tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4324318645713922972024-02-20T08:50:12.525-08:00Teegee: Essaysteegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.comBlogger283125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-83879043793839805642018-08-21T23:33:00.000-07:002018-08-21T23:33:17.640-07:00Sharing "The Gulf" by Jack E. Davis<br />
Ordered only three days ago, a book that must be shared by all who have ties to our Gulf. which, as Mr. Davis says, he needed to put it all together and give us the book that we have needed. Others have given their due to such as Yosemite, to Alaska, tothe Andes, et al., to bring them to life, but in my three decades down here they have done nothing better than The Weather Channel, and for all the people I have come to know not just types. I have made myself ashamed, reading almost incessantly and failing to write to everyone!<br />
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I'm "publishing" this as is, not that it is per se a blog post.<br />
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<br />teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-1284805791400824022018-07-13T04:26:00.000-07:002018-08-22T01:42:41.917-07:00The gift of Genetics: sanity in the midst of Current NewsMy emphasis on my outdated genetics brought me a wonderful birthday gift, the Kindle edition of Richard Dawkins recent book. It came from a friend young enough to have been one of my last students (actually, his mother was one of my last graduate students), but he must have been shocked by my ignorance, only a little exaggerated (better that than gobbledygook). Dawkins saved my sanity, and he writes so well. So now I've downloaded Darwin himself; it has been his original Origin of Species that I'd left unread. No matter how old, it has all the honesty and thoughtfulness (and he too wrote so well) that I need. I'll just Publish this note for now. And again thank Cian for giving me the credit to profit so richly in old age from reading Dawkins.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-3325423475235283212018-02-18T17:17:00.000-08:002018-02-23T13:36:02.281-08:00GLAUX<b><i><span style="color: #3d85c6; font-size: large;">Athena's Little Owl</span></i></b><br />
<span style="color: #3d85c6; font-size: medium;">After weeks I return to this topic, lest it grow stale.</span><br />
<span style="color: #3d85c6; font-size: medium;">First, the word that small dictionaries define simply as "owl" proves to be quite different from what I imagined its history might be, and I can't go more deeply into its history right now than just to make that much clear. I hadn't known more about owls than about the etymology of their name. I'll come back to "glaux" later if I can.</span><br />
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(1) Even in Greek, even in Attic Greek, it is not the standard word for 'owl'. The basic word for that kind of a bird is onomatopoeic and like its call that hearers have heard as something like<i> kookoo </i>or the Latin <i>ulula</i> (whether or not strictly considered it derives from the verb <i>ululare</i>). Only about the time that the <i>Iliad</i> reaches its final form, especially in Attic Greek, it seems, does it seem to stand alone for Athena's little owl: in vase-painting and in a classical type of statue, known in copies, she holds it and, by the way, as I learned it is that little owl (<i>koukouvaya</i> in spoken modern Greek) that fits in a human hand and that all over Europe is the common type and size, not the big barn owl that rural Americans are familiar with. Albrecht Dürer's exquisite watercolor dated 1506 as well as the justly famous Late Protocorinthian perfume bottle in the Louvre, ca. 635-625 BC, are just the right size, not more that three inches long. The French diminutive, <i>chouette</i>, is usually preferred in the critical literature. In earlier ancient Greek authors <i>glaukos</i> means the pale, gray-bluegreen, of the sea surface or for eyes, especially in Homer, where Athena is specifically called <i>glaukopis</i> (just as Hera is cow-eyed). The adjectival forms, as glaukos -e -on, occur earlier commonly than the noun. The big dictionary Greek dictionary, Liddell, Scott, and Jones, spells all this out carefully. The fullest account in a single-volume work that I have is, Partridge, <i>Origins, </i>1958, s.vv. words like <i>glass, </i>ff. and, in the "elements" section at the back, <i>glauco-, </i>since of course, one of the Hellenistic doctors will have coined <i>glaucoma</i> (Pliny has it in Latin, but doubtless got it from his sources; (made-up scientific terms are not actually part of the 'natural' history of the word as such). The OUP family of dictionaries, of course, are also useful and the ever-loving Webster's Collegiate. One just had to learn not to think that one got <i>the </i>answer just by looking in one place.<br />
(2) It was from one of my favorite reference books, H. J. Rose's <i>Handbook of Greek Mythology </i>(still in print, but the original HB editions have larger print and wider margins), with which I had started, a habit since I first 'took' Mythology more than half a century ago, that I first found Rose's noting Homer addressing her as <i>glaukopis, </i>which 20th century translators render as 'bright-faced', though the older ones (think Alexander Pope or Lang, Leaf, and Myers) translate as green (or gray)-eyed. I think you can imagine both at once. Now, as an alternate name for Athena, <i>glaukopis </i>seems to me perfect, but in giving new names to residences, in those towns that still prefer naming addresses, it is customary not to choose names that some neighbors find difficult or awkward. Of course, the Latin name <i>Minerva, </i>gets used on houses first, though she was Etruscan and not the same goddess; if a poet called her fair-faced it was taken from Greek literature (a jolly sentimental mixup in German, which Mary Midgley incorporated in her memoir, is German Romantic dressed in antique garb, more or less, so her title <i>The Owl of Minerva</i> is simply charming, and is solid evidence for the continued prevalence of Latin in English education. I found that I'd bought it when it came out but hadn't got around to reading it). You begin to see how one can get distracted in this sort of "research".<br />
(3) Perhaps the best single volume on Athens Oxbow Monograph 67 (1997), a very rare treasure, 40 independent specialist articles from a conference on Athens, <i>all</i> of them interesting and worth having, which I just had to have for its Proto-Attic and above all for its article on the KX Painter on Samos. Seeing that I am interested in the history of the kylix cup and in the namepiece of the Samos Painter which was found there. .. But the volume has rewarded my interest in a number of other areas, too. Of course, it is in the nature of <i>Attic Potters and Painters</i>, who traded so widely and influenced other potteries, who matter so much for their development of glaze-paint, who illustrate Greek literature richly and incessantly, so that I think we could not half understand either the literature or the daily life without the vase-painting, that scholars like John Boardman and Erika Simon (to name only the two to whom it is dedicated) could so generously dedicate their lives to it without, even so, come near to exhausting it. One article, from a hand devoted to an utterly careless late black-figure group of vases, the Painter of the Half-Palmettes, left us a slew of rapidly produced vases many with, as he shows, a sanctuary of Athena and her local cult. François Lissarrgue, op. cit., pp. 125, ff, fig. 25, London B 359, showing her <i>chouette </i>on a little column behind the goddess's large profile bust to l. That bust, also, dates it: not earlier than the <i>kore </i>statue from the Acropolis signed by a sculptor named Antenor: the end of Late Archaic. The rest of the vases are consistent with this one (in fact, most of them could come from stock produced to be sold at a single festival (though one wouldn't want to put that in print). Now, who would look at this kind of painted ware if some picture-gallery dealer had it for sale? No one. It is evidence; it is history of popular religion. And, by the way, it's the kind if vase-painting that never (at least I can't imagine it) gets faked.<br />
Anyhow, I had to finish this.<br />
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teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-29790997269789343452017-10-13T21:28:00.001-07:002017-11-22T17:15:52.639-08:00Pre-DNA Double-helix Genetics<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-size: medium;"><b><i>Dominant and Recessive: Mendel's Peas</i></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">I don't know how many reading this had textbooks in which genetics were Mendelian. I was an assistant professor before the brightly colored, full-paged <i>Life </i>magazine publication of the double helix appeared and was read by everyone. When I was in school, Genetics was those three generations represented schematically in terms of genetic dominance. We all realized that of four children of the same parents, the two brunettes also carried genes for red hair (and that was why ladies who wanted to be red-haired had only to bleach their hair with hydrogen peroxide), and the two kids who had been tow-haired as youngsters did not grow up red-haired (as my next sister and I did), but brown-haired. Indeed, my father was true blond and my mother brunette. But all four of us children had brown eyes. I suppose that was why I found genetics interesting. Both of my paternal grandparents had pale eyes, and and my father's were true pale gray, but so were my maternal grandfather's. Nana's were a beautiful dark chocolate brown, and her lashes and brows were as black as her hair (and, of course, it turned white and black, real salt and pepper, as she aged).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">Anyhow, if you want to know about Mendel, whom I regard as an intellectual hero, just go to the Wikipedia. And yet, with all the Ancestry advertisements and Louis Gates on television, I haven't gone beyond popular genealogy. And it would be genetics that would tempt me.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">What I began thinking about was that Mendel, so far as he could go without technology, remains worth considering. He was very careful, after all. And it's not as if genetic dominance were hogwash. I daresay the minor uncertainties that so worried early 20c scientists here and there in a Mendelian third generation could be explained, e.g., by epigenetic research—not that I'd know how to do it.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #ea9999; font-size: medium;"><b><i>Note: When I faced all the pages of Egyptian painting provided in the Images by Google, though I did not find another cat between Dynasty 18 and the Late Periods, I did find one from the famous tomb of Khnumhotep of Dynaasty 12 (Middle Kingdom) at Beni Hasan, more than half a millennium even earlier than Nebamun's. It is the same kind of cat and also, of course, is part of Khnumhotep's hunting scene. Of course, Middle Kingdom painters didn't use modeling as a few New Kingdom ones did. But I went through all the tiresome choices of Egyptian painting for Middle School children and did not find additional cats. </i></b></span></div>
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Back to living cats. Cats do have eyelashes (to be distinguished from the furry rims in the place of brows), but they are hard to photograph. One day a close-up of my ginger tabby, Percy, did record his lashes, and they are ginger-colored, too. I conclude with photos taken the same day which seem to match the pattern of markings on Nebamun's cat.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiapxy_HcbkvxWHLTqy0h_mlfwPUg-e2nyBEMNvFFPeYbqdvpctf_0QwFDzceyIUpvMt2qGmDQpDGiRh6F58QPmLXD4XegDYo6mctbAH-htPEa9p3spCY-nqBKsSfZDTLY9XgDuQ2u7Q8s/s1600/KK-25Sept2017+PercyCloseTawnyLashesDSC_2593.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiapxy_HcbkvxWHLTqy0h_mlfwPUg-e2nyBEMNvFFPeYbqdvpctf_0QwFDzceyIUpvMt2qGmDQpDGiRh6F58QPmLXD4XegDYo6mctbAH-htPEa9p3spCY-nqBKsSfZDTLY9XgDuQ2u7Q8s/s400/KK-25Sept2017+PercyCloseTawnyLashesDSC_2593.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Showing "red" lashes</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4iUlRE-iB3egla0mhRDun_JFb1kvbftueqUcR4q2Rz1h9ZX0-5SKs9bQztB8Bmlep0svhWUEbeFGxknai13In97AE5rc-Jw165ddYlnaYn9e8sdpKfade5vK7_XfPe_X6S1bm-nRTpNU/s1600/KK-SupplementPercyCloseEyesIrisDSC_2592.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4iUlRE-iB3egla0mhRDun_JFb1kvbftueqUcR4q2Rz1h9ZX0-5SKs9bQztB8Bmlep0svhWUEbeFGxknai13In97AE5rc-Jw165ddYlnaYn9e8sdpKfade5vK7_XfPe_X6S1bm-nRTpNU/s400/KK-SupplementPercyCloseEyesIrisDSC_2592.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">When eyes are fully open, the lashes don't show</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq-zuWEFWM01rI3IpeG-8ll4SOJrcbBSB3mSbowUgkKcRq39f1d-YxfqObrlwbJHZpfH_XyRKhPC50kIuMgxPTcg73B5w8OefKMPEeCbQYrHgBiR4zFffvZnGzUSJiB6mwfFhIV7nAyZQ/s1600/25Sept2017+PercyBackFlankPatternsDSC_2588.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq-zuWEFWM01rI3IpeG-8ll4SOJrcbBSB3mSbowUgkKcRq39f1d-YxfqObrlwbJHZpfH_XyRKhPC50kIuMgxPTcg73B5w8OefKMPEeCbQYrHgBiR4zFffvZnGzUSJiB6mwfFhIV7nAyZQ/s400/25Sept2017+PercyBackFlankPatternsDSC_2588.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The sections of pattern are alike, down to the tail</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcM9YGma8ZkKE6PS8BnHMxEalMfLgjPynUVjZcE_51K078zBG6BeT45OqsSzaUoXqB8DnXUNNBH7pnFW46vSztU-7WBFextSygICJasRwqDXt8uSasjo6j1Dt3Zlu4KlBqY3x_KgFEGqQ/s1600/KK-SupplementPercyBackPatternDSC_2591.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcM9YGma8ZkKE6PS8BnHMxEalMfLgjPynUVjZcE_51K078zBG6BeT45OqsSzaUoXqB8DnXUNNBH7pnFW46vSztU-7WBFextSygICJasRwqDXt8uSasjo6j1Dt3Zlu4KlBqY3x_KgFEGqQ/s400/KK-SupplementPercyBackPatternDSC_2591.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The stomach markings have yet to be photographed...</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">I forgot to mention a couple of important details:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(l) The Egyptian ones I found are, so to speak, black-and-blond tabbies, and they are the ones that have identical markings, in exactly the same configurations and symmetrical. Even as dark tabbies have black stripes they also have dark eyelashes, and so has Percy, my cat. Yes, cats do have very slight <i>lashes</i> on their upper eyelids (not to be confused with the short hair brows, so to speak), and only the hybrid males with white bibs, bellies, and paws have the lashes that are pale. I have never seen a blond tabby from Egypt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(2) The new young "Morris", the blond one (like the original Morris, whether he was part white I no longer remember) on some of the bags of Nine-Lives kibble, with his "signature" written across him, is like Percy, identically marked, line for line, and with the same adorable face, with a little chin like that which now serves as the trademark of the New York Public Library. Young "Morris" (the blond one: the same brand of cat food also used black-and-tan kittens).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(3) I cannot guess how many painted Egyptian cats there are. Stupidly, I once supposed that all the bronze cats, which are feminine, of course, too, are the dark color of ancient bronze. Well, I suppose they may have been. I mean that I have been forced to admit that though the goddess Bastet ought to have been a brown goddess's color, she wasn't always so imagined. I mean, the Louvre has a tiny bronze of a bronze mother cat happily nursing a litter of kittens, and perhaps she isn't even Bastet. So far, I rely on the Cat Fanciers' page that says that it is only toms that are free of white patches.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">It is astonishing how interesting things are once you quit just assuming. Well, Darwin's curiosity was legendary.</span></div>
