Happy Bicentennial, Mr. Dickens

This is quite the year for anniversaries, so I thought I'd start acknowledging them both on the Farm (when appropriate) and on the Cabinet--beginning with Charles Dickens's 200th birthday. Dickens worked and wrote tirelessly about the appalling social conditions in nineteenth-century England, and many of the causes he championed were the same ones William Morris embraced.

If I needed any prompting to remember the date, Google's Doodle for today provides a cute reminder, along with a linked Google search on Dickens (coming up with the Wikipedia article first, of course, followed by Google Books editions of his works; you can get a better list using "Charles Dickens"). But since I try to encourage inquiry beyond the obvious, I thought I'd link a few choice bits here for anyone inclined to celebrate.

During my otherwise largely misspent youth, I binged for some time on nineteenth-century English novels, especially those of Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Dickens. My interest paid off, because when a grad student in the English department at Penn needed someone to type his dissertation on Dickens's serial techniques, I got the gig, and gave him a deal: 50 cents a page. I loved doing it, and took away a much deeper understanding of the man and his work.

The Dickens oeuvre is massive (online versions of his works abound, but go to Project Gutenberg for a list that includes audiobooks (the link is to the "D" page; scroll down). Folks like me, who prefer hard copy, can find numerous editions at Half Price Books, and occasionally snag nice old copies with pretty covers, like my People's Editions from 1883. Marks inside the covers show I spent between 50 cents and a dollar for each. I bought a good acid-free copy of Our Mutual Friend in London, and should probably begin again to remedy lapses in my library.

This week's news outlets are packed with stories, and many tout his social views: against slavery, supportive of "fallen women," and especially his identification with the poor and downtrodden: The Guardian (on literacy), The Christian Science Monitor (on the 19th century 99%), but not, alas, the Daily Poop, which has noted only what others are doing. My favorite bit is from The Guardian: A Fiendishly Difficult Birthday Quiz, for the true aficionados. And no, I haven't taken it, nor would I do all that well if I did, having not read the man's work for forty years. But that copy of Our Mutual Friend I bought in 1971 is next on my list of bedtime reading.

Some of the absolute best sources on Dickens can be found on the web. My favorite is the official Dickens Museum site, and the Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth (a late, dear friend of mine was also born in Portsmouth, and loved this museum). The Morgan Library and Museum's online exhibit, Charles Dickens at 200, is spectacular. If you're in New York, you can visit it yourself--although it closes February 12.

Huge numbers of films have been made of the books, most of which I have refused to see because Dickens's plots and characters are far too complex for Hollywood not to mangle. The 1946 David Lean version of Great Expectations is the only exception I can think of (mainly because I saw it when I was young and, as yet, untutored in things Dickensian; the link is to the Criterion Collection edition, which is beautiful)--although my husband swears by the 1977 serial television production of Nicholas Nickleby. Perhaps on some dark and stormy night I'll relent and start collecting selected DVDs.

There was also a PBS biographical series on Dickens back in 2003. It's probably time to see if that's available, since his own life story is every bit as interesting as his fiction. Speaking of biographies, there's a relatively new one out by Michael Slater (2009), Charles Dickens: A Life Defined By Writing (Yale UP, 2009), which I haven't read but intend to get. Last November, David Gates reviewed two more in The New York Times (by Claire Tomalin and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst).

There are a number of good Dickens portraits available online (my favorite is the George Herbert Watkins photo that opens this post), in many media. A quick image search can locate dozens. But because Dickens was such an outspoken figure, he was frequently lampooned. The best of the caricatures is probably this one, by André Gill ("Dickens crosses the English Channel, carrying books from London to Paris" from the cover of the French newspaper, L'Eclipse. Gill was a prolific caricaturist, and many public figures relished being portrayed by him.

Not far from where I lived in Philadelphia, in one of the vest-pocket parks the city has sprinkled all over the urban environment, is this statue of Dickens and Little Nell, the heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop. I remember a lit prof once telling the class that ships passing one another while crossing the Atlantic as the book was appearing in serial form would call to one another, "Does Little Nell still live?" My, how things have changed.

I'll have to think of an appropriately Dickensian brew for the Beloved Spouse this evening, and raise a glass to a superb novelist with an admirable social conscience. He ought to be assigned reading for people running for political office.

