#i need my art in a museum. i need biographies written about me. i need my name to be spoken in music schools for 100s of years

[discountdyke]

i think all i really want, when it comes down to it, is just to reach other people. i want to make people emotional, i want to share my horrible and frightening and uncomfortable feelings and have people say “i feel this way too”. i loved singing bc it made the old ladies at church cry, and i love writing because so many people say “you’re writing about me” and i love painting because people love reacting to art. and i have all these ways to reach out and connect and still i dont know how to do it in a way that will ever feel meaningful to me.

[galleryyuhself]

Sexypink - A huge loss to Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you Geoffrey for your vision, kindness and love.

..............................

Geoffrey's contribution to Art history. He was the definitive writer on Cazabon.

An image of one of Cazabon's paintings.

Finally, a beautiful tribute to Geoffrey MacLean from one of many friends.

.................................

TRIBUTE TO GEOFFREY MACLEAN. In each island nation of the Eastern Caribbean, economies of scale make it so that there are only one or two (and if they are lucky, three or four) local experts in some field of study which has little to do with industry or clerical work but everything to do with the national character and its history. Because they are often without precedent, these experts often have had to travel abroad for their training or are otherwise self-trained in their chosen sector of the liberal arts/humanities/social sciences.

Trained architect and avocational art historian Geoffrey MacLean was one of these indispensable sages in the field of visual studies and the built environment. He was the world’s foremost specialist on nineteenth-century landscape and genre painter Michel Jean Cazabon. Cazabon was a partially unwitting member of a global late colonial/early post-colonial landscape painting tradition that encompassed artists such as Mexican José María Velasco, the Chartrand brothers of Cuba, Filipino painter Fernando Amorsolo, and the painters of the Hudson River School in the United States. What all of these artists had in common was their urgent need to capture and pay tribute for posterity to the natural beauty of their respective lands before that “Edenic” verdure was despoiled by then-already encroaching industrialization.

MacLean’s passion for Cazabon pressed him not only to hone further the scholastic abilities he had already developed at Presentation College in his native Trinidad and Bristol University in the U.K. but to travel back and forth between the Caribbean and Europe hunting down examples and collections of Cazabon’s work. He also assisted the government of the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago in the acquisition of some Cazabon works for display in its National Museum and Art Gallery.

MacLean was generous with his knowledge, his time, and with his published materials. Every time I visited him, I came home with an armful of books and catalogues (one of my favorites is an unassuming little pamphlet of a catalogue called Chinese Artists of Trinidad & Tobago which probably played some part in my decision to write the book about Sybil Atteck on which I am currently working with Sybil’s nephew Keith). In graduate school, I relied heavily on MacLean’s Cazabon books for the research I was doing on colonial Latin American and Caribbean painting. MacLean’s enthusiasm for Cazabon’s genre painting, especially his rapt verbal and written descriptions of the late 19th century painting Negress in Gala Dress (pictured here) revealed to me that Cazabon’s paintings of local “types” (e.g., “Negress” instead of named individual) was sometimes a form of real portraiture and thus departed the tipo de país-to-costumbrismo continuum that we sometimes use in Latin American art history. Cazabon loved his people too much and included too much implied biography and other narratives in those paintings, to reduce their subjects to mere “types.” His titles were thus deceptively taxonomic.

Architect, scholar, art gallery director Geoffrey MacLean’s contribution to the study and preservation of T&T’s architecture was legendary even before his passing. He has searched out original plans for fretwork houses and saved some of these architectural jewels from the bulldozers of “developers.” He has done the same for members of the Magnificent Seven around the Queen’s Park Savannah and taught workshops on both the civic and residential architecture of Trinidad & Tobago. As MacLean himself now passes into legend, we are left with the perennial question in these small and mid-sized islands of the Eastern Caribbean each with their two or three experts on local art and architecture – who will pick up the torch?

~ Lawrence Waldron

[audreydoeskaren]

Thank you for posting a review on the book Evolution & Revolution Chinese Dress 1700s - 1990s. It’s so disappointing how the book potentially could’ve been good. What are your favorite books on Chinese fashion history?

Hi, great that you found the review useful! To be completely honest, I haven't really read any books on Chinese fashion before I started this blog, because I mostly used online resources like museums' websites, archaeology reports and other blogs. I actually started this blog in the hopes that people might recommend me some books😅 And I only ever read about the Ming, Qing and republican era so my knowledge is very limited.

Anyway, here are some books people recommended to me that I found great, some that I'm currently reading and some I know to be objectively good:

Ming Dynasty

Q版大明衣冠图志 (2011) 董进著

A classic made by the popular fashion history blogger 撷芳主人 (real name Dong Jin), this book is the ultimate compilation of Ming Dynasty looks illustrated by the most adorable drawings. It has basically everything you need to know about Ming Dynasty garments from informal civilian fashion and theater costumes to the most formal court dress and military uniforms. My only quibble with this book is that it doesn’t specify the decade/year each look is from, giving the false impression that everything could be worn throughout the Ming Dynasty (I heard that he did specify some eras in the new version? I don’t have it so I’m not sure). You can follow the author on Weibo where he regularly posts stuff about the Ming Dynasty, or check out other books and articles written by him. Even if you don’t have the book, you could probably find images of individual entries on the internet. Unfortunately all of it is in Chinese and no English version is available :(

华夏衣冠 中国古代服饰文化 (2016) 孙机著

More of a collection of essays Sun Ji wrote on historical Chinese clothing from a variety of eras, I got it for the chapters on Ming Dynasty xiapei 霞帔 and headwear. Professional, academic language that is still easy to read, plenty of references and neatly traced line drawings of artifacts. Useful diagrams on the structure of 狄髻 diji. However if I remember correctly, Sun had some beef with Dong Jin on the terminology of parts of diji, not sure if that was ever resolved; here’s an article about that. Also only in Chinese (that I know of).

Qing Dynasty

Chinese Reverse Glass Painting 1720-1820 (2020) by Thierry Audric

This is the book form transcript of a dissertation given by the author in 2016. It's more Chinese painting than Chinese fashion but has a lot of wonderful images of 18th century export paintings (with dates even), which depicted fashion realistically. I love 18th century export art in general, they're really beautiful and unusual so I would recommend everybody to check them out. I love this because Chinese oil painting outside of a court context (and all other forms of art that were not literati painting e.g. woodblock print, lithograph, pen and ink illustration) gets very little attention from Chinese art historians. This book could be downloaded for free in pdf form the publisher Peter Lang.

A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (2020) by Rachel Silberstein

This book focuses on the 19th century and has some interesting insights on the impact of commercial workshops on Qing fashion, which is a welcome break from the “dragon robes” and women’s domestic work stereotyped in most literature on the Qing. It has rich descriptions of the decoration patterns and fabrics used in the 19th century, accompanied by paintings and photographs. It did kind of fall into the trap of “the late Ming continued into the early Qing” and just dismissed the 18th century altogether, which is a shame. Silberstein’s dating of several prints also appears somewhat incorrect, but it’s still a very useful analysis of the 19th century nonetheless. I read this for free on JSTOR through my university login.

Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (2005) by Dorothy Ko

This book is absolutely epic and an undeniable classic on the subject. Ko masterfully avoids all the surface level problematic takes on footbinding and offers an extremely nuanced, extremely well researched overview on the history of footbinding in the Ming, Qing and republican eras, the reasons for its popularity and demise, with a most interesting analysis of the problems with the way people in the republican era went about the abolition of it. The book is more heavy on the social analysis side but also contains a lot of factual description of the process of footbinding, styles popular in different eras etc. I just love how she approaches the topic in the most factual and non-emotionally charged way possible, which is refreshing considering the sheer volume of literature on footbinding that is just brainless condemnation without any nuance, a lot of which also unconsciously perpetuate misogynistic ideas rather than combat them. I don’t know of a way to read this for free, I bought it from Amazon.

Every Step a Lotus (2001) by Dorothy Ko

I haven’t read this yet but apparently it works well as a supplement to Cinderella’s Sisters. Also on footbinding.

China Trade Painting 1750s to 1880s (2014) by Jack S C Lee / 中国外销画 1750s - 1880s 李世庄著

Another book on export art, focusing more on the established painters. Lee digs a bit more into the painters’ experiences and biographies, with big portions on George Chinnery and Lam Qua, but also includes plenty of portraits and scenery paintings depicting men’s clothing and the architecture of the studios at the Guangzhou factories (十三行). It’s great because the paintings included were super realistic and well made with accurate proportions and anatomy----the quality on a par with those produced by the European academies----so they contemplate conventional Chinese portraits made in the same era in showing how the clothing fits on the body. Again I bought this book second hand from Amazon.

----

I don’t know of any reliable books for republican era fashion because for some reasons most discourse on it is centered around the glorification and mystification of the cheongsam... Fortunately, due to the abundance of extant originals and photographs, books are largely not necessary for the research of republican era fashion :3

There are some other books and articles that were recommended to me but I haven’t yet read: x, x

@fouryearsofshades also made a post recently recommending books and it covers other time periods as well.

If anyone knows any other books on the Ming, Qing or republican era please tell me regardless of good or bad. I need to read more😅

[chantalstacys]

What books have you been reading lately? I love romance novels too 🙈 they’re so fun

romance novels are fun!!! i just started reading them this year, before i pretty much only read biographies and classic fiction. everyone always told me that romance novels were supposed to be trashy and stupid but i’ve been enjoying them ☺️ so whatever to them

anyway! you can look at my books tag for other books i’ve read this year but here’s what i read since my last update~~

♡ the seven husbands of evelyn hugo (women’s fiction) i almost loved this one! i loved the story and i loved reading an old hollywood themed book but the writing honestly felt so dry, which was a shame because i really wanted to feel more invested in it. i really wasn’t that attached to anybody and honestly the twist didn’t really phase me

♡ finally read flowers for algernon and yes tears were shed and yes felt numb when i finished it and no i don’t want to talk about it. it was great and it moved me and frustrated me and i’m leaving it at that

♡ from the mixed up files of mrs. basil e. frankweiler (children’s/YA) omg the CUTEST and funniest book i've read in a long time. this is what i needed after flowers. it truly spoke to my inner child because i definitely had (have?) fantasies of running away and living in a museum

♡ i’m currently finishing up how to fake it in hollywood (romance) and the first half was good but now i’m just trying to finish it and move on. BUT the spice is good lol. if you want to read a hollywood romance, funny you should ask is definitely the one i’d recommend first!!!

♡ things we never got over by lucy score (romance) it wasn’t what i thought it was going to be! from the cover art i thought it would be weepy and sappy but it was actually very fun and sexy and i was really charmed by it! it’s super long (perhaps longer than it needed to be) but i read it in two days

♡ tessa bailey!! i read it happened one summer, hook line and sinker (both romance) and my killer vacation (romance, mystery). IHOS had the best story and characters and spice by FAR. they’re all cute, casual reads and they feel like watching a movie

♡ DREAMLAND BILLIONAIRES BY LAUREN ASHER (both romance again lol) oh my god, the disney world fantasies of my dreams. terms and conditions was good (i love a good fake relationship) but the fine print is the one. it has a sexy, broody, secret artist “dreamland” (disneyland) heir, a cute girl that reads regency romance, a disney park date i read twice in a row, fantastic smut and it’s mostly set in a pretend disney world, so i felt like it was written just for me. i’m very excited for the last one to come out next year

anyway! that’s mostly what i’ve been reading lately. and now i’m really looking forward to my fall list 🍂 and i’m branching out a little more this season!

[birdlord]

Every Book I Read in 2019

This was a heavier reading year for me (heavier culture-consumption year in general) partly because my partner started logging his books read, and then, of course, it’s a competition.

01 Morvern Callar; Alan Warner - One of the starkest books I’ve ever read. What is it about Scotland that breeds writers with such brutal, distant perspectives on life? Must be all the rocks. 

02 21 Things You Might Not Know About the Indian Act; Bob Joseph - I haven’t had much education in Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous nations that came before it, so this opened things up for me quite a bit. The first and most fundamental awakening is to the fact that this is not a story of progress from worse to better (which is what a simplistic, grade school understanding of smallpox blankets>residential schools>reserves would tell you), in fact, the nation to nation relationship of early contact was often superior to what we have today. I wish there was more of a call to action, but apparently a sequel is on its way. 

03 The Plot Against America; Philip Roth - An alternative history that in some ways mirrors our present. I did feel like I was always waiting for something to happen, but I suppose the point is that, even at the end of the world, disasters proceed incrementally. 

04 Sabrina; Nick Drnaso - The blank art style and lack of contrast in the colouring of each page really reinforces the feeling of impersonal vacancy between most of the characters. I wonder how this will read in the future, as it’s very much based in today’s relationship to friends and technology. 

05 Perfumes: The Guide; Luca Turn & Tania Sanchez - One of the things I like to do when I need to turn my brain off online is reading perfume reviews. That’s where I found out about this book, which runs through different scent families and reviews specific well-known perfumes. Every topic has its boffins, and these two are particularly witty and readable. 

06 Adventures in the Screen Trade; William Goldman - Reading this made me realize how little of the cinema of the 1970s I’ve actually seen, beyond the usual heavy hitters. Ultimately I found this pretty thin, a few peices of advice stitched together with anecdotes about a Hollywood that is barely recognizable today. 

07 The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton - A love triangle in which the fulcrum is a terribly irritating person, someone who thinks himself far more outré than he is. Nonetheless, I was taken in by this story of “rebellion”, such as it was, to be compelling.

08 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis; Sam Anderson - Like a novel that follows various separate characters, this book switches between tales of the founding of Oklahoma City with basketball facts and encounters with various oddball city residents. It’s certainly a fun ride, but you may find, as I did, that some parts of the narrative interest you more than others. Longest subtitle ever?

09 World of Yesterday; Stefan Zweig - A memoir of pre-war Austria and its artistic communities, told by one of its best-known exports. Particularly wrenching with regards to the buildup to WWII, from the perspective of those who had been through this experience before, so recently. 

