Random Musings 14

Last Saturday I finally had a chance to get back to Brooklyn Museum for 2 exhibitions I've been wanting to see. John Singer Sargent Watercolors celebrates 2 major collections of watercolors by Sargent (1856-1925), owned by Brooklyn and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Joined together for this exhibition, there is a clear distinction between the more finished set of pictures purchased in 1912 by Boston and the 1909 purchase by Brooklyn, which are more sketch-like. Depending on your taste and interest in how an artist thinks, each of the works will appeal to viewers differently. The show is arranged thematically, with segments on Italy and sailing, for instance. Sargent was born in Italy to American parents and lived throughout Europe (I still have a difficult time thinking of him as an "American" artist), so he was well-traveled for his day and time. One of my favorite watercolors from the show was the work you see above, Corfu: Lights & Shadows, 1909, from the MFA, in which he represents a small building on the Greek island, but captures all the sensation of sunshine using different hues to show how the branches of the trees cast shadows onto the white building. It is truly a tour de force of a work, revealing how Sargent's handling of color and lighting can convey atmospheric conditions and the emotional satisfaction of the place he's showing the viewer.
In sharp contrast to Sargent's work, I also enjoyed the exhibition showcasing the work of contemporary Nigerian artist El Anatsui. Although he has had a long career, his more recent works using found objects from garbage dumps (tin can lids, bottle caps, twist-ties, etc.) have made him internationally famous. He recreates large-scale sculptural installations that are fascinating. They appear like tapestries of gold. They are the detritus of society reimagined as beauty, and thus say much about the interactions of different classes and ethnic groups in the cultural exchange of the objects as they were imported from Europe and rebranded as "African" products. This is an installation shot I took of some of his works hanging in the main rotunda of the building.

In my last Random Musing, I posted an update about the New York Public Library's Central Library Plan. bklynbiblio followers will recall that I've been among the many criticizing them for their plans to renovate the main historic building and research center, and turn it into the modern-day equivalent of a library-like Internet Starbucks cafe. Under pressure from critics, NYPL President Tony Marx has agreed to have an independent committee evaluate the plans, according to this article in The New York Times (thanks, PR, for the lead). We will see what this next chapter will bring.

Two years ago, I blogged about my new fiction discovery, British novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980; thanks again to TC for the introduction!). Her short novel Excellent Women (1952) has become one of my favorite books. I can see her influence on other British women writers I enjoy reading, such as A.S. Byatt and Ruth Rendell. The charm of Excellent Women is that nothing really happens. The book focuses on Mildred Lathbury, who makes tea, helps decorate the local church, unexpectedly gets involved in the drama of her neighbors, and makes observations about everyone in her life in an ever-so-judgmental Christian way that will have you laughing aloud. Her later novels are reportedly darker, but I haven't gotten to those yet. Pym is also an inspiration to writers. Her first few novels sold modestly well, and then publishers refused to publish her because she was seen as old fashioned. It took years before she was published again, and that book wound up winning her the Booker Prize. The lesson learned is never to give up. June was the centenary of her birth, so you can read up more about her life and novels in these laudatory articles in The Telegraph and The New York Times. There's even The Barbara Pym Society website to peruse as well.

Archaeology published a tidbit of fascinating news: this 400-lb. stone sculpture of a nude female torso was excavated in Brooklyn in the DUMBO area (that's "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass" for non-Brooklynites). There are traces of paint on it, and she's been dubbed Ginger because this area had spice warehouses in the 19th century, but no one knows much about who she is or why she was there.

And, finally, I had to wrap up this musing with something rather fun. Ever hear the joke about how to make an Italian stop talking? You tie his hands behind his back! Italians talk with their hands. I even do it, and half the time I don't even realize it. There is an article in the NYT exploring how these gestures may have a more important role in communicating and reach back to ancient Roman days. There's also a short, fun video that explores the topic some more, and this interactive feature of animated images that shows you just a small handful of the more than 250 gestures that are considered part of Italian communicating. Enjoy! (Insert hand gesture here.)

Random Musings 10

I'm heading to Florida for a dysfunctional family Christmas. If you're wondering if this is a picture of my relatives, it's not, but I swear if my lesbian cousins (the DG-JBs) were to ever really let loose, I'm convinced they would be just like Edina and Patsy (more on them below). I've been saving up a bunch of links and posts to blog about, so enjoy this Random Musing.