Image credits: Photograph of Charles Dickens by George Herbert Watkins; albumen print, 1858. (National Portrait Gallery; also available on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The photo of Clark Park's Dickens and Little Nell statue is by Bruce Anderson, via Wikimedia Commons. The Gill cartoon is from the Wikipedia Article on L'Eclipse.

News, Newsreels, and Uncle News

For no particular reason, other than the fact that I'd been going through old photographs yesterday, it occurred to me to do a bit of research on an old family friend, Newsreel Wong.

Wong made a name for himself in the late '30s for a photograph he took (and possibly staged to some extent) of a baby on a Shanghai train platform.

What I didn't know was that he had been in New York City on July 28, 1945, when a disoriented pilot flew his Boeing B-25 Mitchell Bomber into the Empire State Building. Visiting the Hearst Metrotone offices early that morning, Newsreel Wong had been the only one in an office when the phone rang, and he answered it. He ended up commandeering a camera and headed to the site, where he was able not only to shoot the exterior of the building but got in to get film of the offices that were affected. The only other person who managed to gain access was Max Markman, who posed as a doctor, and shot the footage of the event included in this British Pathé newsreel.



A less dramatic version of the coverage can also be found on YouTube, but I thought this highly edited bit was interesting for its embellishments. Since I'll be teaching the Visual Anthropology course in the Fall, this could provide some talking points about the role of the observer in the interpretation of events, and the impact editing has on the reception of information.

I don't know what happened to Wong's footage (although I suspect that if it exists it's accessible through UCLA's archives), but locating this particular event during an innocent search for a character from my past (he was known to my brother and me as "Uncle News" and lived near us on Yang Ming Shan outside of Taipei) amounts to a bit of the kind of synchronicity we've been talking about in the Myth class. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, this incident resonates eerily with more recent events.

One of the best blogs about media history I've ever found on the web is Amanda Emily's Feeding the News Beast: A Century of Tales from Behind the Lens. Her post on this event is the source of much of my information, and one on Wong himself explains how he got his nickname. Digital Video and Photography students ought to bookmark her site, because it's an endlessly informative record of visual news coverage.

Note: I'm posting this entry on both the Cabinet and The Owls' Parliament, due to its potential interest for a variety of audiences.

The Green Life

Every now and then, out of vanity, curiosity, or fear (I'm not sure which), I Google myself to find out if anyone is using my name in vain.

Usually what comes up are posts from the Farm or here--as well as the ubiquitous "rate your professor" sites (my hotness factor is, alas, still zero). Once in a while, however, somebody will quote me and refer to one of the posts. I'm usually happy for the exposure, and occasionally join the conversation. It's rare, however, that I happen upon something truly wonderful.

I pinched the above image from an internal visual journal, Vita Viridis (Green Life), published by some clearly like-minded folk who work at one or more of the Harvard University Herbaria. There are only a few available online--volume 1 number 5 (from whence I obtained the page that includes a letter I wrote to the editors of Orion magazine some time ago), volume 1 issue 2, and issue 3, in living color and .pdf format so they can be enjoyed in all their visual splendor.

I love this idea so much that I'm going to try something similar with my myth class this spring--a sort of in-class journal of stuff they write and create (the great thing about teaching in an art school is that you can actually ask students to do this and they will), and things they find that they think apply in one way or another. It'll be a one-off venture, but we can scan and share among ourselves--and perhaps with readers of the Cabinet.

Anyway, the real treasure here is not the "me" part, but the discovery of the Herbaria pages themselves. As an inveterate plant lover, erstwhile amateur naturalist (who can still identify every one of the eighteen "official" trees on her half acre, as well as all the volunteers that now occupy various corners of the Carbon Sink), Old China Hand, and certified museum junkie, this site offers nearly everything.

For example, check out the Digital Collections of such wonders as the SHIP initiative (images of seeds in the collection of the Arnold Arboretum) and links to the expedition collections of Joseph F. C. Rock, who explored the "Hengduan Mountains Hotspot" in western Sichuan and eastern Xizang (Tibet), China. I especially love the Arnold Arboretum Image Collection, which contains historical photos taken in the "Hotspot" region during the early twentieth century.

The website offers a mere glimpse into the richness of Harvard's collections, but since I didn't have any idea of their extent (and only vaguely knew of the herbaria at all), this amounts to a truly serendipitous find.

