Mona Lisa

From the WSJ story.

the Mona Lisa is, technically speaking, a very great work of art. But is that really obvious? Well, it would be if we could still see the thing. Unfortunately, like the dollar bill and the American flag, it has assumed a pall of such impenetrable familiarity that we no longer see it at all.

But if ever you succeed in seeing the painting as people saw it in centuries past, you will discover something astounding: The Mona Lisa looks entirely different from what we have been led to believe. To many observers, this is the one supreme masterpiece, the unarguable bedrock of our visual culture, the painterly equivalent of the Parthenon, Chartres and the Taj Mahal. In fact, it is anything but that. It is a mysterious, shifting, elusive thing, and it was that very ambiguity that so confounded and compelled the attention of all who saw it in the past.


From the web.














Like most of the portraits of this period, and like most of Leonardo’s portraits, the Mona Lisa is a half-length of a seated woman (it is just possible to make out the arm of the chair in which she sits.) The face is an odd compromise between the general and the particular. Representing Leonardo’s preoccupation with anatomy, the face expresses unparalleled naturalism, yet it remains largely an androgynous type, one that recurs in Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rock” and in his depiction of St. John.

After the eye has accounted for such generalizing impulses, suddenly it is drawn to the incongruous perspectival and anatomical perfection of the hands and midriff, which are angled away from the picture plane. Those hands embody the scientific naturalism that began among the Lombard Herbalists of the late 14th century and would be revived, a century after Leonardo, in Caravaggio and his followers.

From the Louvre.

A reputation made ...

Once a reputation is made ... this book is not yet out, and it has 135 holds on it already.

Letter by Lincoln, Lost for Decades, Is Returned

National Archives - President Lincoln wrote the letter five days before the Gettysburg Address.























A letter Lincoln wrote in 1863 is back with the National Archives, nearly 70 years after it was torn from its original volume.















The letter, written to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, was donated to the archives by Lawrence M. Cutler, a private collector from Arizona who bought it a few years ago.

Lincoln wrote the letter on Nov. 14, 1863 — five days before the Gettysburg Address — on behalf of Robert Stevens, the recently fired head of the United States Mint in San Francisco. The president directed Mr. Chase to allow Mr. Stevens, who was the son-in-law of a deceased senator and friend of Lincoln’s, to either have a copy of or be allowed to examine the files explaining why he was fired.

Horse Soldiers

A patron asked for this book: Horse soldiers: the extraordinary story of a band of U.S. soldiers who rode to victory in Afghanistan, by Doug Stanton

Hold that book

David Baldacci's newest, First Family, has 630 holds on the first 333 copies. Now, that's a best-seller.














Not to be outdone, James Patterson's newest, 8th Confession, has 753 on the first 375 copies.

Summers with Lincoln

Summers with Lincoln: looking for the man in the monuments. (2008). James A. Percoco.
New York : Fordham University Press.

Fun read. Informative. For the devoted Lincolnite, mostly, but good for everyone who wants to learn some history.

When Korean Culture Flourished

View Slideshow

Mention is made of the Imjin War, 1592-1598.

Two Japanese invasions of Korea and subsequent battles on the Korean peninsula took place from 1592 to 1598. Toyotomi Hideyoshi led the newly unified Japan into the first invasion (1592-1593) with the professed goal of conquering Korea, the Jurchens, and Ming Dynasty China.^[7] The second invasion (1594-1596) was aimed rather solely as a retaliatory offensive against the Koreans.^[7] The invasions are also known as Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea, the Seven Year War (in reference to its span) and the Imjin War (Hangul: 임진왜란 - lit. Japanese Invasion of the Imjin Year), in reference to the "Imjin" year of the sexagenary cycle in Korean.^[8] The Japanese name of the war means, "Joseon Campaign"; and the Chinese, "the Eastern Pacification".^[9]

Tatum's Art Changed Jazz

Regarded as a serious virtuoso, Art Tatum was studied by the great classical pianists.

Caillebotte

L'Yerres,effect de pluie - 1875
(literally: effect of rain); aka River bank in rain
Oil on canvas. 81 x 59 cm
Indiana University Art Museum

An important French Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte played a unique role within the Impressionist circle. The recipient of a large inheritance, he organized exhibitions and gave financial assistance to his Impressionist friends by purchasing many of their paintings. He was also an extremely inventive artist, developing a personal style characterized by a distinctive sense of space, perspective, and composition. With its formally structured, three-part composition and high horizon line, "Yerres, Effect of Rain," painted at his family’s home in the countryside, shows the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, which were avidly collected by French artists in the late nineteenth century.

