May 23, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Having a Moment By Sadie Stein Shaker Church Family Barns, Sabbathday Lake Village, Cumberland County, ME, 1970; photo via Wikimedia Commons Big in 2014: the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Founded in 1783 in what was then called Thompson’s Pond Plantation, the community consists of eighteen buildings, an orchard, a tree farm, vegetable and herb gardens, livestock pastures, and hay fields, all spread over eighteen-hundred acres of land. The community practices traditional Shaker crafts—basket-making, weaving, printing—although only three of its members—Sister Francis, Brother Arnold and Sister June—are still active today. This summer, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, will honor the Sabbathday Lake community with its 2014 Maine in America Award, which is presented to an individual or group who has made an outstanding contribution to Maine’s role in American art. Prior honorees include Robert Indiana and Alex Katz. They and the three elderly Shakers may seem like strange bedfellows. Equally unlikely is their association with the famously innovative Wooster Group, whose Early Shaker Spirituals is currently playing in New York. The show—part of an ongoing series based on recordings—is grounded on an eponymous 1976 LP recorded by the Sisters of Sabbathday Lake. Using a technique the company pioneered, the actors wear earpieces through which they hear, as they perform, the actual recordings of Shaker songs. The show also includes pattern dances, inspired by surviving fragments of Shaker ecstatic dance. (You can see clips of a rehearsal here, and watch the actors morph from ecstatic Shakers back into actors, joking and laughing.) These are real and fitting tributes to people whose work and art have added genuine beauty to the world—it’s gratifying to see the community receiving attention while there are still Shakers around, and to know that there is a living record of their history. And yet, one wonders: will the three surviving members come to New York to see the show? Will they go to the Farnsworth Summer Gala to accept their award? Read More
May 23, 2014 Look The Inquisitive Fallacy By Lilly Lampe A professor’s unlikely quest for busts of Alexander Pope. Pause Play Play Prev | Next “Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac, and the Portrait Bust in Eighteen-Century Britain,” recently on view at the Yale Center for British Art, tells a curious tale of Alexander Pope’s legacy, focusing on the strange fervor that continues to surround busts and portraits of him. Pope, whose birthday was earlier this week, was a household name, at least in one sector of British society. He was the first English poet to publish two volumes of his own collected works while living—and with the publication of the first volume, he also became the first English author to sustain himself entirely on the proceeds of his work. And he didn’t lead a meager existence. Pope was able to lease a sizable villa near Richmond, a painting of which was on view in Yale’s exhibition. For any writer, these achievements would’ve been no small feat, but they’re especially impressive in light of Pope’s many obstacles. He was a Catholic at a time when Catholics weren’t allowed to live within ten miles of London or Westminster or to attend university; and he was beset with health problems that led to a visible hunchback and permanently stunted his height. Even so, Pope became a celebrated member of the British literary canon—someone whose very image evoked intellectual achievement. Paintings and busts of Pope were commissioned for wealthy families and artistic friends—they conferred status among men of letters. According to Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English at Yale, when Voltaire visited England in 1727, he marveled that he saw Pope’s portrait in “twenty noblemen’s houses.” The placement of these busts was telling of the poet’s reputation; he was displayed with such notable British intellectuals as Laurence Sterne and Isaac Newton. “Fame and Friendship” assembled an intriguing array of these busts, made of stately marble or—in the case of a petite, mass-produced work—porcelain. At the center of the collection are eight busts of Pope by French émigré sculptor Louis François Roubiliac, created between 1738 and 1760. Though they were made over the course of twenty-two years, they carry certain hallmarks: a telltale droop beneath Pope’s eyes, a marked thinness in his cheeks, an inquisitive gaze, and a slender nose. In Roubiliac’s skillful hands, the signs of Pope’s infirmity are presented instead as characteristics befitting a poetic countenance, with all the sensitivity that poetry implies. Read More
May 23, 2014 On the Shelf Clean-Living Canines, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Carl Reichert, Paar Doggen Jane Austen read her own reviews, and took scrupulous notes: “Austen appears to have compiled the reactions of her readers from letters, hearsay, and direct conversations and recorded them on a set of closely written pages around 1815, before her death at the age of forty-one, two years later.” From now till June 21, you can apply for a residency with Write A House, a new program with a terrific mission: to renovate homes in Detroit and then to give them, permanently, to writers. One of those writers may be you. “Dogs have a kind of moral code—one long hidden to humans until a cognitive ethologist named Marc Bekoff began to crack it … If three dogs are playing and one bites or tackles too hard, the other two are likely to give him the cold shoulder and stop playing with him, Bekoff says. Such behavior, he says, suggests that dogs are capable of morality, a mindset once thought to be uniquely human.” Today in artificially intelligent cyborg assassin news: “a team of scientists destined to doom us all has developed the first bionic particles fusing organic materials and synthetic semiconductors, in a project they openly admit is ‘inspired by fictional cyborgs like the Terminator.’” “In 1835, the Finnish linguist Elias Lönnrot published The Kalevala, a compilation of traditional epic poetry. In his home country, The Kalevala is now considered to be one of the most important works of literature of all time … Five photographers traveled to Kainuu in Northeast Finland, the birthplace of The Kalevala, and explored the mythology through contemporary photography.”
