Teegee: Essays

Museum T-Shirts and Onesies

2012-02-13T07:11:00.000-08:00

British Museum T-Shirt with tondo of Epiktetos's early red-figure cup: Youth and Dancing Girl

I had wanted to post a note on the cup-painter Epiktetos (his own signature: it may mean that he was a slave or the son of one or for some other reason had the nickname), who was the artist, in fact, of whom Sir John Beazley wrote that you can draw differently but not better.

But unless I went back to reproductions of pre-photographic drawings, I couldn't find good images out of copyright.

I resorted to taking a snapshot of the British Museum's T-shirt that a friend had brought to me (above). Subtlety may be lost, but Epiktetos's elegant style actually is a great designer's choice for a T-shirt. It even makes plain why Beazley admired it so much. Note, too, that Beazley's appreciations were, in part, grounded in his own practice of making drawings of the artists he was studying, and his are among the very best. I know of no better way to learn a style of drawing.

But last week I saw this year's first prize winning news photo, by Samuel Aranda, in a favorite blog, Thesprotia News. It is a truly great photograph: unforgettable and beautiful. The blog also provides a link to the competition page. Click on edô at the end of their article. Some of the other winners are great, too, but this one has the finality of the greatest images.

It reminded me of a very great painting, the Avignon Pietà, which I found very well represented in a Google Images page. In comparison, even other famous Pietàs seem rather stylistic virtuoso images.
But then I saw something (the 34th image on my screen in the array that the link provides) that makes the British Museum T-shirt itself seem reverent, the Avignon Pietà reproduced on one of those infant garments (an undershirt with a crotch) that young mothers call onesies.
Considering some of the appropriations of this and other Pietà, I do not want to object to trafficking this one on baby clothes, but I don't know why!

A modest Royal note

2012-02-05T23:01:00.000-08:00

Though I cannot claim to be a faithful watcher of the British Royal Family, as one whose entire childhood in the 1930s and through World War II included so much about the Princesses, I had to notice something I never imagined seeing: a Diamond Jubilee. I suppose that as a child I thought it was something that Queen Victoria celebrated when my grandparents were young.
Without fantasizing about the Queen, I have to admire her wholeheartedly. It seems to me that she possesses the grace and earnest modesty of her parents. And, though I am younger than she is, I do belong to the same generation, even though American, and have some notion of the changes that persons of all sorts have watched and adjusted to during a lifetime of more than three quarters of a century.
I see that there will be celebrations next summer, doubtless televised, but the actual anniversary date has made me recall many events, many images--in short, the history of about three quarters of a century.

A Photographic Entr'acte

2012-01-27T01:29:00.000-08:00

The Imaginative Power of Forms in Light

I often wonder whether the suggestive forms that I see, photographed "straight" (point-and-shoot if you like, though framing and vantage point are not considerations that many point-and-shoot photographers are wont to think of before pressing the button) will convey what I hope for. Digital cameras are very good now in capturing the really neutral gray of a paved street or a concrete sidewalk; they even get the greens of plants and the lavender of agapanthus. Also, as many are discovering, the little miracle in the new iPhone is just that, miraculous.
Opposite my house, in the parkway (i.e., the grassy or flowery area between the sidewalk and the curb) there is one of the tallest pin oaks (or swamp oaks or red oaks, all current names) in the neighborhood, where the oldest houses are now nearing a hundred years. No true oak tree, even if not the noble quercus robur, can get by in a parkway no more than a meter wide. All over the older neighborhoods in southern US cities, the Department responsible for gutters and drains and the like has industriously cut the obtrusive roots back. They look like parts of carcasses badly mangled.
Often, besides, they recall to the mind's eye mankind's own creations, in art. Not always. Today, after being soaked by two inches of constant rainfall, this one (above), which I called snarly and gnarly in the Picasa album, immediately made me remember the Shang bail-handled bronze vessel in the shape of a tiger or a bear (depending on the interpretation) which is swallowing a man. It also evoked all the most powerful Guardians of the great Chinese and Japanese shrines. When the root is half dry, and the colors are differentiated, the suggestion is strongest. That the 'head' seems to strain against the mossy stretched bark only makes it more like a living thing. Of course, what it evokes for each viewer depends on his or her previous visual experience and how great its effect has been. In my case, Prof. Otto Maenchen-Helfen's course, Art 1D, a survey of the art of India, China, and Japan, was the initiation. In 1953, there were not so many picture books readily available, and, a Freshman, I had never seen Asian art, except for a few bamboo paintings reproduced in women's magazines—not even in Art News.* I continued taking his courses, eventually even graduate seminars, though eventually I had to choose between Greece and China. Professor Maenchen was a mysterious idol to his devoted students. He came from Vienna. He had spent time in a Tibetan monastery. He invited his graduate students to meet in his home (in fact, near the end of his career, he had a weak heart). He treated us with interest and respect. What I never guessed until I ran across it several months ago in a Note in Mary Gabriel's biography of Karl and Jenny Marx was that he had been the co-author of one himself, years before he came to Berkeley. Not only did he never discuss political ideologies with us, such a life episode could not compare with his knowing everything, it seemed, about the Huns, for example. He seemed far above any politics! I shall never forget him; he was the most wonderful person and scholar imaginable. So I think myself most fortunate to see Asian images in other things.
In the warm and humid atmosphere a few days ago, when I walked around to the other side of the same tree, standing on the sidewalk and seeing a bit of the pavement beyond, without having any notion of its "standing for" anything other than spreading roots and a dry fallen twig, I had a visual feeling about it that reminded me of Japanese gardening and of album-leaf paintings. Literally, it is just another plain photo, unaltered by any post-processing, with no additional cropping (since I had seen what I wanted, though if I had wanted a square image I'd have cropped, of course). Aesthetically (the Greek verb, aisthanomai means to perceive through the senses), it is for me something quite different.
It was a good afternoon's taking pictures for me. You can find them all, dated Jan 22, in the same album as the snarly, gnarly root.

*Actually, so long as the gallery was in existence, C. T. Loo had a full page advertisement in every issue of Art News. Some of the best ones were for Shang and Zhou ritual bronzes. I had had that periodical for several years (as I related above, a bill collector who had to give up on my mother took pity on the 12-year-old who had stayed home from school, and brought me a stack of Art News). I kept them for years and pored over them. Indeed, I had them until 1973. So it is remarkable that only when I took a course in Asian art, and had a boxful of University Prints to go with it, did I pay serious attention to C. T. Loo (Sherman Lee's big Asian equivalent to Janson's History of Art was still a decade in the future). C. T. Loo keeps recurring, most lately in Edmund de Waal's Hare with Amber Eyes. Nothing given to an observant child is truly wasted. If only one is fortunate to live long enough it all comes together to enrich the decades when hiking all over the world's great cities is too difficult (since true aesthetes seldom get rich).

Cosmological Words

2012-01-18T00:25:00.000-08:00

Nothing and Chaos, with or without Strings

Here is the NASA link to the photograph used to illustrate, in part, a galaxy cluster at the limit of visible space. See Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, 2012, Ch. 2 (on a Kindle, search CMBR, ff. or gravitational lensing where, at "location 622-625" the NASA photo is reproduced to illustrate it).

Krauss, whatever other physicists may be saying right now, is incomparably the best teacher among them, barring perhaps only Richard Feynman. He isn't merely being cute when he says that everything, and you and I, are literally made of stardust: our basic constituent elements were born in the cores of the first stars. Before that there was only plasma. That is OK in physics, I guess, but it's misleading if you think Greek (for the word is Greek). Plasma is any substance that one can model things in, so think of the God of Genesis 2, or of Prometheus modeling Pandora. Generally, though, he is wondrously good with words. He knows that 'data' are plural, and he is as concrete as it is possible to be. He knows that his readers are not stupid but also that it is hopeless to try to explain Dirac's equation (for example) to them. He can be humorous, but without being low, when the context permits: "Infinity is not a pleasant quantity, however, at least as far as a physicist is concerned", a neat rebuke to the metaphysical tribe. Before I say any more I'll have to read the book a second time, but I do not hesitate to recommend it heartily (or you can take Richard Dawkins' "Afterword", if you want his authority). It is a wonderful book to read, only I have read it so fast that I need to read it again. As my heading indicates, he does not like string theory.
What I can address, though, is the antiquity of his mentality. Epicurus and Lucretius, even the pre-Socratics, are downright modern by comparison with Hesiod.
Hesiod, who in the Theogony is not, I suppose, later than Homer (once the obligatory window dressing to the Muses is done—it is not his own), begins, II. 116, ff., "First of all Chaos came into being, next broad-bosomed earth... Out of Chaos came Darkness and black Night, and out of Night came Light and Day..." It is not the order we'd put things in, but Hesiod's cosmus comes before any deities or heroes are named. As I was taught, this is earlier than Genesis 1. And Chaos should not be translated as "void" or "space" or "yawning gap" (ginnungagap is the Norse word). The big lexicon, LSJ, itself refuses to further define Chaos, "the first state of the universe" (citing Hesiod, as above). Chaos, undifferentiation, is prior to cosmus, order. Now, that is tantamount (and in the 8th century BCE!), to Nothing (with the upper-case initial supplied by Krauss to make it clear). It is as good as Odysseus making the befuddled Polyphemus think that he is Oudeis (Nobody). Chaos does seem to be the Undifferentiated, so No-Thing.
Greek thought, even so early that abstract words have not yet evolved to meet the task, is from our earliest records cosmology and physics, not metaphysics. Lawrence Krauss is up to his eyeballs in it, and, like the Greeks, he is highly verbal (not that he cites Hesiod!).
Working through Epicurus philologically will take me a bit more time, but I haven't forgotten it.
Credit
Though by now most of my thoughts or opinions are as mixed as my all-American genealogy, it is mete and right to say that my idea of Chaos came straight from one of my favorite professors, Joseph Fontenrose, at UC Berkeley.

Belfast on Antiques Roadshow

2012-01-06T23:09:00.000-08:00

Harlan and Wolff, Titannic, Canberra, and Belfast

6 Jan 12 Buster's bath. Only tangentially relevant.

One of our treats on Public Broadcasting is hours of the original Antiques Roadshow. Occasionally, these are more than usually interesting. Not that surprising remarks don't occur on the American one. Once a representative of a big firm, such as Christie's, said of a wonderful little picture of a cat in that complicated pose, which Leonardo da Vinci himself drew (and I think it's in one of the notebooks at Windsor) that unfortunately most people would be offended by the cat's being shown washing more than its face, and so the picture would realize much less at auction. But what is more admirable than an elderly cat that, rain or shine, keeps its white underside as white as an albino rabbit? And the posture is one of the miracles of nature. So when I came home Friday afternoon, and saw Buster at work, I grabbed the little camera; he was so industrious, and the sun was so low at 5 pm, that 1/25 second couldn't quite stop his action, since the wonderful little camera correctly read its object as needing f 4.8 for depth of field: Buster, my favorite model, was posing for Leonardo, no less.

Earlier this week, though, we had an hour of the UK Antiques Roadshow from Belfast, at the monument in the building site of the Titannic and her sisters. To read even the Wikipedia article on the Titannic, you'd think that the iceberg, the loss of life, the passenger list, the lifeboats and all were the whole story. This is to ignore the most important human and socio-economic side of this equivalent of an Empire State Building or, for that matter, a World Trade Center, though icebergs cannot be blamed of plotting. As one after another showed memorabilia and recited recollections of their assorted relationships to Harland and Wolff, I realized that I had understood nothing much at all about the city of Belfast (and probably about Northern Ireland in general). Here were the most modest and proud and devoted people you could ever dream of meeting and their sweet and unaffected children. For almost my whole life I've known nothing, seen nothing of Belfast but the "troubles", which, of course, were all too real and tragic. But here were men, women, and children quite unaffected in front of the camera and enjoying the occasion, too. Their pride in shipbuilding was unforgettable, not least that of the gentleman whose pride was in Harlan and Wolff's last great ship, the Canberra, 1961 and not scrapped till 1997. Shipbuilding is for Belfast what automobiles are to Detroit, steel to Pittsburg, filmmaking to Hollywood, but I have never seen a finer identification of a community and great industry than that evinced by the builders of the Titanic and their descendants. They had given their all to shipbuilding.

And Buster, now somewhat arthritic, is unaffectedly doing what a clean animal ought to do.

I must go and see what the eleventh Britannica, 1910, for which I have three update volumes, has to say.

More Lucretiana

2011-12-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

Scriptoria, Invocations, and a Philological Note

From Lorna Price, The Plan of St. Gall in Brief, an overview of the three volume work by Walter Horn & Ernest Born. UC Univ Press, Berkeley, 1982. Here I refer to the plan, whole, opposite p. 1, to the index drawing on pp. 10-11, to the reconstruction drawing on p. 29, showing the E end of the church amd the novitiate and infirmary complex, and the detail of the abbot's house on p. 40. In the Index drawing, "a" marks the "Scriptorium below" and "Library above", tucked into the NE angle of the transept (in the SE angle is the Sacristy, below, and the Vestry, above). The legends, the longer ones scanning, are in a fine Carolingian miniscule of their date, AD 820.

As you can learn on line, if you don't know, Fulda as you see it today is no longer the Carolingian monastery church that was indeed famous as a center of learning. You can see original parts of the church of St. Michael, and the article from the Catholic Encyclopedia gives a good idea of how important Fulda was. Based on archaeological studies over nearly two centuries, a reconstruction of the abbey church can be made. But to get an idea of its place in the development of transalpine European architecture, it still is best to go to Kenneth Conant and Nicholas Pevsner, if English text is wanted. And Greenblatt, in The Swerve, was wise not to insist that Poggio Bracciolini had to have found his manuscript of Lucretius at Fulda (the actually Carolingian Oblongus and Quadratus weren't known yet; modern texts rely heavily on them). Yet, for all the reasons he gives, Fulda is not unlikely.

So the room where the monks sat to copy as well as the library space that housed Fulda's collection of manuscripts do not exist. For that matter, if you go to St. Gall, the architecture you see is Baroque (and later in details), but the Abbey Library owns the plan made for the abbot of St. Gall, evidently (from the dedication on it) in AD 820. We don't know if it was ever built in full this way, but it tells us more about Benedictine monastic organization and building north of the alps and the communal life lived in them than all the tomes of Mabillon. The scriptorium is labeled (and the sedilia are shown: see a on the Index drawing). It even tells us which buildings were provided with permanent privies, necessaria naturae, and how many posts were thought necessary in each outhouse (you can see those for the bloodletters' building, next to the infirmary, in the detail above at top left, and those for the abbot's mansio, at bottom left, by and large the same buildings that had rooms with a caminus (cheminée) built into a corner.

One of the great experiences of my student life was a seminar on the St. Gall plan under Prof. Walter Horn. I happened to be the only member of that seminar with enough Latin to read and interpret all the legends on this tabletop-size vellum document (yes, made from three skins). Everyone else had the task of enlightening me on the architecture. I no longer have my card file of every single word on the plan. On its web site, you can study and zoom and read everything for yourself, though I haven't found a list of the Latin yet. If you can find Lorna Price's book, it is invaluable (though the legends are not given in full or in Latin). The main point is that almost every novel or film or social studies textbook depends on the St. Gall plan for its evocation, if it has any substantial elements, of Benedictine monastic life, either from this plan or on the many studies, a few in English, many in German, based on it. Monte Casino itself was less informative. Notice the arcaded porticoes of the Abbot's house: at least this building had stone walls, as, of course, the church had, but Horn and Born are surely right that these monasteries had roofs steep enough to shed snow, and not tiled!
I do wish Greenblatt had shown the same familiarity with this material as Umberto Eco did in The Name of the Rose.
The example above suggests how the reading of Greenblatt's book is enhanced if one brings assorted bits of substantial knowledge to it. It also helps to know at least a little Latin and Greek and to have read, probably in translation, the three evidently authentic Letters of Epicurus preserved by Diogenes Laertius.
First, though, concerning the Invocation to Venus. I think that Greenblatt may make too much of its Venereal properties. That is to say, any long poem written in hexameters must have an invocation and it needn't be to the Muses as such. If Epicurus had chosen hexameters, he'd have felt obliged to have one, too. To address the force of Nature, of Physis, pervasive in everything (barring the atoms themselves), Nature which is generative and forcibly active in us all, is a sound Epicurean choice. And an invocation must be to mythological entities (not to Poetic Inspriation but to Muses, for example), so to Venus rather than to Physis. That is what Lucretius means by it, and he exploits it most gloriously for pages of poetry. Why, in an Ode to St. Cecilia, for example, Nicholas Brady (co-author with Nahum Tate of a new singable translation of the Psalms, Tate who wrote the libretto for Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) for Purcell's 1692 Ode does invoke Cecilia, though in terms that do not stress her martyrdom, then provides Purcell and the audience with a virtual Middle Baroque Guide to the Orchestra, whose verses illustrate the virtues of each section of instruments, as if evoking the provinces of all the Greco-Roman pantheon, after hymning the Soul of the World. That's just poetry, nothing to do with theology and not much to do with philosophy. No more, I think, does Lucretius mean to worship Venus (rather, to reverence Nature profoundly and provide an appropriate opening to de Rerum Naturae). But when "the jarring seeds of matter" kept singing in my head, recognizing the setting as just like that in the Frost Scene of King Arthur, I had to go and check on the Lucretian credentials of Nicholas Brady (which is fact are excellent). Also, by the end of the 17th century, those "jarring atoms" were a common trope. That is why I rather wish that Greenblatt had written one more chapter! If you like Henry Purcell, as I do, you will love the 1692 "Ode for St. Cecilia's Day".
Back to Epicurus. I had not read the only substantial surviving works, and I still have to find myself a good text of Diogenes Laertius, heaven help me (even for the 3rd century AC he is not the most inspiring writer). But the Epistle to Herodotus is easily obtainable in Perseus, on line, even if you have trouble getting the Greek text there, and in The Epicurus Reader, inexpensive on Kindle. Both of these include all the scholia (and distinguish them, too, from proper Epicurus); the Perseus** is the nicer translation, and the Reader doggedly excludes any Greek words, but the Kindle word-search comes up with all the swerve references.
Now, 'swerve' not only provides Greenblatt with his title. It translates clinamen (both the i and the a are 'long'), which proves to be a strictly Lucretian Latin word, though in its meaning plain as all the other -clin- stem words). The dictionaries cite an "obsolete" Latin verb, *clinare, which per se does not occur in preserved texts. Given that it is obviously cognate to Greek klino, one immediately suspects that Lucretius has done just what Cicero would have done: taken the Greek, formed from a Middle Voice participle, and used it, as we do such French as "de luxe" and "souvenir". Consider, too, that LSJ (Liddell, Scott, and Jones, the big lexicon), in one of its citations uses the English swerve as a translation: eklínthê, he swerved. We usually use that word for what an vehicle does to avoid hitting another vehicle, or a pothole. As an absolute noun it is unusual, even rare, and poetic. So clinamen would have seemed to Romans reading de Rerum Natura. Besides, the Notes in the Kindle Epicurus Reader cite two studies on the Epicurean 'swerve', and by that name: "Epicurus on the Swerve and Voluntary Action," Atlanta, 1987, and H. Jones, "The Epicurean Tradition", London, 1989, AA Long.
** Under Epicurus in Perseus, the reference is D. L. 10.1, sections 55—83, where D.L. stands for Diogenes Laertius.
So my immediate suspicion that Greenblatt had not personally chosen 'swerve', though he made it his title, is borne out even by these elementary inquiries, and the range of translations for all the forms from klino in LSJ made clear why Lucretius had chosen clinamen (wherever it would scan) to explain why atoms in motion sometimes colliding and prior to space or distinguishable matter do account for...well, for everything. And this is why the Church couldn't stomach Lucretius. It isn't just that no gods are accessible (though their names can be invoked). And, Lucretius got pretty nearly all of the Epicurean material from Epicurus himself. Epicurus's dissolution of the soul at death is utterly antipathetic to any stretch of Christian philosophy. The Church rather cherished the Stoics and certainly wallowed in neo-Platonism, but Epicurus and Lucretius are pure and serene atheism. Like many moderns today, good Epicureans in antiquity could happily enjoy the art and architecture, the poetry and rhetoric of traditional religion (and they had no need for personal salvation), without believing in anything in them. I mean, if Epicurus and Lucretius were alive today they'd be passionate about the Higgs boson.
It is more astonishing than I had ever dreamt: Epicurus realized that there was no beginning, because there was no 'what' to be a beginning of. He had no mathematics relevant to the tasks at CERN. He had no instruments to speak of. He had a most remarkable human brain and in its exercise developed a most exceptional human mind. Lucretius was his greatest disciple, evidently, and he barely escaped extinction; the two Carolingian Mss that we have seem to be the basis of the later medieval ones such as that found by Poggio Bracciolini.
To me, being able to read some of Epicurus and consider the questions in his language and the lack of mathematics beyond plane geometry, is profoundly reassuring; to be human surely is enough and more.
And the conscious mind is what makes one human.
I want to celebrate the New Year by making this post in time for it. If I find more in further reading, I'll write another post. For now, once again, I thank Stephen Greenblatt for his book and the Loeb library for endless good things and Perseus for surviving so many evolutions of formats.
And a Happy New Year to all readers.
CLINAMEN addendum
My excuse for fascination with the noun clinamen was its being the rarest, to my knowledge, of the“bare” neuter nouns formed on verb stems, that all are declined like nomen. All are neuter 3^rd declension. “Bare”because there is no qualifying element and nothing to suggest agency: nomenbarely names the ‘know’ stem.

I have never shed my adolescent pleasure in inflections andetymologies. I suppose it is dueto having begun Greek, Latin, and German at about the same time and in thatorder.

Later, in that St. Gall seminar, dealing with thehypercorrect spelling, toregma for toreuma, only cemented it.

How wonderful that Latin has the consistently adverbialablative case to help make sense of Greek use of the remaining oblique cases,not least genitive ‘absolutes’. That Greek has the middle voice of the verb to explain Latindeponents. Not to mention eachother’s sequences of moods / tenses.

Anyhow:

• clinamen, n. ‘swerve’is perfect for Epicurean atoms (or sub-atomic particles, for that matter) thatin their unqualified, undirected state of motion prior to time and space (and shape) maybump into one another, to be propped by one another, without any purpose orwill or agency;

• flamen, n., cf.‘blast’ as well as compounds like ‘inflate’ (unrelated in its stem to themasculine gender ‘flamen’ for a young priest), is the name for the motion ofair;

• certamen, n. is thename, contest, for matching;

• flumen, n.,memorized as meaning ‘river’, and, of course, the same as Italian fiume, is the name of streaming or (liquid) flowing.

Those are the ones that come to mind. Like the stem verbs themselves they areintransitive, i.e., without agency.

The apparent Greek form from which the noun clinamen may derive (thisis why I need to read the Epicurus epistles in Greek) is a Middle Voiceparticiple, i.e., a verbal adjective of the Middle Voice of klinô, in Greek a very common noun both bareand in compounds.

