to change a system is worth it if it has a long history and is widely used. This was said in the context of a question about whether it's worth it to fix outdated and offensive terminology in LCSH and other vocabularies or should you just start over. She applied her theoretical work based on intersectional feminism to say that we should topple the hierarchy, smash the binary, and embrace pluralism. Use LCSH, try to fix it, supplement it in the short term by other vocabulary. Both/and, not either/or.

separated at birth: Boullée and Bourgeois

 

  Étienne-Louis Boullée,

cenotaph for Isaac Newton after plans by Boullée,

model by Bernd Grimm, photo by Jan Kraege

(image from Wikimedia Commons)

Louise Bourgeois,

Untitled, 1991-2000, white marble

MASS MoCA, photo taken 13 July 2021

armchair traveler: Edmunds, Washington/Maine

 

At today's virtual meeting of the VRA Cataloging & Metadata Standards Committee (CaMS), someone mentioned Story Maps software in connection with our discussion of coding the geographic coordinates of a building depicted in an image. I googled "story maps" after the meeting and went for a visit at the Library of Congress. I picked the Roadside America story map from photos by John Margolies who could easily be called the father of roadside Americana. Touring about the story map, i settled on various places I've visited. I clicked on the furthest east pin in far eastern Maine, near the bridge over to Campobello Island (New Brunswick) which I memorably visited with Christie. The pin led to the picture above and the metadata said the sign was located in Edmunds, Washington. Wrong side of the continental United States. My first thought was that the pin had slipped off the West Coast and ended up on the East Coast.

Appropriately enough, I ended up going into a rabbit hole to figure out why the pin got in the wrong place. Did the coordinates get entered wrong? But the coordinates were not in the LC bib record for the image. Then I zoomed into the part of Maine where the pin was stuck. Ah, Edmunds, Maine. The authorized heading for the town in Washington is Edmonds but there's a reference from Edmunds.

The image metadata indicated that the Harvey's Tavern sign was on Route 99. No Route 99 in that part of Maine but there it was in Washington. Got the little yellow man in Google Maps to take me on a tour of Route 99. There was the sign though it now says Harvey's Lounge. The picture of the rabbit appears to be the same. That stretch of Route 99 looks pretty busy nowadays.

at the corner of Delancey and Chrystie

 

I was walking around the Lower East Side in New York City after a visit to the New Museum to see the "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America" exhibition. I noticed a building at the corner of Delancey and Chrystie streets that had a facade decorated with squashed soda or beer cans that reminded me of the work of El Anatsui.

A while later, I was having a mid-afternoon meal at Loreley, a longtime favorite since the days when one could smoke in the beer garden out back. I asked the waiter if she knew the building and what the name of the current occupant was. She said that it was some fancy boutique that she wouldn't shop at. Same here. But I was curious about the logo on the facade that looked almost like the Masonic symbol. I decided to see if I could get the name by asking the little yellow man on Google Maps to zoom in and find the name in Street View. Well, he found the old version of the building. Metadata indicates August 2019. It doesn't answer my question about the logo but it's interesting to see what's beneath the new incarnation.

P.S, I walked by the store again a couple days later on the way to the subway. It's the Daily Paper Clothing NYC flagship store. Getting the daily paper, of the Times variety, on Sundays in Ridgewood is nigh impossible.

P.P.S. This is what the building looked like on 27 May 2021.

separated at birth = elective affinities

I was looking at the September-December 2019 issue of Visual resources, a special theme issue on "Art and the periphery: in memoriam Foteini Vlachou." Vlachou died in 2017 at the age of 42. The obituary essay in the issue included a mention of her blog - https://iknowwhereimgoing.wordpress.com/ - which is still available, without new entries. I went to look at it and was intrigued by her series called "Elective affinities" in which she did about three dozen posts with a pictorial comparison or reflection. The last one, done two months before she died and marked "hors série," was a book cover for Estrela solitária by Ruy Castro compared to the Barberini Faun.

