From Louis Seize to Thomas Sheraton

from the book "The Practical Book Of Period Furniture", by Harold Donaldson Eberlein And Abbot McClure.

In the Louis Seize period there was a noticeable return to rectilinear principles in the design of furniture. Vertical and horizontal lines were emphasised and some of the cabinet-work possessed a distinctly perpendicular aspect. While curved surfaces did not altogether disappear from cabinet-work, carcases were in the main rectilinear. Although the amenity of curves in the shapes of chair seats, backs and arms and in the rounding of corners was not disdained, the legs of tables, chairs, sofas, stools and cabinets were almost altogether straight, and the same may be said of stretchers where they occur. Legs and stretchers displaying curves were only the exceptions that proved the rule. Had it not been for the grace of well-placed embellishment, not a little of the furniture might have been open to the charge of angularity. As it was, however, ornament was so adroitly disposed that it enhanced the classic purity of structural lines without the loss of distinction resulting from superfluity.

The representative Sheraton type of furniture, as we are accustomed to understand it, was based entirely on his first book and richly deserves all the distinction and originality he claims for it. In his later books there is a marked and rapid deterioration in the quality of the designs given. Whether it was because Sheraton was failing in inspiration, or because he was trying to accommodate his designs to a popular taste that clamoured loudly for the latest French forms, it would be hard to say. It was probably the latter, for one who had produced types of such artistic excellence a few years before could scarcely sink to such depths of impoverished invention independently of some extraneous cause. This inference is supported by the pathetic laments he utters, as early as 1802, that "a clumsy four-footed stool from France will be admired by our connoisseurs in preference to a first-rate cabinet of English production" or that the British public has brought to pass this deplorable state of affairs by "foolishly staring after French fashions" instead of giving "suitable encouragement to designers and artists" in England. "Instead of this," he says, "when our tradesmen are desirous to draw the best customers to their warerooms, they hasten over to Paris, or otherwise pretend to go there, plainly indicating either our own defects in cabinet-making, or extreme ignorance, that we must be pleased and attracted by the mere sound of French taste."So bad were his later designs, so jejune in character and so impregnated with a debased French feeling that it seems almost unfair, and is certainly prejudicial to a clear understanding of types, to attach Sheraton's name to them. We shall, therefore, pass them by with scant notice.

Sheraton's "Drawing Book," the publication upon which his claims to a distinctive style are wholly based, was a most important and valuable addition to the literature of cabinet-making. Unfortunately a fair-minded reader cannot fail to be annoyed and repelled by the disparaging and acrid attitude he assumes towards the designs and achievements of his predecessors and contemporaries, of whom he speaks uncharitably and contemptuously. Chippendale's designs he brands as "now wholly antiquated and laid aside;" Manwar-ing's book contains nought "but what an apprentice boy may be taught by seven hours' proper instructions;" for some of Shearer's work he did, indeed, express measured admiration and proved the sincerity of his admiration by adopting and really improving some of his designs; but of Hepplewhite, the designer between whose plans and his own there was the closest similarity, a similarity positively perplexing at times, he says, while grudgingly conceding that a few of the designs in his book "are not without merit," "if we compare some of the designs, particularly the chairs, with the newest taste, we shall find that this work has already caught the decline, and perhaps, in a little time will suddenly die in the disorder." This of a volume published but five years before his own

Manet

From: The Judgment of Paris by Ross King

p 52

the viewing public was accustomed to standing close to paintings and studying them minutely and marveling over the delicacy of the handiwork. ... But manet's apparently clumsy brushstrokes and lack of clarity did not lend themselves to this sort of appreciation. The work looked lackadaisical and incomplete because inplaces the undercoat of white primer and the weave of the canvas could clearly be seen. Elsewhere the marks of the paintbrush were visible. Most other painters used thin glazes and fine brushes made of sable to cover their traces, in effect brushing themselves out of their work.

The vast majority of pigments sold in France were no longer mixed with linseed oil which yellowed with age, but rather with poppy oil whose use resulted in more buttery, textured pigments than the smooth ones produced with linseed oil.
Painters using pigments bound in poppy oil therefore needed to work harder to eliminate the bristle marks from their canvases, though a number of them, notably Delacroix and Couture had been leaving behind the visible sign of the brush as a kind of signature of their individuality and workmanship. They were following in the tradition of painters of the Italian Renaissance, such as Leonardo and Tiotian, some of whose works showed how they even smeared paint with their fingertips. But by the nineteenth cetury this seemingly spontaneous approach had disappeared.

On "upstairs gods"

From "South Wind":

You seem to have a quarrel with Moses and his command- 
ments, which we are taught to regard as the keystone of 
ethics. I don't want to discuss things. I want to listen 
to the opinions of a man so different from myself as you 
are. It may do me good. And I think I could stand 
almost anything," he added, with a laugh, " in this 
landscape — in this clear pagan light, as you call it." 

" I used to be interested in such things as a boy. I 
suppose all respectable boys are ; and I was respectable 
even at that tender age. Nowadays, though I still pick 
up an Oriental rug now and then, I have no further use 
for Oriental gods." 

" What is your objection to them ? " 

Mr. Keith paused before replying. Then he said : 

" The drawback of Oriental gods is that they have 
been manufactured by the proletariat for the use of the 
aristocracy. They act accordingly ; that is, they distil 
the morality of their creators which I consider a noxious 
emanation. The classic gods were different. They were 
invented by intellectualists who felt themselves capable 
of maintaining a kind of comradeship with their deities. 
Men and gods were practically on a level. They walked 
hand in hand over the earth. These gods belonged to 
what one might call the horizontal or downstairs 
variety." 

