So last year right around this time [and consequently one of my last blog posts--tenure-track life is NOT conducive to blogging] I reflected on the passing year in list form. I enjoyed trying to remember the previous 12 months, and so I thought, it being a frigid Maine night during my winter break from USM, that I'd try my hand at a 2009 version of the year in lists. I am going to try and refrain from any "Best of the Decade" lists, mostly because I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that we are entering into a new decade, but one or two may slip in. Was Y2K really ten years ago? Seriously? I'm getting old. Happy reading [if anyone else besides me even reads this--blogs are almost as self-indulgent as twitter and facebook] and I'd love to read some of your 2009 lists!
Biggest 2009 Life Changes:
Giving up Diet-Coke [and all caffeine, actually]. This occurred in early August.
Becoming a Vegetarian [This also occurred in August, though I now occasionally eat fish]
Becoming a Level-II Reiki practitioner [Hoping to be Level-III in 2010--energy healing is amazing--let me know if you want to have a session]
Best Overall 2009 Discovery:
Acupuncture. It's changed my life--I don't know what I'd do without it. Thanks Jason at Rocky Coast Family Acupuncture in Portland--you are AMAZING!
Random Facts:
This is the first year of this decade that we attended no weddings.
At one time over the course of 2009, we knew 11 people who were pregnant.
2009 marked our 7th year of marriage :).
Proudest Moment of 2009:
Finishing the Maine Half-Marathon in October. 13.1 miles is far, even when you walk most of the way!
Newest Internet Time Suck:
Twitter [Thanks to Derek Peplau] But I must admit, it's fun, informative, and useful on personal and professional levels!
Most Exciting Professional Moment of 2009:
Seeing my name in print in a book in my chapter in Tom O'Connor's Two Centuries of Faith.
Most Exciting Professional Development of 2009:
The exhibit on Modernism in Georgetown, Maine is definitely a reality [Summer 2011, Portland Museum of Art]; I'm co-curating it; Yale is publishing the catalogue.
Best Books I Read [or am reading right now] This Year [in no particular order]:
Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato [One of the only ones of his I hadn't yet read--the culminating book to my senior seminar on history through film and fiction--and a brilliant novel]
Michael Pollen, In Defense of Food [and the companion Food Rules: An Eater's Manual]
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle [yes, I only read this for the first time this year, before I taught it]
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath [same comment as above--some classics just slip by....]
Chuck Klosterman, Downtown Owi: A Novel
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge
Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic
Charlaine Harris' Nine Sookie Stackhouse Novels [pure trash--vampires, faeries, etc. but I loved every moment of them]
Juhmpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth [wonderful short stories]
Ruth Moore, The Weir [Classic 1940s Maine novel--worth the read!]
Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt Maine
Top 10 movies I saw this year [in no particular order]:
Up [I cried for the first 30 minutes, I think]
Precious [So disturbing and yet, so powerful]
Food Inc. [Everyone should watch this]
Avatar [not for the plot--just for the beautiful 3-D world]
Fantastic Mr. Fox [brilliantly done by Wes Anderson--the vignettes are perfect--I laughed the whole time]
Up in the Air [Required viewing in this economy--esp. if you or anyone you know has spent time jobless]
Away We Go [Sweet and believable]
Adventureland [Great Indie flick--good tunes, too]
500 Days of Summer [One of the better love stories I've watched]
Zombieland [Steve made me see this--I thought I would hate it--it was great]
The Hangover [This is only on here because it made me laugh so hard--believe me, it was dumb, funny, but dumb]
[Star Trek should probably be on here too]
The Five TV shows I make time to watch even when I shouldn't [Thank Goodness for Tivo]:
Mad Men
True Blood
30 Rock
Friday Night Lights [I promise you this is the best show you're not watching]
Glee
[And also Gossip Girl, but that's too embarrassing to admit, oops.....]
Number of Movies on Moviefone's 50 Best Movies of 2009 that I have seen: 17
Sites most Frequently visited by me on the interwebs in 2009:
Google
Google Book
Facebook
Twitter
Post Secret
New York Times
JStor
Sirius Satellite Radio On-line listening
The USM Homepage and Mainestreet
The Best Professional Conference I Attended in 2009:
The 50th Anniversary Conference of the Maine Women Writers Collection in June entitled "Women in the Archives"--great panels, great connections, and fascinating inter-disciplinary folks from all over the country.
The Best Christmas Card of 2009:
It's a tie between the George Bischof Christmas letter and Morgan Lake Adams and Tim Schneider's story card.
Best Maine Adventures of 2009:
Open Lighthouse Day hike to Squirrel Head Light in Arrowsic
The one day trip to Lubec [and back--10 hours in the car] this fall--gorgeous place, gorgeous drive--can't wait to go back!
The Kingfield adventure in search of Chansonetta Stanley Emmons at the Stanley Museum
Popham Beach and Fort with Megan and Steve.
