Susan Boyle

There's nothing like an underdog who manages to come out on top. Susan Boyle (left) auditioned for Britain's Got Talent, a reality television program that has everyday people perform for judges who include the infamously acerbic Simon Cowell. Needless to say, this 47-year-old single, "never-been-kissed," unemployed woman from the village of Blackburn, Scotland blew everyone away, including Cowell. She sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from the musical Les Miserables. She is simply amazing! The video on YouTube has been watched nearly 19 million times as of this morning. If you haven't seen it, do so immediately by clicking here and watching it (the embedding for the video clip has been disabled so I can't link to it from here). This woman will touch your heart. She proves that one should never judge a book by its cover, and that everyone has a little something inside of them that is bursting to come out. All you have to do is have a dream, take a risk, and try. We've got our fingers crossed for Ms. Boyle as she moves into the competition part of the show.

Library Bytes: Overdue Books

Overdue fines for late library books is one of those things people groan about and consider to be a petty thing about libraries. The truth is, they can be a serious matter. In the case of academic institutions and municipal libraries, these books are owned by a governing body. For instance, a book borrowed from your local public library is actually paid for and owned by the city, so by returning it late, damaging it, or not returning it at all, you're dealing with the potential for having committed a serious crime against the city government. Believe it or not, people have been arrested for not returning library books!

Admittedly, it does seem a little ridiculous, but libraries just want their books back, not to horde them, but so that everyone can share in them. In a way, they need a system to ensure books are returned. After all, if there were no penalties for late books, would you ever return them? Of course, things are different if you damage or lose a book. Then the library is going to make you pay up (probably by forcing you to turn over your first-born child to the library to become a shelver).

I bring this up because two separate incidents regarding overdue books occurred today. The first is a news report on NPR. Washington and Lee University in Virginia had someone return an overdue library book. Why the big deal? Because it was stolen during the Civil War! Apparently, 145 years ago a Union soldier stole a volume from their library. A friend of a descendant of that soldier has returned the library book, with the stipulation that he not be charged any overdue fines, which the library accommodated. Can you imagine if they had fined him? It would have been cheaper for him to donate a new wing instead. You can hear a brief NPR interview with a librarian from Washington and Lee University about the bizarre story by clicking here.

The other incident took place while I was waiting in line at the circulation desk of the library (I'm purposely not mentioning which library). A woman before me was trying to return a library book that had been declared lost a few years ago. She had paid the lost book fine and all overdue charges, but now that she had found the book, she apparently wanted to return it and get her money back. The clerk didn't know what to do, so he called the Circulation Manager, who told her to keep the book. Presumably they wouldn't accept it back. This shocked me. When I was the Head of Access Services at a university library, we had a procedure in place for these kinds of situations. We called it a REFUND! I couldn't believe that this library wouldn't give her a refund. Amazingly, though, she just shrugged and walked out. All I can say if that I hope it's a book she actually wants to keep.

Remember that libraries want their books back so that everyone has an opportunity to use them. So the next time you check out a library book and discover it's overdue, don't freak out. Just return it and pay the fine. If you can't pay all of the overdue charges for financial reasons, talk to them. You may discover that they are willing to reduce the fees, as long as you promise to return the books on time in the future. And in case you didn't know this, you can renew books too. As long as no one else has a hold on them, usually you can keep renewing them. With most libraries, you can even do this over the Internet now and not have to return to the library itself. In other words, there's no excuse for having overdue books anymore. But if they are overdue, be brave. Return them and pay the fine. Because if you don't, they may send the police to your home!

UPDATE (4/18/09): So there definitely is something in the air about the issue of overdue fines for library books. University of Cambridge professor Mary Beard (a brilliant ancient Greek & Roman cultural historian) has a post on her blog A Don's Life related to this: "What's the point of library fines?" The Cambridge University Library reported a noted decrease in overdue fines, which they took as good news because it means students are returning books on time. However, Prof. Beard wonders how good this is, because she sees something to understanding the cost factor of books and going through the angst of respecting libraries and their materials. Regardless of her take, her last sentence is worth citing: "Perhaps the real truth here is that librarians have just got nicer."

The Passing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

On Sunday, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died after a long battle with cancer. Few people outside of the academic world may know about her, but her influence on the development of gender and queer studies has been profound. She had been a Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, which she joined in 1998 after a career as a professor at Duke University. As of today, the English Department still has her listed on their faculty webpage, where she had listed the following as being her academic areas of interest: "The Victorian novel; queer studies; performativity and performance; experimental critical writing; material culture, especially textiles and texture; early modernism and Proust; Romantic fiction; artists' books; non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; Buddhism in the West." She also was a poet and artist in her own right. However, her legacy always will be her work in gender and queer studies.

