Sonya Clark's truce flag

At last night's discussion group, the topic was Ukraine: when did the war begin? is "war" the term you'd use? why did it start? how much money has the U.S. spent in support of Ukraine in the last nine months? is that amount reasonable? organizations that funnel donations to the Ukrainian cause? to Ukrainians? would you send money? specific support for Ukrainian relief or to organizations that work in many situations, e.g., International Rescue Committee, Doctors Without Borders, American Friends Service Committee (or other service committees)? how has your opinion changed over the course of the year? can the U.N. or the international courts play a role in ending the Ukrainian conflict?

Most of the people in the discussion supported aid for Ukraine, including military aid. I mentioned in an email before the discussion (which was online rather than in-person) that I was torn by the whole thing. I'm an adamant pacifist but I couldn't explain what that meant in this context. I do believe strongly that war is generally (always?) a result of earlier war or conflict. How do you get to peace? Is it just utopian and totally unachievable? Quakers and Mennonites and others have been trying for centuries to achieve peace. Martin Luther King said that "true peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

I'm in Washington at the moment and visited the "This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World" at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum today. Lots of powerful work but one work that seemed to me to address my dilemma about explaining pacifism. The wall text near Monumental by Sonya Clark read "What if this flag of truce was the flag we knew, instead of the Confederate battle flag?"

The large textile work is based on the piece of cloth flown at Appomattox Court House in 1865 to indicate the surrender of the Confederate army. The cloth is in the collection of the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian. This large version was made by Sonya Clark in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. It was shown in a 2019 exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. For more information on the project: https://americanart.si.edu/blog/sonya-clark-art

Conflicts and wars involve two or more parties. We need justice but, mostly, we just need to all be willing to say "no" to resolving our conflicts through violence. I am discouraged by the situation in Ukraine but I know that peace is impossible when military response is honored.

the books I read in 2022

The last book I read in 2021 was the enjoyable Some reasons for travelling to Italy by Peter Wilson. That title will not surprise you. The only surprising thing might be the "some" rather than "oodles of." As is usually the case, my reading this past year has been a mix of fiction and non-fiction. This is the list of titles, in chronological reading order, some annotations. Most of the editions I read are paperbacks; the dates here might be the hardcover date. 

• Mr Beethoven, by Paul Griffiths (2020)
• Memorial, by Bryan Washington (2020) - this was on a friend's list of books read and recommended this year; me too
• Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (2020) - strong feeling of place (Scotland) and economics (poverty) and youth; also on another friend's list of books read
• A nest of vipers, by Andrea Camilleri (2013) - Camilleri's Montalbano mysteries are set in Sicily and very evocative of place; many have been made into TV movies
• Dark archives: a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin, by Megan Rosenbloom (2020) - sounds morbid but Rosenbloom uses a book to focus each chapter which may or may not involve a book that is actually bound in human skin; really enjoyed reading this book
• Queer city: gay London from the Romans to the present day, by Peter Ackroyd (2017)
• Breakfast with Buddha, by Roland Merullo (2007) - Dorothy recommended this one after I told her about having read his The delight of being ordinary; both are recommended by me, Breakfast takes place on a road trip to North Dakota
• On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed (2021) - I had to read it for a variety of reasons, including its currency and Juneteenth is my birthday
• A visit to Don Otavio, by Sybille Bedford (first published in 1953, I read the NYRB edition, 2016, with introduction by Bruce Chatwin)
• The nickel boys, by Colson Whitehead (2019)
• How to hide an empire: a history of the greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr (2019)
• Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell (2020)
• Out of Italy: two centuries of world domination and demise, by Fernand Braudel (first published in 1989, I read Europa Compass, 2019, translation)
• Logical family: a memoir, by Armistead Maupin (2017) - some good reflections on life events that played out in his fiction
• The glass facade, by John Watney (1963)
• The folded leaf, by William Maxwell (first published in 1945, I read the 1956 Vintage edition)
• Square haunting: five women, freedom and London between the wars, by Francesca Wade (2020) - H.D., Dorothy Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, Virginia Woolf, on Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury
• Bath haus, by P.J. Vernon (2021)
• The smart enough city: putting technology in its place to reclaim our urban future, by Ben Green (2019)
• A saint from Texas, by Edmund White (2021)
• Broken glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the fight over a modernist masterpiece, by Alex Beam (2020) - I toured the Edith Farnsworth House, outside Chicago, after the ARLIS/NA conference; the struggle to get the house built was monumental; it was wonderful to see the house, much illustrated and published, in its landscape along the Fox River
• Ninety-nine glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown (2017) - maybe I liked it because I'm just a royal family fanboy or because I was kind of obsessed with The Crown; still, this was a good read of short chapters focusing on events with some association with Princess Margaret
• The mirror & the light, by Hilary Mantel (2020) - finally
• The sweetness of water, by Nathan Harris (2021)
• Four lost cities: a secret history of the urban age, by Annalee Newitz (2021) - Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, Cahokia
• Correspondents, by Tim Murphy (2019) - the protagonist is an Irish-Arab American who becomes a journalist/correspondent in the Middle East during the late 1990s into the aughts; I enjoyed it very much, good place-ness, rather heartbreaking
• Lotharingia: a personal history of Europe's lost country, by Simon Winder (2019) - one of a trilogy about Central Europe