10 Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing; Tim Parks - A writer finds himself plagued by pain that conventional doctors aren’t able to cure, so he heads further afield to see if he can use stillness-of-mind to ease the pain, all the while complaining as you would expect a sceptic to do. His digressions into literature were a bit hard to take (I’m sure you’re not Coleridge, my man).

11 The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences have Extraordinary Impact; Chip & Dan Heath - I read this for work-related reasons, with the intention of improving my ability to make exhibitions and interpretation. It has a certain sort of self-helpish structure, with anecdotes starting each chapter and a simple lesson drawn from each one. Not a bad read if you work in a public-facing capacity. 

12 Against Everything: Essays; Mark Greif - The founder of N+1 collects a disparate selection of essays, written over a period of several years. You won’t love them all, but hey, you can always skip those ones!

13 See What I Have Done; Sarah Schmidt - A retelling of the Lizzie Borden story, which I’d seen a lot of good reviews for. Sadly this didn’t measure up, for me. There’s a lot of stage setting (rotting food plays an important part) but there’s not a lot of substance there. 

14 Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy; Angela Garber - This is another one that came to me very highly recommended. Garber seems to think these topics are not as well-covered as they are, but she does a good job researching and retelling tales of pregnancy, birth, postpartum difficulties and breastfeeding. 

15 Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier - This was my favourite book club book of the year. I’d always had an impression of...trashiness I guess? around du Maurier, but this is a classic thriller. Maybe the first time I’ve ever read, rather than watched, a thriller! That’s on me. 

16 O’Keefe: The Life of an American Legend; Jeffrey Hogrefe - I went to New Mexico for the first time this spring, and a colleague lent me this Georgia O’Keefe biography after I returned. I hadn’t known much about her personal life before this, aside from what I learned at her museum in Santa Fe. The author has made the decision that much of O’Keefe’s life was determined by childhood incest, but doesn’t have what you might call….evidence?

17 A Lost Lady; Willa Cather - A turn-of-the-20th century story about an upper-class woman and her young admirer Neil. I’ve never read any other Cather, but this felt very similar to the Wharton I also read this year, which I gather isn’t typical of her. 

18 The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country; Helen Russell - A British journalist moves to small-town Denmark with her husband, and although the distances are not long, there’s a considerable culture shock. Made me want to eat pastries in a BIG WAY. 

19 How Not to be a Boy; Robert Webb - The title gives a clue to the framing device of this book, which is fundamentally a celebrity memoir, albeit one that largely ignores the celebrity part of his life in favour of an examination of the effects of patriarchy on boys’ development as human beings. 

20 The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will be Glad that You Did); Philippa Perry; A psychotherapist’s take on how parents’ own upbringing affects the way they interact with their own kids. 

21 The Library Book; Susan Orlean - This book has stuck with me more than I imagined that it would. It covers both the history of libraries in the USA, and the story of the arson of the LA Public Library’s central branch in 1986. 

22 We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; Samantha Irby - I’ve been reading Irby’s blog for years, and follow her on social media. So I knew the level of raunch and near body-horror to expect in this essay collection. This did fill in a lot of gaps in terms of her life, which added a lot more blackness (hey) to the humour. 

23 State of Wonder; Ann Patchett - A semi-riff on Heart of Darkness involving an OB/GYN who now works for a pharmaceutical company, heading to the jungle to retrieve another researcher who has gone all Colonel Kurtz on them. I found it a bit unsatisfying, but the descriptions were, admittedly, great. 

24 Disappearing Earth; Julia Phillips - A story of an abduction of two girls in very remote Russia, each chapter told by another townsperson. The connections between the narrators of each chapter are sometimes obvious, but not always. Ending a little tidy, but plays against expectations for a book like this. 

25 Ethan Frome; Edith Wharton - I gather this is a typical high school read, but I’d never got to it. In case you’re in the same boat as me, it’s a short, mildly melodramatic romantic tragedy set in the new england winter. It lacks the focus on class that other Whartons have, but certainly keeps the same strong sense that once you’ve made a choice, you’re stuck with it. FOREVER. 

26 Educated; Tara Westover - This memoir of a Mormon fundamentalist-turned-Academic-superstar was huge on everyone’s reading lists a couple of years back, and I finally got to it. It felt similar to me in some ways to the Glass Castle, in terms of the nearly-unbelievable amounts of hell she and her family go through at the hands of her father and his Big Ideas. I found that it lacked real contemplation of the culture shock of moving from the rural mountain west to, say, Cambridge. 

27 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of Lusitania; Erik Larson - I’m a sucker for a story of a passenger liner, any non-Titanic passenger liner, really. Plus Lusitania’s story has interesting resonances for the US entry into WWI, and we see the perspective of the U-boat captain as well as people on land, and Lusitania’s own passengers and crew. 

28 The Birds and Other Stories; Daphne du Maurier - The title story is the one that stuck in my head most strongly, which isn’t any surprise. I found it much more harrowing than the film, it had a really effective sense of gradually increasing dread and inevitability. 

29 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Faded Glory; Raphael Bob-Waksberg - Hit or miss in the usual way of short story collections, this book has a real debt to George Saunders. 

30 Sex & Rage; Eve Babitz - a sort of pseudo-autobiography of an indolent life in the LA scene of the 1970s. It was sometimes very difficult to see how the protagonist actually felt about anything, which is a frequent, acute symptom of youth. 

31 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; Graham Greene - Gotta love a book with an alternate title built in. This is a broad (the characters? are, without exception, insane?!) satire about a world I know little about. I don’t have a lot of patience or interest in Greene’s religious allegories, but it’s a fine enough story. 

32 Lathe of Heaven; Ursula K LeGuin - Near-future sci-fi that is incredibly prescient about the effects of climate change for a book written over forty years ago. The book has amazing world-building, and the first half has the whirlwind feel of Homer going back in time, killing butterflies and returning to the present to see what changes he has wrought. 

33 The Grammarians; Cathleen Schine - Rarely have I read a book whose jacket description of the plot seems so very distant from what actually happens therein. 

34 The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network; Katharine Losse - Losse was one of Facebook’s very earliest employees, and she charts her experience with the company in this memoir from 2012. Do you even recall what Facebook was like in 2012? They hadn’t even altered the results of elections yet! Zuck was a mere MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, probably. Were we ever so young?

35 Invisible Women; Caroline Ciado Perez - If you want to read a book that will make you angry, so angry that you repeatedly assail whoever is around with facts taken from it, then this, my friend, is the book for you. 

36 The Hidden World of the Fox; Adele Brand - A really charming look at the fox from an ecologist who has studied them around the world. Much of it takes place in the UK, where urban foxes take on a similar ecological niche that raccoons famously do where I live, in Toronto. 

37 S; Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams - This is a real mindfuck of a book, consisting of a faux-old novel, with marginalia added by two students which follows its own narrative. A difficult read not because of the density of prose, but the sheer logistics involved: read the page, then the marginalia? Read the marginalia interspersed with the novel text? Go back chapter by chapter? I’m not sure that either story was worth the trouble, in the end. 

38 American War; Omar El Akkad - This is not exclusively, but partially a climate-based speculative novel, or, grossly, cli-fi for short. Ugh, what a term! But this book is a really tight, and realistic look at the results of a fossil-fuels-based second US Civil War. 

39 Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation; Andrew Marantz - This is the guy you’ll hear on every NPR story talking about his semi-embedding within the Extremely Online alt-right. Most of the figures he profiles come off basically how you’d expect, I found his conclusions about the ways these groups have chosen to use online media tools to achieve their ends the most illuminating part. 

40 Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm; Isabella Tree - This is the story of a long process of transitioning a rural acreage (more of an estate than a farm, this is aristocratic shit) from intensive agriculture to something closer to wild land. There are long passages where Tree (ahem) simply lists species which have come back, which I’m sure is fascinating if you are from the area, but I tended to glaze over a bit. Experts from around the UK and other European nations weigh in on how best to rewild the space, which places the project in a wider context. 

FICTON: 17     NONFICTION: 23

[alcalavicci]

(Disclaimer: if you wrote this and don’t want it up, send me an ask and I’ll take it down)

Jill and Claire:

Jill: You mentioned that Dean directed a play called "Man With Bags" at the Pilot Theater in Hollywood in 1979. I find this information invaluable. I'm going to make sure it is in our Database here on the Sassies list. If you have any other info about obscure stuff Dean has worked on, please let me know. I mean it. I don't care if no one else is taking notes. I am.

Claire: I have the playbill from "Man With Bags." Russ Tamblyn starred, along with Sally Kirkland. I will photocopy for you. If you don't mind I'll have to send via regular mail, as my scanner doesn't work. I also have a playbill from a show he did in Albuquerque. This probably was early '70s sometime. I can't remember the name of it, but I wrote to the photographer at the theater and he sent me a bunch of photos and stuff. This stuff is packed away. I will look for it tomorrow when I get time. After I get it out, I can give you more information and you can tell me what you'd like to see.

Jill: Re: George Herms, you said "I knew he was a close friend of Dean's....." Yes, he was, but how did you know that? Dean wasn't exactly talked about much in the press between 1970 and 1979. Was he being discussed in Art magazines? And were you subscribing to these magazines? George Herms is the one who painted those symbols on Dean's torso for Dunwich Horror. But I bet you already knew that. Okay, I threw that out there for others who might not know.

Claire: Regarding Mr. Herms. Remember all those old movie magazines they used to have in the '60s and '70s. I believe one was called "Photoplay," and there were some others whose names I've forgotten. Well, they used to have pen pal pages in them. One time, they listed a girl who said she was the ultimate Dean fan. Her name was Geordie James. I wrote to her. She had already made contact with Dean, and believe it or not, he was working on his autobiography at that time. He sent it to her to see what she thought about it (I kid you not). She told me she was going to start a fan club for him and asked me if I wanted to be the secretary. I said, yes, and she promptly sent me the autobiography to type--for him!! It was in this biography that so much was mentioned. "Moonstone" is the film Dean directed with George Herms as his star. It's a film about George's art. And you got me, I didn't know George had painted those symbols on him in "Dunwich." Too cool. Back to the autobiography. I typed it up and was so excited. I sent it back to Geordie without making a copy. Something I came later to regret, of course, since he apparently didn't have it published, but I retained much of what was discussed in it in my head. That's how I already knew about George Herms. Geordie James later had a house fire (she lived in Utica, NY). After that, I never was able to get back into contact with her. I never told Dean I had typed his autobiography either. For some reason, I didn't want to come off (at that time) like Miss Ultimate Fan. It was a stupid "coolness" thing.

Jill: What is 'Moonstone?' Is it a short film? An art object? And why did Herms need Dean in order to show it?

Claire: As I said above, "Moonstone" was directed by Dean, starring George Herms. As I wasn't real artsy at the time when I saw it at George's retrospective, I don't remember a whole lot about it. I just remember it revolved around a gem called a moonstone. It was definitely a short film. Real art house stuff.

Jill: You mentioned that Dean walked in with Joy. I thought she didn't come to Hollywood to see him until 1981? You mentioned that he had just started dating her at the time (so this means he finally dumped Toni Basil by 1979?). And.................Big question here........how did you know it was Joy? Did he introduce you to her? I mean, how did you know At That Time that it was Joy Marchenko, and that they had just started dating? Or is this something other people told you later on?

Claire: Now you got me. I'm not really sure that it was Joy. Later when I saw Joy's picture (after they got married), I jumped to the conclusion that that was the girl he was with at the museum because she looked very much like her. But you're telling me the dates don't jibe, so I'm probably wrong.

Jill: Did you recognize Russ Tamblyn right off? Did you already know that Russ and Dean were friends? And how did you know that? Did you already know Russ' wife's name, or did you find that out later? Is this the wife Russ separated from, right about that same time, and then he and Dean became roommates? And where did that leave Joy? Come to think of it, are you positive that was Joy that Dean was with? And are you positive that was Elizabeth with Russ?

Claire: Right, I already knew he and Russ were friends. Russ also was the star of "Man With Bags," which I had just seen two weeks earlier. I knew Elizabeth's name from reading a "Photoplay" article about Russ. She also was at the play. They could have been separated for all I know, and he was just still taking her to things. I also saw Elizabeth around 1980 at Toni Basil's show at the Fox Venice. She was not with Russ at the time; she was with her mother. I know it was her mother because I was in the restroom at the same time they were and she called her mom or mum. I also did not see Dean at Toni's show.

Jill: Another good tidbit here....."about 5 years later, when he was appearing in a dinner theater production of "Relatively Speaking." Another item for my database. So you're thinking it was about 1984? When Dean was still living in Santa Fe? And where was this dinner theater production at? I'm thinking Los Angeles, since you were living in California. Unless this was one of those dinner theater appearances he did in Las Vegas?

Claire: The dinner theater production was in San Clemente, Calif. I have the autographed playbill. I will dig out tomorrow. It had to be before he moved to Santa Fe, so I'm wrong on dates. I can get more specific when I find the playbill. Sorry I was generalizing so much on dates. I know how important it is when you're trying to keep a database.

Jill: When you saw Dean at the restaurant.........how did you know he was with his manager? Did he introduce you? Or did you assume it? Or did you know his manager?

Claire: I assumed there, too. He seemed like a manager-type person. The person was very business-like. They appeared to be discussing business before I walked up to the table. It could have been the manager of the dinner theater. 

Jill: How did you know Dennis Hopper had dubbed him "Rainbow Razorbrain?" Where did you read that? Or did someone tell you?

Claire: Can't remember where I read it, but I know it was an article I read in a movie magazine before I moved to Calif. I believe it was around the time Dennis' "The Last Movie" was released and there were some articles on them at this time. Later Dennis talks about Dean in Roddy McDowell's photo book (can't remember the title). I'm thinking he mentions calling Dean "Rainbow Razorbrain" in Roddy's book.