May 23, 2014 Sleep Aid Minutes from the Second Annual Meeting of the American Society of Microscopists By Secretary, The American Society of Microscopists It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “Minutes from the Second Annual Meeting of the American Society of Microscopists,” published in 1879. Eric Earnshaw, After Lunch, 1942 The American Society of Microscopists met in Second Annual Convention, pursuant to the final adjournment of the First Annual Session, in the Central School building, Buffalo, New York, at ten o’clock a.m., August 19th, 1879; the President, Dr. R. H. Ward, in the chair. The Rev. Dr. Van Bokkelen, of Trinity Church, offered prayer. Then, on behalf of the local Microscopical Club, Dr. H. R. Hopkins welcomed the visitors with the following address: Mr. President and Gentlemen: let us exchange congratulations upon this the occasion of the second meeting of the American Society of Microscopists. I most heartily congratulate each and all of you who have the pleasure of remembering that you assisted in the work of founding this society, and I also congratulate all of you who have the opportunity of attending the second meeting and of enrolling your names among the lists of its members. I also ask you to congratulate the citizens of Buffalo upon the fact that the second meeting of this society is held in our city. I congratulate you upon the hearty cordiality with which you are made welcome by every member of your local committee, and the various societies and associations which that committee represents, and I ask you to congratulate us upon the cheering prospects that our expectations of the pleasure of listening to your deliberations are so near fruition. Again I congratulate you upon the fact that there is an American Society of Microscopists, and I believe that the work of recording what Americans have done and are doing for the advancement of this department of science can safely be trusted to the future of the Society. With this thought in my mind, I must congratulate you upon the prospect of having with you one who has had the rare good fortune to teach the world how to make objectives, whose angles extend far outside the limits which authorities had fixed as the boundaries of the possible. Let us give all honor to the modest yet noble American, Mr. Charles A. Spencer, at once the father and the genius of Modern Microscopy. Read More
May 22, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Gatto Nero By Sadie Stein Corinne May Botz, The Roehrs House, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey Back in the day when video stores existed and I used to patronize them regularly, I depended particularly upon the judgment of a cinephile clerk named Will. One day, I went into his Brooklyn store and found someone different behind the counter. I explained to him what I was looking for: A creepy psychological thriller/horror movie along the lines of Don’t Look Now, The Innocents, the original Wicker Man, Haunting of Hill House, Burnt Offerings, or Audrey Rose. (I added that, despite its mediocrity, there were things I liked about Skeleton Key.) In short, I tend to like a not-too-silly movie dealing with ghosts and the occult. I am especially drawn to those set in the 1970s, in which everyone is seemingly punished for the naivete of belonging to a happy family (just as a decade later one would be punished for being a teen girl). Catholic clergy is a plus. Hammer horror, serial killers, vampires, zombies, malevolent animals, and monsters of other kinds need not apply. We discussed this earnestly for some time and he determined that I must rent the 1981 version of The Black Cat, loosely based on the eponymous Poe story. As he seemed to understand exactly what I was looking for, I was very excited and set aside a whole evening for viewing. Read More
May 22, 2014 Look A Rookery of Pterodactyls By Dan Piepenbring Pause Play Play Prev | Next In celebration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, have a look at these illustrations from the original serialization of his novel The Lost World, which appeared in The Strand Magazine from April through November of 1912. Conan Doyle’s novel tells of an expedition to South America, where—wouldn’t you know it?—dinosaurs still roam the earth. Everyone associates Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, but The Lost World also left its mark on popular culture: though Conan Doyle borrowed a large part of its conceit from Jules Verne, it remains the paradigm for a sort of swashbuckling supernatural adventure, full of bumbling professorial types and out-of-their-depth journalists and strapping, granite-abdomened men in pith helmets. It’s served as the source material for everything from The Land That Time Forgot to Land of the Lost and plain old Lost, and, of course, for Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park. This is no country for Jeff Goldblum, but these illustrations, full of terror and adventure, do seem like the sort of thing Steven Spielberg and George Lucas might have hanging in their offices—and there’s definitely something of that Industrial Light & Magic awe in Conan Doyle’s vivid description of a pterodactyl nest: Creeping to his side, we looked over the rocks. The place into which we gazed was a pit, and may, in the early days have been one of the smaller volcanic blow-holes of the plateau. It was bowl-shaped, and at the bottom, some hundreds of yards from where we lay, were pools of green-scummed, stagnant water, fringed with bulrushes. It was a weird place in itself, but its occupants made it seem like a scene from the Seven Circles of Dante. The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, grey, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely motionless save for the rolling of their red eyes or an occasional snap of their rat-trap beaks as a dragon-fly went past them. Their huge membranous wings were closed by folding their forearms, so that they sat like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-colored shawls, and with their ferocious heads protruding above them. Large and small, not less than a thousand of these filthy creatures lay in the hollow before us.