The Guardian has an interesting interactive guide that allows you to zoom in and find out more about drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, in conjunction with the National Gallery's current exhibition about his years at the court of Milan.

When I was at the YCBA, my co-visiting scholar was Georgina Cole, who received her PhD from Sydney University in Australia. She was there working on a project relating to the senses in 18th-century British painting. She's also started a new blog/website, Early Modern Art Network, which focuses on news relating to art from the 17th and 18th centuries. She's transcribed a funny 18th-century letter to the editor from an enraged parent about how having his children trained to be artists had made his life miserable: "When I the other Day found that Remonstrance was in vain, and rage exerted without Effect, and clasped my Hands and sighed with pure Vexation, my Daughter told me I looked like the Soldier in Belisarius; my eldest Son said I was more like West’s weeping Grenadier, and my youngest, a little Imp about ten Years of Age, got into a Corner of the Room with his Chalks and blue Paper to copy my Face, his own Father’s Face, Sir, for a Head of Despair."

I've blogged about the World of the Year in the past, but unfortunately we now have conflicts depending on the source as to what the actual word of 2011 is. Dictionary.com had declared "tergiversate" to be the annual word (huh?), but now Merriam-Webster claims the word of the year is "pragmatic," based on the number of people who searched for that word. Complicating matters is the Oxford English Dictionary, which apparently declared "squeezed middle" the word of the year, never mind that's a phrase, not a word.

Thanks to my dear friend SVH, my latest sci-fi obsession is Farscape. Yes, I'm a little late to this, as it's been off the air for a while, but it's fun. A pregnant bio-ship with a sexy lost human and escaped alien prisoners, none of whom know or trust one another? What a fun concept!

New York magazine has declared 2011 to be the year in which male bodies were exploited in the movies, such as Chris Evans here in Captain America. There is a rather lovely slideshow of images worth seeing on the site, although I do find it odd that they all look alike (never mind why  Evans insists on shaving his chest hair). Unfortunately, my fantasy boyfriend Ewan McGregor wasn't on the list, although I guess he didn't actually take his shirt off in any films this year (a first for him!). His film Beginners, with Christopher Plummer as his aging father who comes out of the closet late in life, was absolutely one of the best movies of the year. The Anglophenia blog put up a post earlier this year with video clips of all things Ewan, so check it out.

And unless you've been living under a rock I'm sure you've heard the news that--20 years after the first episodes premiered--Absolutely Fabulous is coming back with some new episodes with Edina and Patsy partying hard and Saffie scolding them the whole time. I can't wait! Here's a hilarious clip from the newest episode in which they trash-talk the Kardashians (who I still to this day do not understand why people think they are important!!). Enjoy, sweetie dahling!

Refudiating (and Measuring Words) Since 2010

Following up on last year's "unfriend" as Word of the Year, it's time we spoke about the word "refudiate." I was a bit dismayed when I heard last month that the New Oxford American Dictionary had selected Sarah Palin's malapropism as the 2010 Word of the Year. (Note that I was just as disgruntled when I had heard "bootylicious" had been added to the Oxford English Dictionary a few years ago.) Palin's use of the word combined "refute" and "repudiate" and probably was an innocent typographical error when she Tweeted it this past July (not that the p and f are anywhere near one another on a keyboard). People attacked her almost immediately for her ignorance and for ridiculously inventing new words, especially when she discovered she had something good going on and she began using it on a regular basis. Eventually she defended herself by Tweeting that, like Shakespeare, she could invent words too because English was constantly evolving.

Now, as much as it kills me to admit this, she was right about that. In fact, it's strangely coincidental that soon after the news broke about the Word of the Year, I went to the British Library in London and visited the special exhibition Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. Conceptually, this exhibition was fascinating, and it had on display texts from scrolls and codices to modern-day advertisements and letters. The show is about the history of the English language both in written and spoken form, covering its Anglo-Saxon and Celtic origins, the heavy influence of Norman French with William the Conqueror, Shakespeare and the evolution of modern English, all the way through the way imperialism brought new words into English. But the exhibition also had to do with issues of grammar, syntax, and spelling. In fact, one of the more interesting parts was when they pointed out that people have been worrying since the 1600s about the standardization of the language and its corruption through the introduction of new unapproved words. And just when you thought things like text message abbreviations were a new thing, with phrases like "Thx for ur msg - c u 2nite!", the exhibition showed at least examples such as a handwritten letter from the 1890s where a woman used the same type of abbreviation to write to her friend. In other words, phonetic abbreviations are nothing new.