Good Stuff

This spin-off from the Farm has been sadly neglected, in part because it takes so much effort for my aging brain to curate the ephemeral events and objects I run across. Other blog-wunderkammern (like those on the blog roll) are much better about this than I am, and continue to inspire me, but my writing-energy is almost wholly devoted the mother blog, at least until I can get myself better organized. Nevertheless, I occasionally run across things that group themselves into curatorial categories--even as nebulous as "good stuff"--so I'll keep posting them as they collect.

My ambivalence about technology, frequently commented upon on the Farm, doesn't usually come into play here. But I do appreciate some of the mod cons that make it possible to enjoy the cultural benefits of living in a place like New York, even though I'm unlikely to get there any time soon.

In my weekly newsletter from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was reminded of the new(ish) Cloisters blog, The Medieval Garden Enclosed, about which I posted back when it started up back in 2008. Like many of my favorite web places, it slips my mind frequently, but it's such a welcome and informative place to spend time that I thought I'd bring it up again. The blog itself is full of useful information on Medieval life in general, and plants in particular. The photographs are also lovely, offering a virtual visit to the Cloisters that almost makes up for not being there.

Anyone with an iPhone might be interested in two terrific apps. The new promotional freebie related to the J. J. Abrams film, Super 8, is almost more fun than you can have legally. I got it for my iPhone 4--newly acquired when the old Silverback version just got too clunky for my digital needs--but apparently also works with a 3GS and iPad2. In essence, the designers have given us our own miniature Super 8 camera from which we can shoot grainy movies that work like a time machine to take geezers like me back to "the day" when home movies were made like this. Similar, though not as sophisticated, apps are widely available for still photography as well, such as Old Photo Pro (free), which allows you to convert your iPhone photos into Daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, infrared images, and the like.

The second bit of technological wizardry I've come to admire is the New York Public Library's new app for the iPad, Biblion, an interactive multimedia tour of the 1939 Worlds Fair. I find this especially cool because this particular fair introduced all manner of forward-thinking ideas (not all of which transpired), including a decidedly Art Deco view of art and design. "The World of Tomorrow" was the source of many a science-fiction fan's dreams of the future: robots, cars (not flying ones, though), and utopia. There are quite a few shots from the Fair featured in Robert Hughes's episode "Streamlines and Breadlines" from his rather epic treatment of the history of American art, American Visions.

The Beloved Spouse has just begun to grind up wood-droppings into mulch for the garden, so I'd better go help. Our own garden should benefit immeasurably from this effort, and will perhaps spark another post before too long.

Image notes: I couldn't resist a doctored "flying saucer" sighting constructed in PhotoShop Elements, which came with my new scanner. I may alter it even more when I have some time, to make it look more like something I could get from Old Photo Pro.

Early Spring Miscellany

It seemed prudent to abandon the Farm this week, because I've got too much to stew about and not enough time to think it out on "paper." So this week's Skywatch contribution comes from Owl's Cabinet, still (on occasion) my repository for the fleeting, ephemeral, odd, or idiosyncratic moments and objects that show up in my life. All of the photos were taken with my cell phone.

The sky photo is actually another of my iPhone moments, taken out the west-facing windows in our school library. I've done this before, but this one has more than the "alien spaceships" (reflections of the banks of ceiling lights behind me); I saw a wondrous cloud formation around the setting sun and decided to shoot it. My antique iPhone (I have a "silverback"--first-generation version) has only a 2-megapixil camera, so the effect is pretty low-grade. But I rather like its weirdness.

On Tuesday night the utopia class wandered the shopping/dining/living complex that surrounds the school, talking about new urbanism and utopian city-planning. The shot at left is of one of the lights that flank the elevators on the main "street." My ever-inventive students thoroughly enjoyed playing with the marbles by rolling their hands back and forth over the surface.

And finally, a contribution to Phenology 101: some of the first signs of spring to show up in my garden (the others include budding pears and peaches, flowering quince that sticks through my fence from next door, and a few herbs poking up through the detritus left over from winter). We could still get a freezer or two, and according to the weather guy, it's snowed in March three out of the last four years. The daffodils, however, are up in force, and I thought they looked rather nice in the window.

I hope everyone has a lovely weekend.

For the Love of Print

Just when I had decided to severely limit the number of print magazines I subscribe to, I ran across mention (can't remember where now) of a new effort called Anthology (subtitled "Living with substance & style"). The initial attraction was the inaugural issue's theme "The Slow Life: Relax and Enjoy the Things That Really Matter." I'm a sucker for slow anything, so I succumbed.