Her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) broke ground with the neologistic concept of "male homosocial desire," a phrase that has since become so ubiquitous in academia it risks losing its groundbreaking importance. Sedgwick did not take credit for the word homosocial itself, but she did create an oxymoronic construct in the phrase "male homosocial desire." Directly linked to the idea of homosexuality, i.e. male-male sexual attraction, the phrase simultaneously implied its polemic opposite, the fear and hatred of homosexuality based on the deterministic non-erotic impulse of male heterosexual bonding. In other words, Sedgwick was exploring how aspects of male bonding in literature (and, by implication, art) have at their core a sexual dimension that may be either explored or rejected by the men involved. I am grossly simplifying her ideas and barely scratching the surface of her intent, but what is significant is that "homosocial desire" has since become a common trope in the discussion of gender relations. Those interested in women's studies in particular found her idea a solid platform to explore new areas, for in these all-male homosocial environments, women were often excluded or objectified. The use of a detail from Edouard Manet's scandalous 1863 painting Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) on the cover of this book (see above) is a telling example of this, for despite the obvious female nude sitting in a park having a picnic, the relationship between the two dressed male figures philosophizing with one another is in fact the true focus of the painting.

Sedgwick's other great text was Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Here is the opening paragraph of the book:

Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured--indeed, fractured--by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory. (p.1)

Now, admittedly, if you're baffled by this introduction, you're not alone. Sedgwick's theoretical writing was, to be blunt, abstruse to many (and I include myself wholeheartedly in this group of the dazed and confused...theory has never been and never will be my game). Still, the premise of her work has to do with the origin and nature of the "closet," an idea directly associated with how homosexuals have lived in a closeted world, and that much in the way of gender relations has to do with where one is situated with regard to the closet. Sedgwick is less interested in the historic, biological construct of homosexuality. Rather, she's interested in exploring how with the taxonomic identification of the "homosexual" as a type in late nineteenth-century Europe (the word homosexuality first appeared publicly in print in a German pamphlet written anonymously by the sexologist Karl-Maria Kertbeny in 1869) led to the opposition of the homosexual as an "other" distinguishable from the heterosexual. As she writes, "What was new from the turn of the century was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence." (p.2) Epistemology then addresses how the consciousness of the closet became a transparent force, heretofore ignored by scholars, that can be read in works of literature and art.

Last year, Jason Edwards, Senior Lecturer in art history and Director of the British Art research school at the University of York, England, published a book about Sedgwick's theories as part of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series. He points to Sedgwick's theories about the first-person experience in writing and reading to be critical to an understanding of her work. In his introduction Edwards writes, "Sedgwick's perhaps most important, deceptively simple idea [is] that people are different from one another, and her notion that the first person is a potentially powerful heuristic. That is to say, by addressing you directly and describing my history, I have been covertly introducing you to Sedgwick's belief that paying attention to your own experience in the present tense, and then reflecting back upon it rigorously, might be one of the best, if least valued strategies for problem-solving. This idea is at the heart of Sedgwick's oeuvre, which quietly insists on the irreducible particularlity and potential pedagogical value of every reader, writer, thinker, activist and viewer." (p.4)

The LGBT@NYPL blog (from The New York Public Library) noted that Sedgwick's contributions changed lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies in the humanities: "She taught us to read in a whole new way—not to read homosexuality as much as the productive power of its invisibility." Finally, in The Nation, Richard Kim has another interesting and personal take on Sedgwick's contributions in defining degrees of homosexuality. The comments to his article are worth browsing, but be prepared. It's startling that as far as we've evolved in our society with regard to human rights, there are still people who believe it's acceptable to quote Revelations and use phrases like "Sick!" in evaluating high-quality academic work on queer studies.

UPDATE (4/18/09): William Grimes in The New York Times has an obituary for Sedgwick, published a few days ago: "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Pioneer of Gay Studies and a Literary Theorist, Dies at 58." It's a straight-forward (no pun intended) obituary, although Grimes does summarize the point of two of her more controversial essays that are worth citing, since they give you an idea of some of her theories in practice: "In a 1983 essay on Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, she drew attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, rivals for the love of Lizzie Hexam but emotionally most fully engaged when facing off against each other. Several of her essays became lightning rods for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism and gay studies—most notoriously 'Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,' a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1989. In it, Ms. Sedgwick argued that Austen’s descriptions of the restless Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility should be understood in relation to contemporary thought on the evils of 'self-abuse.'"

We Are Their Voice

Today is the 143rd birthday of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals (ASPCA). Established in New York City in 1866, the ASPCA's early interest was in stopping the inhumane treatment of working animals, such as horses and livestock. Soon afterwards, they were working to stop the cruel treatment of dogs and cats and to provide healthy opportunities for their adoption. One of the horrors I discovered was that prior to the ASPCA's existence, it was not uncommon for dog catchers in NYC to round up dogs, cage them, and throw the cages in the East River to drown, because the catchers were paid by the number of animals they caught, not by the hour. This is just one of the many inhumane activities the ASPCA brought to an end.

