The Guermantes are delayed

The last page of "The Guermantes Way":

‘I should like to know, all the same,’ Mme de Guermantes asked him, ‘how, ten months before the time, you can tell that a thing will be impossible.’
‘My dear Duchess, I will tell you if you insist upon it, but, first of all, you can see that I am very ill.’
‘Yes, my little Charles, I don’t think you look at all well. I’m not pleased with your colour, but I’m not asking you to come with me next week, I ask you to come in ten months. In ten months one has time to get oneself cured, you know.’ At this point a footman came in to say that the carriage was at the door.
‘Come, Oriane, to horse,’ said the Duke, already pawing at the ground with impatience as though he were himself one of the horses that stood waiting outside.
‘Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy,’ the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-bye to us.
‘But, my dear friend, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I consulted last winter, the thing I’ve got – which may, for that matter, carry me off at any moment – won’t in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,’ replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out.
‘What’s that you say?’ cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage, and raising her fine eyes, their melancholy blue clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. ‘You’re joking,’ she said to Swann.
‘It would be a joke in charming taste,’ replied he ironically. ‘I don’t know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment… But whatever I do I mustn’t make you late; you’re dining out, remember,’ he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took preference of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: ‘Don’t worry about our dinner. It’s not of any importance!’ But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: ‘Come, Oriane, don’t stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o’clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles,’ he went on, turning to Swann, ‘but it’s ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte’s.’ Mme de Guermantes advanced resolutely towards the carriage and uttered a last farewell to Swann. ‘You know, we can talk about that another time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like,’ (with Mme de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons) ‘you will let me know your day and time,’ and lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: ‘Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather,’ he said to the footman, ‘tell the lady’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.’ ‘But, my dear,’ replied the Duchess gently, annoyed to see that Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stood back to allow the carriage to pass out in front of us, could hear, ‘since we are late.’ ‘No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight they’d have to wait for us, but you can’t possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes.

More to feed the fireplace fire

One of the articles I collected on the attempted establishment of an objective system when valuing art: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/01/arts/ruling-prevents-removal-of-warehouse-sculpture.html?scp=1&sq=judge%20prevents%20removal%20of%20warehouse%20sculpture&st=cse
Also January 27: Jane Alexander testifying for a "legitimate Federal role in the Arts".
From May 21, 1996
GAY RIGHTS LAWS CAN'T BE BANNED, HIGH COURT RULES
In a significant victory for gay rights, the Supreme Court today struck down a provision of the Colorado Constitution that not only nullified existing civil rights protections for homosexuals in the state but also barred the passage of new anti-discrimination laws.

"A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in a forceful opinion for a 6-to-3 majority. He said the Colorado provision, known as Amendment 2, had placed the state's homosexuals "in a solitary class," singling them out in violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee for a legal disability so sweeping as to be inexplicable on any basis other than "animus."

It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort," Justice Kennedy said in an opinion joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. [Excerpts, page A20.]

Justice Antonin Scalia filed an equally forceful dissent, accusing the majority of taking sides in "the culture wars" through "an act not of judicial judgment but of political will." The process by which Colorado's voters adopted Amendment 2, by 53 percent to 47 percent in 1992, was the "most democratic of procedures," Justice Scalia said.

September 4, 2005

Reviews of bios on Edmund Wilson, Henry Ford, Matisse

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04TOIBIN.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=american%20critic%20colm%20toibin&st=cse

and:

"Spurling reached the end of Volume 1 with a transcendent insight: his ''paintings of light and color . . . seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries. . . . He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a 20th-century art that would draw its vitality essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04HOWARDL.html?scp=1&sq=matisse%20the%20master%20richard%20howard&st=cse

Reducing the fire hazard further

Mostly from the NYT:
On Bingo:

BINGO goes back to 1530, descended from an Italian game called Lo Givoco del Lotto D’Italia. A pitchman encountered a version in Germany and sensed its possibilities, bringing it to America in the 1920s as a carnival game. It was called Beano, since players marked their cards with beans. Winners shouted, “Beano!”

A struggling toy salesman from New York named Edwin S. Lowe saw the game at a carnival near Atlanta in 1929. Back home, he tested it on friends, and one winner mistakenly called out, “Bingo!” rather than “Beano!” He liked what he heard.

It was a priest in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who recognized the game’s power to help his ailing church. Trouble was, there were just 24 unique cards at the time, so too many people were winning. The priest pressed upon Mr. Lowe the need for vaster possibilities of losing. Mr. Lowe enlisted a Columbia math professor named Carl Leffler, who configured more than 6,000 different bingo cards.

All those combinations took a mighty toll. He is said to have gone mad.

On Martin Amis:

A.S. Byatt accused Amis of "folie de grandeur" for demanding $794,000 for "The Information", firing his agent and switching publishers. "I always earn out my advances and I don't see why I should subsidize his greed simply because he has a divorce to pay for and just had all his teeth redone"

On judicial reasonable doubt:

"Jon O. Newman, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a November article wrote that a curious feature of a judge's instructions about reasonable doubt is that trial courts are reluctant to explain it to juries.
"I find it unsettling that we are using a formulation that we believe will become less clear the more we explain it."