I decided not to make this part of my Essay, proper, becausemy infatuation with the comparison of the bare bones of languages, at theirmost elementary, might not interest everyone. But is it fatuus whenit dawns on a young mind that the stuff in grammars is not the invention ofschoolteachers or philologists but rather the natural science of language?

What I've Been Thinking . . .

2011-12-02T00:13:00.001-08:00

Buster: Fast Food

When indoubt, post the cat

A couple of weeks ago, when the five finalists for theNational Book Award in non-fiction were announced, I found that I had readthree of them, all with interest. Loving Lucretius for most of my long life, I may have enjoyed Swerve most, and Stephen Greenblatt writes wonderfullywell; seeing a mature scholar give himself so wholeheartedly to my favorite Latinauthor gave me great pleasure, and though I had read accounts of the Council ofConstance I had never read one so alive as his. I was so surprised by his chapter on Montaigne that Idecided to get the Essays complete and read him, as I never had donebefore. I also pulled out my goodold Budé text of Lucretius and re-read a good deal of it, using the French as Ihad done in university when I got stuck, to avoid slowing down too much byusing a dictionary; Lucretius, however, is not so hard as Greenblatt says. Greenblatt was reveling in aspects ofthe Renaissance that I have always enjoyed dabbling in, not least PoggioBracciolini. Yet I didn’t darethink he’d win the prize. I wasafraid some readers might think he was proposing that, if the Lucretius manuscriptshadn’t been discovered just when they could be copied and printed, Reason might not haveprevailed in the way that it did. I don’t think he meant that, though no man could fall for Lucretius morewhole-hog than Greenblatt does. Iwas, however, disappointed that he stopped at the point that he did, and I knowthat there still are lots of educated readers whose temperament makes themassess Lucretius by each and every error (e.g., the size of the sun) that hemade rather than by the power and depth of his inquiry and the glory of hispoetry (Screech’s Penguin Classics Montaigne is almost Thomist in consideringthe essayist’s faith, and he certainly does not make much of his references toLucretius).

I was surprised that Deborah Baker’s The Convert, which certainly I had read with great interest, wasamong the finalists; I thought it insufficiently well structured and wasdisconcerted by its relationship to its living subject. In sum, I thought that Mary Gabriel’s Loveand Capital, on Karl and Jenny Marx wouldbe the winner. I had never readanything about Marx and his family and Engels that was both serious and treatedthem as living persons, persons living in a particular history, too, not merelydomestically. Though works on Marxand Engels fill libraries (not that I have read very much, for when I was astudent one did not want to be noticed reading about the founders of Communism,and I don’t like ideologies of any kind very much, especially not when they’reargued as political science is), I think that Mary Gabriel has done an outstandingpiece of work in this biography, and I thought it was the best balanced andmost complete and likely to endure of the three finalists I had read. I cannot overstate how much I have learned by reading MaryGabriel. I thought Greenblattwould get torn limb from limb, though his vulnerability, which almost asks forattacks, is no excuse for failing to read him, as one would read any poet, Ihope, for what he offers, which is important if not exclusively so, and for the self-portrait, if I may say so, that hisbook provides. I mean, we don’tattack poets, do we, for laying themselves bare? But evidently the committee saw it my way; usually I am atodds with committees. Stephen Greenblatt did win.

And then there is my fascination with theoretical physicsand with astronomy. Not wishing toconfine myself to Brian Greene’s books or rely too much on the perhaps toolively video assistance of the NOVA programs (the books are really clearer, ifyou want to try to learn so far as a lamentable lack of mathematics permits, byreading and thinking over and over), I have tried and tried to get through LisaRandall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door, andI just can’t. She explains indefatigably, as if for the very stupid and stubborn, what I don’t need to haveexplained, and she does not explain at all some things at the very heart of herwork at CERN, for example, that I do need help with. And her writing has all the worst characteristics of, say, ScientificAmerican articles, only aggravated byefforts to entertain by talking about her encounters with popular culture. I was prepared to like her book, froman interview that I saw, but I can’t.

Never mind. Isee that the difficulty of explaining Branes and Dimensions and the rest is dueto human verbal language being created by and for our empirical, sensoryexperiences in Newtonian space and time. I have to try to think my way through concepts that are, literally,ineffable. Likewise, my brain’sability to envisage needs not to be worried by a video that looks as if ahere-and-now figure or object or event were visibly here-and-now elsewhere orotherwhen, too. And I probablycannot ask for a resolution of exceeding the speed of light as recorded byinstrumentation made by and in terms of a Newtonian (or Einsteinian)model. It suffices to keep readingand thinking about it all. Historyis full of funny language, as funny as black energy. Someday it may be possible to name better what is beinglearned (it always has been possible). After all, the only thing is that I want to know that everything,including parallel universes and other oxymorons, has no beginning and noend—and what it has, instead. Imean, some enigmas are for Six Year Olds:

Elizabeth Ann said to her Nan: “Please, will you tell me howGod began? Somebody must have made Him. So who could it be, ‘cos I want to know?”

A.A. Milne, Now We Are Six, “Explained”,pp. 76–78.

To punctuate the series

2011-11-22T17:21:00.001-08:00

22 Nov 2011 Not on Pearl Harbor Day, as usual, but even before Thanksgiving Day (actually on the 50th anniversary of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy), as I was returning from collecting the old cat before an oncoming deluge, at the bottom of the Japanese Camelia tree, where its blooming always begins, and almost in the dark in the shade of the tree, I saw this new camelia (which the heavy rain surely damaged), so I took a chance that the baby Nikon could take it without flash, which these camelias respond to badly in a photograph

I had already decided to interrupt the series of essays on vase-painting. Among the reasons are copyright laws and the abundance of good literature (as well as appalling stuff) on the great masterpieces of Greek vase painting, since I object to the use of most of the old drawings instead of the real vases. Even more critical to my decision is the fact that the subject becomes far more complex in the periods from Late Archaic through Late Classical, and the best work (which fortunately was done on fired vases rather than some biodegradable ground, but is no less great for being on a pot) needs to be discussed in individual essays, treated in the same way as I have done the Miletos lion or the "Barberini Faun", for example.
In the album, for the time being, I can call your attention to a great Late Corinthian black-figure krater, Louvre E 638, Payne's no. 1474, for which I do have an acceptable digital image:

Louvre E 638 (Payne NC no. 1474; Amyx CorVP, pp. 574-5, often considered
mainly for its inscriptions, since, like the EC Eurytios Krater, it stands alone,
without another known by the same hand. It represents the Departure of Hektor
for battle at Troy.

I could write a whole essay on a vase like this; indeed, it is pointless just to say how interesting and fine it is, and no more. The very fact of Corinth's rubbing red clay onto the surface of these kraters requires discussing their Attic contemporaries along with them, the very works of Sophilos and Kleitias of which I have no photos that I can use here.

So, though I haven't at this moment decided what to write on next, I shall return in Teegee: Essays to just that, essays instead of lessons. That also will allow me write true Opera Nobilia essays on some of the masterpieces of drawing and design for their own sake.
See: http://teegeeoperanobilia.blogspot.com/2011/11/homage-to-berlin-painter.html

V. Middle Corinthian Black Figure

2011-11-16T22:19:00.001-08:00

Middle Corinthian Black Figure, c. 600–c.570 BCE

Munich. The Dodwell Pyxis

I used to have a 19th-century dictionary of antiquities (in a paperback reprint) that dated the Dodwell Pyxis, named for the famous traveler who acquired it in the Corinthia, to the time of the Dipylon vases, then recent finds in that cemetery, which bore figures that the writer (was it Nettleship? William Smith?) thought extremely primitive and childish. He had a similar opinion of the letter forms on the lid of this pyxis. In any case, it was the cast of characters in the Boar Hunt that interested him. Of course, we know now (and some knew then, in the 1880s) that the spelling and writing on the lid are simply the work of someone less than a calligrapher (though about two decades later than the Eurytios Krater), and its animal friezes, as well as the shape of the pyxis itself, are Middle Corinthian. The Dodwell Painter typifies much of the animal frieze work of the first quarter, or so, of the sixth century BCE. Usually insouciant, his work is occasionally ambitious, as on a huge oinochoe (made as pretentious grave goods) in the Richmond, VA, Museum. I can add nothing to the work of my friend and mentor, D. A. Amyx, on the Dodwell Painter and his followers (not to say that other work is not useful, too). Humfry Payne, though, was surely right in regarding Middle Corinthian (MC) frieze work as more commercial than EC, let alone Protocorinthian.

BM Large trefoil oinochoe with triple handle and three friezes. Late in MC, perhaps ca. 570 BCE.

One gets pictures of details for study as one can:

BM Large trefoil oinochoe with triple handle and three friezes. Late in MC, perhaps ca. 570 BCE.

This large trefoil-mouthed oinochoe, with three friezes and a triple handle, is less idiosyncratic than work by the Dodwell Painter's best followers, but generically it is of much the same kind.
My own favorite work in Middle Corinthian is by the Corinthian Chimaera Painter and the painters in his group; I posted the one that first took my fancy last month, in this blog, before deciding that many of the pots were after all not what you'd call opera nobilia. His best plates, though, such as the Louvre one, have as much distinction as anything I can think of. A companion of his, The Painter of Louvre E574, has a tighter manner of drawing but also is very fine.

Munich, Antikensammlung, 6449 (346A). Purchased in 1904 from a Paris auction.
Payne, NC 1047. Amyx, CorVP 171, AP1. Lawrence, most recently, Hesperia,
Supplement 28 (1996), pp 72-73, 123, L14. MC/LC plate by the Painter of
Louvre E 574, who also decorated the famous Copenhagen plates.

These horses are rather comparable with those on the great Attic François Vase by Kleitias, in the next post, and are probably not much earlier.

Apart from the kylixes of the Gorgoneion Group (see Amyx in AJA 65 (1961), pp. 1–15, pls. 1–15, for a very enlightening discussion of the Medallion Painter and the rest of this group), the finest miniature work of Middle Corinthian—I have already illustrated the Brussels Aeneas kylix above—the finest, perhaps the finest of all miniature work in MC, is that of the Samos Painter, and for him the kotyle Louvre CA 3004:

Louvre CA 3004. The Hydra and Herakles' companion
Iolaos at right. Both the figure work, the floral chain, and
the lettering, in my opinion (AJA 88 (1984) pp. 59–64,
pls. 21–23), give this a relative date of c. 585 BCE.

The front of the kotyle is noble and sprightly and elegant, but the dancing komasts, dipping wine from the dinos that you can just see under the handle to the right of Iolaos, each one named by an epithet to characterize their nature, go around the back of the cup and are the most delightful of their kind. Since Amyx and I published our studies, excavations at Samos have been published that, in my opinion, really link this artist with the Attic KX Painter and suggest that at least the latter spent some time actually working on Samos. The Corinthian Samos Painter, however, made his cups of Corinthian clay. My photo, above, though at least it shows the little cup in a lifelike way, is slightly too pink.

Here, copied from my article, are those komasts:

Louvre CA 3004. Here are the komasts, Playful, BigButt, Phallios, Komios, and the rest. At right, the horses of the chariot that brought Herakles and Iolaos. There is a great publication of this kotyle in the Mon.Piot 40 (1944) pp. 23–52, figs. 1–17, pls. 1–3, by Pierre Amandry.

Just how great these komasts are can be appreciated by comparing them with those on the Berlin kotyle, Payne's no. 953, published as early as Gerhard, which are like wooden puppets rather than human dancers wearing padded festival costumes:

Kotyle, Berlin. Payne's Necrocorinthia no. 953. Condition outstanding; art OK

Alabastra continued to be made larger and larger, as much as 30 cms. tall. Consider the two from Delos (illus. below) and from Tocra (Boardman, no. 369—he was part of that excavation and he published the Tocra (Taucheira) one. This artist, rather fantastical, on whom I have published in Hesperia 67 (1998), pp. 302–322, pls. 50–60, began in the period of EC style and worked through most of MC.

Delos 431, Boardman, Early Greek Vase Painting, no. 370, by
the Taucheira Painter, who often doesn't know which wing
he's engraving! But splendidly. Notice the fashion for showing
a potnia theron as if she were an ancient statue of herself.

Here are two large alabastra in Berlin, both with tritons, as we call them. The one at left
is itself part of the heavily embroidered "Luxus Phenomenon" that the Tocra and Delos
alabastra exemplify.

I think this will do for Middle Corinthian. It is too much my specialty for me to write about it with too few illustrations, and where I disagree with my elders I want only to say what I think without being contentious.

But, between Boardman's book and these posts, I daresay you are getting more of these things than you are used to seeing. Or are you?

IV. Exceptional Picture Vases

2011-11-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

The Eurytios Krater and the Gorgon Dinos

Paris, Louvre E 635, from Caere (modern Cervetri). Payne, Necrocorinthia,
no. 780 and pl.27, a view similar to this one. Boardman, Early Greek VP,
p. 199, no. 396, moves around to the right, to show us Herakles and Iole
(Boardman,p. 179, provides the Corinthian alphabet). Among the indices
that date it are the head of Iole and the floral festoon on the shoulder.

Known from surviving written sources (indeed, these very names of Eurytios's three sons are given in a fragment of Hesiod, a good century earlier), the story, which this krater shows must have been substantially the same at the end of the seventh century BCE, shows Herakles feasted at the house of Eurytios, seeking the hand of Iole (whose name, by the way, as the digamma initial used here hints, is the same as our 'viola' or 'violet', which came to us by way of Latin), is not the sort of thing we have seen much earlier in vase-painting. Herakles will abduct her and so seal his fate. The Chigi Olpe, a generation earlier, does have names written for the little Judgment of Paris: 3 letters survive of 'Alexandros', the proper name of Paris, and most of the names of Athena and Aphrodite, but we cannot tell whether the artist had a specific literary story in mind for the main scenes, while the hare hunt is surely generic. It is different to add a realistic anecdotal touch by showing dogs eating scraps from the table; they also creatively serve as space fillers in the composition.

Now, not to bring in here the suggestion that the artist of the Chigi Olpe may be the name Ekphantos (alas, just a name), what is significant is that we have very little more by the artist of the Chigi Olpe (see the preceding blog post) and nothing more by the artist of the Eurytios Krater, despite generations of efforts to match the little animal frieze on the surface of the krater's rim (Amyx CorVP III, pl. 57, 1a–b) with other little animals of similar quality, such as those by the Heraldic Lions Painter, which do, though, further confirm the relative dating of the great krater—as for an estimate of the absolute date, coming late in EC black figure, it is close to 600 BCE. The Eurytios krater is a reminder of how little we know of picture-art, especially so early as this. Its artist is vivid, skilled so that he draws it all with ease, delightful. He does not seem to be laboring to copy something else, but it does seem likely that he did not spend his life in the potteries. It is not that painting on wooden, gessoed panels is 'nobler', though engraving and coloring slivers of ivory (since the material cost more) probably was reserved for especially admired artists. Painting on temple walls (assuming that they did paint directly on walls, as the Etruscans would start doing) was hardly, in my opinion, more prestigious than making these kraters the majority of which were made to be shipped to Etruria: that's where they're found. Painting on slabs that formed tomb walls, as at Paestum, likewise was funerary art; we only assume that the kraters "must have been" used at banquets for the living before being placed in the tombs where they were found. If we want to fantasize about Etruscan tombs, we now know just enough to find more to say than D. H. Lawrence's private daydreams in Etruscan Places.

There are a few good places to seek further pictures of the Eurytios Krater; the best is the Louvre's own web site. Some of the bad sites are dreadfully bad, worse than anything you'd find in 19th-century books. Some sites are just dumb and generalized with little, excessively processed images. You can trust the Louvre and the British Museum. My own efforts to photograph the Eurytios Krater through glass, hand-held, are mostly not sharp enough to post, but consider these riders in the lower frieze.

Louvre E635: The Eurytios Krater. One of the riders from the lower-frieze
horse race (I think of a 'cavalcade' as a parade of walking horses, and these
short-haired riders are, I think, jockeys, not hippeis (which is Greek for
equites in Latin) who raise and own the horses. For vase painting, what is
most relevant here is that other horses at this date, if shown in motion, have
their hind legs gathered up below their bodies, and the drawing here is both
very skillful and very loose for Early Corinthian.

The Gorgon Dinos poses superficially similar questions, in so far as the main frieze, with the Gorgons on one side and duellers with their charioteers attending them on the other, do also seem to be evidence for painting of other kinds, "free painting" in some sense of the word, and its floral festoon is one of the most elaborate of any period:

It is not only grand and complicated, however, but also shows that it is later than the Eurytios krater. Its splayed lotuses and the four-way knotted arrangement in the centers are more comparable with Middle Corinthian black-figure of the period of the earlier kylixes that, many of them, have a gorgoneion (gorgon face) in the center of the bowl. Consider this early publication of the unattributed one in Brussels:

This cup, incidentally, shows the Homeric way of duelling, with one's backers, here riding, behind the heroes, and everyone is named: one of the Ajaxes, backed by the other Ajax, fights Aeneas (with the snake episemion), backed by Hippokles. Dolon, almost as a space filler, kneels behind him. The Gorgon dinos duellers are more strongly individualized.

I have always liked the way that their charioteers look back at them, over their shields slung over their shoulders. Yet the Gorgon Painter's drawing in the figure work here is somewhat timid compared with either the Nettos Painter before him or the artist of the Eurytios krater some sixty miles away in Corinth, and one suspects that he meant to evoke some "free painting". Remember that, even on the interior walls of temples and civic buildings, large panel paintings on primed wood could be placed in shallow recesses (consider the interior walls of the pinakotheke at the lefthand side of the Propylaea to the Athens Acropolis), so that we needn't think of fresco (or preclude it, of course).

Again, the Louvre's own web page on the Gorgon dinos offers several more images and so does Boardman's Black Figure. Besides, there are more handheld details in the Picasa Album, as well as four images, nos. 91–94, of an amphora, Louvre E 817, by the Gorgon Painter, which is wholly in the manner of the remaining friezes on the big dinos. In fact, we have many vases by the painter of the Gorgon Dinos that are in this more ordinary mode, without which it might have been a more demanding task to attribute the big dinos and the other work to the same hand.

That is just what we do NOT have for the artist of the Chigi Olpe (just four exceptional pieces surely attributable), let alone the artist of the Eurytios Painter (one early column krater in splendid isolation).

These observations are important because they afford a parallel to Kleitias and Sophilos in the next generation.

You can begin (if you want to venture on attribution by style alone) with an easy exercise. Compare these confronted sphinxes (sirens would have birds' legs) flanking a palmette-and-lotus cross with a bird atop it with similar elements in the smaller friezes on the dinos. And never mind the residues of dot-rosette fillers (he also uses incised ones, anyway) which like his predecessor, the Nettos Painter, he was loath to give up when he wanted something very dainty and unobtrusive. Remember the old joke: Columbus made three trips to the Americas and died on one of them: which one? Always date relatively by the latest traits.

2011-11-02T00:39:00.000-07:00

IV. The Adolescence of Black-Figure Vase-Painting
Corinth's transition to real Black Figure.

Paris, Louvre. An olpe and a trefoil-mouthed oinochoe
of the Transitional Period, which Humfry Payne dated about
635-625 BCE. Even if it's as much as ten years later, we cannot be sure.
The olpe is one of those from the Campana collection that are the
work of the Painter of Vatican 73 (see refs. in Album)

This is ordinary good animal-frieze work, nothing like the Chigi Olpe! But developmentally, it is taller and slenderer as an olpe shape, and this same workshop before long will start using incised blobs instead of clusters of dots, or rings with a dot in the center as on the oinochoe in the background. Also, we see on these vases a standardized design syntax, shape by shape, which will last a good half century, of which the tongues (derived I suppose from petals) incised on the shoulder of the oinochoe are typical. In fact, this artist, The Painter of Vatican 73, turned out fine olpai so alike that you have to count the animals and notice the cracks where they are mended to tell some of them apart. This is the corner turned that makes this stylistic phase Transitional—not only its rosettes.
Milesian Middle Wild Goat Style in its most splendid example.
The varieties of East Greek animal frieze vase-painting are finally being sorted out and dated, so far as possible parallel to Corinthian animal frieze vases, in most cases trefoil-mouthed narrow footed oinochoai. But all of the "wild-goat" genus opted out of black-figure with incised details. Instead, as if they wanted to 'respect' the integrity of the smoothed surface (and in some cases perhaps considering that their brown clay would show through the pale, almost white, engobe coating, especially in the incised lines), they more or less painstakingly 'reserve' the lines showing internal muscles and features and often leave the faces of animals as well as sphinxes in outline. One of the largest and finest of all these vases is the Marseilles oincochoe, Louvre CA 350, now classed as Milesian (quite appropriately for such a rich and ancient polis) on archeological grounds. If I were studying from Boardman's book, I'd make an enlarged copy of his chronological chart on p. 271 and pin it up on my bulletin board (or put its File handy to be clicked open on my computer's Desktop). Milesian Middle Wild-Goat is now dated comparably with Transitional and Early Corinthian (black-figure), and, as for the Marseilles oinochoe (Boardman, op. cit., fig. 287 with discussion on pp. 142-143), the proportions of its neck and trefoil mouth as well as those of its animals leave me in no doubt of its contemporaneity with the Painter of Vatican 73. It is extremely elegant, cosmopolitan. There is nothing "backward" about the wild-goat-style's choosing not to use black figure.

Detail of Louvre CA 350, the Marseilles oinochoe

I chose not to photograph the whole, knowing that it is in Boardman and also confronted with lots of glancing light except where I could shield its freestanding case with my body! Note that it 39cm tall and almost as wide. Painting on the pale engobe coating here, they have a problem similar to that at Corinth, that the glaze-paint does not stick so well as on Attic (or Rhodian), so a closer photo of the splendid sphinx was called for.
To Compare large Early Attic B-F with small Corinthian (Transitional B-F)
Despite my resolve to wring instructive essays from images immediately at my disposal on my own computers, I do need at least one small Transitional Corinthian painter of alabastra, and not only because he is one of my favorites. So I took a snapshot of Humfry Payne's tracing of Palermo 489, a drawing even older than I am, showing a very different approach to animals from that of the Painter of Vatican 73, above. He illustrates the favorite scheme for alabastra, confronted animals with another creature or motif in the center; his lions are of the rich-maned Assyrian type (and with that nub on the bridge of their nose that we see on early coins, on lions, which numismatists have been tempted to over-interpret—e.g., as a sun symbol!) but the alabastra are still very small, about five inches tall, and the filling rosettes are still of the type made out of dots.

Palermo 489, from Selinus. NC 76. Tracing by Humfry Payne

Payne's gray shading is for added red. I deliberately used my smallest pocket camera, handheld, lest the Clarendon Press (late, lamented) object to my putting it here. For I need it to compare with the very large Attic chimaeras, one from Aegina, the other from the Athens Kerameikos cemetery, which must illustrate, I think, the same phase though at a dramatically larger scale and in the Attic tradition:

Athens, Kerameikos Museum. Fragmentary, but it is Bellerophon on Pegasos confronting
an Athenian serpent-tailed chimaera; this bold type takes the tradition that chimaeras
have the forepart of a lion, a goat in the middle, and a snaky tail to the limit.