The organization began with Henry Bergh (1813-1888), pictured at right, who became known as the Great Meddler because he actively went around enforcing animal cruelty laws against owners of horses and livestock. In a passionate speech he gave on February 8, 1866 at Clinton Hall in NYC, Bergh pleaded on behalf of "these mute servants of mankind." Bergh detailed inhumane animal practices in America, including cockfighting and the horrors of slaughterhouses. According to the ASPCA's website: A basic tenet of Bergh's philosophy, protecting animals was an issue that crossed party lines and class boundaries. To his audience, which included some of Manhattan's most powerful business and government leaders, he stressed, "This is a matter purely of conscience; it has no perplexing side issues. It is a moral question in all its aspects." Fortified by the success of his speech and the number of dignitaries to sign his "Declaration of the Rights of Animals," Bergh brought a charter for a proposed society to protect animals to the New York State Legislature. With his flair for drama he convinced politicians and committees of his purpose, and the charter incorporating the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was passed on April 10, 1866. Nine days later, an anti-cruelty law was passed, and the ASPCA granted the right to enforce it.

For more on this organization's long history of helping "these mute servants of mankind," see the ASPCA's History website. In the spirit of their motto, that "We Are Their Voice," let's wish the ASPCA a very happy 143rd birthday and thank them for all they have done for our four-legged friends. (And, yes, by sheer coincidence [or is it?], my birthday is today as well.)

Cherry Blossoms in Brooklyn

I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden today for Hanami, the Japanese tradition of viewing cherry blossoms, which started a few days ago. The viewing of cherry blossoms has been a recurring theme in Japanese art for centuries. (Click here to see an example of an Ukiyo-e print with geisha and cherry blossoms by Kitagawa Utamaro I at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.) At the botanical garden, not all of the trees were in bloom yet, but I did manage to take a few pictures with my digital camera about 1pm today, until the batteries in my camera died. Both of the pictures you see here were taken near the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. I used today's gorgeous blue sky as a backdrop for the pink blossoms in the picture above. The one below has white blossoms framing the pond and the torii gate that traditionally is found at the entrance of a Shinto shrine.

Rescue Shelter Boys?

The Pet Shop Boys (Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe) has been one of my all-time favorite groups back to their first release, "West End Girls." Well, admittedly, I've never been a huge fan of that song. My favorite has been "What Have I Done to Deserve This?", although there have been quite a few other goodies through the years, like the dance tracks "Domino Dancing," "New York City Boy," and the special theme song for one of the best comedies ever, Absolutely Fabulous. On April 7, Yvonne Taylor, the Special Projects Manager of PETA Europe (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), sent the Pet Shop Boys a letter asking if they would consider changing their name to the Rescue Shelter Boys in an attempt to draw attention away from pet shop cruelty in favor of shelters for abandoned animals. You can read the entire letter on the duo's website under the news section. Taylor makes significant points: "Most dogs and cats sold in pet shops are sourced from profit-hungry breeders who may have bred them in cramped, filthy conditions. With an emphasis on quantity rather than quality, unmonitored genetic defects and personality disorders pass from one generation of puppies and kittens to the next. ... Most pet-shop animals are kept in cages or runs that are far too small for their needs. Exercise is minimal, and they often never leave their cages until the day that they are sold. ... By agreeing to change your name to the Rescue Shelter Boys, you would help raise awareness about the cruelty involved in the pet trade and encourage your millions of fans to consider giving a home to an abandoned or unwanted animal from an animal shelter." The duo isn't planning to change their name, which I completely understand, but Neil and Chris did feel as if it was an issue worth drawing attention to and they appreciate PETA's mission. Andy from the Towleroad blog asked PETA to comment about their response, and PETA's Senior VP Dan Mathews said, "Neil Tennant shows that the Pet Shop Boys are just as smart as their lyrics and appreciate PETA's creative ways of bringing issues to the public." On a personal note, I am vehemently opposed to pet shops. I have vivid memories from my childhood of wanting to break into pet shops at night and let all the animals free...something I probably would still fantasize over if I ever went into a pet shop with caged animals, which I never do anymore. As for the group, their latest album Yes is available now, and the first release "Love, etc." has a great pop-dance feel to it that I'm enjoying listening to on my iPod. Here's the video, courtesy of YouTube (or click here to view it).

Sunny Spring Sunday

My friend NV from Miami Beach was staying with me for the past few days, and the whole time we've had either rain or cold weather. Finally, today, the weather was spectacular, so we ate brunch in Brooklyn Heights, then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I took these pictures with my mobile phone. The top one of the bridge I shot at 1:24pm today. The Brooklyn Bridge is an amazing architectural and engineering wonder, and it has served as a source of inspiration for artists and writers from Joseph Stella to Walt Whitman. Afterwards, we walked through the financial district for a while. I took the picture below of the New York Stock Exchange at 2:31pm.