On the favorite film villain, the Government:
"There have been so many movies with such a consistent theme that I'm afraid they're also shaping the views of society," Mr. Thompson said. "That's not to say that government shouldn't be fair game along with everything else. But can you think of a movie in the last 10 years that has shown the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in a positive light?"

RONALD BROWNSTEIN, AUTHOR of the 1991 book "The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection," is critical of that scene, on the grounds that it unduly simplifies the problems of governing. "It symbolizes what's wrong with all of these movies and so much of our politics as well," he said. "They perpetuate the idea that the problem in the country is self-centered or careerist leadership rather than the structural disparity between what we want and what we are willing to sacrifice for what we want."

Such plots, which pit a well-meaning outsider against a vastly corrupt political system, have another effect. They let audiences cheer for the hero while realizing the fleetingness of the victory: if people are told that the root of government is rotten, then even a good branch can't survive for long.

On Tony Alamo:

Born Bernie Lazar Hoffman in Joplin mo.; married Susan Lipowitz in 1966 (his 3rd of 6 wives). The cult designed and manufactured jeweled jackets. Susan died in 1982. Alamo stated she would be resurrected and for six months he had her body on display "while their followers prayed". After 16 years, her body was given to her family.

On July 28, 2009, shortly after his conviction, Tony Alamo again made headlines by calling himself "just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the gospel." On October 22, 2008, Alamo's former followers testified in court during a preliminary hearing that Alamo had practiced polygamy and had taken an eight-year-old girl as a wife. He was sentenced to 175 years in prison on November 13, 2009.

On Leo Strauss:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/weekinreview/the-nation-a-very-unlikely-villain-or-hero.html

From the November 13, 1994 Book Review, letters on the Bell Curve controversy and a terrific article on Voltaire by Professor Larry Wolff:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/13/books/if-were-younger-would-make-myself-russian-voltaire-s-encounter-with-czars.html

Pope JP2's 1995 letter against ethical relativism which hints at moral ambiguities inherent in Democracy

James Atlas' article on the conservative movement:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-counter-counterculture.html?scp=3&sq=the%20counter%20counterculture&st=cse

February 19, 1995's reviews of a book on teaching and race:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/are-white-schools-bad-for-black-children.html?scp=1&sq=kwanzaa%20and%20me&st=cse

and a review of Gert Himmelfarb's book on Morals:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/why-can-t-we-behave.html?scp=1&sq=the%20de-moralization%20of%20society%20himmelfarb&st=cse

And a review of the Joseph Frank Dostoevsky bio, The Miraculous Years.

and Clinton's 1995 State of the Union Address

Lambert Orme nee Firbank

From Harold Nicolson:

His sitting room was exquisitely decorated.

When I think of that room, I am again convinced there

was something cabotin about Lambert Orme:

people at the age of twenty should not have rooms like that.

He had painted it shiny black....

I did not see him again for some five years. He

went round the world, and sent me a postcard from

Yokohama. He was immensely impressed by the

beauty of American cities, and it was from them that

he first learnt to see life as a system of

correlated planes. It was several years, however, be-

fore his very real and original talent for association

was finally able to cast the slough of symbolism.

When I next met him he was still intensively con-

cerned with the relation between things and himself:

it was only in his final period that he became

predominantly interested in the relation of things

towards each other. His talent, which though singu-

larly receptive was not very muscular, had failed to

attract any interesting synthesis from the confront-

ation of the universe with his own twitching heart:

He had tried, and failed, to interpret con-

scions cognition by a single simple emotion. But,

in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying

original analysis, implicit rather than expressed of the

diversity and interrelation of external phe-

nomena: he was able to suggest a mood of subcon

cious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities.

The conception of life as a repetition of self-con-

lined and finite entities can be integrated only

by the pressure of a compelling imagination: Lambert's

imagination though mobile was not compelling- I

suspect indeed that less power is required to disinte-

grate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms for-

tuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a

tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of

our convention. His later poetry succeeded because

of its influence to this unapparent reality, I am now

assured that some of his later poems were very re-

spectable.

Kenneth Clark on William Blake

Personal revelation also has an insidious effect on illustration. Clark on the appalling visions of William Blake.

"Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a

visionary. It is a vague term. Artists, even the most realistic, start

from some kind of vision – that is what leads them to select what they

need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

But with Blake the word vision has a more precise meaning. He did not draw from

nature because, as he said repeatedly, his visions were clearer and

more vivid than his optical perception of the world around him. He

saw these visions as a child; saw God put his head in at the window,

saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree at Peckham Rye. There is

nothing extraordinary in this; many imaginative children have

similar experiences. What is exceptional is that Blake kept these

intense powers of visualisation after the age of puberty. Exceptional,

but not incredible, because this can be paralleled in other forms of

mental activity. Some people have the gift of total recall and others

can renumber accurately whole pages of figures; physiologically

these endowments seem to me quite as hard to explain as the accurate

visualisation of images.

