Finally had to learn about tarot cards

Starting with early Dover books…

I found this on Wikipedia.  It is astonishing what stuff people will post with limited usage just because , I guess, reading tarot cards is a business?  Anyhow, all the early ones are for games.

Back when I was a student, the Economy miracle was the catalogue of Dover books.  I mean, you could get things like a great (but O.P.) edition of Dürer's woodblock prints, reduced but still beautiful and large on good paper very reasonably.  But now all sorts of grubby stuff is jealously protected from free use just because it's for fortunetelling.  It was from Dover reprints, though, that I saw how many people were avid to pseudopsychologize from the Tarot; the books flew off the shelves to students.  I thought they were corny, in a class with ouija boards and crystal balls.  The happy cardplayers in the photo I found (above) make their game look better than Old Maid but similar in principle–much easier than learning to play Bridge.  Cribbage, too, is easy fun.

But yesterday, seeing the delightful artwork of a friend who uses the Tarot repertories as a point of departure, I had to wonder what could be meant by a Seven of Cups in designs that also use animals.  The Wikipedia provided all I needed.   I did know, of course, that quantities of pre-scholarly Egyptian stuff and Late Greco-Roman personifications and astrology and numerology bestrew Tarot decks, and, beyond that, followers of Jung found more than fun in them. But I am allergic to Jung, so I hadn't got any closer to Tarot cards than my exposure to my friend's delightful use of them.

Actually, I am very happy to know that the Joker really is the same as the everyday deck's Joker, that the Cups equate to Hearts, that Trumps are Trionfi, and so on.  But the Survival of the Pagan Gods, which I knew from Seznec but also from Panofsky are, like the survivals from Ovid, for instance, and the gradual development of modern languages from Late Latin (and every aspect of the Dark Ages– Dark because for a couple of hundred years they really were obscure) are so profoundly interesting as such that taking them as intellectual playthings bothers me.  I don't want, in any case, to titillate myself with "secrets" of the future or of the past; I am more than content to live each day as if it is my last.  

The great fact is that the Tarot for fortune-telling is actually a phenomenon of the late 19th and 20th century.  The Tarot decks themselves developed only in the Early Renaissance.  The Occult, while always appealing to the Curiosity, the venal sin of idle and lazy minds (not to be confused with scientific curiosity), is as Early Modern as Sherlock Holmes' use of cocaine.

I do find myself interested in putting together all the bits of partial learning and partial understanding that I may have collected in my eight decades.  Surely that is what memory is for?

I need to think more about these questions.

Concerning NOVA on Colosseum

This is from one of my own old slides,  probably from the 1980s.  It does show the whole oval at one of the rare times when it wasn't covered, as for some performance.

These are both very old textbook diagrams, old enough to have been in the early editions of Bannister and Fletcher, but they are just scans from my teaching files and were taken from old slides that didn't bother to cite the sources.  Not that they are bad, though.

Some Ineluctable Questions 
Quite rightly, NOVA presumes no previous knowledge; their historical archaeology pages themselves can serve as invitations to study the subjects.  So the following are offered just because it is useful to have them at hand, in a medium that holds still and provides a different context.
•• On the relationship of Vespasian's Amphitheater (in the parts of it covered in the NOVA program), to parts of Nero's Domus Aurea, see (in the second volume of the Pelican History of Art's 1994 pb edition), J. B. Ward-Perkins, Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 59–61 and for the site of the artificial lake fig. 26, also for the position of the colossal statue of Sol which gave the Flavian amphitheater its nickname).
•• For a good, convenient translation of the original texts relevant to the Domus Aurea, pp. 140–144 and to the Flavian works, pp. 153, ff, and for the key passage from Martial, p. 158, see J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Rome (in the Sources and Documents series).  It is better to read through the whole section for Flavian architecture.
•• For a good picture of Roman contractors at work, with pulleys and all, see the relief from the Tomb of the Haterii (itself late Flavian).  This is a little hard to interpret literally, but should be considered if you have any doubts about how Roman builders might work.  It is illustrated, full-page, in the first edition (1991)—but not later ones—of the Ramages' fine textbook, Roman Art, fig. 5.16.