I'm not quite done with Lotharingia but it is such a wonderful read. Lotharingia started out as the portion of Europe given by Charlemagne to one of his grandsons.  The story has lots of Burgundy and Flanders stuff, places and art and architecture that I have long been interested in. Winder litters his history with geographic and cultural spices.

I didn't annotate all of the titles and I pretty much enjoyed all of this year's books. It took me quite a while to get through The mirror & the light but I had to read volume 3 of the Cromwell trilogy and I was deeply immersed in Tudor England as I read it. 

If you want to see how Goodreads sees my year's reading, go to https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2022/6837039. There, you can click on book jackets and see a description. Remember to support independent bookstores if you are going to buy the book. Both IndieBound and Bookshop.org can help you order a book by mail and support an independent bookstore in the process.

separated at birth: Mary Baker Pirelli

 

Pirelli Tower

Milan, Italy

Gio Ponti, with Pier Luigi Nervi and Arturo Danusso

1956-1958

Photo by jon_buono on flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonbuono/13996836142/

Christian Science Center

Boston, Massachusetts

tower on right: former Administration Building, 1972

Araldo Cossutta of I.M. Pei & Associates

By I, Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2689070

separated at birth: goats and antiquities

The Ortlip Gallery at Houghton University currently has an exhibition of "Lithographs of the Holy Land and Egypt by David Roberts, Royal Academician." I know I recataloged a bunch of large portfolios, including like Roberts if not Roberts himself, when I was in the reclass section at Cornell between 1969 and 1971. Here's one of the lithographs that especially caught my eye in the exhibition.

"Goats at the entrance to the caves of Beni Hassan"

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864)

Part of the reason it really caught my eye is that we had seen sheep and goats at the ruins of Solunto. We heard their bells before we saw them. We were heading along the northern coast of Sicily, about to return our rental car and spend a last couple days in Palermo before heading to Rome and home.

We also have seen goats being used for grass and shrub control in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It's a fairly old park but not antique.

Christmas 1994 & the Cistercian Chapel by Gary Cunningham

Christmas 1994 found me alone (but not lonely) in Texas, where I was then living, in Fort Worth. I gave myself a local road trip for Christmas. The day started with Christmas morning mass at the Cistercian Abbey Church on the outskirts of Dallas, designed by Gary Cunningham and completed not long before. The low winter sun was bright on the facade of the church.

I went on to the Solana office park, designed by Legorreta Arquitectos. The campus was adorned with bright red decorative balls in reflecting pools and across the landscape.

Next stop was Decatur to add to my collection of county courthouses. There was recorded seasonal music playing around the courthouse square. This was Texas so the temperature was plenty warm for Christmas, compared to upstate New York.

It is nearing Christmas 2022, twenty-eight years later. Today's mail brought the November-December issue of Texas Architect, one of the magazines I index for the Avery Index. Imagine my delight to find that the Cistercian Chapel has won the 25-Year Award from the Texas Society of Architects. There are more professional pictures in the article, including one with a healthy layer of snow and three interior views.

Life and reading always chase their own tails. I am presently reading Lotharingia by Simon Winder. We are in the 15th century so it is lots of Burgundy and plenty of Cistercian stuff.

$200 billion dollars

One of the headlines in today's New York times: Worsening debt in poor nations threatens crisis. Looming default risk. Lenders are slow to help--World Bank warns of lost progress.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/business/developing-countries-debt-defaults.html

So what's the amount that the poor countries owe, by some calculations? As much as $200 billion dollars to wealthy nations.

An article on visualcapitalist.com has a table of the ten richest billionaires for each year of the last ten. Mostly men. The richest person in 2022 has something over $200 billion. The richest person in 2013 had a rather paltry $73 billion.

Yes, I know it's only money. The 2022 person is Elon Musk so that number may be different now than it was at the beginning of the year. In 2015, two Kochs or two Waltons, together, could have beat out #1, Bill Gates.