“What was the nature of Blake's visions? His accounts of them sug-

gest that, although obviously closely related, they were of several

different kinds. The first was simply his poetic faculty that led him

to see a natural event as something supernatural. 'It will be ques-

taoned', he says in his Descriptive Catalogue, 'when the sun rises do

you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea – Oh no, no,

1 see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy?

holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty”. The seventeenth-century

poets, Traherne or Vaughan, might have said the same. The second

was when an analogy became so strong in his mind that an ordinary

experience was transformed: 'With my inward eye 'tis an old man

grey. To my outward a thistle across the way.' These lines show

that Blake was capable of switching from one kind of vision to another

out of course Blake's pictures in the fire' are far more precise than

ours.

This leads us to visions of rather a different order which seem to

have involved an element of hallucination. They are described in

detail by Varley and Linell, in whose presence Blake drew a number

of what are known as 'visionary heads' One must remember

that Varley was an early spiritualist and he encouraged Blake to

draw these heads in the middle of the night and in an atmosphere

rather like that of a mediumistic séance. He was requested to draw

the likeness of William Wallace, says Linell, 'the eyes of Blake

sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace,” he exclaimed,

“I see him now, there, there, how noble he looks – reach me my

things.”Having drawn for some time with the same ease of hand

and steadiness of eye as if a living sitter had been before him, Blake

said: 'I cannot finish him, Edward the First has stepped in between

him and me.'

There was an element of clairvoyance in his work, but the

visions that make his best work unforgettable were somewhere

between the poetic analogy of the rising sun and the literal reality of

the heads.

From auction: Doisneau and Cartier Bresson

Austere lady from auction

Embossed on a box. Chocolates? Enema?

Henri Rousseau

From "The Banquet Years" by Roger Shattuck

The initial question in dealing with Rousseau s work is

thrust upon us: Is he a modern “primitive”?

Primitive' and 'naif' were used very early to describe

his work and found ready acceptance; recent esti-

mations of his work have tended to treat him as a painter

who cannot be separated from the evolution of modern art

by such glib and arbitrary classifications.

It is no slur to call Giotto and Cimabue “primitive”; it is

a means of locating them within two centuries which pre-

pare the formulation of the strict optical conventions of

Renaissance art. Rousseau reveals a comparable primitiv-

ism, for he strove in his conscious thinking about art to

achieve a naturalistic, academic style. He admired Bou-

•uereau and Ger6me and Courtois. Twentieth-century

Western art, however, the disgruntled offspring of a great

naturalistic tradition culminating in impressionism, was

seeking out the methods of primitives from Italv, Africa,

and contemporary Paris. Like Picasso and Braque and

Matisse and Delaunay, Rousseau worked not -with the op-

tical image (a rational transformation of what we see) but

with his personal beholding of things. He stood beside them

without having made the journev of styles which they had

made in their development as artists. He is primitive in

that, occupying the same ground as these men, he never—

teless looked yearningly toward a style they violently re-

jected. Robert Goldwater writes of this paradoxical situa-

tion:

But it is important to realize that the style which he

achieved was but a stopping place upon a road

along which he would have travelled further if he

could, and that the effect which he attains, seen

from the point of view of the mechanics and psy-

chology of its creation, is because of this intention,

even if it is in spite of it from the point of view of the sophisticated observer.

In other words, Rousseau was primitive in performance

but not. in intention. The distinction is accurate yet danger-

ous. What is usually described as his intention was really

his ambition—the desire to show in official Salons.

There remains one last preliminary: the technical prob

lem of dealing with Rousseau s work. First of all, forgeries.

Soon after his death, a profusion of counterfeit Rousseaus

appeared in Paris (and from as far away as Japan) per-

haps because counterfeiters believed a “primitive should

be easy to imitate.

As an artist, Rousseau, followed no steady evolution of

style, nor even a series of outwardly melodramatic reversals

like Picasso's. At his first Salon des Independants in 1886,

The year following his retirement at forty-one, Rousseau hung Un soir de carnaval, one of his masterpieces.

This canvas shows him already in command of his mature style.

In none of these compositions did he explore linear perspective;

we feel space as accumulation.

One stage does not flow logically out of the last, as we usually expect from an

artist . Along with their similarities, the paintings have a

discontinuous quality which suggests that .the order of their

execution is not a profoundly relevant factor. In addition,

uncertain dating of the bulk of Rousseau s canvases

makes chronological classification difficult.

We never find Rousseau isolating human features as a form of pure beauty

or expression. They appear in association with appropriate land-

scape or fragments of ordinary life.There was nothing casual

about the name he gave this type o£ paintings which he

considered his discovery. In 1907, writing the judge in-

structions before his trial, he stated flatly. “I am the in-

ventor of the portrait-landscape;

In the Moi-meme portrait of 1890, Rousseau s figure stands boldly

and masterfully in the middle, except that he had some difficultv about length of leg and making

the feet rest solidly on the ground. As a result—and also because Rousseau's head is just on the

level of the free balloon-—the figure is itself to rise into the bright sky.