The Passing of Helen Levitt

New York-based photographer Helen Levitt died this past Sunday. She was 95 years old. If you think her name sounds familiar in the context of this blog, it's because in my recent interview with photographer Gerald Mocarsky, he cited one of her works as his favorite photographic image. Levitt was a Brooklyn girl, born in 1913 in Bensonhurst. Critics consider the highlight of her career to be during the late 1930s and early 1940s, although she was still producing documentary-style photography into the 1990s. The image you see here, New York (Boy with Toy Gun), dates from about 1939 and is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Levitt became known for works such as this that capture street life in New York City. She would travel to areas of the City few middle-class whites visited, notably Harlem and the Lower East Side, and she would photograph everyday people doing everyday things. Her images speak to a time in New York history when the working class, immigrants, and the impoverished lived in these neighborhoods, both on these streets and in them as well. Her photos always seem so unplanned and naturalistic. A work such as this one may border on the sentimental because of the boy's clothes and sad face. But there is something haunting about this image, seeing a boy clutch a gun, uncertain how to handle it. This is a test of his future and his masculinity, as he stares off at someone, something, that obviously concerns him. It's as if he's waiting to be told what to do. He is frozen in uncertainty. His ebony skin glows from this image, framed by the whiteness that surrounds him in his shirt, in the street, and in the building behind him. This was a time of segregation, and this image is wrought with the angst of racism even though nothing violent is shown. Yet, it's also a stunning photograph of a precious black boy looking dazed by the world around him, just like any child in the City would be. Margarett Loke in The New York Times describes Levitt as a photographer "who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York." Loke emphasizes Levitt's ability to capture innocence, but notes also how she and her fellow photographers Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Ben Shahn all used their documentary photography to instill social reform. For more on Levitt's life, see Loke's obituary in the NYT, or the NPR audio clip interview with Levitt and an essay by Melissa Block.

DW: PotD...Coming Soon!

The BBC has released the preview for the first episode of the new season of one of my all-time favorite shows, Doctor Who. Sadly, this will also be the last season for David Tennant (right), who plays The Doctor. According to his website, the first episode of the new season, entitled "Planet of the Dead," goes something like this (cue freaky space music): "When a London bus takes a detour to an alien world, the Doctor must join forces with the extraordinary Lady Christina, in this one-off seasonal special. But the mysterious planet holds terrifying secrets, hidden in the sand. And time is running out, as the deadly Swarm gets closer." The "one-off seasonal special" part means it's the first episode of the season and is meant to whet your appetite for the rest of the season, which will air over the course of the year. This episode is supposed to air in the UK over Easter weekend. The only question is...when the heck is it going to air in the US so I can watch it???!!! If only I had a TARDIS, I could jump two weeks into the future and visit my friend CC and her family in northern England, watch the episode with them, then jump back in time to now, and write a blog post about having seen the episode already! But I wouldn't want to ruin it for you, would I? Here's the preview for the episode (or click here to see it on YouTube).

AHNCA Symposium (Part 2)

Yesterday was the Sixth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art, co-sponsored by AHNCA (Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art), the Doctoral Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Dahesh Museum of Art. Last week I posted about this and put the abstract for my paper online. The symposium was held at the Graduate Center in the Martin E. Segal Theatre, the same location where we held the Why Victorian Art? symposium in early February. Symposia such as this are excellent opportunities for so-called "junior scholars" to discuss aspects of their dissertations or other art historical projects on which they are working. Just when you thought everything had been said about a particular artist or topic, it's surprising to discover there's apparently always something more that can be said. These symposia also are excellent opportunities to network with fellow students and many of the leading art historians in the field. Below I summarize each of the papers, although I leave open for discussion whether or not my occasional interpretation of each is completely accurate. I confess that I often find it difficult to listen to conference papers for the first time and fully grasp their entire meaning (i.e., I'm a visual learner, not an audio learner). It would have been helpful to have read abstracts ahead of time to be more familiar with what the papers would be discussing. Regardless, it's fortunate that with art history, there are always pretty pictures to look at.

I spoke last on the morning panel session about the Ottoman Turks at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, examining the ambiguity of Anglo-Turkish relations as both colonialist and exoticist and issues of Otherness and the Self. Hannah W. Blunt (Boston University) spoke first about the American artist William Bradford's tour of Greenland and discussed issues of reality and the picturesque in the composite photographs used for his travelogue and Bradford's subsequent landscape paintings of the Arctic circle. Stassa B. Edwards (Florida State University) discussed Oscar Rejlander's theatrical performative photographs that were used by Charles Darwin in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). (It turns out Stassa and I have colleagues in common: we both worked as interns at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.) Stephanie O'Rourke (Columbia University) spoke about the 19th-century optical illusion of the "waterfall effect" and used this to discuss issues of motion with regard to the ever-increasing spread of the railroad in early Victorian history, drawing on J.M.W. Turner's painting Rain, Steam, Speed - the Great Western Railway (1844) to exemplify the impact of motion. This painting from the Tate is the image you see above, with Turner suggesting the rush of the train as a symbol for new industrial technology. This is one of Turner's best-known works, mostly for his handling of the swirls of paint to suggest the atmospheric conditions of the steam train. If you look closely, you can also see a minuscule white rabbit hopping just in front of the train, which scholars have interpreted as a symbol for how technology was advancing beyond nature. I've written about Turner on this blog before. I'm not a huge fan of his work, but I do think he was an amazing artist.

