Friday photo

Washington Monument. Washington, DC, February 2007.

Today's image features our National Phallus, the venerable Washington Monument. Begun in 1848, but not completed until 1884.¹ It's the usual project, overly ambitious and poorly-administered, soon running over budget and sitting half-completed for a generation before someone decided to just finish the damned thing. Which they finally did, after they gave up the plan for the Greek temple surround the base. And it wasn't even a government project.²

The Monument has been in the news lately, of course, because of cracks discovered after the recent East Coast earthquake; more have been discovered in the wake of Hurricane Irene. Reportedly, the Monument is sound and not about to fall over, but that hasn't stopped our modern-day Jeremiahs from discerning God's wrath in natural phenomena. Pat Robertson begins with "I don’t want to get weird on this, but," and realizing it's already too late for that, continues, "it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power. It has been the symbol of our great nation. We look at the monument and we say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it. Is that a sign from the Lord?” Not to be outdone, a certain Professor of Practical Theology³ at Southeastern University speculates on what message God might be sending, asking, "If the crack in the monument is, in fact, a God-sent ‘sign’ for the moment, then what might God be saying? And to whom is He speaking?"

I sometimes think God is just some great, vaporous infant. He cries every time He's unhappy, which is most of the time, but He can't tell you exactly what the problem is.

Perhaps He's just gotten around to noticing that the founder of His Own Country was honored by constructing a pagan edifice. The Washington Monument is an obelisk, a style of monument that first adorned Egyptian temples and has no Christian connotations whatsoever -- although the things are so cool that even the Vatican still keeps one that was erected by the beloved Emperor Caligula.

We needn't be surprised at this. Who can't admire the architecture of the Classical Age? If you look around Washington, DC, you'll see a lot more references to classical Rome and Greece than you do to Christian sources, and the buildings all resemble Greek temples more than Christian cathedrals. Both Rome and Greece also copied the Egyptians' obelisks. The Romans not only built their own, but they plundered them from Egypt, too, long before Napoleon began the modern tradition of collection development, so that today only half of all surviving Egyptian obelisks are still found in Egypt.

Frankly, I don't mind a bit that, in honoring our primary Founding Father, Americans also honored one of the most accomplished cultures of the ancient world.



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1. Which makes me think of Orwell's 1984, which was published in 1948 and gained its title by reversing that last two digits. But I can't quite make any other connections, so I guess I'll have to drop the whole thing.

2. If you look closely at the photo, even though it's backlit, you can see the difference in color between the marble in the original base and that used to complete the monument.

3. It's hard to even type that without giggling, isn't it?

Hallowed ground

Baseball and 7-Eleven, symbols of American cultural imperialism at the site of the world's first nuclear assault. McDonald's, by contrast, maintains a discreet 2000' distance across the river.

A linguistics scholar at Western Washington is hoping to recover unknown African history by translating an almost-forgotten writing system:

The Lost Script (at the Boston Globe)

Starting at least in the 10th century, African holy men who had converted to Islam and learned Arabic began to modify Arabic writing to enable them to spread the religion more easily. The resulting Ajami script - the name comes from the Arabic word for stranger - helped make Islam accessible to shepherds and other commoners who could not understand Arabic.
[...]
But officially speaking, it has also been widely ignored. Uncounted Ajami manuscripts squirreled away across the continent have gone untranslated, even unseen, by scholars. Even in African countries where it is still used, the script lacks government recognition. In French colonial archives from Africa, Ngom says, Ajami documents remain classified as “unreadable Arabic” - based on the mistaken notion that writing in African languages simply did not exist.

via the Archives Listserv

The Little Leather Library

A few months ago, I found a set of miniature books at Mom's house that looked rather old and which I don't recall ever seeing before. They were sitting in the garage, which has the typical lack of climate-control - so I brought them home for better care.

They turned out to be a set of books from the Little Leather Library, which published over a hundred classic titles from about 1916-1926. The brown book in the photo is one of the earlier editions, but the rest (with the green covers) would date from between 1920-1924. I had imagined that Mom's parents bought these for their kids sometime while they were growing up, but they actually predate her parents' marriage in 1925.