Claire: Okay, I've gotten the questions out of sequence, let's go back. Regarding "Man With Bags." I found all the other playbills, but this one. I will keep looking for it, because it's special since Dean directed it. Also, now that I think back, Sally Kirkland was the stage manager of the play. Russ was the only "star" I knew who was in it. There was another girl, I believe her name was Kristen Larkin, who played the lead. And Patty ?? (forgot her last name, but she was one of the sisters in "The Beguiled" with Clint Eastwood. Hope that helps until I locate the playbill. Regarding the Sally Kirkland story, I had only heard that she lost her balance during the earthquake scene and hurt her back as a result. The "Dennis stabbing her" scenario is just a little freaky, but what's new. 

Jill: For some reason, I was being cross-referenced to the film "The Beguiled" just the other day, and I think it had something to do with Dean or a co-star of Dean's. Isn't that weird? I'll have to go over to IMdB.com and try and figure out what I was looking for.

Claire: I think that was awfully synchronistic you were cross-referenced to "The Beguiled," and then I mentioned it. Uh-oh, I think I hear the "Twilight Zone" theme.

Jill: The story of Sally Kirkland and her lawsuit is in the Archives, I'm sure, and I'll see if I can dig it up.

Claire: Thanks, that will be interesting to read.

Jill: I'm not sure where Joy Marchenko came from, but I know she was a ‘Textile Designer in Morocco.' I think that's from the People Magazine interview. And that's about that, unless you know anything else?

Claire: I don't really know anything about her either. I read somewhere that they had to move from Santa Fe because of her asthma. That's too bad, 'cause that's pretty country.

Jill: You mentioned that you didn't know Dean and Joy were divorced until 2000. Well, you're already ahead of most of Dean's fans. I didn't become a fan until late 2000, and by early 2001 I was on the Internet, asking 'Where's Dean's wife, anyway?' Nobody seemed to know that they were divorced at that time. A member here, also named Joy, met Dean in Reno in Nov. 2001, and he said to her "Oh, you had to pick my ex-wife's name!" So, that was our first 'official' confirmation. But, like with just about everything else related to Dean, it wasn't written in stone. But things began to emerge. First, a member joined from France who happened to have a magazine interview from 1996 where Dean talks about separating from his wife. And, there is a lady who published a biography of Dean this year (you can buy it over the Internet - but pretty much everything in it you can find in our magazine articles here on the Sassies list - and she completely glosses over anything 'beatnik' or 'hippie' about Dean - there will be absolutely no mention of Toni Basil or George Herms in her book). Anyway, this lady briefly joined the Sassies list, and she had no idea that Dean & Joy were divorced, and pretty much denied it, by saying "Why wasn't it in the papers?" And I replied, "Why didn't any of Dean's fans know that his mother died in 1993?" (Another fact she forgot to put in her book). And then she unsubscribed. And then another (former) member on the Sassies confronted me with the fact that I have no proof that Dean and Joy were ever divorced (which I don't), and insisted that they're probably still living together, or are just separated. I'm getting pretty used to people calling me on things, and just take the facts as they are presented to me, and do with them what I can. So far, my hunches about things have been more right than wrong. 

Claire: I read a small piece on them being divorced somewhere around 2000. It shocked me pretty good. I can't imagine someone writing a bio on Dean and not mentioning the Beat/Hippie connection. This still is like the heartbeat of Dean (snap, snap).

Jill: You mentioned Toni Basil was backed by Devo in her show (and I would have loved to have seen this show! Sounds wild!). She was dating their bass player at the time. She was the one who gave Dean a tape of Devo to listen to, and then Dean gave it to Neil Young. Hmmmm............which came first.......Dean leaving Toni for Joy, or Toni leaving Dean for the bass player? LOL!

Claire:  Or Toni leaving Dean because of her enormous crush on David Bowie. That would have driven me bonkers!

Jill: Oh, and I have no proof that Toni and Dean were ever married, other than those two mentions. What do you think? My first hunch is to say No - that people (such as the musician that was quoted on the Internet) simply assumed they were married. Sort of a 'common-law' marriage, if you will. It's yet another mystery of Dean.

Claire: I kinda think they weren't married. Toni always reminded me of, how do I put this, if Dean had been a woman, he would have been Toni and if Toni would have been a man, she would have been Dean. I think they were too similar for their own good.

Claire: Regarding Dean's mentioning George, Millie, Dennis, Wallace, etc. They were mentioned only in context [in his autobiography] with the chronology of his life. There were no asides, unfortunately. Dean was still Dean back then, very secretive and protective about personal events and people in his life. He mentioned that he had married Millie and divorced. I believe he mentioned "Breakaway" and his collaboration with Toni and Bruce, but only in that context. He detailed Wallace's influence on him, and talked about directing "Moonstone," which I now know he began filming in 1963 with George. I have George's chronology of events from the book "The Prometheus Archives--A Retrospective Exhibition of the Works of George Herms," which I purchased at the show. The dates on my copy say the exhibit showed from June 2-July 22, 1979 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. I will send the chronology to you.

[howardschatzphotography]

On Seeing, A Journal. #278 Andrew Moore, "Dirt Meridian,” a book review.

Sun Through Rain.  ©Andrew Moore

Schoolhouse, China Pasture. ©Andrew Moore

I receive, daily, the internationally informative photography news site

The Eye of Photography from the former editor-in-chief of French Photo Magazine and now editor-in-chief of The Eye of Photography, Jean-Jacques Naudet. This daily posting is phenomenally valuable, covering all sorts of photography events, portfolios of photographers throughout the world, gallery shows, museum exhibitions, etc.  

The site is free, though as an aside they can use financial help for their service. Apart from having contributed features from time to time, I have no affiliation with them, I’m only interested in seeing the on-going success of something that publishes so much information and imagery every day.

Other important sources include AtEdge and Graphis.

Each of these open up to a wide world of brilliant photographers, designers, and other creatives.

A recent post contained an article about the The Yancy Richardson Gallery in New York City. The images of Andrew Moore who is represented by the gallery particularly caught my eye. I went to his site ((http://www.andrewlmoore.com)) and was so moved by his body of work that I bought his recent book, "Dirt Meridian.”

I do that, buy and collect photography books. Along with the internet, books are my major source of self-education. I am well aware that if I am to grow in this visual art, it’s imperative that I study, continually, tenaciously. It’s essential to gain, maintain and expand a vast visual data bank if one desires to create unique, original and exciting work. For photography, one needs to look, study, and look even more, reviewing and surveying everything available in galleries, web sites, periodicals, museums, presentations and, yes, books. Our brains are such that images drop out; constant replenishment is needed for any sort of positive development, success, and even survival in this challenging art. It’s essential to recognize what’s been done before in order to avoid repetition. Knowing what hasn’t been done, or done well enough, comes when one has seen – and keeps seeing -- a vast range of imagery.

When “Dirt Meridian” arrived, I opened it and couldn’t put it down, studying every image.  And, as I always do with a new book of photographs, I left it out, opened, on a counter I pass daily, so that I could look at it again and again and imprint the images in my memory.

This is not the kind of photography I endeavor to create in the controlled environment of a studio (or a pool, my particular kind of  studio).  Moore’s work is done outdoors, in this case in the vast, almost empty space of the great plains of middle America. What he shows us are sand hills and sky and weather and cattle.  And the Badlands and old abandoned barns and buffalo and meadows and creeks, windmills and wildlife. He also shows the determined struggle of the human spirit against the toughest elements, and the effect of those on deserted homesteads.

America, its 100th meridian.

Moore’s epic visions of the vast treeless space in the 100th meridian, cutting through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, are all about space -- empty sprawling and seemingly infinite space. The images are intoxicating, filled with magnificent beauty in the loneliness that is the trackless expanse of seemingly endless land. From his Acknowledgement: “…the land’s beauty lies in its vast and sublime emptiness."

I wrote to Moore and learned, happily, that his NYC studio/office is located only a few blocks from mine. So, I invited him for lunch and an in-person review of his magnificent photographs.

Working on this book project, he spent weeks at a time on many trips from the East, met many individuals and recorded their stories, histories, lives. Each photograph is accompanied by text containing fascinating information which provides a rich understanding of the work.

Moore made many of the photographs from a Cessna 180 single-engine plane flown by Doug Dean. They attached his medium format digital camera to one of the plane’s wing struts, using a screen and remote control from the passenger seat.

They flew low, yielding a unique perspective. This technique is one important reason why the images look so different from photographs of this area I’ve seen before. He spoke of the emptiness as a spiritual reservoir, a spiritual landscape.  He wrote in the Acknowledgements, “the intimate seemed conjoined to the infinite."

During the project he moved from north to south, contrasting open spaces with cluttered, claustrophobic interiors, rich with poor, immigrants and native born, industrial scenes with mythic landscapes, all of which he explained was a metaphor for the sense of possibility, of hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

In the book his pilot wrote, “I hope you take pause, if only for a moment, to consider the story of this land, where second chances are few, and how the decisions we make today will impact the generations to follow."

Moore allowed me to choose images I personally wished to use for this review.

Storm Blow.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “Sheridan County, Nebraska. These dry, fallow lands and terraces lie to the southeast of Clinton. The wind coming out of the north was blowing at over 70 mph. When choosing the angle approach to a subject, Doug Dean piloted us, if possible, into a headwind, since that slowed the plane down and allowed a bit more time for picture making. On this day we had little choice but to let a powerful tailwind take us on a Nantucket sleigh ride if we wanted to catch this billowing cloud of white dirt."

Pronghorn Antelope. ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “A herd of the wild antelope, which in wintertime can number into the hundreds, roams the high plains that stretch toward the Big Horn Mountains in the background. Early pioneer cattlemen noticed that the native grass animals roaming this area tasted particularly good, and to this day Niobrara County grass has become famous among livestock buyers for the finish it gives cattle.”

Riding Fence.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “Sheridan County, Nebraska, 2013. Heidi and Brock Terrell and their son Royal (led by their red heeler) ride fence along their land in Sheridan County. They not only raise both cattle and sheep but they also farm soybeans and sugar beets.   Heidi is a sixth generation descendant of Jules Sandoz, among the earliest homesteaders in the area. Better known as ‘Old Jules,’ legendary for his cussedness and his justly famous tenacity, he was immortalized in the biography of the same name written in 1935 by daughter Mari Sandoz.”

First Light.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: "Cherry County, Nebraska, 2013. Cattle and heron share a drink at the tank in the residual morning fog. Much of the success of cattle ranching in the Sandhills is due to the shallow reach down to the Ogallala Aquifer. In some places it's only six feet to water, so one can easily and cheaply put down a windmill in order to water livestock anywhere in the vastness of this terrain. (There are many sub-irrigated meadows that provide hay at the driest times.) The hilly landscape provides the herd with protection from the wind and snow. However, the quality of the grass is not as good as on hard soil land, so it can still take 20 to 30 acres to support just one cow/calf pair."

Round Up Number 2.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “McKenzie County, North Dakota, 2005.   Branding day at the Hepper Ranch outside the town of Keene. In the shadows of the Blue Buttes, amidst lush May grass, family, friends, and neighbors (and several dogs) help round up this herd of 300 cow/calf pairs. The large crew included five heelers, six sets of floppers, branders, vaccinators, and iron tenders. The older more experienced cowboys do the actual branding while the younger folks who wrestle the calves are known as floppers.”

In the book’s introduction, Kent Haruf wrote, “These are wonderful photographs, clear, and evocative, unsentimental, they seem to understand the sacredness of the country. They suggest its holiness."

Howard Schatz,  November, 2018.

[suburbanmetaldad]

What can I do for you?

Here, friends, is my super power:

I can create an entire book — a good one — quickly, with very little help.

You want a book with your name on it. I can make that happen.

Maybe you typed up a draft, and you’re not sure where to go next.

I can take it from here.

And anything smaller than that will be cheaper and faster.

Get on the schedule while you can.

Following are more details about me and my work.

Follow are links to different things D.X. Ferris makes & does. 

I am D.X. Ferris.

I grew up obsessed with music and reading. I went to school for writing. At the time, I thought I couldn’t create things. I didn’t know it yet, but I was wrong. I tried to quit. Writing wouldn’t let me. It kept pulling me back in. 

Once I figured out how to do what I wanted to do, I made up for lost time. Now I’ve covered a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction for Rolling Stone. I endured a career-ending injury. I’ve been to the Pentagon on business. I’ve written books with & about some of my iconic heroes. Communication is my business, and business is good.

I do a lot of different things. 

I am an award-winning writer, editor, manager, publisher, teacher, speaker, cartoonist, maker, co-author, ghost writer, and overall communications professional. To me, those various & sundry processes are all part of the same sphere — and here’s the common thread: Communication is the art of organizing information. That, friend, is what I do. I can do it for you. And we can make some money together.

I have written/co-written nine books. My personal record is four new books in 16 months.

I cut my teeth as a rock & roll journalist. Then I successfully transitioned to hard news. Lately, I’ve been creating motivational literature and self-help books. I write very effective press releases & promo material. I write & storyboard short videos. I’m writer for a documentary I can’t talk about yet.

I get around. I teach college. My CV includes work for dozens of publications, including Rolling Stone and Alternative Press (America’s two top rock & culture magazines). I’ve also written for leading outlets such as The A.V. Club and Decibel. I write and stage communication seminars. 

I have been to the Pentagon and National Air & Space Museum on business. I have been backstage at the Vans Warped Tour on business. My body of work includes book-length oral histories. 

I have collaborated with certified Grand Masters, civilians, and high-profile musical & Hollywood creative types. I have had Almost Famous moments on the side of the stage at European festivals. I wake up so early it hurts. I make money for my partners.

I am a 33 1/3 author. An Ohio Society of Professional Journalists Reporter of the Year. And a third-degree black belt (in Taekwondo). Also a 32° two-time WM/PM.

Let’s do some good work — and then let’s do some good with what comes from it.

Click the following links for my...

Good Professional Wrestling: Full Contact Life Lessons From the Pinnacle Performance Art The Good Advice From... series is now officially a franchise. Volume II features a foreword by Diamond Dallas Page, motivational icon, founder of health & wellness movement DDP Yoga, and WWE Hall of Famer. Professional wrestling is the toughest business. It is a form of competition built on collaboration and cooperation. Every successful wrestler has a diverse skill set that can help you get over too, no matter what your business or lifestyle. Filled with short chapters and useful advice, this browsable motivational manual features inspirational quotes from dozens of wrestling icons. Each is followed by easy-to-read analysis and actionable tips that can turn a life around.