Sebago Lake in the rain with Mike and Erica.
New Record for longest houseguest [at 59 Underhill]:
Megan MacDonald--most of Summer 2009.
Books Assigned this semester that resulted in the best overall papers from my students:
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
Jack Kerouac's On the Road
Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
Best New [to me] Cookbook:
The New Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen [vegetarian]
Best Technology Purchase of 2009:
My Nikon D60--it's one sweet camera.
Most Unique Party We Attended:
Morgan and Tim's Sake Tasting Party
My best YouTube Discovery [other than clips I pull for class like Superman shorts from the 1940s]:
Any of the "Drunk Histories"
The one on the Burr/Hamilton Duel is particularly good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V_DsL1x1uY
Favorite New Class I Taught:
It's a tie between my Spring Semester Photographing American History and my Fall Semester Senior Seminar--History through Film and Fiction [this might be the best class I've ever had the privilege of being a part of--never mind teaching]
Most Interesting Research Trip of 2009:
A Month at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson in Arizona. Lesson learned--avoid the desert in June and July because 109 is REALLY HOT!
Favorite Coaching Moments of 2009:
When Hannah broke 140' in the discus; when Katie PR'd in the weight; when Vanessa broke 35' in the shot-put; when Matt PR'd in both the shot and the weight with a dislocated thumb at our first indoor meet.
Biggest Disappointments on the 2009 Chicago Bear Roster [Most Disappointing to Least] [This is so obviously Steve's list]:
1. Jay Cutler
2. Orlando Pace
3. Nathan Vasher
4. Tommy Harris
5. Matt Forte
6. Lovie Smith [the Coach]
Top Five Reasons You should Hate Brett Favre [This is also Steve's list]
1. He's selfish.
2. He thinks he's the coach.
3. He always chokes late in the season.
4. Those [expletive] Wrangler ads.
5. He's a waffling little girl.
If you need more lists, might I suggest Time Magazine's 'The Top Ten of Everything--2009:'
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1945379,00.html
2010 Resolutions:
Write more.
Exercise for at least 30 minutes EVERY DAY.
Happy New Year to All! May this decade bring us all peace, health, jobs and joy.
Libby
30 December 2009
20 April 2009
Random Thoughts on Robert Frank's "The Americans," Steichen's "Family of Man" and the State of Things
It being late-April, it's high time for my monthly post [maybe more time in the Summer?] And I felt like writing tonight [and I thought I'd indulge the urge because it doesn't come often enough].
So, I was doing some reading this evening [or more like looking] for the Photographing American History class I teach on Thursday evenings and I was paging through both Robert Frank's The Americans and Edward Steichen's The Family of Man. Of all photo essays I've ever come across, Frank's is my very favorite as a historian and also just as a casual observer. It is so much of America from the perspective of the outsider--sometimes the only one who can see without the baggage of citizenship, residence, or claim. And yet, Frank is no tourist, just an introspective soul on a journey. As many times as I've read Jack Kerouac's introduction to the photographs, I find something new in it. Today, this phrase struck me:
"What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind. Whether 't is the milk of human kindness, Shakespeare meant, makes no difference when you look at these pictures. Better than a show."
Frank's images [among others] do provide proof that photographs can be poems. And yet, I wonder if there are poems out there written by just the young upstarts [or the old ones] Kerouac talks about, and if not, what a fun book project that would make some day--inviting poets young and old to choose a picture of Frank's and write about it--to tell a story from within and without the frame. Maybe in my next life I'll put that together. Which photograph would I write about? Many probably, but there are a few stories to be told within [and without] "Yale Commencement--New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut." Graduates mill about in the uncomfortable conformity that is academic regalia. Where to put one's hands? In fists, behind backs, in poses of nervousness and excitement--one foot in the past--one in the future--and a mind everywhere but present on graduation day. As for the old man on the bench with the folded up newspaper, well, his mind is in the past, imagining his own commencement and replaying images in his mind of a life in between, when he walked in these robes [or didn't] and where he thought he would be, and where he is, on this bench, on this morning, in New Haven.
In fact, I would like to read more poems inspired by photographs, because they tend to be poems of vicarious experience and displacement, and thus interesting. I was at once surprised [and not] to learn earlier this semester that not only was Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" originally based on the text of a poem written by Abel Meeropol, but that the poem was his response to viewing Lawrence Beitler's brutal photograph of a 1930 Indiana Lynching. It is amazing how many lives an image can have [and yet not save] when translated into text, and then later, song.