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teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-11905959883212441112017-09-15T10:12:00.003-07:002017-09-15T10:34:21.983-07:00My Cat from the Tomb of NebamunThis fragment from a New Kingdom Hunting scene in the British Museum today comes from the Theban tomb of the tomb of a nobleman named Nebamun. To attest to a good life, the basic trilogy of subjects, going back to the beginning of Egyptian funerary painting in the Old Kingdom, include the Banquet, the Hunt (and/or his means of living, such as agriculture or shipping), the Portraits (with or without Deities). In the magisterial Tomb of Nebamun, a perfect cat, as good as life, accompanies the hunter. For I have been adopted by a perfect Egyptian cat; the Algonquin Hotel's new Hamlet is similar and beautiful but not quite so Egyptian.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmKmP1m29-02KEY69KYLUVehyphenhyphenx54yxzF1RzWsNweYPPKeQUiHNlhfnk4mZlPguLL-7ouK2sHYIAvVmWqlgLvKQFGKDhkZEE76W0Kj38D7xugEoEVjB-8GGv5DdXaitXCxw2iRVpcac8LE/s1600/Dyn18+HUNT+WITH+CAT+EANE0426.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="579" height="331" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmKmP1m29-02KEY69KYLUVehyphenhyphenx54yxzF1RzWsNweYPPKeQUiHNlhfnk4mZlPguLL-7ouK2sHYIAvVmWqlgLvKQFGKDhkZEE76W0Kj38D7xugEoEVjB-8GGv5DdXaitXCxw2iRVpcac8LE/s400/Dyn18+HUNT+WITH+CAT+EANE0426.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: start;">It is easy to overlook the cat, and even the butterfly, so I did it justice by making a special trip to the museum. For the cat is important, being nearly a millennium earlier than all those elegant Saitic cats. And the domestic cat is surely originally Egyptian—we just take for granted that small cats can be pets. And not funerary, either. My new cat, who adopted me, about six months ago (I know not from whom he had been abandoned, but he was already neatly neutered), shares all the features and character of Nebamun's.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDbG4i5bFsmDmtKB0twffhPMfSeqdhc33PYv8gAs43SYgXb5QK_-xaSLL7UZgSCnCLN1xJcO4mHYE7_rzvK7UfeyaMSXFnD0fdhdxYnikyUf070NKiWXjAytuivZ0lwnuiVqmjJoa99lo/s1600/DET+CAT+TOMBEANE0427.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="600" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDbG4i5bFsmDmtKB0twffhPMfSeqdhc33PYv8gAs43SYgXb5QK_-xaSLL7UZgSCnCLN1xJcO4mHYE7_rzvK7UfeyaMSXFnD0fdhdxYnikyUf070NKiWXjAytuivZ0lwnuiVqmjJoa99lo/s400/DET+CAT+TOMBEANE0427.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The question is, how do cats, usually without our deliberate breeding, produce truly ancestral types through time and space? All the pedigrees, with fancy names, beginning with "Siamese" such as Abyssinian (which may not have stripes) or Bengal (with strong spots) or Bombay (solid black, pedigree granted in 1950s) or Burmese (puma-brown and lovely), have been created by cat-fanciers.</div>
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Since it took me more than a week to find my British Museum detail, I started by looking for defined types. It's not like dogs, which are working animals, and all the pages of cats on line seem to be, if not cute kittens whose traits are not yet well defined, apart from long-haired (which basically seem to be "Persians") either sturdy and round-faced (British) or narrow-faced with very long tails, long toes with clearly defined joints, muscular-haunched and very short-haired. </div>
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That is, they all can (and do) mate with one another, so they are all domestic cats, <i>tout court</i>.</div>
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It seems to me that they are all descendants of either forest-floor or barn cats or tree dwellers. American short-hairs seem to me to be as perfectly hybridized as can be. My old cat, RIP <i>aet </i>18, more or less, like most of the cats in our neighborhood, was a typical American short-hair: he had lots of white on his face and underside and the white was fluff: my friends who are allergic to cat fur got runny-eyes if they sat where he had been, and cats that had no white but whose undercoat was fluff ("bunny fur"), were regular American tom tabbies, and allergenic, too. My new cat, a wonderful creature, may of course have been purchased from a breeder, but the Algonquin Hotel's new cat is a true NYC alley cat; he even came with a torn ear. He may not be, however, a true climber. My climber, though with all the personality traits of breeds given "Asian" names, is named Percy.</div>
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The little book (such as you are tempted to buy as stocking stuffers at the book shop's check-out) called "The Little Black Cat Book", which a dear friend sent me years ago, is my source for the "Bombay" breed, pedigreed only in the 1950s. I remembered how such black breeds are known to occur. Once, some time in my adolescence, my mother took me with her to a household of fanciers of Siamese, whether some of her second cousins or customers who had done a Stanley Home Products party. In either case, they controlled very carefully the breeding of their cats: I was fascinated by how they lived (compare the TV program about breeders and exhibitors of pet ferrets); my own cats had been chosen at the SPCA. Anyway, they had a gloriously beautiful accidental cat: a large neuter male solid black with emerald eyes. He was the offspring of two seal-point Siamese, and he was very fond of humans. He was the loveliest cat I ever saw, and they told me I could adopt him. But I had no place of my own, and I knew I couldn't take care of him. But, <i>nota bene</i>, I never forgot that cat. That "Bombay" cat, I am sure, was the result of such an accidental hybrid. Yet, I am no expert on breeding, of course.</div>
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Anyway, whether ginger or tiger or black (or perhaps including Russian Blues), cats with body configuration like Nebamun's 18th dynasty cat, with long bones, and paws meant for climbing, and no white bunny fur undercoat but pure short-hair coats, like my Percy, very nice and sleek, also have panther/puma personalities and the ancestral propensity to climb and small high voices and affection for their humans, BUT they are not lap cats, gentle and clean though they are. In fact, Percy is the most assiduous washer of all the cats I've had. He is also very alert and intelligent, responsive to verbal commands without much teaching. And, of course, he loves cat toys. He's not fussy about food, however, eating any kibble of decent quality, and I've never seen him stalking the blue jays or cuckoos, and he's plain afraid of opossums. So I'll Publish this now, adding a photo later.</div>
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photos taken this July. His eyes are the color of Dijon mustard.</div>
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<br />teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-15889339430845677932017-07-26T13:31:00.000-07:002017-07-26T13:33:53.916-07:00More rewards from Arthur WaleyFinally I treated myself to a masterpiece that everyone had told me to read. I suppose that I am not the only person who for unfathomable reasons resists what it seems that everyone estimable recommends: for example, I put off watching "The Seventh Seal" for decades. <br />
But finally I downloaded the eBook edition of "Monkey".<br />
If there is no one, at just this moment in history, who has not read "Monkey", or who supposes that Waley's translation of Genji is surpassed by the later one (though both are excellent) or that "Monkey" is any less relevant than it ever was, or less joyous, let me risk putting off anyone who suffers from the same resistance to recommendations as I have had, that though it is never too late to read it (the extra Introduction by the Chinese scholar-ambassador, Hu Shih, also is very fine, in the edition available online dated at the end of Arthur Waley's preface to 1942) makes this the edition of choice, I think.<br />
I won't even hint at "Monkey"'s perennially pleasures, but if you need any help, read the front matter first. If you find the daily news just fine, well...teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-87583563035318657982017-06-23T11:33:00.000-07:002017-06-23T14:14:02.782-07:00Golden PeachesIt has been years since I last read it straight through, and by now I have picked up perspective that I lacked when Schafer's <i>The Golden Peaches of Samarkand </i>was first published and, to my pleasure, is still in print, both literally in hard copy and as an e-book. I never took Schafer's course, but most of my friends did, and his colleagues admired it, too. I owned the first edition of 1962, one of the UC Press's finest productions, and after I returned to teaching in the 1980s I replaced it (evidently given away to an appreciative friend when I entered a religious order) with the current paperback. Now that the Kindle edition is so much easier on my eyes, I have acquired it and am grateful that the footnote access works perfectly. No scholarly book has ever managed its documentation, of almost unequaled adequacy, and mostly the author's own, better than this one; to a reader who habitually reads footnotes it is wonderful to be able to use them just as well as in the original. <br />
There was a period of several months in my last undergraduate year when, privately, I struggled with the realization that I couldn't do graduate work in both Greek and Chinese art and history in the parallel fashion I'd been enjoying; either one demanded some real mastery of the language. Since I had always worked my way through, my head start in Greek and Latin was decisive; I had not even begun Chinese, and there was always a generous but limited provision of scholarships, fellowships, teaching assistantships (from the budgets of different apartments), and hour-basis jobs in the University Library loan department (where, also, I had learned punch-card based computer programming). In sum, the University had already treated me as royally as even Oxford or Cambridge was wont to do for such as me. But my interest in China persisted, and China was foreign only in the same way as Greece was, though I never did study the language. <br />
One evening <i>Antiques Roadshow</i> featured a lion both powerful and exquisite and wonderfully preserved. As the expert said, it is certainly Tang, and it triggered a search all over my house for my copy of Schafer's book and then to seek it in Amazon, where, behold, there it is. What with all the place-names in both the older transliterations rather than <i>pinyin </i>and finding adequate maps (assuming that, like me, you are unhappy without them) it is not easy reading, but I can only say that, even reading it for the first time, one is possessed by it (rather like Arthur Waley's translation of <i>The Tale of Genji </i>in this respect) once you have read not more than a hundred pages. The <i>Encyclopaedia</i> <i>Britannica</i> Eleventh Edition (1910) double-page map of China is best, but it is more daunting than the most readily available (and possibly based on it) double-page map in any edition of Sherman Lee's <i>A History of Far Eastern Art. </i>You see, I am actually urging you all to read Edward Schafer's <i>Golden Peaches of Samarkand. </i>It still bears its 5-star rating in Amazon. <br />
So, this is, you see, my first repayment of my debt alluded to in the last Post, a true pleasure of real value in recompense for time taken to try to chase that money trail, since now I see that all the media are finally onto it. The latter quest isn't something that one values having learned more than half a century later. <br />
Of course, each of us may find his own <i>Golden Peaches</i>.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-16147322029668132392017-06-10T03:08:00.000-07:002017-06-10T03:08:30.268-07:00Epilogue, esp. to Post of March 18, 2017Enough of politics and banking!<br />
Not that learning about all that, better late than never, but I cannot even keep up with what I've realized, and there is no way that I could learn (and judge what I've read) enough to offer advice to you all, most of whom know more than I do. It is not that I am surprised by Money being more shocking than reading a few spy novels years ago taught me, and of course I am too old to be shocked to read that all nations, apparently, are engaged in covert actions (and of course I don't have to believe <i>everything </i>that I read, but surely we all can respect all thoughtful opinions), but the current specialists don't realize even as much as I do about knavery as well as sanctity through the ages; some even write that it all <i>began </i>with the CIA!<br />
But with everything falling apart, why add my bit?<br />
Let's just have the grace to realize that our readers can work it out alone (and, for that matter, what one learns from others must be struggled through each by himself).<br />
I just mustn't pontificate on what I have yet to digest.<br />
Only, in the primary sense of the word, I am, of course, a liberal. And I owe a debt to give most to the arts that have given me the most.<br />
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<br />teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-63606314047792399692017-05-01T11:39:00.001-07:002017-06-10T03:11:01.800-07:00Alt-Syrien, revisedThe purpose of this Post is to show why, unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, for example, we have a rough, vague idea of what we mean by <b>Syria</b>, due mainly to its being a geographical designation rather than, really, an ethnic one. That is, after World War I, the name was given to the Levant (apart from Lebanon, approximately) south of Turkey (that is south of Alalakh), west (more or less) of the upper Euphrates, and north of Damascus. Its lovely city, Aleppo, was not far south of Turkey and was notable for its cosmopolitan culture. Its population, in the days of Lawrence of Arabia (but the movie was filmed, as I recall, in Jordan), was, as the adjective itself implies, cosmopolitan. Compare, perhaps, Bangkok. But it was not nationalized until after the end of the Ottoman Empire, after World War I, after the Treaty of Versailles, and its modern borders date only from that time. That is why I mentioned Lawrence of Arabia. It had long before become urban and largely educated. Even old Palmyra, though far inland and my no means so Greco-Roman as Baalbek, was as much Roman Imperial as Levantine. Remember that 'Levant' is just French for Anatolia (Latin for Orient), whence from the Mediterranean point of view, the sun rises, but the name Syria comes from the NW Semitic name used for its Bronze Age immigrants. By the time I am concerned with here, the 10th to 8th centuries BC, the descendants of those NW Semites, Aramaeans (speaking Aramaic) were among the prevalent peoples in Syria, but the traders we call Phoenician and, in the north, Luvians, who had inherited more than a tinge of sub-Hittite culture, to judge from their art, and doubtless other people, constituted a largely urban population. If I were a scholar of ancient Semitic languages I might be able to say more, but, so far as it goes, I think that's sound. Beware of 'sources' that are merely old cut-and-paste; they are prone to saying <i>simply</i> that Syria is the land of the Phoenicians; the American OED provided for online dictionaries is one such. Today some specialists are not even sure what dialect those sea traders in luxury goods actually spoke. <br />