My first issue arrived last week, and it turns out to be far more evocative and interesting than any shelter/design magazine I've encountered in years (with the possible exception of Selvedge)--and I'm both familiar with most of them and very choosy about the ones I pay attention to. Most of these I can read in the school library, like American Bungalow, Style 1900, Old House Journal, and Natural Home. I still occasionally pick up a copy of the British edition of Country Living, but have weaned myself completely from Martha Stewart Living, figuring that after fifteen years she didn't have that much more to offer me. Gone, too, are the subscriptions to Eating Well, La Cucina Italiana, and Cooking Light.

If I find myself going back to these old friends more than once in a while, I'll look for digital subscriptions. But since I don't toss 'em when I've finished with them (I usually recycle after I've excised interesting material), they had become a burden. It was clear that I was never really going to do anything with all of those articles anyway, even 99% of the recipes, so out they went. Some of them, like American Bungalow, were just too nice to pitch, so they've been shelved for future use and enjoyment.

I had pretty much vowed to subscribe online from now on whenever possible, but when I saw Anthology, and started reading the blog, the whole "print is not dead" notion began to resonate. After all, I am a great magazine sniffer from way back (see the comments on Esopus from a couple of years ago) and this one smells great. It's also full of quirky craftsmanship, eclectic design, and really interesting-sounding people. Check out the video introducing the first issue, with some cardboard sculpture I found particularly amusing:

Print Is Not Dead from Anthology Magazine on Vimeo.

For more cardboard sculpture, see the blog entry about Chris Gilmour.

I guess one reason I like this publication so much is that it combines craft with design; it marries two of my major concerns and it seems to welcome off-center ideas and views of what makes life beautiful. The fact that the creative director, Meg Mateo Ilasco, has also written a book called Crafting a Meaningful Home indicates that there's a real connection to some of the notions I deal with in my blogs, both here and on the Farm.

The admixture of esoteric aesthetics and nostalgia--as well as trendy stuff that's not as attractive to me, but will be to my daughter the designer, makes perusing the magazine itself and its digital augments a pleasure. I'll be looking forward to each issue, and have added the blog to the Cabinet's sidebar.

A New Poet Laureate

I don't encounter many poets any more, except for Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder--whose prose works are among my "usual reads." When I was younger, I read a great deal of Wallace Stevens and Wilfred Owen, and I was introduced to W. S. Merwin by Rainer Schulte at UT Dallas when I was a grad student. We read him in several classes, and studied his translations of others' works--which made them available to those of us who lacked anything but ancient or obscure languages.

I loved the clarity of Merwin's work, and its lack of sentimentality; his poems are personal, but also universal, so I don't feel like I'm reading autobiography. He writes about living in nature as an act of being--not just of observing.

As usual these days, I was surprised to learn that Merwin was still alive (he's 82) when a little pop-up box from the New York Times announced that he had been named the nation's newest poet laureate yesterday.

This news drew me back to his work, and reminded me of my former attachment to his poems. I was disappointed to discover that none of it rests on the copious bookshelves in this house, so to celebrate I'll start remedying that situation. A trip to Half Price Books should turn up a few of the earlier works, at least, and then perhaps I'll treat myself to one of the newer books.

In the meantime, here are some links to pages about him, some with further links to poems. Do try them if you don't already know him; he's well worth reading, especially when he focuses on nature and our life in the natural world. His poetry should resonate with anyone who reads any of the owl blogs.

Modern American Poetry

Dwight Garner, Finding Home and Inspiration in the World of Nature

Patricia Cohen, W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate

Poets.org

Random House page on Merwin, with links to works (including poems)

The Mole, a poem that appears on the National Resources Defense Council's OnEarth page devoted to award-winning journalism.

I keep forgetting that the Cabinet is the perfect spot for little gems of information like this. I spend so much time grousing about the human condition on the Farm and the sorry state of education on the Owl of Athena that I neglect the enjoyment of serendipity and gallimaufry--so I'll try to pay more attention.

Image credit: lacking a legitimate source (Wikimedia Commons has failed me!), I've stolen this photo from the Natural Resources Defense Council's blurb on Merwin. I'll take it off if they ask me, but maybe the link to their pages will count for something.