" And those others ? " 

" Oh, they are the upstairs or vertical type. They 
live overhead. Why overhead ? Because they have 
been created by the proletariat. The proletariat loves 
to humiliate itself. Therefore they .manufacture a god
who approves of grovelling, a god who can look down 
upon them. They exalt this deity to an infinite degree 
in point of goodness and distance, and in so doing they 
inevitably abase themselves. Now I disapprove of 
grovelling. 7'hat means I disapprove of upstairs 
gods." 

" Upstairs gods " 

" If you walk into my front door as a distinguished 
visitor I am happy to show you the place. You can 
prowl about the garden, poke your nose into the pantry 
and learn, if it amuses you, all about my private life. 
But if you rent a high attic overlooking my premises and 
stare out of your window all day long, watching my 
movements and noting down everything I do, why, 
damn it, I call that vulgar. Staring is bad form. Vertical 
gods are inquisitive. I don't like to be supervised. I 
don't care about this dossier business. My garden is for 
you and me to walk about in, not for outsiders to stare 
into. Which reminds me that you have not been to see 
me lately. You ought to come and look at my cannas ; 
you really ought ! They are in magnificent bloom just 
now. When shall it be ? " 

Mr. Keith seemed to be already tired of the subject. 
In fact he was as near being bored as ever he allowed 
himself to be. But the other refused to let the conversa- 
tion be side-tracked. He wanted to know. 

" Vertical and horizontal gods. . . . Dear me. Sounds 
rather profane." 

" I have not heard that word for quite a long time." 

" You don't feel the need of any kind of superior 
being to control human affairs ? " 

" Not up to the present. I can find no room in my 
Cosmos for a deity, save as a waste product of human 
weakness, an excrement of the imagination. If you 
gave me the sauciest god that ever sat on a cloud or 
breakfasted with the Village Idiot — 'pon my word, I
shouldn't know what to do with him. I don't collect 
bric-a-brac myself, and the British Museum is dreadfully- 
overstocked. Perhaps the Duchess could make some use 
of him, if he specialized in lace vestments and choral 
mass. By the way, I hear that she is going to be admitted 
into the Roman Church next week ; there is to be a 
luncheon after the ceremony. Are you going ? " 

" Vertical and horizontal gods, ... I never heard 
that distinction made before." 

" It is a difference, my dear Heard. Mankind remains 
in direct contact with the downstairs variety. That 
simplifies matters. But the peculiar position of those 
others — perpendicularly overhead at a vast distance — 
necessitates a cumbersome code of verbal signals, un- 
intelligible to common folk, for the expression of mutual 
desires. You cannot have any god of this kind without 
some such cumbersome contrivance to bridge over the 
gulf and make communication possible. It is called 
theology. It complicates life very considerably. Yes," 
he pursued, " the vertical-god system is not only vulgar ; 
it is perplexing and expensive. Think of the wastage, of 
the myriads of people who have been sacrificed because 
they misinterpreted some enigmatical word in the code. 
Why are you intent on these conundrums ? " 

More from Nepenthe

A directory to the springs of antiquity:

The Fountain of Saint Calogero, described as one of the most famous,
was lukewarm, of ammoniacal and alkaline flavour; a glassful of it
produced the most violent retchings and vomitings. Properly applied,
however, the water had been found to relieve the gout, the discomforts
of child-bearing, leprosy, irritation of the mucous membrane of the
nose, impetigo, strabismus and ophthalmia. If the patient observed care
in his diet, avoiding articles of calorific nature such as fried fish
and boiled lentils, he would find himself greatly benefited by its use
in the case of cornucopic hydrocephalus, flatulence, tympanitis and
varicose veins. It was useful, furthermore, as a cure for the stings of
scorpions and other venomous beasts.

The so-called "Fountain of Paradise," of nitrous ingredients, spurted
forth with a prodigious hissing noise at a temperature of boiling lead,
from so inaccessible a fissure in the rocks that little had been done
to investigate its peculiar properties. It was held none the less to be
efficacious for the distemper known as PLICA POLONICA, and the peasant
folk, mixing its spray with the acorns on which their pigs were
fattened, had observed that these quadrupeds prospered vastly in health
and appearance.

The Fountain of Hercules, laxative and tartaric, had proved its
efficacy in cases of enlarged spleen, hare-lip, vertigo, apoplexy,
cachexia, cacodoria, cacochymia senilis and chilblains. It was also
considered to be a sovereign remedy for that distressing and almost
universal complaint, the piles.

The Fountain known as "La Salina," of arsenical nature, was frequented
chiefly by women who found in its waters an alleviation for troubles
which Monsignor Perrelli does not specify. It was recommended,
moreover, as a sheep-dip.

The Fountain of the Virgin, purgative and blastopeptic, had given
relief to sufferers from the quartan fever, herpes, elephantiasis, and
to all persons of atrobiliary and lunatick temperament.