"Separated at birth" just seems so mundane relative to "elective affinities" and "hors série" is pretty esoteric too. Still, I really enjoy doing my "separated at birth" posts and won't appropriate "elective affinities" though I'm really glad I found Vlachou's posts. She credits the comparison to Arthur Valle who used the juxtaposition on his Facebook page.

separated at birth: ladder to the river, ladder to the sky

 

"ladder to the river"

posted to Flickr by Alberta Mayo, copied here with permission

https://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamuseum/50885119208

Martin Puryear

"Ladder for Booker T. Washington" (1996)

(installation at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2015)

separated at birth: firehose or is it art?

The Allentown Volunteer Fire Company

offered 700 feet of four-inch hose, free to a good home.

Tammy suggested it would make for a good stretch of walkway ...

but all I could think of was "Civil tapestry 5" (2012) by Theaster Gates.

 (now in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery)

https://www.albrightknox.org/artworks/20143a-b-civil-tapestry-5

I do not mean to make light of Gates's allusion in this work to the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and the use of fire hoses to spray protestors during demonstrations. The collection entry linked above gives a brief description of the history of the works that Gates did with decommissioned fire hoses.

armchair traveler: biking to Terlingua or Antwerp

Sherry Volk does an amusing column in the local paper, The Alfred Sun, called "Scene about Alfred." She does one or more pictures from around town with a story or theme. She and Bob go down to Big Bend for a while during the winter and they're down there now so the "scene ABOUT Alfred" is not a scene IN Alfred. This week's paper had some pictures of bikers on the Big Bend Run, stopped in Terlingua at the Alon gas station on Route 118, at the intersection with 170.

Sherry and Bob stay in an RV camp near the intersection. There's a motel there too and Arno and Marvin and I spent a few days at the motel in 1995, very happily, while we hiked (aka walked) in the beautiful arid mountains, drank margaritas, and ate yummy Tex-Mex food.

Sherry's pictures took me to Antwerp as well. When I was there in 2014, there were a bunch of bikers in the Old Market Square.

It may be sacrilegious but there was a hymn this morning in church that had the words "'till traveling days are done." Nope, I'm not done yet.

thinking about my carbon footprint

There's a panel discussion on resilient communities this afternoon based on the 2018 NOVA documentary about "Decoding the Weather Machine." The discussants are an Alfred University environmental science professor (Frederic Beaudry), a sustainable food systems undergrad (Dale Mott Slater), and an MFA graduate student in ceramics (Marianne Chénard). The scientists in the film laid the groundwork for resiliency in the face of climate change and then spent the last portion talking about what we humans can do: we can do nothing; we can adapt; we can act to mitigate the circumstances. The more you mitigate, the less you have to adapt to, say, flood waters, wildfires and smoke-filled skies, and extreme storms.

I was feeling pretty good about my overgrown lawn which captures carbon and stores it. And then I remembered my leaky old house in which I have ten rooms to myself and my stuff (and the heritage stuff that comes with serving as "trustee" for the family homestead). All that space needing heat, presently provided by natural gas. There's plenty I could do to mitigate my carbon footprint beyond my reliance on walking as much as I can to do things around town and letting the plants go wild with capturing carbon. I did establish "Embedded carbon" for the Avery Index as part of my indexing. That doesn't mitigate my carbon use but I could consolidate my winter residing to a few rooms. But then I'd have to decide if I wanted to be upstairs or downstairs.

When I moved to Alfred in 2009 after retiring from New York University, I pretty much lived in the whole house but mostly used the kitchen and bath downstairs, sleeping upstairs. I consolidated downstairs when I rented most of the upstairs to a student friend of my brother's. I spread out again after he graduated and moved to a different space. Then I consolidated upstairs when my ex sister-in-law needed a place to stay after separating from my brother. The upstairs is less encumbered with heritage materials since my parents had rented it quite consistently for several years in the 1990s. I have felt more like I was in "my" space. After Jeanette moved to her new house in Almond (she likes to own a house which I see more as a noose), I spread out some but kept most of my living needs upstairs. That is, my study as well as the kitchen and bath stuff. It works well and I get exercise using the stairs much more. BUT ...