*****

Though a NOVA program is not very long, this one could edit all its general Social Studies comment and gain at least 10 minutes without losing anything germane to historical engineering and architecture; background if desired for middle-school use should be relegated to the web site.

I found the study by Heinz Beste (of the DAI, Rome) and the work of the engineers who realized it so interesting that I promptly recommended the program to all my like-minded friends.  Then, awaking in the middle of the night as persons of my age often do, the questions began to arise.

• Do any of the other large, Imperial amphitheaters have such deep and complicated hypogaea as the Colosseum?  Did the program even mention the artificial lake (yes, in passing), let alone its practical relevance?
• Why was the hydrologist who discovered that the huge water tunnels found while digging the new Metro line led straight to the Colosseum so surprised?  Why were the scriptwriters for the program surprised when experiment showed that (after a major cloudburst filled the Colosseum) opening these tunnels emptied it so rapidly that a morning naumachia could be followed by afternoon chariot races?  (I had to wonder whether the hydrologist really had been surprised).
• Why was the geographical site for the find of gladiators' skulls that clearly had been perforated by the trident-like weapons not named?
• Why was the dedicatory inscription of Vespasian changed much later in the Empire—I'm sure this is known. and young people are going to want to ask?  And why not show one or more of the other inscriptions that, now lacking their bronze letters, have been convincingly elucidated by the study of the holes in which the bronze letters were pinned?
• What is the evidence for saying that the funds for Vespasian's amphitheater, finished and dedicated by Titus, came from booty, from Titus's sack of Jerusalem?  All due respect to David and Solomon, could anything in Jerusalem have been rich enough for that job?  Even if Titus hadn't been building new Baths and restoring central Rome after another great fire—and all this in the space of his two-year reign.  

I'd never fuss about details in the answers to such questions.  What bothers me is that questions that hold together the whole presentation weren't even raised.  If other amphitheaters were not so large and deep, doesn't Nero's lake come into the question?  I can't pretend to have checked every big amphitheater, and probably most had a tunnel or two for delivering animals (old Greek theaters sometimes have a tunnel for some deus ex machina). Considering all the Imperial waterworks hereabout,  how can supplying the naumachiae have been a problem, anyway?  The Romans were masters of water management.  Why, even the Hellenistic Greeks were good at it.

It is good to consider the Colosseum as part of Flavian history.  Problem is, they failed to do so.  OK, babble if you wish about the populus participating in the glory of Rome.  But not at the expense of the purported subject of the TV program.  And not using those last-century illustrations of gladiatorial sport that used to be in all the Latin I textbooks.  If you want some extra images, the Circus Maximus is available near by.  You could even go to Piazza Armerina  (though it is confusing to use it, or North African mosaics, as if the Games in Rome were just the same, necessarily).

The readers should study this program for themselves, which is so good a beginning to figuring out how the animals actually were managed (not only how they were brought up to the arena level).  Having done Heinz Beste's part so well, it is a shame that they wasted footage on the sort of stuff that tour guides rejoice in.  How does it happen?  Without any authority I suggest that parts of three essays (on Heinz Beste's work, on the Austrian work on the wounds and weapons of real gladiators, and on the waterworks of central Rome) were available, and the editors / writers who put it together were neither well informed nor closely supervised, while the professor who spoke of the Romans in general may not have truly collaborated with any of the others.

In sum, as so often when one is disappointed in a newly published book, this is a program without an author.

P.S.  I learned how to stream the program and must report that Heinz Blest is an architect rather than an engineer and that the person who provides most of the interpretive narrative is Katherine Welch of NYU.  Also, the later dedicatory inscription is dated to the 5th century.  And it is not to imply that they are wrong that I posted this but to share questions.