I'd be very surprised if these two vases were as much as five years apart in date, even making all allowance for that old argument about "advanced" and "conservative" artists, left over from the critical vocabulary (and its assumptions) of the early to mid- twentieth century.

About the painter of the Attic chimaeras, I wrote in the files for my students:

Athens, Kerameikos Museum. Earliest Attic Black-Figure. Skyphos-krater by the Attic Chimaera Painter (there is also a Corinthian one). I do not agree with the revision that equates this style with that of the Nettos Painter. In any case, this work is contemporary with Transitional Corinthian work, dated ca. 625, so should not be much later; the head of a terracotta figurine, at right, also is still 7th century.

I believe that most emphatically. That said, we now switch to Boardman's Attic Black Figure Vases (1974), for Athenian work. That was the first of the World of Art vase-painting books and probably covering the full scope of Greek vase-painting was not yet envisioned. Sir John Beazley, in ABV (1956) lists The Chimaera Painter on pp. 3-4, and the above vase is no. 3—nowadays, more of us use the Greek spelling, rather than the Latinized, Ceramicus, that good Oxonians of Beazley's generation were taught (he was born in 1885). By the date of the first Paralipomena pp. 2–5 (1971), pp. 1–5, where this vase is no. 9 (and the Aegina one is no. 1), Beazley's friends and disciples had convinced him that this artist was the same hand as the Nettos Painter. Despite his authority and his own well considered convictions, Beazley was deferential to other scholars whose work he respected; it wasn't just that he was getting old. The question arose from the publication of the three great Vari kraters, huge grave markers made in three parts, lid, bowl, and stand, and it is clear (to me) that at least two vase-painters worked on them. The one illustrated in fig. 6 in Boardman's Black Figure book is 1.10 meters tall, from knob to foot; it is no. 13 in Paralipomena (1971), itself several years earlier than Boardman's Black Figure—and that is why I have to spell out so much here!

In the Eleusis Museum there is a very early neck-amphora, Paralipomena (1971), no. 3, which George Mylonas, the discoverer of the big Middle Protoattic Polyphemos amphora, attributed to the Chimaera hand (earlier publication than ABV, 1956) whose conjoined panthers, on the neck, you would agree is the same artist as did the same on one of the Vari kraters (Anagyrous, by the way, is the same place as Vari):

Eleusis Museum, from Eleusis. Early Attic black-figure amphora by the same artist as the Kerameikos and Aegina chimaeras and at least one of the Anagyrous kraters, A; whether this is the same hand as the Nessos Painter is the very difficult question.

Eleusis Museum, from Eleusis. Early Attic black-figure amphora by the

same artist as the Kerameikos and Aegina chimaeras and at least one

of the Anagyrous (Vari )kraters, A; whether this is the same hand

as the Nessos Painter is the very difficult question.

But here is a detail which, when you compare it with the Nettos (=Nessos) on the namepiece of the Nettos Painter in Gisela Richter's Handbook of Greek Art, on facing pages 288 and 289 in the 1959 edition, is obviously by the Nettos Painter (and the bigger the picture, as Boardman Black Figure, fig. 5, the better). Judge for yourselves: isn't it obvious that these are two artists, even if they may have been benchmates? Every trait is drawn differently. "Style is the man himself" (though Buffon had in mind only literary style, since, being a Word man, he thought that drawing and painting were just imitation!).

Detail of Athens, Agora P 1247. Paralipomena (1971), p. 2, no. 4. Note that this is NOT
a neck amphora.

But I must not get into introducing elements of teaching that belong in the introductory sessions of a seminar.

Back to the animal-frieze olpai.
Meantime, here is one of Medousa's sisters in pursuit on the Nettos Amphora. Magnificent Gorgons, both terrible and entertaining:

Athens, NAM. One of the gorgons, not childlike masks now, on the body
of the name piece of the Nettos Painter. The floral festoon of lotus flowers
and palmettes are also in real black figure, but they still look quite early.

Early Corinthian Vase-Painting, and the Sphinx Painter
The Sphinx Painter was a little younger than the Painter of Vatican 73 and also quite happy to paint the same kind of animal frieze vases in his long career—the whole duration of EC vase-painting—but he also occasionally painted small vases. Evidently he was respected in the Corinth potteries, since his influence is widely observable. His style was straightforward but fluent and very consistent.
Here is an olpe of his in the Louvre and one in the Villa Giulia (Houston has another):

Paris, Louvre. Shape evolved beyond that used by
the Painter of Vatican 73; the pendant lotus as a
center motif and his highly characteristic siren are
hallmarks.

The Villa Giulia one simply rearranges his repertory:

Rome, Villa Giulia. The pendant lotus may be a bit
more evolved, so too the filling ornament; the lion is
very perfect Sphinx Painter.

The Syracuse Museum has wonderful vases, and from one of the graves at Megara Hyblaea we see the Sphinx Painter on the EC form of aryballos, round, still quite small, 0.107m tall, so that the figurework is about the same size as the corresponding group on the Louvre olpe, above:

Syracuse, Museo Paolo Orsi. Sphinx Painter. EC round aryballos from
Megara Hyblaea

A much more interesting vase, an EC alabastron in the same museum, is the namepiece of the EC Gorgon Bird Painter. Again, Humfry Payne's drawing used stippling for the added red:

Syracuse, Museo Paolo Orsi, inv. 10701. Payne, Necrocorinthia, no. 440.

Syracuse 10701, The face of the Gorgon Bird

On the back of this vase, under the handle, there is a lion's protome. Let no one suppose that some mythical or mystical creature is intended by the artist. He is just being playful in the best sense of the word: the bearded gorgon mask not only echoes the curves in the wings but masks the awkwardness (if this were a natural animal) of the conjoined avian-felines! I posted Payne's drawing to show where the added red was.

Another glorious Gorgon, this one a whole Gorgon, is on a larger round aryballos from the Delos excavations, and this publication, 1910, is early enough that I make bold to use its photograph. In Payne's catalogue it is no. 600, and in Amyx's it has five views on pl. 38. Its inventory no. is Delos 330, and it is the namepiece of the Painter of Delos 330. I have made some further study of this artist, but this is not the place for it. Sufficient here to post this Gorgon, drawn with such panache. The filling ornament is idiosyncratic (those dot-and-rings), and the vase's size (becoming a little large for a perfume bottle, except as a grave gift) as well as the style of the lion on the back of the vase show that it is near the end of Early Corinthian.

Delos X, no. 330, fig. a on pl. XXVI, row A.

In the second part for this period, I shall begin with the large vases with pictorial scenes.

III. Early Archaic Glory (cont'd)

2011-10-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

III (b) Protocorinthian
Under its early tyrants, and while Athens had not yet made any such ventures, Corinth's potteries became truly professional but, on the whole, not yet careless of quality. It was in Corinth, on vases where it became customary, that casual use of incised details became truly (unless you count the filling ornaments in the field) black-figure: black silhouettes, with incised details, heightened with added colors, red almost always (sometimes called 'purple', simply because it often turned rather mauve in the earth or was fired not quite red—the redder the clay, the truer the added red (and the clay in Protocorinthian did more often show its iron content), white often, and yellow as well. A few vases, like the Chigi Olpe, are practically in color on a black-figure base. Attic vase painting didn't become nearly so much like full-fledged black figure until close to the end of the seventh century.

Louvre. A "powder pyxis" (or, rather, a cylindrical pyxis) and three Protocorinthian aryballoi

Not all vases were customarily proto-black figure. The powder pyxis, as we call it without assuming what it might have contained, and other straight sided little boxes but with regular lids, usually were decorated with conventional motifs. As the Louvre's line-up shown here demonstrates, the little pointed perfume bottles, about two inches high, might have plain silhouette (here with some red bands) or, without being necessarily later (details of the shapes are evidence for relative dating, as always based on the larger and more elaborate vases in tomb groups, those at Syracuse for example). It might have been more difficult to date these if they were not in context, beginning even with the Cumae Group, posted above because still datable in the eighth century (that's OUR eighth century, let us never forget, though books and labels often talk as if the ancients had known how many years before the Christian era they were living in: luckily for us, they early began dating in Olympiads, which traditionally—and possibly really—were founded in 776 BCE). As it is, despite efforts almost "Shakespearean" (with reference to the current movie) to prove the consensus wrong, we have a really intricate and well woven and well knotted relative chronology, tied to the few historical dates that we have. Boardman's book is well informed and maturely considered, so you really can, thanks to dated trading posts and colonies with their cemeteries, date rather confidently.

The kotylai of the Hound Painter (Middle Protocorinthian)

The largest number of published Middle Protocorinthian is from Aegina and is still under copyright, I'm afraid, so I shall use scanned slides that I took through glass with Daylight Agfachrome film 30 years ago in the British Museum. Actually, for teaching, these vitrines showing the true relative sizes of the vases, all of them small compared with the monumental Attic grave markers, remain best for teaching. These posts are not for their photography (though the strip above here shows what advantages even a little, early two-megapixel digital camera has).

British Museum. The Hound Painter's kotyle, H. 7 1/2 "; compare the size
of the ring-shaped aryballos (a novelty shape, of potter's virtuosity,
and note the guilloche, and at left a little cylindrical pyxis.

Though continuity from the Cumae oinochoai is evident in that bud on a loop, and there is still a sub-geometric filler above the hound's back, the pinwheel rosette in front of him and the stacked rays at the base of the kotyle are of this new generation. The hound has fully incised (even with double lines) muscles in his legs and toes; his lovely head is as expressive as it is elegant; he has (mostly worn away) added yellow ochre in the upper division of his neck (for no reason but decoration); every relationship of the curves of his contours has been most carefully considered. [the pinkish color is due to age of the slide and cannot be fully corrected in post-processing]

British Museum. Beside the vases shown above (and here the color is slightly
better) are one of the earliest alabastra (the shape as well as the name going
back to Egypt) and the very great, very tiny masterpiece called The Macmillan Aryballos,
which is Late Protocorinthian, about 635 BCE (see below), dwarfed by the kotyle
behind it.

On his other very similar surviving kotyle, almost a twin to this one, the Hound Painter again put a water bird under one of the handles, as here. We think this work dates from just about the middle of the century. As for the names of all these vase-shapes, the best way to learn them first is, as here, as they are mentioned with reference to real specimens. By the way, when we say that a lion on an early Greek coin still looks like a seventh-century one, we mean that it resembles those like the one on the Macmillan Aryballos.

The favorite Protocorinthian aryballoi, shown in developmental order,
in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. No. 9 is almnost as early as the Cumae ones,
and no. 13 is even more elaborate, and even slightly smaller than London's
Macmillan Aryballos, by the same artist.
I have added a detail of one of the female heads on either side of the lion's head;
it is in the Album, near the end.

They may be made of plain clay (though well levigated and set to age a bit, probably, to impart as much elasticity as possible by allowing organic elements to rot), but their extreme virtuosity, even in nos. 9 to 12 (you who have taken a course in ceramics will gasp at them, and when seen broken the walls are only a millimeter thick), make it certain I think that these were made and sold as luxury items, just as perfumes were sold in Tiffany flasks a century ago. Most other potteries didn't even try to compete with them, not even in Rhodes and Ionia. But Corinthian clay, possibly because of the amount of lime in it, partly because also the glaze-paint had to be made from clay beds with more iron or less lime (or both), so that the glaze-paint had a different coefficient of expansion in firing and did not become one with the clay body, did not survive so well as the black glaze-paint on Attic and some other orange clays. That difficulty did not deter the vase-painters of the wonderful aryballoi with lions' heads from painting and incising and coloring (by mixing their earth-color pigments) the molded animals and human heads, the elaborate battle scenes, the hare hunts in black-figure with added colors—however little remains, only traces, on the Berlin aryballos, no. 13. It is this work that I think may have been executed with cactus thorns very finely sharpened and painted with a few hairs in the brush.

The Chigi Olpe in the Museum of the Villa Giulia in
Rome. Like the two aryballoi, it dates from (in our calendar)
the third quarter of the 7th century. You can see most of
the figure work more clearly in Boardman's pp. 94 and 95, but
I took these (clandestinely and with the best figure work away from
the light) to show what the vase actually looks like.

In this picture, under the handle root, you can see the clear remains, with names inscribed, too, of the Judgment of Paris. There is a fine sphinx, too, that helps date those by other painters on little vases. Then, in the major frieze, to the right of the Judgment is the wonderful cavalcade, and you can make out above the rider visible here the famous earliest certain representation of the Greek phalanx in action.

Move around to the left of the handle root, and, on the shoulder
you see the other phalanx group, with their episemata (lion head,
gorgon face, eagle, etc.) showing on their shields; the wonderful
flute-player is on Boardman's p. 95, and so is the lion hunt.

Although the Chigi Olpe is 26 cm. or about 11 inches tall, its figures are only a couple of inches tall, and the hare hunt below the main frieze as tiny as one of the aryballoi, though the figures on the latter are no taller than a half inch. Besides, there is black polychromy: black with incised drawing alone, heightened with touches of color. And all of this alive and varied and extremely elegant. There can be no doubt that this artist, whether you call him "Chigi Painter" or "Macmillan Painter", was a major artist. Clay may be cheap, but Greek art is not the kind that wallows in gold and gems, and it must be said for fired clay that it survives better than almost anything else, both because it is relatively indestructible (though, alas, breakable) and because barbarians head for the gold. So we don't know what this artist spent most of his life doing, though ivory work was already becoming widespread and painting on prepared panels, too. We have only vague references, of traditional memories, but the Levant and even Egypt were beginning to teach Greeks the ancient techniques.

The Chigi Olpe was one of the first things magnificently published in color lithograph drawings made with the help of a camera obscura or camera lucida. Though these are large folios of plates and rather rare, with the digital camera it was possible to photograph some details from them without touching the plates, and they are still nearly as good as detail photographs, hard to get, from the vase itself and all in copyright:

From Antike Denkmäler. The boy leading the horses in the cavalcade is
very hard to find in any other publication, and they were diligent in recording
the white dot decoration and the colors.

The hare hunt with the small hunter in ambush behind some rushes (?) also is too small to come out well in the usual photographs.

A detail of the hare hunt below the main frieze on the Chigi Olpe

You can study the Lion Hunt in Boardman, on p. 95. However he got it, this artist has mastered the Assyrian type of lion which we know from the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, which, by the way, is hardly earlier than the Chigi Olpe. Increasingly now, Greek artists will know and prefer the Assyrian lion with its long nose and rich mane.

It is a fact that the serious study of Protocorinthian is rather young, and most of the images that I used in teaching are still in copyright, or probably so. In any case, art historically, with the help of the brightly lit galleries in the great museums and the well chosen array provided by Sir John Boardman in Early Greek Vase Painting, using these remarks as an introduction to his text (the least generalized of all his books in the World of Art series) you can form a good idea of all the regional potteries and of all the kinds of wares produced at Athens and Corinth. It does no good to throw too much at once at those of you who previously have studied only the mythology on the sixth- and fifth-century vases.

P.S. I thought we should have in this post an example of a more "regular" Late Protocorinthian vase, so I found the image of the British Museum's aryballos, a little larger than the foregoing ones, by the artist aptly nicknamed the "Head-in-Air Painter" (the animals have such an Attitude!):

The Head-in-Air Painter. Fine but "regular" Late Protocorinthian.
There is a grayscale image in the Album showing two more
views of it.

Vase Painting. III. Early Archaic Glory in the 7th c. BCE

2011-10-27T21:20:00.000-07:00

(a) An Introduction to Proto-Attic work
I shall present the Attic vases first. They are just as good, and at least as exciting, as the Protocorinthian of the same period, but the latter is already professional and export ware, and it was in closer touch with the sources, direct and indirect (Crete, in some cases), in east Mediterranean luxury art—at any rate, more obviously affected by familiarity with it. Different Greek sites have yielded different styles from different sources; Olympia is especially interesting, with some imports evidently from Van (yes, where they just had an earthquake), where the Kingdom of Urartu reigned at this time, or else through North Syrian trading centers on the coast, but for the time being Athens seems rather independent, though at Aegina the excavators found painted ceramic wares from both Corinth and Athens.

The Louvre's amphora by the Analatos Painter, usually dated c. 680.

This is Early Protoattic. Together with the name-piece, the hydria from Analatos, in the Athens NAM, and the krater in Munich, which seems a little more advanced, it is illustrated in Boardman, Early Greek VP, pp. 98-99, and a lid in the British Museum, p. 100, also seems to be his.

Though, indeed, it cannot be much later than that krater in Argos, it is well over any line you want to draw between Late Geometric and Early Orientalizing. Personally, since different potteries pick up, and make up, their styles from extremely varied East Mediterranean sources, I would not speak of 'the Orientalizaing style', because the important thing to see and grasp is that we are dealing here with a bewildering variety of manners and styles, with motifs and ideas being picked up almost faster than they can be assimilated, let alone shared with all the other Greeks: I would think of 'styles', just as we have 'techniques' (silhouette, outline, incised details, added color or none), yet all are caught up in orientalizing, just as all the Greeks begin to regard major sanctuaries and certainly the main lines of their mythology and epic as well as the still evolving alphabet for their closely related dialects as belonging to them all.

I was just thinking: it is as exciting as being in on the rapidly developing wonders of the internet in the last half century!

The Analatos Painter is a little wild. What look like cactus come from palmettes, but secondhand. His horses have proportions similar to those of the Argos krater that we saw last time, but along with outline for his wonderful bugeyed faces and the blousing of his women's peploi and the feathering of his sphinxes' wings, he uses incision wherever that suits his purpose best—not Argive white lines, not carefully reserved lines as on Rhodian. He keeps as much leftover Geometric junk as he needs but adds rosettes, double-outlined as if from metalwork, and guilloches. Notice, too, that his sphinxes are obviously not inspired directly by Egyptian ones; next time you go to the Louvre, study all the Egyptianizing stuff there, from the 15th down through the 6th century BCE (that's why I said, simply, eastern Mediterranean). Look at the Analatos Painter. Imagine yourself doing his drawing. Thus you will know him forever.

By the way, those pierced handles on that tall neck are the mark of these grave amphoras; this one is 80 cm. tall, almost a yard.

For Middle Proto-Attic, we may use the great Eleusis Amphora (in the Eleusis Museum), which was made as a grave marker but, when damaged, reused as a baby's (or toddler's) sarcophagus—and thus was preserved without further damage.

The Eleusis Amphora with the Blinding of Polyphemos on the neck and the story,
in full, of Perseus and the Gorgons on the body. A view of the whole vase in
front view is given by Boardman on p. 105. It is 1.42m. (56 inches) tall.

The Polyphemos Vase (with Perseus and the Gorgons on the Body)

In the first half or so of the 20th century, this was called the Black-and-White style. The added white paint is not so permanent; it is not glaze-paint. The treatment of the guilloches, with one strand white and the other incised, and the 'rays' at the base (slenderer now than at the beginning of the 7th century) alternately black and white, justify that nickname, but the gorgon sisters have a glorious mixture of white paint and plain outline, too. You can compare the animal combat, the usual carnivore and herbivore, on the shoulder with the animals on the Munich amphora (Boardman, p. 99) and see that they are a generation later: almost fully incised.

If you want to see something being drawn for the first time, this will serve even better than a picture of a gorgon based on a story read aloud by a gifted child in an elementary school. Actually, I had the privilege of publishing an earlier, yet more canonical, gorgon face found at Corinth—almost surely slightly earlier, from its archaeological context, but these surviving sisters of Medousa, pursuing Perseus, are independent imaginings: scaly-reptilian, snake-haired, toothy. These are childlike in the best sense of the word.

In the two side views of the amphora, we see, directly to the left of her sisters, the dead Medousa lying in what must be a field of asphodel. Under the other handle we see a vulture coming to clean the bones. Never mind questions of botany for the asphodel or ornithology for the vulture! You also can see in the pictures (scanned from long-suffering Agfachrome slides) the carefully cut-out clay handles, alluding to grave amphoras of metal, I suppose, though no one ever has found a piece of one such, and (proof that it was intended to stand in front of a wall or a bush) the perfunctory decoration of the back of the vase.

Perseus and the Gorgons and the Blinding of Polyphemos are two of the favorite subjects of Early Archaic vase-painting.

Berlin, St. Museen, no. A9 from Aegina. Middle Proto-Attic Neck Amphora (one
handle missing) attributed to the Ram Jug Painter. For the Ram Jug, see Boardman, p. 104, no. 206.

The Ram Jug Painter also worked in the middle decades of the 7th century, but he used fewer filling patterns in the field and was a sweeter tempered artist in his style. Sir John Beazley, in the first chapter of his delightful The Development of Attic Black-Figure, pp. 9-11 in the Revised Edition of 1986 (and pp. 10-11 in the original of 1951, verbatim I think), regarding this also as the Ram Jug Painter's masterpiece, in one of his greatest essays (and these were lectures) shows how intimately this vase corresponds to our written sources of the story, when Peleus brings his son, the infant Achilles, here clad in an infant's chiton, to that tutor of heroes the wise centaur Cheiron, who holds out his arms to receive him. Cheiron has been hunting and, as the poets say, return with a fox, a boar, and a wolf (as they seem to me) tied to a pine branch. The poets say pine. As for that thing on the neck of the amphroa, it is a palm, surely, drawn by a man who has never seen one growing!

Alas, the vase is very fragmentary and so, like many another masterpiece, it is not in the textbooks, not even Boardman's, so (please observe academic fair use) here is a link to the plate from the 1951 edition of Beazley.

Finally, two more, for which I do not have exact references at hand (I'll add them in the captions or comments in the Picasa Album if I find them).

The first, also in Berlin and from Aegina, is very like the Ram Jug Painter, and the second, at right, is for you to study to see why one would date it a couple of decades, perhaps, later; it is from the Athenian Agora and is in the Stoa of Attalos Museum there.

Berlin, St. Museen. In front of the man's head is one of the flat legs of a geometric
type of tripod, I think. Though he lacks the tip of his nose, his alert expression and his neatly
elaborate voluteed ear are delightful to me. Athens, Stoa of Attalos Museum. Confronted sphinxes (see the feathered wings?) flanking a delicately drawn double palmette.

*****

Vase Painting. II. Beyond Most Handbooks

2011-10-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

The general introduction holds for this posting as well.

Athens, NAM. Lidded Geometric oinochoe from the Tapestry Workshop

Faced with writing a single chapter on all of Greek art, many authors (online as well as hard copy) use the big grave markers (amphoras for females, kraters with masculine subjects for males, it is thought) as typical developmental examples. In fact, in successive generations, some of the small vases have no hatched maeanders while it is only the grave markers that have funerary scenes. Instead of a plain knob for lifting the lid, in the very generation of the great Dipylon amhoras, it was fashionable either to refer to the vase-shape itself or to use a bird or, on large lids, horses in lieu of a knob. But so far as painting the vase is concerned, the love of one workshop for beautifully executed patterns is just as purely Geometric as the prostheses. Also, it is purely Attic. When other regions have elaborate patterns they don't have this kind of discipline, this concern for the whole vase.