It isn't very smart for energy consumption. It's difficult to close off space when it gets really cold or hot. Upstairs is generally colder in winter and warmer in summer. Alfred rarely gets hot for longer than a few days and generally gets cool overnight so summer works pretty well. I do feel silly that I have to heat the downstairs air in order to have heat upstairs.

With all of this in mind, I took off with enthusiasm to walk downtown to do a bank errand, thinking I'd come home and start pushing and shoving some of that heritage stuff before the panel discussion this afternoon. By "pushing and shoving some heritage stuff," there are some simple tasks like sorting through my dad's and my mom's desks and consolidating all of the paper clips, pencils, pens, paper pads, and other office supplies, keeping what is useful and sharing the surplus. That might make one of those desks usable again as more than a storage cabinet. There are more significant and difficult tasks but it's difficult to get to them with the stacks of unnecessary and generic materials in the way. You see, the house is overgrown too.

cataloger tools & reference questions

Meredith Hale, metadata librarian at the University of Tennessee, asked on ARLIS-L if anyone could provide an authoritative source for the birth and death dates of the photographer who signed his photos Wasow. She needed the information for rights clearance and authority record creation. She noted that there are several images on Wikimedia Commons, including this portrait of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin from 1924.

Spyros Koulouris, archivist at I Tatti in Florence, responded with the link to Wasow's record in the Deutsches National Bibliothek authority file. The DNB records, as well as those of the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Getty Union List of Artist Names and several dozen other organizations, can be searched together in the Virtual International Authority File or VIAF. This is a really useful tool in name authority work.

Reflecting on this exchange on ARLIS-L, I was reminded of a little reference question I helped a fellow graduate student with, way back going on fifty years ago (early 1970s). Caroline Boyle-Turner (then Caroline Rachlis) was studying the French symbolists and was trying to verify some book by one of them. Paul Gauguin, I think. It had been elusive and she mentioned it to me. I had done plenty of searching in the book catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale when I worked on the reclassification project at Cornell University. She told me the title and we went to look in the BN catalog. I don't remember the details of the book but she was very happy to find that the book did actually exist. Catalogers can be successful reference librarians. Cataloging tools can be good sources of information. Of course, the BN book catalog, which has been supplanted at least for newer items by an online version, was not just a cataloger's resource but it wasn't on Caroline's radar. Fast forward some fifteen years or more, Caroline and I were delighted to coincide at a reception at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

[my photo of the Van Gogh Museum from a later trip, 2016]

birth control and a living wage

So I read the headline "Lack of birth control deepens women's burden in Venezuela" on the front page of the Sunday New York Times and thought why aren't the men taking some responsibility here. (The online title varies from that of the print edition, as quoted.) Then I read the sentence that said a packet of condoms around Caracas costs $4.40 which is three times Venezuela's monthly minimum wage of $1.50. Birth control pills are more than twice the price of a pack of condoms.

(photograph by Meridith Kohut from the article)

LCSH, literary warrant, heading deprecation, today's news

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging held its semi-annual meeting last week. It would normally be held in conjunction with ALA Midwinter or Annual but was virtual again this time around. Judith Cannan, the head of the Policy, Training and Cooperative Programs Division at the Library of Congress, gave a very interesting thought piece called "Emerging thoughts on LCSH" (the link is to my notes on the meeting) which she cautioned was purposefully unpublished (not even lecture slides) but was to encourage thinking about the future of LCSH.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings originated in 1898 though I'm sure LC did subject access in their catalogs before that. It was maintained for LC and by LC. In the century and more since then, it has expanded far beyond LC and many other libraries contribute subject headings, most through the Subject Authority Coooperative Program or SACO.