And then I looked through Steichen's famous MOMA exhibit of 1955 [how I wish I could have seen this in person--the catalogue does NOT do it justice], and Kerouac's words still resonate: "the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind." Because in "The Family of Man," we see human kind, and love and music and dancing, and eating, and life and death in all of its human-ness everywhere, not just in America. And we are, despite our quibbles, and foibles, and differences of belief, still a family of man. The show is so hopeful in the middle of a century filled with so much death and destruction by the hand of man. And wisdom from throughout the world is quoted, as on p. 60:
"Before me peaceful,
Behind me peaceful,
Under me peaceful,
Over me peaceful,
All around me peaceful..." --Navaho
And maybe it was Steichen's audacious hope, but its' tenacity persists, and the images continue to work against disconnection and forgetfulness of the human condition, especially the universality of it. In a way that only images can, evoking both past and present.
Both of these works were of the 1950s, and neither fit stereotypes of the decade. That is, perhaps, why they work so well as history. Because, in Montaigne's words [as quoted in the catalogue]: "Every many beareth the whole stamp of the human condition." And Montaigne knew that, I think, better than most of his era, as he sat, in his library in his estate in France, writing essays borne of his very ordinary struggles with kidney stones, friendships lost, and war and death.
Our own struggles, be they ordinary or extraordinary, find perspective in Steichen's masterful exhibition, because we have all, when looking at each and every photograph, literally been there--emotionally if not physically.
And so, I think this has helped me organize my thoughts for Thursday. Or, perhaps just set me on a path strewn with more questions. But isn't that the point of looking? Yes.
Robert Frank, "Yale Commencement--New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut."
So, I was doing some reading this evening [or more like looking] for the Photographing American History class I teach on Thursday evenings and I was paging through both Robert Frank's The Americans and Edward Steichen's The Family of Man. Of all photo essays I've ever come across, Frank's is my very favorite as a historian and also just as a casual observer. It is so much of America from the perspective of the outsider--sometimes the only one who can see without the baggage of citizenship, residence, or claim. And yet, Frank is no tourist, just an introspective soul on a journey. As many times as I've read Jack Kerouac's introduction to the photographs, I find something new in it. Today, this phrase struck me:
"What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind. Whether 't is the milk of human kindness, Shakespeare meant, makes no difference when you look at these pictures. Better than a show."
Frank's images [among others] do provide proof that photographs can be poems. And yet, I wonder if there are poems out there written by just the young upstarts [or the old ones] Kerouac talks about, and if not, what a fun book project that would make some day--inviting poets young and old to choose a picture of Frank's and write about it--to tell a story from within and without the frame. Maybe in my next life I'll put that together. Which photograph would I write about? Many probably, but there are a few stories to be told within [and without] "Yale Commencement--New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut." Graduates mill about in the uncomfortable conformity that is academic regalia. Where to put one's hands? In fists, behind backs, in poses of nervousness and excitement--one foot in the past--one in the future--and a mind everywhere but present on graduation day. As for the old man on the bench with the folded up newspaper, well, his mind is in the past, imagining his own commencement and replaying images in his mind of a life in between, when he walked in these robes [or didn't] and where he thought he would be, and where he is, on this bench, on this morning, in New Haven.
In fact, I would like to read more poems inspired by photographs, because they tend to be poems of vicarious experience and displacement, and thus interesting. I was at once surprised [and not] to learn earlier this semester that not only was Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" originally based on the text of a poem written by Abel Meeropol, but that the poem was his response to viewing Lawrence Beitler's brutal photograph of a 1930 Indiana Lynching. It is amazing how many lives an image can have [and yet not save] when translated into text, and then later, song.
And then I looked through Steichen's famous MOMA exhibit of 1955 [how I wish I could have seen this in person--the catalogue does NOT do it justice], and Kerouac's words still resonate: "the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind." Because in "The Family of Man," we see human kind, and love and music and dancing, and eating, and life and death in all of its human-ness everywhere, not just in America. And we are, despite our quibbles, and foibles, and differences of belief, still a family of man. The show is so hopeful in the middle of a century filled with so much death and destruction by the hand of man. And wisdom from throughout the world is quoted, as on p. 60:
"Before me peaceful,
Behind me peaceful,
Under me peaceful,
Over me peaceful,
All around me peaceful..." --Navaho
And maybe it was Steichen's audacious hope, but its' tenacity persists, and the images continue to work against disconnection and forgetfulness of the human condition, especially the universality of it. In a way that only images can, evoking both past and present.
Both of these works were of the 1950s, and neither fit stereotypes of the decade. That is, perhaps, why they work so well as history. Because, in Montaigne's words [as quoted in the catalogue]: "Every many beareth the whole stamp of the human condition." And Montaigne knew that, I think, better than most of his era, as he sat, in his library in his estate in France, writing essays borne of his very ordinary struggles with kidney stones, friendships lost, and war and death.
Our own struggles, be they ordinary or extraordinary, find perspective in Steichen's masterful exhibition, because we have all, when looking at each and every photograph, literally been there--emotionally if not physically.
And so, I think this has helped me organize my thoughts for Thursday. Or, perhaps just set me on a path strewn with more questions. But isn't that the point of looking? Yes.
Robert Frank, "Yale Commencement--New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut."