On the Fanciful Parts of the Preceding

Frontispiece from the 1941 reprint of an edition of Palgrave's Golden Treasury (Garden City, 1907) with four color plates "reproduced from paintings by Maxfield Prarrish".  They are not all in the same Parrish maniera, and I cannot believe that they were done expressly for this book, otherwise an unillustrated text of Palgrave, ending with Wordsworth.  The list of illustrations gives as a caption to this one Shakespeare's "Tell me where is Fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head?"  But I know of no Maxfield Parrish more charming per se than this one.  I found the book in a secondhand bin, and it is not only ex-library but ex-School Library and in condition by no means 'collectible.

Who Has Maxfield Parrish Prints Today?

My grandmother, until well after WW II, still had the pair of reproductions of two of those Maxfield Parrish horizontal paintings of mildly symbolic character with titles such as Evening or Summer Dream; one of the theaters (the Curran?) in San Francisco had his paintings, but vertical, on its walls (at least, I thought they were his…).  From the first decades of the 20th century more of his work was illustrations for books or magazines, like the lantern-lighting by young persons dressed like Pierrots, above.  One caption in Google Images says it came from Collier's magazine, for 1908 (that illustrated Palgrave went through several printings, down to 1930).  One caption in the Images says it was by a follower of Parrish's, but only one.  No matter.  
It exemplifies what Parrish did, and it probably was inspired by the Sargent painting, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sargent-carnation-lily-lily-rose-n01615 which is still popular today and which I first saw reproduced in one of my grandmother's ladies' magazines.  When finally I saw the original Carnation Lily Lily Rose and had developed a lifetime admiration for everything that Sargent ever did, it only renewed my passion for Sargent's work: see the Tate Gallery's page on it, linked above.
Parrish was not a great painter, as Sargent was, but he was very good indeed (though the dreamy evening landscapes may pall).  And my love of Sargent explains why I bought that grubby Palgrave (already owning a couple in decent editions) about a quarter century ago.
http://hugoxavie5.wix.com/hxavier#!scribners-illustrated-classics-/cyev
A couple of other titles in that Classics edition also were illustrated by Parrish.
You will wager that I also unrepentantly love Jessie Wilcox Smith, and I do; I met her in the illustrations for A Child's Garden of Verses, also published in that fine series of Scribner's reprints c. 1955.  As for R. L. Stevenson, his Treasure Island in that series was illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, and the whole Illustrated Classics is a cultural treasure, in my opinion.
It is not a question, I think, of Post-Impressionism and Cubism being good and figural subjects (especially illustrations) being bad, as Art, but of the best in any category, if objectively of enduring value, being worthy of lifetime study and pleasure.
Similarly with generations (this does seem super-obvious, even objectionable): in distinguishing generations of authors (or other artists) D. E. Stevenson's 'Janetta Walters' (née Jane Watts) in the Barbara Buncle novels seems to be indistinguishable from the authors who publish in Harlequin Books (for example), is a spoof that could be made today; the novels for sale at Walmart, for example, are just like the romantic "bodice busters" that my mother got in the mail from the Dollar Book Club, and they still sell just as well.  What is astonishing, in fact, about D. E. Stevenson is her consistency in writing marriage-in-the-end novels for a more literate feminine readership.  I may have read no bodice-busters since I was in school, but I have enjoyed six of hers (which are not prudish but certainly decent).  But I am not much of a judge, because detective stories are the fiction I tolerate best.
Anyway, A. F. Benson (of the same cohort as, say, Picasso or V. Woolf—actually, of Henri Matisse) was fully a generation older than D. E. Stevenson.  Both wrote a lot, simply had to write, it seems.  Both are writers that I enjoy for their writing and for their literary high fun.  But his most enduring work, I think, will be Mapp and Lucia, rather late in his career, and hers, I venture (not having read so many) will be the Barbara Buncles, which are relatively early in her career.  His c. 1930  are his most free-wheeling (I think of that trip on the kitchen table), but hers  proceed from the onset of WW II to become more conventional from a literary point of view.  I mean, I like A.F. Benson so well that I'll even read his ghost stories, though it is not a genre that appeals much to me, apart from The Turn of the Screw.
By the way, I've gotten round to Benson memoirs, and I cannot recommend As We Were too highly (just get past the first chapter).  Free and easy but discrete and insightful memoirs of an Archbishop of Canterbury's son must be very rare indeed.
I must not try to summarize all the pleasures of a Great Depression child in the literature of her (or his, I'm sure) parents and grandparents.  And I am somewhat limited by the eye-ease of Kindle (and other electronic) editions.  And I let this go stale while I reacted to the World.

