dual personalities

Those wonderful Romans of the late Republic and early Empire were a sophisticated lot. They had artistic talent

Garden fresco from Livia’s villa at Prima Porta

or at least the taste to recognize it.

Garden room detail

Although it was a turbulent time, some people had their priorities straight. Take Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), for example. An old-school intellectual and statesman, he understood the importance of reading,

“Read at every pause; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goes out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.”

and of books.

“For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.”

He also realized that if the Republic were to last, its citizens must know their history.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”

I could quote on and on, but you get my drift. Aside from technology, there’s nothing new under the sun — or at least not much new since Roman times. Unfortunately, the classics are no longer considered ‘relevant’ and have dropped out of most school curricula. Did they fill the resulting void with something equally wise and useful? I think not.

Why not get curious and read some of the Latin classics? There’s so much to choose from, including The Aenead, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Catullus’ love poetry (not my thing), Livy’s History of Rome (wonderful, wonderful storytelling), Ovid’s Metamorphosis (kinky myths), Plautus’ comedies (middle Republic), and loads of stoic philosophy. In other words, there’s something for everyone. But if you don’t have any literature handy, you can always watch Gladiator, which, though not historically accurate, kind of gets the flavor right.

In any case, have a wonderful weekend!

*Cicero

Thinking positive!

I don’t know about you, but we have hardly seen the sun in January here in flyover country. They are saying it may come out on Sunday…That would be nice. It will be February!

I guess the Super Bowl is coming up, and I guess I’ll root for the Chiefs since they are a Missouri team.

The boy thinks that is sacrilegious or something. But he has still not gotten over the Rams moving to L.A. I probably won’t watch either.

It was Crazy Hair day at the wee babes’ school…

The wee laddie wins I think.

Yesterday at work we had cake to celebrate the end of my cancer treatments!

Wasn’t that  nice?

Do you have plans for the weekend? I am going on a retreat with the vestry at my church. I am the newest member since I was elected at the annual meeting last Sunday.

I know. I said I would never again after I went off the vestry 11 years ago. But never say never. It’ll be fine.

I thought this was good. I like Chris Stapleton, don’t you?

And, oh…

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)

Have you come across the #dollypartonchallenge? As we’ve discussed before, Dolly Parton is very cool right now, and her Instagram presence in particular is thriving. After she posted a version of the below (representing herself), celebrities followed suit in droves.

DN sent me the T. S. Eliot version this morning. “Is there is anything more blog-appropriate than Dolly Parton x T. S. Eliot content?” he asked. Hmm, not really. So there you have it — a slice of meme culture for your Thursday morning!

Well, I had plans to write a blog post about how I don’t understand the amount of alcohol consumed by characters in books and movies, but I couldn’t find the quotes I wanted. I’m reading The Sun Also Rises, so booze consumption is on the mind. I mean, I had two glasses of wine at a party ten years ago and I’m still described as so fun. We all know that is latin for lush.

Pardon my french. 

That screengrab is making me laugh too hard. But I digress.

Jake Barnes aside, I’m also thinking about Jane and Dagobert in Delano Ames mysteries. And Nick and Nora in The Thin Man. I do not understand how these characters function, let alone function the next day. I mean just watching this montage makes me want a drink and gives me a headache. Regardless, Nick and Nora are the ultimate in style and over-drinking. They make me wish I drank martinis.

I’ll have to remember this trick at work.

And speaking of over-drinking, on Monday, I coerced my co-workers into crashing the photo op in the Governor’s Office with the Stanley Cup. It turned out our invitation had been lost in the mail. I was impressed because they said the trophy visited Springfield (I’m assuming at the Bass Prop Shop) and 6,000 people came. That’s a lot of non-St. Louisans!

I think it is so nice when everyone in the picture is looking at a different camera.

Of course, I shudder to think of the inelegant drinking associated with that 37 pound trophy.

*The Sun Also Rises

Boy did I need a weekend. Even though last week was a short work week, it did me in. I spent all of Thursday in staff retreat workshops, and on Friday had to fix an HR fiasco that involved hours on the phone and lots of hand wringing. In the past, it would have been a real recipe for “let’s get margaritas immediately,” but these days I am just taking a lot of restorative hot baths.

We are still chipping away at getting the guest room in order. I made a lot of progress organizing the closet and my desk, though I also managed to drop something on a pile of frames and make a huge mess of broken glass. You win some, you lose some…

… and then you try on glasses! I went into DC to hang out with a friend who lives around the corner from the Warby Parker store. My optometrist told me I was overdue for a new pair and I don’t disagree. I ended up with a pair suspiciously similar to my father’s. (Not the overly-large ones above.) My father also gave me the “blanket coat” I’m wearing — clearly I was channeling the OM.

DC rooftop sunset

Going into DC is not my favorite — I’m really much happier in my little neighborhood. Cue a Sunday of sleeping in, perusing the farmer’s market, taking a walk, and cleaning up a bit. I’m OK with a quiet life!

As you know, I like to look at houses — houses for sale in obscure places; historic homes to visit, and photos of houses that, for better or worse, their owners proudly display on the Internet for the world to see. For some reason, staircases have been catching my eye lately and I’ve been struck by how wildly they vary. There are the over-the-top palatial monstrosities designed to signal wealth and power.

This is absurdly ornate and not at all aesthetically pleasing, especially with that color scheme.

I can’t help thinking that these are less likely to inspire admiration than the rebellion of the proletariat!

Castel Peles, a 19th century Romanian conceit.

Call me bourgeoise, but I much prefer the clean, restrained lines of Georgian and Federal architecture.

This is the Silas Deane house in Westerfield, CT. To be honest, I had a hard time finding a photo that I liked well enough to use. This house needs some better wall art and an oriental rug, and I’d have preferred blue paint, but the point is that the stairs are as utilitarian as they are beautiful. The style is tastefully reserved — just what we need in this era of wild abandon!