01 March 2009
On Local Historical Societies
The snow has started [again--supposedly another 12-16 inches]; the white bean, kale, turkey sausage soup is on the stove; and it's a new month. Methinks it's time for a post. Welcome March--in like the lion--apparently.
Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the new site of the Georgetown, Maine Historical Society in [you guessed it] Georgetown, Maine. Georgetown is a small coastal community outside of Bath and is the site of the book project I am working on about modernists who came to Georgetown in the late-nineteenth century, and then again in the 1920s and 1930s.
I've spent a good deal of time over the course of the past 8 years in Georgetown--mostly at the Chalet--the former summer residence of the photographer F. Holland Day--one of the main characters in my dissertation. For my second project, I'm back in Georgetown, but looking at a whole new crew of modernists including: Gaston Lachaise, the Zorachs, Marsden Hartley, Paul and Rebecca Strand, and others. I'd like to forge a connection between the early modernists [Day, Clarence White, Max Weber, Gertrude Kasebier and the like] and the latter--using Georgetown as an alternative site of American modernism, a place both groups came to escape from New York [and Alfred Stieglitz]. Why Georgetown?
Well, that's the question really, and one the historical society is also trying to figure out.
When I was researching my dissertation, GHS was just a tiny shack-like building on the second bridge into town. Now, it's a lovely multi-room cathedral ceilinged building with lots of light, research and storage space, and also a gallery/exhibition space that can hold 100 people.
I arrived at 10am [it's open to the public in the winter on Wednesdays and Saturdays] and was greeted by Lynne and Jeanne who gave me a tour of the new space and set me up at a table to work. Since I'd last done work there, Clarence H. White's daughter-in-law had left a portion of her estate to the society, and there were lots of new photographic materials and ephemera.
GHS also had a resource that proved to be invaluable--the guest book from the Seguinland Hotel from 1934-1937. The Seguinland [now Gray Havens] was essentially the only "hotel" in the area at the time, and was where the Strands, Hartley, and others came to stay. Yesterday, as I poured through the register, I was able to find the Strands multiple times [and one more than I thought would be there], Hartley, the Lachaises and even Paul Rosenfeld [big find]. This seemingly insignificant crumbling register has provided me with an extremely key piece of evidence--namely WHEN and HOW LONG the characters at the center of the new project were in Georgetown.
I think sometimes people often overlook local historical societies, not really imagining just what might be hiding in the back rooms and notebooks, but also dismissing the knowledge and expertise of the volunteers. Jeanne and Lynne were extremely knowledgeable, and, at the same time, desirous to know more. In our eventual sharing of information and research [checking what GHS has against what I've found at the Beinecke, what I will find at CCP, etc] I think a much clearer picture will emerge of just why these men and women fled to Georgetown and found exile there.
Jeanne has also begun a large map as to where these artists were in Georgetown and when [visually SO helpful] as well as a web of interactions and friendships between them. The web is only growing and we were able to add a few more yesterday. I was also able to go and see the former Lachaise House and Studio at Indian Point--a house I've passed COUNTLESS times on the way to the Chalet.
It was a lovely morning, and I can't wait to go back and dig through more. It's further evidence of the underlying principle of my whole project--how friendship and collaboration can influence cultural production.
Thanks GHS. I'll be back soon. This weekend, I'll be going up to Bates to look at the Hartley collection, given by his niece. Can't wait! Providing the snow stops, that is. Old man winter is hanging on tight up here.
Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the new site of the Georgetown, Maine Historical Society in [you guessed it] Georgetown, Maine. Georgetown is a small coastal community outside of Bath and is the site of the book project I am working on about modernists who came to Georgetown in the late-nineteenth century, and then again in the 1920s and 1930s.
I've spent a good deal of time over the course of the past 8 years in Georgetown--mostly at the Chalet--the former summer residence of the photographer F. Holland Day--one of the main characters in my dissertation. For my second project, I'm back in Georgetown, but looking at a whole new crew of modernists including: Gaston Lachaise, the Zorachs, Marsden Hartley, Paul and Rebecca Strand, and others. I'd like to forge a connection between the early modernists [Day, Clarence White, Max Weber, Gertrude Kasebier and the like] and the latter--using Georgetown as an alternative site of American modernism, a place both groups came to escape from New York [and Alfred Stieglitz]. Why Georgetown?
Well, that's the question really, and one the historical society is also trying to figure out.
When I was researching my dissertation, GHS was just a tiny shack-like building on the second bridge into town. Now, it's a lovely multi-room cathedral ceilinged building with lots of light, research and storage space, and also a gallery/exhibition space that can hold 100 people.
I arrived at 10am [it's open to the public in the winter on Wednesdays and Saturdays] and was greeted by Lynne and Jeanne who gave me a tour of the new space and set me up at a table to work. Since I'd last done work there, Clarence H. White's daughter-in-law had left a portion of her estate to the society, and there were lots of new photographic materials and ephemera.