The so-called "Old Fountain," of sub-acidulate and vitriolique flavour,
chalybeate and cataplastic, was renowned for removing stains from
household linen. Taken in minute doses, under medical advice, it gave
relief to patients afflicted with the wolfe, NOLI ME TANGERE,
crudities, Bablyonian itch, globular pemphlegema, fantastical visions,
koliks, asthma and affections of the heart. It also "fortifies the
stomach, comforts the bowels, reduces the gallstone to sand, the sand
to mud, the mud to water--water which can be passed out of the system by
the usual channels."

The Fountain of Saint Vulcan, anti-blepharous and amygdaloidal, was
charged with such potent minerals that a single spoonful produced a
diarrhoea more distressing to witness than cholera. None the less,
applied externally, it was a wondrous remedy in cases of jaundice,
toothache and open wounds.

The Fountain of the Capon, sedative and scorbutic, was indicated for
rheumatisms of every kind, not excluding sprained limbs, hydrophobia,
lycanthropy, black choler, oppilations and procrastinating catapepsia.

The Fountain known as "Spina Santa" was resorted to by all persons
suffering from maladies of the alimentary canal, such as dysentery,
cloven palate, follicular hepatitis, and trabulated hyperaemia of the
Bivonian passage.

The Fountain of Saint Feto had, by virtue of its smell alone, applied
to her nose as she lay in her coffin, raised from the dead a certain
Anna da Pasto.

The Fountain popularly called "La Pisciarella" was peculiarly adapted
to those ailments which are incidental to childhood and youth--to wit:
chlorosis, St. Vitus' Dance, constipation, ringworm, otootitis and
other perimingeal disturbances, urticaria, moon-sickness, scrofula and
incontinence of urine.

Lastly, the Fountain of Saint Elias, sulphurous and saponaceous, was
renowned for its calming influence upon all who suffered from abuse of
lechery or alcohol, or from ingrowing toe-nails.

This concludes the list.

The Way of All Flesh

by Samuel Butler.

"On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old Mr Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the village according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of the century; the loaf was called a dole. We had never heard of this custom before, besides, though we had often heard of penny loaves, we had never before seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown up people, for our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent them, but only one. We had never yet suspected that we were inhabitants at all; finally, the little loaves were new, and we were passionately fond of new bread, which we were seldom or never allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be good for us. Our affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand against the combined attacks of archaeological interest, the rights of citizenship and property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness for food of the little loaves themselves, and the sense of importance which was given us by our having been intimate with someone who had actually died. It seemed upon further inquiry that there was little reason to anticipate an early death for anyone of ourselves, and this being so, we rather liked the idea of someone else's being put away into the churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme depression to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new earth had been revealed to us in our perception of the possibility of benefiting by the death of our friends, and I fear that for some time we took an interest in the health of everyone in the village whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least likely."

A little less of a fire hazard

Another pile of articles torn from 12-year-old newspapers found in a folder under my bed- archived here and then tossed on the fireplace:

An article on the industry created around viatical settlements for AIDS patients- suggesting that the business would collapse if the lives of AIDS patients could be prolonged.

An obit of Herbert Huncke: "It was through Mr. Burroughs that Mr. Huncke soon met Mr. Ginsberg, then a Columbia undergraduate, and Mr. Kerouac, a recent Columbia dropout who became so enchanted with Mr. Huncke's repeated use of the carny term ''beat,'' meaning tired and beaten down, that he later used it as his famous label for the Beat Generation. (Mr. Kerouac later clouded things by suggesting it was derived from ''beatific.'')

How Perrier water nearly killed everything on Earth:
AROUND 250 million years ago, something so devastating occurred that about 90 percent of Earth's animal species were wiped out. While the cause of this greatest of all mass extinctions remains uncertain, a new study by biologists and geochemists suggests that a huge upwelling of carbonated water from the depths of the oceans may have played a lethal role.
That mass extinction, at the end of the Permian period, reshuffled Earth's genetic deck, making way for the rise of dinosaurs in the subsequent Mesozoic era and widening the niches available for the mammal-like reptiles destined to become ancestors of the human race.

The bizarre practice of Feng-Shui:
The ancient Chinese craft of feng shui (pronounced fung shway) is the practice of arranging surroundings to promote prosperity and harmony. Here are basic guidelines from Tin Sun, a feng shui master, for assessing the feng shui of an urban apartment.
EXTERIOR:
A building should not have its front door facing oncoming traffic. Cars and lights create negative forces that disturb the peace. There should not be any sharp objects or corners facing a doorwya of a building or apartment. The corners are like arrowheads, shooting negative e4nergy toward the building and its tenants. One should avoid facing glass buildings. The buildings would absorb the negative energies of their surroundings and reflect them back. If a building is on a hill, the back of the building should not be on the lower part of the slope. It would be like a chair without back support - the energy would roll down the hill. It is not advisable to have bridges in close proximity. They create tension and negative forces.
INTERIOR:
An apartment should not be next to or facing an elevator, especially if one hears the mechanics of it. The humming of the elevator machinery disrupts the flow of qi, or life force. When one enters an apartment, the stove should not be visible. It can turn happiness into sorrow because of its concentration of fire, which disturbs the peace of the space. This is a common cause of family problems. An apartment should not be next to or facing a garbage disposal chute, which draws away energy from the apartment. Heavy traffic around the chute also disrupts peace.


The text of Justice Scalia's anti-gay dissenting opinion when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Colorado's attempt to nullify civil rights protections for gays (Thomas and Rehnquist joined Scalia)


Obit for Arkansas Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright- full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/10/obituaries/j-william-fulbright-senate-giant-is-dead-at-89.html

They asked John Barrymore...

