text: Teegee: Essays: 2016
  Deplorable Atrocity
  I like to listen to interviews on C-Span's Book TV, but sometimes I wonder whether the interviewer was aware of what he or she said and, even more, whether author, whose new book was in his hand, had had the services of a competent editor; it seems very often that he hadn't. In any case he was unconscious of the effect of his (or her) speech on the meaning of what he meant to say. For example, one author habitually ended most sentences with "etc.", over and over, as if periods or any other meaningful punctuation were unavailable. And he gesticulated a lot with his hands, though without any apparent special emphasis. If he writes as he speaks, reading his book will be a dreary, irritating experience.
  I started fussing this way after Hillary Clinton was made to regret saying "deplorable". I understood her meaning that the positions held by her opponents made her unhappy. But commentators of both parties seemed unanimous in accusing her of calling him deplorable. First, her syntax made clear that she meant that the state of discussion in the campaigns had become deplorable, and, second, that it is conditions, opinions, and the like, that are fit to make one weep.
  Of course, even half a century ago (even, in fact, a whole century ago), it was emphasized that languages change, so that a Latin original might have changed its meaning. Certainly! Just as our remote ancestors who walked out of Africa had skeletons fascinatingly different from ours, both from regular evolution and in response to different environments (and Dobzhansky was certainly right to go to the trouble of proving that we continue to evolve—it was less universally realized half a century ago than it is today), so, too, our speech. If not, all the ancestors of modern speakers of Romance languages would have transmitted their Latin to them unaltered. Indeed, philologists of the Enlightenment had already sorted out the descent of Indo-European tongues pretty well.
  Thus, "deplorable", it seems, first came to us in its French form (though we have to rely on texts as evidence), but no matter: deplorare already meant in Latin "to weep bitterly", and Roget gives us many alternatives for use as context and style may demand, of which "lament", "bemoan", and "bewail" are only three. Now, don't let me get started on the misuse of Roget as a source of 'synonyms' to stuff into bad sentences as ornaments. It's too late now, and hardly anyone would care, but Hillary was exactly right that the level of the political exchanges last week was 'fit to make one weep'.
  Atrocity is much harsher. On the News someone was trying to explain how, legally, ever since Nuremburg, acts of war, atrocities, terrorism, ... I forget the fourth one, ought not to be used interchangeably, just for emphasis. I do agree that they ought to be used thoughtfully, but he did not succeed in enlightening me.
  Anyway, atrox is a more specialized and interesting word, even having a possible Greek cognate, and having the same stem as the ater of atrium, originally the sooty, ashy, fire pit in the center of the primitive round hut. Anyhow, in classical Latin atrox, atrocis (3rd decl. adj.) means 'cruel', 'fierce', and also 'savage' and 'brutal'. That last may suggest the bridge to the primitive fire pit? It is not so commonplace a word as deplorare.
  For that reason, 'atrocious' seems to have entered modern English, like most of the 'worsened words' (those that have been demoted to cheap overstatement) to mean, colloquially, 'very bad', 'abominable', as it appears in the margin of a student paper or in an impatient book review of a lousy novel. You can look up 'abominable' for yourselves.
  Posted by slokind at 3:18 AM
  One of the occasional gifts of wind and/or rain
  What I cannot claim to have planted, neither can I identify
  In the course of thirty years, this almost spectacular lily (?) flower has come up overnight, bloomed (lasting several days), and disappeared . Once a friend identified it until (unless) it came again late in summer. But after my Picasa files lost their classification, of my own devising, among so many thousand images I cannot find the earlier one, in whose caption ("title") or File Info (not come over from Photoshop!) the data for this plant is lurking. What is worse, I cannot find it in Wikipedia.
  Yet these are seen all over town in Baton Rouge, LA.
  The current snapshots were taken on the last day of August. I opened the back door to feed the cat, and, like red lamps that had shot up overnight, there they were, and I hastened to document them and, this time, post them in the blog, rather than just asking all my friends what they are.
  I am, as you must realize, no gardener, but I am grateful for whatever I get.
  And I thank anyone who can identify this (otherwise than as "firecracer") for me.
  STEEL: Pittsburgh and Bethlehem in Literature
  Walker Evans, 1935, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from hill, across cemetery, to steel mills and furnace chimneys. Large negative.