Corinth did have equal design discipline:

Corinth Museum. The pale clay is typical of the fabric, and in this period'
the very neat and reasoned placement of simple motifs is remarkable.

Though it would be the first city to export both to its colonies and elsewhere, Corinthian geometric, however fine, is not abundant, nor, at home, does it cater to funerary use in the same way as at Athens. Fine Corinthian burials are in stone sarcophagi or box-like pits. Still, a krater like this one could be used not only as a punchbowl but as an ash urn in which smaller offerings would be included; it's about a half meter in diameter at the base of the handles.

Argos Museum. Geometric krater, of similar capacity to the Corinthian one.
But in mid-8th century it is dark and likelier to have hatched maeanders than a Corinthian one.

A man could hike or ride a donkey or a horse from Athens to Corinth, or from Corinth to Argos, in a day or so. Therefore, the consistent tradition of the potteries in each place is worth considering. I do not recall seeing so much imitation of metallic moldings and attachment (as at the base of the handles) in any early Corinthian work.

Argos Museum. End of Geometric and, chronologically, possibly as late as
Attic and Corinthian work datable ca. 680 BCE. (see p. 72 in Boardman's book)

This big krater (H. 47cm), with fragmented maeanders and oddments of Late Geometric II motifs, has horses somewhat comparable with those of the Attic Analatos Painter (who will head the next post), and on this side, the principal one, internal details are drawn in white lines. The man's pelvis and thighs, like his face, with beard and hair separated from it, also are comparable with earliest Protoattic (which is short for Proto-Black-Figure). The different terms are not necessarily a problem. The difference is technical: in this Argive work, incised lines are not used for the internal details. And don't worry about that T shape under the horse's belly, which may be nothing more than yet another element of maeander-like fillers, unless one of the more imaginative explanations should be shown to be right.
E. Gabrici at Cumae.
Especially since it was published promptly and fully, and our sources place the foundation of Cumae fairly securely in the middle of the 8th century, Gabrici's finds from the early cemetery may be placed before 700 BCE, and they are already Early Protocorinthian. That is, not only are they decorated with plant forms and rosettes (instead of broken bits of the DNA, so to speak, of Late Geometric), but all of the larger and some of the smaller vases (see Boardman, p. 81 as well as the plates from Gabrici, below) have details drawn with a sharp point through the glaze-paint in the leather hard (still damp) clay. That point could be sharpened metal or bone or, on tiny perfume bottles, a cactus needle mounted in bone. Humfry Payne was doubtless right, that it was inspired by near eastern metal work, perhaps also by engraved detail in ivory. For more than a century, we have found it convenient to define 'black figure' technique to include the use of incision for details. Cumae (my first ever Link to Facebook!) is near Naples, and all the pottery found by Gabrici is there.

It was because the Greek colony was founded from Chalcis in Euboea
that Gabrici labeled the plates "Chalcidian".

Now, as Boardman has said (and not only in this book), Greek artists took ideas, but they didn't copy outright. Sometimes we cannot say whether from Al Mina or some other trading post on the coast that is now Lebanon, or perhaps from one where now the border of Syria and Turkey meet at the sea, but it is quite proper to call this art Orientalizing. This usage is unrelated to the invidious use of words like Oriental and Orientalism that evoke notions of odalisques and harems. The peninsular Greeks now were trading (and their remains have been found) and they were delighted by what they found; they borrowed like eager magpies. It is also significant that they made these little perfume bottles and trans-shipped them to the western colonies, full, I should think. Note that I said Near Eastern—not Middle.
But the pitcher, the oinochoe, just over a foot tall, is a Greek shape, and it still has sub-Geometric patterns on the neck. And its artist has created glorious buds in four directions on the body, not copied but most certainly orientalizing, and their details are incised with a sharp point. Free plant forms, yet disciplined to make design sense on the body of the oinochoe.
True, all of this is Early Archaic, but some Early Archaic is not inebriated with Near Eastern art. It is a fashion, yes, but one that permanently altered the severity of the earliest post-Mycenaean art. The Egyptian component is still to come, but it won't affect vase-painting very much. Orientalizing brought the alphabet, some fancy metalwork (doubtless too some fancy weaving), and all those palmettes and lotuses everywhere.
It is at this point that Protocorinthian, produced for export as well as regional use, became more sophisticated than Protoattic:

Corinth Museum. One of the very first trefoil-mouthed Broad-bottomed Oinochoai.

You notice first of all those big rays (as we call them; they derive from sepals at the base of near eastern vases) are like those on the tall oinochoe from Cumae, above. But they co-exist with a new shape, a non-tipping pitcher, which otherwise is decorated mostly with those thin lines that Corinth likes so much: you can use the slow-spinning wheel to apply them perfectly, and they are as "smart" as any other pin stripes in the history of design. The running hare on the shoulder is as local as the nutria (coypu) that Cajun kids hunt in Louisiana swamps. But the division of his legs, his cheek and eye, are rendered with incised lines. And the flat-bottomed shape, with slightly swelling walls, with its broad strap handle is wholly original and couldn't be nicer, in my opinion.

Basic book:

As for the first post, above, Boardman's Early Greek Vase Painting.

I cannot resist adding, in case anyone can find it in an older library, Arthur E. Lane, Greek Pottery, Faber and Faber, 1947. My own copy is falling apart, since, until the Boardman book became available, it was what one studied from, my students after me. It is not worth buying a collectable copy, unless you are trying to get every single book on ceramics, but if you can find a tattered one, don't despise it, buy it.

Vase Painting. I. Athens First: no accident

2011-10-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

It is my purpose here only to discuss what may escape notice in most books and most courses in colleges and universities. Thanks above all others to Sir John Boardman we have easy access in several languages to affordable books of the highest quality. I must assume that others will gratefully acquire these books and, of course, any others that appeal to them, though the presence of full-color illustrations and exciting suggestions in other books only make Boardman's books more necessary. From these one can go on to magisterial tomes and specialized monographs and articles. Acquiring real knowledge of the world Greek vase-painting opens up is sufficient to enrich and engage a lifetime.

Athens, Kerameikos Museum. Two proto-geometric amphoras with belly handles, datable not far from 1,000 BCE.

Tradition told the truth: Athens was not taken by the Dorians. Oh, there is archaeological proof that they knew them, but (just to cite two things) continuity of burials and pottery-making techniques and the Attic dialect attest to that claim. Burial in the area that became the Agora was uninterrupted, and the great cemetery by the Dipylon (one of the later gates in the city wall) and the later, Classical cemetery of the Kerameikos provides, with graves partly overlying one another, the framework of history in the centuries still (strictly speaking) pre-historical, though Athens had strong traditions, too.

After a generation that was impoverished, when the pots were poorly made but continuous in fabric and many elements of form from the end of Mycenaean, we now see well prepared clay, deliberately designed and proportioned pots, purposeful change—very evident pride in what they were doing. They not only get a passing grade in Basic Design, they have invented it, as the West ever since has understood it. These amphoras are still less than a meter tall, but in an age that did not yet use drafted stone or carve limestone or marble or use bronze for things larger than the long pins that were worn in the shoulders of a peplos, they held the ashes and bone fragments of the deceased. For the moment, ceramics engaged the most esteemed craftsmen. I omitted armor, because we know of very little datable this early, and votive vessels for the same reason; even the plain ones that I know of are later. There was no money as such, and it would be a century before they had adapted the alphabet that we know from Aramaean monuments. The Late Mycenaean foundation settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor did, of course, trade with other Greeks, but during recovery from the collapse of the 12th century, trade seems to have been a luxury for all. Here, though, we see Athens, at least, emerging from hand-to-mouth survival. Athens had had, of course, a Mycenaean palace on the Acropolis and kings and therefore (besides that boast about the Dorians) something to be proud of, and good land, too. This mere paragraph should tempt the reader to get a good history, if he hasn't done so before.

The pair of amphoras we begin with not only have structural clarity, but (plain as they may seem) characteristic innovations. Where sub-Mycenaean decorators drew freehand messy half-circles, these have managed to invent a compass that lets them draw perfectly even complete circles; it may even be a comb compass. Then someone discovers that if you paint the ground around the half-circles on the shoulder with glaze-paint (which occasionally, even on large pots, they manage to fire evenly and black), you have in effect light half-circles where you'd drawn them dark. And, though very soon, they will sometimes put plus-designs in the center of concentric circles, they quite evidently do not mean wheels, especially not at first, and certainly nothing like banal symbols, stars or suns. They are done per se. Everything points the way to all of Greek art, where technique and pleasure in form underlie all else.

Athens, Kerameikos Museum. Two Middle Geometric neck-handled amphoras

By the 9th century, as we calculate, the ornament that is the mark of fully Geometric decoration, the hatched maeander, is often joined for a generation or so by the expansion of the dark grounds to make the vases predominantly black, and the circles often, but not always, disappear. Also the necks are taller and straighter, the bodies taller and more ovoid. The strap handle to the neck, also, used this way,becomes commoner.

A 1959 snapshot to emphasize the size of the Great Dipylon Amphora

(and its less well preserved twin)

By the middle of the 8th century, Geometric decoration had reached its classic stage; there is nothing more to do in this direction, and those double belly handles (abstracted bull's heads, which go back to Mycenaean pottery) will soon disappear. The funerary scenes in the handle zones also, in this artist's work, reach perfection: go any further with anecdotal subject matter and it will be at odds with the bands of non-representational patterns.

The prothesis in the handle zone of the Great Dipylon Amphora.

Prothesis is the word for the laying out of the corpse. Already we see the women differentiated by their long skirts and a breaved child at the head of the bier. As Ernst Gombrich would emphasize in Art and Illusion, this is conceptual representation, to show what is happening, not how it looks. The checker pattern over the corpse was indeed over the corpse, but it is not shown as a covering. The zigzags in rows and the asterisks serve to prevent the figures' standing out too emphatically, to keep them in the surface design that embraces the whole pot. They are not signifiers. The greatest mistake, one easily corrected, is to suppose that the artist could not have drawn differently. Introductory books commonly call the figures childish. The corrective is either (a) to try to copy these figures or (b) to ask a child to draw a figure like these. Suddenly you notice that The Dipylon Painter (and we give all the major painters these easily remembered names, just as good-sized moons of major planets get names) has managed without any detail at all to make us believe that these figures are mourners singing dirges at a wake. And no two are actually alike.

The other Great Dipylon Amphora, a bit later, and showing the next stage
of the funeral, the ekphora, transporting the corpse to the cemetery

The figures are slightly livelier, some of them may have dots in circles for eyes in their heads, and the birds have feathered wings. It's just a little looser. The severe classic discipline of Geometric, as of many other stylistic movements, was too hard to maintain. What with writing and Olympic games and even the first colonies, the Athenian world was becoming more exciting—and probably richer.

Sometimes, too (already in the 9th century with the granary and the granulated gold dangle earrings from the tomb of a wealthy woman in the Agora, illustrated in Boardman) we have found tomb groups of vases that are hard to look at otherwise than whimsically:

Berlin, St. Museen, Tomb group of fancy vases. Beautifully fired black glaze-paint
(but also waxed to shine). The hanging vases are in the shape of a basket and an ostrich egg.

Basic book:
John Boardman, Early Greek Vase Painting. World of Art, 1998. It is richly provided not only with annotated illustrations and excellent, essential chapters, but with charts, maps, notes, and bibliographies in the back. There are translations, if needed, in half a dozen other languages.

In the next post I'll look at some less familiar pieces.
I've decided that pots are not exactly opera nobilia. They aren't studied the same way, and they're all originals, and they are much more varied.

To give some time to the other blog...

2011-10-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

The Corinthian Chimaera Painter's Louvre lion plate

To give some time to the other blog, Opera Nobilia
Even without changing my mind, I don't want to leave the most recent posting here in Teegee: Essays an uncommonly negative review. I know about the history of the Guthrie theater, and I can't imagine why they did what I reviewed. To my astonishment, people keep reading it. Well, sometimes it is necessary to say what one really thinks. I would add only that I have no objection to making "A Comedy of Errors" (itself reworked from Plautus's "Menaechmi") into "The Boys from Syracuse", let alone taking "West Side Story" from "Romeo and Juliet", just to name two familiar examples, or even to Peter Sellars' putting Mozart into Manhattan and the Bronx. The question is, whether it works, and, if it doesn't, why not, what is wrong?

I have been worrying over what I want to say about Economics and what I get from reading Theoretical Physics. I keep reading and trying not to misunderstand (for, you know, I have practically no math).
I have a sense of the necessity of understanding both, at least as well as I can. It matters, just as much as the arts matter. But I need to think a week or so more before trying either subject.

But I promised to write something about Greek vase-painting, for Opera Nobilia, the subject that I do know something about, and I need time to find images that are not copyright and yet are not too poor to post publicly. I have hundreds of images, but they are scattered in four computers and their external drives, and after I have found some which are usable, I have to decide what they might illustrate. Since I took them myself, they are not just a lot of Examples. And, so far as an introduction to the subject is concerned, I can list half a dozen basic books.

At the head of this posting, I share a plate that was in my MA thesis, which I shall not discuss now, fifty-five years later. This Louvre plate re-oxidized in firing; that is why the glaze-paint that would be black is in this case red.

Arts in Minneapolis

2011-10-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

Broadcast of HMS Pinafore from the Guthrie Theater

Even in the catalogue of Gilbert and Sullivan, there are few works as resilient as "Pinafore". Sir Malcolm Sargent's is nice, certainly, but a school orchestra or even two pianos will serve, and I have heard it done by everything from Middle School children to Little Theater Groups to summer Opera, leaving apart the old D'Oyly Carte albums. It can survive even singers who can't sing.

It cannot quite survive 'musical arrangements' that sound like bad imitations from "Trouble in Tahiti"or "Guys and Dolls". It cannot stand, in addition, stage business, relentlessly, that make it look like "Saps at Sea" set in Lake Wobegon on "A Prairie Home Companion". You could get arrested in Texas or Wyoming for some of its sexual stunts (not that minstrel shows mixed with burleykew on the road didn't do the like). They just plain trashed it, as hard as they could, and quite obviously thought they were being new and bold. Not.

They did keep most of W. S. Gilbert's most well known lines, but they cannot be said to have kept anything of Sir Arthur Sullivan.

I must make one exception: Peter Thomson as Sir Joseph Porter. Graceful even when asked to do dumb things, musical in everything he sang. Excellent, and quite horribly out of place. After ten minutes, I had wondered what would happen when we got to "When I Was a Lad". No problem. If only Buttercup hadn't been so bad.

The cast besides kept falling into and out of the grossest imitations of Cockney that I ever heard; only Peter Thomson used Standard English. How would it be if you did Oscar Wilde in the Ozarks?

The performance was far too broad to compare with "The Three Penny Opera". Laurel and Hardy (as suggested above) was the closest I could think of, but the latter had far more art in their act. Crudity demands great art. The worst of this Guthrie thing was that they thought they were so awfully cute, and the orchestral arrangements the most so, the worst of all. Oh, Jerome Kern, where are you now that we need you.

Maybe Cajun Louisiana isn't so bad, after all.

Other attempts in pocket photography

2011-10-13T15:31:00.000-07:00

This is with the assertion that I do know that a professional or semi-professional DSLR with a carefully chosen lens and a tripod, and maybe even a ring flash (for the microscopic, especially) is the toolkit proper to the shots I've been playing with, I want to see what an advanced pocket camera can do. It is my belief that most people don't even try to see what they CAN do (and that is not to vie with a kit that costs more than ten times as much).
In this post I venture to deal with very high-contrast basically dark circumstances and then with the very tiny, but without special lens or ring flash, let alone a highly manipulable tripod, yet avoiding (on the dark one) destroying the atmosphere of a dark room as really experienced.

The light I was staring at

During household rearrangement

It takes some thinking to update and rearrange, when the house has limited provision (even after re-wiring) for power supply, all of one's video and audio and IT that needs to work together. Just take my word for it. And don't ask what the mundane reality of this stuff is, though I'll vouch for the dark-stained pine planking of the floor. The temporary placements are not exactly House Beautiful.

Taking a break from reading on a Kindle, for a coffee break, as the sun came in and out of scudding clouds, I was as usual loving my old house, just as it is. And light I always love. Could the pocket camera possibly accept photographing the darkness without losing every hint of detail where one window with its blinds tipped downwards shone on the polyurethane (of some kind) alternative to wax.

Logically, the only hope was to place the 4-spot reading in the largely light middle of the picture (this is not a post-cropped image), set shutter-delay, and hold my breath. It worked. I had hardly any work to do in Photoshop Levels. The mistake would be to have the camera take the exposure (and focus) from the dark areas, thinking that you needed to get some detail there; you would lose the atmosphere that I was sitting in, and you would burn out the highlights while devotedly detailing the dusting rags.

In the Picasa album you can find two more, one of more of the room, one of only a detail.

Bugs and bits of leaves and...?

What I'd never taken a second look at

Though I've owned much larger and more expensive cameras, I'd never before had one (except for the Nikon D80 with its 1987 AF f. 2.8 macro lens, which I can't hold steady hand-held and which has mirror jerk and at a distance of inches has little depth of field) that I could take close-ups with, of objects like this chance accumulation that is on the siding of my front porch. I had to be taught by the blog Naturally even to look at things of this kind (though neither am I prone to brushing them away).

On most computer screens the above subject, without zooming, is slightly larger than the real thing is.

And yet the pocket camera, not because it is affordable, not because it is tiny, but because the technology is so much farther advanced, took it on first attempt. All I had to do was use the Tulip and the Delay and hold my breath; actually it "took" at 1/25 sec. I did crop it. We didn't need any more white siding. For scale, though, the visible width of my cypress siding is four inches (allow for slight foreshortening here). It looks as if I have some small flies and spiders here, but which creature chopped up the leaves?

Please feel free to provide answers in the Comments, either here or in the Picasa album or by e-mail.

Criteria that aren't Judgments

2011-10-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

What if all the others are just as good?

I don't know how to justify the need to know why I feel it is wrong for me to just take a lot of images of some objects that take my fancy, though the objects aren't much in their own right. Of course, no one by accident takes a lemon outdoors; I needed something like pebbly rind in a bright color, and rounded, in case I wanted to set off, for example, this hunk of gray quartz or a red autumn leaf. And the reference photo was taken not only to mark where the series began but its materials (medium sizes, not to exceed possible depth of field). Yet this is no attempt to emulate one gradually rotting green pepper in an aluminum washbowl, over the course of several days! At the other extreme, however, photographing or drawing or painting just therapeutically is never, I suspect, either really therapeutic or in the slightest degree like art. My grandfather and my father taught me to use cameras, which I loved, and I have lots of friends and former colleagues who either are photographers or, like my grandfather, take their cameras seriously, rather in the way that people approach good cooking or good gardening. It has to be done as well as possible to rank among the higher pleasures. Anyway, it is depressing to think, "Well, I have nothing to do, so I'll just take some pictures".

I was feeling a little dissatisfied with just clustering things close together, partly because it always works to some extent and partly because I got it from lots of Cézanne drawings. That's no reason not to play with it once again, but could I also fulfill the classic instructional challenge to make the same or similar things relate in some necessary-seeming way but well apart from one another? Can one re-actualize with today's tiny cameras assignments one was given to execute in conté crayon or cut paper nearly a century ago? By re-actualize I mean, without using in post-processing tools to make new advertising art that looks like work done in old, manual techniques. It must entail that old requirement of seeing as the camera sees—which itself is different today from it was with my grandfather's Rolleiflex and a roll of 80 ISO Kodak film. And it's not as if Canon/ Nikon color behaves aesthetically like pigments and dies, either.

If I were a great photographer, my using the shadow of a cubical piece of quartz to relate it to the tip of the red leaf and the lemon, and the leaf's black shadow of its distinctive shape to emphasize the lemon, would be too obvious, but yesterday afternoon I wasn't sure that the camera would make the contrast strong enough and sharp enough. So, when it opened in Photoshop, and I saw that it did, I wrote in the Title/Caption, "It worked!" Images 30–46 (Day 4), punctuated by another cat picture at the end show the afternoon's efforts.

Supposing I had a big DSLR with its best zoom lens, one from ~25mm to ~400mm, not only would it cost a couple of thousand dollars but, at my age, it is too hard to handle, and a tripod for it would preclude taking pictures like these. The little camera can be managed with one hand. My one better lens is a 'micro' (close-up, for coins) which, closer than a meter or two has very little depth of field at speeds that permit hand held exposure. See the ones I tried with it. I don't think that perfect focus from my nose all the way to Erewhon is necessary, or even always desirable, though the micro lens does get the wonder of crystalline structure better than the small one can. What is worse, the SLR has a mirror that has the kick of a rifle, and that, too, has to be managed. For some, the Fine Arts alternative is essential, for others the Optics alternative. Neither is better, except for each visual mentality that makes images with cameras. So I'll close with another one. You may like another. I rather like them all in one way or another.

A Porsche 356A, 1959, of fond memory

2011-09-25T03:49:00.000-07:00

Superbug at the Autocross on a Sunday

July 1968, South Eugene, Sunday autocross on an new strip mall's empty parking lot

As the Wikipedia article on the 356s points out, their beautiful unibody construction almost guaranteed rust and made restoration nearly impossible. In the Pacific Northwest, by the time my aesthetic soul made the affordable acquisition of the last of the 356A model, a 1959, possible, the signs of rust were already apparent, though it could have been worse if its underside had not been protectively sealed (standard where there were salted highways with slushy snow and perpetual damp besides). It was not only aesthetics. My friends, most of them younger, owned sportscars or minicoopers or at least cars that could be autocrossed and rallyed. After three years of being licensed to drive and listening to all their conversation, I was eager to learn to drive properly. The VW had accustomed me to the rear engine and taught me the clutch (even if need be without synchromesh in first gear), and the 356A had a built-in roll bar (and was not prone to roll anyway). On Interstate 5 it cruised, at optimum rpm, at 80mph, perfectly legal at that time, its gears were like cutting butter, it purred. It got excellent mileage. Yet no one could say it was too hot a car for a thrity-something lady to drive.

I usually had it serviced in Berkeley where I visited twice a year; the garage there was manned by two German-Americans trained at Wolfsburg itself. I think it was in 1972 that they told me that the axles had rust such that it was unsafe at sustained highway speeds, and so I gave it (or sold it for $1) to a young friend who would only enjoy displaying a red Porsche at the supermarket or driving it to San Francisco. He promised, and he kept the promise. I told him that its engine and transmission in any case could be sold. I, too, am physically risk-averse, always was, and I never have felt secure driving lesser engineering as I drove the 356A.

From the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club I learned about good and bad shock absorbers, the importance of checking psi in the tires, the utility of having a tachometer, and the importance of a shoulder harness as well as a lap belt. And lots more, if one wanted to brake and accelerate so as to feel the car's hold on the road surface and manage the car on curves. All the stuff that they never show you in advertisements for cars.