The British of course still think their version of English is the correct form, and who are we to judge, but what is interesting is that we all accept variants of the same tongue. We spell some words differently, like "color/colour," we use different words to say the same thing, like "elevator/lift," and we even pronounce some words differently (Americans say "premiere" with the accent on the second syllable; Brits put the accent on the first syllable). But it's still English, and no one questions these variations in use. If I learned anything from the exhibition, it's that the English language has been and continues to evolve, so perhaps we shouldn't worry too much about where it's heading and how new words are introduced.

So, yes, Shakespeare did invent new words, and so did Chaucer, and literary/cultural theorists like Roland Barthes and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick did it with regularity too, but we're more willing to accept new words from them because they were great writers and thinkers. Hey, even I've made up new words at times! One of my favorites is "Britty," which I use to describe a certain type of British comedy that is dry and witty. But who is Palin to make up new words? Palin is...well...these days she's an Alaskan housewife who shoots caribou on her TLC reality television program (and who also apparently still claims she doesn't want to be President, even though Glenn Beck thinks that makes her just like George Washington, so she probably will run for President...but I digress). Does that qualify her to invent new words? But wait--actually it turns out that she didn't invent the word at all. According to this NPR report "it had appeared in literature several times more than 30 years ago." So Palin just made it popular, and it's that popularity which has earned its place in the dictionary.

In case you were wondering, though, if "refudiate" also was the top word in English in 2010, it may surprise you to discover that the Global Language Monitor claims it was only #4. The top word was "spillcam" followed by "vuvuzela" and "narrative." The Global Language Monitor records word usage on millions of websites, news articles, blogs, etc. Now, when you first think about this, it seems to suggest that the words then were the most popular words of the year, but actually they were simply the most frequently reported words. The only reason why "spillcam" became such a popular term was because of the oil spill crisis and every news agency in the world reported on it. In contrast, I have no memory of a single person I know ever actually saying the word "spillcam." So this record of top word usage is useful in telling us the most important words in a given year, but they also become dated very quickly and can disappear by the next year.

Measuring words usage is all the rage now, thanks to the digitization of books, and there are some new interesting studies that never could have been done before in the same way. True, there were concordances to the Bible and Shakespeare. A concordance counts the number of times a word has been used, so you find out how popular a word was in a given text or by a particular author. But to measure word usage in publishing over a few centuries never could have been done by a single individual in one lifetime. Digitization has made this possible. For instance, NPR had a report about Google Labs conducting studies on the words appearing in the nearly 15 million books they have digitized so far. They've generated a test system that allows you to create fascinating graphs so you can see how frequently words were used or cited at different periods in time. For instance, I searched for the names Canova and Thorvaldsen, two of the most important sculptors during the 19th century. The high spike on Canova's name in the mid-1820s must be because he had died in 1822, but the overall comparison shows us that Canova was apparently discussed more frequently than Thorvaldsen. But this isn't a perfect system either. One assumes that the popularity of particular words matched the ongoing increase in the publishing of books themselves, but we shouldn't assume that is true. Regardless, this doesn't negate the very useful and quite fascinating sense that we can now see how popular (or not) certain words or ideas were in published texts over time.

Measuring word usage also has a silly fun side too. A Facebook application now ranks for you the most popular words you used in your regular status updates, suggesting perhaps that those words have some meaning to your personality. When I did mine this week, my top word was "now," followed by "out," "tea," and "think." Are they accurate? I'll let the people who know me well make that determination for themselves. In the meantime, I think I'll make a cuppa tea and think about this topic some more.

Random Musings 4 (UK Edition)

Thank God the English love tea. And cakes, of course. I have been needing the regular caffeine infusion just to keep me going every day with all the research I've been doing. Okay, so it's not physical labor, but it is mentally exhausting to be examining art objects, reading through pages of files, typing up notes, interpreting and reading 19th-century handwriting, and just smiling and being friendly the whole time. Hm...suddenly reading this I'm realizing that few people will want to sympathize. All I can say is that the mental activity is exhausting, and lots of tea (and cakes) helps tremendously. It is interesting though that tea shops seem to have disappeared from most English cities. At one time they were ubiquitous, a public place for ladies especially to congregate where their moral integrity would be preserved and they could socialize. Villages and small cities still have them, of course, or CC and I never would have made it through our day trip to Lincoln. But in Leeds and Liverpool, there was nary a tea shop in sight. Pubs, on the other hand, are everywhere, but even there you can see that the old-style pubs, the rusticated tables-and-chairs, laid-back blokes, the old world charm, what one might consider to be more traditional, is slowly fading as well. Chain restaurants and bars like Nando's and Pizza Express are taking over, the same way chain coffee shops like Starbucks have taken over tea shops. It's sad really, but I have to confess that when I've wanted that cup of tea (or cappuccino or hot chocolate) I haven't hesitated to walk into a Caffe Nero, Pret a Manger, or Starbucks, all of which are chains here.