GHS also had a resource that proved to be invaluable--the guest book from the Seguinland Hotel from 1934-1937. The Seguinland [now Gray Havens] was essentially the only "hotel" in the area at the time, and was where the Strands, Hartley, and others came to stay. Yesterday, as I poured through the register, I was able to find the Strands multiple times [and one more than I thought would be there], Hartley, the Lachaises and even Paul Rosenfeld [big find]. This seemingly insignificant crumbling register has provided me with an extremely key piece of evidence--namely WHEN and HOW LONG the characters at the center of the new project were in Georgetown.
I think sometimes people often overlook local historical societies, not really imagining just what might be hiding in the back rooms and notebooks, but also dismissing the knowledge and expertise of the volunteers. Jeanne and Lynne were extremely knowledgeable, and, at the same time, desirous to know more. In our eventual sharing of information and research [checking what GHS has against what I've found at the Beinecke, what I will find at CCP, etc] I think a much clearer picture will emerge of just why these men and women fled to Georgetown and found exile there.
Jeanne has also begun a large map as to where these artists were in Georgetown and when [visually SO helpful] as well as a web of interactions and friendships between them. The web is only growing and we were able to add a few more yesterday. I was also able to go and see the former Lachaise House and Studio at Indian Point--a house I've passed COUNTLESS times on the way to the Chalet.
It was a lovely morning, and I can't wait to go back and dig through more. It's further evidence of the underlying principle of my whole project--how friendship and collaboration can influence cultural production.
Thanks GHS. I'll be back soon. This weekend, I'll be going up to Bates to look at the Hartley collection, given by his niece. Can't wait! Providing the snow stops, that is. Old man winter is hanging on tight up here.
12 February 2009
What is Libby Up To? [Updates]
1) Teaching Research Methods and Photographing American History.
Both classes are a lot of fun so far. Great students--smart!!
I've been reading a good deal for Photographing American History and writing lots of lectures--most recently about Photography and ideas of the "West" particularly survey photographs after the Civil War, Edward Curtis' Native American Indian Photographs, and images taken at the Carlisle Indian School.
2) Coaching the "Throws" for the USM Men's and Women's track teams.
I was a volunteer assistant coach up until two weeks ago when I became an assistant coach.
We're having a fantastic season [lots of personal bests recorded the last 2 meets] and I am so glad to be back in the world of Track and Field. Our Conference Championship is this weekend.
3) Thinking about my Maine/Moderns book [and looking forward to doing some writing over February Break next week]
4) Spending too much time on Facebook [I try to limit to morning when I wake up and at night before bed--it's working].
It's such a treat to connect with old friends--especially since we don't physically see each other enough.
5) Skyping: Have you tried it? This video free chat is free, easy and futuristic. It's fun.
6) Doing more yoga and pilates.
7) Making a concerted effort to cook more. Today I made Irish Guinness Beef Stew. Good Stuff. Sunday I made Snickerdoodles.
8) Not blogging.
9) Spending more time in Portland. Walked around the Old Port Tuesday afternoon.
10) Listening to Howard Stern in the early morning and late evening.
Both classes are a lot of fun so far. Great students--smart!!
I've been reading a good deal for Photographing American History and writing lots of lectures--most recently about Photography and ideas of the "West" particularly survey photographs after the Civil War, Edward Curtis' Native American Indian Photographs, and images taken at the Carlisle Indian School.
2) Coaching the "Throws" for the USM Men's and Women's track teams.
I was a volunteer assistant coach up until two weeks ago when I became an assistant coach.
We're having a fantastic season [lots of personal bests recorded the last 2 meets] and I am so glad to be back in the world of Track and Field. Our Conference Championship is this weekend.
3) Thinking about my Maine/Moderns book [and looking forward to doing some writing over February Break next week]
4) Spending too much time on Facebook [I try to limit to morning when I wake up and at night before bed--it's working].
It's such a treat to connect with old friends--especially since we don't physically see each other enough.
5) Skyping: Have you tried it? This video free chat is free, easy and futuristic. It's fun.
6) Doing more yoga and pilates.
7) Making a concerted effort to cook more. Today I made Irish Guinness Beef Stew. Good Stuff. Sunday I made Snickerdoodles.
8) Not blogging.
9) Spending more time in Portland. Walked around the Old Port Tuesday afternoon.
10) Listening to Howard Stern in the early morning and late evening.
20 January 2009
Transcript of the Reverend Dr. Joseph Lowery's Benediction at Obama's Inauguration
I was so moved by this today [among so many other things], and was glad the Associated Press published a transcript. I think this might be the **coolest** prayer ever! This old gentleman has seen so much, and his benediction was so lovely. Welcome President Obama. Hope.
"God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day.
We pray now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.
He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations.
Our faith does not shrink though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.
For we know that, Lord, you are able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.