If the morning session was about the English-speaking art world, then the afternoon session was all about the French. My fellow co-student Karin Zonis (CUNY) presented on a heretofore unexamined French Revolution print by an unknown engraver named Duplessis, considering the work as an example of what she calls a middle-ground print, using aspects of both fine art engraving and popular prints. Phoebe Prioleau (Columbia) discussed fictional accounts by Balzac, the Goncourts, and Zola that utilize the imagery of the skin of artists' models as a metaphor about the creation of art. Emily Eastgate Brink (Stanford University) spoke about the appreciation of Japanese manga prints by Hokusai in late 19th-century France. Justine De Young (Northwestern University) gave a paper on paintings of women dressed in mourning at the 1872 Salon as new allegorical subjects for French patriotism over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. The last speaker of the day was Andrew Eschelbacher (University of Maryland), whose paper dealt with the overthrow of the independent city-state the Paris Commune in 1871 and the Third Republic's use of public monumental sculpture to consciously erase the memory of the Commune's brief, but bloody, period in French history. By the late 1880s, however, aspects of the Commune were being incorporated into French public art, as seen in the figure of Labor in the work reproduced here, Jules Dalou's The Triumph of the Republic (1889) [image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons].

According to Petra ten-Doesschate Chu in her book Nineteenth-Century European Art (2nd ed., 2006), this work shows "a larger-than-life figure representing the republic, complete with Phyrigian cap and fasces [symbols of freedom and legal order]. She stands on a globe, which rests on a chariot pulled by two lions. Symbolizing the strength of the people, the lions are led by the genius of Liberty, a young boy with a torch in his raised right hand. Additional allegorical figures--Labor, Justice, and Abundance (or Peace)--surround the chariot on the other three sides." (p.376)

Brian Lukacher (Vassar College) and Anne Higonnet (Columbia) were the respondents for the sessions. The members of the selection committee, all of whom were present, were Petra Chu (Seton Hall University), Stephen Edidin (New York Historical Society), Brian Lukacher, and Patricia Mainardi (CUNY). All in all, it was a great academic day, and I was fortunate to be part of it. The Dahesh Museum of Art is sponsoring an award for the best paper given at the symposium, so I'm sure I'll be reporting back very soon on who the winner is. I think I know who they are going to pick (no, I don't think it's me!).

UPDATE (4/5): All of the speakers received word that Andrew Eschelbacher won the Dahesh prize for the best paper presented at the conference. This wasn't a surprise to me or KZ, as we both thought he was going to get it. His paper was written and presented well, and his argument convincing, so he rightfully deserves the award.

MTA Aggravation

Permit me a moment to bitch about something. The MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority), which runs all of the subways, buses, and bridge/highway tolls for the greater New York City area, announced this morning that in fact they would be raising rates and cutting services as of May 31. They've been warning us for months about the possibility of this happening, but it was officially decided this morning. The implication was that the MTA has been waiting from Albany to have the state government assist with their budgetary shortfall, but of course Albany is in no rush to do anything for NYC. Albany has a love-hate relationship with the City. They're willing to take in all the tax revenue and tourist dollars that the City brings the state, but they hate the fact that the 5 boroughs of NYC thus become the focus of the entire state's attention. Not too long ago, when Mayor Bloomberg was begging them to make a decision about supporting the federal government's plan to help states improve mass transit systems, they couldn't even get their act together to discuss the issue, and we lost out on an opportunity for millions of dollars of revenue to improve our mass transit system. Sometimes I wonder whether NYC would be better off as its own independent state.

I realize of course that everyone is hurting financially, including all government agencies. But during an economic crisis such as this, doesn't it make more sense to somehow help the people by improving mass transit systems, so as to alleviate traffic from commuter cars? You should see the subway terminals. Very few are attractive. One or two are actually quite nice. The vast majority, however, are in desperate need of some serious cleaning. And what's with the ridiculous waste of thin plastic cards that you can only reuse if they're pay-per-ride? London has been using a permanent debit-like card for ages now! (Okay, admittedly, the tube in London is also more expensive.) A few years ago, the MTA was claiming they had a budgetary surplus, so they gave people free rides through extended passes. A year later, they were raising rates, and now they're raising them again.

It currently costs $2 to ride the subway or a bus. That's going up to $2.50. Many residents have unlimited passes though. I always buy 30-day unlimited passes that are currently $81 and allow me to ride all the subways and buses without paying another fee. That is going up to $103. Now, that's a bit of a jump to me. Admittedly, it's only $22 per month, but that works out to be $264 a year. Can I afford that? Yes, I guess so, but it means cutting back on a few splurges. For people who are making lower salaries and are dependent on the mass transit system to get them to work, this is going to make a difference, and I feel most angry for them. To make matters worse, the MTA also is planning to cut 35 bus routes and 2 subway lines completely. In addition, they're cutting back on subway service during nights and weekends. Tolls on highways/bridges are increasing as well.

People started complaining months ago when the MTA held hearings, but it had no effect. You would think they at least would have adjusted these changes to make them less severe. Supposedly there is a slight possibility that Albany may come through in time to help salvage some of this before it officially goes into effect, but I'm not holding my breath. You can read more about all this in The New York Times. You'll quickly discover by all the comments from readers that it's a mixed bag. What bothers me more than anything else is that it seems like something just isn't working at the MTA.

