Ubi sunt and the snows of yesteryear

from the vanitas series (2007) by Guido Mocafico (b. 1962),
an Italian-Swiss photographer living in France.

Song of Love, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914

Pennsylvania Station

Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818 

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” is a line taken from the Ballade des dames du temps jadis ("Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past") by the medieval French poet François Villon. It expresses the sentiment of ubi sunt, a term I came across the other day and was surprised that I hadnt learned years ago. Latin, meaning “Where are....[they]?", it comes from a longer phrase, "Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?" [Where are those who went before us?]*.

The phrase is used as a literary term: a meditation on the transience of life, youth, beauty, and human achievement. A common motif throughout literature and song**, Hamlet's soliloquy in the graveyard is an example:

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?..."

Shelley's Ozymandias is, I think, an ubi sunt once removed.

In its emphasis on the brevity and ephemeral quality of existence, ubi sunt is on a spectrum between carpe diem's almost jocular parry against the implied futility of existence and memento mori's blatant corpse waving. Unlike carpe diem, there is no exhortation to embrace the now. Yet ubi sunt, I believe, stops short of the grim rumination and extravagant, hand-wringing denial of life of memento mori. It is a softer rueful awareness.

In this way it is like mono no aware, a Japanese term for the mindfulness of the transience of things. Mono no aware incorporates both an immediate wistfulness at their passing as well as a more prolonged and resonant sadness about the reality of life. Significantly, in mono no aware, as wikipedia notes, “awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty.” I think this engagement with and affirmation of the world as it is is also true with ubi sunt and further distances it from memento mori.

I find myself falling into an ubi sunt frame of mind all too often, which then leads to a bad case of sehnsucht, but that is for another post...

* I cannot track its source, if anyone out there knows.
** Wikipedia gives two interesting examples of 20th century popular music which incorporate the ubi sunt motif: the 1960s folk song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson and the final verse of the Simon and Garfunkle song "Mrs. Robinson" which asks, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" 

Charles Burchfield and Bruno Schulz

“Came the yellow days of winter, filled with boredom. The rust-colored earth was covered with a threadbare, meager tablecloth of snow full of holes There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, black and brown, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics—coal black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, beams, and spars—the dark lungs of winter winds. Each dawn revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots which had emerged during the hours of darkness, blown up by the night winds: the black pipes of a devil’s organ. The chimney sweeps could not get rid of the crows which in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch only to fly away at dawn in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent cawing the musty yellow streaks of light. The days hardened with cold and boredom like last years loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with lazy indifference.”

—Bruno Schulz, Street of Crocodiles

Some aspects of Burchfield's work remind me of outsider art, some remind me of visual aberrations, specifically, scintillating scotoma, which I've experienced. This is a "visual migraine" in which a vibrating zig-zagged circle of light superimposes the field of vision for a few minutes.

“Afterward the gardens filled the air with enormous sighs and grew their leaves hastily, doing overtime by day and by night. All flags hung down heavy and darkened, helplessly pouring out the last streaks of color into the dense aura. Sometimes at the opening of a street someone turned to the sky half a face, like a dark cutout with one frightened and shining eye, and listened to the rumble of space, to the electric silence of the passing clouds while the air was cut by the flight of trembling, pointed, arrow-sharp black-and-white swallows.” —Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“Paint the feeling, regardless of drawing. At dusk there is an ominous feeling of something huge and black about to descend upon the earth; this should be painted, not sky or clouds.”
—Charles Burchfield

I recently discovered the painter Charles Burchfield (April 9, 1893 - January 10, 1967). His work is singular though it evinces references to many — Van Gogh, the Fauves, Eric Ravilious, Thomas Hart Benton, Caspar David Friedrich. In his anomalous American Regionalist middle period in the 1920s and 30s, he was even like an Edward Hopper with more rain. But mostly Burchfield immersed himself in landscapes— and painted hundreds of them in watercolor sometimes so saturated it resembles oil.

Burchfield painted the everyday in an extraordinary way. The mundane landscapes and streetscapes of the Ohio and upstate New York towns where he lived are transformed into pulsing hallucinatory visions.  A cryptic interpreter of nature, Burchfield created landscapes sometimes dark and brooding, other times manically aflame, often palpably dense with psychological weight. Common things become strange, and the invisible is brought into focus. Flowers and stars give off acidic halos, and the sound of cicadas or power emanating from telegraph wires is transcribed as thickets of shuddering line. It is anxiety made manifest. Evidently Burchfield never was fully at ease and suffered from anxiety and depression. As a teenager, he endured nervous exhaustion and later, astounding bouts of mania-- producing half his entire output of painting in the years 1915-1917 alone. His heightened psychological response and susceptibility is plainly visible and, I believe, informs his whole aesthetic. 