"The First Family" (1962)

Buster

Not that he needs another portrait, but freezing weather demands a bed on the denim jeans.

Some folks feel that pets' comfort in sleeping on unwashed clothes that retain their owner's personal scent betrays nasty taste.  They forget that dogs follow scents and that cats who couldn't care less what an opossum looks like are greatly put off by their specific odor.  I have a neighbor whose cat for years found his way around quite easily when he'd been blinded by glaucoma.  As for Buster and my bluejeans, they are to him recognizable as a cub's den, where kits find one another and pile up till their mother returns from hunting.

I had in mind to head this posting by (a) a cartoon, and (b) by an album cover:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Family_(album).  All the dozens of reproductions of (b) are under copyright, and, I guess, so is the cartoon (a), which I recall seeing in The New Yorker just after the death of Pope John XXIII; some of you will recall that he called Vatican Council II and that he was famous for having come of peasant stock and being far more open-minded than Pius XII.  The caption was, "He was a good pharaoh" and it illustrated some rather housewifely Egyptian women (water jars on their heads) processing past pyramids, palms, and camels.  I have searched and searched for the cartoon but only located the caption for it.  So Buster is their stand-in.
As I recall, the Kennedys did not object very much to the LP record, and I never heard of the Church objecting to the pyramids.  Queen Victoria's offense at all sorts of improprieties (which astonishes us) was not something she'd deign to mention, and her subjects, one gathers, took for granted their license to be somewhat rude in their humor, just as Halévy and Offenbach used Jupiter's hypocritical womanizing when they figured him as Napoleon III and represented the personified Public Opinion as a rigorously judgmental Victorian lady in black.  When all bored Olympus begged 'Jupin' to take them along with Orpheus when Propriety demanded his return there, no one thought that the preference for Hades/Hell was sacrilegious.

My generation, which since WW II had regarded our presidents (and the UK royal family, too), and the Church, both Catholic and Protestant (consider Norman Rockwell pictures) as inherently serious, loved Pope John XXIII, even if some of us were non-believers who privately loved "The Merry Minuet" and did not take the words of Christmas songs literally, inwardly whooped and hollered at "The First Family" (which is still available from Amazon, by the way) when it came out, not least because we really enjoyed the Kennedy family, with Jackie speaking French in France, with the lovely little children, and all.  How great to make fun of grass-roots idealization of them!  It wasn't as if Pres. Kennedy hadn't real problems to deal with.  It wasn't as if they were really plaster saints, either.  But what joy to laugh with the songs on the LP record, how great to be free to do so.
Then, of course, he was shot.  Me, without a word, I put away the record.  Sure, they weren't saints, but their human loss...