We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union.
And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little angelic Sasha and Malia.
We go now to walk together as children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone.
With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."
"God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day.
We pray now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.
He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations.
Our faith does not shrink though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.
For we know that, Lord, you are able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.
We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union.
And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little angelic Sasha and Malia.
We go now to walk together as children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone.
With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."
05 January 2009
My Modernists
Good Afternoon.
So it's a bit surreal blogging while sitting in the reading room at the Beinecke, but why not. I'm overwhelmed with primary sources; I have a horrible cold and am a bit hopped up on medicine [my body hates all foreign drug substances]; and I need to start putting things together for myself and start to draft an outline to the book I'm working on. Having just returned from a weekend in NYC at the American Historical Association Conference [lovely to see old grad school friends, not so lovely to have barely left the Hilton b/c of conducting interviews and because I'm so sick], the wheels are beginning to crank again and I feel the need to put some order to what I've done and what I'm doing.
I have found, in the past two and 1/2 weeks, an absolutely surreal amount of information. When I won this fellowship, I thought I would find some stuff and maybe have a hard time filling four weeks. Now I know four weeks won't be enough. I'm also wondering why no one else has pursued my topic [though I'm glad that they didn't]. I shan't reveal all my amazing discoveries [lest there be any modernist project poachers in cyberspace], but let's start at the beginning.
In 2000 I wrote a seminar paper on the photographer F. Holland Day. From this paper sprung forth a dissertation: Against An Epoch: Boston Moderns, 1890-1905 where I argued, among other things, that Boston was aesthetically 'modern' before NYC, that it was a different sort of 'alternative' modernism based less on the individual artist genius and more on the cultural productions made possible by friendship and collaboration among like-minded artists, photographers, writers, poets, architects, etc. At the heart of the dissertation were aesthetic Bostonians [and transplants] of the 1880s and 1890s--a sometimes decadent crew that included [among others]: the publisher and photographer F. Holland Day, the Irish Catholic poet and essayist Louise Imogen Guiney, the architect Ralph Adams Cram, the poets Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman, the impressionist painter Thomas Buford Meteyard, the regional prose author Alice Brown and some others. The group individually published a good deal of singular work, while at the same time collaborating on small magazines like: The Knight Errant, The Mahogany Tree, and Le Courier Innocent [while at the same time publishing mainstream--Harper's, The Atlantic, etc.] as well as being members of clubs and secret societies--Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, The Visionists, etc. They hung around Harvard, they spent time at Meteyard's house by the shore in Scituate; they were visible members of major movements like Arts and Crafts in Boston and were celebrated among peers for accomplishments in Boston and beyond. They weren't pleased or sold with the currents of the nineties--industrialization, a world moving ever faster, a disconnect between art and life, a diminishing natural world--but they fought their dissatisfaction with their art, and stemmed the tide of progress away from communal ties and collaboration with their friendship. They were NOT as Jackson Lears has argued, "anti-modern." They didn't wish to stop progress, but they didn't wish to lose their souls and identities in the sweep of progress either. For more about them--you can see my dissertation.
I finished that project in 2005, and was, for awhile DONE with it. I pursued other threads. I have a side interest in friendships among disparate generations of 19th century women writers; I learned more about 19th century Boston; I thought about the transatlantic flow of ideas among art colonies [all the ideas didn't come from Europe to America--the currents flowed both ways] and I kept working on F. Holland Day, and particularly his initial friendship and later rivalry with the famed Alfred Stieglitz. It's the classic Boston vs. New York, but it's something more too. It has a lot to do with who gets remembered from the past, who gets called the father of American Art Photography, and who falls into the annals of history remembered infrequently and pigeon-holed as a pictorialist whose influence waned. I'll eventually write the article that tells everyone how Day was more famous at the turn-of-the century; that Day was more interested in mentoring a generation of photographers who were his friends than in mentoring the movement as a whole--that was Stieglitz's passion. Day chose to leave the mainstream and keep his friendships. Stieglitz prized the movement above the individuals who comprised it. I spent a semester teasing out the simultaneous rise of both photographers and their allegiances--culminating in Day's 1900-1901 New School of American Photography Show in London and Paris and Stieglitz's 1902 founding of the Photo-Secession. Day refused to join--his name was soon forgotten--this was not a game he wanted to play. Stieglitz soldiered on, took pictorialism to what he felt was its natural end in 1910 and ushered in his modern--straight lines--the city--currents from Europe. The Armory SHow Came to NYC in 1913. Stieglitz opened his galleries to painters and sculptors. He supported photographers with no pictorial pasts--Paul Strand, especially, and reinvented himself as the main promoter of modern art in America. He married the promising female modernist Georgia O'Keeffe. He was reborn--he divorced himself from his first wife and from his first life. He turned from photographer to promoter to businessman to demagogue. He got very good at alienating his ever-evolving stable of artists. He was the Axis; and, by default, so was New York.
