a journey through cloudland*

Note: Even more to bring to this encore post; a friend alerted me to Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov who is following in Wilson Bentley's path— fashioning a DIY attachment to his camera and capturing stunning images of snowflakes. See images at bottom. Yet another Russian, Andrew Osokin, has done the same just with a macro lens, documenting snowflakes as they touch the ground, moments before they disappear.

Kljatov is most in the spirit of Bentley with his personal intensity for the project and home made mechanical ingenuity. He also, like Bentley, photographs the snowflakes against a homemade black backdrop. Kljatov's specimens have a crystalline sharpness. Otherworldy, they look alien and almost unsettling. They are, for me, too clinical to have the same resonance as Bentley's soft, idiosyncratic and sometimes humorous work.
Also of note: A couple years ago this Talk of the Town (All Alike by Adam Gopnik) mentioning "Snowflake" Bentley was a beautiful adjunct to this post.

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (February 9, 1865 - December 23, 1931) was born in Jericho, Vermont, in a farmhouse that remained his lifelong home. He was home-schooled and never ventured far from Jericho. At 19, after he combined two treasured presents– a microscope and a bellows camera–Bentley succeeded in capturing the world's first photomicrograph of a snow crystal or snowflake. Working outside, of course, he caught each crystal on a black board and transferred it rapidly to a microscope slide. Doing this he was able to create about 5000 images over the course of his life.

In town, Bentley was considered odd and was known to many neighbors as the "Snowflake Man" because of his quiet demeanor and unusual preoccupation. Although he was a gifted musician– he played piano, organ, clarinet, coronet, and violin, as well as composed music –he devoted himself to his photography and study of snow.

In 1931 Bentley worked with William J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau to publish Snow Crystals, a monograph illustrated with 2,500 photographs. After picking up his copies of the newly published book he walked home in a snowstorm. He died of pneumonia at his farm on December 23.

. . . . .
"The rare delight of seeing for the first time this exquisite lineaments under a microscope, the practical certainty that never again will one be found just like this one... To perpetuate each masterpiece the image of each of each rare gem in the photograph, before its matchless beauty is forever lost (to us) is an experience is so rare so truly delightful that once undergone is never forgotten...Was ever life history written in more dainty hieroglyphics!"– Wilson Alwyn Bentley

. . . . .
Bentley donated his collection of original glass-plate photomicrographs of snow crystals to the Buffalo Museum of Science
*Bentley's description of a snow crystal's trajectory

Thanks to Herbert Pfostl/Blindpony for alerting me to Bentley.

Snowflakes by Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov. Read more about his technique on his blog

 

the pathos of a library card

An encore post, with updates:
I have a small unintentional collection of library cards.
Each card, long after its obsolescence, remained tucked like a little secret note in a book I borrowed or bought. But they're far from billets doux— rather they give off a blustery officiousness with their "do not remove"-s and their all-caps penalties.
 
They document a nice range of data-recording technology--from hand-written to type-written, rubber stamp to various arcane punch card configurations. That seems kind of interesting as a tiny piece of Historical Record. But mostly I just like them formally, graphically. The red-edged card at top right is positively bristling with overly involved methodology and procedure. The "Alluring Problem" with its red accent and bold star has an obvious beauty but I think my favorite is the small printed and punched ticket at lower left. The holes give a delicate visual syncopation to the printed statements which, although they are emphatically not, remind me of a haiku.

Library cards are extremely mundane but have a subtle intricacy that's poignant. There's something quietly affecting about the card on the bottom, right. Each month and year stamped and noted, each entry a remnant of a long-ago reader whose path crossed at that exact point with that very book. Had that card lain dormant in the back of Fashions in American Typography, in the basement of the Brooklyn Library, since June 29 or so, 1950—the last date recorded? Had it not seen the light of day until I requested it be retrieved after 60 years?

Am I waxing too precious to think of each of these little pieces of paper as superannuated governesses, each as an attempt to safeguard their charge when released out in the world?