I don't know whether it was my grandmother or grandfather who bought them, but they would have been affordable to a young adult or a newlywed couple. They were mainly sold in sets, at prices that came to about 10¢ per copy. Early editions were sold through Woolworths department stores, but later they were marketed directly through the mail. I expect these were a set, because otherwise it's hard to imagine my conservative grandparents choosing two Oscar Wilde titles. LLL also published many books of the Bible, but grandma and grandpa would have already had Bibles.

The Little Leather Library was all about bringing classic literature to the masses, at as cheap a price as possible. Classic literature, of course, meant out-of-copyright, royalty-free literature; to further reduce costs, the original leather covers were quickly replaced by cheaper synthetic covers. However, the expensive look remained, as the publishers understood that middle America not only wanted good literature to read, but wanted nice things to display in their homes. One of the publishers even later coined the term "furniture books" to describe volumes which sold on appearance as much as literary content.* Their success can be gauged by the fact that the little books aren't rare: you can find them on E-Bay for about $3-4 dollars per book.

As a point of interest, LLL founder Albert Boni went on to found the Modern Library; the men who bought the company from him, Harry Scherman and Maxwell Sackheim, later started the Book-of-the-Month Club.


For more, see Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire , or Little Leather Library


Titles:
Robert Browning, Poems and Plays
Robert Burns, Poems and Songs
Samuel T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems
W.S. Gilbert, The "Bab" Ballads
Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Addresses
Thomas Babington Macauley, Lays of Ancient Rome
Thomas Babington Macauley, Lays of Ancient Rome (misidentified on the cover as Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish)
Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisande
Olive Schreiner, Dreams
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Enoch Arden and other Poems
Henry David Thoreau, Friendship and other Essays
George Washington, Speeches and Letters
Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol and other Peoms
Oscar Wilde, Salomé
Multiple authors, Fifty Best Poems of America

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* No to accuse my grandparents of mere pretension, however. Grandma was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and raised a family that valued education.

Friday photo

Lake Hotel, Yellowstone National Park. October 2004.

Lake Hotel was my first location in Yellowstone. When I arrived to sell souvenirs in the gift shop in 1988, the building had just undergone a three-year renovation and everyone was going around cooing about how beautiful it looked. It was my first sight of the building, but they told me how it had been allowed to become something of an eyesore during the 1980's. The new concessioner, TW Recreational Services, had agreed to pour a bunch of money into the hotel and the results were good.

The building itself neatly recapitulates the cultural history of Yellowstone. It open in 1891, financed by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Although the NPRR didn't operate directly inside the park, they did carry most of the traffic -in fact, they were the driving force behind creating a national park in the first place - and were willing to invest money in making Yellowstone a desirable destination. It began as a rather plain building, but was remodeled in 1904-1905 in a colonial style that sounds bizarrely out of place in the Rocky Mountains, but is remarkably affective nonetheless.

In the early days, well-heeled visitors would pay for packaged tours that took them from hotel to hotel on carefully-scheduled stagecoaches (after 1915, in open-topped buses), where they would be greeted by singing hotel employees. Each of the western national parks had a grand hotel: the Ahwahnee in Yosemite, the Many Glacier in Glacier, or El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. Yellowstone's grand hotel was not the one at Lake, but rather the Canyon Hotel (which no longer survives).

Lake Hotel itself only barely survived. Throughout the 1920's and 1930's, more visitors were bringing their own cars to the park and chose to sleep in the cheaper campgrounds and lodge cabins. The hotels, built to cater to the wealthy and genteel, were fast becoming anachronisms is this new world of mass consumer culture. One wing of the hotel (oddly perpendicular to the rest of the building) was torn down in 1940 and there were even plans to demolish the entire structure except the kitchen, which would become part of a "new Lake Lodge" complex consisting entirely of cabins.

But WWII intervened. There were few visitors and no money for new construction. Then, when the war ended, the visitors returned in hordes. In 1941, park visitation had topped half a million for the very first time; after 1947, over a million visitors were arriving every year. Those people needed beds, so the notion of tearing down a perfectly functional building was scrapped and Lake Hotel was saved.