I don't know if amateur clubs do weekend autocrosses anymore. You just need to rent a bunch of rubber pylons and have some guys who know how to lay it out and a large empty parking lot, which is why we did it on Sunday afternoons, as seen above. I don't recall whether we didn't call it, rather, a race when we went out to the desert over the Cascade mountains in eastern Oregon. Is it a 'race' when there's no pavement or other prepared surface?

Although as a female driving a 356A I was often alone in my Class, it's not as if I ever won a trophy, anymore than today I win any for blog design, but every time I participated I got a metallic sticker for my dashboard, and by the time that I had to give up driving the car one of my Berkeley friends asked if I'd really won all that jock stuff. Well, sort of.

Now, does anyone wonder why an old Californian finds it necessary to keep track of her continuous identity by hoarding a few objects?
(P.S., yes, that's me in the car)

Dating Difficult but Solid Walnut

2011-09-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

My Life in Objects

The table and one chair (wide angle)

When I moved into this house in 1986, from a furnished stock apartment, the most urgent need was to get some things, which I'd left with my youngest sister, moved to help furnish it. These were not heirlooms brought across the plains in a covered wagon. The only pedigree was of the black japalac'd oaken chair that one of my mother's high school teachers had handed over to my grandparents, telling them that her parents had gotten it when they were married (which ought to have been in the 1880s) but, as she was going into a Senior Home and she could find no one to buy it, she hoped that my grandparents could. They knew I'd want it, but it entered my family only with me. I already had the "Aegipan Chair" in the basement apartment where, a few pages at a time, I typed out my dissertation, 1961-1962:

1961-62. Berkeley, with Persephone an ASPCA black cat for company.

As I have said somewhere in these essays, after he retired from teaching woodshop in the public schools, my grandfather, born in 1886, opened a small shop to repair and restore old and antique furniture; purely by word of mouth it flourished for as long as eyesight permitted his handling the table saw and band saw and my grandmother could help with refinishing, as she had often done before.

But small-business furniture work of this kind accumulates a lot of pieces of defective furniture. Therefore, when I was visiting them in 1966, and was buying an empty house in Eugene, Oregon, I was offered a solid walnut oval dining table, with drop leaves, that would have qualified as Good Furniture if someone hadn't burned a hole in the middle of it. Gramps would take a piece of old walnut (new will never match), cut away the damage, and insert the patch; he was very good at doing this. Nana would clean the top, stain the patch to match, and put new traditional finish (thin shellac, pumice, twice, then carnuba paste wax, rubbed down, also twice). Besides, I had my choice of the incomplete chairs (chairs live a harder life in families than any other furniture) hung on pegs and nails up on the wall. Such chairs are made of assorted hard wood. I found three without any dreadful pressed-wood work on them, one of which has real pretensions to design—though nothing you'd take to Antiques Roadshow. It is the one that today sits by the walnut table (not that its relative distinction is visible here):

One of three chairs, finished to match the walnut table

One of the others also has hand caning in the seat; the third had, and so has today, spline caning; the fourth chair, of the 1920s, I guess, is one of those straight rush-bottomed ones that tip over so easily. But all of the caned seats are partly broken. If you have children, don't get cane-seated chairs; my sister's children were well behaved, but young knees DO get put into chairs, and cane, as it dries out, won't tolerate being kneed. The care and maintenance of furniture that is not "ante-bellum" and is not "plantation style" is not a Southern virtue; there seems to be very little intermediate between antiques (only the armoires, in my opinion, being really desirable) and disposable trash.

Now, when I asked Nana and Gramps about the date of the table and chairs, they just said Victorian. Of course, the chairs could be any date before the 1930s; they only vary in terms of niceness (all are basically kitchen chairs), and I guess my precious table (for I have become very fond of it) could be anywhere before World War I, though I guess that Gramps probably was right, that it's late 19th century, urban taste in turning, from somewhere with plenty of walnut. Of my own and succeeding generations I know middle-class tables only of of "Philippine mahogany" or ash (always showing greenish through the stain) and, since the 1960s, mixed woods (if indeed real wood at all) with some veneer (or even photographic paper or plastic) on the top.

The cigarette burn visible here on the leaf is later; notice the screw adjusting levelers

When the grandparents offered me the table it was for the legs that I wanted it. I thought, and I still think, that this is good turning; in a good profile drawing it wouldn't be just a bunch of cheap ins and outs, such as one sees the guys on TV woodworking shows actually boasting of. Worthy of all the solid walnut (not glued up) that's in them. Walnut is my favorite wood. I also like the very sober fluting. And now my own life, and my own moves, are the table's pedigree. It probably was more than a half century old when I got it in the 1960s; it's been in this house for a quarter century. Similarly, I've had the "Aegipan chair" (which was about seventy-five years old when I got it) for about fifty years. It is almost as if these things and a few others somehow prove that I'm always me.

Brighter, still not sharp enough

[Tomorrow I'll take the AF 1987 f 2.8, 60mm Macro lens on a tripod and get true profiles and less distortion with that great fixed lens. I'll even try to get the chair in profile.

***

The Macro lens is just too long for my short rooms, even after I struggled with the tripod. And with the S9100 the exposure required with available light is always a whole second in this room, even near noon and with mini-blinds and door open. So here are the best I could get, avoiding wide angle so far as I could with the S9100 hand-held.]

Table cleared, both pieces dusted.

The preferred kitchen chair.

Finally, allow me to include the one-second exposure that, even zoomed, worked better: the lion-head finial of the oaken chair, not such good taste as the legs of the walnut table but certainly photogenic.

The chair of oak with black japalac: finial

Nature Morte: Some Single Examples

2011-09-10T18:41:00.000-07:00

IV. Some more Examples
Since most of the abstract-inspired commercial work is under Copyright, serious copyright, I shall merely point out that many famous photographers did such work. One that is outstanding, in my opinion, is Paul Outerbridge. But from Steichen through Irving Penn (and not counting Fashion photography) high-end work for publication in print included some brilliant and influential work, largely in the line of descent that I have tried to open up in these posts. For example, Steichen's 1926 Matches and Match Boxes for Stehli Silks (scroll down at linked site) are part of an international exploitation of photographic abstraction for patterns. Among the best current examples (more 'abstract' than you might think?) is Oak Leaves in the blog "Naturally".
But I was dumbfounded when an old friend, js, contributed four images of a wrapped quarter-pound of butter such as to make the young Paul Strand feel jealous: was butter already wrapped that way before World War I? Did men not use kitchens in Strand's New York City? These are perfect photographic, Nature Morte, too, specimens of modern abstraction.

Two more are available in the Album. Butter is not the subject nor the idea. Between the shapes of light and shadow and the slightly crooked wrapper the perspective is almost reversed, and the shapes of incident light and cast shadows are both inseparable and equally interesting, not to mention the surprising transparency of the butter itself. Details of light showing under the corner of the butter (it is the western USA "cube" rather than the eastern USA "stick") and striking through the folds of wrapping are delightful.

One more by bw is also plain elegance, no less: very pure Nature Morte of classical kind, not with an abstract effect, but not "about" books or pots, either. Understated complementary colors, yes. Again, it is not jumbling nor avoiding recognizability that makes a distinguished photographic still life.

For example, the next image is not really about turtles, attractive as these creatures are as they scramble up and down sandy beaches to hatch their eggs. It is not ecology so much as delight in them, as daylight behind them and a band of pale green in the upper half of the image enhances them:

I have very much enjoyed others' contributions, as when some objects rescued from bins visually recall the daguerreotypes of fossils in rows (these are not, of course, ac's only contributions):

Needless to say, as the older photographers have inspired us all, my friends' contributions have also inspired me to profit from increased familiarity with that Nikon S9100 (all cameras, and tools generally, must be learned and made one's own) and from their own examples.

These three, perhaps, may represent my viewing my own premises as objects of view defined by light.

No matter that the objects are cheap imports or that the stoop has no door stop but an old paint can. One becomes obsessive, happily so. The pots of kitchen tools likewise keep suggesting themselves, over and over, and now that one needn't buy film...

Sometimes one sees in terms of a different chapter of Naomi Rosenblum's big textbook (or other books on the history of photography); after all, as John Szarkowski pointed out, oh so justly, in "Photography Until Now" (Museum of Modern Art, 1989, his "Now"), the generations of photographers that have been educated in art schools and universities where History of Photography is required, are apt to find that there is nothing new under the sun. True, but even my Game of Nature Morte Picasa album shows that novelty is not the same as a new and personal, unique way of seeing: Vision is never stale, except the meretricious kind of imitation, exploiting what is current and fashionable. Take a camera, any camera, and make it your own by using it consistently as you desire to use it (no, not for muckraking or stalking!), and you will find your own vision. The Nature Morte in photography is just a good way of getting at the difference between illustrating anecdotes or verbal notions and making images that are memorable for their visual properties. Szarkowski's book, by the way, especially if you can find a used copy of the original edition, is a beautiful and enlightening one. You don't have to agree with everything he says. One never has to become a True Believer (a book title very popular when I was quite young).

Of course, there is nothing wrong with using photography to illustrate something else or to suggest an association or allusion. It is, however, very hard not to do so. Personally, I love trying to take watery and associative images like those of Clarence White and Gertrude Käesbier and Baron de Meyer (for all of which see the textbooks and the Masters of Photography web site). This view is one such.

pl (2006)

The line may be hard to draw, but photos that are just visual anecdotes of lots of one's own junk are also something else again, and I have left some of my own in the album, just stuff without any memorable visual organization (the other contributors are not referred to here; that is why I put initials under all the images, but for 'pl', mine, I did just toss in a lot for you to sort out). I also left in the album a number, by several of us, that I like just as well as those I chose to discuss here.

Another category that is important in the mid-20th century is Expressionist or Surrealist images. Only a few artists succeed. I'd never try to imitate Minor White or Clarence Laughlin or even that aspect of Harry Callahan. If someone must, as an artist, go that way, he or she must find it within and of necessity. I confess (to make an example of it) to seeing light hitting plastic through the back of an old chair in such a way that by moving I could confine it. I knew why it attracted me, but it doesn't mean anything in particular; it doesn't even SEEM to mean anything inward:

The wire (I was charging the Kindle's battery) only looks odd. Not that it's a bad snapshot, but Minor White has a magical photograph that I was merely reminded of. Ergo. That's what comes of knowing the history of photography.

But the Butter images by js mean something in terms of the miracle of the human brain in the act of seeing.

P.S. If anyone still has an unsent image that needs to be added here, send it and, if I understand it, I'll add it here, or at least add it to the album with your initials. Only it must be "Game of Nature Morte".

Nature Morte with Mixed Messages?

2011-09-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

III. Still Life Images with Obvious Associations

If you look in the Album assembled to support these essays, you will see in the sequence nos. 52–64, images that are the least unsuccessful (i.e., not moved) recording the accumulation of souvenirs little changed in the four years since the grayscale images of nos. 1–2 at the beginning of the Album, when the Christmas card with a Fra Angelico angel was recently received.

The mantelpiece which faces north is not well lit, but it had inspired this Game of Nature Morte, so finally I put the tiny camera on a big tripod and struggled to get it both near enough and high enough, tilted up, to get what I wanted to see: the semi-circles of the basket and half of the angel's halo as my principal motifs. I barely got all of the Scribe's head, and I cropped excess off the bottom and managed to include the angel's profile. The pin from the Egyptian exhibit at New Orleans raised its wings, and a king-cake baby that had escaped the transfer of the rest of them to the kitchen window sill raised its hands (from so close and at this angle). A student who had been to Delphi brought me the sphinx, and another brought me the Discus Thrower fixed to be a Christmas tree ornament by the addition of an eyelet screwed into its head. But they don't belong to this image.

In other words, to avoid breaking my own rules (beyond removing the hurricane candle left over from Gustave), I struggled mightily to get from it the formal organization of the above image. Since this is in a dark-pink room, with black mini-blinds and sofas (and a red and gold painting off camera to the right), the receipt of that fine card with the Fra Angelico angel, over half a decade, was determinative to the requisite accumulation.

It must be understood that, whereas families stereotypically put lots of framed photos and snapshots of their own all over their living and working spaces, a number of us, usually single, make accumulations like this one, adding as whim governs. For example, I put the Lenten New Orleans baby in the Scribe's lap because of the Dynasty XVIII statues of Senmut holding the infant princess Nefrure (the only Egyptian statues where Scribes hold babies); besides, that plastic baby is so pink.

But, of all the mantelpiece photos that I took with the new Nikon S9100, only this one has the purely visual compositional and coloristic integrity to qualify as a true Nature Morte. Any importance it has is formal, viz, abstracted from the mundane stuff that the camera was made to register.

VISION creates the image, and lenses and focal planes and apertures are the brushes, pencils, etc., the graphic tools that vision has to work with, since PHOS, light, is what they all, severally, record. That is why, with new kinds of cameras today, I made a photographic game precluding processes that Strand used.

Anyone can see that my mantelpiece stuff is just souvenirs (though the originals weren't).

Now let's consider my favorite image with mixed messages.

First, the British Museum terracotta plaque card (which when shifted changes from monochrome to color, based on such works as the Mari frescoes and probably correct) is always called "Lilith", because of the fearsome 'screech-owl' in the King James translation. I have discussed her elsewhere: http://www.forumancientcoins.com/ayiyoryitika/ProlegomenaEros/ProlegomenaEros.html, under Figure A. Behind her is a box of science fiction dvd's (but also at far left a Rigoletto which I take for the delightful one directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle). Similarly, the classic film of Orphée by Jean Cocteau suggests no more than that the shelf photographed here belongs to someone whose idea of an old movie is not one from the early 1990s. But the statuette of the woman (it would be about 20" tall if it stood) is, in my opinion, powerful and not like a goddess or even a royal ancestress, nor yet, despite her slender nudity, an adolescent girl just through a rite of passage (I have tried to imagine everything I can), as her crossed arms with large, expressive hands (and also bashfully or anxiously crossed feet, visible in another photo several years ago) might suggest. Her face resembles one on a Shang Dynasty square ding, but also that of the Turkana boy, a homo erectus who died young, as reconstituted by the skillful Victor Deak. At that time she already sat in this bookcase, though apparently on the next shelf up, since the wooden seat that she came with was impermanent, degradable. It is a most likable statuette, and it sits where its owner can look at it, but its associations (unless with the "Lilith", temperamentally quite unlike) are accidental.
Now, I insist this is a true Nature Morte, though it defies being looked at like some Pipe or Apple or Bottle. It is in strict perpendiculars, with significant coincidences, at several scales and like receding planes; depth is given by darkness, too, though the red and blue at left pop out; the pale reflections in the lucite case of the Orphée respond to the similar tints of the woman's headdress. The image, even the iconic seeming statuette itself, would not be so powerful if otherwise seen and framed. In this respect it is like my mantelpiece still life. The bw image is (take your choice) either a work of art parallel to but independent of the statuette, or the statuette is above all a constiuent part of his photographic image. Neither would be the same without the other.

It is so much the easier therefore to enjoy looking at the sci-fi still life as such. The style of lettering and the titles will give real pleasure to all who have loved them, and the containers formed from slabs of china clay (I think) with the similarly fabricated YES in one of them, do show that this shelf belongs to them, whether or not I am right in reading our moon on the one at left. I don't even know whether they are explicitly meaningful, but like Galactica's letter forms they have formal meaning—and I may be right in reading the IS in a circle as corresponding to that moon. No matter, chiastic warm and cool colors make this a delightful still life.

The line dividing a photograph for a museum catalogue, scrupulously recording the profiles of these Late Classical cups, a skyphos and a kylix, one in the Gnathia style and the other plain black glaze-paint (the most waterproof and durable), and a Still Life, is very fine indeed. An art museum might be especially concerned with the aesthetics and to show the three-dimensional objects in real, directional light (not too strong, of course) to give them a sense of atmosphere and space. I think these are privately owned, but the style of photography would do equally well for the V&A.

When I saw this image about a centimeter wide as a 'thumbnail' on a friend's cell-phone screen I asked to have it for this blog post. When it came, the EXIF had hardly any metadata, so I asked whether it really was taken with a phone camera or perhaps with a film camera. In fact, it was taken with a cell phone. It proves that this Game could be played with cell phones alone, if it had to be. She saw the light, she aligned the chopsticks, she got the essential combination of diagonal and foreshortened circle full of round toppings on the ramen; the camera was capable of recording the weave of the cloth and the stoneware glaze of the bowl. Of course, it won't enlarge so far as some of the others (but neither will most photos taken on film). The yellows and reds in and out of the bowl echo each other.

But would this photo also serve a cook book, just as the black-glazed cups also would serve a museum catalogue? Of course. But a lot of museum and culinary images lack their artistic properties.

I intend to write one more blog post in this series, considering some images alone, rather than as representatives of categories.

Nature Morte in response to the Modern

2011-08-21T02:49:00.000-07:00

Denise (study all the triangles and parallelograms!)

II. What began with Paul Strand

Paul Strand, in the course of a long career, worked in a number of kinds of photography, but we are concerned here with the body of work completed in his twenties, just before World War I, exhibited and published by Alfred Stiegltiz in Camera Work in 1916-1917. Ideally, those who don't know this body of work should try to get access to Sarah Greehough's Aperture publication of the National Gallery's exhibition in 1990. The Dover Press published in 1978 a pictorial index to all of Steiglitz's Camera Work, thus providing a conspectus of the introduction of the latest 'cutting-edge' European art to New York City at Stieglitz's Gallery from 1903 through 1917, including Cubism. With international distribution (not to mention the American west coast) of Camera Work, Strand's experiment to discover and to show that straight, unretouched photography could explore vision as well as anybody's cubism immediately reached photographers worldwide—just before the War brought such efflorescence to a close.

The succession to this accomplishment of formal, abstract values in pure photography informs most of 20th-century gallery photography through at least six decades, since the curriculum of the Bauhaus (itself further disseminated by the diaspora of its faculty caused by World War II) also furthered the use of the camera as a means of understanding the meanings of form (see Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the early work of Renger-Patszch, for example), and, since the Bauhaus was a school of Design, it still is usually dominant in high-end commercial work. Basic design courses in art schools even today are rooted in this tradition. These brief notes, of course, only lead to much else!

Of course, Strand's famous early prints, at first platinum prints, then gelatin silver, are large CONTACT prints, nearly 11" X 14". What can the little digital cameras do? More than one might think, though obviously they are not the same. But we are interested in how things are seen.
What is the relationship of analytic cubism to the Nature Morte? First, the latter uses the forms of things not anecdotally (not, for example, to glorify the guitar as a musical instrument or the bottle for its contents) but as such. When young Picasso and Braque began making cubism, they used the genres that Cézanne had been working with (Picasso also, like Degas, was interested in the camera's effect on forms in light). Still life (unless you include Netherlandish laden tables and all their Fur and Feathers, which replace idolatry with the worship of gastronomy and hunting) is simply painting as such. So: just in case you wondered as I did in my youth why cubists were so fond of musical instruments and newspapers and bottles—and, a novelty, printed lettering for its own sake, too.
Now, the earliest photographs had to prefer whatever held still, but it was those who had an educated knowledge of art, Daguerre, because he was himself a painter, and Fox Talbot, because he belonged to a class of Englishmen who were educated in art and architecture, who made real still lifes in the first decade of photography. Of course, these were carefully arranged and set up in advance, not "found" in one's ordinary surroundings. You might say that they MADE a Nature Morte and then photographed it. Most of the first generation, in any case, were interested in genre pictures, fishermen, card players; see the work of Hill and Adamson, though Fox Talbot also set up his friends as card players and in other pictures that were illustrations such as the public liked.
Again, it is with the last decades before World War I, not least with Paul Strand, that the Still Life Hiding in Plain Sight really took hold. Among those participating in the Album that supports these posts, Denise is especially good in recapturing the discovery of Strand's work a century earlier, and both of them fully appreciate that it makes no difference whether the mundane identity of the things photographed is obvious or not. In fact, the perfectly recognizable stuffed cats that I used in the last post are as perfect a formally, abstractly considered composition as can be: it's what the photograph IS, not what it was taken from. That is why, too, when Denise's elderly and interested black cat came nosing in to help in what she appeared to be doing, his visible presence does not make him break the rule of the game, that cats "are not morte enough". In this case, he is (though in everyday life, we are glad to report, he's perfectly alive), simply part of the photograph:

Denise

In this photograph, taken in the kitchen, the dramatic diagonal of a white board (materially, perhaps a nylon cutting board) is transformed by the pattern of reflections on it:

Denise

Their source is just discernible between the folds of the curtain, but the arc that they cast is the true subject of the image.

Similarly, it is not the chair and the barstool stand themselves but the dark design that they create against the complicated brightly lit material behind them that makes this image memorable:

Denise

Most dramatic of all Denise's contributions (also demonstrating positive exploitation of the small cameras' wide-angle extreme) is the image of a strong band of light in receding space, picking up in its course a sequence of objects, each different but not all of them identifiable in their daily-life character, and leaving inexplicit and perhaps unimportant the book-title legible at the bottom of the picture plane:

Denise

The term "picture plane" has been used deliberately, since, as in analytic cubism and much of Bauhaus teaching, the image discourages reading it as space in depth, in spite of the perspectival clues.

BW's casually diagonal vantage point to the righthand end of a book shelf is very discretely abstract, deriving its governing compositional coherence from the jagged shadows at upper right and the plain block of red at lower left:

My own oddly modest, viz, unexciting, visual sensibility seems to tend to photographing light striking through cloth or paper, which is all I seem to do—not only missing the emulation of Paul Strand but also that of Imogen Cunningham, one of his earliest and most interesting disciples, but it is no good if one tries something phoney, so I don't:

There is nothing 'modern' about it, but it is not a traditional Nature Morte either, and I do like (in daily life as well as in the photos) the color added by my accidental accumulation of king-cake babies and the bricks responding to the checkers.

Even more unassuming is the composition that originated in a stack of half-folded laundry, but it is perfectly true to the least Modern of Strand's early portfolio, being not even a Nature Morte but a composition that is perfectly true to the picture plane, tied to it in fact by the apple-green garment among so many textures and kinds of stripes, greens and reds.

MS's cooking top works similarly, adding the reflections of ceiling fixtures in the polished granite.

Traditional Nature Morte

2011-08-16T16:11:00.000-07:00

I. The traditional Still Life, or Nature Morte

Since all the best images of famous examples are copyright, and this project began as exploration of the abilities of small, one-piece digital cameras, my friends have joined in this exploration and the entries may be seen in https://picasaweb.google.com/102498681030579488308/NATUREMORTE.

The initials or other chosen designation of each photographer is given here as in the Album.

We all found present-day equivalents true to the tradition without simply imitating the appearance of a Chardin, for example.