AHNCA Symposium (Part 1)

Next Friday, March 27th, I will be giving a conference presentation at the Sixth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art, co-sponsored by AHNCA (Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art), the Doctoral Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Dahesh Museum of Art. The title of my presentation is "Turkish Delights: The British, the Ottoman Turks, and the Great Exhibition of 1851." My abstract is below, but you can see a list of all the presentations by clicking here. My friend and fellow student Karin Zonis is speaking on "Prints of the French Revolution: The High, Middle, and Popular Styles." We did a test-run this morning, and I learned quite a bit about printmaking after the French Revolution from her talk.

If you're surprised that I'm presenting about the Ottomans, I have to admit I am too. I've always had an interest in Asian culture and I used to teach about art and religion from India, China, and Japan, but I was less familiar with the Ottoman world. Ever since I took a course last semester on the Ottoman Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries, however, I have become fascinated by their interactions with the British during the 19th century. I'm particularly interested in Sultan Abdülmecid, whom you see here (image courtesy of Wikipedia; painting in the Pera Museum in Istanbul). He reigned in Istanbul from 1839 to 1861. There is a lot one could say about this Sultan, but Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary. Since the anonymous author provides citations and an extensive amount of detailed information, I suspect the fact he had 24 wives in his harem must be true. What the entry doesn't talk about is his court favorite, Serefnaz Hanım, presumably his homosexual lover. One of my favorite quotes about this relationship comes from Çelik Gülersoy, who writes in Dolmabahçe: Palace and It's [sic] Environs (Istanbul, 1990): "When, on one occasion, the government had with the greatest difficulty managed to scrape together fifteen thousand gold purses to pay some of the wage debt they owed the construction workers, Abdümecid gave five thousand of these to Serefnaz Hanim, with whom he was infatuated at the time, and then had to distribute vast amounts of gold to his wives and concubines to keep them quiet.” (p.55)

Here is my abstract for the conference paper. Since I first submitted it, I have modified it somewhat. It's such an enormous topic that I had to make some cuts and modify my methodology a bit. In any case, wish me luck! I'll report next week about some of the other papers at the symposium.

Turkish Delights: The British, the Ottoman Turks, and the Great Exhibition of 1851
by
Roberto C. Ferrari

On May 1, 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations officially opened in London’s Hyde Park. When it closed in October, the Crystal Palace had welcomed in over six million visitors to see the products of Great Britain and other nations. Although it was not the first industrial fair, the Great Exhibition was truly the first world’s fair, as foreign lands were asked to display their own national examples of products for public consumption. Among the more eager international participants were the Ottoman Turks. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire had been Europe’s most formidable enemy, but by the eighteenth century they were smaller and a less serious threat. By the mid-1800s, the Ottoman Turks were regularly interacting with Western Europe, and Great Britain was one of their closest allies. Although they had helped liberate Greece from the Turks, the British now worked with the Ottomans to help modernize their empire, encouraging the Tanzimat reformation laws that forever transformed Turkey, and in 1854 fighting with them against the Russians in the Crimean War. Thus, the 1851 Great Exhibition was for the Ottoman Turks an excellent opportunity to display not only their empire’s industrial productivity, but also their strong ties with Great Britain.

Situated in a prime location in the Crystal Palace, at the northeast corner where the nave and transept intersected, their pavilion was boldly labeled “Turkey.” It was large in size, surpassed only by India among the Eastern nations. Arranged like an Eastern bazaar, the pavilion hosted a panoply of Turkish delights, from spices, animal skins, and swords, to hookahs, embroidered silks, and a sled. Yet, despite the pavilion’s size and impressive display, it is startling that over the past 150 years few (if any) scholars have considered the impact of the Ottoman Turks and their pavilion at the Great Exhibition. Indeed, the historiography on the fair largely has focused on, not surprisingly, what the Great Exhibition tells us about Victorian British culture. Only recently have scholars such as Jeffrey Auerbach, Lara Kriegel, and others begun to consider the international scope of the Great Exhibition, and much of this discussion has been on India because of its importance as a British colony. Until late 2008, no article in English had discussed the Ottoman Turks at the fair. This new article by Francesca Vanke considers their presence from a historical perspective; however, she neglects to incorporate the visual culture that provides us with insight into Anglo-Turkish relations at this time.

In this paper, then, I will discuss some of these examples of visual culture, such as published lithographs of the Turkish pavilion and its wares, the architectural floor plan of the pavilion, and an illustrated guide to the fair that was written for children. More importantly, and thus coursing through this discussion, will be an assessment of Edward Said’s ideas about colonialist attitudes towards the East, first published in his book Orientalism in 1978. Scholars have taken to heart Said’s theories, with Linda Nochlin’s subsequent groundbreaking work among the more demonstrative examples of Orientalist attitudes in Western art. However, in more recent years, other scholars such as Emily Weeks have begun to redress Said’s (and thus Nochlin’s) essentialism in art historical discourse. Ultimately, by considering some of the primary source material in English on the Ottomans, such as news articles from the London Times and the works of visual culture mentioned above, I will demonstrate that indeed both Saidian and post-Saidian interpretations are necessary and apparent in an examination of Anglo-Turkish relations and the Ottoman presence at the Great Exhibition. Indeed, the products of the Ottomans—their Turkish delights—were greatly welcomed, as long as their producers—the Turks—knew their place and didn’t intend to stay.