The Anatomy of Swearing

"The fact is swearing is an instrument, which like any other can only be effectively played
when it is sustained by a sufficient amount of feeling."

It sounded good. I found The Anatomy of Swearing by Ashley Montagu randomly at the Library hoping it might bear resemblance to one of my favorite books of recent times, The Anatomy of Disgust. (Also, I was amused at the idea of swearing being parsed by someone who may as well have called himself Percy, Lord Foppington)

Swearing is fundamental to human behavior, providing a psychological as well as physiological release. Montagu asserts that it is "a means of expressing anger and potentially noxious energy is converted to a form that renders it comparatively innocuous." He explains distinctions between swearing that draws strength from invoking sources of religious power and the sacred, and swearing that calls upon the secular, the "prohibited" and the prurient. Also, that swearing owes much to the form of the judicial oath, (May I be gutted like an oyster if its not true) whereas cursing invokes some evil to be cast upon the subject (A pox to thy bones). Obvious perhaps, but interesting enough, none-the-less, to someone who never thought about it before. He sets out to cover swearing from antiquity (did you know swearing was sex-determinant in Greece and Rome? Ostensibly women swore by female deities, men, male gods) onwards up through an unintentionally humorous analysis of motherfucker (“It may be used as a pejorative or as an honorific”).

Yes! the book is a bit high-flown, could you tell? Montagu revels in the British love of wit and wordplay (he touches admiringly upon invective and sportive swearing, essentially skillful put-downs as performance art). Here's a magnificently dashed off explanation which I loved:

Damn remains the great English shibboleth, the most widely used of intensives, and the one most likely to steer the swearer clear of the Scylla of profanity and the Charybdis of vulgarity.

Getting beyond the basic groundwork, though, I often found the book difficult to follow... The distinctions between swearing, oaths and cursing start muddying since definitions or partial definitions are given numerous times in differing ways. Mostly, I think, I got lost amidst the liberal excerpts from Shakespeare, Rabelais, Sterne, Smollett, Byron and on and on... Far, far too many long and digressive quotes, pages really, reproduced verbatim which was just a tad too much for this attention-challenged reader to handle.

I was hoping to get profanity, blasphemy, vulgarity and obscenity laid forth in a buffet of verbal amuse-bouche, but I got a fucking five- course sit-down dinner instead.

Songs of Himself: Levi's and Whitman, Sampled

Whitman was very conscious of his image-- literally and figuratively. He was among the most photographed men
of the 19th century with something like 125 known extant images. Here he is as audacious "loafer", 1855, on the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass— Even his portrait was an affront

Levi's "Go Forth" ad campaign of a few years ago. This spot features an actual recording of Whitman reading.
A mind-blowing conflation of American transcendent idealism and cynical commercialism.
I'm very gratified to have introduced Professor Alan Trachtenberg (see below) to these on Youtube!

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,
the scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer...
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it.
— “Song of Myself” 1855

"No one in this age of [expensive] flour and high rents can afford to be a nobody. Be somebody— biographically, poetically, or historically."– satirical editorial in The Brooklyn Eagle, October 11, 1855
Revisiting an old post, with updates and edits:
As I noted a few years ago, I'm disturbed when I come across glaring gaps in my education—something that stops me short as I think, Wait, how do I not know this? Whitman: Titan of American literature, Leaves of Grass, "body electric," repressed homosexuality, beard—that was nearly the sum of what I knew. At that time, I got the Penguin Classics Collected Whitman and started on a mini research mission. In this current Whitman endeavor I've signed myself up for a course taught by the venerable Alan Trachtenberg, essayist and Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale. I now know I'm far more interested in Whitman as cultural-social catalyst and influence than I am in his works per se.

I do not like reading Whitman's poetry (prose, like Specimen Days, is more agreeable). Considering the sweeping vistas and universalism he invokes I find the reading experience leaves me clammy and oddly claustrophobic. (I'm guessing that Whitman was a close talker....) He does however, conjure a mystical rawness, an uninhibited immediacy, blatancy even, that is astounding. Especially when one thinks of his being published at a time when "Victorian" morality was in ascendance. (Emily Dickinson evidently wrote in a letter, "I have never read his book– but was told that he was disgraceful," which I find enormously funny.) Despite not actually enjoying his work, I'm finding the idea and persona of Whitman pretty compelling.

In Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, David Haven Blake places the self-styled "good grey poet" against the backdrop of America's developing intellectual identity and popular culture. A very good read. The 1850s was a time of an expanding awareness of a specifically American intellectual identity. The search for a "native American" literary style, independent of European models, was a cultural imperative. Whitman felt he was the answer to that call. It was also the time of Barnum and the rise of consumer culture. Whitman offered himself, seemingly, as an entity (or commodity) that could effect happiness and harmony with the world.

Whitman's sheer audacity is amazing; he craved attention. He self-published Leaves of Grass then published reviews of his own work anonymously ("An American bard at last!"). Later he compiled various laudatory comments and reviews as well as pans and included these as an addendum to later editions of the book. Throughout his life, it seems, Whitman was compelled to ceaselessly promote himself. "The public is a thick skinned beast," he confided to a friend,"and you have to keep whacking away it its hide to let it know you're there."

David Haven Blake's point, which was a new angle to me at least, was that celebrity in the mid-19th century could be seen as a true democratic phenomenon. Fame (and possible subsequent wealth) created and bestowed by the people– rather than by birth, class or inheritance–was, in a sense, sanctioned by popular vote. The celebrity was the embodiment of a culture sanctioned by the people, and an affirmation of the great American experiment.

In my current readings, Trachtenberg in “Walt Whitman Precipitant of the Modern” makes what I believe is the key to my interest in Whitman: the case of the poet's influence on the American avant garde-- ie the rise of Modernism in art and literature. Ezra Pound said of Whitman: “He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America.” I paraphrase Trachtenberg: Whitman breaks through constraint to say exactly what's on his mind, he sanctions desire, rebellion, individualism with an unprecedented openness of form and emotion.
IMAGES: the infamous frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, 1855. Virtually all reviews at the time commented on the "defiant", vulgar quality of the portrait. Whitman knew exactly what he was doing; Levi's Jeans "Go Forth" tv ad campaign by Weidan + Kennedy featuring Whitman's poems. Some of the comments on the Youtube page are interesting: “Is this some genius speaking through satire or has consumerism become this crass? The American dream of independence and self-actualization has become a pair of over-priced jeans....”; “2/3 length with hat outdoor rustic”--This 1877 photograph was Whitman's favorite and caused much to-do with acolytes and early scholars who argued about this butterfly. Whitman tried to foster the idea that the creature was real and had somehow alighted upon his finger... in the midst of a photo studio. In 1995, someone found the butterfly in a cache of Whitmaniana that had gone missing from the Library of Congress in 1942.

Great Moments in Art*

Onesipe Aguado, Woman Seen from the Back, 1862; Winkle

 Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930; Winkle

Francis Bacon, Three Studies, 1967; Winkle

Alexandre Cabanel, Samson and Delilah, 1878; Winkle

Weegee, Body of Dominick Didato, Elizabeth Street, NYC, August 7, 1936; Winkle

Pierre Bonnard, Siesta, 1899-1900; Winkle

Alexandre Cabanel, Albayde (detail), 1848; Winkle

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793; Winkle

Lucian Freud, Naked Portrait With Reflection, 1980; Winkle

Walter Sickert, The Iron Bedstead, 1908; Winkle

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Tepidarium, 1881; Winkle

Parmigianino, Madonna of the Long Neck, 1530; Winkle

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le Grande Odalisque, 1814; Winkle

* As interpreted by my cat. // The cat photos are random, taken over the course of several years, and are virtually unretouched except for some lighting. The art matches came about this past weekend, part obsessive inspiration, part avoidance mechanism.