Without laboring over physical likeness, he expressed

character in a pose, or repose, of the whole body, in a selec-

tion of significant objects attached to the figure, and in a

meticulously painted background. He portrayed not an appearance but an environment.

Ever since Rembrandt, the intense portrayal of human

character has tended to eliminate the natural world as a

distraction. The face should tell all. Even the romantics

hesitated to paint a formally commissioned portrait out of

doors. Rousseau set his highly formal compositions against

pastoral or semipastoral backgrounds. His

refusal to separate portraiture from landscape and genre painting chara-

acterizes the “primitive” sensibility which sees a person and

le objects that surround him as a single entity. Rousseau treated his canvas as a surface upon

which to combine and relate the material parts of a person s life, rather than as a

means of dramaticallv isolating a face from all incidentals.

La belle epoque

“It all started with a wake and funeral such as Paris had

never staged even for royalty. In May 1885, four months

after an immense state banquet to celebrate his eighty-third

birthday, Victor Hugo died.

His remains lay in state for twenty-four hours on top

of a mammoth urn which filled the Arc de Triomphe and

-was guarded in half-hour shifts by young children in Gre-

cian vestments.

Within a few yards of Hugo's apotheosis.

an endless procession across Paris the next day included

several brass bands, every political and literary figure of

the day, speeches, numerous deaths in the press of the delirious crowd,

and final entombment in the Pantheon.

The church had to be speciallv unconsecrated for the occasion. By this

orgiastic ceremony France unburdened itself of a man, a

literary movement, and a century.

Paris had just had her face lifted.

Baron Haussmann's ambitious plans for opening up the constricted city

had been executed by 1880.

Of all the stages that made up the city, the most for-

malized and demanding was the salon. [The aristocracy

still cultivated the conversation of what were assumed to

be great minds.

As the salon declined for lack of ladies trained to con-

duct one and through disappearance of the basic attitude

of hommage on which the institution rested, the need for

a verbal arena increased. One of the principal changes.of

la belle epoque was that the great performers moved from

the salon into the cafe.

Here anyone could enter, and each

man paid for his drink. As far back as the mid-eighteenth

century artists and writers in Paris had begun to rely in-

creasingly on the stimulus and exchange of the cafe. (They

were served by young boys, whence comes the word garcon

for waiter.) The term boulevardier was now invented

to describe men whose principal accomplishment consisted

in appearing at the proper moment in the proper cafe.

More than the salon, the cafe came to provide a free market-

place of ideas and helped France produce its steady sue-

cession of artistic schools.The Cafe

Guerbois and the Nouvelle Athenes in the sixties and sev-

enties had nurtured the first artistic movement entirely

organized in cafes: impressionism.

In the title of his famous

play, first produced in 1895, Dumas fils brilliantly named

this special world: Le demi-monde.

Fashion influenced every, domain of life, just after 1890

the velocipede had been introduced with little success.

A few years later, the Prince de Sagan, the most prominent

and dashing nobleman in France pedaled through the Bois

on a “little steel fairy" wearing a loud striped suit and

specially designed straw boater. The city was delighted.

And womens' fashions changed immediately to allow them

to ride astride. The bicycle, symbolizing everything demo-

cratic and modern (and supporting two weekly papers and one daily),

led the way to an upsurge of sport which cul—

minated in the revival of the Olympic games in 1894. After

the bicycle, but without public participation, came the air-

plane. The Eiffel Tower, raised at the cost of fifteen million uninflated francs in 1889.

This great anomaly of modern engineering

aroused protest from a committee of prominent citizens

and expressed all the aspirations of a period

which set out to surpass its heritage. And it remain-

ed: styleless, functionless, unhistoried- the Eiffel Tower in its truculent stance is the first

monument of modernism.

Graham Greene's Brighton Rock

It was all over. Ida squeezed out with difficulty

a last tear into a handkerchief scented with Californian

Poppy. She liked a funeral—but it was with horror-

as other people like a ghost story. Death shocked her,

life was so important. She wasn't religious. She didn't

believe in heaven or hell- only in ghosts, Ouija boards,

tables that rapped and little inept voices speaking

plaintively of flowers. Let Papists treat death with

flippancy: life wasn't so important perhaps to them as

what came after. But to her death was the end of

everything.

She believed in ghosts, but you couldn't call that thin,

transparent existence life eternal: the squeak of a

board, a piece of ectoplasm in a glass cupboard at the

psychical research headquarters, a voice

she'd heard once at a séance saying ''Everything is very beautiful

on the upper plane. There are flowers everywhere.”

Flowers, Ida though scornfully- that wasn't life.

What was the sense of dying if it made you “babble of flowers?

She took life with a deadly seriousness: she was prepared to cause

any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in.

To lose your lover—“broken hearts,” she would say, “always

mend” to be maimed or blinded—''lucky” she'd tell

you “to be alive at all.” There was something dan-

gerous and remorseless in her optimism...