So here comes my new project--rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. And it all centers around a small coastal town in Maine: Georgetown.
Guiney and Day went to Georgetown to escape Boston. It was a retreat, but a place in which they brought all the friendships but not the city. It was quiet, it was on the coast, it was lovely, it was rejuvinating. Day bought the place from Guiney; he built a huge Chalet there in 1910-1911; he brought up all his former pictorialist friends--Clarence H. White, Gertrude Kasebier, George Seely, etc. By 1910--both Kasebier and White had split with Stieglitz in unpleasant ways. Day was the other pole-star; he received them and nurtured. White bought his own house in Georgetown--his family was happiest there--away from the city. He started a summer school for photographers there--he brought up other modernists to help--including the painter Max Weber. Day stopped coming to Maine in the late-teens. He died in Norwood, MA in 1933. White died in 1925 on a photographic trip to Mexico with students. In short, Georgetown is where many of the pictorialists found escape from Stieglitz and New York.
Fast forward a decade or more. There are more modernists in Georgetown--the sculptor Zorach and his painter wife Marguerite, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise--they both set up summer residences there in the 1920s--they're part of the Stieglitz circle. Come to 1928--Paul and Beck Strand and Marsden Hartley spend a good chunk of the summer there with the Lachaises--they all write about the collaborative environment--how energizing it is to be together there. Strand takes photographs unlike any others he's done before--he shows them all at Stieglitz's gallery in NYC. But more people come: Hart Crane, Charles Sheeler, Hartley spends another summer--1937. This is the extremely short version.
But the question remains:
Why do they all come to Georgetown? What do they find there? And what's the connection between the early pictorialists and the later modernists being inspired by the same place? And what's with the later more individualistic modernists finding the same sort of collaborative possibilities in friendships deepened in Georgetown? Georgetown becomes an alternative site of American modernism and also a site of Alternative American Modernism. Let's de-center from New York but not run into the "regionalist" camp too quickly.
It's the place AND the people who come there. And they all come to Georgetown to flee New York. And they all find new work and inspiration there. And despite two very different eras, the common person they're all, in a sense, fleeing, is Stieglitz.
And so, what I've been looking for, in all this correspondence between these artists and writers at Yale, are mentions of Georgetown, and what that time meant to them. AND it meant ALOT. And they took this work back to NYC and sold it. So what's the role of the market here, what's the role of region? Of Maine? And what's the role of retreat, and informal colonies? And how might one go about analyzing the cultural productions? And what might it all mean?
Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. What I know, however, is that it's more than coincidence. And I need the missing link between Pictorialism and Modernism, and I think it's Georgetown.
So it's a bit surreal blogging while sitting in the reading room at the Beinecke, but why not. I'm overwhelmed with primary sources; I have a horrible cold and am a bit hopped up on medicine [my body hates all foreign drug substances]; and I need to start putting things together for myself and start to draft an outline to the book I'm working on. Having just returned from a weekend in NYC at the American Historical Association Conference [lovely to see old grad school friends, not so lovely to have barely left the Hilton b/c of conducting interviews and because I'm so sick], the wheels are beginning to crank again and I feel the need to put some order to what I've done and what I'm doing.
I have found, in the past two and 1/2 weeks, an absolutely surreal amount of information. When I won this fellowship, I thought I would find some stuff and maybe have a hard time filling four weeks. Now I know four weeks won't be enough. I'm also wondering why no one else has pursued my topic [though I'm glad that they didn't]. I shan't reveal all my amazing discoveries [lest there be any modernist project poachers in cyberspace], but let's start at the beginning.
In 2000 I wrote a seminar paper on the photographer F. Holland Day. From this paper sprung forth a dissertation: Against An Epoch: Boston Moderns, 1890-1905 where I argued, among other things, that Boston was aesthetically 'modern' before NYC, that it was a different sort of 'alternative' modernism based less on the individual artist genius and more on the cultural productions made possible by friendship and collaboration among like-minded artists, photographers, writers, poets, architects, etc. At the heart of the dissertation were aesthetic Bostonians [and transplants] of the 1880s and 1890s--a sometimes decadent crew that included [among others]: the publisher and photographer F. Holland Day, the Irish Catholic poet and essayist Louise Imogen Guiney, the architect Ralph Adams Cram, the poets Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman, the impressionist painter Thomas Buford Meteyard, the regional prose author Alice Brown and some others. The group individually published a good deal of singular work, while at the same time collaborating on small magazines like: The Knight Errant, The Mahogany Tree, and Le Courier Innocent [while at the same time publishing mainstream--Harper's, The Atlantic, etc.] as well as being members of clubs and secret societies--Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, The Visionists, etc. They hung around Harvard, they spent time at Meteyard's house by the shore in Scituate; they were visible members of major movements like Arts and Crafts in Boston and were celebrated among peers for accomplishments in Boston and beyond. They weren't pleased or sold with the currents of the nineties--industrialization, a world moving ever faster, a disconnect between art and life, a diminishing natural world--but they fought their dissatisfaction with their art, and stemmed the tide of progress away from communal ties and collaboration with their friendship. They were NOT as Jackson Lears has argued, "anti-modern." They didn't wish to stop progress, but they didn't wish to lose their souls and identities in the sweep of progress either. For more about them--you can see my dissertation.