Hands off my Red Royal Limbertwig

Pomona Britannica ; or, A collection of the most esteemed fruits...with the blossoms and leaves... (1812)

A repost with updates
A highly subjective sampling of some of the more intriguing names
bestowed on the apple:

Red Astrachan, Beautiful Arcade, Bigg's Nonsuch, Bismark, Bottle Green, Bramley's Seedling,
Bulmer's Norman, Calville Rouge d'Automne, Chisel Jersey, Cockagee, Coe's Golden Drop,
Cole's Quince, Cox's Orange Pippin,
Devonshire Quarrenden, Doctor Matthews, Dolgo Crab, Double Red Jonathan,
Edith Smith, Egremont Russet, Ellison's Orange, Esopus Spitzenburg, Etter's Gold,
Five Crown Pippin, Fortune, Foxwhelp, Frauen Rotacher,
Geeveston Fanny, Gravenstein, Gray Stark, Green Sweet,
Horneburger Pancake, Horse, Hubbardston Nonesuch,
Idaho Spur, July Red,
Keswick Codlin, Kidd's Orange Red, Kirk's Scarlet Admirable, Knobbed Russet,
Lamb Abbey Pearmain, Lehigh Greening, Lombart's Calville, Lydia's Red Gala,
Mincham's crab,
Newell's Late Orange, Newton's Wonder, Old Nonpareil, Perrine Transparent, Plum Crabbie,
Queen Cox,
Red Royal Limbertwig, Rubinola, Runkel,Saint Germain, Striped Beefing, Sullenworth Rennet,
Tompkin's King, Tydeman's Late Orange,
Virginia Greening,
Walter Pease, Watkin's Large Dumpling, Wealthy, Winterstein, Yellow Tremlett’s, York Imperial,
Zabergau Reinette

Codling An immature or green apple. Pippin A seedling apple. From the old French 'pepin' meaning seed. Russet The word means red, but the term here refers to the texture of the apple skins–from 'russet coat' the dull red/brown wool coats of peasants.

costermonger– In Britain, a street seller of fruit and vegetables, originally from "costard seller." Costard, which was a family of large British cooking apples popular as far back as the 13th century, became a slang term for 'head' by Shakespeare's time.

Apples of Sodom was a term I'd never heard before. The fruit of trees reputed to grow on the shores of the Dead Sea which, while lovely on the outside, are full of ashes within. Josephus, Strabo, and Tacitus evidently refer to them. Like an apple of Sodom signifies disappointment and disillusion.

Images from NYPL Digital Gallery and Mary Evans Picture Library

aesthetic consumerism notes: an update

The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

The Museum is an imaginarium of immigrant struggle. Its cleaned-up, prettified tableaux are irritatingly appealing to me. "People suffered in these stifling hell holes," I have to remind myself... and yet...that linoleum is... really cute. Somehow the privations of the past become... aspirational./
The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.//

update: I posted the surreal juxtaposition of Martha Stewart Living and a kitchen in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum at top 5-1/2 years ago. If the Tenement Museum represents the masses of yesteryear cozied up for an afternoon's tour, and Martha Stewart created an aspirational, nostalgic version of that long-ago for today's upscale consumer cognoscenti, what does the Pottery Barn catalog I got recently (above) represent? Dumbing down the rarefied nostalgia of yesteryear's masses for today's masses? Pottery Barn's ticking stripe ironing board covers and French wire hampers share space with prop rotary fans, faux washboard "art" and actual cast-iron hand irons. Seriously, PB is selling old coal-heated hand irons (scavanged from India) and fake washboards to hang in your laundry room. There's something odd going on in the aesthetic zeitgeist when a museum and a mass market catalog look alike. Where is Susan Sontag when you need her?

In related news, I have irrefutable evidence from that same catalog that my own home decorating style has jumped the shark. Scattered old wooden and metal letters? check. framed flea market-sourced antique buttons? check. Animal horns? I'm afraid so. Rusted metal industrial detritus? Color-grouped depression-era pottery? Done and done. Regardless of whether it's time for a change anyway, what does one do when one's formerly "personal" style, accrued over the years from here and there, is on wholesale offer at Pottery Barn? When anyone can buy all their 'vintage-inspired' needs at one fell swoop, what happens to the genuine collection? This nothing new — I'm sure all the peerage of Britain cough into their handkerchiefs at the sight of Ralph Lauren Home—it's just happened so rapidly and completely. And I happened to feel it personally.