She came out of the crematorium-And there from

the twin towers above her head fumed the very last

of Fred... a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens.

People passing up the flowery suburban road looked

-tip and noted the smoke; it had been a busy day at the furnaces.

Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms:

he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.

Another creepy doll

This one moves.

Creepiest doll ever.

At auction. The bathing suit doesn't help.

2 new woodcuts from auction

2 pieces by Harry Bonath, Seattle art director from the 1920's till his death in the 70's.

The birth of modern auctions

From Wesley Towner's "The Elegant Auctioneers"

English auction houses, by tradition and by design, catered then almost exclusively to the trade. Sales of famous art collections sometimes drew the curious as spectators, but private buyers were excluded from the bidding by custom. If they wanted to buy, they placed bids through dealers, who had entree to the sales and charged 5 or 10 percent commission on the purchase price.

The rooms had the atmosphere of a. catchall for derelict possessions. Things were sold just as they came from the consignor—often dirty and in disrepair. The lots were numbered and just put around.

Mediocrities were not readily distinguishable from things of value: Catalogues, unless interpreted by an expert, gave little clue as to which was which. Oil paintings had the dust and grime of years thick upon the glass that preserved the brush strokes of a master or blurred the hand of a copyist or forger. The sales had an air of cut-and-dried professionalism. Porters in green baize aprons held up chairs by one leg or hoisted portraits that may or may not have been painted by Reynolds above the bidders' heads. The auctioneer wore wore the formal dress of a stockbroker and, in. contrast to his surroundings, was a man of similar dignity and consequence. The porters, it was said, did not even wash their necks. The dealers who did the bidding sat around a big table or stood near it, subdued, expressionless, and tense, like seasoned players in a gambling house. They were firmly organized in the Ring,

The Ring, or knockout system, which still prevails at auctions where the bidding is predominantly by the trade-is an age-old conspiracy to control auction prices and keep the “privates” -the dealers' word for nonprofessional bidders—from getting anything of value at less than the going retail price. The dealers in a particular category of art property form a syndicate and agree not to bid against one another, When one member of the combine bids, the others- however much they may want to buy the lot refrain from running up the price.

After the public sale, the Ring holds its own auction, and the members bid on the lots obtained among themselves. If an item is of no interest to other members of the combine, the original bidder may pay for it and keep it. When two or more dealers in the ring compete for it, the difference between its knockdown price and the amount it brings in the Ring auction goes into the profits of the syndicate. An object of exceptional value may remain joint property of the syndicate members until one of the dealers finds a customer for it and submits a bid acceptable to the others. The gravy is then portioned out among the members as usual.

There are many variations and vicissitudes in the operations of the syndicates. Occasionally a rival combine will invade the auction rooms and bid against the regulars with the object of gaining membership in the established gang. Strong and unpleasant measures may have to be taken to restore monopoly. Sometimes syndicates operate within the syndicate, in which case two or more members form a conspiracy not to compete against each other in the Ring auctions. If the Ring-within-the-Ring succeeds in obtaining objects below their market value,its members may hold a third auction to divide the spoils.

For instance, a Chelsea soup tureen may bring £100 in a London auction. If the porcelain syndicate is composed of ten dealers and the soup tureen brings £1,000 in the King auction, each of the ten dealers gets £90 profit. But the £1,000 may have been paid by three dealers united in a Knockout of their own. The soup tureen for—brings say, £4000 in the subsequent auction among the three, regardless of which dealer buys the tureen, each of the three comes out with an additional £iooo profit. Moreover, a syndicate member, whether the mere circumstance that a Chelsea soup tureen has come up at auction nets him £90 or £1,090, would be unlikely to pay taxes on his ill-gotten gains, since the operations of |the ring are illegal in England, and in any case, undercover.

In any event, the “privates” are not to be tolerated at Ring-controlled auctions. A functionary, who used to be given the colorful title King of the Knockout, is delegated to take over the casual intruder who imagines he can buy advantageously for his own account at auction. If, for instance, a gentleman fancies a Georgian silver coffeepot and attempts to bid for it against the silver Ring, the King of the Knockout will run him up to about the retail value of the coffeepot—or higher, if the gentleman appears to be well-heeled and stubborn—and let him have it. The intruder goes home with his prize—for which he may have paid more than it would have cost in a Bond Street silver shop, -pondering on the fact that in the published reports of auction sales similar coffeepots had frequently fallen for the price of crockery.

As a defense against the Ring, English auction houses operate on a system of reserve prices. The consignor is permitted by law to put a secret reserve, or “upset,” price on each lot to be sold. When the bidding fails to reach the upset price the auctioneer knocks the lot down to himself and the would-be seller pays only a reduced commission. Thus the bidder is placed in the position of playing a kind of blindman's buff with, the auctioneer, who alone is supposed to know what the reserve price is.