  Retired persons, especially if they are not just tempted but compelled to use eBooks for their zoomable fonts, have the time and open schedules to follow ideas and motifs and recall novels and pictures that made an impression fifty and sixty years ago. Sometimes it seems that motifs recur significantly. For example, the adolescent girl, bound to become a protagonist, goes into service or takes a wearisome job, at only fourteen or so. Even Isabel Allende uses this Type and I noticed it emphasized in the campaign film as the key idea in the youth of Hillary Clinton's mother. Surely, in real life, it was not always the most important fact in a whole adolescence. To me, as I'm sure to many others, the necessity to do whatever one could find at that age was commonplace and belonged to melodrama, as in the plays produced by David Belasco. A real Girl of the Golden West, however, had plenty of self respect. Early in this blog I wrote about San Pablo Poultry Company; I rather gloried in it.
  Immediately I remembered Mary in Marcia Davenport's The Valley of Decision. This novel made a great impression on me, though I never saw the movie. I remembered the steel mill at night (though the photo that I chose, and it's only a little less than a decade earlier than the novel, and is of Bethlehem rather than Pittsburg), which is wonderfully described. Ever since wherever I was traveling in the vicinity of steel-working I thought of Davenport's verbal picture. I know that she did live in Pittsburg before writing about it. She may not have been our greatest novelist, but her firsthand knowledge and sound research are pervasive in this book as in her first success, Mozart, and in her operatic novel, Of Lena Geyer (her mother being the soprano Alma Gluck).
  But I need the electronic edition to re-read so long a novel, and having read The Valley of Decision while myself a teenager, and before I even was self-supporting, apart from the steel industry, the parts that remain vivid are the love interest! I am certain that Davenport did all her homework, but the Kindle, for the first time, cannot help me. I don't know why it is available only in hard copy, since it is, at least, as good as Gone With the Wind, and far more valuable for all its background. I'm sure it's worth reading, though I've moved on to George F. Kennan and Julian Barnes, which are really more rewarding!
  But have you noticed, e.g. in the 1930s, that there seem to be 'meaningful' recordings, usually Gramophone Society, and usually of Bach?
  And I do think that the Poor Little Match Girl stereotype in political footage has been overdone (not that I hold it against the candidates themselves).
  Posted by slokind at 12:02 PM
  Again, fixation on Light as the Photographic Medium
  Three of a handful taken the morning of August 23, 2016
  These are not pictures, such as would illustrate a catalogue, of cheap porch chairs, but of the light that the late morning sunlight happened to create, so that I can only apologize for the burnout at lower left of the second one. Photography has been for me, from my first permission to work, under the red safelight, over the development trays in my father's darkroom, the art whose medium is light itself, just as its early practitioners realized in calling it Photography. The objects themselves are not its interest, just as line drawings in an early mail-order catalogue are not at all the same thing as drawings and prints made in their own right are not the same thing.
  If I were a better photographer, let alone a great one, the images would be more interesting—but I continue to take them anyway, the reason for continuing to own cameras.
  The light was especially welcome, though, after a solid week of rain and the dreadful flooding (but not where I live: I had done my homework before buying a house; no house in Louisiana "lives on a hill" but, as everywhere, it is wise to live in the oldest neighborhoods).
  Posted by slokind at 5:27 AM
  Supposed Romans à Clef
  A strained association, but Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon occurred to me
  Shop window in Alexandria, VA, AD 2006
  Visiting a friend who had been my roommate in college and then a friend, though usually by mail, ever since, I took the occasion to look over this justly famous old city, Alexandria, where she had settled. This true bow window is evidently the ornament of a dress shop (which was closed at the time I passed it). Well, we have nothing in Baton Rouge (or for that matter in Berkeley) to match the main street of Alexandria, so even in a light rain I was delighted to explore it. Still using a camera that took small-capacity cards, I did not take enough pictures to write a blog post on it, and you can go to Wikipedia now, anyway. It did amuse me to let the window display recall Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, a century earlier, and for a decade now I have wanted to use this favorite photo in this blog (so please indulge me, since I had wracked my brain for something, of my own, not copyright, to head this post).
  If someone could not help experiencing everything in old Alexandria turned into famous modern paintings and probably scarier things, too, along with uncontrollable streams of meanings alien to them, that would be manic paranoia. On the other hand, this is a composition with scantily clad plaster models, coping with a window difficult to use for a display to the street, that does vaguely recall the Demoiselles. That resemblance would not excuse supposing that the shop's owner had deliberately borrowed their narrow pyramidal arrangement from Picasso's painting, as if, perhaps, he or she acknowledged that the bare shoulders were suggestive here in a window looking onto the street (as Picasso ironically intended by the "demoiselles" of the painting's title). Such a supposition is what I'm complaining of.