"Did Hamlet sleep with his mother?"
"Only in the Chicago company," he replied

Nepenthe

From South Wind by Norman Douglas
Worldly-wise, indolent, good-natured and, like most
Southerners, a thorough-going pagan, Don Francesco
was deservedly popular as ecclesiastic. Women adored
him ; he adored women. He passed for an unrivalled
preacher ; his golden eloquence made converts every-
where, greatly to the annoyance of the parroco, the
parish priest, who was doubtless sounder on the Trinity
but a shocking bad orator and altogether deficient in
humanity, and who nearly had a fit, they said, when the
other was created Monsignor. Don Francesco was a
fisher of men, and of women. He fished ad maiorem Dei
gloriam, and for the fun of the thing. It was his way of
taking exercise, he once confessed to his friend Keith ;
he was too fat to run about like other people — he could
only talk. He fished among natives, and among foreigners.

Foreigners were hard to catch, on Nepenthe. They
came and went in such breathless succession. Of the
permanent residents only the Duchess, always of High
Church leanings, had of late yielded to his blandish-
ments. She was fairly hooked. Madame Steynlin, a
lady of Dutch extraction whose hats were proverbial,
was uncompromisingly Lutheran. The men were past
redemption, all save the Commissioner who, however,
was under bad influences and an incurable wobbler, any-
how. Eames, the scholar, cared for nothing but his
books. Keith, a rich eccentric who owned one of the
finest villas and gardens on the place, only came to the
island for a few weeks every year. He knew too much,
and had travelled too far, to be anything but a hopeless
unbeliever ; besides, he was a particular friend of his,
with whom he agreed, in his heart of hearts, on every
subject. The frequenters of the Club were mostly
drunkards, derelicts, crooks, or faddists — not worth
catching.

and

"that little place all by itself fascinated her. Bitterly she regrets her choice. She has discovered the drawbacks of a promontory. My Dear Duchess, never live on a promontory! It has fearful inconveniences; you are overlooked by everybody. All the island knows what you do and who visits you and when and why..."

and


Concerning the life and martyrdom of Saint Dodekanus:
He had entered the land of the Crotalophoboi, cannibals and
necromancers who dwelt in a region so hot, and with light so dazzling,
that their eyes grew on the soles of their feet. Here he laboured for
eighty years, redeeming them to Christianity from their magical and
bloodthirsty practices. In recompense whereof they captured him at the
patriarchal age of 132, or thereabouts, and bound him with ropes
between two flat boards of palmwood. Thus they kept the prisoner,
feeding him abundantly, until that old equinoctial feast drew near. On
the evening of that day they sawed the whole, superstitiously, into
twelve separate pieces, one for each month of the year; and devoured of the saint what was to their liking.

Lytton Strachey

I'm loving his "Elizabeth and Essex":
No human creature can ever hope to be truly just; but there are degrees in mortal fallibility, and for countless ages the justice of mankind was the sport of fear, folly, and superstition. In the England of Elizabeth there was a particular influence at work which, in certain crucial cases, turned the administration of justice into a mockery. It was virtually impossible for anyone accused of High Treason—the gravest offence known to the law—to be acquitted. The reason for this was plain; but it was a reason not of justice but expediency. Upon the life of Elizabeth hung the whole structure of the State. . . . Her own personal fearlessness added to the peril. She refused, she said, to mistrust the love of her subjects; she was singularly free of access; and she appeared in public with a totally inadequate guard. In such a situation, only one course of action seemed to be possible: every other consideration must be subordinated to the supreme necessity of preserving the Queen's life. . . . It was futile to talk of justice; for justice involves, by its very nature, uncertainty; and the Government could take no risks. The old saw was reversed; it was better that ten innocent men should suffer than that one guilty man should escape. To arouse suspicion became in itself a crime.
It was in the collection of evidence that the mingled atrocity and absurdity of the system became most obvious. Not only was the fabric of a case often built up on the allegations of the hired creatures of the Government, but the existence of the rack gave a preposterous twist to the words of every witness. Torture was constantly used; but whether, in any particular instance, it was used or not, the consequences were identical. The threat of it, the hint of it, the mere knowledge in the mind of a witness that it might at any moment be applied to him—those were differences merely of degree; always, the fatal compulsion was there, inextricably confusing truth and falsehood. What shred of credibility could adhere to testimony obtained in such circumstances—from a man, in prison, alone, suddenly confronted by a group of hostile and skilful examiners, plied with leading questions, and terrified by the imminent possibility of extreme physical pain? Who could disentangle among his statements the parts of veracity and fear, the desire to placate his questioners, the instinct to incriminate others, the impulse to avoid, by some random affirmation, the dislocation of an arm or a leg? Only one thing was plain about such evidence: it would always be possible to give to it whatever interpretation the prosecutors might desire. The Government could prove anything.

Reprieved

I rid myself of another large carton of books. Mysteries by Ruth Rendell and Edmund Crispin. The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott. I received, much to my astonishment, sixteen dollars, with which I purchased "The Judgment of Paris" and "Alfred Kazin's America". I then began emptying another carton onto the living room floor to sort. After close consideration I have decided to keep a dozen books which I have had for many years but have never quite gotten around to reading:
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimares Rosa- apparently Brazil's answer to "Ulysses"
Natural History by Joan Perucho- a sort of literary vampire tale
Dog Years By Gunter Grass- even understanding that I have still never finished anything by Grass
Essays by Leon Edel
A book on the English Civil Wars, "War Without an Enemy"

and several others I am anxious to read: J.G. Farrell's Singapore Grip, Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons.