Like a 17th-century Nature Morte, this new photographic one makes full use of composition in terms of light as well as shapes to create a unified Still Life. The textures of pressed cardboard and paper towels draw attention to the the variety of smooth surfaces, and one metal lid refers to the metal foil. The more you look, the more you notice the considerations that make it coherent and interesting.

ms: see her remarks in album

Perfectly true to Nature Morte, though also more interesting than oranges per se, here transparency and reflections work wonders.

pl: the best the small camera could do so far

Who would guess (I didn't) that a quartered orange could outdo the quartz? The translucent rocks demand perfect focus throughout; when you zoom, you need more time and (handheld) may move, but with wide angle the compactness of the group is compromised:

pl: max wide angle

Like the whole mantelpiece, this is no longer really in the spirit of a still life. Here I learned the limitations of using the Nikon S9100 according to my own rules!

Some of the purest Still Life is very simple, with only two or three objects (or even one):

Some of us keep things that we like placed appropriately, but given a little light, noticed at the right time of day, things that are much less than objects of delectation can become Still Life in a photo. As Robert Doisneau said of wet streets, they are better objects for photography than for painting:

And a single crab, considered from a good vantage point, can become new, too:

anon

Denise, who is so good at seeing the abstract qualities in the ordinary, is also skilled in getting the most out of the chip and lens of a tiny Nikon S6000:

denise

The line between the simple Nature Morte and the use of a camera to abstract in the terms of early Modern art is hard to draw.

For a beginning, enjoy these straight photographs of simple things, seen and framed in terms of the long tradition of the Nature Morte, to be enjoyed visually as such. The more you look at them, the more you see.

The Game of Nature Morte

2011-08-14T01:43:00.001-07:00

The mantelpiece six years ago, when my friend Denise was visiting with her Nikon 8800. An accumulation of souvenirs ready to become Nature Morte. Taken deliberately in grayscale.

One year when there was a Biennale at Venice and a lot of special exhibits as well, I happened onto one of Giorgio Morandi, all paintings of vessels, still lifes of the greatest purity and deliberate simplicity imaginable. Of course, like any art historian I was familiar with the genre of the Nature Morte (the French is truer to what it really is) even as pure and austere as in the post-Cubist Amadée Ozenfant or the Spaniard Zurbaran. And I knew that even in the Hellenistic period, if not earlier, Greek artists had done smallish paintings of things, purely just for the painting of them (which implies that there were also connoisseurs of such work, free of anecdote or of symbolism). In the heyday of the French Salon, the genre of Nature Morte was a category in its own right. Chardin has, all his own, a gallery of still lifes in the Louvre. The Impressionists, pre-eminently Manet, honored Nature Morte, delighting in which modern painters like Richard Diebenkorn followed their example. The thing about such paintings, or photographs, is that there can be no reason for doing them at all but the artist's desire to do all that he can with his seeing the raw material and to get all that he can, as an artist, from it, at the same time offering the pleasure of such works to those whose participation in them is in viewing them and considering what the artist has done. Cézanne's skull here is not a memento mori nor his apple for eating, nor some utilitarian object for using or the guitar for playing. A Ming jade bowl and a toilet bowl (if by Edward Weston) alike are both just what the artist has done with them. The proof of this is in such experiences as my afternoon with the work of Giorgio Morandi, who, I think, would not have used the form of a bathroom commode, lest anyone suppose it could be meant to refer to the article in daily use. Once known, his work is unforgettable.
Through a half century of teaching art I have learned that, at least in America, young people have trouble understanding that works of art need not signify or suggest or teach that which verbal language does perfectly well. Of course there are images, including some great ones, such as Michelangelo's of Creation in the Sistine Chapel, and some painful ones, such as Eugene Smith's, that leave much less license for kidding oneself than reportorial language usually does. What I am saying is only that the genre of Nature Morte is full of meaning, but the meaning is gained only from looking at it meditatively (if I my use that word) and enjoying it visually. I think that neuroscience is advancing in helping us to understand these distinctions, but on the internet one finds that almost everyone is regarding visual art as mere symbols or illustrations alone. It is not that Still Life needs to work in terms of abstraction, though the young Paul Strand showed that photographs could succeed as abstract works without compromising the medium of photography, and there are plenty of abstracted photographs that are not Still Life.
Anyway, I was thinking, looking at my more advanced miniature camera with all its zoom and megapixels, how it would perform in a Game of Nature Morte, much more complicated than simply zooming at a construction crane on a bright day. Already I have an entry that proves, once again, that vision rather than tools is the critical thing.
Though I wanted to participate, I didn't want to be limited to my own vision, so I invited a number of friends, who know what Nature Morte / Still Life is, to send me some of theirs. I want to emphasize, as I multi-task (blog composition and PGA golf), that this is not a competition. At least two of my chosen friends are better photographers than I am, but no matter: it is just to get varied vision that I have prevailed upon all. I am eager to credit each one or to guarantee each contributor's anonymity. Though it will be impossible to post every image in the blog, I shall post in a Public Picasa album all that I may and keep in a Private album any that the photographer prefers to keep private, though, N.B., indecency is certainly private and practically unknown in the genre of Still Life (though Fur and Feathers is important in Netherlandish Still Life, to avoid offending many animal lovers, I won't use them here, and bouquets of flowers similarly are hard to handle, since the criteria of specimen-perfection and the artist's vision can need more discussion than a simple game with miniature cameras can encompass). I have no intention of judging anybody's photography, even my own, though a fundamental question is whether the intention was Nature Morte.
Contributions dribble in; friends may be shy or busy. So I'll start with the simplest category.
I. Photographs in the Tradition
II. Photographs to compete with Modernism
III. Photographs easy to interpret differently
IV. Photographs that are carefully arranged, either for commercial work or surreal intention; they may rely on the Nature Morte tradition without being part of it.

I sent my friends this list of criteria:

(1) Available light only

(2) Available arrangements only, relying only on vantage point and framing (to avoid those dreadful art school set ups that were so pointless and limiting

(3) Botany excluded as a subject (my pods on the stovepipes trees don't belong here, nor do the mushrooms)

(4) Cats as primary subject are not 'morte' enough

(5) Built-in lens only

Denise, who is VERY good at this kind of photography, may use the 8800 as well as the 6000, but the latter is actually faster, I think. Older one-piece cameras also are OK.

The modus operandi I choose is to have the small camera at hand at all times (meaning I needed to get its own carrying case ASAP)

(6) No one needs to play but me, but in a couple of weeks I'll make a new blog post with a half dozen 1000 pixel images, just to show that shooting high and far is not the only test of a camera's utility. But for anyone using a $100 camera, this is not a test of your lens or your chip. I mean, the Nikon S6000s will do just as well as the S8000 and S9000 series and similarly all the same-priced competitors.

This potful of tools has been sitting here for at least a decade, and the light comes in every afternoon when it's not raining. For posting but zooming, too, image should be 1000 pixels in the larger dimension.

I attached the first (fuzzy) version of this image to make clear that "Period" candlesticks and old wine bottles and wooden potato mashers are NOT of the essence. As Denise said in an e-mail, "still lifes hiding in plain sight": not arrangements.

Glory to Technology

2011-08-05T16:57:00.000-07:00

Building a new parking facility and bookstore at LSU

As our Health Science teacher said when we were in Junior High School (now called Middle School) it's no use to complain about the Facts of Life. Similarly, in a week where the only slight comfort is reading about what they tried to do to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937, I see no point in more talk about economics. And I wonder whether they'll still be printing many books by the time that new facility (see caption) is finished (but it probably was approved and budgeted a decade ago). Great building cranes have been in use, too, for a half century and though they're really impressive theirs is not the glory, though when I took a niece from eastern Washington state with me to Europe, she loved the cranes against lovely blue skies; that was in the 1980s when building was everywhere. And the last time I could traipse all over cities, in 2002, my first, little digital camera boasted only 2X zoom: it could register a building crane, but just that, and I had no young niece with me to provide enthusiasm.

The Glorious Technology again is the combination of miniaturization and power. A portable reel-to-reel tape recorder weighed as much as an L.C.Smith office typewriter. During the Vietnam War families sent their voice recordings on cassettes. But then came the Walkman, the first machine to record using AA batteries. Today, for all the horrors of improvised explosive devices and clouds of hot dust and all, finally (for the moment) soldiers in current wars do not lack for IT: it is even possible to watch the birth of one's baby in real time (if only you can live to raise the child), and you watch it on a device the size of a Cartier cigarette case. Similarly, cameras with extreme telephoto lenses, even in the 1960s, were nothing for any but the most rugged tourists to tote. If they were zoom lenses, they were even longer, heavier, and more expensive, besides needing strong tripods for longer exposures as you zoomed and zoomed.

Six years ago I bought my first mini digital pocket camera, and I just decided to see what Nikon had done between my S1 (5.2MP and 2X zoom) and today's S9100 (12.1MP, 18X zoom--f.3.5 to 5.9 zooming 4.5 to 81 mm, which is like 25mm and 450mm on a 35mm film camera!). And they were in the same price range, neither kiddy junk nor too expensive.

So my general view of that crane is as wide-angle as an old 25mm lens would be; you can just make out the crane operator's cabin in the middle of it. It was taken at 4.5mm.
The next one seemed to me like what a Normal lens (like 50mm) of my youth would have framed; it was taken at 10.9mm:

I'd have been pleased to get this with any of my film cameras.

The third one seemed to me to be making a very bold demand on the little pocket S9100; I had never had a camera with a lens to take this one; it was taken at 34mm:

This tells me more than I ever guessed about these cranes

Finally, I moved to the extreme of the zooming thing (which is right in front of the taking button: how's that for thoughtful design?). That is 81mm, and that is what, as I look at the little camera, about 4" X 2" X 1" (with the lens withdrawn to nearly flush with the face of the camera), and then at the image, even when you see it reduced from 4000pixels to 1500pixels, larger dimension--that is what seems to me a glory of technology at its best.

That cabin is nearly as large as the cab of a large semi, a big 18-wheeler

Now the question is, why should the humble tourist not have in his or her pocket such a little glory of technology and perhaps learn to see better by using it? I taught History of Photography for over a decade, and I truly believe that cameras are for learning to see. Sure, you can do it with a pinhole box (it is harder with a Hawkeye!), but with this kind of tool, it seems to me, that everyone's innate capacity for true seeing must be enhanced.

Is this my newest toy? I shall learn by playing with it. I needn't try to buy what I can neither tote by myself nor afford to pay for. A powerful zoom for my DSLR? I shall leave that for the young.
P.S. Click on these images to make them full-screen.
P.P.S. No, I'm not doing this just for Nikon. There is a class of these really good miniatures, all about the same price, each with its own special features. The reviews are careful to explain what each emphasizes, and all the major brands are good in their own ways. I have had Nikon cameras since 1965, and I understand them most easily.

The Year of Webcor, Reed, and Fischer-Dieskau

2011-07-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

It was 1956, just before or just after I completed my B.A. and I was living in the chocolate-brown apartment at 2308 Haste Street in Berkeley. Claude was at sea with the Merchant Marine, I don't think that M. had yet moved in, and I still knew people whom I'd come to know in the apartment at the back of the second floor of 2411 Durant Avenue. One of these was a graduate student in History named Reed Abel, whom I don't think I've written about before in this blog. It's all right, I think, to mention him by name, because I can't find anyone at all academic or by now nearing age 80 anywhere on the Web. I owe a lot to him, primarily as a friend (as lovers we didn't really get anywhere). He told me things to read in history, he taught me to read German lyric poetry, which became a lifetime pleasure (though I never got around to taking the course, by all accounts delectable, for a single credit hour, devoted to reading not only Goethe but the likes of Ruckert, too).
At that time, too, set on the window seat alongside my single rollaway bed, I had a Webcor Fonograf, three speed, with a flip cartridge for the two diameters of stylus. I had found, too, the first complete Monteverdi Orfeo on a dozen 12" Voce del Padrone 78rpm shellac records and the two-disk album of the Vivaldi-Bach Concerto for violins or (Bach) for four pianos—the very recording that was used in the film of Les Enfants Terribles. And I picked up used 78rpm in every secondhand bookstore that I visited. But it was also the decade not only of Remington records, LPs, very cheap, many of them pirated, seemingly from Austrian state radio and given fictive names of conductors and orchestras. Not pirated, though issued in the USA under license from Ducretet-Thompsom (if I have that right), and costing only a dollar more, was the Westminster catalogue, where we first listened to Hermann Scherchen and much else of enduring value, and (full price) Concert Hall LPs which I shall always associate with Walter Goehr. I am not a thorough discographer, so I won't trace all the re-issues later on. Here it is a particular Westminster LP that is my point of departure.
It is one that I no longer have, but purely on a whim, because I wanted to hear what they were like, I had bought an LP of Beethoven Lieder sung by Alfred Poell, a nice Austrian baritone (I assume you all know how to Google him). Poell was no longer young, but only middle-aged, and a native speaker of German, but he was no great Lieder singer. Still, I loved the songs, and I loved the record, too, until my friend Reed visited with the second volume on Electrola, sent from Germany, recorded in 1955, of the thirty-year-old Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (beginning with the Gellert Lieder). His accompanist was Hertha Klust. She was not the greatest, and later Fischer-Dieskau did record with the greatest who were capable of accompanying Lieder, but she was very good indeed, much better than Poell's pianist (I've forgotten, too, who he was).
The sequel is predictable. Yes, of course, I like operas. But I live for Lieder and mélodies and even art songs by composers that otherwise I can live quite without. I have 32 complete Winterreise, nearly as many Schöne Müllerin, the whole Hyperion Schubert, and much, much else, even down to mid-20th century composers like Hindemith, whose chamber music I value much more highly.
Not to bore readers who can do without Lieder, just imagine what all this has done for my basic German and for Sprachgefühl. Imagine how much pleasure it has brought to reading even much more difficult German.
I owe it mostly to my friend Reed Abel.
And now I wonder whether he is still alive. After all, I'm no spring chicken, either. And Lucian Freud died the other day, then two days later Michael Cacoyannis (of Zorba fame, though I like the film called, in English, The Girl in Black). And others, all a little older than me but younger than Queen Elizabeth II and Shirley Temple. So far as I know the pianists Jörg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda (two more known thanks to Westminster LPs) are still among us.
But almost every day I wonder, How is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau? He is, of course, retired; he must be 86. Perhaps he is so old that he supposes that no one remembers him. Of course, I know no one who could tell him that there are those of us who owe half of their sensibility and understanding and pleasure in music to his art, and I don't expect an angel to whisper it in his ear, but there it is. There were other singers and conductors and dancers I had youthful crushes on, but Fischer-Dieskau was not so much an idol as a great mentor. Yes, there have been others, but I came to know the others' art much later; it was F-D, indeed, who brought me to listen to them.
And all credit to that laughable-looking little Webcor Fonograf; they sounded good, and my 1950s LPs still are in playable, enjoyable condition (of course, I kept them clean, and I also have CDs of many of them). Somewhere I found a YouTube of a couple of young guys who bought one for $4.50 at Goodwill, and found that it runs fine, correct speed, sounds "great" (well, anything is better than a bud in the ear from an iPod).

All Religions Alike

2011-07-04T17:20:00.000-07:00

Having given a year to the Brain, Charlie Rose (PBS) has initiated a series on Islam, which bids fair to be outstanding. On Friday, 1 July 2011, he had numerous academic, thoughtful, authoritative guests to help him frame the questions. Some of us will think that we already are aware of all the varieties of religious experience, but it is always interesting to hear others sort them out.
One thing caught my attention. Considering Duke University's Islamic Studies Center, he asked his round table what they would most hope for Islam in America. Professor Miriam Cooke wanted it to be "just a religion". That is sympathetic; all my Moslem friends would enjoy the same status as I do, coming from many generations of WASPs in America. As one who has pled for serious separation of religion and state, I must agree. It is just what I'd urge to children, but consider its inadequacy, since it requires that all the others be just religions, too.
Buddhists will have no problem.
Jon Meacham will have no problem.
Baylor Baptists will have none, either.
Eminent Turkish and Egyptian intellectuals will rejoice in keeping their personal beliefs to themselves, and I'm sure that Michael Bloomberg will, too. In short, the whole happy society of the urban educated, for the most part, will rejoice in refraining from saying its prayers in the marketplace, as Jesus of Nazareth enjoined.
What can be more private and more personal than an adult person's spiritual life? What is harder to enunciate than answers to the ultimate questions? Blurting them can make them tawdry.
Many persons, if not most, though, do not differentiate emotional life from spiritual life; they never have.
Professor Fukuyama is probably right about the residuum of tribal identity as the monkey wrench (spanner to the English) in 21st-century civilization. One sees one's fellow citizens making their religious affiliations fill the needs met by extended families. So, too, adherence to football teams and clubs. When religious and national affiliations coincide, social problems, political problems (political action committees and parties, etc.), can mount deleteriously. They not only can—in fact, they do, all the time and the world over.
It's forever the "Merry Minuet".
Quite simply, one's most inward, highest life is one thing and is compromised by the stuff we join with so as not to be so responsible for ourselves. That is what Freud was trying to get at in Civilization and its Discontents. I hope he wouldn't mind my saying so.

2011-06-28T22:43:00.000-07:00

Monetary Predicaments

Athena Street, AD 2000

Sovereign Wealth and Debt

We take such a drubbing from our legistlators’speeches. They seem to becomposed, like the lamest, latest interpolations into the Homeric epics, ofthreadbare fragments all of the same platitudes. By now one is convinced that the quotations of strings ofhuge numbers really mean nothing in these persons’ mouths.

One Representative says, “a lot o’ things we’re doin’ wecan’t afford to do” and never specifies what we’re doing and can’t afford. No matter. We’ve been hammered with this stuff so relentlessly that weknow that it merely encompasses whatever the opposing political party thinksworthy. No need to spell outanything. It’s like the members ofthe insane asylum in the old story, who knew all one another’s jokes so wellthat they just said the number of each and laughed or groaned accordingly.

But I care deeply about economics, and I’ve been working tomaster the vocabulary, at least, for the last four years. More. Ever since Enron was victimizing California more than adecade ago, and I began to learn a bit about ‘creative’ accounting; one had todigest the fact, that such disrespect for the ideals of real wealth could gouncorrected for so long. Yes, oneknew that ever since the end of antiquity money has been ‘debt’ money (evenwhere some governments managed to maintain gold and silver reserves to back itup), but in school they taught us that the arithmetic of the Gross NationalProduct had to be correct. Whenone of our own, USA, newsmen today remarked that Christine Lagarde would beable to speak truth to nations who hadn’t faced it, another observed that hehadn’t meant Greece but ourselves. That’s just what I’ve been thinking, how Greek we all are, how philotimoi, not to say vainglorious, with our Great Nation stuff. We have lived way beyond ourmeans. We have believed ourstock-market averages, and so forth.

We have let those most capable of paying taxes payleast. For let no one think thatwage-earning Greeks do not pay taxes, but they can’t pay enough to cover theexpenses, the legitimate expenses, I mean, of their nation. Just our own problem: school teachersand bus drivers and builders, and all, no matter how late they wait to retire,have paid for and must have something to live on when they can no longerwork. And that is the least ofwhat a nation must pay for.

Why do we bad-mouth Greece so? We don’t bully Iceland so badly. We forget that UBS (to name the most eminent) had some ofthe Madoff stuff. He made it, butthey ought to have known better, surely, just as our banks ought, than to betempted by it.

I take for granted that our own economists as well asGreece’s Papandreou know better than I do, just as surely as Swiss or Scotchbankers do. But that means thatour presidents and premiers and prime ministers may be practically helplessrelative to the banks and brokers. I take some hope, even so, from knowing that Papandreou is a very soundeconomist.

But I headed this post “Sovereign Wealth”. That was the first term that I had tolook up in 2008. I gather it isanalogous to Capital relative to Income, which persons who are not wage-earningworkers refer to in old novels: nice people live on their incomes. As I recall, however, when I looked itup, only one European nation, Switzerland, had sovereign wealth and only oneAmerican State, Alaska. It seemsthat sovereign wealth is a good thing to have. I guess that the USA, even more than one of the large SouthAmerican nations when in money trouble, has a store of natural resources suchas Greece lacks. Of course, as onewho professes Greek art and archaeology, one who loves Greece second only to myown country (without supposing that either of them is faultless or superior,intrinsically, to any other place), I have been agonizing over Greece formonths, and I am angry when transalpine nations speak of Greececondescendingly. It is painfuleven to a mere philhellene; think how Greeks must feel. I read their newspapers on line everyday, and I am proud of them. Ifonly I knew the real resolution of all these problems, which (of course) areours as well as theirs, both in their causes and in their possibleeffects. I hope that ChristineLagarde can help.

Taking Positions

2011-06-27T22:23:00.000-07:00

WHY NOT USE MY BLOG TOTAKE POSITIONS?

Is this why the radical 1960s called me wishy-washyliberal? It almost always seems tome that questions, or “issues”, as stated in the media, can only be debated interms that preclude obvious reasonable solutions. Is it only because these seem to be politically impossiblethat they are carefully avoided?

Let me take one question prominent in the News over the lastweekend, that of gay marriage. Theword, marriage, itself does not imply a religious rite or consecration, but incommon parlance it is felt to entail a divine blessing and a holy vow. Fine. A word’s meaning is not necessarily identical to itsetymology. Be that as it may, thequestion seems to me simply a question of the separation of church (vel sim.) and state:

(a) the state cannot demand of a religious institution thatit consecrate a civic right or privilege. Thus, a church, such as the Roman Catholic (but not her alone), cannotbe required to give its sacraments to those outside of it and/or at odds withit, whether it be a sacrament such as communion or marriage or last rites orburial in cemeteries of its own, consecrated to the use of its members. Also,

(b) in a pluralistic constitutional democracy (in ourinstance) none of the faiths that are free to worship as they believe has theright to impose its own institutions on the citizens, whether many or few, whobelieve otherwise. It is the statethat determines what is necessary to keep us civilized. Nor can the state privilege any onereligious institution’s social traditions. All of the rights of citizenship as such must be availableto all.

Thus, if everyone must register their marriage irrespectiveof their religious beliefs, if any, and obtain divorces, when needed, in thelegal way, those who wish the wedding consecrated by the religious faith thatthey adhere to will arrange for the religious rite of their own kind; and ifdivorce or non-belief or their sex should preclude the consecration of marriageor the administration of last rites, or whatever, religiously, so be it. The religions in a pluralisticdemocracy decide what is essential to each of them.

But I can just hear the claims during a political campaign:that would be requiring a “Soviet union” of everyone. Is that why the obvious solution is politically impossible?

Can it be (I don’t know) that our president is afraid ofalienating the Baptist churches?

Therefore, I do not rehearse in my blog postings what seemsobvious to me. After all, I am tooold for the question of marriage to be urgent for me, and I come from a part ofthis nation where partnerships are just as respectable as marriages. I am sure that questions such asinheritance could be worked out legally, in any case. I confess, in fact, to being a little leery of marriage,since my parents made a rather poor job of it, but that is no reason to denyits excellence to others.

