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.