A few have a probational period until I have the energy to open them: Nancy Lemann, Carson McCullers, Glenway Westcott.

And some have exhausted my patience and appear overweening and unforthcoming:
Daniel Martin by John Fowles, Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter of Snow, and B. Traven's The Night Visitor.

And in a postscript.... I found a hardcover set of "The Raj Quartet" and bought it... and have found the Farrell to be an unprofitable read.

From "The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook"

"When we first began reading Dashiell Hammett, Gertrude Stein said that it was his modern note to have disposed of the victims before the story commenced. And so it is in the kitchen."

Some marvelous Dorothy Parker

From a 1953 speech of Parker's discovered in a remarkable hardcover periodical called "7 Arts" which also includes contributions from Henry Miller and Washington Irving:
"I don't know what more to say about Hollywood. I just say it is a Stagnation. It is a horror. Brilliant flowers smell like old dollar bills. Those enormous vegetables taste as if they had been grown in old trunks."

elsewhere:
Gilbert Highet on kitsch:
"If you have ever spent an hour wandering through an antique shop, you must have noticed how your taste grows numb , and then- if you stay- becomes perverted. You begin to see unsuspected charm in those hideous pictures of plump girls fondling pigeons, you develop a psychopathic desire for spinning wheels and cobblers' benches.
There is a name for such stuff in the trade: kitsch. It means vulgar showoff, and is applied to anything that took a lot of trouble to make and is quite hideous.

elsewhere, Miller:
"The late John Dudley once chalked up over my door,"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver."

I now devote myself to the works of Anthony Powell

Powell's effortless mastery has won me over. From the first volume of the unfortunately titled "Dance to the Music of Time", "A Question of Upbringing":

"To Short, Sillery was a mysterious, politically-minded cardinal of the academical world, 'never taking his tea without an intrigue'(that was the phrase Short quoted) forever plotting behind the arras. Others, of course thought differently, some saying that the Sillery legend was based on a sort of kaleidoscope of muddled information collected in Sillery's almost crazed brain, that his boasted powers had no basis whatever in reality; others that Sillery certainly knew a great number of people had passed around a lot of gossip, which in itself gave him some claim to consideration as a comparitively influential person, though only a subordinate one. Sillery had his enemies, naturally, always anxious to denigrate his life's work, and assert that he wass nothing more than a figure of fun; and there was probably something to be said at least for the contention that Sillery himself somewhat exaggerated the effectiveness of his own activities."

The acerbic pianist

I took a bushel of admittedly undesirable coffee-table books of the American West purchased at auction to Half Price Books. They offered one dollar. I politely demurred and dragged the lot uphill to the shabby, smelly Twice Told Tales where I was offered fourteen dollars credit. It took an impossibly long time to find anything remotely readable in the shop. They have either the worst instincts or the worst luck possible. Eventually I unearthed a copy of Claude-Edmonde Magny's "The Age of The American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars" and a biography of Oscar Levant, the dog-faced cohort, from which the following anecdotes are culled:
It was William Goetz, an executive at 20th Century-Fox who finally fired Levant. Goetz, who had married one of Louis B. Mayer's daughters and so owed his job to his father-in-law had harbored a grudge against Levant ever since Levant had one-upped him in a battle of insults at a Hollywood party. Goetz had snidely asked Levant "Why don't you play us a medley of your hit?" referring to Levant's one hit song.
"Why don't you play us a medley of your father-in-law?" Levant responded.
and
The perennial bachelor Moss Hart entered a room with Edith Atwater on his arm. "Ah, here comes Moss Hart and the future Miss Atwater," Levant said.
and
After playing his moving, elegiac composition dedicated to his late friend George Gershwin, Levant's mother comments, "You call THAT a dirge?"

What progress I'm making!

The next batch:

An obituary of the painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) the maestro of the hiked skirt, the akimbo legs and the bared pudendum. Illustrations accompanying are by the decedent.

An article on 200 Afghani refugees wandering the mountainous wilderness: During the night the people on the outer edges of the sleeping pile rotated inward, and the people in the middle were spun outward. In this way no one froze to death.

An incisive description by Kevin Kelly of the way recording technology influenced the shape of music:
There is no music made today that has not been shaped by the fact of recording and duplication. In fact, the ability to copy music has been deeply disruptive ever since the invention of the gramophone. When John D. Smoot, an engineer for the European company Odeon, carted primitive recording equipment to the Indonesian archipelago in 1904 to record the gamelan orchestras, local musicians were perplexed. Why copy a performance? The popular local tunes that circulated in their villages had a half-life of a few weeks. Why would anyone want to listen to a stale rendition of an obsolete piece when it was so easy to get fresh music?
As phonographs spread throughout the world, they had a surprising effect: folk tunes, which had always been malleable, changing with each performer and in each performance, were transformed by the advent of recording into fixed songs that could be endlessly and exactly repeated. Music became shorter, more melodic and more precise.
Early equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians truncated old works to fit and created new music abbreviated to adapt to the phonograph. Because the first sound recordings were of unamplified music, recording emphasized the loud sounds of singers and de-emphasized quiet instrumentals. The musicologist Timothy Day notes that once pianists began recording they tried, for the first time, to ''distinguish carefully between every quaver and semiquaver -- eighth note and sixteenth note -- throughout the piece.'' Musicians played the way technology listened. When the legendary recordist Frederick Gaisberg arrived in Calcutta in 1902, only two decades after the phonograph was invented, he found that Indian musicians were already learning to imitate recorded music and lamented that there was ''no traditional music left to record.''
As the technologies of reproduction bloomed in the last century, consumerism boomed. What consumers consumed -- whether in the form of a book, a CD or a can of Coke -- were exact copies. The ability to make copies in mind-boggling quantities, ceaselessly and perfectly, was the chief ingredient of mass culture. Music rapidly adapted to the culture of the copy. Reproductions were made exact, while copies were multiplied vigorously. Music lived in its constant reproduction