With the demise of Canyon Hotel, and the refurbishing effort of the 1980's, Lake Hotel is now the fancy-pants accommodations in Yellowstone, with lakeside rooms running $216 and a nightly string quartet in the sun room. I don't have that kind of money, so it's a good thing I worked there. It's still one of my favorite places in the world.

On insularity

It takes a special level of cluelessness to allow a multinational corporation to publish ads of a Hindu goddess eating hamburgers. And Burger King has achieved it.

The Elgin Marbles in the news

Italy returns piece of Parthenon Marbles to Greece

The British Museum still hasn't given up their holdings, which represent the majority of the marbles.

Envelopes

Back in the days before email and cell phones, my siblings and I used to send a lot of snail mail, often with 10-page letters, always with newspaper clippings. We had a lot of Big Thoughts back then. But part of the fun was decorating the envelopes, usually with irreverent headline clippings and similar odds and ends. Good ol' post office - they'd deliver a letter to my address, even if it was addressed to Dan Quayle or the Knight of the Living Dead or whatever other random thought had popped into someone's head.

James and I certainly didn't have the drawing skills to do this, however. Pity.

Revenge of the turds

A giant inflatable dog turd brought down a power line after being blown away from a Swiss museum.


Insert your own all-too-obvious joke below.

Fascinating fountain

From Fukuoka, Japan:

Bookstores

Richard Cohen weighs in on the decline of books as the essential means of reading:

It's really tough being a book lover in a digitized world

But then there's this paragraph:

I never buy from Amazon unless I have to. I buy from actual bookstores. You go there and people are browsing or having coffee or staring into open laptops and pretending they're writers or something.

What!? You still find people in bookstores? Then what's the #v*%ing problem? I love books, too, but sometimes the medium is not the message. As long as reading remains vibrant, I don't care how it's being done.

Archaeology in Paris

Via Global Museum, I learn that Paris is 3000 years older than previously believed. I'm annoyed that I didn't hear this until just now.

Forgeries at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

Revealed: one third of Brooklyn Museum’s Coptic collection is fake

Unlike most of the other articles I found on this topic, this piece from The Art Newspaper discusses what makes the fakes recognizable as such ... which is, of course, a more interesting story than the mere fact that forgeries have found their way into a museum.

Living in a puzzle

An architectural designer builds a mystery into a Manhattan apartment

Roman d20

So what's Latin for Dungeons & Dragons? I thought 20-sided dice were a rather recent innovation but, no, here's one from 1800 years ago. The lot notes at Christie's say

Several polyhedra in various materials with similar symbols are known from the Roman period. Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used.

I have to wonder if they were used for games, for fortune-telling, or both?

Alexander Hamilton house is moved

I hadn't heard about this before, but Alexander Hamilton's house was just moved down the street into Harlem's St. Nicholas Park. Back in the day, it was a quiet country home. Now ... seems Harlem has changed a little over the years. Moving the house to the park will restore a little hint of its original character.

The article mentions the project being fought in court. This article explains that it's just a dispute over which way the house should face, not an attempt to halt the move altogether. This NYT article also contains more information.

Don't let Indiana Jones near this

Rare Bust of Wrinkled Caesar Found

Owning history

Afarensis reviews James Cuno's Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage and I could scarcely agree more with this statement from the book:

All cultures are dynamic, mongrel creations, interrelated such that we all have a stake in their preservation. National retentionist cultural property laws deny this basic truth. They depend on the myth of pure, static, distinct, national cultures. And not just about living cultures, but about ancient cultures, too. They define and seek to regulate access to ancient cultures on the grounds that they belong to the modern nation as the work of its descendents and the origins of its modern culture and identity. They promote a sectarian view of culture and encourage the politics of identity at a time when nationalism and sectarian violence are resurgent in the world.

Well said.

Library pics for the prurient

Hot Library Smut.
Go ahead. Check it out. No one's looking.

Romantic baseball cards, 1910

From Yale's Beinecke Library, via Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities:


Less risque:



Puts "America's pastime" in a new light.