Secret reserve prices, though not sanctioned by law, certainly prevailed at New York auctions. What was worse, if the auctioneer did not actually own the property he sold, he mixed in derelict objects of his own in order to cash in on the good will emanating from a real consignor's name. moreover, the consignor—if consignor there was—could hardly be said to be in a better position than the bidder faced with all those unidentified competitors. Most auctioneers were shoe-string operators; they delayed payment interminably, juggled the accounts and sometimes absconded with the funds altogether.

During his retirement from the rostrum Kirby had been mulling over the trouble with auctions, and he had come up with some cardinal principles to herald the Art Associations entrance into the field of management. What he proposed to establish, with the Seney sale as a springboard, was a free and unrestricted auction commission market with the private buyer as its main support. In the language of his manifesto this was to be accomplished by “selling without reserve, restriction or protection, never permitting addition to sales of private or estates' collections, prominently advertising and displaying real ownership, mating final payment within thirty days from the date of sale.

These are in essence the principles under which the Parke-Bernet Galleries functioned for many years. If they do not sound particularly cardinal now, they did in 1885.

From: O Rare Don Marquis

In 1931, Don Marquis' publisher suggested he write his autobiography. He turned down the proposal with these word: "I'm entitled to a better subject".
He did write:
"The name Marquis is not French but Scottish in origin. the first of the name of whom I have any record came to Virginia from the North of Ireland in 1720, and settled near Winchester. They were Calvinists who believed in Infant Damnation, Calomel, and Scotch Whiskey. "

Marquis and his wife moved to Brooklyn in 1909, the year horse-drawn streetcars were abandoned for electrically powered car lines. "...and as more and more ofthese conveyances swung down the streets of Brooklyn, the local citizenry came to be known as trolley dodgers.... eventually shortened to dodgers", which is how the Brooklyn Dodgers acquired its name.

For some years Marquis rattled out his daily stint with his typewriter machine perched on an up-ended packing crate. This box had stenciled on it "1 GROSS TOM CAT" which meant tomato catsup, but became by legend the first suggestion of mehitabel.

Barbara Comyns

From "Sisters By A River", her first novel....


After she had had six babies at eighteen month intervals Mammy suddenly went deaf, perhaps her subconscious mind just couldn't bear the noise of babies crying anymore. Mammy had always looked and been rather vague, she had a kind of gypsoflia mind all little bits and pieces held together by whisps, now she grew vaguer still and talked with a high floating voice, leaving her sentences half finished. It must have been beastly looking at all those flapping hands all the time.

All our family were very superstitious but Granny was the worst, and she was always seeing spirits about the house. she would say things about the house had a curse on them, even our toys and they were burnt because of that, sometimes I thought maybe she was a witch in rather thin disguise.

Zeena Frome

Shockingly, this appears to be Edith Wharton, minx.
I've reread Ethan Frome (whom I believe bears his fate uncomplainingly as complaining would be churlish at best. After all, he has had nearly everything he desired given him, but, like Victorian children who find a genie, has rashly forgotten to specify the terms.)
After marrying Zeena...

But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility of transplanting her. She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within a year of their marriage she developed the “sickliness” which had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances.

From the auction

A pewter lidded container with a recumbent fawn knob, marked "Denmark" and unhelpfully accompanied by an indistinguishable maker's insignia.

My hangover Agatha

Funerals Are Fatal.
A half-batty elderly sister attending her brother's funeral, blurts out "Well, it WAS murder wasn't it?" and is subsequently chopped to bits with a hatchet. Her companion is poisoned by a slice of mailed wedding cake- part of which she leaves under her pillow so as to dream of her own wedding. Mustachioed nuns are thrown in as a red herring, and Victorian wax flowers under a bell jar become significant to Poirot. The means and the murderer become glaringly obvious from the wedding cake on, although the motive would be, let's say, unlikely to inspire hatchet murder in many; that motive being to take the money from selling the victim's Vermeer (over which the murderer had painted a seaside scene) and open a tea shoppe.
Of course Aggie sets herself a brilliant problem to solve- what if a murder is not a murder but an opportunity to distract from a planned crime? (Not that the sister hatcheted herself to death.)

Nice cover, though.

The Day of the Locust

Reading Nathaniel West's final novel in a wonderfully lurid pulp edition.(bottom pic) A pocket edition as dry as a pressed flower. It closes like an over-used wallet because its spine has been broken. The two halves of pages are nearly bifurcated at the place where Homer Simpson takes pity on Miss Martin, the lush. Everything after Miss Martin would drift and flitter out one page after the other but for the six tough strings of dried glue that hold it intact. They stretch like spit between lips and are amber, crusted with bits of brown paper- like broken, translucent bug parts.

I have also included the Penguin edition which has the most fitting cover art.

From the bk.:
It was a picture of Faye Greener, a still from a two-reel farce in which she worked as an extra. She had given him the photograph willingly enough, had even autographed it in a large wild hand, "Affectionately yours, Faye Greener". Faye played one of the dancing girls. She had only one line to speak, "Oh, Mr. Smith" and spoke it badly.