It is not, of course, that France was the first nation to turn the unbearable into comedy.  Greece and Rome  (Japan, too) had done so, and gloriously.
Our European tradition springs from Greece.  I'll just mention Aristophanes.  At least as irreverent as CharlieHebdo, and still profoundly funny.
The Athenian Theophrastus encapsulated tiresome Athenian types in his Characteres, and in the 17th century Jean de la Bruyère published a French version that is quite faithful to Theophrastus (himself a follower of Aristotle).http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7736 for Jean de la Bruyère's close version of Theophrastus.
The old Loeb classical library for Jebb's edition, Greek facing English, is available at http://www.eudaemonist.com/biblion/characters   Jebb is hard to compete with: the text of the Characcteres is lucid Attic Greek, but you do need to know the finer meaning of the key words in context (just using the Latin equivalent given in a standard dictionary is often unenlightening at best and robs the work of its edge).  One English edition offered in Amazon is not only unedited (OCR not checked; punctuation abused) but just plain bad.  It is the one touted for having illustrations of the types.
If there's a new Loeb volume, I'll come back to add it.

How can any of our talking heads forget Rabelais?  Some of CharlieHebdo is Gargantua indeed.

Even the best broadcast commentary, the best I have found being that on NPR's "On the Media", does not mention the Greek and Roman (think of Juvenal!) roots of our tradition.  These roots are in fact older than Islam (not that a few centuries matter, of course).  Here are some links to start with:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=aristophanes&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7736 for Jean de la Bruyère's close version of Theophrastes


http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=gargantua&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 for Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel

Some of the broadcast commentary explaining the problems in refraining from reproducing CharlieHebom has been especially good:
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/on-the-media-2015-01-09/?utm_source=local&utm_medium=treatment&utm_campaign=carousel&utm_content=item0

News and Ideas at the Reilly-Reeves House

The Turreted House at the Corner of Park and Cherokee­

Last year, when a friend pointed out to me the singular features of this house, I was eager to learn about it.  At that time it still had a blue plastic protective sheet on part of the roof to protect it after damage due (I think) to Hurricane Gustave, and it needed a good paint job.  See the Teegee Essays blog posts from January and February of 2013. ­

Now an exemplary paint job, including details of shutters, etc., is almost complete.  I have added a new album of nine supplementary views: https://plus.google.com/photos/102498681030579488308/albums/6079512143570108641?banner=pwa

*******

Yes, it was Richard Norman Shaw who marketed the fancy houses from c. 1870 to c. 1910 as "Queen Anne".  Reading surveys of Nicholas Pevsner's generation I had been puzzled: we had endless specimens of the style that flourished about up to World War I both in California and in the Pacific Northwest to our north, where a whole neighborhood in Seattle has been called "Queen Anne".

But in the middle of the 20th century, when I was studying at Berkeley and labeling and filing 2X2 slides used in teaching there (and socializing with graduate students in both architecture and the figural arts, though never, I admit,  taking a course in 19th century American architecture), no one called these houses anything but Late Victorian (not even the occasional friends who owned one of them)—not that Victoria had been our queen, but certainly Anne hadn't.  At least some of us knew that she belonged to the generation of Jane Austen, say, and thought of Chippendale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chippendale)  and the Image album, s.v. chippendale furniture) to furnish it.  I don't know how our Baton Rouge house is furnished, but I can't quite see a forest of cabriolet legs in it (there's a good page on them in Wikipedia, s.v.) or even an American version of Hepplewhite.

As so often (but why didn't I find this page last year?),  the Wikipedia comes down hard and clear on the real estate abuse of "Queen Anne": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Anne_style_architecture , not deigning to call the American (and other colonial) "painted ladies" (their San Francisco nickname now) by Queen Anne's name unless prefaced by "revival".

Most of the antique or pseudo-antique furniture, from which I got my first notions of furniture styles (remember: no internet, no TV shows on Great Homes or Antiques Roadshow, no Wiki, though the Britannica of 1910, s.v. Furniture, does have five plates of excellent examples) came from Grand Rapids factories as they passed through my grandfather's shop, and the furnishings of the Reilly-Reeves house, whatever their stylistic affiliations, could just as well come from that industry, already by 1912 more than two generations old, and may have been of hardwoods finer than ash.  It doesn't matter; I think houses back then were named more for their period style than for charming association with earlier queens.  In fact, the commercial use of "Queen Anne" is so entrenched for Late Victorian that is both fancy and expensive that the Wikipedia labels the houses of the end of the 18th century "English Queen Anne".