NYC Moments (1)

We've all had those moments where we've entered a room and we hear someone say something like, "My God, he's huge!", and we stand there befuddled for a moment wondering who they're talking about and whether they're making reference to his career or to a certain appendage. This "walking into the middle of a conversation" syndrome can be embarrassing or startling, but you have to admit it's worth the experience if for no other reason then the story that comes out of it. This thought occurred to me earlier today after two classic New York City experiences. But I didn't exactly walk into conversations. Rather, I walked into classic NYC Moments.

The first one happened yesterday morning as I was on my way to work. I have about a 15-minute walk from my house to the 4 subway in Brooklyn Heights, so anything (or nothing) can happen on that walk. As I got closer, I realized there were enormous trucks and trailers everywhere, some with lighting equipment, others with cables and cameras. I kept walking and watched a gaggle of teenaged-like people snacking on breakfast foods at the catering truck, and I realized I had walked onto a film set. Television and movie crews film regularly in NYC, and they love Brooklyn for its brownstones and residential feel. My own neighborhood has been featured in Moonstruck and the Spiderman movies. Now, if I watched more television, I might have been tickled pink to be able to identify the stars of Gossip Girl, for that was what was filming, but alas I cannot tell you who I saw. The show films regularly at Packer Collegiate Institute, usually during periods when they're closed (they're on spring break right now). It's a private school whose Tudor architecture suits the snooty rich kid soap opera environment perfectly. I couldn't care less about the show, but it was fun to think I had very briefly stumbled onto a television production set.

The second experience was a little less fun. I was leaving work on the Upper East Side and decided to walk a different route to the subway. As I turned from Park Avenue onto 77th Street, I was taken aback by all the news crews. I followed their cameras, and I realized I was standing outside Lenox Hill Hospital. This is where the actress Natasha Richardson had been brought after she fell unconscious from her skiing accident. I stopped for a moment, looking at the newscasters. I didn't recognize anyone, and so I started to go on my way. But then something made me stop again, and I looked back at the hospital. I realized that at that very moment her husband Liam Neeson, her children, and probably her mother and aunt, the Redgrave sisters, were in there, hoping and praying for her recovery. It was another NYC moment, the realization that while I knew she had been brought here and had heard about it on the television news that morning, to actually walk by the hospital and realize this was happening then and there gave me a completely different sense about the reality of what had happened to her. (As I've been writing this, I've checked online again, and Natasha Richardson has died. Click here to read her obituary in The New York Times. She was only 45 years old.)

Anything can happen in NYC, and it usually does. These two very different experiences both made me feel like I had walked into the middle of something, and I had. It's called life. We forget so easily that while we go about our own business, going to work and meetings, eating lunch, shopping, whatever, other people everywhere around us are living their own lives. Some are working hard as actors on a television shoot. Others are ringing up sales at a cash register. Others are booking vacations. And then others are praying over their sick loved one while news crews wait outside to know if their mother/wife/daughter has died. It is disturbing to realize that the world that exists in our own head is not the center of the universe. It is only one of over eight billion parts of the same universe, and they are all moving, all acting, all living, at the very same time, in the very same city. I find that synchronicity unnerving, mind-boggling, and comforting all at the same time.

A wise woman reminded me earlier this evening that life is about the journey and not the destiny. So can there be a better place to live an exciting journey than in New York City? I think not.

UPDATE (3/20): Just to show you how frequently film crews are in NYC shooting, by total coincidence my friend TF over at the New York Portraits blog posted an entry talking about the same thing: "We Prefer The Term 'Background Actor."

Solomon in Italy

As many readers of bklynbiblio know, I have done much of my art historical work on Simeon Solomon (1840-1905). I posted about Solomon on his birthday last October. This Anglo-Jewish artist made a career for himself among the greater Pre-Raphaelite circle, until he was largely erased from their history after being arrested for homosexual crimes in 1873. During the height of his career in the 1860s, he took three trips to Italy where he toured the sites, socialized with British and American artists and writers, learned a great deal about ancient and Renaissance art, and painted quite a few important pictures. I recently was asked to write an article about Solomon for the premiere issue of an academic electronic journal, and I'm pleased to announce that this article has just been published online and can be accessed for free. The title is "Simeon Solomon in Italy: The First Trip, 1866-1867" (click here to read it).

The bilingual (Italian-English) e-journal is called Ravenna, and it focuses on 19th-century writers and artists who had a connection to Italy. The e-journal is part of THE OSCHOLARS, a series of free journals that deals with aspects of late 19th- and early 20th-century British art, literature, and culture, with its focus on Oscar Wilde and his world. Ravenna is edited by Luca Caddia and Elisa Pizzotto.