Interestingly, Burchfield was assigned to the camouflage unit during the First World War. At the time the Army was practicing a particular camouflage variant called "dazzle" where large Cubistic shards and stripes of light and dark would obscure the outlines of the structures being covered. Burchfield, I am sure, found a particularly sympathetic outlet for his nervous striations in this unit.

Dazzle camouflage, 1918

About the same time I came across Burchfield I rediscovered Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892 – November 19, 1942), the Polish writer and graphic artist. I realized there were sympathetic ties between Schulz's intense mesmerizing verbal cascades and Burchfields hectic visions. Both artists' worlds are animate, mystical and heavily psychological. Both kept somewhat insular lives, Burchfield painting his immediate surroundings in Ohio and upstate New York, Schulz, describing familiar sites in Drohobych, the town he lived in his entire life. Each artist drew from a store of personal mythologies and preoccupations, and seemed to be able to train his eye on that which others overlooked or could not see.

Hartsdale Pet Cemetery

 

 

photo by keridiana chez 

 

2 photos above by keridiana chez

A few friends and I made a trip up to the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery near White Plains. The first cemetery of its kind in the US, Hartsdale, also called The Peaceable Kingdom, was established in 1896 by a New York City veterinarian. Its five acres are home to 80,000 pets (rabbits, guinea pigs, birds, and a lion cub among the vast numbers of cats and dogs) and quite a few humans as well. The rambling, hilly terrain is packed with so many tiny stories: laconic grave markers, floridly effusive epitaphs, bronze and granite bombast, the kitschy pathos of makeshift memorials, the discomfit of shared graves—owner and beloved friends. What really impressed itself upon me was how fervent and true the sentiments were. Unlike human cemeteries, where the epitaphs are often stilted and tradition-bound, laced with religious boilerplate, Hartsdale was filled with colorful outpourings of love, of yearning and grief, of disbelief and the hope that “gone” was not forever.

The Peaceable Kingdom, Edward Hicks, 1826

King Charles's Head, Caesar's Wife, and Shared Knowledge

In reading 19th century primary sources—diaries, poetry, essays, etc—I'm struck by how allusive the writing is. References to Milton, Chaucer, biblical parables, mythology, ancient historical figures, military history, and of course Latin and Greek phrases are frequent and typically without explanation. There was a seemingly vast store of what was considered common, shared knowledge. This knowledge was expected of all those who had attained a certain level of education and who shared a particular socio-economic status. I wonder, how much of that is left? Judging by me—a supposedly well-educated member of a certain class— not that much.

The image above shows part of a test my mother took in about 1951. It was the Language Arts section of the supervisory license for New York City. In other words this was part of what was expected of those hoping to become a New York City public school principal.

Of a total of 75, there were about 46 I could eke by with, and several more that I'd heard of but was vague about. Here are a few of the 18 or so of which I had no definitive knowledge, along with my first association:
Areopagus "Areopagitica". But what was that? Milton? What?
Golconda sounds vaguely decadent, like it might be around the corner from Gomorrah.
Barmecide feast  killing something? No, I've got nothing. 
Caesar's wife —Great Caesar's Ghost! Never heard this and it's really quite useful...
King Charles's Head perhaps some jolly English Protectorate gallows humor? (I especially liked learning this one)
Ananias   Nothing.
piling Pelion on Ossa  Complete news to me, this belongs with other Sisyphaean labors
Savoyard—  no idea --the French Revolution or Paris Commune?
to come a cropper —Again, never heard this and it's quite useful, rather like a dusty, antiquated "epic fail"
Ephebic Oath I should have known this but I didnt. I really came a cropper.

[Now I'm going to make a pitch for the invaluable Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, first published in 1870. I picked it up by chance for $2.50 at a book sale on Shelter Island and wrote about it in an early post. It is one of the most quirky, varied, fascinating and delightful repositories of knowledge, both eminently useful and absurdly obscure.]

Pill Heds

I've been thinking about drugs names. I don't think I'm alone in my occasional scrutiny of these mysterious, often ridiculous, sometimes brilliant confabulations. (The pharmaceutical business spends a good chunk of their budget on branding and naming and I think this tangential element of design justifies my assessing the results, no? I'm not going into the logo design here, but see this amusing step by step "review" of Ablixa.)

Huge potential money-makers like psychopharmacological agents and erectile dysfunction buttresses have particularly high stakes in naming and design. According to Medscape the cost in 2001 of consultation on naming alone ranged from $100,000 to $700,000. Elsewhere I read the numbers are "easily" $500,000 up to a couple million.