I collaborated with Darren Paltrowitz on this one-of-a-kind positivity handbook. It breaks down the habits, skills, and strategies that your favorite superstars practice — and you can too, starting today.

Good Advice From Goodfellas: Positive Life Lessons from the Best Mob Movie It’s the last — or maybe first —  motivational manual and self-help guide you’ll ever need. 320 pages, paperback; Kindle ebook also available, cheap. At 145 short chapters, it’s the perfect airport/travel book. This unique meditation & reading finds teachable moments in all your favorite and quotes and scenes from this beloved, seminal movie. If you know what to look for, Goodfellas covers all the same evergreen topics as your favorite business podcasts and startup seminars... but it’s a lot more fun. No, seriously.

Co-author of motivational/how-to Masonic leadership manual

Co-author of parents’ motivational guide to kids’ martial arts

I am the most prominent, prolific non-marquee contributor the music-writing/music journalism textbook How to Write About Music, from the brain trust running Bloomsbury/Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. TECHNICALLY, I AM ON THE SAME LABEL AS NEIL GAIMAN. This is one of two or three books on this topic. Note to self: Write your own.

Wrote the official book with Donnie Iris and the Cruisers For my money, Donnie Iris & the Cruisers are the best-kept secret from 80s rock radio. That had not one, but seven hot 100 hits. The bandleader/songer penned an enduring disco hit. AND he worked with three Rock Hall of Fame artists. The band have a continuous near-40-year run. During this epic tale, they work with a young Trent Reznor, Kiss, Breathless, Cinderella, Sam Kinison, Gamble & Huff, the Jaggerz, Wolfman Jack, and bunch of others. The book is a painstakingly researched oral history that plays like a mix of the four-hour Tom Petty documentary, the movie That Thing You Do!, and the American Hardcore book. Coffee-table book, 464 pages, 102 images, 308 endnotes, 8.5x11″.

Wrote two books about thrash-metal icons Slayer

One is part of 33 1/3, the vanguard series of music-related writing.

One is an exhaustively researched full-length biography featuring 33 images and over 400 endnotes.

Publisher of 6623 Press, home to creator-owned, useful, reasonably priced, unconventional books about popular culture, success, and other cool stuff. People like them.

Full-service, full-contact indie publishing. I write, co-write, ghost-write, edit, and publish books. Quickly.

Do you have book in you? We’ll get it out.

Worked for Rolling Stone, the no. 1 music & culture magazine ever.

I’ve been writing for Alternative Press — America’s no. 2 music magazine — off & on since 2002. More recent pieces are here. Older material is here.

Wrote for alternative newsweekly Cleveland Scene, in various capacities, for 8 years. Won numerous awards for news reporting, business reporting, arts reporting, commentary, feature writing, personality profiling, and sports reporting. Click here for profiles, business features, columns, reviews, and more.

I think this piece about Cleveland’s LeBron James banner won me the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists’ Best Reporter award: Literally the entire city was looking at an iconic, massive piece of public art/advertising — and I was the one person who looked behind the scenes. For alt-weekly Cleveland Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/64-and-counting/archives/2010/08/05/goodbye-lebron-banner-hello-sunshine-workers-behind-the-banner-speak

For Rolling Stone, I interviewed a band and created unofficial liner notes for a classic album:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/they-might-be-giants-flood-track-by-track-guide-to-the-geek-chic-breakthrough-82345/

This kind of piece is a specialty. For Alternative Press, I interviewed an infamous punk musician about his friendship with the late, great Anthony Bourdain. I supplied many conversation prompts, transcribed it, then edited his answers into one continuous narrative, while I remained invisible in the piece. If it looks like I didn’t do much, then that was the entire point.

https://www.altpress.com/features/anthony-bourdain-harley-flanagan-cro-mags-tribute/

I visit a business, describe the experience, and research how a controversial industry works. For Cleveland Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/game-of-chance/Content?oid=2183398

While the rest of the rock-journalism world were writing SOPA stories (Summarizing Other People’s Articles) about a developing story, I dug deep, excavated some court records, and wrote an informed summary. For Metal Sucks — for my money, the best metal news & views site.

https://www.metalsucks.net/2019/06/11/how-many-more-misfits-reunion-shows-will-there-be-according-to-legal-documents-probably-just-one/

A friendly multi-person Q&A and sidebar, stitched together from three different interviews from different media. For Alt Press.

https://www.altpress.com/features/punk-goes-fearless-records-interview/

Cover story/feature profile of the president of a local university — and how his work has helped shape the city. It’s pretty whitebread and dry, but I can work in that style when I’m not writing about raging hellions. For Cleveland Magazine, the city’s upstanding guide to what’s happening and who’s doing it.

https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/the-read/articles/city-mission

News interview with Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cavaliers and Quicken Loans. For Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/enhanced-interrogation-dan-gilbert/Content?oid=1678536

Excerpt from Good Advice From Goodfellas, my self-improvement book that draws positive life lessons from the greatest gangster movie:

https://6623press.tumblr.com/post/181078213342/the-new-self-helpmotivational-manual-good-help

Christmas Sevenfold: Metal Dad, Compendium Two  My second comic-strip compilation collects seven years of Christmas & fall holiday stripes, with new art, a foreword, and an essay about why the kind of guy who wrote two books about Slayer still loves Xmas. 180 pages, oversized 8.5 x 11″ paperback.

Suburban Metal Dad, Compendium One: Raging Bullshit. The first compilation book for my webcomic. It collects Years III and IV of the comic, with 172 strips, 8 previously unreleased demo strips, an updated FAQ, and a true-life, all-text real-life metal dad story (so there’s something to really read). 180 pages, oversized 8.5 x 11″ paperback.

Individual strips of Suburban Metal Dad, an online comic that has run twice weekly since 2010.

I am totally into the Misfits/Danzig/Samhain, and wrote a bunch of stuff about this record-setting continuum of ground-breaking musicians

I wrote things for Metal Sucks

Guest on heavy metal podcasts, and bloggage about it all

Guest on assorted TV and superhero-show podcasts

Guest host on rock podcast Lost Together

Annotated both versions of “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” at Genius

Random bloggage about stuff that isn’t necessarily metal... mostly movies and holiday stuff like a survey of Christmas imagery in True Detective season 1

Tweet too much, but it’s healthier than taking cigarette breaks.

The Pentagrammarian: I take note of writing, grammar, usage, and the business thereof. I am one of very few professional writers who can list the four parts of a well-rounded profile or break down the constituent parts of a sentence, in correct technical grammar terms.

The goat had it comin’. I swear.  

[aion-rsa]

Charles Addams Biographer Defends Addams Family Values

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

The Addams Family, Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1991 comedy classic, will celebrate its 30th Anniversary this month. The Addams Family 2 recently resurrected the classic characters for a cross-country holiday, and the classic TV series The Addams Family can still be seen on syndication, streaming, and in memes and dreams.

The malevolently mischievous artist Chas Addams is as mysterious as his comic The Addams Family is iconic. Addams was the only cartoonist at The New Yorker magazine whose mental facilities were questioned. He was rumored to sleep in a coffin, to keep eyeballs in martini glasses, and show up in a full suit of armor at non-costume parties. The only biography written about Addams is Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, which was rereleased by Turner Publishing on Oct. 19. The book doesn’t dispel the myths so much as confirm the vast eccentricities of the social butterfly with bat-wings.

Charles Addams loved fast cars and beautiful women. All three of his wives projected the essence of his most iconic muse, Morticia Addams, and he dated the actress Joan Fontaine and the presidential widow Jackie Kennedy. But he also drew black and white cartoons so off-color they offended Nazis. The real Addams passed around sex drawings to his classmates in English class, was arrested for breaking and entering, studied at the Grand Central School of Art, and lived in a townhouse with a leaky water tower on the roof.

Linda H. Davis is the author of Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, which initially came out at Random House in 2006. She is also the author of the biographies Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane, and Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White. Davis spoke with Den of Geek about the many misconceptions of a man who thrived on mystique.

Den of Geek: What drew you to Charles Addams as a subject?

Linda H. Davis: It’s the strangest thing. I don’t know why he came into my head. But I had this file I never looked at, into which I put obituaries, because that’s a great source of ideas for biographies. And I found that I’d clipped two of his, including from The New York Times, which started on the front page with a photograph and was wonderful. I looked into it, and it turned out nobody had done it. But honestly, I can’t tell you. I think he was a repressed memory. He was there, buried inside. I just didn’t know it.

Do you think he would’ve liked the idea that you had a box of obituaries?

He would’ve loved it. Absolutely. He would’ve said, “That’s the biographer for me.”

People today don’t know that his contemporaries saw him as an off-kilter public figure. Tell me about the man about town.

The man about town. I mean, he was just the most charming man you could expect to meet. He was on the top of everybody’s dinner party invitation list in New York, and knew everyone. He socialized a lot and had an incredible love life, but he never let socializing or his love life get in the way of his work. He was very serious about it from the time he was young. But yeah, he was out and about. He owned a couple of tuxedos, because he needed them. He couldn’t have rented them, because he needed them too often. And well-traveled.

But he also would wear pajamas to parties.

Well, there was just that one time. Someone had given him some red pajamas, so he wore them kind of as a joke. But he didn’t usually do that.

Abraham Lincoln at a non-costume party?

Yes. That was one. And when he went to a costume party, he wore a real medieval suit of armor. I mean, he did that at least a couple of times.

I know he didn’t sleep in a coffin, but his decor in his home, even in New York City, was like the Addams Family mansion. So how was it like that?

Well, of course, it wasn’t a big gold house. He’d always wanted to live in a house, like in a big Victorian, but somehow it had never happened. This was the apartment in New York, at the back of which overlooked the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, was the top two floors and not connected by an inside stairway. You had to go outside to the stairs to get up, which was very inconvenient. If it was raining, and you were wearing your red silk pajamas, but it also leaked. It was under the water tower there. He had a lot of drawings and papers and things stored under his bed and maybe in the closet that got wrecked. I mean he had a very, very nice set of medieval arms and armament, along with the Maximilian suit of armor.

There was a papier-mâché, anatomical figure that had been used in a medical school, and you could take the organs out. But maybe the most sensational thing was his coffee table, which was made from a Civil War embalming table and still had the headrest at one end. Then he had a lot of things that people gave him, bats. And there was a bat door-knocker on the front and things like that. Some of it was just having fun. And some of it was that he really did love these things. He thought the crossbows and longbows, which he knew how to use by the way, were beautiful. And they were, I mean they were hand-decorated and etched and really marvelous. And his widow sold them at Sotheby’s for a pretty penny after he died.

Would he have been surprised at the continued success of the Addams Family?

I think he would have been very disappointed that he missed out on all the really big money. Yeah.

Did he get screwed from the TV show? Is his family getting any of the money coming out of the movies? Did they ever fix that?

I want to be clear that he didn’t get screwed by the people who did the TV show. He got screwed by his second wife, and that’s a whole dark section of the book in which she managed to wrest the rights from him. His second wife Barbara, Barb as she was known then, became Lady Colyton. It was a very brief marriage, extremely complicated. And she walked away with all of that and with a number of cartoons. He did not have any children. There are no more residuals from that, but the films things that go on are continuing to make money for the Addams Foundation, which Tee [Addams third and last wife] set up before she died, along with the help of Kevin Miserocchi, who’s running it.

Was his first wife, Barbara Jean Day, the basis for the character Morticia Addams?

No. I mean, they liked to play that up, because she had dark hair. She’s a prettier, softer version of Morticia, but I will say that all three of them did bear a resemblance to Morticia. And he liked to draw them as Morticia, particularly Tee. And I think I’ve got one of those drawings in the book. They were just playing that up, and she did grow her hair long to please him and play along with it and would dress in black for photographs.

What do you think the films get wrong?

I think what they get wrong is they’re not nearly as dark as the original cartoons. And one thing, they’ve never passed anybody who looks like, well, Gomez in particular is a really revolting-looking man. He was inspired by Thomas E. Dewey, though there was a little bit of Peter Lorre. Addams never said that, but I could see that. But crossed with a pig, a very unattractive man. And I think that Hollywood just can’t bring themselves to cast somebody who looks like that.

And Morticia, of course, has always been made prettier. Although he said, “She was just my idea of a pretty girl,” Morticia. He did like that type. And all three wives had dark hair and were that certain type, though he did date blondes and redheads too. But I think there are so few Addams Family cartoons that I wish that somebody would look at his other cartoons and add them to the script, because there are a lot of other dark cartoons that could work.

The cartoons are really more sinister and don’t rely on pratfalls. So, it seems to me, first of all, it’s very difficult to create a good script based on the Addams Family, because there are so few of them, but it seems to me that the knowledge of Addams’ cartoons isn’t deep enough.

What cartoons do you think would lend themselves cinematically?

I’m thinking of one cartoon for instance, from the 1930s, which shows a woman entering the gates of a rest home. I think she’s wearing mink or fur as women in those days did. And there are vultures sitting on the post. And she’s sort of doing a double take.

There are a lot of cartoons about husbands and wives doing away with each other or trying to. He illustrates the idea, of course, not the act, which wouldn’t be funny. One of them, a very early cartoon, I think it’s from the ’50s, shows a man. He is opening the door of his car. It’s overlooking a really steep cliff. “Darling, will you step out for a moment?” I’m not a screenwriter. These are just my thoughts.

What was the most surprising thing about him that you did find?

I don’t want to give the story away, because it’s kind of a shock when you find out how far it went. But the story about his second marriage and just how far things went and his inability to just put his foot down with her and fight back. It took me a long time to understand, and that really surprised me. That was a shocker for me. It was really difficult to understand and write about.

Did his work actually get darker after that?

No. No, it was always there. It was always there; from the time he was a kid.

Tell me about how breaking and entering informed his life as an artist.