Finally

I had long avoided reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a difficult feat. At the time, the prevalent edition was this one with a bird being annoyed by poky color triangles. I suppose I thought the book was about murderous Graphic Designers. As a child, I couldn't even look at the cover without it upsetting me. I also shunned it because my sister (possibly kindly) warned me if a dog died in anything, a movie, a book or a television show and one, named Tim Johnson, does indeed die- so I deliberately never watched the Gregory Peck film, and may eventually have confused it with Member of the Wedding.
Of course, I loved the novel.

From the bk.....
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Revisiting Muriel Spark

Daylight was appearing over London, the great city of bachelors. Half-pint bottles of milk began to be stood at the doorsteps of houses containing single apartments from Hampstead Heath to Greenwich Park, from Wanstead Flats to Putney Heath; but especially in Hampstead, especially in Kensington.
In Queens Gate, Kensington, in Harrington Road, The Boltons.... Chelsea and its backwaters, the bachelors stirred between their sheets, reached for their wound watches, and with waking intelligences noted the time; then remembering it was Saturday morning turned over on their pillows. But soon because it was Saturday, most would be out on the streets shopping for their bacon and eggs.... would set out early, before a quarter past ten, in order to avoid being jostled by the women, the legitimate shoppers.

and

It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others besides ourselves, he thought who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history. Others ferment in prison; some rot, maimed; some lean over the banisters of presbyteries to see if anyone is going to answer the telephone.

From "Hawkins of the Paris Herald"

Sarah Bernhardt, 1879: "It's curious how many idle stories there are about me. My favorite dishes are supposed to be burnt cats, lizards' tails and peacock brains sauteed in monkey butter, whatever that is..."

I saw La Goulue sometime after her retirement from the Moulin Rouge. True to her soubriquet, meaning the glutton, she had ruined her dancing career by overeating, and my glimpse of her was as a lion tamer in a street fair. She later became a wrestler and just before she died in 1921 she could be seen selling oranges outside the Moulin rouge.

"In the early years of the century, the Folies Bergere competed with the Moulin Rouge by producing revues that featured English dancehall girls, because French girls are incapable of learning the precisions required in a chorus line.

Ladies of pleasure had been known under the Second Empire a les biches and les soupeuses. A biche was a small deer. A soupeuse was a beauty of limited virtue available for supper. By the turn of the century, the appellations had gone out of fashion in favor of the simpler 'demimondaine'.

Worst wedding toast ever

John Donne in 1627, from the NYRB:

Where be all the splinters of that Bone,
which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the Ayre ?
Where be all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive hath eat away,
or a Consumption hath breath'd,and exhal'd away from our arms, and other Limbs ?
In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth,
ly all the graines of the ashes of a body burnta thousand years since ?
 In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned
in the generall flood ? What coherence, what sympathy, what dependence
maintaines any relation, any correspondence, between that arm that was lost in Europe,
and that legge that was lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers between ?
One humour of our dead body produces worms,
and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries,
 and molders into dust, and that dust is blowen into the River, &
that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebs and flows in infinite revolutions,
and still, still God knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies,
in what part of the world every graine of every mans dust lies.

MURTHER somewhat foul

After a marvelous July 4th with work folk, I spent the afternoon with Agatha. "Murder at Hazelmoor" opened, as always, with a terrific premise. An evening party where the hostesses, suggesting diversions, agree to some table turning. The lights are dimmed and the table raps out, letter by letter, that Captain Trevelyan has just been murdered at the Hazelmoor cottage he was renting. His good friend Burnaby sets off in a snowstorm to investigate. Trevelyan is indeed dead- coshed with a sand-filled sock laid against under door draughts. Since the time of death coincides with the spirit occurance, it is obvious that one of the guests must be the murderer, and as only 4 characters are sketched out in the length of the story, it is of course the one most present in that narrative.

Acquisitions

The 3 latest art purchases at auction- unsigned or illegibly signed. "Landscape" pencil signed " N. Mayer", dated '51. Mid to early 20th century- the two lithographs were from the estate of artist Eugene Pizzuto- in a sheaf of art from many different artists. The bridge is a greater mystery- the artist seems to have also created the frame- there is a two letter monogram in the lower left corner, possibly "K.T.".

Agatha

Left: The face of my hangovers.





When, on the morning following a night out I have no desire to move, I'll reread an Agatha Christie cover to cover until the throbbing ceases. After "The Clocks", I read "Mrs. McGinty's Dead" in which an elderly charwoman was murdered by one of any of her five clients as she had discovered that one of them was related to one of four murderesses featured in a newspaper article. The solution, not very thrillingly, had to do with the fact that "Evelyn CAN also be a MAN'S name!"
Next it was "Ordeal by Innocence" in which a woman is murdered by one of any of 4 adopted children, her husband, secretary or housekeeper. The motive was rather implausible.... (housekeeper infatuated with son, hiding theft of slain mother's money). The reaction of the son when convicted of the murder committed by the housekeeper was inexplicable.
I enjoy having all the Christie paperbacks around to remind me of my days spent in paperback swap shops like The Book Rack, situated next to the waterfall in the University Village shopping center, but I never need read them again, so they are being purged, along with Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Virginia Kelly (Clinton)'s Autobiography and some Brigid Brophy.