Each drug receives 3 names:
• the chemical name—usually a string of prefixes, numbers and a lot of "ethyls" and "phenyls"
• the International Nonproprietary Name (INN, also known as the generic name)— these names are created from a standardized group of "stem" components which represent different classes of drugs (eg. anti-inflammatories, antidepressants)
• the brand name

here's an example:

• chemical name — 7-chloro-1,3-dihydro-1 methyl-5-phenyl-2H-1,4-benzodiazepin-2-one
• generic name — diazepam (-azepam is used for many antianxiety agents)
• brand name — Valium

Names have to be memorable, convey something medicinal and curative, not interfere with international marketing (ie. should not sound like "bad luck" in Chinese) and not be too similar to something already out there. This last criterion is not only for marketing purposes— the FDA evidently rejects 4 out of 10 names so as to not create confusion and possible medical disasters (for instance Celexa vs Celebrex).

Going through what must surely be a gauntlet of committee presentations and focus-grouping, how on earth do names like Xalkori and Xofigo see the light of day? The New York Times noted that "drug makers have favorite letters, and they run the gamut from X to Z." They quoted James Dettore of Brand Institute and explained;

"the letters X, Z, C and D, according to ...  "phonologics," subliminally indicate that a drug is powerful. "The harder the tonality of the name, the more efficacious the product in the mind of the physician and the end user," he said." 

 According to Slate, though, there might just be a computer algorithm behind all those Xs:

During tough financial times... many drug manufacturers skip human consultants and use computerized algorithmic name generators because they just want something that will get quick approval from the FDA and don’t care how ridiculous the name looks or sounds. //

My not-so-empirical approach to looking at drug names
the word-- how does it sound? how does it look?, associative images–– what does it sound like? what does it bring to mind?, appropriateness–— how well does the name work for what the drug does?

Successes:
Ambien—pretty good at conveying a zoned-out calm, perhaps a little too techno
Zoloft—  its propping you up, get it?--holding you zoloft
Viagra— brilliant— it's vigorous, it's vital, it's Niagra Falls for chrissakes
Abilify— "this antidepressant has abilified me to be functional!"
Keppra— Strangely elegant and aloof, like the name of an ancient Egyptian deity. Not bad for an anti convulsant

The not-so-greats:
Vioxx— a vanquished Transformers villain— anti-inflammatory now off the market
Viibryd—looking like something you'd find at IKEA (thanks Andrew) this antidepressant doesn't even have an aspirational quality. plus the sound of it seems a bit too manic for a mood stabilizer
Coumadin—a blood thinner that sounds like a mid-level bureaucratic title of the Ottoman Empire; its generic name, warfarin, sounds like a strategic conflict board game
Effexor— this antidepressant reminds me of Gigantor, Space Age Robot
Aubagio— sounds to me like an Italian restaurant you'd find on Staten Island, odd association for drug to treat multiple sclerosis
Stalevo— treats Parkinsons disease but looks like it's a city in Serbia
Simponi Aria— is it part of an Italian opera? an obscure part of the brain (see Wernicke’s area)? No it treats rheumatoid arthritis. Perhaps it leaves you singing.

Fails:
Fungizone— targets potentially fatal fungal infections; the name sounds appropriate in a blatant ham-fisted way, but I would not like to tell people I was on it.
Latuda—an antidepressant that seems more like a vulnerable area of the lower back; see  "phonologics"mentioned above—this drug doesn't sound man enough to make me happy
Lamictal— looks like a term for a pus-forming condition—not so good for a mood stabilizer/anti convulsant
Zortress—suppresses the immune system but sounds like a 1980s video game
Zingo— just completely wrong

The ABCs of B. de B.

You can see the entire collection of alphabet prints at our shop: www.b-de-b.com

The scrapbook is pretty large, about 15 x 17. Each linen page is pasted back and front with scraps of printed woodcuts and engravings hand-colored with watercolor paint.
The whole thing is dirty, creased and coming apart— but its fabulous.

Some of the other offerings in the scrapbook are on the more macabre side.

 

The Background:
At an Ephemera Fair a couple years ago, Doug, Sam, and I bought a large scrapbook of brightly hand-colored printed illustrations. Culled from a series of British children’s chapbooks, the scrapbook’s most recent image appears to date from about 1837 but many of the images are “cuts” created years, even decades before. All the clippings are affixed to pages of linen edged in red silk and are bound in a disintegrating cover marked “Juvenile Scrapbook” and “B. de B. Russell.” 

“B. de B. Russell”? Was that a business, place, or person?