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Every day you hear news reporters alluding to 'Syrians' in terns that leave most of us feeling that families of illiterate or unwashed or anti-western people threaten our civilization. Folks feel that they all belong to angry Muslims. True that there are some who are fearsome, but there are many, many more who are dentists or skilled technicians or grocers and bakers, etc. And of course the children and their mothers and grandmothers are just that, as they can tell us themselves having been taught English and/or French in school. The world is often a dangerous place. Everyone should be watchful, but ignorance is most dangerous. The world is several times more populous today than it was when in the 1940s homeless families had to seek homes where they could.<br />
Anyway, most Syrians are the descendants of the inventors of the alphabet and the first adopters of minted coins as a means of exchange. There really are very few truly primitive peoples today, and the Levantines rendered homeless by these wars are among the most cultivated of all.<br />
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About 15 years ago when I was using the University Prints (then they went out of print and were no longer copyright) instead of one of the overpriced textbooks for my undergraduate courses. Two years ago I took the syllabus I had made and combined it with fully annotated University Prints. I used the Blogpost format to put them on line and urged anyone at all to use them. To that end I edited the verbiage very carefully and told everyone to translate them into any language they preferred, free of charge. For that reason they are very carefully edited and I cannot by now do the job as well again. But the 'page' entitled <span style="background-color: #990000;"><span style="color: white;">"After the End of the Bronze Age",</span></span> which <span style="color: #990000;"><b>I posted April 22, 2014, in TeeGee:TraditionalArtHistory</b>,</span> is saved to be as economical as possible, so it can run on cheap or old laptops (actually, on one of the new iPads, I think, full length), but I am having trouble linking it here. I'll get it up in this convenient place, with several extra images of my own, if I can.<br />
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<i><span style="color: #990000;">Here is the original introduction to Alt-Syrien:</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: #783f04;">You can't imagine how few archaeological picture books there were in the early 1950s. I mean the kind that have adequate and correct captions, never mind that they looked like newspaper photos. When in 1952 I took the Survey course in ancient art, the two most useful were Helmut Bossert's </span><span style="color: #783f04;">Alt-Kreta </span><span style="color: #783f04;">and </span><span style="color: #783f04;">Alt-Syrien. </span><span style="color: #783f04;">Popular accounts, themselves new, like </span><span style="color: #783f04;">Gods, Graves, and Scholars</span><span style="color: #783f04;">, were scantily illustrated and, for that matter, very generalized.</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="color: #990000;">It is <b>Alt-Syrien</b> that remained precious, even after Henri Frankfort's <b>Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, 1954,</b> one of the very first volumes of the Pelican History of Art; it contained only one slim chapter on Aramaeans and Phoenicians in Syria. Frankfort had been old when he wrote it, and his devoted successors had to keep his chapters. So it wasn't surprising that the late, lamented University Prints stuck to Frankfort. Besides, the profitable textbooks, which had to be used by teachers who still were bewildered (even those who had access to German books of Bossert's generation, or could read German) by what wasn't either just Mesopotamian or Egyptian, there being no illustrations of early Jewish art unless you believed the Providence Lithograph Company, often just skimmed over the material that they were in a hurry to get through the course. There is still, I must say, unresolved difference of opinion as to the sense in which ancient texts use the epithet Phoenician: whether it is only geographical, or cultural, or linguistic and ethnic; cultural it certainly is, but when very old books speak of the alphabet as Phoenician, questions arise. Such questions do not excuse journalists' tendency, even in Wikipedia (which is by no means so faulty as folks like to say), to generalizing in terms of who "the Syrians" are, or were. And, when I found the college textbooks unendurable (after several years they did improve), I was one of numerous professors teaching ancient art in survey courses who put together their own courses using University Prints.</span></i><br />
<i><span style="color: #990000;">When I had been retired for several years, aware of the horrendous prices of the new textbooks and concerned for students worldwide who might not have affordable access to any orderly corpus to study, I felt that I had to offer my mid-20c (so "traditional" simply because it comprises what the University Prints offered at the Survey level, held together by my outline as free of ideology as I could make it) and offer it free of charge.</span></i><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><b><i>https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3192706135770676794#allposts/src=sidebar</i></b></span><br />
<i><span style="color: #990000;">You will notice that the posts are in reverse chronological order. The University Prints have their own captions (and some of them are very old and corrected in the accompanying texts). The images from my own teaching collection are hand-held color photos.</span></i><br />
<i><span style="color: #990000;">You can open to the Introduction page and, from the list at right, go to the page that will help you put Syria in its place in history.</span></i><br />
<b><span style="color: #990000;"><i>http://teegeeforwhomever.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-centuries-of-reorganization.html</i></span></b><br />
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<span style="color: #134f5c;">And here are the additional images:</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al). Orthostat with a sub-Hittite warrior or god.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al), time of King Barrakub, ca. 720s BCE. Detail of the Aramaean princess on her grave stele. Notice her rosette jewelry (typical) and her Phrygian-type (remarkable) dress pin.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> PHOENICIAN. London, BM. Ivory plaque from Assyrian palace at Nimrud. Romantic exoticism in the subject, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style. 8-7 c. BCE. H. 0.105m. The inlays are of lapis lazuli and carnelian; it is partly gilded and plated with gold.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">PHOENICIAN. New York, MMA. Romantic exoticism, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style: note the "Tutankhamen proportions" of the figure and the type of sandals. From the Assyrian palace at Nimrud. 9 or 8 c BCE. H. 5 5/16"</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRxeojUccmQfvyN_2vsTWVRQvzemKrOAKm7qTdR5_BZzcEsQbpVQtBmt2KGa3R1ybs3QVwchq5eKo5K9aMpQtv9TEDWAVILcI0oVjd_pkBQXQ2sVdIdkH6FU7zBSXF2eyd5WQ7bef83tQ/s1600/EANE0822.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRxeojUccmQfvyN_2vsTWVRQvzemKrOAKm7qTdR5_BZzcEsQbpVQtBmt2KGa3R1ybs3QVwchq5eKo5K9aMpQtv9TEDWAVILcI0oVjd_pkBQXQ2sVdIdkH6FU7zBSXF2eyd5WQ7bef83tQ/s320/EANE0822.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">SYRIAN. London, BM. Ivory head of a woman. 750-700 BCE. H. 0.044m. The eyes, with equally curved upper and lower rims and a drilled dot in the center, the round cheeks, the shape of the ears, and the rendering of the hair are all Syrian--nothing Egyptianizing about this.</td></tr>
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teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-85403753407802074582017-04-25T11:38:00.003-07:002017-05-01T12:11:52.594-07:00ALT-SYRIEN<br />
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<b style="color: #b45f06; font-size: x-large;"><i>The Difficult Definition of "Syrian": It was never a single ethnicity.</i></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5WkYR9ephOVjqJeOKHLkF5R8vwlgSk4aritr3MqW-AnVAQyOd8Mv1SjykwimZ8_LPO_51ieowmbZp_p8ehiJeZPl6faN9C1U3JhvtkXfMAIpLIGVEFThDmAhsu_IYb1C404s0okqlrEY/s1600/EANE0732.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5WkYR9ephOVjqJeOKHLkF5R8vwlgSk4aritr3MqW-AnVAQyOd8Mv1SjykwimZ8_LPO_51ieowmbZp_p8ehiJeZPl6faN9C1U3JhvtkXfMAIpLIGVEFThDmAhsu_IYb1C404s0okqlrEY/s400/EANE0732.jpg" width="328" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al). Orthostat with a sub-Hittite warrior or god.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUS24hT1Hh-S52waZ3l-2qDLW1fOGEwSOEHua09EqOjP3NzUbr4Dto-rSKURXH5FigcW4rRtlC5_0-WSoftbmUyysWmWzlJuRhud7sYHHxVlFEs1Uj8L8KQuYsAmKc0BNnFcFkDGCidnc/s1600/EANE0820.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUS24hT1Hh-S52waZ3l-2qDLW1fOGEwSOEHua09EqOjP3NzUbr4Dto-rSKURXH5FigcW4rRtlC5_0-WSoftbmUyysWmWzlJuRhud7sYHHxVlFEs1Uj8L8KQuYsAmKc0BNnFcFkDGCidnc/s400/EANE0820.jpg" width="227" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">PHOENICIAN. New York, MMA. Romantic exoticism, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style: note the "Tutankhamen proportions" of the figure and the type of sandals. From the Assyrian palace at Nimrud. 9 or 8 c BCE. H. 5 5/16"</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirgXXwh6_wba31Z4Kx0t8CZ-OXFWvjC2X3FU_z99SXa-zi5j3wA902S_58Ylju9ieoWLjX9SMu-KUl3LQtGKt0DWWOSXrsfEXQ3PVfl0wX26bbD5MWBxPJ2_mCsv_ZThdjqwuUJhgdAxY/s1600/EANE0818.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirgXXwh6_wba31Z4Kx0t8CZ-OXFWvjC2X3FU_z99SXa-zi5j3wA902S_58Ylju9ieoWLjX9SMu-KUl3LQtGKt0DWWOSXrsfEXQ3PVfl0wX26bbD5MWBxPJ2_mCsv_ZThdjqwuUJhgdAxY/s320/EANE0818.jpg" width="307" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">PHOENICIAN. London, BM. Ivory plaque from Assyrian palace at Nimrud. Romantic exoticism in the subject, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style. 8-7 c. BCE. H. 0.105m. The inlays are of lapis lazuli and carnelian; it is partly gilded and plated with gold.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVO17iCJ4xPNWUhU0l5z3GaVxlL8ffY2hlMfwP0zAFMDZV2hRPUlIexQo9XooCEhVev3dnb6vYtqPoInxD9vJDI61O9WkDY4d9J0IU9ETsbER1PW4RAmRbmWJDKv_1-E9l3aAgDVEZ4Q/s1600/EANE0738.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVO17iCJ4xPNWUhU0l5z3GaVxlL8ffY2hlMfwP0zAFMDZV2hRPUlIexQo9XooCEhVev3dnb6vYtqPoInxD9vJDI61O9WkDY4d9J0IU9ETsbER1PW4RAmRbmWJDKv_1-E9l3aAgDVEZ4Q/s400/EANE0738.jpg" width="291" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al), time of King Barrakub, ca. 720s BCE. Detail of the Aramaean princess on her grave stele. Notice her rosette jewelry (typical) and her Phrygian-type (remarkable) dress pin.</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibUKI1teNdX5mYjrfZ4m3cMedqQBYpybkBPG8fsVhGuWVR3Kjd-KxM3DcSQdrk1bEktAeA9iCYnOj1O_t_GgJQEAclqLJbdu6XQdVzoozwhzFLvhptBcAzDvNNwLLunQPtjS55BEYJoyM/s1600/EANE0822.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibUKI1teNdX5mYjrfZ4m3cMedqQBYpybkBPG8fsVhGuWVR3Kjd-KxM3DcSQdrk1bEktAeA9iCYnOj1O_t_GgJQEAclqLJbdu6XQdVzoozwhzFLvhptBcAzDvNNwLLunQPtjS55BEYJoyM/s400/EANE0822.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">SYRIAN. London, BM. Ivory head of a woman. 750-700 BCE. H. 0.044m. The eyes, with equally curved upper and lower rims and a drilled dot in the center, the round cheeks, the shape of the ears, and the rendering of the hair are all Syrian--nothing Egyptianizing about this.</td></tr>
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<span style="color: #783f04;">You can't imagine how few archaeological picture books there were in the early 1950s. I mean the kind that have adequate and correct captions, never mind that they looked like newspapaer photos. When in 1952 I took the Survey course in ancient art, the two most useful were Helmut Bossert's </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Alt-Kreta </i><span style="color: #783f04;">and </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Alt-Syrien. </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Popular accounts, themselves new, like </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Gods, Graves, and Scholars</i><span style="color: #783f04;">, were scantily illustrated and, for that matter, very generalized.</span></div>
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It is <i><b>Alt-Syrien</b> </i>that remained precious, even after Henri Frankfort's <b><i>Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient</i>, 1954,</b> one of the very first volumes of the Pelican History of Art; it contained only one slim chapter on Aramaeans and Phoenicians in Syria. Frankfort had been old when he wrote it, and his devoted successors had to keep his chapters. So it wasn't surprising that the late, lamented University Prints stuck to Frankfort. Besides, the profitable textbooks, which had to be used by teachers who still were bewildered (even those who had access to German books of Bossert's generation, or could read German) by what wasn't either just Messopotamian or Egyptian, there being no illustrations of early Jewish art unless you believed the Providence Lithograph Company, often just skimmed over the material that they were in a hurry to get through the course. There is still, I must say, unresolved difference of opinion as to the sense in which ancient texts use the epithet <i>Phoenician</i>: whether it is only geographical, or cultural, or linguistic and ethnic; cultural it certainly is, but when very old books speak of the alphabet as Phoenician, questions arise. Such questions do not excuse journalists' tendency, even in Wikipedia (which is by no means so faulty as folks like to say), to generalizing in terms of who "the Syrians" are, or were. And, when I found the college textbooks unendurable (after several years they did improve), I was one of numerous professors teaching ancient art in survey courses who put together their own courses using University Prints.<br />
When I had been retired for several years, aware of the horrendous prices of the new textbooks and concerned for students worldwide who might not have affordable access to any orderly corpus to study, I felt that I had to offer my mid-20c (so "traditional" simply because it comprises what the University Prints offered at the Survey level, held together by my outline as free of ideology as I could make it) and offer it free of charge.<br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b>https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3192706135770676794#allposts/src=sidebar</b></span><br />
You will notice that the posts are in reverse chronological order. The University Prints have their own captions (and some of them are very old and corrected in the accompanying texts). The images from my own teaching collection are hand-held color photos.<br />