He had to break and enter to get into The New Yorker, I guess. That was just a childish prank, but I think those things tend to get overplayed also. And when people write about Addams, they want him to be so literally like his cartoons, and he wasn’t.

He used to describe himself as just a normal American boy. And he was, except he had medieval crossbows and an embalming table in his apartment and some rather sinister taste. But he was sophisticated and urbane and charming and witty. One of the things that most pleased me is that he was just as funny and interesting a man as he was a cartoonist.

He said his experience at True Detective magazine didn’t open his imagination, but what do you think it did besides give him a steady check?

He learned some things technically from it, because his job was to lighten the blood stains to make them look less horrible, I think, to readers, and mark the X where the body was found. I mean, he found it a bore, I think, very quickly and then quit to be a full-time artist after he’d sold a few cartoons to The New Yorker, which was a brave decision in 1935. But I think just some technical things about working for a magazine were helpful to him, but that was it. It had no effect on his imagination. He was really born with that imagination.

I’d like to hear about his friendship with Alfred Hitchcock, his relationship with Joan Fontaine, and how he was seen by Hollywood.

I don’t know any details about his friendship with Hitchcock unfortunately. He became very close to Burgess Meredith. He and John Astin became friendly when Astin got the part of Gomez in The Addams Family on TV.

I did talk to Patricia Neal about him. I mean, everybody just adored him. That was another thing that’s so unusual in biography, frankly, or in learning anything about anybody, that not anybody, that not one, even an ex-wife, had anything bad to say about him. Barbara Colyton, when her back was against the wall, but even she didn’t enjoy it.

Everybody liked him. And Carolyn Jones had a party for him at her very swanky house in Beverly Hills. She had a wonderful party for him when the Addams Family was on TV. Everybody just wanted to know him and felt better for having known him.

Other than those few things, I don’t have any specific information except that Burgess Meredith and John Astin wrote a song about Addams, which they performed at the wonderful memorial party, celebration of a life event, that Tee had for him at the New York Public Library. This was a couple of months after he died. Just an incredible party.

And yet he expected people would be disappointed to meet him.

He was just kidding. I mean, he told one of his lady friends, “Tell them I have a scent of formaldehyde or something.”

I wanted you to talk a little bit about his love of cars, the Aston Martin and the poor man’s Bentley.

He started collecting cars early, I think when he started making money, and he got the Bugatti. And he had a Mercedes at one point, kind of an old Mercedes. I can’t remember. The kind of the classic I think was the 1960s Bentley sedan. And he would squire girlfriends, including Jackie Kennedy, in that car, drive off to Pennsylvania at 80 miles-an-hour and take them to a nice restaurant after going antiquing. He loved classic cars. He was an amateur car racer. Good driver, very fast.

Can you expand on his relationship with Jackie Kennedy?

Well, he had a little romance with her, and I write about it in the chapter called “The Addams Family.” Part of what I think is kind of funny is that he was seeing Jackie, when The Addams Family came on TV. He was also seeing a number of other women, and she was seeing other men. But this was just a few months after the assassination.

What was the relationship like? Was it photographed and chronicled at the time at all?

People did get some pictures. The paparazzi were always stalking her, but I don’t think the romance was really known until I wrote about it in my book. She, I think, liked him very much. He wasn’t somebody she was going to get that serious about, because he didn’t have enough money. But I think she was quite charmed by him and enjoyed him. And they remained friends too, but there are a few anecdotes in there that are, I think, pretty funny and revealing about the two of them.

There’s a story about them at Bunny Mellon’s house in Virginia. There was a big house party, and they were assigned separate bedrooms, all looked very proper, but somebody walked into Jackie’s room by mistake. And Charles Addams was sitting on the bed, in a robe or something. She was in bed, and they were talking. When the door closed, Jackie said, “Well, I’ll be invited back again, but you won’t be.”

I should ask about the Nazi cartoon. Why were they so offended? And has it been seen?

Oh, yeah. It was published. I’m trying to remember where it was originally published. It might have been a German publication. Oh gosh, now I’m going to forget exactly which one that was. I think I would have to check this. I think it was a Boy Scout cartoon. He loved to draw Boy Scouts. He’d been a scout himself and could, by the way, recite the entire Boy Scouts code his whole life, which he’d love to do for girlfriends.

He loved drawing scouts in their little uniforms and everything. And I think it’s the one where a Boy Scout opens the door to a room in his house, where his father is trying to hang himself. And one arm is kind of caught and the scout says, “Hey, pop, that’s not a hangman’s knot.” And the Nazis were offended by it. And I’m sure that made his day. 

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Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life will be re-released by Turner Publishing on Oct. 19, the same day the newly restored cut of Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family arrives on Digital 4K Ultra HD.

The post Charles Addams Biographer Defends Addams Family Values appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[academiablogs]

Writing is Writing it Over Again

(Fox’s The Orville, which takes its cues from many sci-fi series)  Every writer—if you’ve written long enough—knows this moment: the moment where you’re watching a movie, or perhaps just reading a book, and there it is. Your story. Your idea. Your character. Your dialogue. Not that it’s been stolen from you, but you both lucked on the same source of inspiration; they just beat you to it.

For me, it was a situation—a humorous moment that two characters found themselves in, which led to very awkward dialogue that made the situation even funnier. And I had imagined it all. Some contextual details aside, it was more or less the same scene, with quite similar dialogue, though with a slightly different conclusion. My story—almost my words. And now I couldn’t use them. Or I could, but it would forever be in the shadow of the previous work, which would lead to a profoundly guilty conscience.

Even if I did pass it off as my own, the internet is keen to point out unoriginal premises, such as when a recent (and very clever) episode of The Orville borrowed an idea from the show Black Mirror. Comment after comment accused the show of plagiarism, of being derivative, of how much better the “original” was…though, sadly, that idea was not coined by the writers of Black Mirror, and must have been used in countless science fiction stories over the years (for those interested, check out The Orville, Season 1, Episode 7, “Majority Rule”).  Indeed, with the encyclopedic knowledge of the average fan, as well as the endless database that is the internet, why would anyone want to risk writing a story that might be—that will be—that already is a copy of a copy of a copy?

But is it a copy if you’ve never seen the original? Certainly it’s not plagiarism, but if you luck on a story that borrows ideas and twists from another show, or a story now out of print for 60 years, should you hastily withdraw from the scene with a desperate mea culpa? If so, then where would the apologies end? The simple truth is that every story is an act of unconscious plagiarism, borrowing the essence of a thousand stories that preceded it. Characters are traded like faded playing cards, used year after year in a kindergarten classroom. And plots—well, they’re like faces, which repeat in an endless loop, making a hundred year-old photograph or a five hundred year-old painting look like your best friend’s mother.

Let’s face it, the very act of writing is derivative, since self-expression goes back to the very idea of history itself. We tell stories to be remembered, and to remember ourselves. In general, we all want to remember the same things: acts of love and heroism, moments of greed and sacrifice, and the five or six dick jokes that never get old (even Shakespeare enjoyed them). With so many books telling so many stories, most of them more or less the same, is there really any reason to keep going? In the past, when books vanished through war or were devoured by time, it made more sense: books had to be replaced, stories needed to be retold, particularly when so much literature only existed in the mind’s and voices of nomadic storytellers.

(The forefather of borrowed plots, revisited characters, and dick jokes). In the 21st century, however, nothing gets lost: a hundred years of books are jockeying for space in used bookstores, while a hundred million more are waiting to be downloaded, with new ones published by the second (or milisecond). It is the nature of literature to help us remember, but how many reminders do we truly need? Aren’t a hundred thousand—even a million—books sufficient to jar our memory of the basics: that we’re human, we’re flawed, we’re capable of the greatest evils and the greatest triumphs, and we love a good dick and fart joke?

The same question has been asked throughout history; no doubt the Sumerians (who invented pretty much everything known to man) asked themselves, “haven’t all the songs been sung? What more could any human say about his or her adventures?” After all, Gilgamesh not only fought all the monsters on earth but also stormed the Underworld to rescue his best friend from the jaws of death. What more could you conjure up for a sequel? So if we drained the well a good five or six thousand years ago, shouldn’t we throw in the towel? It’s not like we’ll ever be at a loss for good books, and there’s more authors than we could ever discover or five or six lifetimes devoted solely, and slavishly, to reading.

The answer is a surprisingly simple one: storytelling is an art. And all art is a language, something that must grow and develop through speech and intercourse with the world. If we stopped writing words themselves would grind to a halt. We would probably stop reading, too. Once books become museum pieces, something we once did when we had more to say, they will no longer seem relevant. The beauty of art is that it’s a living conversation: we all add to it, even by reading and discussing it with others (particularly those of us in college, since college is an embodiment—even a metaphor—of the process of art).

The struggle of art is to find new ways to keep it relevant and meaningful to a new generation. We do that, largely, by writing new books on old themes; old characters in new worlds; timeless love affairs with modern mores. The story remains the same, but the readers are ever-changing. Even to read a book changes what it was, since every new generation reads with fresh eyes and different voices in their heads. Writing a new book based on a timeless folktale makes us read the original anew. We see how the modern author interprets it, and writes it into existence by a careful act of addition and subtraction. This doesn’t negate the original or exalt the revision. They exist together, like father and son, mother and daughter, or better yet, siblings; they both share the same DNA, even if it speaks a different language.

In fact, one work can help us translate the other—and we can go in either direction. Too often, we’re taught to see works as existing in a vacuum, each one “original” or “derivative,” and the greatest works betray the greatest originality. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Both Shakespeare and Chaucer pilfered nearly all their plots, carefully cherry-picking through the annals of Greek and Italian literature for the ripest fruits. To be sure, they took these threadbare plots (some of them very homely) and built them into towers that could be seen for a thousand generations. Even Chaucer’s most original creation, The Wife of Bath, tells a story of King Arthur that was second-hand in the 14th century.

At its heart, writing is more a response than an act of creation, so the more you know the conversation, the easier it is to write. Shakespeare wanted to write poetry, to create dialogue, to make audiences laugh; why waste time concocting an original plot that might do none of these things, when he had Boccaccio or Ovid for inspiration? In this sense, we’re the luckiest generation of writers: for we have everything to draw from. Every writer who ever drew breath, every story, every poem, every play, every biography. All we have to do is find the best ones (and they’ve been carefully curated for us by generations of scholars and critics) and write a love letter in response.

The best works, after all, are affairs of the heart, written not to this or that person, but to the works we first fell in love with. Look at the recent Netflix smash, Stranger Things, which is almost scholarly in its homages to every great 80’s horror and science fiction film large and small. To me, nothing is more Shakespearean: give the audience what it wants, but remind us why we want it. Once you figure that out, the rest is just taking dictation. 

But be warned: taking something apart is much easier than putting it back together. We can easily see how a Shakespeare play is composed of iambic pentameter and a plot of mistaken identities; but trying to make it sing is alchemy of a higher order. Perhaps that’s the real reason we keep writing in defiance of time and an increasing volume of books: to convince us that it can actually be done, by mere mortals, writing against time and advancing senility.

[thebitesizedigest]

Day 1: April 15, 2020 Periodicals

The New Yorker, April 13, 2020 Issue

Ariel Levy, “A Missionary on Trial” (reporter at large): A white Christian woman from America is accused of causing the deaths of malnourished children at her feeding rehabilitation center in Uganda. In this article, Levy explores post-colonial white savior complex, ethical ambiguity in assigning blame when the sick die receiving last resort care, and steep ambivalence with which the locals regard NGOs and their services. Most locals mistake such NGOs to be hospitals with real doctors and nurses. More often, they are short-staffed rehab centers filling immediate needs with no bandwidth (or motivation, depending on who you ask) to follow up or attack the root of the problem. To some, this reality is proof that international charities and volunteers consider their work in third world countries as self-gratifying projects rather than earnest vocations.

Peter Schjedahl, Mortality and the old masters. (art scene): Schjedahl is one of my favorite art critics to read, which is why it saddens me to know he is currently quarantining from the virus with advanced lung cancer. In this piece, he recalls studying Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) in the Prado shortly after receiving his cancer diagnosis. Now stuck at home months later, he ponders the creative essence in the works of the Old Masters, art history’s most iconic painters and sculptors before the 1800s. Perhaps their talent was forged in the hellish fires of the plagues, civil unrest, and actual fires rampant in their day and repeating in ours. How will surviving today’s global pandemic color our experience of their works in museums (with luck) someday soon?

Casey Cep, The Radical Faith of Dorothy Day. (books): Reviews of multiple Dorothy Day biographies wrapped up in Cep’s deliciously tangled yarn of her life as an activist, anarchist, and a Catholic. Day grew up poor and fought against poverty and racism, but also against abortion rights and birth control (both of which she had used before her conversion at age 30) with equal fervor. Weighing such contradictions, liberals and believers alike are contesting the Church's steps toward her canonization. This is where her biographies become crucial. When I was a Jesuit Volunteer, I’d noticed Day’s quotes adorning the walls of other volunteers’ homes and retreat centers. It seemed everyone came in knowing who she was and it was just too late for me to ask. Reading this was a welcome education--gratifying, even--to know people can be fiercely dedicated and dichotomous in their fight for a better world.

Dan Chiasson, Joyelle McSweeney’s Poetry of Catastrophe (books): A review of phonetically biting (those T’s C’s and X’s, ma’am!!) and viscerally cutting sonnets written by a poet who is pregnant again after losing a previous child so soon after birth. Poetry has never been my go-to but after reading this piece by Chiasson, I may try to get my hands on a copy soon. In “Toxicon and Arachne” (Nightboat), McSweeney’s metaphors are chillingly suited for the pandemic; they illustrate a mood of anger, grief, self-blaming, and doomsaying that I can taste like blood on my teeth from a cut on the inside of my lip--wincing but with great relish. Based on Chiasson’s descriptions and the excerpts he chose to examine, I couldn’t help but picture the illustrations in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, whose obsession with the grotesque manifested with jarring grace and serenity in decadent black ink (always black ink!), accompanying her lines in print. If only Aubrey, who died in 1898, could conjure hand grenades, nuclear fallout, and modern surgical equipment from thin air.