You've all heard the English say "Cheers!" It's become in many ways the most frequently heard English word by Americans. It's used as a general "Hello" and "Good-bye" but it's also used to say "Thank you" as well. The thing is, I've realized that "Cheers" is a gender-biased word. Men say "Cheers" to one another all the time, as in "Cheers, mate!" to imply gratitude and farewell at the same time. But while a few women said "Cheers" to me to say thanks, they are all young women, which suggests a new generation is appropriating this masculine form of chat. The fact is, you never hear a woman say "Cheers!" to another woman. It's usually always "Thank you!" and "Bye!" It's funny how such a simple word could be so gender-biased even in the 21st century.

But the big news this week in the UK is of course self-evident from the picture above: Prince William and Kate Middleton are getting married. He proposed to her using the ring his father gave his mother. Personally, that would seem like a bad omen to me, considering how that marriage turned out, but he claims he feels like his mother is now part of their union (which seems both sweet and creepy at the same time). The first 24 hours of the story hitting the airways was of course all wonderful. The BBC was interviewing people in the street and naturally everyone was very happy for them. The bitter aftermath has begun though. Americans think the Brits love the monarchy, but after having one for more than a millennium, even though their political power has been practically stripped away, a significant number of Brits want the monarchy to disappear completely, and to take the entire aristocracy with it. That's right, no more lords, ladies, earls, countesses, princes or queens. The fact is, having a family of figureheads living in a number of palaces wears on the nation's economy. To quote JE's recent Facebook post about the nuptials: "So, we can't afford higher education or drugs to keep bowel cancer patients alive, but we can afford a royal family and a royal wedding." He's citing another even that has been in the news late. Students have rioted here recently to protest the proposed increase, up to 3 times what it is now, for university tuition fees. William and Kate may want to take note of this. Maybe they should elope to Gretna Green like generations of young lovers did in the past. I've been wondering, however, since he's the future King William V, will she become Queen Kate? Will they allow a commoner (God, that is very class-ist) to be named queen? Or will they name her Princess Consort or something comparable, as Albert was Prince Consort to Queen Victoria? Or make her a Duchess like Camilla is? Whatever the case, as this journalist has pointed out, she would be the country's 6th Queen Catherine, but hopefully not follow the fate of most of her predecessors with that name (think Henry VIII). Then again, with rising anti-monarchical sentiment brewing here, especially in a tight economic crises, will they make it to the throne at all?

Unfriending Since 1659

Have you ever unfriended someone? In today's world, with online social networking sites like Facebook, unfriending means you drop them from your network. I once dated this guy who insisted we become Facebook friends. We stopped seeing each other after 3 dates, and just when I was getting ready to unfriend him, I discovered that he had already unfriended me. I was devastated! I mean, to unfriend someone can be empowering, even if you feel guilty about doing it. But getting unfriended is like showing up for a party and having the door slammed in your face. It's not fun.

Why all the hoopla about unfriending? NPR had a news byte today that the New Oxford American Dictionary has selected "unfriend" as their 2009 Word of the Year. The funny thing is that the word isn't new. It's been around since 1659. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first recorded use was by Thomas Fuller in The Appeal of Injured Innocence: "I hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Unfriended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us." I checked my Webster's Dictionary and it's strange that they don't have a listing for unfriend, but they do have one for unfriended, an adjective that dates back to 1513 meaning having no friends. Of course, the word is directly linked to unfriendly and unfriendliness, which date to the 15th century, so basically we've been hostile and rejecting friends for hundreds of years now, way before Facebook!

Yes, I'm a logophile: I love words. I especially love etymologies (where words come from), so this is all fun stuff to me. What were some of the past few Words of the Years? Two interesting ones were 2007's locavore (one who tries to eat locally grown food) and podcast in 2005. I wish I could pick my favorite word. There are so many to choose from, but two of them are meretrix and perspicacity.