You can open to the Introduction page and, from the list at right, go to the page that will help you put Syria in its place in history.<br />
<b><span style="color: blue;">http://teegeeforwhomever.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-centuries-of-reorganization.html</span></b><br />
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<br />teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-58149035832070035392017-04-08T22:12:00.000-07:002017-04-09T04:26:41.908-07:00An Unabashed Recommendation: Charles PetersWherever I picked it up (perhaps from PBS News), this recommendation of a brand-new, Random House book is my own. As usual, I downloaded it on trial (to see if it was well written!), then bought the eBook (Kindle), and, as my posts earlier this year will suggest, you will learn what I mean by "true liberal". The author is, of course, only a few years older than I am, a member of that Shirley Temple generation who has lived preserving all his marbles. His is the mindset that formed my own; he remembers what I remember (only better, because in the '70s I was in a religious order with very limited time, so that I really needed help to make continuous sense of some of that decade), and he saw it in the same light as it had been formed, basically in the 1950s in Berkeley, CA. He doesn't see FDR quite the way that textbook-formed baby-boomers do; it is part of his life and his career as a literate journalist. Jon Meacham, though, is right: until now I didn't know anything about Charles Peters.<br />
https://www.amazon.com/We-Do-Our-Part-America-ebook/dp/B01JWDWPDK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491712454&sr=1-1&keywords=charles+peters. <br />
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In any case, it proves that my own memory and attitudes are not peculiar nor, indeed, aberrant. And it is so recent, and so thoughtful, that he even has thought through President Trump's campaign.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-18618315339189486112017-03-18T17:16:00.001-07:002017-04-08T22:13:08.453-07:00Cohen, The Life of Riley, and One's Turn in the BarrelWhen I honestly recall what I knew and understood when I was a college student, I cannot despair of today's young, eagerly trying to make sense of Life. I was still reading Edna St. Vincent Millay, biographies of opera stars, and assorted novelists. I still did not know, really, how sex was done (the books that Parents Magazine had recommended to my mother...). I thought the newspapers were dumb (and they were, really) but the little map of Korea on the front page of the Berkeley Daily Gazette didn't indicate where it was. I had no TV, and when I went to my mother's there was no news on it. But would I have followed Public channels if I'd had them? And, of course, there was no Cable TV. The Voice of Firestone was still on AM radio (I had no FM) and of course nothing was in color. In compensation we had the NBC Symphony (Toscanini), the New York Philharmonic (Mitropolis, usually), and both the Metropolitan Opera and the San Francisco Opera, besides the Chicago Opera (? title?) with a speech by Col. McCormick.<br />
That's enough to show how different things were. LP mono records were just beginning to come on the market, but most of our collection was in albums (and that is when and why we say "album"): a symphony was usually five discs, ten sides.<br />
And so on.<br />
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But here I'm going to describe a ten-inch record of a vaudeville song. Later I bought, new or used, some vaudeville material, but the pop stuff my parents had was from their high school days and not at all indecent. I must still have "Cohen is Living the Life of Riley Now".<br />
(1) I cannot locate the disc or the cassette taken from it, but I think it was a blue-label US Decca two-sided 10-inch disc, and I can actually recall what it sounded like, so I think it was early electric. It definitely was vaudeville, late vaudeville, and purchasable at the dime-store, not at the music library shop that sold RCA red-seal records; I got it from a bin in a secondhand store or possibly from a batch of records from someone's family attic. What is remarkable is that I cannot find it in the LOC jukebox site or anywhere in Amazon or in YouTube. Not that it is explicitly, verbally sexual. No. It is horribly Incorrect: Cohen is making out with Reilly's wife, named Molly, and they are teaching each other their food, their slang, and so forth (which serve to imply the unmentionable things they share). That's how it was. As in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn": you could take the whole family and pretend that the children didn't know what Cohen and Riley <i>did</i>. So I thought I'd check to see how much popular culture (most of the stage acts being Jewish or Irish in fact) dealt crudely with such crude affairs.<br />
And I found nothing else! Not even in Eric Partridge. I only found a footnote in the 15th (centennial) Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, on p. 922, with, yes, a vaudeville show about the Life of Riley in the 1880s, followed by a slew of references to 'life of Riley' with as many variants (they are on line, <i>svv</i>) as for 'I used to work in Chicago' but not as rich, and, yes, the first ones British and all in the same spirit as old Punch jokes, with their Tenniel-style stereotype of an Irish man. That is, crude (and unprintable today) but not blatantly sexual: my phono record is at least two generations later and New York rather than London. Does anyone else know this NYC recording?<br />
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(2) Just as blue-collar families took the whole family to shows in eastern cities, unless a grandmother was available to babysit, so when I started in art school, on a scholarship in 1952, my coeval fellow students were far more knowing and certainly less inexperienced than I was, but though protective and eager to show me a San Francisco, that of the Beat Generation in galleries and coteries that are now famous, that my mother's employment as a club vocalist for soldiers and sailors, though hinted at at home (like my father's stories from the Hunter's Point shipyards) also were unaware of. Some of them did have signs saying "Off Limits to Servicemen". Only once (and, after all, I was still far under age for <i>any</i> bar), did they take me to one of these and they made the regular customers assume I was someone's little sister, but we all hung out at the same cheap eateries and bookstores, such as City Lights, wherever someone's pictures were hung. And back in our neighborhoods and in the studio classes they told me who slept with whom and who wouldn't speak to each other. And they told me, when I asked, what homosexuals did. I guarantee you, my family (I no longer lived with them, since there was an addiction problem there) did not know what they did. I must tell you that the class distinction between folks who who did things they couldn't or wouldn't name and those who could and would talk and write about what they did not do (and, as I said, if you were young and inexperienced, one's friends shielded you from doing or being used). This seems, today, an odd way of talking. Yet, until a decade ago when I retired from teaching, it still seemed to me that I could tell which students (freshmen) were still shielded and which probably were not. Not that it mattered.<br />
The only reason for mentioning this is that one of my homosexual friends told me a lot of his favorite jokes, including one about an ocean-going ship of hard-up sailors, who might be introduced to the Barrel. I forget the mechanics involved, but the punchline was, when a new crew-member asked if he could have its use on a given weekend, he was informed, no, that was <i>his</i> night <i>in</i> the barrel. I couldn't imagine how this joke made sense unless both guys were <i>katapygon, </i>a word I'd just learned from a Greek vase inscription. I assumed, further, that this joke belonged to homosexual society. Funny, you say, what one remembers. Indeed. But when on MSNBC someone wrote a tweet, addressing Mr. Podesta, that next it would be HIS turn "in the barrel", guys younger than me knew that to be "in the barrel" (so not privy to jokes left over from WWII in the Pacific) meant that taking one's turn willy-nilly was nasty and unpleasant. Getting the point of genital humor is, after all, universal? Locker room humor... Our President's social past, admittedly, I decided, probably was not exceptional, though letting it be recorded certainly was imprudent. I mean, half a century later someone still cherished a recording.<br />
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(3) Since then, I have continued reading about the scandals in international banking / investing. Are any of the large institutions not scandalous? How does one get stupendously rich? The studies I have read, at UBS and Deutsche Bank, just to name two, are hair-raising. No wonder it seems impossible to know how much one did or did not pay to the IRS. No wonder, if one's President does not want to put up with publicity on Fifth Avenue or a former DC main post office, one may have a whole remodeled floor of an uninhabitable tower at Baku in Azerbaijan, managed by his daughter. Not that I know it firsthand. Only, Adam Davidson's long article, <i>The New Yorker</i>, March 13, pp. 48, ff. (and now he's a staff writer, too), is not only hard to put down and very hard to dismiss and awfully coherent. Now I had to give in and subscribe on line to <i>The New Yorker. </i>Having read it since the 50s and still missing the bloopers at the bottom of the back page, it was more than my old eyes could take to read it every week. And I was astonished that ALT+F, but spelled out in full and freely, was now, especially in Reviews, abundant. I feel much better having its company in this world. But you'll have to read it yourself; I won't be anybody's press secretary.<br />
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P.S. Originally I had been struck by the preponderance of Irish names in the Trump cabinet and staff, but I couldn't find any explanation for it and even began to think that it might be illusory. But that was why I had headed this Post with Life of Riley.<br />
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<br />teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-68066959279232832312017-02-06T01:51:00.000-08:002017-02-08T02:30:56.367-08:00Liberality<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Liberality</i></b></span><br />
I didn't mean to follow up on my last Post, which I wrote deliberately very promptly, so as not to hear others' opinions.<br />
But I just was badly frightened by BookTV which I've listened to almost every weekend since the 1990s, even when it covered authors far to the left or to the right of Brian Lamb or his successors. <br />
For three hours Nick Adams said whatever he wanted in depth, though his depth was not quite such as I'd call it. Thing is, I watch Fox News channel only for major sports events (I had just turned off the Super Bowl). I only knew Bill O'Reilly, for example, from Henry Louis Gates' genealogy program. Had just, unhappily, made the on-line acquaintance of KellyAnne Conway, whom I didn't like. Anyway, now, directly following Nick Adams, I am consoled by Hugh Hewitt, who like Morning Joe is reasonable and even entertaining. Certainly reasonable (though I prefer Chris Mathews). And like Hewitt, I've been reading lots of stuff I ought to have read decades ago, but the Kindle now encourages instant purchases, and back in my graduate student years and early teaching years I had neither the money nor the time taken from publishing to gain job security (I didn't have time or shelf space. either).<br />
Anyway, though I always voted D, I am no political fanatic. It's interesting however, now that I'm reading up on Eisenhower and the Bushes and the youth of Joseph Pulitzer has proven that American history may be wasted on kids, but Nick Adams seems to me a frightening basket case. That label shows how scary he felt to me. So bless Hugh Hewitt for consoling me.<br />
But I have to get back to that word: <span style="color: #20124d;"><b>liberal</b></span>. Don't ask me to say what that new OED may say of it. What I say is what it HAS meant, and why it is worth considering that.<br />
Liberality is the mentality of the freeborn, such as Romans born as freeborn children are, of <b>famuli </b>of <b>patres familiarum.</b> Of course, there were others in the household, who could work their way out of slavery: I've never been sure, in the absence of something quite like our Welfare, whether all of them were purchased persons, or in either case, they were at least indentured. They were <b>servi</b>, who were <b>servili</b>, just as the freeborn <b>liberi </b>were <b>liberali. </b>Nicely bigoted children, who might grow up to inherit or to marry their peers, could be called liberal as adults, just as servi, whom you might dislike even when they'd worked their way free, might be dismissed as servile, especially if they had bowed and scraped.<br />
Now on BookTV Dennis Prager in his turn is heartening me even more than Hugh Hewitt did, though I'm sure, alas, that Nick Adams is awfully illiberal. But I do recommend Dennis Prager. And the ancient source of the word <b>liberal</b> clings happily to its etymology, even though usually it is mangled.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-39006556527608464342017-01-10T19:30:00.000-08:002017-01-11T17:55:56.441-08:00Democracy<i><b>The closing address.</b></i><br />
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I just listened to President Obama's address from Chicago.<br />
l have to say, unabashedly, that I believe every word of it and its sum. It is why I voted for him before, and even more after all he's been through. My Pacific president, but not just that. Now I can't refrain from saying so. A great president. A great American. Not that other forms of constitutional government (such as monarchies) can't be great. I no longer am so unhappy as I was just a week ago.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-68955143444572948512016-12-07T01:04:00.000-08:002016-12-07T01:13:45.226-08:00A brief note on the prefix 'alt-'The other day, failing to notice that the blog on which I'd left a comment (and now can't even find) about "alt-", is puzzling: unless it means nearly the same as "neo-" did several years ago in political discussions, it would be a truncated form, as "lumis-" and "paci-" frequently are and as such easily confused with the German "alt-", meaning <i>old</i>,<i> </i>and too similar to Latin "altus", referring to <i>height</i> but doubly unclear when truncated.<br />
The author of the now-defunct blog post explained with several current, published examples that it means alternate or alternative. My comment suggested that between German and Latin look-alikes, familiar to older readers, this confusing one should be abandoned.<br />