The most amiable author

2011-06-06T00:10:00.000-07:00

The Kritian Boy

For two weeks now Book TV (C-Span 2 when the House of Representatives is not in session, and every weekend) has invited listeners to send in their current choices for Summer Reading. The most astonishing variety of readers choose a book that I, too, have read with great pleasure, by everyone's favorite conservative, David Brooks, The Social Animal. It is not original, ground-breaking neuro-science and social science. It is just awfully well done and perfectly candid without being ickily confessional. It is just like himself, whether writing columns or talking with Jim Lehrer and Mark Shields every Friday on PBS. I enjoyed it so much that I read it in two sittings.

What is it, though, that I like so much about David Brooks?

I realized that it is his recalling a face that I've known for more than sixty years, indeed in the same photograph that is older than I am.

It is the face of that most candid and kaloskagathos from the Athenian Acropolis, the Kritian Boy, which may actually be Kritian, if you agree that it resembles the head of Harmodios, the young Tyrant-Slayer.

How can one possibly not like and trust a man who, in middle age (he is the same age as our President Obama), has all the candor of that most open-faced of all adolescent Athenians?

Besides, may I take this occasion to recommend his book, The Social Animal, to you all? It is unpretentious and utterly free of malice.

With Reference to Yorkshire

2011-05-30T16:26:00.000-07:00

Winifred Holtby, South Riding, Ilkley Moor, James Herriott, Virginia Woolf, The Princess Casamassima, the Kindle device

Discipline, I tell myself, is called for. With a memory that works by free association, I find myself prompted by another blogger’s essay on Cromer, and its geology, to recall Girl Scout camp and singing “On Ilkley Moor bah t’at” to look up pictures of the real place and thus to recognize a reference to local dialect in the occasional use by Winifred Holtby of the “t’” in the speech of rural men, and so to wonder whether “All Creatures Great and Small” had been filmed, outdoors, in Yorkshire (it was). And Henry James had gotten into the mix because recalling a bit of Hamlin Garland from school, I had gone back and finally read A Son of the Middle Border and gotten Henry James’ letters to William Dean Howells, who had encouraged Garland, which made me remember how I had loved The Princess Casamassima half a century ago. Besides, Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, had promptly supplied a copy of Holtby’s biography of Virginia Woolf. I think VW must have been scared silly by the idea of this younger and more literal writer doing a biography of her (it would account for her mixture of sarcasm and fair-mindedness towards Holtby, who, at that, did fare better than Katherine Mansfield in VW’s letters and diaries, and, in my opinion, deservedly). VW would really be scared, and angry, I think, if she had to see some of the posthumous studies and biographies. Holtby alone published in V. Woolf’s lifetime, and, what’s more, she’s good—and not only because she can’t talk about, couldn’t guess about, Woolf’s death. What she did know was The Waves, which Woolf sent to her pre-publication, and she grasped it all by herself; if she didn’t like the italicized sea scenes, unless as prose poems apart, well, neither do I.

It is all because of the Kindle device and my love of literature even older than I am. We old things are cheap or even free of charge. The blogs allow me to write with no thought of selling, and the Kindle gives me a very choice library that only looks oddly assorted, because it is all my own, though I’m constantly reading several things at once. Retirement gives me the leisure to look up the etymology of anything that takes my fancy and answer the question, why real Yorkshire has only three Ridings. The OED obliges: the word, in the Domesday Book, is treding, and it means a third. Not to mention making the acquaintance of the Cow and the Calf on the real Ilkley Moor.

A friend just wrote asking me whether she should really read The Princess Casamassima, and, since she is an excellent reader and this is the most readable Henry James you’ll ever find, I do recommend it, to her and to all true readers. This is no Daisy Miller or Wings of the Dove, which, of course, are great, but even if you think that you don’t like Henry James you will very probably love The Princess Casamassima. And even if you didn’t like the recent BBC version of Holtby’s South Riding, which was too telescoped into three episodes, which was photographed with relentless use of darkness and side-lighting (I think that must be cheaper?), which lost all the literary character and much of the nuance of the book and was so chopped up that you needed to read the book along with it just to follow it and remember who was who in the story (not that you could tell in the dark, either), you should read Holtby’s novel, too. She is a wonderful writer, and she is describing her own world, with neither sentimentality nor condescension.

P.S. It is true: I still haven’t read Wuthering Heights. But first I’ll finish some of what I have begun.

The accidental triad, put to use

2011-05-28T20:10:00.000-07:00

On May 5 I posted a snapshot of three short logs that some neighbors had put out with the trash.
Reminded that, despite my age, I could move them if I simply rolled them, I did so:

Rolled onto my parking pad

And a younger friend, Amber, moved them for me; perhaps Buster the Cat could, like the Three Bears in the Goldilocks story, eat from them. The next afternoon, just one week ago, I saw him curled up asleep on the largest one, but he moved when he saw the camera: it flashes.

Triad of logs positioned beside the deck

I thought that if I put out cat food there he would discover it. Since he patrols his territory very thoroughly, I'm sure he did, but he wasn't the only one. Does everyone know that birds love cat kibble?

Cat food put on the logs never lasts more than a couple of hours.

And it isn't only blue jays and crows; smaller birds come, too. On my front porch I saw the pair of cardinals calmly consuming Purina Cat Chow–and they have little grosbeaks for cracking nuts.

I never am quick enough with my camera. The closest I came was in trying to photograph one of the grey squirrels, but just as I raised the viewer to my eye he was up on the shelf afforded him by my neighbor's privacy fence.

Four feet above the logs, the squirrel (I made the inset to help you see him)

Click on the pictures to zoom them.
This post is for my friend Nina, who immediately also saw the logs as an aniconic triad and liked them. She has been ill, and I hope she'll be better soon.

Perhaps Final Flooding Report

2011-05-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

In bright sunlight, the Vatican statue of the Nile River, with all his little cubits. Our own Old Man Mississippi cubits also are looking as tame as these restored ones. It doesn't matter that the sculpture is not easy to study in such a photo as this, since it is so heavily restored.

Actually, it is nice to report that the Mississippi flood looks like being successfully managed, though it would be foolish to assume that a saturated levee can be trusted to hold firm for another couple of weeks. So far as I know, only parts of Vicksburg down here are actually flooded. I waited this evening till the 10pm news was complete and can report that some folks are taking crawfish wild, that some farmers, owing to heat and drought, were able to harvest Spring wheat before the fields were inundated and hope, if the waters recede and evaporate quickly enough, to plant another crop or two. Between assiduous work on the levees built after the 1927 flood, and the judicious use of the spillways, and the thirst of the drought-dry Atchafalaya basin, this flood may have been managed—though who am I to say, a Californian from away back? Anyhow, the local TV stations no longer seem very anxious about it. There remain the towns nearer the gulf, but already the crest measurements have been reduced in their forecast, and that is great. Anyhow, we'll be watching our little cubits. I understand that one can get a good view looking west over the basin from the top of our State Capitol, climbing and driving on the levees being forbidden, but, hey, it's too darned HOT.

I don't say that there won't be loss and damage, but nothing like the chaos that was Katrina. I almost am afraid to believe that all will be, if not well, not so bad down by Morgan City. And I'll be interested to see what this will have done to the salt and fresh water balance down there.
That the flood event is a real and serious one is plain from the frightening speed of the current.

Updating the River

2011-05-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

02 III 00 AE28 Nicopolis ad Istrum. Commodus / River God. Obv. AVT KAI MAR AVRE KOMODOS (in Greek); Rev. NEIKOPO PROS IST [H]EGEMO KAIKI SERVEILIA (his full name was Servilianus). Pick p. 352, no. 1235, pl. XVII, 31. Pick, p. 350, says that the large coins of Commodus are of quite exceptionally bad style and seem all attributable to the same die cutter.

Fully developed river gods meant as Father Danube / Ister are relaxed and comfortable, even idyllic in appearance, but this one of Commodus is not. I've had this image in my files for more than a decade, and here is a chance to use it, to head this thread. No one seems to talk about the Danube delta with its many tributaries, though surely (together with the Tigris & Euphrates, the Nile not having the same sort of tributaries) it is the Great River most comparable to North America's, if I may judge from from its vast delta of wetlands as seen from the air. I don't know very well how the Amazon works.
So here is a heading for this post, and as soon as they decide how much of the Morganza Spillway to open, to divert water to the Atchafalaya basin, when its force becomes too great for the modern channel, I'll finish this posting. Note the Native American name, from the language of one of the peoples who lived off the swamps before the relatively modern European Americans (not only Anglos and Acadiens but also Spanish and German and lots of Irish) made it their home. And, for that matter, the main channel of the great river in geologically recent times was still in that basin, but that was a long time ago in the minds of present-day Louisianans.
Just after midnight, now May 14, Chicago Time
Well, they are going to open that Morganza Spillway that I'd barely heard of until this week. Let me first correct the impression given above: The Morganza Floodway is parallel to and to the east of the Atchafalaya Basin. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morganza_Spillway
I was right that it had never been opened in the 30 years that I've lived here. Even though the land that will be flooded is owned as a floodway, and is only used otherwise with that understanding, as with certain lands below old earthen dams on the Sacramento River in California, no one wants either to destroy crops or to displace families that have lived on the land for generations, unless it is necessary.
Consider, though, up in Pointe Coupee Parish parts of the old town of St. Francisville, just to name one, are already flooded (Morganza is just up river from it). Notice, too, all the worm-shaped water thereabouts which are, literally, pieces of the Mississippi, left behind when it shifted to its present course (no, Man didn't make it do that; we think that the river has shifted more than once in the last few thousand years). The Morganza Floodway will carry water where the river has at times been before.
But Industry, chemical and specifically petroleum, is not just something to yell at, as if it were the Viet Nam War. Louisiana is no place for five million population were it left as the Native Americans enjoyed it. The New Bridge, the one over I-10, was built high so that it needn't be opened for ships, but just yesterday, Reuters said, a ship (registered in Baikal!) had to turn back, because the River was already so high that clearance was insufficient. And, it was bruited about, the Exxon-Mobil plant was already flooded today, at least enough that it couldn't operate, enough that liquid cargo (you know what) couldn't be unloaded.
I honestly don't think that my neighborhood will be flooded; it IS a little higher than some others, but I'm just as glad that opening as many gates as necessary in the Morganza Spillway will bring down our crest, estimated to be on the 22nd of May, by a couple of feet. I'm sure that the University and the refineries and Dow Chemical and BASF, et al., are just as glad, too.
Already US 61 up by Tallulah is closed and a number of other highways; even parts of the Interstate are expected to be awash.
I confess that the Mississippi fascinates me. Not because of its might so much (look how it meanders for much of its length) as how it gathers so many Waters together. When I came here, I was consoled for the absence of mountains by the presence of the great river. When I was little, there was a black-and-white movie, a biopic, about Mark Twain. When I was in university, I was taught to understand the history of Europe as the history of its rivers. And so on.
It isn't simply the height of the water, it's the mass of it this year.
When I lived in Oregon, they said that it only snowed in the mountains--and then one year I had 35 inches of the stuff on my ticky-tacky FHA-built roof (which naturally couldn't take it).
When I came to Louisiana, they said that New Orleans lived a charmed life, because hurricanes never actually hit it (of course, there were professors at LSU that thought otherwise).
Now, just when I thought I might live out my remaining years without a repetition of "Lanterns on the Levee" (on the 1927 flood), they are having to take measures lest the levees built after 1927 may not be sufficient to handle 2011. The suburbs flood every several years, anyway, but they are saying that people will not be able to go back to where they lived below the Spillway. This is different from Missouri. Our Old Man River may just, they say, change lanes once again and flow down the Morganza way once again, once allowed to do so, incorporating once again those bits of Old River up by Pointe Coupee.
Bah! I do not like Nature; physis is not theia; and, no, it's not homo sapiens' fault, really; he, too, is part of Nature. Our only advantage is in being able to be interested in it.
So, now I know no more than any of you do.
P.S. They are waiting as long as possible to open the Spillway, so that folks can finish moving everything before the water comes.
N.B. The first gate was opened on schedule at 3pm. BTW, the experts say the water is going to the Atchafalaya...
Note: I won't add everyday to this post, but I'll make a new one in a week, when more results should be apparent. Please note, however, that it is not a question of choosing between flooding big cities or else small communities (many of whose inhabitants have jobs in the ports or need to ship from them) but of minimizing tragedy: should the places where the main levee has shown weakness over the years break, not only the ports and cities but much of the areas west of the river would be flooded anyhow and with potentially far worse consequences. And that spillway at Morganza, which ordinarily retains water, now partly, judiciously opened, may also prevent much worse flooding in places north of Morganza, places like Vidalia, for example, now that diversion through the spillway will, as I understand, reduce the mass of water there when the cresting at Natchez occurs. It is NOT a question of victimizing the basin-dwellers.

Old Man River

2011-05-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

With friends and family from NW USA to SE Europe inquiring about the safety of Louisiana, alarmed by readers of teleprompters, as an interested adoptive resident of this state, since 1981, I thought I might post here what I just wrote in an e-mail:

I think that where I live is safe (not that anyone can believe what officials claim); I think that (a) my neighborhood did not flood in 1927, the year of the Great Flood, after which the levees were buiilt, and (b) it is from the LSU campus and southward that flooding could occur, UNLESS they open the Morganza Spillway. The Continental Shelf ends just south of the LSU campus; south of that, all is alluvium, and the river doesn't have any ancient (stone) banks in that alluvial delta-land. The reason why they will not open the Morganza Spillway unless it is necessary is that there is much fertile land and many farmhouses and villages in the area that would naturally be flooded if the Spillway had to be opened. Still, they already have opened part of the Bonnet Carré Spillway, which diverts water into Lake Pontchartrain instead of into New Orleans.

The Native American tribes who had their settlement at a place where they marked their territory by setting up a bloody stripped tree trunk, which the French settlers, using it as a landmark, called le bâton rouge, whence the name of this city, knew the land and had the good sense not to build their settlement farther south.

It is the wealthier suburbs south of the center of Baton Rouge that are likeliest to be flooded, because also the tributary streams that empty into the Mississippi, such as the Amite River and the Comite River, are NOT protected by levees. I have the good liberal sense to be glad to live among all the ethnicities of Baton Rouge!

Still, one never knows. The Army Corps of Engineers have been busy checking the levees, and along the river, where there are chemical and petroleum plants, they are in fact putting up extra protection--for the first time in my memory, since 1981. And I have never known the Morganza Spillway to have been opened. Not that I recall. So this really is a major flood.

They speak of Vicksburg, MS, flooding, and I must write to my friend who lives on the opposite bank, in Tallulah, LA. Vicksburg hasn't flooded since I came south in 1981.

My sense is that areas that did not flood in the Great Flood of 1927, before there were levees and spillways, this time, with them, ought to be OK.

Hagia Triada, an accidental Triad

2011-05-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

05 05 2011. Apparently abandoned by a neighbor who has vacated the house and placed these in the area to be collected by the garbage company, I both admired the light and considered these as a significant-seeming triad!

Like a series of Russian dolls or nested cubes or cylinders, these apparently were being utilized as deck seats in the outdoor eating area of a neighbor's house.

But one immediately thinks of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Father and Mother and Baby, whose little chair was just right for little Goldilocks.

And then a friend half a world away just wrote by e-mail that they are iconic, like Three Muses or Three Saints. There are so many triads, such as the Etruscan ancestors of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva in the Capitoline temple in Rome.

Greek uses the same word, triada, for the Trinity, so the little chapel that lends its name to a small town in Crete where a villa-sized Minoan palatial residence was excavated a century ago, is called Hagia Triada. Of course, in serious theology a triad of gods is one thing and a god in three persons is another. It's three, though, in either case.

Now that the university semester is over, and houses that were leased to graduate students are vacated, my fig tree has figlets big enough to be photographed, advanced enough indeed that I expect them to be ripe before the first week of July, the usual date. If I give them an extra bit of water (though we do not usually want for rain here), they might be nice this year. They are pale small figs, in any case, not the lovely black Mission figs of California, but they make good preserves.

05 05 2011. Figs still dwarfed by the fig leaves.

What a weekend!

2011-05-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

Catastrophic tornados. Members of Qaddafi's family killed. Royal Wedding (no mishaps, and the same beautiful horses and Edward VII landau, besides a solidly classic Anglican sermon on marriage), Beatification of John Paul II (I prefer Giovanni XXIII and Vatican II), Death and Burial at Sea of Osama bin Laden. Great crowds in popular demonstrations, successively in London, Rome, and Washington / New York City. English, Polish, and US American flags displayed successively. God, irrespective of particulars of each celebration, made accountable for whatever, such as a lady happening not to be at home when her house was swept away. Simplicity of popular reactions and never-ending complexity of the darker side of human nature always increasingly bewildering. Though I am as remote as can be from royal families (even when they major in art history), I can't help but hope for a long union as sound as, for example, that of Elizabeth II's parents for her grandchildren. It would be good for the British Public . The royal family serves Identity (those whom it doesn't serve don't need that so much); I should be glad if my own nation did not have to rely on Ford's Theater, the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, and the Twin Towers instead. How much do Americans actually yearn for a constitutional First Family of their own? I don't know. I don't understand very well anything from this weekend's news. I don't see how deserving to die or not has any relevance to death, and I am offended by considering one's own tribe's deaths as more important than other tribes' deaths. On the other hand, I have to admit to being more comforted by Canterbury's homily than by Rome's. That is an aspect of my elective culture, of course.
As when the USSR came apart, I can't help but worry (if I allow myself the luxury) about the aftermath of this weekend.
Now, why is it that once again, after more than a half century, I revert to the avoidance of wrong, so far as I can, as the nearest I can come to good? See last two posts.

Hope for Easter Sunday

2011-04-23T23:28:00.000-07:00

Severus Alexander 222-235 SPES PUBLICA

More than two centuries before the last of the Severan dynasty, probably in the time we call Imperatorial (unless it was actually Augustan) a figure meant to embody Hope (Spes in Latin, Elpis in Greek) was created for Rome. As a personification it ought not to be too naturalistic, especially in the Late Hellenistic / Late Republican period when Neo-Attic or downright Archaizing or Classicizing or Egyptianizing, especially after 30 BC, were fashionably meaningful in their own right.

It actually was based on the type of a Kore, a maiden statue, holding a flower as a modest offering, and holding her skirt to keep it from being soiled; a Kore was an adolescent girl, the adumbration of the young wife and mother soon to be. Think of Iphigeneia.

By the time of Severus Alexander it still was true to type but had gone through many repetitions without reference to the whole of the original idea. Often we see that the die-engraver was not quite certain what sort of flower she was meant to hold.

I was thinking of the literal Germanic meaning of Lent, and of Spring as re-birth, and of Hope as springing eternal. I was remembering how, at the end of World War II, when I was eleven , the Charter of the UNO (as the UN was called at first) meant to me that the unthinkable horrors of the War were over, and Humanity was ready to establish institutions to guard against recurrence of Man's inhumanity to Man. Still our ally, Russia's Dmitri Shostakovich had written a March for the United Nations, easy to sing and sung by our whole school: United Nations on the march, with flags unfurled, Together fight for victory, a free new world (as I recall: it was shortly much less popular). But they would rebuild Coventry Cathedral, we read, and many other things, though not the Eremitani Chapel.

Before I was quite sixteen, we were at war in Korea. Before I was thirty, JFK had been shot.

But it has been only in the last two years, when I have had time to read works that one ought to have read earlier, that I realized how Thucydides really felt. And it just happened that I was reading not only 19th-century political essays but the Federalist Papers and had to live with some simple truths of politics, always divisive, always compromised (in the worse sense of that word), always lying and calling it 'spinning'. And that we are not alone. There but for the grace of nous or God or the Name of your choice, if Nature can be named, there go all of us.

So here I am, right back where I was in my university student days, believing that to do good is to try to avoid doing harm, simply, and trusting only true artists and true scientists, and them only if they can't be bought. We didn't think we were apathetic, but we knew we weren't True Believers, and we did not trust the Flower Children. Yes, they were pretty. But so is that Archaistic, reality-evading figure of Spes that the Roman Empire clung to.

And yet, before the Tetrarchy, Spes became rarer and rarer, and Apollo ceded to Sol, and (even when the same attributes were used) Diana ceded to Sol's sister, Luna. We name things as we are comfortable naming them

Concordia was hammered home relentlessly, and Providentia was insisted upon...

I have been thinking, meditating you might say, and I think I can live and die happily without that sort of a Hope. It is enough to look at things and collect a few things that I like.
Kalo Pascha.

P.S. The March we sang in school that year is different from the United Nations hymn. It is by Shostakovich, but it was for the film "As Thousands Cheer". You can find it on YouTube, either with Leopold Stokowski conducting or, very nice, sung by Igor Goren. I went checking to make sure that our teacher, who told us it was by Shostakovich, was right. It isn't the only simple thing that Shostakovich wrote, either.

On Good Friday

2011-04-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

22 April 2011, 3 pm, purple and green

Occasionally one touches base with the sensibilities of the Middle Ages and remembers Huizinga's study and one's own experience of liturgical symbolism, such as purple for the dark days of the calendar. While I was outdoors this afternoon recording the progress of my amaryllis blooms (especially for the friend who gave me this stupendous bulb, but those who live where they won't survive in the ground like it, too), I saw my neighbor's Holy Week colors, with dark purple for Good Friday. Of course, I have no reason to think that my neighbor chose the handsome plant as a symbol, and usually I, too, would have seen it purely aesthetically, but today is, in fact, Good Friday, and ever since a cruel explosion damaged the whole neighborhood where I was living while in the evening on Good Friday I was peaceably reading my way through the fifth book of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and suddenly a back door was blown out, shards of a window fell on my record collection, the walls heaved and cracks opened in them (in sum, worse than any earthquake I'd ever known in California), I have never again felt quite the same about Good Friday. I disliked violence enough before, and feared political craziness, too, but since then I have tended to regard the crucifixion of Jesus as an act of political violence. Today's news broadcasts, of course, did nothing to make me regard the wages of fear and uncertainty any more equably.
So I thought that purple framed in green would be suitable self-indulgent posting for the coincidence of Earth Day with Good Friday.
P.S. If someone knows the name of the purple-leafed plant, please tell me.

"...if Amy Lowell had it"

2011-04-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

The hyperallergenic presumed Mountain Laurel

As I was photographing the hyperallergenic bush growing over the fence from my neighbor to the west, which I think is a mountain laurel (I'll check), whose blooming is dreaded by those prone to running eyes and aching sinuses, I remembered, as if the page were before me, a book of light verse that my grandfather had. I think it was the summer, 1945, when we children were sent to visit them; I was eleven years old, if so.

From the parodic verse, quite clever to this day, part of a set titled "Hay Fever" I learned that there was a poet named Amy Lowell, and if this parody was any good I might recognize its sources in her own work. It was my first lesson in literary criticism.