A marvelous and important article on the authenticity of 20th century "antiques":

The market for modernist furniture, once young, fun and inexpensive, is superheating. But it's also getting uncomfortably hot. As Richard Wright, a co-owner of Wright, a Chicago auction house that specializes in modernism, put it, now that big money is involved, ''people have the incentive to cheat.''
As is advisable with fine 18th-century furniture, an unspoken rule has become advisable with modern design: let the buyer beware.
Authenticity, the issue that defines mature antiques markets, is being called into question as objects by the most fashionable names in the business, like Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Chareau and Jean Prouvé, become the newest blue chips of decorative arts. As pieces are rebuilt, repainted, reproduced and newly assembled, or as hybrids of new and old come to market, assumptions about what is original or real are being redefined as rapidly as the prices.
Does refurbishment respect or disguise a designer's intentions? Shortly before the Christie's sale, Ms. Grajales explained that for each of her clients, authenticity was very personal. For some, only a piece without restoration, even if its condition was poor, would carry rarity and value, as is true for traditional antiques. For others, a reconditioned piece, with obvious work, recalled and revalidated the strength of the design.
That Prouvé cabinet, bright red and factory-fresh-looking, in its 50's and still sexy? Read the condition report. It's had more work than Catherine Deneuve. But hey, the loft needs a star for the dining room wall. Would Prouvé be proud?
James Zemaitis, the head of 20th-century design at Sotheby's, which sold the cabinet described above last Wednesday for $78,000 (above its estimate of $30,000 to $50,000), said he thought that modern furniture buyers were savvy and aware of distinctions in condition, which differ by designer.
''If you're seduced by the aura of Prouvé or Perriand, you have to accept the prevailing market realities of condition,'' Mr. Zemaitis said. ''The entire Prouvé market is built on things being refinished and rebuilt. I don't think collectors are being duped. They're completely understanding of this.''



The entire article is here:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E2DB163BF935A25755C0A9639C8B63

Sargent's tots

I love John Singer Sargent

Kings, Devils, Chimps, and Laureates

Pictured left: Vice-President of the United States William Rufus DeVane King




More articles from the NYT:

*******The Vatican issues a revised rite of Exorcism: It cautions exorcists "must not consider people to be vexed by demons" when they are merely annoying. A Vatican bureaucrat said that demonic possession can be recognized by several criteria including: speaking an unknown language, sudden enormous strength and the disclosure of unknown occurrences. The Devil, he stressed, is a real and active entity and his existence is a cornerstone of Catholicism.
*******On 3-19-99 as Germany prepares to mark the 250th annniversary of the birth of Goethe, an article on the secret exhumation in 1970 of his remains by East German scientists. What flesh still clung to him was macerated from his bones which were cleaned and strengthened before his laurel wreath was polished and reattached to his cranium and his body re-interred in the crypt in Weimar.
******An article on the discovery of the AIDS virus in African chimpanzees.
******An article on the discovery that Rigoberto Menchu, the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner lied about much of her biography. She maintains, for instance, that her brother Felipe died from starvation. He denies this.
******A peculiar local matter about an African-American King County (Seattle) Council member, Larry Gossett, proposing that the county include an image of Dr. Martin Luther King with every designation. Obviously, no one has the temerity to object, but there is also little enthusiasm.
King County was named in 1852 for William Rufus DeVane King, an Alabama Senator who was the Vice-President Elect at the time. The county to the south of King was named after Pierce, the President-Elect. King was ill with tuberculosis and died six months after being sworn into office. (His swearing-in was held in Cuba.) He was never replaced by President Franklin Pierce. Aside from his sickliness he was widely disparaged for some perceived unmanliness and his close friendship with bachelor Senator James Buchanan was ridiculed. King was also unmarried.
As Steve Tally writes in "Bland Ambition" a history of the Vice-Presidency: "King did nothing to dispel the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual. He was a flowing dandy who favored silk scarves, brilliant stickpins, and glittery accoutrements. he continued to wear powdered wigs years after they passed from fashion. King's political peers did not view his esoteric air with quiet tolerance. Andrew Jackson, who had a manly reputation as the winner of numerous duels. referred to King as Miss Nancy. Aaron Brown, a senator from Tennessee gave King the nickname Miss Fancy."
Of course, no one could use King's own qualities to defend leaving the County name alone in 1985 when the Council, by a single vote passed some sort of resolution instructing residents that the county name, crafted in 1852, should be considered to signify a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.. Problematically, Vice-President King was a slave-holder as was George Washington.
Though the black population hovered around 5% in King County, no one seemed to begrudge honoring this truly significant role model with the name re-rooting, especially as the frightening and depressing traffic corridor which was renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard has come to look more like a slander than a tribute. As existing names are each a lesson in history whether they continue to have immediate recognition or not, I have a innate distrust of this kind of rebranding. Frankly it showed enormous ingenuity to find another foothold on the late civil rights leader.