Then, one of those dawnings that happen when one is about to fall asleep: it's not "alt-" but ALT on the PC keyboard. And as such it may be useful, to rid us of those strings of asterisks or hyphens ; it would be unambiguous when undergraduates or political candidates or comedians used words that networks bleep and the print media replace with those century-old asterisks, thus: ALT+F, et al.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-74749419548901149872016-11-03T11:37:00.002-07:002016-11-03T16:17:17.707-07:00Paperbacks, eBooks, and Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi53igkGDkO8S1o-hXbG09EHuA8-Ql1sSsh6yPA6zeT1BTaJmOHVQJDX4nkIVDUCJZZ9U7dx_wCYor0vjblNJz_vwbZRKWNSbxFSDPE5tJlpIa031WkpMow-PPAFPCZqVnatEvDoJaV-Fk/s1600/KK-Mimesis4blogDSC_2383.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi53igkGDkO8S1o-hXbG09EHuA8-Ql1sSsh6yPA6zeT1BTaJmOHVQJDX4nkIVDUCJZZ9U7dx_wCYor0vjblNJz_vwbZRKWNSbxFSDPE5tJlpIa031WkpMow-PPAFPCZqVnatEvDoJaV-Fk/s400/KK-Mimesis4blogDSC_2383.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
<span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span>
<span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b><i>At the University of UC Corner</i></b></span><br />
Originally UC Corner on Telegraph Avenue was an international newsstand; that was why it had clocks on the Durant Avenue side window with all the time zones; indeed, it did still have international papers and magazines through at least most of my student years. But it became the best stocked and best organized of the stores of paperbacks and then of LP records. <br />
Of course, there had always been paperbacks, but they were all pulp, such as crime and other non-literary, and one called them Pocket Books, as <i>A Pocket Book of Boners</i>. The exception was Penguin, the categories color coded: turquoise blue for non-fiction, dark green for mysteries, brown for Greek classics, purple for Latin classics, orange (?) for Scandinavian, orange for, well, respectable fiction, and others—a wonderful system. Then, of a sudden alongside the rows of Penguin paperbacks on the shelves of UC Corner, there were Anchor Paperbacks from Doubleday, almost all of them of permanent value and, one noticed, most of them pre-War, out of print. Not just otherwise unavailable but great. At the back of one of the first that I got, Erich Auerbach, <i>Mimesis</i>, was a list of those available in 1957. My first paperback was a turquoise Penguin, <i>Civilization</i> by Clive Bell. I got it at the little bookstore of the College of Arts and Crafts (N.B., before I'd even heard of his famous sister in law). For several years his little essay was like a bible to me! But my systematic acquisition of quality paperbacks began when I moved to Berkeley and to the University of California. I searched out one after the other and read them eagerly. Some of them have been acquired now by the New York Review of Books, such as Lionel Trilling's, but more were such as Huizinga's <i>Waning of the Middle Ages </i>and before long, when Harper (Torchbooks) joined the movement, E. R. Curtius's <i>European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. </i>By then my mentor professor had also had me read Virginia Woolf's <i>First </i>and <i>Second Reader. </i>Needless to say, by the time that I graduated with a BA in Art, specializing in History of Art (for that was how it was administered then), I had worked my way through college, and mostly working in the Loan Department of the UC Library, with a good-looking transcript, yes, but also virtually with an extra major in all the subjects I hadn't been able to take for credit. I did have, by the time I finished the requirements for the PhD, almost a real complete major in Classics. Being able to read Latin and Greek, I see in retrospect, was probably the most useful thing I did, apart from art and architecture per se.<br />
I'll try to concentrate in this blog on some of the value of all the reading that, in retrospect, I see that Berkeley gave me, specifically the south of campus (now utterly changed, since the 1960s and 1970s) alongTelegraph Avenue. Everything I stole time to read added up to another education in its own right, and it centered on the jam-packed but by no means junky establishment of UC Corner. By the 1980s that was no longer what it had been, and, if the internet serves me aright, today it no longer exists at all.<br />
Today, indeed with a touch of presbyopeia and living hundreds of miles from Berkeley, anyway, it is Amazon that feeds my hunger for self-education; another revolution has replaced the paperback revolution as such. That is good, because the Telegraph Avenue with its UC Corner that I took for granted would exist wherever there was a university no longer exists for avid students hardly anywhere. Yet so long as the avid learners exist, well, if Erich Auerbach could write <i>Mimesis</i> in wartime Istanbul, young scholars will take advantage of what we have now.<br />
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P.S. The choice of a picture for the cover of the original paperback (and I have in this case treasured the original) is wonderful. It is a detail from the North Porch of Chartres and the sculptor has found the means of showing God envisaging the creature that in his love he is making in his own image.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-33734002333560194692016-10-04T03:18:00.001-07:002016-10-05T12:34:10.372-07:00Latinity<br />
<span style="color: #20124d; font-size: large;"><b><i>Deplorable Atrocity</i></b></span><br />
I like to listen to interviews on C-Span's Book TV, but sometimes I wonder whether the interviewer was aware of what he or she said and, even more, whether author, whose new book was in his hand, had had the services of a competent editor; it seems very often that he hadn't. In any case he was unconscious of the effect of his (or her) speech on the meaning of what he meant to say. For example, one author habitually ended most sentences with "etc.", over and over, as if periods or any other meaningful punctuation were unavailable. And he gesticulated a lot with his hands, though without any apparent special emphasis. If he writes as he speaks, reading his book will be a dreary, irritating experience.<br />
I started fussing this way after Hillary Clinton was made to regret saying "deplorable". I understood her meaning that the positions held by her opponents made her unhappy. But commentators of both parties seemed unanimous in accusing her of calling <i>him</i> deplorable. First, her syntax made clear that she meant that the state of discussion in the campaigns had become deplorable, and, second, that it is conditions, opinions, and the like, that are fit to make one weep.<br />
Of course, even half a century ago (even, in fact, a whole century ago), it was emphasized that languages change, so that a Latin original might have changed its meaning. Certainly! Just as our remote ancestors who walked out of Africa had skeletons fascinatingly different from ours, both from regular evolution and in response to different environments (and Dobzhansky was certainly right to go to the trouble of proving that we continue to evolve—it was less universally realized half a century ago than it is today), so, too, our speech. If not, all the ancestors of modern speakers of Romance languages would have transmitted their Latin to them unaltered. Indeed, philologists of the Enlightenment had already sorted out the descent of Indo-European tongues pretty well.<br />
Thus, "deplorable", it seems, first came to us in its French form (though we have to rely on texts as evidence), but no matter: <i>deplorare </i>already meant in Latin "to weep bitterly", and Roget gives us many alternatives for use as context and style may demand, of which "lament", "bemoan", and "bewail" are only three. Now, don't let me get started on the misuse of Roget as a source of 'synonyms' to stuff into bad sentences as ornaments. It's too late now, and hardly anyone would care, but Hillary was exactly right that the level of the political exchanges last week was 'fit to make one weep'.<br />
Atrocity is much harsher. On the News someone was trying to explain how, legally, ever since Nuremburg, acts of war, atrocities, terrorism, ... I forget the fourth one, ought not to be used interchangeably, just for emphasis. I do agree that they ought to be used thoughtfully, but he did not succeed in enlightening me.<br />
Anyway, <i>atrox </i>is a more specialized and interesting word, even having a possible Greek cognate, and having the same stem as the <i>ater </i>of <i>atrium, </i>originally the sooty, ashy, fire pit in the center of the primitive round hut. Anyhow, in classical Latin <i>atrox, atrocis </i>(3rd decl. adj.) means 'cruel', 'fierce', and also '<i>savage</i>' and '<i>brutal'</i>. That last may suggest the bridge to the primitive fire pit? It is not so commonplace a word as <i>deplorare</i>. <br />
For that reason, 'atrocious' seems to have entered modern English, like most of the 'worsened words' (those that have been demoted to cheap overstatement) to mean, colloquially, 'very bad', 'abominable', as it appears in the margin of a student paper or in an impatient book review of a lousy novel. You can look up 'abominable' for yourselves.<br />
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<br />teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-44548317915093106012016-09-01T13:31:00.001-07:002016-10-24T09:51:49.077-07:00Occasional Flowers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbbC6SHOu8UJe56WaiZSJTla5KTVz0qNxN2glVJ3nG-pHvqE6hfDRxdEgfA2R8CHQBGhLWBj1wCwMblMgD5ktwymYKKngcml4O_30pA8BwWjKhYhxDFhdyXKyhzWsvJrq0zbWhU4lfiBc/s1600/K-DSC_2346.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbbC6SHOu8UJe56WaiZSJTla5KTVz0qNxN2glVJ3nG-pHvqE6hfDRxdEgfA2R8CHQBGhLWBj1wCwMblMgD5ktwymYKKngcml4O_30pA8BwWjKhYhxDFhdyXKyhzWsvJrq0zbWhU4lfiBc/s400/K-DSC_2346.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsHs42cWIGi-brK3v2qkzD6KaWsGYb5Sj-hWWn-OGRK3f9d5AHL9VNsYAdvHu6KcrhrU_-puCdI5tknsSyTcJ2P2qykk4ZyxSTQ-CiGb6qM2XjKw0f6jL0halXs4PLJJytiWpYjkImdBw/s1600/K-DSC_2337.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsHs42cWIGi-brK3v2qkzD6KaWsGYb5Sj-hWWn-OGRK3f9d5AHL9VNsYAdvHu6KcrhrU_-puCdI5tknsSyTcJ2P2qykk4ZyxSTQ-CiGb6qM2XjKw0f6jL0halXs4PLJJytiWpYjkImdBw/s400/K-DSC_2337.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of the occasional gifts of wind and/or rain</td></tr>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: large;"><b><i>What I cannot claim to have planted, neither can I identify</i></b></span><br />
In the course of thirty years, this almost spectacular lily (?) flower has come up overnight, bloomed (lasting several days), and disappeared . Once a friend identified it until (unless) it came again late in summer. But after my Picasa files lost their classification, of my own devising, among so many thousand images I cannot find the earlier one, in whose caption ("title") or File Info (not come over from Photoshop!) the data for this plant is lurking. What is worse, I cannot find it in Wikipedia.<br />
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Yet these are seen all over town in Baton Rouge, LA.<br />
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The current snapshots were taken on the last day of August. I opened the back door to feed the cat, and, like red lamps that had shot up overnight, there they were, and I hastened to document them and, this time, post them in the blog, rather than just asking all my friends what they are.<br />
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I am, as you must realize, no gardener, but I am grateful for whatever I get.<br />
And I thank anyone who can identify this (otherwise than as "firecracer") for me.teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-86299965699720654272016-08-25T12:02:00.002-07:002016-08-25T12:02:59.829-07:00Industrial Pennsylvania<br />
<span style="color: purple; font-size: large;"><b><i> STEEL: Pittsburgh and Bethlehem in Literature</i></b></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh4x6v35Qpa78L8g0eVpDDsQT2OGz-GwlhpV_NPQPx34fCRwzkcrjotjRKQUeqom3ZSObV37FOw1n4yWxaxqDPhAnzXW9O9LVWbGQgSEPNTifOnm-Xva6pOArYto6lybTRzZ01OyB_FCw/s1600/WALKER+EVANS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh4x6v35Qpa78L8g0eVpDDsQT2OGz-GwlhpV_NPQPx34fCRwzkcrjotjRKQUeqom3ZSObV37FOw1n4yWxaxqDPhAnzXW9O9LVWbGQgSEPNTifOnm-Xva6pOArYto6lybTRzZ01OyB_FCw/s400/WALKER+EVANS.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Walker Evans, 1935, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from hill, across cemetery, to steel mills and furnace chimneys. Large negative.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Retired persons, especially if they are not just tempted but compelled to use eBooks for their zoomable fonts, have the time and open schedules to follow ideas and motifs and recall novels and pictures that made an impression fifty and sixty years ago. Sometimes it seems that motifs recur significantly. For example, the adolescent girl, bound to become a protagonist, goes into service or takes a wearisome job, at only fourteen or so. Even Isabel Allende uses this Type and I noticed it emphasized in the campaign film as the key idea in the youth of Hillary Clinton's mother. Surely, in real life, it was not always the most important fact in a whole adolescence. To me, as I'm sure to many others, the necessity to do whatever one could find at that age was commonplace and belonged to melodrama, as in the plays produced by David Belasco. A real Girl of the Golden West, however, had plenty of self respect. Early in this blog I wrote about San Pablo Poultry Company; I rather gloried in it.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Immediately I remembered Mary in Marcia Davenport's <i>The Valley of Decision. </i>This novel made a great impression on me, though I never saw the movie. I remembered the steel mill at night (though the photo that I chose, and it's only a little less than a decade earlier than the novel, and is of Bethlehem rather than Pittsburg), which is wonderfully described. Ever since wherever I was traveling in the vicinity of steel-working I thought of Davenport's verbal picture. I know that she did live in Pittsburg before writing about it. She may not have been our greatest novelist, but her firsthand knowledge and sound research are pervasive in this book as in her first success, <i>Mozart</i>, and in her </span><span style="font-size: small;">operatic novel, </span><i style="font-size: medium;">Of Lena Geyer </i><span style="font-size: small;">(her mother being the soprano Alma Gluck).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But I need the electronic edition to re-read so long a novel, and having read <i>The Valley of Decision </i>while myself a teenager, and before I even was self-supporting, apart from the steel industry, the parts that remain vivid are the love interest! I am certain that Davenport did all her homework, but the Kindle, for the first time, cannot help me. I don't know why it is available only in hard copy, since it is, at least, as good as <i>Gone With the Wind, </i>and far more valuable for all its background. I'm sure it's worth reading, though I've moved on to George F. Kennan and Julian Barnes, which are really more rewarding!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But have you noticed, e.g. in the 1930s, that there seem to be 'meaningful' recordings, usually Gramophone Society, and usually of Bach?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">And I do think that the Poor Little Match Girl stereotype in political footage has been overdone (not that I hold it against the candidates themselves).</span><br />