We discovered what we had purchased in Connecticut in 2012 was a scrapbook created 175 years ago possibly to mark the birth of a little tyke with a preposterous name. It turned out Blois de Blois Russell was born at the very start of the Victorian era, on June 6, 1837, near Birmingham, England. He rowed crew for St. John’s College, Oxford, and, according to a sniffy email response from the Oxford registrar’s office, he was most certainly matriculated as a “commoner” (not nobility or even a “gentleman-commoner”). We also discovered he died under unrecorded circumstances in 1860 just before his 23 birthday. He seemed to have come from compromised stock as his brother and a sister both died very young as well. Whether being saddled with the name Blois de Blois Russell had any impact upon his health is unknown.
About chapbooks:
Stories, ballads, rhymes and popular tales of piety were passed down through the generations verbally. These oral transmissions started to be written down and printed in the 16th century as broadsides, leaflets and booklets called chapbooks. These were popular, cheap, and cheaply produced texts, typically from 8 to 32 pages and sold by itinerant peddlers called chapmen. “Chap” is etymologically related to an old (Middle?) English word for “trade” (see place name Cheapside in London), and by extension, cheap. Chapbooks specifically for children became popular in the mid-1700s. Chaps were sold plain as printed or colored for an extra cent or two. Who did the coloring? Surely women and children. Pure speculation, but what a Dickensian scene: little waifs with their paint pots working in the dim glow of a lamp, so other, more cosseted children, like B. de B. Russell could enjoy their handiwork...
 
Now, B. de B. and the Chapbook Alphabet Print Series

We were inspired to create prints with what we found in the album’s pages— mixing letters and images for this series of chapbook alphabet prints. So our first offering is generally agreeable subject matter, just slightly off. Next we'd like to plumb the more macabre offerings-- we welcome any thoughts on the matter.

“B. de B.” wasn't our first choice of names—we went through several—but kept coming back to the euphonious, if odd, B. de B. It had become shorthand for the project, and the name stuck. Now, B. de B. has become a growing collection of historically-based designs that rescues ephemera from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and re-imagines it for the twenty-first.

See us at www.b-de-b.com

a bit of tonic

 

Cup of Tea, 1905

Bonne Fille, 1906

Helen Carte, 1885

 

Les Petites Belges (Young Belgian Women), 1907

La Hollandaise, c. 1906

Mornington Crescent nude, contre jour, 1907

 2 versions of Ennui, c. 1914

 

La Giuseppina, 1903-1904

Still thinking about color after attending APHA's all-day color conference. 

An encore post with updates:
A painter I've always liked from afar is Walter Sickert. I say from afar because I never sought out a biography or treatise on him, it was simply that each time I came across one of his works I took note. I am always drawn to his colors: smokey, tenebrous, sharp, acidic. In my mental storehouse of mood and color, however, his choices were always relegated to the appealing but problematic section. His subjects lay in the working classes, the music hall stage, the decadent and alien exoticism of Venice, and most notoriously, in the seamy bed-sit flats of Camden Town in North London and the prostitutes who toiled in them. The moods he captured ranged from the cheerfully tawdry to quiet grimness to the palpably brooding. It wasnt his subject choice that I found problematic, it was something about the atmosphere he conjured up—insistently and consistently—in each work. Is it the sense of remove? Is it the voyeurism? Airlessness? A bit of Sickert is tonic, dwell too long in those visual spaces and one feels a creeping discomfort.

Sickert was born in Munich to a Danish father and an English mother, but grew up in England. After a brief career on the stage, he became an assistant to James MacNeill Whistler. After 1890 he went to Paris and studied with Degas. Sickert's return to London in 1905 was followed up with a series of nudes that have become inextricably linked with the Camden Town Murder mystery. These paintings and Sickert's perverse sense of self-promotion (calling, for instance, a very equivocal scene of a weary clothed man and sleeping(?) naked woman alternately "What shall we do for the rent?" and "Camden Town Murder") ultimately led to the preposterous theorizing of author Patricia Cornwall that Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

Recently I read a brief but brilliantly written essay about Sickert by Max Kozloff*. In it is one of the most expertly evocative descriptions of color:

...It would be hard to imagine a more distraught monochrome a more neurasthenic sobriety. Whether in its resiny or vaporous distillation, the paint molds into umber purple, degraded violets, emaciated brownish greens, diseased oranges, prussic, somewhat mildewed blues, the whole occasionally enlivened with little splutters of toned-down white, cream or mustard.

I find the mental image of that entire palette—degraded violets!— incredibly enticing. Perhaps this speaks to my fascination with Farrow and Ball color charts and my longstanding wish to be paid to research and name colors. How wonderful it would be to have (house) paint charts based on ones favorite painters. Sickert for neurasthenic aesthetes, Milton Avery’s sober olives and grays pierced with oranges, mauves and royal blues for liberal intellectuals with expressionist leanings, Fragonard's nubile pinks and celestial blues for those whose tastes run to more... cheerful titillation. Benjamin Moore take note/

*  I should note that this essay is in an obscure and out of print book, The Grand Eccentrics (From Medieval to Contemporary: the eccentric in painting, sculpture and architecture). Many thanks to Malcolm Enright who pointed me to this fascinating collection of essays. An uneven, and in some ways flawed, book it is never the less a terrific storehouse of some great writing and invaluable facts about some of the most riveting figures in art. The book deserves its own post.