By the way, when Buchanan was made President, succeeding Pierce, he selected the handsome John Cabell Breckinridge as his Veep. Breckinridge was an epic mess, but the street and mall in Little Rock are kind of nice.

New portrait

The fierce bidding at the auction did not allow many things to percolate down to my budget. This lovely portrait of a gentleman in a stiff collar was the only thing I was able to get at auction- fortunately it was my favorite piece and I would have stayed in the bidding beyond a reasonable price. Not signed, as far as I can see in the murk, but written on the stretcher bar is "Alan Beeton" who was a British artist, active in the 1920's, died in the war years, '42 or thereabouts. He has work in the Tate. Our art specialist believed this to be a portrait OF Beeton, possibly by Ambrose Patterson, possibly just once belonging to him. I thought I might rearrange my crowded mantle to put him there.
Here, also along with my mantle, are photos of the carousel bull, the Russian sailor boy and the delirium tremens.

Pseudo-randomness

In the second batch of sere, yellowed piles of flammable information ripped from the New York Times, I was surprised to find an article on the creation of deliberately random numbers. Random numbers naturally do not behave as if they believed they were random numbers. They are just as imprecatory as bank balances. I'd rather not know how one arrives at numbers, nor watch an autopsy. Numbers have far too much power and if you ask me, they can go screw themselves.

******"A sociologist or a statistician surveying a random sample of the public, a biologist analyzing the mercurial spread of a disease or the growth of a population, a psychologist studying whether an avowed clairvoyant can guess the identities of hidden cards with a success rate better than chance -- all need random numbers to calculate the uncertain outcomes of processes that can only be described using probability. ''The world consists of the tension between order and chaos,'' said Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician at the I.B.M. Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. ''When simulating physical phenomena, order is supplied by the laws of physics and chaos is supplied by random numbers.''
Before high-speed digital computers were invented, mathematicians compiled tables of random numbers by blindly flipping through phone books, casting dice, spinning spinners or drawing cards from a hat. As automation came of age, the RAND Corporation used a kind of electronic roulette wheel to generate a classic work, published in 1955, called ''A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates.'' The seemingly oxymoronic term ''normal deviates'' (random numbers whose occurrence can be plotted on a bell-shaped curve) inspired the New York Public Library to shelve the book in the psychology section.
But as science's demand for random numbers continued to grow, even the longest tables were quickly exhausted. A way was needed to produce torrents of random numbers on the fly, and nothing could spit out digits faster than a digital computer.
Therein lay the paradox: how to use order to generate disorder. The best that could be hoped for, it seemed, was pseudorandomness -- numbers that, though produced by a completely deterministic and repeatable process, appear to be patternless.

and some other apparently random interests:

*****An article on an Italian psychologist studying what she calls the "Stendhal syndrome" an over-reaction to art- occasionally even fainting as Stendhal did in Florence in 1817

*****on vagrants:
"The civil war gave vagrancy its first big boost- its immediate effect was to accustom a generation of men to riding in trains, camping out and foraging for food. The word 'tramp' originally described a military foraging expedition, a 'bum' was a soldier who foraged too enthusiastically."

*****Easily disposable articles on Webb Hubbell, the hunched, bloated, droopy-lipped law partner of Hillary Clinton who reached a plea agreement with Kenneth Starr. Also the transcript of Bill Clinton's affadavit.

*****An obituary on Richard Moon, the inventor of the first three digits of the zip code or Zoning Improvement Code (est. 1963)

The Pile: The first 1/16th of an inch

I heard a sinister buzzing the other night. I have been plagued most of the summer by the solitary mosquito- (why do they not collaborate?) passing my ear at night and waking me to saw the air. This buzzing was different. It had sparks. I looked down at the slivers of light being thrown from an extension cord. The buzzing was the incendiary crackling of an electrical short. The wiring in this house is troubling at best. The fuses are the antique screw-in type and the outlets are rare, ungrounded and easily overloaded.
I have several cartons of articles torn from the New York Times (mostly)- saved for many years, lugged from place to place and now stored near faulty wiring in a hundred year-old house. I think I should examine what I have saved, and why, summarize the pile and get it out of here.