Stairs also make me think of Shirley Temple,

and Christopher Robin.

A. A. Milne understood how attractive stairs are to children. I would have included his wonderful poem Halfway Down but I could not get it to format correctly, so a link will have to do.

Of course, a staircase can also be dark and mysterious,

Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase (1946)

and very, very dramatic. Think of the baby carriage plunging down the monumental stairs in Odessa in the famous massacre scene in The Battleship Potemkin (1925),

or the climax of Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Clearly, staircases do more than help us  move from one floor to another; they reflect our values and often project how we want others to see us, though admittedly we can’t always choose our staircase style. In my home the staircase is enclosed and has a door at the bottom. I now realize that although the arrangement would not have been my first choice, it suits my intensely introverted family perfectly. What does your staircase say about you?

I mentioned that this past weekend we saw an exhibit at The Phillips Collection, “Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life.” The Phillips Collection has always been a favorite museum of mine — appealingly small, it makes for a manageable outing, and its collection is largely made up of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century works. Since our university partnered with the museum, we even get free admission!

A selfie from a couple years ago — probably our last visit

Pierre Bonnard is one of my favorite artists and someone I discovered at the Phillips. My favorite painting,

“The Open Window” (1921), shows you what I like about Bonnard: his colors, domestic scenes, generally relaxing subjects, and windows. Nearly all of his paintings have them!

I always figured it was kind of unsophisticated of me to favor the Impressionists (with whom I had always lumped Bonnard), since what I like above all are paintings that are, basically, pretty. One thing I learned at this new exhibit is that Bonnard wasn’t technically an Impressionist, he was part of a group called the “Nabis,” who came after Impressionism.

In late fall of 1888 in Paris, a group of young, like-minded art students banded together after seeing a small abstract landscape by Paul Sérusier that he had made under the guidance of Paul Gauguin. Serusier’s boldly-colored composition, built up from broad patches of greens, yellows, blues, and reds arranged decoratively on the flat surface of a cigar box lid, marked a radical break from the naturalistic palette and broken brushwork of the Impressionists.

By the time of their first exhibition in 1891, the group had assumed the moniker “The Nabis,” a transliteration of the Hebrew navi meaning “prophet.” Their visionary approach asserted the primacy of form and color as abstract equivalents of human feeling. The Nabis’ emphasis on an artistic language of suggestion was in sympathy with the ideals of Symbolist writers, poets, and musicians, with whom the Nabis closely collaborated.

(from the exhibit description linked above)

Lots of kitchen tables…

and doorways…

and mother-child pairs…

Among the paintings by Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Bonnard and others, there were plenty of wonderfully colorful domestic scenes and natural landscapes. But in addition to something like this…

…we also saw some more abstract works, like this:

Large-scale faces! Ink pen mixed with oils!

A 4-color lithograph

I hadn’t ever seen Bonnard’s work in other mediums. Over time, the Nabis took on more urban subjects and ventured to street scenes as they also experimented with new formats like the lithograph. The placard for the above piece by Bonnard quotes him explaining that the limitations of printmaking, particularly limitations in color, taught him more about palette than paint — contrast becomes more important when working with fewer colors.

I was happy that this exhibit taught me something new about one of my favorite artists. The placard I just mentioned is a good example of another of The Phillips Collection’s strengths: exhibits like this tend to be well curated. Informative without being too much or too condescending. Taking the time to read the material throughout the exhibit means navigating the other visitors who often have no regard for personal space, but it’s generally worth it.

Museum shops are a different story though, huh? They rarely stock postcards of the paintings I liked best. I almost purchased a set of Bonnard notecards, until I realized the selection only included two paintings, and they weren’t ones that I like! I did, however, appreciate the inscription inside the box:

Pierre Bonnard painted what he found enjoyable–the comforts of the middle class, the intimacy of the kitchen, pets, children, pretty women, flowering fruit trees, bountiful tables, luxuriant gardens–and his art evokes pure happiness with its vibrant colors.”

What a guy.

“Early Spring” (1905)

Instagram reminds me that six years ago, I walked home from work in the snow. Now, that particular image was not from the night that all of New York City was under a curfew (they shut the subway down at like 8p) because of an impending “snowpacalypse” and ABC booked hotel rooms for everyone who didn’t live within walking distance of the office. Of course, the logistics desk didn’t plan how to transport people from the office to the Times Square hotels after midnight, so the show anchor forced the shuttle they kept on duty just for her (naturally) to drop everyone off. The whole thing was made even more ridiculous because the snow only reached about four inches. My instagram from that night is below.

Here I am in the middle of Columbus Avenue at 1:30 a.m. I’ve had those boots longer than I thought.

I mention this because for the third week in a row, the weather people in Missouri are calling for rain, freezing rain, or snow and calling it a “three-day weather event.” No one knows for sure what we will get and where. But we better get prepared. And we should probably cancel anything we have planned because we can’t trust people to make their own decisions about whether or not to venture out in the weather. 

On Friday, all of St. Louis and Mid-MO canceled school (and probably Kansas City, too) for some cold rain. On Monday, what was forecast to be “flurries” in the weather app–and only around 3 p.m.–turned out to be an all-day snowfest resulting in untreated roads and numerous accidents. Including one that shut down westbound traffic on I-70 for several hours. I can’t decide if the weather people have gotten worse or the news people are more apt to dramatize the weather to gin up drama and ratings. I’m sure it’s a combination. Because we know weather is still weather.

And in the year of our Lord 2020, the inability to accurately predict the weather really gives new meaning to one of my favorite bible verses, “The wind blows where it wills; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from, or where it is going. So with everyone who is born of the spirit.” (John 3.8)