Doreen St. Felix, “The Crass Pleasures of ‘Tiger King’” (TV): ...Honestly, even after reading this review, I couldn’t tell you anything about this wildly popular true crime series that you haven’t already gathered from all the memes. Chances are, you’d already seen it and feel strongly some way about it. While I had a hard time grasping the plot and intrigue (which I suspect had to do with my unshakable disinterest in the subject matter and not at all with St. Felix’s writing) I did marvel at our ability to find comfort in the strangest places even in these most bizarre times. 

Tessa Hadley, “The Other One” (fiction): At twelve, Heloise loses her father in a car crash. This is how she and her mother find out about his affair--the crash also involved his lover and her friend. When the woman she believes to be the friend of her father’s lover (and the sole survivor of that fateful crash) enters her life at a dinner party 30 years later, she feels a cosmic connection to her. She keeps this revelation to herself until she finds out through a chain of serendipitous events that the woman isn’t who she thought she was. Side note: The story itself is fairly straightforward and easy to appreciate on its own, but the follow up interview Hadley gave on this story online tops it off beautifully--I strongly recommend reading both in tandem!

[naoestaobemaver]

How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think

The critic A.O. Scott reflects on the outsize influence Sontag has had on his life as a critic.

By A.O. SCOTT OCT. 8, 2019

“I spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. That pursuit required more effort back then, when nothing was streaming and everything had to be hunted down, bought or borrowed. But those changes aren’t what this essay is about. Culturally ravenous young people have always been insufferable and never unusual, even though they tend to invest a lot in being different — in aspiring (or pretending) to something deeper, higher than the common run. Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. It’s a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search. Once you’ve read everything, then at last you can begin.

2 Furious consumption is often described as indiscriminate, but the point of it is always discrimination. It was on my parents’ bookshelves, amid other emblems of midcentury, middle-class American literary taste and intellectual curiosity, that I found a book with a title that seemed to offer something I desperately needed, even if (or precisely because) it went completely over my head. “Against Interpretation.” No subtitle, no how-to promise or self-help come-on. A 95-cent Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of the author, Susan Sontag.

There is no doubt that the picture was part of the book’s allure — the angled, dark-eyed gaze, the knowing smile, the bobbed hair and buttoned-up coat — but the charisma of the title shouldn’t be underestimated. It was a statement of opposition, though I couldn’t say what exactly was being opposed. Whatever “interpretation” turned out to be, I was ready to enlist in the fight against it. I still am, even if interpretation, in one form or another, has been the main way I’ve made my living as an adult. It’s not fair to blame Susan Sontag for that, though I do.

3 “Against Interpretation,” a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and magazines, mainly devoted to of-the-moment texts and artifacts (Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Saint Genet,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie,’’ Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures”), modestly presents itself as “case studies for an aesthetic,” a theory of Sontag’s “own sensibility.” Really, though, it is the episodic chronicle of a mind in passionate struggle with the world and itself.

Sontag’s signature is ambivalence. “Against Interpretation” (the essay), which declares that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ ” is clearly the work of a relentlessly analytical, meaning-driven intelligence. In a little more than 10 pages, she advances an appeal to the ecstasy of surrender rather than the protocols of exegesis, made in unstintingly cerebral terms. Her final, mic-drop declaration — “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” — deploys abstraction in the service of carnality.

4 It’s hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact “Against Interpretation” had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadn’t — hadn’t yet! — read and movies I hadn’t heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the ’60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed.

But I kept reading “Against Interpretation” — following it with “Styles of Radical Will,” “On Photography” and “Under the Sign of Saturn,” books Sontag would later deprecate as “juvenilia” — for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called “On Style”). For the voice, I guess, but that’s a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

5 Years after I plucked “Against Interpretation” from the living-room shelf, I came across a short story of Sontag’s called “Pilgrimage.” One of the very few overtly autobiographical pieces Sontag ever wrote, this lightly fictionalized memoir, set in Southern California in 1947, recalls an adolescence that I somehow suspect myself of having plagiarized a third of a century later. “I felt I was slumming in my own life,” Sontag writes, gently mocking and also proudly affirming the serious, voracious girl she used to be. The “pilgrimage” in question, undertaken with a friend named Merrill, was to Thomas Mann’s house in Pacific Palisades, where that venerable giant of German Kultur had been incongruously living while in exile from Nazi Germany.

The funniest and truest part of the story is young Susan’s “shame and dread” at the prospect of paying the call. “Oh, Merrill, how could you?” she melodramatically exclaims when she learns he has arranged for a teatime visit to the Mann residence. The second-funniest and truest part of the story is the disappointment Susan tries to fight off in the presence of a literary idol who talks “like a book review.” The encounter makes a charming anecdote with 40 years of hindsight, but it also proves that the youthful instincts were correct. “Why would I want to meet him?” she wondered. “I had his books.”

6 I never met Susan Sontag. Once when I was working late answering phones and manning the fax machine in the offices of The New York Review of Books, I took a message for Robert Silvers, one of the magazine’s editors. “Tell him Susan Sontag called. He’ll know why.” (Because it was his birthday.) Another time I caught a glimpse of her sweeping, swanning, promenading — or maybe just walking — through the galleries of the Frick.

Much later, I was commissioned by this magazine to write a profile of her. She was about to publish “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a sequel and corrective to her 1977 book “On Photography.” The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks — words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief — had not yet died down. I felt I had a lot to say to her, but the one thing I could not bring myself to do was pick up the phone. Mostly I was terrified of disappointment, mine and hers. I didn’t want to fail to impress her; I didn’t want to have to try. The terror of seeking her approval, and the certainty that in spite of my journalistic pose I would be doing just that, were paralyzing. Instead of a profile, I wrote a short text that accompanied a portrait by Chuck Close. I didn’t want to risk knowing her in any way that might undermine or complicate the relationship we already had, which was plenty fraught. I had her books.

7 After Sontag died in 2004, the focus of attention began to drift away from her work and toward her person. Not her life so much as her self, her photographic image, her way of being at home and at parties — anywhere but on the page. Her son, David Rieff, wrote a piercing memoir about his mother’s illness and death. Annie Leibovitz, Sontag’s partner, off and on, from 1989 until her death, released a portfolio of photographs unsparing in their depiction of her cancer-ravaged, 70-year-old body. There were ruminations by Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate and Terry Castle about her daunting reputation and the awe, envy and inadequacy she inspired in them. “Sempre Susan,” a short memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived with Sontag and Rieff for a while in the 1970s, is the masterpiece of the “I knew Susan” minigenre and a funhouse-mirror companion to Sontag’s own “Pilgrimage.” It’s about what can happen when you really get to know a writer, which is that you lose all sense of what or who it is you really know, including yourself.

8 In 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag’s longtime publisher, issued “Reborn,” the first of two volumes so far culled from nearly 100 notebooks Sontag filled from early adolescence into late middle age. Because of their fragmentary nature, these journal entries aren’t intimidating in the way her more formal nonfiction prose could be, or abstruse in the manner of most of her pre-1990s fiction. They seem to offer an unobstructed window into her mind, documenting her intellectual anxieties, existential worries and emotional upheavals, along with everyday ephemera that proves to be almost as captivating. Lists of books to be read and films to be seen sit alongside quotations, aphorisms, observations and story ideas. Lovers are tantalizingly represented by a single letter (“I.”; “H”; “C.”). You wonder if Sontag hoped, if she knew, that you would be reading this someday — the intimate journal as a literary form is a recurring theme in her essays — and you wonder whether that possibility undermines the guilty intimacy of reading these pages or, on the contrary, accounts for it.

9 A new biography by Benjamin Moser — “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” published last month — shrinks Sontag down to life size, even as it also insists on her significance. “What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized,” he concludes, having studiously documented her love affairs, her petty cruelties and her lapses in personal hygiene.

I must say I find the notion horrifying. A woman whose great accomplishments were writing millions of words and reading who knows how many millions more — no exercise in Sontagiana can fail to mention the 15,000-book library in her Chelsea apartment — has at last been decisively captured by what she called “the image-world,” the counterfeit reality that threatens to destroy our apprehension of the actual world.

You can argue about the philosophical coherence, the political implications or the present-day relevance of this idea (one of the central claims of “On Photography”), but it’s hard to deny that Sontag currently belongs more to images than to words. Maybe it’s inevitable that after Sontag’s death, the literary persona she spent a lifetime constructing — that rigorous, serious, impersonal self — has been peeled away, revealing the person hiding behind the words. The unhappy daughter. The mercurial mother. The variously needy and domineering lover. The loyal, sometimes impossible friend. In the era of prestige TV, we may have lost our appetite for difficult books, but we relish difficult characters, and the biographical Sontag — brave and imperious, insecure and unpredictable — surely fits the bill.

10 “Interpretation,” according to Sontag, “is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.” And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into “the life,” a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.

The point of this essay, which turns out not to be as simple as I thought it would be, is to resist that tendency. I can’t deny the reality of the image or the symbolic cachet of the name. I don’t want to devalue the ways Sontag serves as a talisman and a culture hero. All I really want to say is that Susan Sontag mattered because of what she wrote.

11 Or maybe I should just say that’s why she matters to me. In “Sempre Susan,” Sigrid Nunez describes Sontag as:

... the opposite of Thomas Bernhard’s comic “possessive thinker,” who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose “art selfishness” makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable. She wanted her passions to be shared by all, and to respond with equal intensity to any work she loved was to give her one of her biggest pleasures.

I’m the opposite of that. I don’t like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret. She was never assigned in any course I took in college, and if her name ever came up while I was in graduate school, it was with a certain condescension. She wasn’t a theorist or a scholar but an essayist and a popularizer, and as such a bad fit with the desperate careerism that dominated the academy at the time. In the world of cultural journalism, she’s often dismissed as an egghead and a snob. Not really worth talking about, and so I mostly didn’t talk about her.

12 Nonetheless, I kept reading, with an ambivalence that mirrored hers. Perhaps her most famous essay — certainly among the most controversial — is “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” which scrutinizes a phenomenon defined by “the spirit of extravagance” with scrupulous sobriety. The inquiry proceeds from mixed feelings — “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it” — that are heightened rather than resolved, and that curl through the 58 numbered sections of the “Notes” like tendrils in an Art Nouveau print. In writing about a mode of expression that is overwrought, artificial, frivolous and theatrical, Sontag adopts a style that is the antithesis of all those things.

If some kinds of camp represent “a seriousness that fails,” then “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” enacts a seriousness that succeeds. The essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde, whose most tongue-in-cheek utterances gave voice to his deepest thoughts. Sontag reverses that Wildean current, so that her grave pronouncements sparkle with an almost invisible mischief. The essay is delightful because it seems to betray no sense of fun at all, because its jokes are buried so deep that they are, in effect, secrets.

13 In the chapter of “Against Interpretation” called “Camus’ Notebooks” — originally published in The New York Review of Books — Sontag divides great writers into “husbands” and “lovers,” a sly, sexy updating of older dichotomies (e.g., between Apollonian and Dionysian, Classical and Romantic, paleface and redskin). Albert Camus, at the time beginning his posthumous descent from Nobel laureate and existentialist martyr into the high school curriculum (which is where I found him), is named the “ideal husband of contemporary letters.” It isn’t really a compliment:

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. He’s the guy the reader will settle for, who won’t ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Céline or Gide. He’s also the one who, more than any of them, inspires love.

14 After her marriage to the sociologist Philip Rieff ended in 1959, most of Sontag’s serious romantic relationships were with women. The writers whose company she kept on the page were overwhelmingly male (and almost exclusively European). Except for a short piece about Simone Weil and another about Nathalie Sarraute in “Against Interpretation” and an extensive takedown of Leni Riefenstahl in “Under the Sign of Saturn,” Sontag’s major criticism is all about men.

She herself was kind of a husband. Her writing is conscientious, thorough, patient and useful. Authoritative but not scolding. Rigorous, orderly and lucid even when venturing into landscapes of wildness, disruption and revolt. She begins her inquiry into “The Pornographic Imagination” with the warning that “No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornographies — there are at least three — and before pledging to take them on one at a time.”

The extravagant, self-subverting seriousness of this sentence makes it a perfect camp gesture. There is also something kinky about the setting of rules and procedures, an implied scenario of transgression and punishment that is unmistakably erotic. Should I be ashamed of myself for thinking that? Of course! Humiliation is one of the most intense and pleasurable effects of Sontag’s masterful prose. She’s the one in charge.

15 But the rules of the game don’t simply dictate silence or obedience on the reader’s part. What sustains the bond — the bondage, if you’ll allow it — is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.

I often read her work in a spirit of defiance, of disobedience, as if hoping to provoke a reaction. For a while, I thought she was wrong about everything. “Against Interpretation” was a sentimental and self-defeating polemic against criticism, the very thing she had taught me to believe in. “On Photography” was a sentimental defense of a shopworn aesthetic ideology wrapped around a superstitious horror at technology. And who cared about Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin anyway? Or about E.M. Cioran or Antonin Artaud or any of the other Euro-weirdos in her pantheon?

Not me! And yet. ... Over the years I’ve purchased at least three copies of “Under the Sign of Saturn” — if pressed to choose a favorite Sontag volume, I’d pick that one — and in each the essay on Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” is the most dog-eared. Why? Not so I could recommend it to someone eager to learn about the first native Bulgarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I’ve never met such a person. “Mind as Passion” is the best thing I’ve ever read about the emotional dynamics of literary admiration, about the way a great writer “teaches us how to breathe,” about how readerly surrender is a form of self-creation.

16 In a very few cases, the people Sontag wrote about were people she knew: Roland Barthes and Paul Goodman, for example, whose deaths inspired brief appreciations reprinted in “Under the Sign of Saturn.” Even in those elegies, the primary intimacy recorded is the one between writer and reader, and the reader — who is also, of course, a writer — is commemorating and pursuing a form of knowledge that lies somewhere between the cerebral and the biblical.

Because the intimacy is extended to Sontag’s reader, the love story becomes an implicit ménage à trois. Each essay enacts the effort — the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown — to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.