*******

I have come round to this because a good friend sent me the Kindle edition of D. E. Stevenson's "Miss Buncle's Book", new to me and utterly delightful.  She was Scottish, born in Edinburgh in 1892, fully a generation younger than the very English E. F. Benson.  The novel in question, the first of half a dozen, appeared in 1934 just three years later than E. F. Benson's first Lucia.  Both start in a village of more limited possibilities and in the second volume move to a 'better' one, Benson's famous Tilling (which is Rye) and Stevenson's Wandlebury which may or may not be near Cambridge but does take its name from what is now a preservation Park (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=wandlebury+country+park).  That too may be coincidental, and its justly famous self-referential device of a novel written within a novel was unique, but the handling of characters and its sheer joy suggest irresistibly, to me at least, that Stevenson, who had written only one novel before this one, was practically intoxicated by Lucia.  I do recommend the Buncle books, which we owe to Kindle (the 1930s by a Scottish woman not being, perhaps, financially feasible publishing), but with the Baton Rouge promise of a blog post on the Reilly house puzzling me by being called "Queen Anne" I had to notice the two authors' descriptions of fine houses of the late 18th century, that the heroine is devoted to and the authors describe quite accurately.  Now I don't know what D. F. Stevenson actually lived in, but on line she is said to be related to Robert Louis Stevenson (not, to be sure, to an archbishop of Canterbury), and, I guess, is one of that intellectual bourgeoisie who all knew one another—and she writes that way, as Wodehouse, for example, does not, though he's just as clever as they are.  Wodehouse didn't live in a country house, such as he sent Bertie Wooster to, except sporadically.  The way one describes a house that one loves is quite different from a TV presentation of Chatsworth or Castle Howard (used to film Brideshead Revisited, and by Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Castle%20Howard) whether a smaller house or a great one.  Now D. F. Stevenson loves the house she puts the second novel in the same way as Benson loved his Lamb House (for which I refer you to some very good photos of the house and the whole town (in Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Lamb%20House%20Rye).

But the point is: whoever did it (I think in the Registry of noteworthy buildings in Baton Rouge), calling the Reilly-Reeves house Queen Anne of a sort, all those writers who need copy have copied the label (usually taking pains to disclaim it) and find nothing reliable but the photos in the EBRLibrary collection and the data attributed to "the courthouse", whence we have names for a contractor and an architect (both unknown to me, but no matter: an architect was hired to realize the owner's vision) and the date, also guaranteed, it is high time we considered the house itself and not some realtor's label.  Incidentally, if one chooses to trust the memories of someone of the family but elderly, and if the building of the Gottlieb House over on Drehr really was a direct response to that on Park Boulevard, it would seem to endorse a pre-World War I dating for the Gottlieb house.  Only one interview says so, but does assert that they had the first telephones.  One thing you can trust from Antiques Roadshow is the folkloric historicity of family memories.  It is like the genealogy of the Troy Tale: there is truth in these traditions but for accurate data…  If you've read thousands of student papers 'researched' in a branch public library (to avoid going to the university library) and then boiled down to make sense to the writer…  On the other hand, until I read those two descriptions of fine houses beloved by the authors who put their principal characters in them, and found the Wikipedia article, s.v. Queen Anne Architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Anne_style_architecture

I hadn't dared to let the house itself be its own evidence, making a stylistic statement unlike any in the handbooks or old catalogues.  But I admire the family who are proud of it, and for more than two decades I have been glad to live in its neighborhood.

The Gottlieb House

The One Truly Different House in the Garden District

The front through the great tree

 When, Depression baby that I was, I had saved enough to put down the full 20% of the asking price on a house in the neighborhood that I liked,  I got a 6-room 1928 bungalow, with fixtures just like the ones of my childhood.  Our "Garden District" offered dozens of these.  My oldest neighbors then were about my present age, and many of them were the original owners, and they knew all about our Garden District.  As Southerners, though (I was from northern California, via New York City), they meant that they knew all of  Who was Who.  Our corner-lot houses are larger and most of them are the ones with family names.