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teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-4814445954945213832016-08-24T05:27:00.002-07:002016-08-24T05:27:51.820-07:00Again, fixation on Light as the Photographic Medium<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiY4duTZrH40YaYJtESUXs2_la8N0brLH5GBFyJolq3laJLBlni-_s8OzEMh8AjgFRw3YP7RDKTfz3KXGReqJEKY0ukKhFFVTZWC1cUY2cvGnpq7m9SxeL94lBoIV14rj4qy2IeK_ppQA/s1600/100ppi082316+DSC_2325.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiY4duTZrH40YaYJtESUXs2_la8N0brLH5GBFyJolq3laJLBlni-_s8OzEMh8AjgFRw3YP7RDKTfz3KXGReqJEKY0ukKhFFVTZWC1cUY2cvGnpq7m9SxeL94lBoIV14rj4qy2IeK_ppQA/s320/100ppi082316+DSC_2325.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEROVvvF7wmxqg16VgQD6G2rB6E-xaXKyfRuhQODUTYiUwAMLduev5UIbOrmggDt3KzokH2ijU6ppvsDVw-_H-FcHXirRKkAisr33fyNuAKcBXI9wp-5WILS4DmYpgHeNk_1czgb20Mqw/s1600/100ppi081216_DSC_2328.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEROVvvF7wmxqg16VgQD6G2rB6E-xaXKyfRuhQODUTYiUwAMLduev5UIbOrmggDt3KzokH2ijU6ppvsDVw-_H-FcHXirRKkAisr33fyNuAKcBXI9wp-5WILS4DmYpgHeNk_1czgb20Mqw/s320/100ppi081216_DSC_2328.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b style="font-size: x-large;"><i>Three of a handful taken the morning of August 23, 2016</i></b></div>
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These are not pictures, such as would illustrate a catalogue, of cheap porch chairs, but of the light that the late morning sunlight happened to create, so that I can only apologize for the burnout at lower left of the second one. Photography has been for me, from my first permission to work, under the red safelight, over the development trays in my father's darkroom, the art whose medium is light itself, just as its early practitioners realized in calling it Photography. The objects themselves are not its interest, just as line drawings in an early mail-order catalogue are not at all the same thing as drawings and prints made in their own right are not the same thing.</div>
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If I were a better photographer, let alone a great one, the images would be more interesting—but I continue to take them anyway, the reason for continuing to own cameras.</div>
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The light was especially welcome, though, after a solid week of rain and the dreadful flooding (but not where I live: I had done my homework before buying a house; no house in Louisiana "lives on a hill" but, as everywhere, it is wise to live in the oldest neighborhoods).</div>
<br />teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-10361198873417855882016-07-12T12:29:00.000-07:002016-07-16T17:36:04.423-07:00Coal Miners<span style="color: #444444; font-size: large;"><b><i>Bill Brandt, Lewis Hine, D. H. Lawrence</i></b></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8UjZkakXbpN5dthGqG-vgaS1dGHBE7X_PXe_pMZOvhLWIhkEyzVnhTJ72uJepu4WMV_c6RUFlL4pFzkyyQJOaCv7gyZC7LAY4DXKUe6zIhz89xQDkBMI7Ozse87WbGMBDruwfttrDyDc/s1600/BRANDT_MINERS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8UjZkakXbpN5dthGqG-vgaS1dGHBE7X_PXe_pMZOvhLWIhkEyzVnhTJ72uJepu4WMV_c6RUFlL4pFzkyyQJOaCv7gyZC7LAY4DXKUe6zIhz89xQDkBMI7Ozse87WbGMBDruwfttrDyDc/s400/BRANDT_MINERS.jpg" width="303" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill Brandt, Miners a generation later than D. H. Lawrence's father.</td></tr>
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<span style="color: #444444;">Once again, works of art (photographs in this case) have brought me to re-read a novel that made a huge impression on me while I was still in high school, so probably not more than 18 years old: I was still doing my browsing and reading from the Berkeley Public Library, the one in Egyptianising style on Shattuck Avenue, and my ideas about photography were still derived from the camera club work of my father and grandfather. As for literature, not only did I very quickly become impatient with D. H. Lawrence, so that I never did read (still haven't) <i>Lady Chatterly's Lover</i>, even though it would soon become publishable, but I acquired friends who would have discouraged my admiring him. I mean, by the time I had taken a course in ancient art I judged <i>Etruscan Places</i> of, at best, negligible value. You will see that I had not yet learned to judge things for myself, but several decades later I thought no better of it. From Taos I had gotten, besides, strong prejudices regarding the art colony clusters there and, rightly or wrongly, for half of my life would not take seriously writers, painters, photographers, et al., who took to it.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;">Anyway, what about <i>Sons and Lovers</i>? I'm afraid that barely after graduating from re-reading Louisa May Alcott, I was smitten by an early (though not the earliest, except for its subject) novel by D. H. Lawrence. It shares most of the flaws of Miss Alcott's <i>Jo's Boys. </i>The descriptions of the mines, of their dangers, of the black coal dust, are still worth reading; more recent collieries are bright and clean, though, as we know from West Virginia, nothing seems to be able to make them safe. The old ones, with old flash lighting, remain among the most photogenic of inhumane work places. The greatest improvement is the elimination, in most regions at least, of child workers who ought to have been in school. That was not only in coal: Has anyone read, for example, <i>The Five Little Peppers, and How they Grew, </i>just to mention one piece of formula fiction that present-day octogenarians avidly consumed? Yet coal was the grimmest, perhaps. The first chapters, dealing with the pits, are the best things in <i>Sons and Lovers. </i>Evidently, autobiography brought out the worst in D. H. L. (they say that he was remembering how <i>he</i> felt and dealt with Lady Chatterly). One learns that 'gin' with regard to cotton as well as coal is short for [en]gin[e], and dozens of other words, with the dictionary on the desktop, are no longer just skipped over as vernacular jargon. When D. H. L. must characterize persons and their relationships, he just repeatedly gives us their eye color and their clothing and the like. Only from the wiki did I learn that he just added the setting and the social study to Paul Morel (himself) and published the result. Adding in his boyhood memories of his mother is the <i>coup de grace</i>. Yet this is the novel of his that for me remains, on the whole, memorable.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;">Memorable as Bill Brandt's photos from the 1930s are, it is Lewis Hine that remains the greatest of the pre-WW II documentary photographers. He records early 20th century labor so that we cannot forget the weary and hopeless ten-year-old girl, the crowded bench of breaker boys, and eventually his last work, the men in high steel building the Empire State Building.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;">It was not to belittle Lawrence that I couldn't praise him any more than I could some 30 years ago. Go ahead and read him (though I don't think I'd have liked him as a lover, either: you might). But as I pulled out the picture books I found that I wanted to study them—and Paul Strand, too—all over again. I took over teaching History of Photography just because we lost our specialist, and at least I had some grounding in it. It was with great profit and pleasure that in that last decade of my career in teaching I could learn more and more of it.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b>A few references:</b></span></div>
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<li style="text-align: left;"><b style="color: #444444;">Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography. Page and figure numbers differ from one edition to the next, but there is a whole "album" for Lewis Hine.</b></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><b style="color: #444444;">The Google sources are almost inexhaustible, but see Coal Photography, et sim., and svv. Horace Nicholls, Lewis Hine, Bill Brandt (early work), and of course </b><b style="color: #444444;">D. H. Lawrence, though his is not Wikipedia's best article.</b></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: right;">A note: as with all the other illustrious Lawrences, I am not related to D. H.</span></li>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Coming Home". One of Bill Brandt's most famous photos of working men.</td></tr>
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teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-74383960650178756982016-06-10T17:12:00.002-07:002016-06-11T12:15:59.946-07:00Heard that Song Before...<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: large;"><b><i>Though History does not quite repeat itself…</i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: large;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span>
As the USA approached the astonishing climax of its 2016 primary presidential campaigns, I began wondering whether someone, somewhere might get killed or drop dead. I mean, I can't forget (in our internal history) that <i>annus terribilis</i>, 1968. Yet I was comforted a little by the new biography of Joseph Pulitzer, of whom (shame on me) I knew nothing, even that he was born Hungarian, except that the Prize is named for him. Surely he was mentioned in one of those Social Studies textbooks that in high school I merely skimmed? Surely, on the occasion of the prizes, someone had said something memorable about him? Surely, more important, someone had tried to teach me about the decades following our Civil War, about the politicians that opposed Grant's presidency? About the expectation that the Republican Party would not survive but split? Was it really a consolation that our politics had been fraught from the beginning? Rather, has our teaching of history in secondary schools always been such as apparently mine was (and I graduated, in spite of poor attendance, in the top ten of my class)? Elsewhere here I have recorded my delighted discovery in old age of the generation of Hamlin Garland. Surely, as certainly is the case with science and mathematics, today we do better? I don't think so. Maybe worse. The curricula have so much to cope with!<br />
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Anyway, as these realizations began to dawn on me, I remembered a great old popular song, with Helen Morgan as Harry James' vocalist. My mother had the record, but so have the Library of Congress's American Jukebox and, of course, YouTube. But for two weeks, though I named this Post, alluding to the song, and knew what I wanted to say, I put it off. You see, I have sworn not to take sides on the stuff that bombards us during a campaign, only to record that its takes its toll on me: I am not usually depressed.<br />
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Really, is it true that Thucydides reveals the effect of campaign speeches while democracy was still young?<br />
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Speaking of my darling Greeks, though, their <i>rhetors</i> made public speaking a fine art. Occasionally, one of our politicians must confess to having absorbed the principles of classical rhetoric. I confess that they make campaigns tolerable, even memorable for me. You may choose your own, but the first to affect me (since I was too young to pay such attention to FDR's) was Adlai Stevenson. Recently Barack Obama did, first in the convention speech that made him famous. And Elizabeth Warren perhaps takes the cake. It seems to take the combination of very good schools on top of native intelligence? Is it a similar congruence that made John Coltrane and Miles Davis in his prime such great jazz musicians? I mean, is that what jolted me to attention when I first heard their recordings, so that then I listened closely? Certainly it was those monaural LPs of Beethoven Lieder sung by Dietrich Fischer-Diskau that addicted me to him and to Lieder. The Attic vase paintings (though taken from Gerhard's <i>Auserlesene Vasenbilder</i>) that illustrated Greek myths in the Junior Classics volume? <br />
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Oh, well, maybe it's just as well that some persons have that sensibility as a compensatory gift. teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-20461016731581121252016-04-07T02:00:00.000-07:002016-05-22T19:25:57.105-07:00The Berthouville Centaur Cups (moved)<span style="color: #0c343d; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #073763; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: red;"><i>This post has been corrected and revised and moved to Opera Nobilia, where it belonged from the beginning. Formatting was wrong and impossible in some operating systems.</i></span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #0c343d; font-size: medium;"><i><span style="color: #073763; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #0c343d;">A visit to the Cabinet des Médailles. </span></b></span></i></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPSX34IQWxvzFcNcBCs0v2OlxQOR7XnHka9mo4dJA-IvbG9dhq4KrFSPdZS3dsW6dVN6QxmPRYpCv8Woi41OXpA1j1EUSeVXMb30fm0KKyDLCk-FzPeGGnWfubKpCsE1BbTIqr2u44Sb8/s1600/20020629Carthage-c4cADDSCN2755.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><i><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPSX34IQWxvzFcNcBCs0v2OlxQOR7XnHka9mo4dJA-IvbG9dhq4KrFSPdZS3dsW6dVN6QxmPRYpCv8Woi41OXpA1j1EUSeVXMb30fm0KKyDLCk-FzPeGGnWfubKpCsE1BbTIqr2u44Sb8/s400/20020629Carthage-c4cADDSCN2755.jpg" width="325" /></i></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Paris, Louvre. Miniature mosaic. Eros harvesting wine grapes. Constantinian, from Carthage.</i></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIAAvnxU__UV4qwyAmLWWZcV6c2j2mFml1EXWSyO3J6WZcaK0rMBDz-lJSHE1ACsd6vaCO1zj29auArAl_srn4cXZx53MbDDJWut9eugQJrnlb7cYPXBX66aAXDlheTn9KtpQUgvQLvsY/s1600/BorgheseCentaurDSCN2448.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><i><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIAAvnxU__UV4qwyAmLWWZcV6c2j2mFml1EXWSyO3J6WZcaK0rMBDz-lJSHE1ACsd6vaCO1zj29auArAl_srn4cXZx53MbDDJWut9eugQJrnlb7cYPXBX66aAXDlheTn9KtpQUgvQLvsY/s400/BorgheseCentaurDSCN2448.jpg" width="296" /></i></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Paris, Louvre. The Borghese Centaur.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(The color photos are my own)</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #783f04; font-size: large;"><b><i>Centaurs as a synopsis of Greek Art</i></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">By the later 2nd century and thereafter, the "Dionysian and heroic styles were different parts of the same stylistic or expressive spectrum": R. R. R. Smith, in <i>The Oxford History of Classical Art, </i></span><span style="font-size: small;">OUP, 1993, </span><span style="font-size: small;">edited by John Boardman, </span><span style="font-size: small;">pp. 204-205</span><span style="font-size: small;">. R. R. R. Smith is also the author of <i>Hellenistic Sculpture</i> in the World of Art series, and both texts are worth reading. The Furietti Centaurs, from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, are in harder stone and more academic in their treatment; besides, Hadrian's Old Centaur has no</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">baby Eros. When I was a child, I wondered whether the Eros was part of the original, though, of course, compositionally as well as iconographically, he had to be. Cézanne was right to love this statue. The head of anguish on the old centaur is similar to other anguished Hellenistic heads, but the Eros is uniquely masterly. There are some contemptible 20th century centaurs reproduced in Google Images (though the Disney ones in the original Pastoral Symphony in "Fantasia", even if they may be too cute, do have real charm, and, of course, centaurs of both sexes and lots of sentimentality go back at least to the Classical period), but I won't discuss the latest ones, evidently less than a half century old, which look as if they came from SciFi or Fantasy Fiction.