The image you see here is one of Solomon's best works, an oil painting entitled Bacchus which he painted while he was in Rome. The picture is marked in the lower left with his monogram SS and the number 3 and 1867, signifying he painted this in March 1867. The subject is of Solomon's own design, and it is one example of various works in which he experiments with subjects that reflect aspects of his own homosexuality during a time when the expression of such feelings was unlawful. The subject is the ancient Roman god Bacchus (Dionysus in ancient Greece), the god of wine and sensual pleasures. You can see grape leaves making up a crown in his hair, and he carries grapes hanging from the thyrsus, or wooden staff, which he carries over his shoulder. In mythology, Bacchus was a youthful, bisexual god whose followers included wild animals like panthers and cougars, as well as satyrs (youths who were part-goat) and Maenads, beautiful maidens who turned into ravenous creatures when they succumbed to the intoxication of wine. Walter Pater, the doyenne of Victorian Aestheticism, saw this picture exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1867 and later noted in his essay "A Study of Dionysus" about the work, describing the figure as “the god of the bitterness of wine, ‘of things too sweet’; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup.” Because of the god's association with wine, his worship related to the release of inhibitions associated with drunkenness, including sexual licentiousness. In the play The Bacchae by the 4th-century BCE playwright Euripides, puritanical King Pentheus tries to stamp out the worship of the wine god and in turn is fooled by Bacchus into spying on the Maenads dressed as one of them. But when they discover him, they tear him apart and eat his flesh. The lesson here was never to fool with the gods. To see this painting and many other works by Solomon, go to the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery in England, where they have the largest public collection of works by Solomon and many other Pre-Raphaelite artists, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones.

Shakespeare Portrait?

Since my last few posts have included discussion of the Tudors and a discovered portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, it seems rather timely that earlier this week the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust released to the public what they contend is an official portrait of William Shakespeare (left). It's been given the name the Cobbe portrait because it has been owned by the Cobbe family since the 18th century. However, its original provenance was in the collection of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare's most important patron. It is also worth noting that, despite his marriage to Anne Hathaway (not the actress), some scholars argue that Southampton and Shakespeare were lovers, citing the bard's sonnets which convey male-male sentiments of love and may have been written to Southampton.

The search for portraits of Shakespeare has been something people have spent much time debating over. There is, in fact, an excellent page on Wikipedia called "Portraits of Shakespeare" that shows you what many of them look like, including the most recent Cobbe portrait. But much like the situation with Leonardo da Vinci, I find myself wondering what all the hullabaloo is about. Why should we care what he looks like? I mean, it's interesting to know, but do we need to know him physically in order to understand his writings? Do we need to know what Leonardo da Vinci looked like to appreciate his paintings and drawings? Not really. That said, it is fun to speculate on all of this. Now, I am not an expert on the Northern Renaissance, so I can only cite what I've picked up from others, but one of the things I've read is that Elizabethan portraiture was meant to idealize the sitters and not portray them as they actually looked. Charlotte Higgins from the Guardian newspaper also has pointed out other reasons to doubt this is an actual portrait of Shakespeare. For instance, the Cobbe portrait is supposed to resemble the Janssen Portrait, but apparently that was repainted at a later date so as to make the subject look like Shakespeare. As Higgins points out then, "What we are essentially left with ... is a portrait of just about the right period of a fellow with roughly the right kind of hairdo."

So we're back to square one. Is it Shakespeare? Professor Stanley Wells, Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, believes so, and has made it the center of an exhibition called Shakespeare Found: A Life Portrait. Is it cool to think it might be? Absolutely! Does it make a difference about how we appreciate Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Tempest? No. What does interest me, however, is the news coverage over the find. Articles have appeared in numerous newspapers across Europe and America. Then there are all the subsequent naysayers, many of whom are associated with newspapers as well (see Verlyn Klinkenborg's op ed piece in The New York Times, for instance). Comparatively speaking, the Leonardo portrait barely got even an ounce of the same amount of coverage! What does that say about art and literature? Is there an assumption people are more interested in Shakespeare than Leonardo? If so, why? I think there may be something to be said that people believe literature--even written in poetic Shakespearean language--is more approachable than visual art. Indeed, how many out there have read Shakespeare as compared to studying paintings by Leonardo? It seems like something to think about...

Power of a Pup

Newsweek magazine has a weekly feature called "My Turn," which gives the public an opportunity to submit personal essays about things that matter most to them. Most of the stories often relate to issues that families often deal with, whether its children or the elderly, politics or religion, and so on. This week's issue, however, is a heartwarming story about how a dog helped heal a family's emotional wounds: "The Dog That Made Us a Family" by Ginny Blanford. After a close friend of Blanford and her husband passed away, the couple took in their friend's orphaned child. The girl had never seemed to grieve over the loss of her mother. After the girl begged for a dog, they relented and brought home from a shelter Molly, "a regal chow mix, chestnut red with a feathery tail that wagged all the time," whose picture you see here. Unfortunately, the dog ran away almost immediately afterwards. Their daughter was so devastated, she broke down and sobbed openly for the first time, not only about Molly, but about her mother and all of her feelings. The good news is that Molly the dog eventually did come home after some adventures of her own. Blanford writes that Molly helped break down the walls their daughter had built around her because of her grief, and as a result made them a family. It just goes to show you how important pets are in our lives. It's all about the power of a pup!