I'm not saying I originated a style, I simply gravitated to the objects I was drawn to and my sensibility grew up around that. A sensibility already familiar to some, yes; there was John Derian or Anthropologie or ABC carpet along the way, for reference/inspiration/validation. Now my apartment could be any Brooklyn boutique— or Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn outlet. It feels phony. Yet I still like the horns and the 19th century type specimens and the twee rusted objets. The cognitive dissonance is killing me.

[several comments here are from the original post]

 

I'd just gotten this linen grain sack (!) up in Hudson, NY when I got the PB catalog.
Their vintage-inspired linen pillow cover, bottom.

five images above, my apartment

Pottery Barn

color me impressed

This morning I woke up repeating "Stygian Black".
Stygian is the adjectival form for the mythological River Styx... as in the boundary of the Underworld. Scary sounding dream, right? EXCEPT in the dream I was saying it in the context of some fashion, color-naming brainstorming session. Thus, it was actually some sort of wish fulfillment... because I've always wanted to get paid to be a color namer for paint. Here, a good color (re)post from the archives:

I just read a book I'd gotten months ago and promptly forgot about, "Color: a natural history of the palette" by Victoria Finlay. The author, a British journalist living in Hong Kong, sets out to explore the origins--historical, cultural, physical-- of pigments and dyes. The book, organized loosely by color swatch, is sometimes weighted down with her travelogues of traipsing off to China for fabled greens or meandering through Afghanistan in search of ultramarine mines. But what, early on, had annoyed me to the point of putting the book on the shelf: the chatty, lady's magazine lightness proved to be less of an obstacle as the book wore on. I tend to like bits and pieces, historical oddities and unraveled edges and it certainly provides just that.

In the book, color, something we think of in benign almost frivolous terms (pink or blue case for your cellphone), takes on gritty physicality, volatility, even toxicity. Metals, stones, berries, bark, insects, shells are ground, smoked, burnt and acidified. Through distilling and decanting, arcane alchemical processes produce miraculous results.

The often harsh paradoxes of the material form of color are amazing. Velvety rich blacks rendered from oak gall, soot, and charred bone, brilliant reds from beetles, pristine white from a red dust. Fugitive and unstable, there's an almost spiteful nature to unfixed color-- saintly whites turn black, brilliant reds fade to sickly pink, and puritan blacks that turn a disturbing orange. The almost allegorical danger inherent in many of these colors is fascinating as well: lead white, used extensively in cosmetics and paint and prized for its transcendent luminosity, caused "plumbism" and slowly destroyed one's liver, kidneys and mind. Arsenic used to fashion Scheele's Green, which accented Napoleon's wallpaper on St. Helena, may have contributed to his death.

---
Here's where one can learn a bit about wonderful things like Gamboge, Mummy and Orpiment:
• Museum of Fine Art Boston: conservation and art materials encyclopedia
• Also, a paint-making site.---

images: I'm obsessed with paint color chips-- the typology aspects, the naming, the...prettiness. At top are some Benjamin Moores, below Farrow & Ball (a company I've written about before, in one of my favorite posts from a simpler time); a weaving color/pattern sample book made in 1763 by John Kelly of Norwich, England, from the Victoria & Albert Museum; powdered colors for painting on velvet, 1814, also from the V&A. The three bottles are labelled 'Ackermann's brilliant carmine', 'W H Edwards's lilac purple', and 'W H Edwards's sunflower yellow'.; three of five bottles of dye powder I found when a dye works was being dismantled on Spring and Thompson Streets around 1998, if you can believe. They are from 1951-54 and are labelled things like "Benzo Fast Yellow" from appealing, monolithically-named companies like General Dyestuff Corporation and National Aniline Division of the Allied Chemical and Dye Company.