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">If you would like a fine catalogue of Centaurs in their prime period, the Archaic, I recommend the Princeton University exhibition catalogue edited by J. Michael Padgett, <i>The Centaur's Smile</i>. Perhaps you will agree that centaurs play a different role after, approximately, the Peloponnesian War. That is, they provide something different for viewers to relate to.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Anyway, that's how I came to use the baby Eros in lieu of my high school photo for myself on line. In art history courses, 60 years ago, I was actually discouraged from admiring this art, and of course it is not because Eros is erotic that I love it; I rank it right up there with Verrocchio's in Florence.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV92yJnjmxstqduzHuKIj1EXab5Mj5RuFaFRbYLwbCOkULtaOcyCEFmoGQx3N6pWlhxKZOltgI-2n13MZChhWVJOlrUGQLF6nTu09sTPcxIY3YhJzii3vxgyFpi2XUSqE23XJSUEqpXtc/s1600/MAurBacchicInfant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><img border="0" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV92yJnjmxstqduzHuKIj1EXab5Mj5RuFaFRbYLwbCOkULtaOcyCEFmoGQx3N6pWlhxKZOltgI-2n13MZChhWVJOlrUGQLF6nTu09sTPcxIY3YhJzii3vxgyFpi2XUSqE23XJSUEqpXtc/s400/MAurBacchicInfant.jpg" width="400" /></i></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>This coin shows that an eros, full of energy, but with the attributes of Dionysos, expresses the same enthused joy as a winged Eros. Habitually, I like to keep the Greek names but capitalize the name of Eros, specifically. As the vintner eros (top of page) shows, by the late Antonine period, the use of wings is not quite proof of its being Eros himself.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As R. R. R. Smith said, these works dwell in an artistic expressive realm where Bacchos and Eros dwell alike. I'd love to know the immediate source of the dancing infant with beribboned thyrsos and kantharos on the copper coin (above) that Thracian Philippopolis issued for Marcus Aurelius (it is my favorite coin).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This is the realm, of course, of the Berthouville cups, which recently came to the Getty Museum for technical study. Anyone who had doubted whether the Old Centaur properly had the Eros, and anyone who doubted whether centaurs dwelt in heterosexual families was just wrong. We have, rendered in micro-mosaic, a Hadrianic copy in the Berlin Museum of the Centaur Family, pitiably attacked by a predator, copying evidently the famous painting of c. 400 BCE.<span style="color: red;"><b>*</b></span> My modern period favorites are Winsor McCay's of 1921, but I shall refrain from discussing them here. There is too much else to consider concerning centaurs.</span></div>
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<i><span style="color: red; font-size: small;">* </span><span style="font-size: small;">a list of illustrations, pro tem, of famous works for which I do not have adequate images is given at the end.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I cannot recall, or find, even in Asia Minor, among all the exotic combined creatures that Greek art preserved and transmitted to us through the Romans, any centaurs. I think that, after all, they must be really and truly Greek. The only doubt in my mind that I tried to pursue came from the fact that the very earliest one is the 36 centimeter, c. 900 BCE, centaur with a wheel-made body from </span><a href="http://lekfandi%20in%20euboia/" style="font-size: medium;">Lekfandi in Euboia</a><span style="font-size: small;">.<span style="color: red;">*</span> Today it is illustrated in every textbook, but it has such 'presence' (to use the art critic's favorite epithet) that it reminds us that power, nobility, humor, etc., etc., are not due to realism or expressive faces but solely to the artist's vision and ability to imbue his work with it (OK, I cannot prove the gender of the artist, but...). And though 36 cm is nothing like lifesize, it is no figurine; in fact it looks bigger than it actually is. Now Lefkandi is Greece, but by ship it is close to the Aegean islands and indeed to Anatolia, yet I cannot find any early centaurs farther east, even though I cannot find, either, a bona fide Greek origin for satyrs, griffins, pegasoi, and all the rest of the orientalia that, thanks to Greece, are still with us. The Images that I have found on line include many creatures that are not centaurs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>--</i>Kenneth Lapatin, ed., "The Berthouville Silver Treasure and Roman Luxury", Los Angeles, the Getty Museum, 2014.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>-</i>-Jon Van de Grift,<i> </i>"Tears and Revel, The Allegory of the Berthouville Centaur Scyphi"<i>, American Journal of Archaeology </i>88, 1984, pp. 377-388, 386-387, ills. 1-2, pls. 51-53.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Naturally, I cannot use the brand-new photographs from the 2014 catalogue, and the generous supply of photos s.v. Berthouville in Google Images are mostly of the the most winsome centauress (chosen also for the catalogue's dust jacket) or are small and poor images, while the photographs used by Van de Grift probably were made for Babelon's 1916 monograph and, even though the reproductions are small, they are useful. However, I must say that the Getty Foundation has priced their reasonable and very beautiful catalogue quite affordably, and Amazon has it. Indeed, I learned of it, here in the deep south where I live, thanks to Amazon's very well programed servers which, when I ordered the book on Hellenistic sculpture (also published by the Getty Foundation), instantly suggested the<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Berthouville book as well. As for Jon Van de Grift, his article, abstracted from his dissertation (its committee eminently well chosen for this work), is the only thing he has published, or taught, on Greek and Roman art, as I learned from my Google searches: I wanted to make sure that he had not died</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I had forgotten how much I must have forgotten (if, as I doubt, I had ever thought through the subject) about the representation of centaurs in Greek art. But if I am ever to complete this blog post, as such, I must do so now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Here I shall illustrate only a few of my favorites, which also are good examples, I think, of what I've been mulling over.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For example, on the cusp from Archaic to Early Classical art, the attack of the centaurs on the goddess Iris by the Kleophrades Painter,<span style="color: red;">*</span> whose indomitable joyous energy prevents his rowdy image from being merely typical of its time. Or the centaur on the Broomhall krater,<span style="color: red;">*</span> still essentially Late Geometric, a vigorous man-beast, a wild creature with anthropoid potential to educate heroes. Here Greek art verges on the utter humanity of the Ram Jug Painter's amphora in Berlin, just decades later, where Peleus knows to hand over the infant Achilles to the wise centaur Chiron, the tutor of heroes. There may have been folklore about Chiron for generations, but here an innately empathetic artist brings us to the dawn of literary storytelling: it consists of fragments of a huge vase, but, between Beazley's description<span style="color: red;">*</span> and the early-digital photos that I tried to get, you can make out the infant in his short-sleeved chiton handed over to Chiron:</span></div>
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Chiron, like the Broomhall centaur, still shows himself the Hunter.</div>
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Carefully reassembled, using the curvature as well as the story, we see infant Achilles (with his hair in a layered-wig format) proffered on the palm of Peleus.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I have searched, so far in vain, for a reproduction of the Pompeian copy of the famous Classical painting showing Chiron earnestly, charmingly, tutoring the boy Achilles: it introduced the four-legged Chiron comfortably seated on his hindquarters!<span style="color: red;">*</span> This wonderful addition to one centaur's urbanity exists, usually fragmentary, in sculptured copies, too. It is important here to document the ever-increasing (since the Pompeian copy, in this case, is very fine) humanizing of the centaurs by about the early fourth century BCE, reminding us, as so often, of the virtuosity and beauty of the all-but-wholly lost Greek painting, which was as famous in its time as Renaissance painting of the 16th century in its turn. Indeed, of course, it was the tantalizing ancient descriptions of famous Classical paintings, both mural and, especially, panel paintings that at least as much as statuary brought about the European Renaissance: our temptation to recover, somehow, what was lost forever, though mistaken wishful thinking, is itself an important element in the individualistic emphasis that makes our art seem alien to most Asian traditions: not so much our centaurs, et al., as our humanizing them. Here we come to that stream of art styles often called Hellenistic Rococo in handbooks (because it seems in the eighteenth century to follow Classical, as if there were some inherent sequence at work) which, again, recurs and this time must have been due, indeed, to surviving Early Roman Imperial workshops and treasured collectibles. The styles used for heroic centauromachies, never equaling the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: red;">*</span> and the centaur metopes of the Parthenon all</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">are different, and the story of the wild horse-men of Thessaly itself, in surviving works, is less popular than the sentimental stories. Of the heroes, in Archaic and Classical art, it is Herakles that most often deals with centaurs, such as Pholos.<span style="color: red;">*</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The silver-gilt dedications from the sanctuary of Mercury (using the Latin name for the local cult) are not all of the same date; the scyphi are dated by comparison with those from Hoby, which are, say, a couple of generations earlier. The Louvre has a fragment of cameo glass that reminds us that the Portland Vase and the Hoby cups do not limit cameo glass to epic subjects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUoLqZoQC_IMnrQJcOh0RIeN__iwMOFrKkcml9lcq6am6RKtnzPo2VqmhfzAwceXBLwWtkWgeSRm9Z29nDfE4WWgA3GpgX0iq3pwSUUy1ukbSlG95w3RdsHXp1_wMiBjHDx5WvhnxfF4o/s1600/DSCN1574.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUoLqZoQC_IMnrQJcOh0RIeN__iwMOFrKkcml9lcq6am6RKtnzPo2VqmhfzAwceXBLwWtkWgeSRm9Z29nDfE4WWgA3GpgX0iq3pwSUUy1ukbSlG95w3RdsHXp1_wMiBjHDx5WvhnxfF4o/s320/DSCN1574.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Garland bearers of the highest quality (this fragment may be from the Forum of Trajan in Rome), being architectural, are similar in spirit but sturdy in style.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH-ABFA0V1OWDnwexE27CXmd-t-EPryLp7FGwbTc0m_kaiUKuvNSQJzWxCtkxo08d-zYtfvph6jx1Y1-gmeY05Kn0KGTFbKsRHf_bZolMp6kSeBLdRS7Ox8ejEec_DmtGKNNuYtNoadkA/s1600/DSCN2050.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH-ABFA0V1OWDnwexE27CXmd-t-EPryLp7FGwbTc0m_kaiUKuvNSQJzWxCtkxo08d-zYtfvph6jx1Y1-gmeY05Kn0KGTFbKsRHf_bZolMp6kSeBLdRS7Ox8ejEec_DmtGKNNuYtNoadkA/s320/DSCN2050.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlH0O5PA5Iyi2SPYnUPfnj8YR4CNSbY_sNNcS_jJBVP29Kuk7-c49ixyNRHLhyphenhyphen0ezSf_BvM5q6x5M2-Q6g502XaR1OWXVJAvBI5ypXrmvpei5AbyHrHutwjR2jj5ZYhomTcM-IrRfaQZw/s1600/DSCN1939+CentaursSarcophagus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlH0O5PA5Iyi2SPYnUPfnj8YR4CNSbY_sNNcS_jJBVP29Kuk7-c49ixyNRHLhyphenhyphen0ezSf_BvM5q6x5M2-Q6g502XaR1OWXVJAvBI5ypXrmvpei5AbyHrHutwjR2jj5ZYhomTcM-IrRfaQZw/s400/DSCN1939+CentaursSarcophagus.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBSKfrHOncfGM9v7LF3iw9MO_BS9qniZ85LYbXeNPdLDfEcq60nzPJE3NNI2es4SWKfvMhtYNk48CLpLjUFJLjD7ur2Df0IhO53pBIejTI3wsjGizCvaMMwDQO5ArZL2c8VWnuFRH7NOw/s1600/DSCN0538+PergameneBronzeCommodus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBSKfrHOncfGM9v7LF3iw9MO_BS9qniZ85LYbXeNPdLDfEcq60nzPJE3NNI2es4SWKfvMhtYNk48CLpLjUFJLjD7ur2Df0IhO53pBIejTI3wsjGizCvaMMwDQO5ArZL2c8VWnuFRH7NOw/s320/DSCN0538+PergameneBronzeCommodus.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Among the treasures in the wonderful gallery entered opposite the Cafe Richelieu with the bronze equestrian statuette of Charlemagne or one of his successors, shown explicitly imperial holding an orb (though his horse has rather rubbery forelegs), are ivory diptychs and, mounted (as a medieval treasure)<span style="color: red;">°</span> with a gorgoneion cameo at the top, Bacchus and Ariadne, shown frontally, in a chariot drawn by centaurs. From such objects in cathedral and monastic treasuries (the historical predecessors of Cabinets ancestral to the Cabinet des Medailles itself—see the excellent chapter on the CdM itself in the current Getty catalogue) late Gothic and early Renaissance artists will have found many of their models (as well as in printed texts which were just proliferating), but the Berthouville Treasure was discovered not much more than a century ago. Such a celebratory frontal bilateral composition occurs on a large bronze coin of Pergamon (which I shall add to this post if I can locate the image </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">file), as well as an elaborate front of a large sarcophagus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Now, the whole range of subject matter, of centaurs of both sexes, of their involvement in wine and sex, of their message of intoxication relate them very intricately with the Borghese centaur, with the Furietti pair and the micro-mosiac picture from Tivoli, of the perfect understanding and mastery of this 'rococo' style, and place the scyphi in a class by themselves. The motifs, of course, are Bacchic (theatrical). This post is less than I should wish, but I hope that the centaurs' continuity and its consistency with the general history of Greek art and its Greco-Roman dissemination seem plain, though I have used only a very few illustrations here.</span></div>
