Van Wyck Brooks on: Elizabeth Peabody.
Posted: March 22, 2012 Filed under: Boston, Future Mrs. Hely, New England, people, Van Wyck Brooks Leave a comment
Van Wyck Brooks clearly has a little crush on Miss Elizabeth Peabody, “the founder of the American kindergarten.” More from The Flowering of New England.
As for Miss Peabody’s future, one could see it already. One pictured her, forty years hence, drowsing in her chair on the lecture-platform or plodding through the slush of a Boston winter, her bonnet askew, her white hair falling loose, bearing still, amid the snow and ice, the banner of education. If, perchance, you lifted her out of a snowdrift, into which she had stumbled absent-mindedly, she would exclaim, between her gasps, “I am glad to see you! Can you tell me which is the best Chinese gramar?” Or she would give you the news about Sarah Winnemucka. “Now Sarah Winnemucka” – this was the maligned Indian princess who was collecting money to educate her tribe. Or she would ask if you had read your Stallo. She took down every lecture she heard, although she seldom wrote what people said: most of her reports were “impressions.” *
* “I saw it,” Miss Peabody said, when she walked into a tree and bruised her nose. “I saw it, but did not realize it.”
Look at this asshole
Posted: March 22, 2012 Filed under: art, museum, painting, pictures, villains Leave a comment
Anthony Van Dyck, Self-Portrait.
“Possibly 1620-1.” Art historians, DO YOUR JOBS and get that “possibly” out of there.
“A precocious talent…” yeah I bet he was, The Met.
Trying to learn how to pronounce “Childe Hassam,” found this.
Posted: March 21, 2012 Filed under: art, heroes, painting, pictures 1 Comment
President Barack Obama in the Oval Office 1/28/09. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
That’s his “The Avenue In The Rain” past Barry. Pronounced “Child HASS-m.”
“Amusing Ourselves To Death” by Neil Postman
Posted: March 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentReading doomsaying screeds from awhile ago is strangely comforting, because either a) things didn’t happen as the author direly predicted or 2) they DID happen, like 1000x worse than what the author predicted, but I guess we just deal.
File Neil Postman’s 1984 Amusing Ourselves to Death in category 2.
Postman’s book is worried about the rise of TV. He holds out for special, extended, outraged scorn The Voyage of The Mimi, which is a pretty amazing thing to be mad about.
Towards the end, Postman wonders what we can do about the stupidity of TV:
The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of “Saturday Night Live” and “Monty Python,” the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over television’s control of public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.
You called it, buddy.
Q: What year did Brazil abolish slavery?
Posted: March 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentA: 1888.
WHAT?
Learned from this fantastic article by the amazing Charles C. Mann.
Come with me!
Posted: March 21, 2012 Filed under: adventures, mountains, the world around us, UNESCO Leave a commentTo Reunion Pitons, Cirques, and Remparts UNESCO World Heritage Site!
Pack a lunch! Or should we stop for cari and bonbon piments?
Yank’s A Million
Posted: March 20, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentFriend Of The Blog and exceptional human YankAmerica reviews one million albums!
O’Donoghue’s Opera (St. Patty’s Roundup, Finale)
Posted: March 20, 2012 Filed under: film, Ireland, music, musicals | Tags: musicals 9 CommentsIn the 1960s, some impoverished Irish musicians and folk singers decided to put together an Irish musical. Based on the balled “The Night Before Larry Was Stretched,” attributed to “Hurlfoot Bill,”* the film, “O’Donoghue’s Opera,” starred Ronnie Drew, later incredibly famous for his work with The Dubliners. The film, left uncompleted when the makers ran out of money, was found in 1997 in a junk shop in Galway.
Now you can enjoy the entire film on YouTube. I can’t encourage you to power through the whole thing. But I think you’ll have some fun around 2:44 of Part 1, where some winning girls sing an old IRA recruiting song. Then hop to 7:51 to see Larry’s cat burglar costume and the temptation that proves his undoing.
The stirring conclusion I have TubeChopped for you.
It is quite moving, really, to see Ronnie get hung. This really happened to people all the time.
A great shame that I never had the chance to discuss this film with fellow cinephile/Hibernophile SDB, who was seemingly designed by the Almighty to enjoy this picture.
Elvis Costello recorded “TNBLWS” but I prefer the version by The Wolfe Tones:
* Wikipedia has some stern words on the subject of attribution for this song.
Abandoned places, from The Atlantic
Posted: March 20, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentYes to this. #30 is cheating but other than that.
Hildegard von Bingen receives a vision and dictates it to the monk Volmar
Posted: March 19, 2012 Filed under: art, pictures, religion Leave a comment
(if I don’t cite a picture’s source it’s from wikipedia commons or I took it myself)
The Chernobyl Ant
Posted: March 19, 2012 Filed under: adventures, animals, nature, the world around us Leave a comment
A famous flyfishing fly, the Chernobyl ant was designed (it appears, research cursory) by Mark Forslund and Allen Wooley, guides on the Green River below Flaming Gorge, Utah.
That picture is from the website of Elburgon Flies Supply, “a leading fly fishing flies supplier in Africa.”
St. Patty’s Roundup, #2
Posted: March 18, 2012 Filed under: art, Ireland, statues 2 CommentsThe statue of Molly Malone in Dublin is basically a sculptural softcore boobie pic for dudes who fetishize fishmongers, right?