Cannan's thoughts focused on four areas: the support of LCSH as an international standard is not sustainable with LC resources; the current model is built on literary warrant in published resources and a possible expansion to newspapers, TV, magazines as terminology sources; deprecation of terms which are outdated or offensive; and pre- or post-coordination of terms. How to handle deprecated terms has generally been handled by making a reference from the old term to the new term. There is significant effort going on with revision of headings as the U.S. and the whole world are dealing with systemic racism, social injustice, and other issues. The old terminology is important for some research and may appear in transcribed and descriptive portions of the bibliographic record. Much to think about and the chat box in the iCohere software was very busy.

I was listening to Weekend Edition as I drove to Wegmans for my Sunday morning fix: the Sunday New York Times and the week's groceries. One of the stories was "Newsrooms revisit past coverage as editors offer a fresh start" by David Folkenflik. One phrase he said really stood out in light of thinking about literary warrant from newspapers. He called news reporting "the first draft of history." This so lined up with Judith Cannan's thoughts on the role of history in how we catalog. One of our intentions is that our cataloging can be as objective as possible and therefore last, if not forever, a long time. But words cannot be objective. They are loaded with cultural significance and that changes over time.

armchair traveler: Venice to Palmanova to Sabbioneta

 Mom used to travel vicariously with me. Now, we all can just about only travel vicariously when it comes to European destinations. I was writing up my Venetian adventure as a Pandemic Escape for the Alfred Sun and couldn't remember the name of the artist who did the painting of the Ospedale Civile in Venice that is at Yale now.

Walter Richard Sickert

L'Ospedale Civile 

Yale Center for British Art, Mellon Collection

As I was thinking about Venice, I went to flying over the city and zooming in on Google Maps. I had meandered to the northeast and noticed a name -- Palmanova -- that seemed familiar and probably telling. I zoomed in and there was the 16th century fortified city. Designed by Antonio Scamozzi (but that leads to a different story).

Thinking about Renaissance planned cities led me to think about Sabbioneta, over in Lombardy, north of Parma, where Christie and I stopped in 2001. 

morality/ethics and land vehicles

From the Subject Headings Manual, memo H 1095:

$x Moral and ethical aspects (May Subd Geog) (H 1998) Use under individual land vehicles and type of land vehicles, individual wars, and non-religious or non-ethical topics for works that discuss moral and/or ethical questions regarding the topic.

I was stopped in my tracks by this a few minutes ago. The red text is new. Why the heck would you need to add that this free-floating subdivision was used under individual land vehicles and type of land vehicles if it's valid under most non-religious or non-ethical topics. I guess if you're religious and cultish about your land vehicles, there might be confusion about the non-religious aspect. Or maybe land vehicles don't have a pattern heading so you have to be specific about some free-floaters. Cataloging is fun but sometimes inscrutable.

what city is that?

 John introduced us to the Pratt Institute Libraries Flickr album of bookplates. This image caught my eye:

[from Flickr metadata]

Artist: Ehringhausen, Willy

Description: States, 'Johanna Hoffschulte;' depicts a cityscape

with a cathedral and is surrounded by a border

made of roses. Signed at bottom center 'WE.'

[with tag "German"]

Well, of course, I'm curious to figure out what city. It looked like Cologne Cathedral and another medieval church tower with a distinctive shape. Yup. That's it. The church on the left is Great St Martin, with foundations dating to 960 CE and with a central tower dating to 1150-1250. The cathedral was just getting started in the mid 13th century.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cologne-Cathedral

er, rather, punctuation as poetry

 A few days ago, it was person as poem (the previous posting in this blog), today it's ...

"How poets use punctuation as a superpower and a secret weapon" in the Sunday New York Times Book Review for January 3, 2021. Illustration for the essay by Shivani Parasnis.