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There is so little work of such sophistication surviving to compare. Cicero's <i>Verrines</i> shows that silver-gilt table ware was a treasure for the unscrupulous to die for (or, they hoped, not to die). Babelon and today's specialists have devoted lifetimes of study to this rare treasure, and, of all the treasures in the Cabinet des Medailles, the Berthouville silver was the one I was most surprised to find spending more than a year in America. When I first saw it more than 30 years ago I had gone to see the Brygos Painter's kylix with satyrs dancing ecstatically around Dionysos,<span style="color: red;">*</span> a work of genius if ever there was one (his contemporary Makron, a wonderful vase-painter in his own right, used the same composition but it is static). I had never heard of Berthouville, but I never forgot it. </span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">* The Centaur Family from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">In Beazley's abbreviated translation of Pfuhl's, Masterpieces of Greek Drawing and Painting, fig. </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">119.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">* The Centaur from Lefkandi </span><span style="color: red;"><span style="color: red;">A different view: </span><span style="color: red;">Hampe & Simon, </span><i>The Birth of Greek Art, </i>fig. 377.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">* The Centaurs attacking Iris, by the Kleophrades Painter </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">A detail in Boardman's (World of Art),</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> </span><i style="font-size: 12.8px;">Athenian Red-Figure Vases of the Archaic Period, </i><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">fig. 139.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">* The Broomhall Krater </span><span style="color: red;"><span style="color: red;">Sir John Davidson Beazley, </span><i>The Development of Attic Black-Figure<span style="color: red;">. </span></i>For this vase, the original 1949 editon is better. Plate II.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">* The Ram Jug Painter's Peleus handing Achilles to Chiron </span><span style="color: red;">Idem,</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: red;">pl. II, as a supplemennt to the color slides (photos made before reassembly of fragments).</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">* The Seated Centaur, instructing Achilles </span><span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: red;">(illustration not yet located, but will be found)</span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: 12.8px; text-align: right;">* The West Pediment (Centauromachy) of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: right;">In the Traditional Art History Blog: https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3192706135770676794#editor/target=post;postID=8408145176433190674;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=10;src=postname</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: right;"> (Prints A89 and MA 86)</span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: 12.8px;">* Herakles and Pholos </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">T. H. Carpenter, <i>Art and Myth in Ancient Greece, </i>fig. 185.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">* The cup with Satyrs dancing around Dionysos in the Cabinet des Medailles by the Brygos Painter </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">In Beazley's abbreviated translation of Pfuhl's, Masterpieces of Greek Drawing and Painting, fig. 40</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">° </span><span style="color: red;">Besides the Commodan coin of Pergamon </span>(from the Athens Agora excavations) with this kind if composition, consider an elaborate sarcophagus (with a late Empire portrait in the place of Bacchus and Ariadne, suggesting eternal bliss) has just this composition.</div>
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teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-66563804051080700452016-03-26T02:38:00.000-07:002016-03-26T02:46:03.359-07:00Feeding cats, January 2002 and March 2016<span style="color: orange; font-size: large;"><b><i>Young Buster with Famdamily and Old Buster with ginger cat</i></b></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Ip05nHTPsai5V_-qIRZA1Y30pVpRqqa10ZXgWW3MHosoUMHkVLkASwrKja6G99kriZKa3LmwbQqhAW1tGo2jTLtI1pLMmLwSUpvFuxljDOGgAO2RbBBkZRPHlYeejHZlxrM0GBYk5PE/s1600/2002123Isis%252CSweetie%252CBusterDSCN0113.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Ip05nHTPsai5V_-qIRZA1Y30pVpRqqa10ZXgWW3MHosoUMHkVLkASwrKja6G99kriZKa3LmwbQqhAW1tGo2jTLtI1pLMmLwSUpvFuxljDOGgAO2RbBBkZRPHlYeejHZlxrM0GBYk5PE/s400/2002123Isis%252CSweetie%252CBusterDSCN0113.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">January 21, 2002. One of the first photos taken with the Nikon 775, my first digital camera, days before I left on my last sabbatical leave. The mother cat, calico Iris, and one of her last large litter, famdamily, of kittens (lower left), is joined by a new arrival, the still lanky and adolescent male that I came to call Buster. Though as an alley cat, house raised but left behind by student house-renters when they moved and during my last travels before I retired cared for only by the friends who cared for my house, he has become one of the most affectionate and dependent elderly neutered cats imaginable, now nearly 15 years old, which the digital camera's data records.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheXUdg5lWOSvQEcrVMeRV5c0TehNhcxcBs5JEU1LK0v_Xt-RSoFSU0OIH5m_QMR10tcm23VWn1xjUdxJzjBhD8-JFaugHBcPlI7MH5H3sTs2as5E_avR377fi_nAo_ByuIEXN1c6uL10Y/s1600/21Mar2016+CatsFeedingDSC_2256.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheXUdg5lWOSvQEcrVMeRV5c0TehNhcxcBs5JEU1LK0v_Xt-RSoFSU0OIH5m_QMR10tcm23VWn1xjUdxJzjBhD8-JFaugHBcPlI7MH5H3sTs2as5E_avR377fi_nAo_ByuIEXN1c6uL10Y/s400/21Mar2016+CatsFeedingDSC_2256.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">21 March 2016. Though it was very overcast, I relied on the Nikon 1 v2 to record Buster, who never learned NOT to share food on the side porch, though he is as territorial as can be about his yard and the sanctuaries around and under it as ever. One of my wisest friends warned me of the wisdom of letting neighboring cats in for company but NOT (repeat NOT) feeding them, since they aren't mine and I don't want to be adopted! Buster, ever semi-feral, with Spring weather, insists on eating outside, unless it's raining. Well, you see what has happened. The ginger cat (less orange than Buster but without any white extremities, not even on his underside or his chin) evidently is house bred (neutered and clean and well nourished), but Buster still wants to eat outdoors in fresh air and doesn't mind company, though if he stares too hard the ginger cat will back away, then sneak back in a couple of minutes. They act as if the kibbled food were a carcass and they were taking care to pick it safely. I do not want a young cat to adopt me, but no one claims him so far. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ2_je7htfyPCjhLVywvgTYX8xGXdidvImHih1q46cZxvye5W9SXQ8pEROhIj0E1gy-AVRTduN4FryCKeyhxCD5rtfhDDdatXzJQH_kwJYSLueJU0XybZ_ZzdMa5VtCiVwSwmQM-vVNz4/s1600/21Mar2016+CatsFeedingDSC_2258.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ2_je7htfyPCjhLVywvgTYX8xGXdidvImHih1q46cZxvye5W9SXQ8pEROhIj0E1gy-AVRTduN4FryCKeyhxCD5rtfhDDdatXzJQH_kwJYSLueJU0XybZ_ZzdMa5VtCiVwSwmQM-vVNz4/s400/21Mar2016+CatsFeedingDSC_2258.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">2 March 2016. Solid-color, or even striped cats free of white points and bellies, are rarely seen hereabouts; this is the only one I've seen within walking distance of my house in all the thirty years I've lived here. I notice that he does have white whiskers and wonder if show cats of this sort must have tan whiskers, too. He has amber eyes. Note that he is a 'pure' shorthair; Buster has a short but fluffy undercoat. He is very timid of me, but that is because I make it plain that Buster owns me. </td></tr>
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<span style="color: orange; font-size: large;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span>teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-432431864571392297.post-42494027232467892322016-02-10T14:36:00.000-08:002016-02-26T12:15:25.016-08:00Supposed Romans à Clef<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<span style="color: #3d85c6; font-size: large;"><b><i>A strained association, but Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon occurred to me</i></b></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Shop window in Alexandria, VA, AD 2006</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Visiting a friend who had been my roommate in college and then a friend, though usually by mail, ever since, I took the occasion to look over this justly famous old city, Alexandria, where she had settled. This true bow window is evidently the ornament of a dress shop (which was closed at the time I passed it). Well, we have nothing in Baton Rouge (or for that matter in Berkeley) to match the main street of Alexandria, so even in a light rain I was delighted to explore it. Still using a camera that took small-capacity cards, I did not take enough pictures to write a blog post on it, and you can go to Wikipedia now, anyway. It did amuse me to let the window display recall Picasso's <i>Demoiselles d'Avignon, </i>a century earlier, and for a decade now I have wanted to use this favorite photo in this blog (so please indulge me, since I had wracked my brain for something, of my own, not copyright, to head this post).</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394; font-size: large;"><b>*****</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If someone could not help experiencing everything in old Alexandria turned into famous modern paintings and probably scarier things, too, along with uncontrollable streams of meanings alien to them, that would be manic paranoia. On the other hand, this is a composition with scantily clad plaster models, coping with a window difficult to use for a display to the street, that does vaguely recall the <i>Demoiselles. </i>That resemblance would not excuse supposing that the shop's owner had deliberately borrowed their narrow pyramidal arrangement from Picasso's painting, as if, perhaps, he or she acknowledged that the bare shoulders were suggestive here in a window looking onto the street (as Picasso ironically intended by the "demoiselles" of the painting's title). Such a supposition is what I'm complaining of.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394; font-size: large;"><b>*****</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Let me first beg your pardon for letting two days intervene before completing this post. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Most literary authors draw on their own inner lives and also on their own friends and families. Some, preeminently Virginia Woolf, have left us diaries that discuss their own works as they were published, as if, one might think, having begun as a literary reviewer, the habit of reviewing her own work was preordained (though, of course, there's more to it than that). Besides, eventually she wrote memoir-essays and volumes of letters. I have always found them integral to her oeuvre. On the other hand, except for Quentin Bell's, I have put less stock in the biographies. I have come to regard, as many others do, <i>Mrs. Dalloway </i>as her greatest novel, but I took this occasion to re-read <i>Jacob's Room </i>and <i>Between the Acts</i>, too; the latter being perhaps my favorite, no matter how I judge it (why judge it, in fact?).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The point is that the stream of consciousness of Septimus in <i>Mrs. Dalloway </i>can only be drawn on her own experience. It is unlike any other such account. For, though today we have many studies and memories of bi-polar experience, their authors are either less gifted or more reticent or consciously scientific. When I was young and first read my way through Virginia Woolf, I could hardly bear to re-read <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>. All the characters in that novel are memorable, but all the rest of them were copable for a young Berkeleyan in the arts. Thus, it is fair to say, I have come to Septimus from a literary point of view for the first time: what Woolf did was to give its own voice to a unique person's manic experience. It is impossible for me to imagine what it must have cost her, not least in exhaustive revision of the text. But this is not the place for a non-specialist venture. The point is that Virginia Woolf did draw endlessly on her own life in creating the lives in her fiction, and not only in the high play of <i>Orlando</i>. It is agreed, for example, that <i>Jacob's Room</i> remembers her brother Thoby.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">But (and this is the point of confusion), Ethel Smyth, the composer, was the longterm friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf as well as of E. F. Benson, where in the whole <i>Dodo </i>trilogy she plays an important rôle as Dodo's friend, Edith. And Benson, much as I adore his writing, was happy to incorporate Ethel, whole hog, in the Dodo trilogy. Of course there are exaggerations, just as there would be in the <i>Mapp and Lucia</i> books, but anyone at the time would, and did, recognize Ethel Smyth in Dodo's friend. So did she, and she is recorded as richly enjoying it. But Virginia Woolf did not incorporate real persons in her novels in that way. Clarissa's being in love with Sally Seton is not comparable, though it is an important motif.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In any case, Margot Asquith did NOT accept identity with Benson's Dodo. Yes, Benson knew everybody, the Asquiths included, and yes, he did range through his whole acquaintanceship throughout his career. But he knew, as I said, "everyone", and nothing is to be gained for the reader by worrying over who Dodo "really" was. As a reader, I rather resent being asked to keep considering Margot Asquith. I admit, I have not read her biography, but the biographies of persons in society, not to mention those close to the royal family, do not impress me as being either deep or subtle, and only if the biographies of persons in society were esteemed as literature would I want to read them. If they sat for Cecil Beaton, and were the subjects of his best photographs, I'd be interested in how he photographed them. I don't especially relish bell peppers, but I love Edward Weston's photographic studies of them. What makes so much of E. F. Benson great reading is that (unlike Mr. Fellowes) he is writing of his own experience at the time: his account of the Armistice in London is given to Dodo, but it is his own, and I can't remember reading another as good. On the other hand, he has made a unique woman, Dodo, in novels ranging from her youth in the 1890s to the end of World War I, doubtless from his acquaintance with real women (yes, of the same social class as Margot Asquith), just as Rye gave him the material for Mapp and Lucia, just as his David Blaize novels are drawn from school memories (and, yes, in part of his own, not least the daydream and dream memories of the pre-school child in <i>David Blaize and the Blue Door</i> which are far too specific and exact to be anything but his own).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">So here I am again urging the pleasure of reading E. F. Benson on everyone. Of course, not only is he a full generation older than Virginia Woolf, and he is <i>easy</i> reading of the highest kind if ever there was any, but the case of Ethel Smyth, whom the Woolfs wrote about privately and discreetly (though quite frankly, not regarding her as a great composer) perfectly exemplifies the sheer stupidity of spilling ink to prove that a work of fiction is a roman à clef.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Speaking of stupidity, was it really necessary for me to write a post about this? Only, why do the persons who write for Wikipedia bother with such stuff?</span></div>
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teegeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12719991678290299753noreply@blogger.com0