Also of note in Dublin statuary, Oscar Wilde. I mean, c’mon dude. Sit up! :
St. Patty’s Roundup, #1
Posted: March 18, 2012 Filed under: adventures, how to live, Ireland Leave a commentA good pick-up tactic, from the Tain, as translated by Thomas Kinsella:
Nes the daughter of Eochaid Salbuide of the yellow heel was sitting outside Emain with her royal women about her. The druid Cathbad from the Tratraige of Mag Inis passed by, and the girl said to him:
“What is the present hour lucky for?”
“For begetting a king on a queen,” he said.
The queen asked him if that were really true, and the druid swore by god that it was: a son conceived at that hour would be heard of in Ireland for ever. The girl saw no other male near, and she took him inside with her.
She grew heavy with a child. It was in her womb for three years and three months.
That kid, as you no doubt know, Reader, was Conchobor, who gets obsessed with Deirdre later on. Bad idea, Con, she ain’t called “Deirdre of the sorrows” for nothing.
Scraps from F. Scott’s notebook
Posted: March 17, 2012 Filed under: DFW, fscottfitzgerald, heroes, writing Leave a comment
My edition of The Crack-Up, from New Directions, includes a bunch of other assorted scraps found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebook. They are amazing. Plots, lines, ideas, whatever. Here are some from the two pages I happened to open to:
- A tree, finding water, pierces roof and solves a mystery.
- Girl and giraffe
- Marionettes during dinner party meeting and kissing
- Play about a whole lot of old people – terrible things happen to them and they don’t really care.
- Play: The Office – an orgy after hours during the boom.
- A bat chase. Some desperate young people apply for jobs at Camp, knowing nothing about wood lore but pretending, each one.
- Girl whose ear is so sensitive she can hear radio. Man gets her out of insane asylum to use her.
- Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges. (hear that DFW?!)
- Girl marries a dissipated man and keeps him in healthy seclusion. She meanwhile grows restless and raises hell on the side
On the next page begins the section “Jingles and Songs.”
Fitzhugh Lane
Posted: March 15, 2012 Filed under: art, books, fitzhughlane, livesoftheheroesofboston, museum, New England Leave a comment
Fitz Hugh Lane: When he was eighteen months old, in his father’s yard, Fitz Hugh Lane grabbed a handful of some kind of weed and put it in his mouth. John J. Babson’s History of the Town of Gloucester (1860) says it was “apple-peru.” It may have been jimsonweed. No matter. Fitzhugh “was so unfortunate as to lose the use of his lower limbs in consequence, owing to late and unskillful medical treatment.” He was paralyzed.
Apprenticed to a printmaker in Boston, he soon became famous for his paintings of ships and sunsets. He decided to go back home. On a peninsula called Duncan’s Point in Gloucester, he designed and built his own home. He didn’t like the name Fitz Hugh and with some difficulty had it changed legally to Fitz Henry. So in catalogs or museum signs he’s sometimes called that. He was well-known and loved in Gloucester.
Fitz Hugh had a very close friend, all his life, Joseph Stevens, who was from an old Gloucester family. The story’s told that one day, when they were boys, Joseph Stevens rigged up a special contraption of ropes and pulleys to lift Fitz Hugh high up in the masts and rigging of a ship, so he could look out at the harbor.* Fitz Hugh died in Joseph Stevens’ house, with Joseph Stevens at his bedside.
– from Crawley’s Lives of The Heroes Of Boston (1958), which I cannot recommend highly enough. Get yourself the reissued 1998 paperback for like a dollar on Amazon.
Once in winter I drove up to Gloucester to the Cape Ann Museum (got the top picture from their website) to view the Fitz Hugh Lanes.** On the streets of Gloucester with the wind I was as cold as I can ever remember being.
Fitz Hugh Lanes: good name for a Gloucester bowling alley.
*Crawley notes here that he is citing John Wilmerding‘s book Fitz Hugh Lane. Crawley always acknowledges, often at tedious length, that he has done no scholarship of his own and relies on the work of others.
** Much like the Scottish guy Indiana Jones pretends to be in “Last Crusade” drives up to the castle “to view the tapestries.”
The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
Posted: March 10, 2012 Filed under: adventures, books, from wikipedia, heroes, how to live 1 Comment
A quotation by [mountaineer W. H. Murray] is widely misattributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The following passage occurs near the beginning of Murray’s The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951):
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… but when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money— booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
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Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
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Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
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– from our old friends at Wikipedia. That Goethe quote is great, sure, but I’ll take Murray himself if I’m going on a hike. Murray’s autobiography, btw, was entitled The Evidence of Things Unseen, citing of course Hebrews 11:1.
Small Fates
Posted: March 9, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentEnjoying reading these on Teju Cole’s Twitter feed.
Is the opposite of cool also cool?
Posted: March 9, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentExhibit A: Stan Rogers (and friends).
1:06-1:09 a particularly rich subject for study.
Fate of course intervenes – from our friends at Wikipedia:
Rogers [age 33] died alongside 22 other passengers most likely of smoke inhalation on June 2, 1983, while travelling on Air Canada Flight 797 after performing at the Kerrville Folk Festival. The airliner was flying from Dallas, Texas to Toronto and Montreal when an in-flight fire forced it to make an emergency landing at the Greater Cincinnati Airport.
Smoke was filling the cabin from an unknown source, and once on the ground, the plane’s doors were opened to allow passengers to escape. Approximately 60 to 90 seconds into the evacuation of the plane, the oxygen rushing in from outside caused a flash fire.[1] Rogers was one of the passengers still on the plane at the time of the fire.
Ten Stone Baby
Posted: March 8, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentHuge HT to the great MCW.
Helytimes 