17 The version of this essay that I least want to write — the one that keeps pushing against my resistance to it — is the one that uses Sontag as a cudgel against the intellectual deficiencies and the deficient intellectuals of the present. It’s almost comically easy to plot a vector of decline from then to now. Why aren’t the kids reading Canetti? Why don’t trade publishers print collections of essays about European writers and avant-garde filmmakers? Sontag herself was not immune to such laments. In 1995, she mourned the death of cinema. In 1996, she worried that “the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people.”

Worse, there are ideas and assumptions abroad in the digital land that look like debased, parodic versions of positions she staked out half a century ago. The “new sensibility” she heralded in the ’60s, “dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia,” survives in the form of a frantic, algorithm-fueled eclecticism. The popular meme admonishing critics and other designated haters to shut up and “let people enjoy things” looks like an emoji-friendly update of “Against Interpretation,” with “enjoy things” a safer formulation than Sontag’s “erotics of art.”

That isn’t what she meant, any more than her prickly, nuanced “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” had much to do with the Instagram-ready insouciance of this year’s Met Gala, which borrowed the title for its theme. And speaking of the ’Gram, its ascendance seems to confirm the direst prophecies of “On Photography,” which saw the unchecked spread of visual media as a kind of ecological catastrophe for human consciousness.

18 In other ways, the Sontag of the ’60s and ’70s can strike current sensibilities as problematic or outlandish. She wrote almost exclusively about white men. She believed in fixed hierarchies and absolute standards. She wrote at daunting length with the kind of unapologetic erudition that makes people feel bad. Even at her most polemical, she never trafficked in contrarian hot takes. Her name will never be the answer to the standard, time-killing social-media query “What classic writer would be awesome on Twitter?” The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it.

Sontag was a queer, Jewish woman writer who disdained the rhetoric of identity. She was diffident about disclosing her sexuality. Moser criticizes her for not coming out in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when doing so might have been a powerful political statement. The political statements that she did make tended to get her into trouble. In 1966, she wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” In 1982, in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan, she called communism “fascism with a human face.” After Sept. 11, she cautioned against letting emotion cloud political judgment. “Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.”

That doesn’t sound so unreasonable now, but the bulk of Sontag’s writing served no overt or implicit ideological agenda. Her agenda — a list of problems to be tackled rather than a roster of positions to be taken — was stubbornly aesthetic. And that may be the most unfashionable, the most shocking, the most infuriating thing about her.

19 Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the difference between resistance and complicity.

Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didn’t soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didn’t read — or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances — to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it. What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: “From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”

20 “Consciousness” is one of her keywords, and she uses it in a way that may have an odd ring to 21st-century ears. It’s sometimes invoked now, in a weak sense, as a synonym for the moral awareness of injustice. Its status as a philosophical problem, meanwhile, has been diminished by the rise of cognitive science, which subordinates the mysteries of the human mind to the chemical and physical operations of the brain.

But consciousness as Sontag understands it has hardly vanished, because it names a phenomenon that belongs — in ways that escape scientific analysis — to both the individual and the species. Consciousness inheres in a single person’s private, incommunicable experience, but it also lives in groups, in cultures and populations and historical epochs. Its closest synonym is thought, which similarly dwells both within the walls of a solitary skull and out in the collective sphere.

If Sontag’s great theme was consciousness, her great achievement was as a thinker. Usually that label is reserved for theorists and system-builders — Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud — but Sontag doesn’t quite belong in that company. Instead, she wrote in a way that dramatized how thinking happens. The essays are exciting not just because of the ideas they impart but because you feel within them the rhythms and pulsations of a living intelligence; they bring you as close to another person as it is possible to be.

21 “Under the Sign of Saturn” opens in a “tiny room in Paris” where she has been living for the previous year — “small bare quarters” that answer “some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on.” Even though, according to Sigrid Nunez, Sontag preferred to have other people around her when she was working, I tend to picture her in the solitude of that Paris room, which I suppose is a kind of physical manifestation, a symbol, of her solitary consciousness. A consciousness that was animated by the products of other minds, just as mine is activated by hers. If she’s alone in there, I can claim the privilege of being her only company.

Which is a fantasy, of course. She has had better readers, and I have loved other writers. The metaphors of marriage and possession, of pleasure and power, can be carried only so far. There is no real harm in reading casually, promiscuously, abusively or selfishly. The page is a safe space; every word is a safe word. Your lover might be my husband.

It’s only reading. By which I mean: It’s everything.”

[a-h-arts]

Terrific biography of a fascinating woman Bought this to read before trip to Santa Fe since it was the most comprehensive biography I could find. The print is a bit dark but some of my friends liked that when I was sharing info. It would have been ideal to have had an iPad to look up the paintings named in the book as I read but I was still very happy with this book. It is a really good overview of the entire life of an amazing woman, her art & times. Would have enjoyed the book even if I didn't have a purpose in reading it. Good research and a fascinating read. Highly recommend it. Go to Amazon

Fascinating story of a remarkable artist Very good read. Lots of information about her as a painter and what motivated and inspired her. Then the story of her life with Stieglitz as a thread throughout her life. Fascinating because she had such a long life and lived in very interesting times. I knew a lot about O'Keefe but there was so much more in this book. Go to Amazon

Great insight. Well written and explains the life of O'Keeffe. Having been to her museum in Santa Fe, and then her home in Abiqui, and then at Ghost Ranch....The book brings this all together. Oh, and also got to Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, another one of her stops in life. Great insight. Go to Amazon

Five Stars Great review of the life and work of Georgia O'Keefe. Well researched and easy to read, Go to Amazon

Four Stars Interesting reading, but it seemed to skip around . Go to Amazon

Highly recommend this biography The only reason I knew of Georgia O'Keefe was her paintings of flowers which I have always appreciated. This book gave me insight into who she was, why and how her career progressed and why she painted the way she did. A well written book that not only educated me about a great artist, but encouraged me to look at art in new ways. Go to Amazon

Georgia is one of my favorite artists and the book contained valuable information that truly ... Thank you so much for getting me this book in a timely manner as I needed it for a presentation which I was able to give. Georgia is one of my favorite artists and the book contained valuable information that truly allowed me to give a thorough presentation. Thank you again. Go to Amazon

Recommend!!! One of the best books I've ever read. Never thought that a biography can be written so well. Inspiring and aspiring! Go to Amazon

Well written and personal. Well-written and I liked it a lot Factual yet personal telling of the life of Georgia ! Four Stars Five Stars Read this if you are interested in strong women, art, or history. Four Stars Five Stars Looks like it's a bootleg book or something

[talesofhawaii]

Makaha Surfside

Leialoha Perkins mit Shana Okuda – ©Gérard Koch, 2018

Makaha Surfside

In the agenda is the following entry: Mon 27.Nov. 2017-Leialoha Perkins, Makaha Surfside, Waianae, HI. – Yes, we need to get off the bus from our Honolulu hotel in time to arrive at Leialoha at 10.00. We stand at the bus station just opposite our hotel and wait for the express bus C, which goes over the country, out of the city. “Shana, I can already see our bus coming in behind the other guy who is just heading for our station.” I believed the seven dollars in the bus money for both of us out of my pocket and got ready to board the next bus. In one hand I held the film equipment backpack and with the other hand I pushed the dollars into the counting machine at the driver with my request to get two day tickets. In the back of the bus, which was already crowded with workers, there was just a seat in the bus for us two, where I grabbed the last window seat. Although only 45km as the crow flies, the bus has to be tormented by the traffic from Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, as the busy coastal road along. The modern, glittering high-rise buildings of Honolulu slowly disappear behind us. We can be lucky that we have to go to the interview place city outward, because on the opposite lane of the highway towards the city, the cars are in four to seven lanes, miles in a sheet avalanche. After a good hour’s drive, the express bus leaves the highway and drives through residential areas and business districts to Kapolei, to the large bus station in Haumea Str, which is just a long roadside. There we had to board the next bus, which was already ready. At the last major intersection “Ewa-Schofield Junction” the express bus follows Highway 1 to “Honokai Hale” where the highway merges into a two-lane main road. “We still have to get fresh lei’s,” Shana told me loudly in the not so quiet bus. Arriving in Waianae, the big yellow, white bus stops at the “Tamura” shopping center, where we leave the swaying, noisy monster to go and buy the Lei’s. Here in Waianae, the original Hawaiians still live with their keen watch dogs and huge, self-erected trucks. The contrasts from Waianae to Honolulu can not be greater, like poverty to wealth, but also from tourists. If you find in Waianae only tourists who have lost their way, the capital is overflowing with them. With a fragrant white ginger flowers and a cornflower leis we leave the shopping center where we waited again for the next bus, which drives us to Makaha Surfside. There arrived in a few minutes, we get heavily laden and freezing the moving freezer. Waiting for the green man at the traffic lights, we reached the destination, where we then reported to the security in the receiving container, which brought our arrival to Leialoha.

biography

Leialoha with Roland Francis Perkins – ©Gérard Koch, 2018

Leialoha Perkins is on Born March 5, 1930 in Lahaina Maui, Hawai’ian Islands. She was the daughter of Samuel Umi and Margaret Malia (Kaa’a) Apo. Leialoha loved the language and traveling. So she has traveled the whole world in an adventurous way in her life. In 1954 she married Stephen G. Mark, who unfortunately died in 1966. After a few years later, in 1971, she married Roland Francis Perkins, with whom she gave birth to two children, Mark ‘Umi Perkins and Kele Douglas Perkins. In addition to her terrific education and career, she has invested with Roland their time in the history of Kumulipos and conducted research. She has also written several books as an author.

The following training and career has been accomplished by Leialoha: (in chronological order)

1957       Bachelor of Arts in englischer Literature cum laude, Boston University 1959       Master of Science in Library. Science, Simmons College 1966       Master of Arts in englischer Literature, Mount Holyoke College 1978       Doctor of Philosophy in Folklore and Folklife, University Pennsylvania 1959-1961     Catalogue library Museum Fine Arts, Boston 1965-1966     Smith College, Northampton 1966-1968     Instructor English Northeastern University, Boston 1973-1974     Library Boston Psychoanalytic Institute 1980-1986     Associate professor English and Anthropology Atenisi University,Nuku’alofa,Tonga, 1989-1994     Instructor Hawaiian studies University Hawaii-Leeward, Pearl City 1994-1999     Assistant professor Hawaiian studies University Hawaii-West Oahu 1994              Coordinator International Oral Traditions Program, Honolulu 2004              Co-founder Hui O Na Vahine Honua Earth Women’s Collaborative International

2001 Sept. 09,Tutu Leialoha Apo-Perkins at Yama Royale Ranch. photo by George F. Lee

Award:

Promotion Prize for the Initiation of the Journal HawnPac Folklore Folklife Studies, Hawai’i State Legislation, 1984-1986. Appointment to the first joint doctoral internship in Culture Learning Institute at the University of Pennsylvania in the East-West Center, 1974-1976, Excellence in Teaching Award 1994, Hawaii Award for Literature, Hawaii State Foundation Culture and Arts, 1998. Fellow for oral Tradition the Humanities, 1994.

HE Kumulipo

The Kumulipo is the Hawaiian Genesis consisting of 2,102 sentences in 16 “wā” (chapters) which was sung in honor of Prince Kalaninuiamamao of Big Island. This story from the 18th century is the song that tells both the origin of the world and the genealogy of Hawai’i’s ruling family. The Kumulipo is a poetry with many nuances of meaning and puns, which also contains many subtle parables and parodies of rivals of the royal family. This mythology story was verbally passed on to Alapaiwahine. In 1889 King Kalākaua printed the Kumulipo for the first time in a 60 page brochure. He enclosed a two-sided paper showing the original Chant. Queen Liliʻuokalani described the singing as a prayer for the development of the universe and the descent of the Hawaiians. She, Lili’uokalani, translated the singing under house arrest in the Iolani Palace. This translation was published in 1897 and re-published in 1978 by Pueo Press. It is very difficult to turn the Hawaiian wordplay and rhyme into English or German prose. Many scholars are still divided on the translation today.

In this fantastic conversation, we also learn from Leialoha Perkins what connects them to Bamburgh Castle in the english county of Northumberland. Also, we learn an ugly story about the Waimanalo Gulch Landfill.

  to Video Subscription

epilogue

A terrible message has reached us from Oahu over the holidays of 2018. The wind of Kaneana Mountain has taken Leialoha Perkins with the birds and insects. She has passed the colorful rainbow into the land of souls and has closed her eyes on ……… forever. Hawai’i loses with her one of the most important cultural people who has written so much about Hawaiian mythology and published books. Her biggest wish in her life, though she was always afraid of the camera, was that she could tell in a recording about her cumulipo. You have to know that all Hawaiian Islands have their own Chant. Leialoha’s version, however, which she had explored with Roland, her husband, is the chant of the entire Hawaiian Islands. This interview, which my wife Shana and I were allowed to do with Leialoha, was her life’s wish. Also, this conversation, not knowing, is the last conversation of Leialoha Perkins, a historical masterpiece that will be an important pillar of Hawaiian history. Thank you Leialoha Perkins for getting to know you through my wife Shana. Listening to your stories was exciting and informative. Your humor, your stories and friendliness were unique. You will stay in my thoughts.

Aloha nui, Leihaloha Perkins.