But I'd forgotten the name of the clever parodist. It was the charming versifier Christopher Morley, a man of letters well known at the time. I knew him for one of my favorite verses in the anthology "Silver Pennies", on a child remembering having animal crackers and cocoa as a favorite treat.
Morley's verse taught me that children in other social classes and transoceanic societies had different mores from mine of the 1930s in California, and, of course, so did A. A. Milne's Christopher Robin and Robert Lewis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses". My grandparents liked these themselves and gladly read them aloud to me, over and over, till I knew many by heart. If you want to know one more way of raising literate and broadly imaginative children, read quantities of good children's verse to them, some of it neither up to date nor of your own community. And, please, forbear explaining too much. Let them wonder and gradually put it together. The song of "Dark brown is the river, golden is the sand; It flows along forever with trees on either hand..." eventually elucidates much more than can be explained away.

I just checked Wikipedia s.v. Mountain Laurel, and I'm still not sure that my picture is that plant, which the map provided does not indicate for Louisiana. Anyway, it's pretty, but I'm not about to eat it, any more than I'd suck on our Confederate Jasmine (below) to find out whether it's sweet, as honeysuckle is. Bees do like it, though, and it is intensely fragrant, in bloom right now.

Confederate Jasmine

Confederate Jasmine, one warm day later

An orange cut in the Neapolitan manner

2011-04-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

A delicate new rose from a cheap, rough stock

On the pleasures of William Dean Howells

Now that I've read his acknowledged masterpiece, I owe you a book report.

On the basis of two novels from the mid-1880s, I can summarize what I perceive as his virtues.

All of his major characters are handled with equal respect and insight; he is interested in them all.

As much as 9/10 of the text is dialogue, dialogue which may continue for pages or consist of only a word or two, giving us the persons gradually but fully. He almost never tells us what the author thinks of a character, and he uses speech more than stream of consciousness, and to greater effect.

He has much to convey about the legacy of Puritanism but never preaches about it.

He has the detachment of an essayist rather than a sociologist. His is a light touch.

Perhaps even more than he could have guessed, his novels are repositories of information, in this case on the 1880s in New England and on industry and finance, too, which he neither glorifies nor condemns.

When he does stop to say something in the author's voice, it is some delightfully well chosen tidbit: of Bromfield Corey at the breakfast table (out of a clear blue sky and without explanation), "He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in quarters."

His mind and ear seem infallible, for example in the counsel that the Laphams receive from the Reverend Mr. Sewell. It is simply wonderful. His friend Henry James can't touch him in this department.

Doubtless, he will come as a surprise nearly a century and a half later, for the essayist's light touch serves an unflinching realist, but if you find Dreiser a little tiresome you will adore Howells. Similarly, he never makes you feel that you have to be reading for style as such, though he is a consummate stylist. I downloaded 15 books in a single file, and I can hardly wait till I come to one of the collections of essays.

The picture at the head of this post is the best I can do for an illustration. That rambling rose from the open-air market, now more than five years in the ground, has done it again, as lovely as it is robust.

When Wikipedia won't work!

2011-03-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

A new technology, the Kindle, has taken me to some old novels, as I have said, and Hamlin Garland's Preface to his Son of the Middle Border had taken me to his friend and mentor William Dean Howells, 15 books for 99¢. Now I've begun "The Rise of Silas Lapham" (1885). First was "Indian Summer" (1886), which was first in the Kindle set, published the year of my grandfather Phillips' birth. I became very eager to see whether "Indian Summer" got anyone married by the end of the book; with Howells, it is by no means obvious. But I was brought up short when his characters, near the opening of Silas Lapham, riding behind a fine horse, took turns looking around the dashboard to observe the horse's gait. Dashboard? I know what that is on my Toyota Echo and what it was on a Model T Ford, for that matter, whence it is the name of that handy Utility in the Dock of my Macs and in turn an option at the top of my blogspot New Post page and the name of the page that gathers all my blogging stuff conveniently so that I can see, e.g., my latest stats and wonder why my Opera Nobilia (only a few months old) has had nearly 800 hits and this Essays not quite 400. I'm always surprised that there are so many for either, but quite happy about it.
Anyhow, Wikipedia won't tell me what a dashboard was in 1885 or when the word was introduced. I went through three pages of hits. It did tell me everything about its use in software! I went to my "Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles" (in two volumes, 1973), a 'gift' that made buying five books in one year from Book of the Month Club not too onerous. It is a wonderful dictionary. The word dates from 1859, and I visualized it pretty well: 'a board or leathern apron in the front of a vehicle, to catch the mud thrown up by the hooves of the horses...' (whence for motor vehicles, as we know it, but on the very early ones, for which you had to wear dusters, very much as for the hooves, except that it was for the tire-treads). I'd have to go to the whole OED for an explanation of why 'dash', unless it's that the word in architecture, dashing roof waste and water away from the wall, was adopted, if that is the older usage. An interesting word that I'd never wondered about before. As when Hamlin Garland forced me to consider what the Golden Gate looked like viewed from the hills before there was a bright red-orange bridge (1936). And that paint: is it the kind of paint that in his novel Howells made Silas Lapham develop and make his fortune from? My impulse anyway was right: reading literary fiction between the administrations of Lincoln and Wilson is most rewarding.

Just one month later.

2011-03-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

23 March 2011. No more tulip magnolias; the tree will be green until late autumn. And I lost my wager that the rose would bloom by the equinox (it does have plenty of buds).

Having begun documenting the blooming sequence at this latitude (about 31° N.) and on the Gulf of Mexico (well, just where the continental shelf ends and from here south is alluvial), I thought I might post a couple of snapshots, since the light was very good. My English friends are better art photographers of nature than I am, but if you live in North Dakota you can take these as a promise of Spring to come.

23 March 2011. The young orange tree is next door. It has several oranges still (the rest having been picked) and if you know where to look at lower left you can see a bee collecting nectar. Anyway, here are the kind of buds and blossoms that, made by hand, are used on brides' veils.

Postscript to Hamlin Garland

2011-03-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

Green Forest is in the north of Arkansas. She was a teacher.

I have now finished reading A Son of the Middle Border, and I am in no way disappointed. The section we were assigned to read in class in the late 1940s was from his boyhood; the book takes us through the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. I'll see if I can find some more of his work, but that this book is a classic, and not only for midwesterners and not only for Americans, there can be, I think, no doubt.
For right now, tomorrow I need to get back to the essays on coins in my Opera Nobilia blog, but I have also downloaded a famous American I have, until now, only read about, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who was a role model and a friend to Hamlin Garland (and to many others): 15 books for $3.99 for the Kindle. Older than Garland, who was born in 1860. These authors who fall between, say, Hawthorne and Henry James, are the ones I've never read.
What attracts me personally, beyond Garland's literary value, is his interest in how America scattered families far and wide in the space of a generation and his keen observation of everything.
I used to have a snapshot of one maternal great grandmother, Sarah Frances Trewblood, who was born in 1856, but it is lost now. The earliest one I have is from the year that my paternal grandparents, Franklin Lafayette Lawrence and Mary Ferguson, were married, and I have posted it at the top of this.

Here they are in 1935 with myself, probably in Oxnard, CA

Hamlin Garland and Grant Wood

2011-03-17T23:47:00.000-07:00

I used to teach Art Appreciation from time to time; I had some studio arts background (some art historians haven't) and I didn't mind at all helping Freshmen fulfill a requirement. But I insisted on teaching medium by medium and based on works of all kinds and eras and cultures, from the point of view of the artists choosing media and showing how they served the media and the media the artist. I loved using works that did NOT appear in the textbooks, especially when they served a number of purposes. And, so far as I could, I preferred using things that artists like and that freshman students like, too. One artist I liked to use was Grant Wood (the inevitable American Gothic was in the textbook, so I did the others that I like, especially those lithographs, some of them WPA funded, which show rural Iowa, the horses with winter coats facing a blizzard, and a farm boy pouring over his head a bucket full of water from the trough, with the title "Sultry Night"). I do not regard it as homoerotic, nor did the WPA, nor did my students. But it is evocative of the end of a hard day's work in the fields, and it is (as they all are) beautifully composed and executed, and it also shows the lithograph as at once fine art and popular art. I had a hard time finding it on line, and this link to "Sultry Night" is not a good reproduction, but it must serve. The vultures who want to make capital of its nudity and the folks (unlike those of Depression America) who think all nudity dirty make this print hard to find on line.
My own blog posting last month, on whether Americans really do read according to gender, had made me remember the big, thick Reader that we had for English class in Grade 8 (yes, there still are graded readers, or there were when I taught at St. Hilda's in the 1970s, just as there had been in the late 1940s, issued by California State Textbooks). That reader contained part of Hamlin Garland's A Son of the Middle Border. I never had read the whole book and, suspecting that it might really be as good as the textbook editors thought, I went on line and chose to buy it for Kindle at 99¢ (you can get it Free, but I thought that "improved" for eBook was worth a dollar).
I now am halfway through the book, and I find it to be the masterpiece that it is supposed to be. How good his fiction or verse or essays are, I do not know. But Garland in this memoir or autobiography has such great literary and personal integrity, such real reticence where called for, such honesty—everything you can ask for in a writer—that I thought I'd do everyone under 60 years of age, probably, a favor by recommending it without reserve. I mean, no one that I know has mentioned it to me recently, and perhaps there is a tendency to toss it in with, say, Fennimore Cooper. It really isn't like what an outline description of it might make you think. You might neglect to go back and read it, as I had done. How useful it is, repeatedly, to be writing a blog; doing so makes me think of so many things that often I don't know what to choose and (as you have seen) procrastinate by posting flowers.
As for Grant Wood, many people who talk about him have no idea how excellent he is, purely as an artist.

Officially an invasive pest

2011-03-14T12:25:00.000-07:00

Lygodium japonicum, climbing fern, imported in the 1930s, now an invasive weed, which no semi-tropical winter can kill. What you see it did overnight, and even the hardy crêpe myrtle suffers from it.

When I came here I called the stuff bind weed and noticed that it was murder also to the siding on houses. But the University of Florida knows what it is. It is sort of pretty, but so is "Queen Anne's Lace".

It is currently 76°F. (or 24°C.) and, with a very few camellias still on the top of their tree, everything else is burgeoning. Bulbs are coming up. Weeds, needless to say, abound (but I don't mind clover and its kin). I wouldn't even mind lygodium, if it weren't so rampant.

I will make a bet: by the equinox instead of timid little buds (and the red growth just unfurled this morning) there will be whole branches of white roses.

Following the seasons still

2011-03-09T18:19:00.000-08:00

My friends' blogs put my 50 X 100-foot plot to shame, but force me to look hard at what is there. Keeping a blog is like that: it has made me re-read books, read new books, and re-watch old films. When it had rained, and one friend's blog gave me a lesson in mosses, I had to go and look harder at my muddy plot. And I remembered that another was familiar with Kew Gardens. Actually, almost everyone I know is a better amateur botanist than I am. Also, they tend to take better outdoor pictures. So I took the trouble to unscrew the Nikon D80 DSLR with its Macro lens and take it outdoors. That lens hasn't much depth of field, but it's good otherwise. The images added today to the Louisiana Seasons album are a dozen of them, and I'll inquire now about the mosses at the head and about a semi-tropical (I think) tree at the bottom. The moss is what I'd call Just Plain Moss, but you may know its name. All winter the trees, which were wind-borne accidents that arrived a few months before Hurricane Andrew (which blew them over, causing the kinks at the bottom), are naked but in the Spring they grow very fast, needing to reach sunlight, evidently, above the great oak tree. For obvious reasons I think of them as "stovepipe trees", but I can't Google that! Someone said that they cost money, if you buy them, but, had I bought mine, I'd know what they are. In a few weeks they'll have leaves a foot or more in diameter.

Hardy plants on 50' X 100' lot

2011-03-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

23 Feb 2011 Rambling rose, white with shell-pink center, in terrible shape this winter, about to be cut back, is indomitably doing its best to bloom.

Well, I agree, plants needn't be in Kew to be interesting (I tell myself, being past much hiking) and every Spring I wait to see what will have survived. While I wrestle with one of those art historical inquiries into numismatics, I'll resort to semi-tropical hardy perennials on my little lot. I just noticed that the azaleas that were pruned a bit later than they ought to be, and by the yardman's gasoline-powered shears, have just made a lot of buds, still tiny; they will take some weeks. Meanwhile, if I look daily, I may succeed in seeing the wild iris, if they come up (other bulbs will be later, unless you count wild onions), and I can assure you that very soon the rambling rose, which a student brought to me in a pot about five years ago, and which I thought might be a goner with its nearly leafless long branches every which way (it sort of went wild when the painters cut it back almost to the ground a couple of years ago), quite surely is coming back and equally surely will bloom, perhaps before the azaleas do if the days remain above 60°F. Yesterday, we broke a record at 86°F, though overnight it dipped to 44°F. SEMI-tropical! Yesterday the rambler got new growth all over the place. The only question is whether the white roses will have shell-pink centers anymore. Fig tree (immortal) is still dormant.

Lovely only once a year

2011-02-27T20:06:00.000-08:00

February 21, 2011

These trees are even commoner, now, worldwide than pheasants, though I suppose they were first developed in Japan, as their name suggests. Here, in a semi-tropical climate, they blossom in February (even earlier, if I recall correctly, in Berkeley, CA, on the university campus). They are in bud until, suddenly, 48 hours of temperatures in the 60s Fahrenheit brings them out. Then, if there is a bit of wind and rain, they fall, and the tree (which does not have regular magnolia leaves) becomes commonplace again for the rest of the year. I'm not much of a gardener, but I enjoy what came with the house. I hope you all will pardon such trivial posts while I try to work on an Opera Nobilia one, on coins issued by Ovinius Tertullus.

February 23, 2011

Pheasant Refuge in Epiros

2011-02-23T00:48:00.000-08:00

Pheasants at Xirovouni (Dry Mountain) at Ioannina

I subscribe to a couple of Greek blogs, one of which is a newspaper at Igoumenitsa, called Thesprotia News. They keep me in touch with all the local and regional, as well as general, news of a country that I love, things that never make it into the BBC or CNN or, usually, even Public Broadcasting System. I enjoy other bloggers' photos from English wildlife preserves, for example, but seldom succeed in photographing any here (brown pelicans keep eluding me). So I hope Thesprotia News won't mind my sharing this one of theirs, http://thesprotia-news.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-post_2087.html, which at a glance says (in case you don't know modern Greek) this was sent in support of the wildlife refuge by the Sklivani Mountaineering Club. There's a page-long article. I'd like everyone to know that Greece is as fond of birdwatching and devoted to conservation as any country you can name. And the perdika, which retains its ancient name, is as pretty a bird as can be found.

Who reads what? A gender question?

2011-02-13T15:59:00.000-08:00

I just heard Elaine Showalter, author of a new anthology of American women writers, discussing (and her listeners in the famous Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC had their opinions, too) what male and female readers actually read. I know I am not alone in reading at least as many males as females, though I just can't quite get involved in Moby Dick, but I have just as much trouble with Joyce Carol Oates (and I'd say that difficulty with Ayn Rand is due to other considerations), and as a child I liked Howard Pyle, then Jack London very much indeed; I just forgot, for the duration, that I was a girl. It was the author's job to help me do so. I even like Hemingway's heroes, and I dearly love all of Steinbeck. If I find that a male author doesn't quite 'get' a female character, I just make allowance. What is more, I'm very, very fussy about fiction, which, when I love it, is mostly a matter of style, but, so long as it's readable, I enjoy history and economics and sciences, no matter how inadequate my educational background (neuroscience, astrophysics, et al.). I don't care whether my archaeology is written by males or females (I belong to a very open discipline, in which women directed excavations a century and more ago).
But at Showalter's talk, people were saying that males won't read females, and, even more emphatically, little boys in America won't read books about girls. As I recall, I can't remember any boy that I knew reading, say, Anne of Green Gables, the way I read Hamlin Garland. Don't boys read Willa Cather?
Showalter says that the virtual segregation is more American than European. Is it true that it's because we had no Jane Austen or George Eliot (for example)? Is Edith Wharton too late to count? What, I ask, is the possible importance of a young national culture being, simply, so young, with so much of the population having not very literary roots? Or are Harvard brats very much like Oxbridge brats?
I just read Nicole Krauss's Great House. Don't I just get a better insight into being a much younger woman and a Jewish woman, because she writes so supremely well that I chose her new novel? If a male reader has enough literary sense to read it, won't he also learn a lot about women? Even if, like me, he's an elderly non-observant Protestant?
Of course, women in love are different from men in love, usually, but isn't that difference worth reading about? I'm not talking about 'bodice busters' (soft porn).

Artists on Art: Cézanne

2011-02-07T23:22:00.000-08:00

I have begun an album, Cézanne at the Louvre, because he made so many drawings there. I still don't have quite what I was looking for, but I can add to it when possible, and, even though the views are not ideal the point can still be made.
An earlier post distinguished art to illustrate or celebrate from art for its own sake.
The relationship of existing art and living artists is different. Here I do not mean artists using existing works to make a statement about art, especially in post-modern art, but artists using existing pictures and sculptures just as they use nature. I mean, Monet used the façade of Rouen Cathedral and Haystacks and avenues of Poplars all alike. And Cézane, though he was bashful enough to prefer a Death of Sardanapalus or any other pre-existing symplegma to a studio full of naked models and, especially in his youth, copied a number of such works for not only formal interest but also their subject matter, he also, drawing or drawing with watercolor added, studied statues both ancient and modern (not only Michelangelo but also, e.g., Puget) in exactly the same way, exploring the essential forms, as he did skulls and apples and the limestone (I think) formations on his own land.
And when an artist like Cézanne takes an elaborately twisted Eros teasing an agonized old Centaur, he draws it so that you know that he sees what its originator meant, not about the teasing subject, a conversation piece, but about the sculpture. We don't know the Hellenistic sculptor's name, but his Eros is easily the equal of Verrocchio's putto in Florence at the Palazzo Vecchio. I am almost certain that I have seen other Cézanne drawings of the Borghese Centaur, but I'll have to add them when I find them.

(the apples and the bather are, of course, extraneous)

(the Hadrianic, Tivoli, black basalt centaur in Rome is more academic and has no Eros)

In this case Cézanne studies the forms just as if this were one of the Michelangelo Slaves, and never mind the playful erotic subject matter.

But when Cézanne sees something in a sculpture, such as foreshortened forms that are always essentially important to his art, he doesn't mind that it is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (with its tufted mattress, which may have come from Bernini's studio but does not belong to it). Indeed, if the 'scandalous' front view were as sculpturally interesting he might even have drawn that, though (I daresay, from studying his drawings as a whole) not with any emphasis on the combination of breasts and penis.

Note that Cézanne was not interested in the facial features, either. I apologize for my 1982 photograph. Somewhere I must have a better one.

Postscript: the book with a whole chapter on Cézanne at the Louvre is the large illustrated edition of John Rewald's classic monograph on Cézanne. The illustrations are, of course, under copyright...

Menuhin plays Delius

2011-01-27T21:59:00.000-08:00

It is not enough just to have the concert favorites of Delius, Suites, and A Village Romeo and Juliet. I saw this one on line. Of several, it was the last to come, because it had to come from Europe. The recordings are not very old (1980 and 1981), late analog originally and very fine.

When I was little, my grandfather had an acoustical recording of Master Yehudi Menuhin, age 12,** and I always have liked his recordings in each successive format; his violin is more introspective than most, though, certainly, he possessed virtuosity; he didn't flaunt it.

When I saw the listing of the Delius sonatas, which I didn't know anyhow, I thought how much I'd like to hear Menuhin on Delius. I've had the CD (actually a pair of CDs) for ten hours now and have been listening to them ever since.

After half a lifetime not paying serious attention to Delius, I finally decided to pay him the same attention as I do Britten, which he certainly repays. And yes, I think that Menuhin is perfect for the violin sonatas.

It is a lifetime habit, to immerse myself in one composer, or genre, or painter at a time. Probably everyone does that.

** The dates don't jibe. I'll see if I can find the disk. He was born in 1916, and for EMI recorded first at age 13. The record, as I remember it, was a Victrola red-seal. My grandfather may have told me that he was only 12. But I may be wrong that it was one-sided. So call it a typical problem of early memory.

P.S. Not too bad; he not only was still "Master" but was still with Louis Persinger. Judging from that Maestronet.pdf (link on Persinger) a likely date would be 1925-1927, so even younger than 12. The Victrola record is electric (VE; 'Orthophonic') and two-sided, but that label looks rather early to me, and the repertoire is not that of an adult musician. I'll ask a friend how to look up the numbers, which will give a precise date. For recording experts, here, below, is the label (A and B). click on image to zoom.

P.S. again: I have corrected the spelling of 'Menuhin'. To my surprise, I did not find a matrix number list for the red-seal issues (though I found one for the pop black-seal of the same period). There is an excellent list for Stokowski and the Philadelphia orchestra; comparing the numbers for 10" releases suggests 1927-8. The "Scroll"-design labels with the VE and 'Orthophonic' and 'Victrola' date between 1925 (but initially without the scroll design) and 1928 (when the name changed to RCA Victor—bought out). The numbers don't jibe with those shared with HMV. The authors of the Stokowski and G&S sites remark that Victor was sometimes cavalier about matrix numbers. Therefore, that Master Yehudi Menuhin, as I suppose the man at the record store told my grandfather, was 12 years old is possible, but he was not older. I found exactly my record in an online auction list, but without any documentary value beyond the contents of the label. Comparison with the John McCormack discography suggests that the recording was not long after January 1928 and this pressing before the change to RCA Victor.

Label of early Menhuin 78rpm, cited above

Teegee: Essays

Museum T-Shirts and Onesies

A modest Royal note

A Photographic Entr'acte

Cosmological Words

Belfast on Antiques Roadshow

More Lucretiana

What I've Been Thinking . . .

To punctuate the series

V. Middle Corinthian Black Figure

IV. Exceptional Picture Vases

III. Early Archaic Glory (cont'd)

Vase Painting. III. Early Archaic Glory in the 7th c. BCE

Vase Painting. II. Beyond Most Handbooks

Vase Painting. I. Athens First: no accident

To give some time to the other blog...

Arts in Minneapolis

Other attempts in pocket photography

Criteria that aren't Judgments

A Porsche 356A, 1959, of fond memory

Dating Difficult but Solid Walnut

Nature Morte: Some Single Examples

Nature Morte with Mixed Messages?

Nature Morte in response to the Modern

Traditional Nature Morte

The Game of Nature Morte

Glory to Technology

The Year of Webcor, Reed, and Fischer-Dieskau

All Religions Alike

Taking Positions

The most amiable author

With Reference to Yorkshire

The accidental triad, put to use

Perhaps Final Flooding Report

Updating the River

Old Man River

Hagia Triada, an accidental Triad

What a weekend!

Hope for Easter Sunday

On Good Friday

More reading: on Susan Sontag

"...if Amy Lowell had it"

An orange cut in the Neapolitan manner

When Wikipedia won't work!

Just one month later.

Postscript to Hamlin Garland

Hamlin Garland and Grant Wood

Officially an invasive pest

Following the seasons still

Hardy plants on 50' X 100' lot

Lovely only once a year

Pheasant Refuge in Epiros

Who reads what? A gender question?

Artists on Art: Cézanne

Menuhin plays Delius