Even in that category (I have written about several of them) this house is outstanding.  Kathryn Darsey, who lived next door to me and was about 80 even when I moved in, told me that the house above was the Gottlieb House.  In 1986 I didn't yet have a computer, let alone Wikipedia, but I did remember the name, partly because she didn't like the house (which I loved at sight), because it was dark.  I should have had the sense to photograph it while it was still dark: for this kind of brick and this kind of design, "dark" is like that original finish that the Keno twins on the Antiques Roadshow insist upon.

Does anyone have good photographs of the house before 2002, when, together with some necessary repairs, it was painted with the cream-colored paint that also is a sealant?

The forms are so powerful that it still has plenty of character, even without white window frames and black screens setting off the dark red brick.  But having a family to fully inhabit it is the most important; it's just that I'd like to have a record of it  as I remember it.

Thing is, since taking pictures of oak trees is a no-no on campus, for a faculty member whose colleagues teach photography (like putting a perfect pink rose on a wedding altar or photographing the Old Wagon Wheel or a Mail Pouch barn somewhere out West), I would go and photograph these equally grand oaks just three blocks from my own house—and only look at the house; I got into the study of houses only about 2011.  And I was timid to trespass: anyone who could have that house and maintain its gardening outclassed me by far, besides my having been taught as a little Presbyterian not to pry or snoop in other peoples' lives.  So one day as I drove past it, it was all cream-colored.  In Berkeley I had always envied the big brown shingle houses, pre-World War I, and knew that people who were working their way through college at 90 cents per hour could never have them.

Anyway, when a friend asked me to take pictures all around it, I was delighted for the excuse to oblige.

You can check as I did, in Wikipedia: The Gottliebs were bankers; they had founded the best and most solid of our banks, in the days before all our banks were bought out.  One of them was an important Louisiana state senator, too.  They certainly were qualified to build this great, solid house, apparently using imported brick and on property ampler than any other in Baton Rouge.  So "Gottlieb House" is correct.

When this old lady showed up with a camera, people were very friendly.  And I promised to post the pictures and not to relay any gossip I might be given and not to ask to come inside: this is a whole family real home.  I really should like to get a Plan, and someone thinks she has one.  It is true that some early Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie Style houses generally handle a porte cochere similarly, and I think that the date I was given, 1915 or 1917, must be about right.  (The Register of houses in Drehr Place gives very generalized dating, especially for houses so different from the Colonial manner or Cottage Style that is prevalent here).  My knowledgeable friends and former colleagues assure me that it is not Wright, but I see what they mean about Prairie Style; it is anything but Gracious Southern.  Colonial's nice, too, but very, very different.  This house is much more like many in well-to-do parts of America, including the Northwest as well as the Midwest.  Not that I've studied it yet.  I have written so many posts about houses that my neighbors tend to suppose I'm an architectural historian.  But what I am is a classical archaeologist and art historian and, admittedly, a thorough dilettante.

32 labeled images in Albums (use link):

Albums

and in

+Google (slokind)

Please feel free to leave comments at foot of this Post, in Picasa album, or in +Google.

Here are the oak trees  about the time of Hurricane Andrew,
taken with a Nikon F camera on Tri-X film.

Post-modern Cartography!

Not that Google Earth isn't great
(but a photograph is not the same thing as a map)
This was meant to be a footnote to the Post of July 29.  Here it is, better late than never.

So long as I was teaching undergraduate courses, as one means of keeping abreast of what the freshmen were getting from my colleagues, I browsed every semester among the textbooks ordered for history, geography, anthropology, et al.  It was quite by accident that I came across one called Human Antiquity, in its 2nd edition (1990 by Feder and Park.  I do not believe that the authors had ever checked the maps (and some of the dates such as that for Friederick Engels on p. 398, where "(1942)" must be that of some other textbook, Engels having died in 1884, indeed, according to the Wikipedia article, in 1892).