Gallery:

Grandmother of Leialoha Perkins

Roland Francis Perkins with his son

Roland Francis Perkins with his son

Roland Francis Perkins with Leialoha Perkins; 27.Nov. 2017 Makaha Surfside ©Gérard Koch

Roland Francis Perkins with Leialoha Perkins; 27.Nov. 2017 Makaha Surfside ©Gérard Koch

Journal of Hawaiian and Pacific Folklore and Folklife Studies Vol.2 – 1991

Journal of Hawaiian and Pacific Folklore and Folklife Studies Vol.1

Cyclone Country – Jan 1, 1986 by Leialoha Apo Perkins

LOVE LETTERS: UNDER, OVER, AND DIAGONALLY – Von Leialoha Perkins & Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo

Natural, and other stories about contemporary Hawaiians Unknown Binding – 1979

Hawaiʻi Review Issue 27 Aloha ʻĀina: 1989

The Oxridge Woman Paperback – 1998 by Leialoha Apo Perkins

Other Places in the Turnings of a Mind – 1986 by Leialoha Apo Perkins

Leialoha Perkins mit Shana Okuda

Links:

Biography Bamburgh Castle Waimanalo Gulch Landfill

Work:

University Hawai’i Academia Library

Book:

LOVE LETTERS: UNDER, OVER, AND DIAGONALLY

Cyclone Country – Jan 1, 1986

Other Places in the Turnings of a Mind – 1986

The Oxridge Woman – 1998

The firemakers and other short stories of Hawai’ì, the Sāmoas, and Tonga

Hawaiʻi Review Issue 27 Aloha ʻĀina: 1989

Natural, and other stories about contemporary Hawaiians Unknown Binding – 1979

Histories in Stone, Wood, Bone – 1998

Kumulipo Makaha Surfside Makaha Surfside In the agenda is the following entry: Mon 27.Nov. 2017-Leialoha Perkins, Makaha Surfside, Waianae, HI.

[hallhub6-blog]

Walking Harlem: An Interview with Karen Taborn

Today on the blog, Kate Papacosma talks to Karen Taborn about the process of developing her book, Walking Harlem: The Ultimate Guide to the Cultural Capital of Black America��. 

Karen Taborn published Walking Harlem in May 2018. Her training as a musician and  ethnomusicologist informed her interpretation of her longtime neighborhood; she features lots of musically centered information on her tours. Harlem’s musical history is hard to rival as a quintessentially American story, and few things bring history alive more than a walking tour. Past, present, even glimmers of the future—It’s all there. With a trained eye, one learns to decode the everyday. Taborn’s clearly written and engaging guide includes maps of each tour and lots of anecdotes about the neighborhood and its culture-shaping personalities. The book is light enough to toss in a bag or pocket and easy to follow, belying the serious amount of information that it contains.

You've lived in Harlem for nearly forty years. What inspired you to write this book now?   My work on Harlem history took place within two timeframes. With a background as a jazz performer and an M.A. in jazz (NYU 1989), I was hired to provide historical research on Harlem in the early 1990s for a revitalization project initiated by the NYC Economic Development Corporation called The Striver's Center Project. Street architects, engineers, and the Harlem Chamber of Commerce were involved; together we revitalized West 135th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. and St. Nicholas Ave., where we installed a Harlem walk of fame. I did historical research on individuals honored in the sidewalk street plaques, several of which are still in place today. I completed a paper for this project called "What Made Harlem Famous" that I self-published in 1992.   After my work on the Striver's Center project, I taught a Harlem history class at the New School for a few years, then I moved on to other projects. In 2000, I went back to school and completed another M.A. in ethnomusicology at Hunter College in 2006. I always wanted to flesh out the paper I wrote for the Striver's Center project and I finally got back to my Harlem work in 2013. I wanted to write a full-length book with self-guided walking tours, archival and original photographs and I wanted to flesh out historical movements, developments and concepts that were part of African American Harlem cultural heritage. This eventually resulted in Walking Harlem.   What brought you to Harlem in 1980? Have you ever considered living elsewhere? Why or why not? How is it the same? How has it changed? Do you agree with the consensus among a growing number of people that NYC is becoming increasingly soulless? If not, how might you counter such an assertion? Could I possibly pack more questions into one question point?   I moved to New York City and Harlem in 1983 to pursue a career in jazz singing, which I actively did in the 1990s. The only other place I've thought I might want to live is New Orleans. At this point, I'm trying to visit the Big Easy once a year. Of course, Harlem and New York City have changed drastically since the 1980s. Some of the changes are good. Others not so good. When I moved there in the early 1980s, my West Harlem neighborhood was infested with drug gang warfare. The buildings on my street were covered with makeshift memorials spray-painted on the facades. I could hear automatic gunfire outside my window at night. Also, at night, I would come and go by taxis that dropped me off and picked me up on my front doorstep. This is no longer the case, and that is a welcome change. In fact, we have less congestion than Midtown or Downtown, and with our parks, Harlem--and West Harlem in particular--is a very livable.   But yes, gentrification is surely upon us. You now see European and white American tourists or residential members of our community. But certainly, Black and Brown folk are still here too, even if in somewhat diminished numbers from earlier days. I think it is imperative that those of us who know the rich history and know and understand the changes that Harlem has gone through, and continues to go through, today be active participants here in our community. There are several cultural institutions, old and new, that we should support, like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Riverside Church, in fact all of our great historical churches, and Al Sharpton's National Action Network. There are exciting new places to support, too, like the i, Too, Arts Collective and While We Are Still Here.  I am active and regularly attend or support all these institutions.   Also, we absolutely need to be involved and aware of our local politics here uptown. Whether it's our city council representative or our borough president, we need to be on their email lists and know what they are prioritizing and what their concerns are and we need to let them know what ours are. Of course, of crucial importance is that we advocate for affordable housing. The National Action Network is a good place to get involved in improving the quality of our community. But to get back to your question, "Is NYC becoming soulless? "The soul of our community to a large degree rests with what we do. We must be active in all these organizations and local government to ensure that the soul of our community is supported now and in the future.   Who is your intended audience for the book? Was it at all challenging to imagine that audience?    My intended audiences for my book are the longtime Harlem residents; new and incoming residents; tourists and visitors to Harlem; schools and university programs where Harlem history is taught. No, it wasn't too difficult to come to this conclusion.   You dedicate this book to your parents, Albert and Jeanette. How did they instill a love of your culture and history in you? How have you carried on that tradition?   I come from a family with a proud African American history. On both sides of my family, we share a tradition and a belief that a noble life lived is one in which you have given back and made the world a better place in some way. My father, Albert Taborn, was the most productive builder of black homes in 1950s Cleveland, Ohio. His company, Taborn Realty, built some 200 affordable homes for blacks during a two-year period. He was an active force combating redlining and blockbusting, and he ran his own company for the rest of his life. My mom was a passionate campaigner for racial justice. She was a member of the Baha'i Faith. She exemplified the truth that there is only one human race--the human race--throughout her life in all that she did. My mother's grandfather, Ralph Waldo Tyler, was a remarkable race man. He was a journalist in the black press and the first and only accredited black journalist to report from a foreign war: WWI. I wrote the Wikipedia article on him and I am now working on his full length biography. My mother, who passed away a couple years ago, was my biggest supporter during the first phase of my Harlem work in the early 1990s. With my writing, I hope and intend to continue in the spirit of my family tradition of educating, enlightening, and bettering my community and beyond.   What would you hope those who take your walking tours take with them during, and after, their walks?   I'd like those who take my tours to gain an appreciation of the spirit of the people of Harlem. One of the things that I learned was the incredible tenacity of black people in Harlem. Nothing was "given" to us! Everything was earned and/or fought for!  Whether it was the industrious measures to get the rent paid through speakeasies and rent parties or the artists who campaigned the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for self-representation in the 1930s or several congregations that tithed their funds to build their own churches, the people themselves were the force behind making Harlem was it became and what it became known for around the world.   What do people ask you most when you lead a tour in person?   People are often curious about the people who lived here. If I can convey the absolute joie de vivre of a Harlem stride piano player like Willie “The Lion” Smith or the passion of a civil rights fighter like Asa Philip Randolph, then I've accomplished my goal.   How have your tours evolved as time has passed?   I've recently enhanced the discussion of architecture, and I'm always reading more on certain figures: Thurgood Marshall, Madam C.J. Walker, etc. So, my tours are always evolving.   In your introduction, you write, "Harlem has been known as an infamous ghetto, and more recently, Harlem has been controversially known as Manhattan's current neighborhood for gentrification. Regardless of changing demographics, it is imperative to remember and celebrate Harlem's rich history." Why is this imperative?    From time to time, I need to remind people that Harlem is so much more than mere real estate for black people. Much of our cultural legacy took place in these buildings and on these streets! So, it is one of the spaces in the U.S. that holds sacred significance for black people.   As a landscape historian and tour guide, I'm of course biased--but there really is no better way to experience/teach history than to walk through it with others. What do you learn as you move through your neighborhood? Do any recent experiences come to mind?    Every time I am at the 135th Street/7th Avenue crosswalk I think of Zora Neale Hurston, who was assigned by her graduate studies advisor in anthropology, Franz Boas, to measure heads of those crossing by. It was the mid 1920s, and the pseudoscience of anthropometry (measuring different human body parts across "races" to classify and compare, and later, presumably, to establish racial difference among peoples) was in full force. Boas, a pioneer of cultural relativism, would have been thinking such research was shoddy and that his students' effort would disprove anthropometry's racist theories. And Zora, with her uncanny humor and comfort level among "her own people" was the only person who could likely pull it off without being shunned and ignored (at the least). I can only delight in the outrageous humor Zora must have made of this assignment.  

Source: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/walking-harlem-an-interview-with-karen-taborn

[razorsadness]

while going thru boxes after the basement flooded, i was hit by this thought: who will archive all of this when i’m dead? i’ve always assumed that one day, after i’m dead, my letters and journals and other unfinished/unpublished writings will be gathered together and published. or at least put in a collection at a museum or university, the kind of place where a scholar of my life who is preparing to write the definitive biography will have to get special permission to browse thru the Jessie Lynn papers. but in order for either of those things to happen, in order for my letters and diaries to be understandable to anyone but me (and hell, even i get confused sometimes), someone will first have to parse all the nicknames and pseudonyms i’ve given the people in the legend of my life. and they’ll have to figure out all my odd little magical realist quirks (“oh, what she wrote here about meeting that fiddle-playing vagabond girl under the bridge, it was really a metaphor for…”); and they’ll have to decipher all my cryptic notes. but there is so much to wade thru that who would even want that task, or be able to handle it all by themselves? i nearly had a panic attack thinking about all that. i started thinking that maybe i should make some sort of a key that explains everything, and arrange it all in vaguely chronological order, so that whoever has to sort thru it one day will have a leg up. i know, it’s egotistical to think anyone will even care enough to save it or sort thru it, but i can’t think of anything sadder than the thought that it may all just get thrown in the trash, may be written off as the ephemera and ramblings of a crazy old bat who suffered from hypergraphia, had a nostalgia problem, and romanticized everything. a couple other things hit me while going thru all those boxes and bins and trunks. one was: my god, i have always just needed to create. writing has always been my primary focus, but there are also loads of drawings and paintings and collages, audio and video cassettes, and photographs. songs and poems and stories, short films and experimental audio recordings and burlesque routines and plays, flash animations and photo essays and watercolors and charcoal drawings, i’ve tried them all. i would say art has been my coping mechanism, but it is more than that. it’s…everything. the other was: i don’t need to hold on to everything. i know, i was just saying that i want someone to take care of my archives when i’m gone, but that doesn’t mean i have to be a completist while i’m alive. fuck, some of those memories are poisonous. i was still holding on to zines written by my ex-best friend, and photographs of people who abused me. and even the sweet memories–do i really need to keep every single gift every ex ever gave me? every single photograph of every friend i no longer talk to? no, no, i don’t. it’s not like i’m going to forget any of those people or moments, anyway–it has been proven that i can’t forget anything, no matter how hard i try. and so what if i do forget some faces and places and times, or at least not remember them with the intensity i once did? that’s okay. it might even be a good thing! in the immortal words of the world/inferno friendship society: there’s much i don’t want to remember / there’s not a thing i wish would last forever. and from that same song: you’d do better living more, and commemorating less. (she says as she writes in her journal…) i’ve begun my at-home writer’s retreat. i still do all the daily work–take care of declan, do chores, run errands, meet deadlines, keep appointments. but i’m also taking time for myself, my writing, and things that inspire and enrich me. i’m giving myself permission to spend time doing those things as much as possible. so i write pages and pages every day, i read a lot, i eat my favorite foods, i do yoga and take walks, i visit libraries and cafes. it’s not that everything is suddenly perfect. i cried this morning, for no real reason other than a deep sadness that then left just as quickly as it came. and there has been an awful lot of drama and fighting between friends of mine, lately, and they’ve been trying to get me to take sides and it’s all such petty bullshit. or, if not petty, it’s stuff that started small but got blown way out of proportion. and i’m lonesome. i miss my friends. i rarely get to go out without the kidlet or hubby in tow, so i don’t get to do a lot of grown-up things or friend things. i know i should reach out to my mom friends and arrange play dates, or invite people over to my house. but i have a tendency to assume no one really wants to hang out with me anyway, so i isolate myself, and it becomes a double-edged sword. overall, though, things are good. as part of my writer’s retreat, i deleted facebook from my phone. i didn’t delete my account, but now if i want to use it i have to sit down at my computer, and lack of easy access means i’m on it a lot less. not only was facebook my biggest time-waster (like, i could be writing, but first let me scroll thru my feed for an hour…), but it is also the place where all the friend-drama is playing out, and it’s usually pretty bad for my mental health in general. i feel so free without the constant alerts and group messages. *** last night, i smelled the summer dusk coming thru the screen door. it smelled of wet and moss from the woods beyond our fence, greenbean cut grass from neighboring yards. it smelled of sun-warmed soil from my tomato plants, with a metallic tinge from the rusted screen. it was the color of a firefly’s abdomen, all blinking intermittent yellow-green. it sounded like a mother calling her children in for bed, like children shrieking and pretending to hide. it felt like the moment just after a rainstorm that went on for days, so still and dew-licked and exquisite. and now, as i write this, i am sitting in my room, writing by candlelight and fairylight. i am sitting in front of the window, and the warm breeze is tickling the nape of my neck. karen dalton is singing from my stereo and everything is lovely for this moment. life is seldom ever perfect, but it can be very, very sweet. *** as a postscript: the journaling app i use to keep my journal entries at least somewhat organized reminded me i had written four journal entries on july 26th. every single one was in-depth and descriptive, so i decided to keep up the tradition and write a long form, poetic entry on this july 26th.