Oh, T.H.R-G!

From Robsjohn-Gibbings' petulant screed against the antique, "Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale":
"Those were the days, so help me, when it was the height of something to sit on a cassapanca upon a tiled floor amid frescoed walls and coffered ceiling- an interior of incredible gloom..."
(A cassapanca is a sort of Italiany hope chest, to which arms and a back could be added).

and on "French Gothic"

This confusion of the ecclesiastical and the secular, the result of too many visits to European churches and cathedrals by the American laity, struck few if any as incongruous. It seemed natural to hang your pants over a prie-dieu, keep the telephone book on a lectern, the cigars in a gutted hymnal, drape the walls with chasubles, put a chalice on the piano, and stand dolorous carved saints in the odd corners.

Somerset Maughham, Agatha Christie, Chanel, William James

The order of completion of the last four books I have read.
This was my second reading of "Cakes and Ale", and I enjoyed it even more than I had previously. It is the only Maugham I've ever attempted (other than a reluctant plunge into "Of Human Bondage"- a novel that should be quietly slid behind file cabinets and into elevator shafts while no one's looking)
I followed this up with Agatha Christie's "The Clocks", which had the irresistible murder of an unknown man who was to be found by a temp hire arriving at the house of an elderly blind woman whose home has been filled with clocks she does not own, all set to the same wrong time.
It became glaringly obvious that these were all red herrings and the murderer was fairly apparent. The motive was unsportingly peripheral to the story, and the eventual identity of the victim was never really a point of interest. It almost seemed an academic problem Agatha was solving, the premise made from words thrown improv style at her. Even if the victim is unsympathetic his death should inspire some sort of empathy in the reader. He was as inert as the clocks. Absurdly, after the murder was solved the blind woman turned out to be some sort of spy which in no way had anything to do with the victim.
Less skillfully, Edmonde Roux's prickly, defensive bio of Chanel largely consisted of extraordinary suppositions, diaphonous sources and a sense that Roux had no interest at all in fashion. So many sentences ended half-way through or trailed clauses into vaporous nothingness that the narrative shuddered to a stop. Additionally its poor translation into stilted English gave one the sensation of falling down a staircase.

From "William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism"

a race of dogs bred for generations, say in the Vatican, with
characters of visual shape, sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every variety
of form and combination, ought to discriminate before long the finest shades of these
peculiar characters. In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, accomplished
connoisseurs of sculpture.
What this leaves out, of course, is the factor of active interest. The mind must have some interest in a given subject before it even begins to register impressions, let aone form opinions. "My experience is what I agree to attend to" is how James puts it. What the dogs will attend to in the scculpture gallery is "Who peed on this pedestal?"

Conrad

"Mr. Arnold Bennett recently protested against those people who, when Conrad is mentioned, exclaim "Ah, Conrad!" as if that were a different thing altogether, as if you were now talking about something that mattered. It is a form of exclusiveness that is very irritating no doubt, especially if you happen to be a novelist yourself."

_Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays

Hugh Trevor-Roper on Scotland

I suppose that the great crisis caused by the Rape of the Stone has been reported even in Italy. The upper classes (feel) if such things are to be allowed, where will they stop? Are not the halls and castles of the Scots aristocracy stuffed with relics and objets d'art dubiously conveyed thither from distant origins far more recently than the 13th century? If everyone is going to claim his own, there will be scenes like the competition for disputed limbs and organs in the great day of the Resurrection of the Flesh.

Jacobean furniture

From the book "The Practical Book Of Period Furniture", by Harold Donaldson Eberlein And Abbot McClure: For those whose needs embrace Jacobean furniture the authors have endeavoured to offset all difficulties and make its study as easy as possible by treating it in the most practical and systematic manner. They would also cheer the reader by assuring him that the subsequent periods are much simpler and less varied in their characteristics.

Before treating of Jacobean furniture itself it is necessary to say a few words regarding the terms used,when we speak of the Jacobean or Stuart period, with reference to furniture, we ordinarily include everything between 1603, when James I ascended the throne of England, and 1688, when the second James fled before the victorious approach of William of Orange.

The contour and style of the furniture of the Jacobean period, as of every other period for that matter, more or less faithfully reflected the social, intellectual and religious temperament and manners of the times. The furniture was stout and staunch, even to clumsiness and severe in form and line even though bedizened with a superfluity of ornament. It matched the coarse manners, abrupt morals, and vigorous theology of the day with all their grotesquerie, terrible earnestness and redundancy of polemics, brimstone anathema and persecution. Contour and style were both thoroughly in accord with the genius of the people.

The Paris Universal Expo of 1867

From "The Judgment of Paris"
Among the new inventions were: a typewriter, a phonograph, a tire made from rubber, a refined hydrocarbon oil called petroleum, and aluminum. There was also dynamite and a new invention from America, the rocking chair. Displayed as well was a brass horn called the saxophone, invented by the Imperial Instrument maker, Adolphe Sax.

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.