  Let me first beg your pardon for letting two days intervene before completing this post.
  Most literary authors draw on their own inner lives and also on their own friends and families. Some, preeminently Virginia Woolf, have left us diaries that discuss their own works as they were published, as if, one might think, having begun as a literary reviewer, the habit of reviewing her own work was preordained (though, of course, there's more to it than that). Besides, eventually she wrote memoir-essays and volumes of letters. I have always found them integral to her oeuvre. On the other hand, except for Quentin Bell's, I have put less stock in the biographies. I have come to regard, as many others do, Mrs. Dalloway as her greatest novel, but I took this occasion to re-read Jacob's Room and Between the Acts, too; the latter being perhaps my favorite, no matter how I judge it (why judge it, in fact?).
  The point is that the stream of consciousness of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway can only be drawn on her own experience. It is unlike any other such account. For, though today we have many studies and memories of bi-polar experience, their authors are either less gifted or more reticent or consciously scientific. When I was young and first read my way through Virginia Woolf, I could hardly bear to re-read Mrs. Dalloway. All the characters in that novel are memorable, but all the rest of them were copable for a young Berkeleyan in the arts. Thus, it is fair to say, I have come to Septimus from a literary point of view for the first time: what Woolf did was to give its own voice to a unique person's manic experience. It is impossible for me to imagine what it must have cost her, not least in exhaustive revision of the text. But this is not the place for a non-specialist venture. The point is that Virginia Woolf did draw endlessly on her own life in creating the lives in her fiction, and not only in the high play of Orlando. It is agreed, for example, that Jacob's Room remembers her brother Thoby.
  But (and this is the point of confusion), Ethel Smyth, the composer, was the longterm friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf as well as of E. F. Benson, where in the whole Dodo trilogy she plays an important rôle as Dodo's friend, Edith. And Benson, much as I adore his writing, was happy to incorporate Ethel, whole hog, in the Dodo trilogy. Of course there are exaggerations, just as there would be in the Mapp and Lucia books, but anyone at the time would, and did, recognize Ethel Smyth in Dodo's friend. So did she, and she is recorded as richly enjoying it. But Virginia Woolf did not incorporate real persons in her novels in that way. Clarissa's being in love with Sally Seton is not comparable, though it is an important motif.
  In any case, Margot Asquith did NOT accept identity with Benson's Dodo. Yes, Benson knew everybody, the Asquiths included, and yes, he did range through his whole acquaintanceship throughout his career. But he knew, as I said, "everyone", and nothing is to be gained for the reader by worrying over who Dodo "really" was. As a reader, I rather resent being asked to keep considering Margot Asquith. I admit, I have not read her biography, but the biographies of persons in society, not to mention those close to the royal family, do not impress me as being either deep or subtle, and only if the biographies of persons in society were esteemed as literature would I want to read them. If they sat for Cecil Beaton, and were the subjects of his best photographs, I'd be interested in how he photographed them. I don't especially relish bell peppers, but I love Edward Weston's photographic studies of them. What makes so much of E. F. Benson great reading is that (unlike Mr. Fellowes) he is writing of his own experience at the time: his account of the Armistice in London is given to Dodo, but it is his own, and I can't remember reading another as good. On the other hand, he has made a unique woman, Dodo, in novels ranging from her youth in the 1890s to the end of World War I, doubtless from his acquaintance with real women (yes, of the same social class as Margot Asquith), just as Rye gave him the material for Mapp and Lucia, just as his David Blaize novels are drawn from school memories (and, yes, in part of his own, not least the daydream and dream memories of the pre-school child in David Blaize and the Blue Door which are far too specific and exact to be anything but his own).
  So here I am again urging the pleasure of reading E. F. Benson on everyone. Of course, not only is he a full generation older than Virginia Woolf, and he is easy reading of the highest kind if ever there was any, but the case of Ethel Smyth, whom the Woolfs wrote about privately and discreetly (though quite frankly, not regarding her as a great composer) perfectly exemplifies the sheer stupidity of spilling ink to prove that a work of fiction is a roman à clef.
  Speaking of stupidity, was it really necessary for me to write a post about this? Only, why do the persons who write for Wikipedia bother with such stuff?