The first article showed what period I had randomly reached back to. It was from:
*Jan 31, 1997 and concerned the further posthumous adventures of Gandhi. Additional ashes from his funeral pyre were discovered in a provincial bank vault. They were ceremonially dispersed in the Ganges by his chubby, bearded grandson.
*The largest Marian library in the world is in Dayton, Ohio. September 8 is her birthday. She is again appearing to adolescents in Medjugorje. Since the second Vatican council she has been pictured mingling with other biblical figures or at least in the vicinity of other people rather than aloof and alone.
*From 12-7-96, an article on an exhibition which celebrates the 18th century English "grand tour" mostly undertaken in and around Rome as Greece was then occupied by the uncongenial Ottoman empire. (The painting which best captured the scene is "Tribuna of the Uffizi" by Zoffany ...above) The grand tour disappeared when the Napoleonic wars began in 1796. When the wars were over the package tour replaced the grand tour. A man named Thomas Cook booked the rooms, set the itinerary and so it remains to this day.
*An article on the dangers of Fen-Phen- I suppose I had worries that my clients might suffer some adverse consequences. I never recommended it, luckily.
*A fragment which states that the monastery of St. Catherine, in Syria I believe, attracts pilgrims to view a sprig from the burning bush of the Old Testament.
*Another fragment regarding Scientology which teaches that humans are clusters of spirits trapped in ice and banished to earth 75 million years ago by Xenu, ruler of the 26-planet galactic federation.
*Part of an article on the increasing storage problems with leftover frozen embryos.
*A description by a writer of her first encounter with peanut butter which evoked feelings of suffocation and oddly, persecution.
*An article on PETA's protests against an artist named David Arnold at Columbia University who created frog-muscle sculptures that moved when electrically stimulated.
*Anthony Bourdain and the search for the perfect french fry. The debate over using the Russet Burbank "it does have a greater purpose when fried in oil. Its interior expands like a souffle and its exterior becomes crispy before absorbing too much oil. And coloring the outside which means caramelizing the potato's sugars gives it just the right bitterness- french fries need a touch of bitterness and loamy flavor smoothed out with fat."
*Renaming Fillmore St. in SF. A black leader states: "For African-Americans the name Millard Fillmore has extremely negative connotations."
*"Passover Cleanup Can Exhaust Orthodox Jewish Women" "Jewish law requires that a house be purged of all traces of hametz or leavening before Passover begins. Over the centuries the search for wayward crumbs has evolved into a frenzied assault.. 'If there is a crumb in the kitchen hiding in the corner, you should do everything to remove it', a Chief Rabbi instructed. 'If need be you should take a hammer and chisel and destroy the wall until the crumb comes out'".
*And finally a September 8, 2005 article from the NYTimes by the polymath Edward Rothstein whose effortless style is beautifully applied to so many very interesting things with equal curiosity, ardor and fun. A long excerpt:
"In the history of humankind, there has rarely been a disaster like the New Orleans flood without a theodicy to go along with it. The word "theodicy," coined in the 18th century by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, derives from Greek roots invoking the "justice of the gods." A theodicy is an attempt to show that such justice exists, to prove that we really do live in what Leibniz insisted was the "best of all possible worlds."
So theodicies have been plentiful after earthquakes, floods and droughts. Explanations are readily offered: disasters are the wages of sin, they herald an apocalyptic age, they cleanse the earth of evil. Theodicies aim to demonstrate that devastation does not really disrupt or overturn our understanding of the moral and social order. Instead, disorder provides evidence of order. The theodicy is that order. It explains forces that seem to lie beyond human powers, evils that lie beyond human cause.
Theodicies are not casual matters, and in the weeks after Katrina, they are bound to evolve, even in secular culture, even when they may not resemble the ones that Leibniz had in mind. So they need to be better understood.
The classic theodicies in the West are biblical. The flood of Noah's time, for example, is a reflection of the divine will, cleansing the earth of humanity's evil. A more powerful theodicy later evolved out of the trials of the ancient Israelites, in which destruction and exile were treated not as random accidents of history, but as forms of retribution for violating the Mosaic law and its ethical consequences. Suffering could become proof of divine attention and not its opposite.
Scholars like Norman Cohn have shown how in medieval Europe the worst human trauma could be interpreted as proof of imminent apocalypse and redemption, inspiring millennial expectations and movements. Meanwhile, the theodicy of divine retribution still thrives today and was invoked by some fundamentalist believers after Katrina.
But between medieval Europe and contemporary America something profound changed in the way natural disasters are interpreted and the kinds of theodicies they inspire. And one of the turning points, as many scholars have argued, was the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon. It destroyed perhaps a third of the city's population, with deaths in the tens of thousands. It overturned the confidence of European royalty and seemed to drive a wedge between the earthly and divine realms.
For the growing forces of the Enlightenment, it also seemed to overturn the very idea that a theodicy could account for the disaster. Voltaire, who had once seen nature as benevolent, was whipped into a rationalist fury by the experience. Leibniz, he believed, had been refuted by nature. Voltaire wrote a "Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon" in which the quake's victims are called "Tormented atoms on a heap of muck/ That death devours and that fate trips up." His character Candide watches the earthquake from a distance, seeing it as morally blind, killing the good and preserving the wicked.
In a sense, the earthquake actually ended up strengthening the hand of the Enlightenment, as if a replacement theodicy had fallen into place. Kant wrote about the quake. Scientific investigation took place. The response of Portugal's prime minister to the disaster was practical, not religious. "We will bury the dead," he said, "and take care of the living."
Recently, the philosopher Susan Neiman argued in "Evil in Modern Thought" that the Lisbon earthquake also destroyed an ancient idea that nature could itself be evil. After Lisbon, she argued, moral evil was distinguished from natural disaster. Earthquakes and floods could no longer be fitted into traditional religious theodicies.
But this did not mean, of course, that theodicies faded away. Ms. Neiman argued that for philosophers theology had been replaced by history. The fates of peoples and nations reflected other forces, and disruptions were given other forms of explanation. Hegel saw history as an evolutionary series of transformations in which destruction was as inevitable as birth. Marx believed other kinds of economic and human laws accounted for destruction and evolution. This mostly left natural disasters for the growing realm of science: if they couldn't be prevented, at least their origins could be understood.