The map, reproduced above, is possibly the worst every provided for college students.  Its most egregious faults, the Black Sea, Pontos Euxinos, shown the color of land, and all of Mesopotamia (though left unclosed at the top!) colored blue.  But, someone surely will protest, the Young will not try to read the map; it is really just an obligatory ornament—though, as a "location of sites", its placing Halaf in the water is shocking.  The more you look, the worse it is: even with the omission of the Danube's mouth, 'GREECE' ought not to be printed where it is.

This textbook is not from a great publisher, but as a 2nd Edition…!  When I was in Middle School in the 1940s, the maps in our books (issued on loan by California to all the students, and after a long war grubby and inky from long use) never had such inadequacies as this one has.

I remembered this awful map when the Islamic State took Mosul, and the Kurds helped the refugees come down from the Sinjar mountains.  I had to go back to the EB of 1910, s.v. Syria, to find my way through the news reports.  The historical atlases I had on hand either omitted too many modern names or too many ancient ones (I knew that the Mitanni had been up there east of Aleppo or Damascus and west of Mosul, but not exactly where, relative to any of the groups of modern Kurds).  And where had the ancestors of the Kurds been (well, soon I did learn that they are Indo-Iranian, so that hadn't been earlier than Media—and how placed relative to Scythians?).  And what about all those other names concerning which I know little more than how to spell them?

Before computer graphics routinely could make maps better, they made them really bad: not very good even when not cheap, not excellent any cheaper than the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, which is to say in atlases as such, not as illustrations in books with illustrations.  In the Art of the World series, published by Crown in the USA and, in German, originally, by the Holle Verlag, in the early 1960s, the maps are reproduced from line drawings, photographically, and visibly in plain pen and ink, usually by someone handy with a crow-quill or a Rapidograph (yes, it's in the Wikipedia).  Some of them were neatly done but with a dismal ignorance and insensitivity to geography.  In that series of archaeological books their quality varies.

Map provided for Edith Porada's Ancient Iran.  

In the same series, map for The Middle East  by Sir Leonard Woolley.

Woolley, the excavator of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, was a full generation older than Professor Porada, but by the end of his career he knew, as Henri Frankfort for his Peguin History of Art volume a decade earlier, what sort of map was required and, doubtless, where to acquire it.  He does not let everything north and west of the Euphrates just fall off at the left in this odd partial tracing of a pre-existing map; having known her, though not very well, I know that Porada cannot have approved of that skewed and discontinuous map of Ancient Iran.  In 1962 a good archaeological map of Greater Iran may not have been available (I didn't find a good 19th-century one offhand, and I suspect that 19th-century Biblical interest in Leonard Woolley's world is partly responsible.

Yet all three of these maps lack indicators of latitude and longitude.  About 38° North is close enough as a starting reference for Mosul and Aleppo, but how far north do modern Kurds live?  Well, south of Hasanlu and Marlik, I think.  Not north of Lake Van and Urartu.  Bit by bit I spread out the larger atlases and began to learn enough geography.  It's getting better, and Wikipedia offers some tourist pictures of the principal cities.  But I got the lay of the land from Robert Baer.  

I am forced to admit that I never did know where the Mitanni lived.  This is still the zone that is Iranian (at least since the end of the 2nd millennium BCE), south of Slavic and north of Semitic.  And please, everyone, don't call all the major groups of Semitic-speaking  peoples "anti-Semitic".

There are beautiful new maps of this whole world in the Metropolitan Museum's new catalogue of art from Assyria to Iberia: at the Dawn of the Classical Age.  Map reproductions of the mature computer age!  I wish I might scan some.  I just got the book.

But no other one that I have seen is as culpable and horrid as the one I put at the head of this Post.