I finished that project in 2005, and was, for awhile DONE with it. I pursued other threads. I have a side interest in friendships among disparate generations of 19th century women writers; I learned more about 19th century Boston; I thought about the transatlantic flow of ideas among art colonies [all the ideas didn't come from Europe to America--the currents flowed both ways] and I kept working on F. Holland Day, and particularly his initial friendship and later rivalry with the famed Alfred Stieglitz. It's the classic Boston vs. New York, but it's something more too. It has a lot to do with who gets remembered from the past, who gets called the father of American Art Photography, and who falls into the annals of history remembered infrequently and pigeon-holed as a pictorialist whose influence waned. I'll eventually write the article that tells everyone how Day was more famous at the turn-of-the century; that Day was more interested in mentoring a generation of photographers who were his friends than in mentoring the movement as a whole--that was Stieglitz's passion. Day chose to leave the mainstream and keep his friendships. Stieglitz prized the movement above the individuals who comprised it. I spent a semester teasing out the simultaneous rise of both photographers and their allegiances--culminating in Day's 1900-1901 New School of American Photography Show in London and Paris and Stieglitz's 1902 founding of the Photo-Secession. Day refused to join--his name was soon forgotten--this was not a game he wanted to play. Stieglitz soldiered on, took pictorialism to what he felt was its natural end in 1910 and ushered in his modern--straight lines--the city--currents from Europe. The Armory SHow Came to NYC in 1913. Stieglitz opened his galleries to painters and sculptors. He supported photographers with no pictorial pasts--Paul Strand, especially, and reinvented himself as the main promoter of modern art in America. He married the promising female modernist Georgia O'Keeffe. He was reborn--he divorced himself from his first wife and from his first life. He turned from photographer to promoter to businessman to demagogue. He got very good at alienating his ever-evolving stable of artists. He was the Axis; and, by default, so was New York.
So here comes my new project--rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. And it all centers around a small coastal town in Maine: Georgetown.
Guiney and Day went to Georgetown to escape Boston. It was a retreat, but a place in which they brought all the friendships but not the city. It was quiet, it was on the coast, it was lovely, it was rejuvinating. Day bought the place from Guiney; he built a huge Chalet there in 1910-1911; he brought up all his former pictorialist friends--Clarence H. White, Gertrude Kasebier, George Seely, etc. By 1910--both Kasebier and White had split with Stieglitz in unpleasant ways. Day was the other pole-star; he received them and nurtured. White bought his own house in Georgetown--his family was happiest there--away from the city. He started a summer school for photographers there--he brought up other modernists to help--including the painter Max Weber. Day stopped coming to Maine in the late-teens. He died in Norwood, MA in 1933. White died in 1925 on a photographic trip to Mexico with students. In short, Georgetown is where many of the pictorialists found escape from Stieglitz and New York.
Fast forward a decade or more. There are more modernists in Georgetown--the sculptor Zorach and his painter wife Marguerite, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise--they both set up summer residences there in the 1920s--they're part of the Stieglitz circle. Come to 1928--Paul and Beck Strand and Marsden Hartley spend a good chunk of the summer there with the Lachaises--they all write about the collaborative environment--how energizing it is to be together there. Strand takes photographs unlike any others he's done before--he shows them all at Stieglitz's gallery in NYC. But more people come: Hart Crane, Charles Sheeler, Hartley spends another summer--1937. This is the extremely short version.
But the question remains:
Why do they all come to Georgetown? What do they find there? And what's the connection between the early pictorialists and the later modernists being inspired by the same place? And what's with the later more individualistic modernists finding the same sort of collaborative possibilities in friendships deepened in Georgetown? Georgetown becomes an alternative site of American modernism and also a site of Alternative American Modernism. Let's de-center from New York but not run into the "regionalist" camp too quickly.
It's the place AND the people who come there. And they all come to Georgetown to flee New York. And they all find new work and inspiration there. And despite two very different eras, the common person they're all, in a sense, fleeing, is Stieglitz.
And so, what I've been looking for, in all this correspondence between these artists and writers at Yale, are mentions of Georgetown, and what that time meant to them. AND it meant ALOT. And they took this work back to NYC and sold it. So what's the role of the market here, what's the role of region? Of Maine? And what's the role of retreat, and informal colonies? And how might one go about analyzing the cultural productions? And what might it all mean?
Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. What I know, however, is that it's more than coincidence. And I need the missing link between Pictorialism and Modernism, and I think it's Georgetown.
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