The Floor-Scrapers, 1875
Oil on canvas - 40 x 57 3/4" (102 x 146.5 cm)
Musee d'Orsay, Paris





This painting is one of the first representations of urban proletariat. Whereas peasants (Gleaners by Millet) or country workers (Stone Breakers by Courbet) had often been shown, city workers had seldom been painted. Unlike Courbet or Millet, Caillebotte does not incorporate any social, moralising or political message in his work. His thorough documentary study (gestures, tools, accessories) justifies his position among the most accomplished realists.


















Jeune homme à sa fenêtre, 1876.
Young man at his window.
huile sur toile; oil on canvas.





The Pont de l'Europe, 1876
Oil on canvas - 54 x 73 cm
Private property. Courtesy Comité Gustave Caillebotte, Paris



















In a Cafè
114 x 153 cms / 44.9 x 60.2 inches - Oil on Canvas
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France
Photo Credit: AKG Images
Image ID: 2-M180-A2-1880-4
Year of Composition: 1880

What is fascinating about this work is the use of mirrors. In the book, Varnedoe diagrams the site. Caillebotte is placed to the right and in front of the man with the derby (southwest); to the front and right of the derby man is a second mirror, behind the card players; the window over the shoulder of the card player we see is "actually a reflection in mirror behind them."

A good customer

A patron who had called this noontime and asked me to put The increment : a novel, by David Ignatius, and Rinnavation: getting your best life ever, byLisa Rinna on hold, called again, asking for three more holds: Matters of the Heart, by Danielle Steel. Rinnavation has just 10 holds; Increment has 27; Heart has 218.

The patron has another16 holds, including Harlan Cobern, David Baldacci, James Patterson and Lisa Scottoline. The patron also has 79 items out: 6 fiction (Stuart Woods, Pattern, Higging Clark); 8 Juvenile non-fiction; 45 J fiction; a mystery; and 16 Readers.

That is getting your tax money's worth. Oh, and there is this message on that patron's record: PLEASE MAIL CARD TO PATRON-DO NOT CALL-NO LARGE PRINT MATERIAL!

Shakespeare in any language

A patron came over to the Information Desk and tried phrasing her question, saying she was not sure how to say it. She wanted to read Shakespeare; well, not Shakespeare himself, but about Shakespeare, so that she could understand it.

"I read it in school many years ago," she said, easily seventy years of age. "But I don't recall much of it."

I did a quick search, simply to be sure I gave her the right information -- though I knew that Shakespeare is at 822.3: just a couple of days ago I went to the stacks to search for Shakespeare's Trolius and Cressida, after finishing the Tunney biography (Trolius and Cressida was the Champ's favorite Shakespeare work), and I remembered 822.3.

"Now I know why I don't understand Shakespeare," she told me in an accented voice. "I grew up in Hungary, in Budapest, and I read Shakespeare in Hungarian."

Oz to Kinneret

A new book, The Amos Oz Reader, was on the New Book truck, and I took a look.

Oz, A., Nitza, P., Lange, N., & Alter, R. (2009). The Amos Oz reader. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.



The first story in the book is entitled The Kibbutz at the present time. Its from a book entitled Under this blazing light: essays, published in 1995. That set me to thinking back to the Kibbutz Kinneret, where I lived in 1963. There are Results 1 - 100 of about 39,700 for kibbutz kinneret. (0.60 seconds) according to Google. The 1st link is nonsense. The second is http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vie/Tiberias.html -- and interesting. The third link has an extension of .to -- which I finally found out belongs to Tonga. The website http://www.flevoland.to/ has a thumbnail map of Holland.

Tonga is located in the South Pacific. Yet the website is Dutch. The distance between Nukualofa, Tonga and New Zealand - Tokelau - Fakaofo is 850 miles, according to a website for calculating distances.

Kibbutz Kinneret. Looking at it on a map set me to thinking back to living there.

New databases

OCLC expanded FirstSearch by adding three databases:

• OAIster: union catalog of over 19 million digital resources from more than 1,00 orgs, developed by U Michigan; it's accessed using Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

• CAMIO - Catalog of Art Museum Images Online: high quality art images from around the globe.

• Archive Grid: online access to descriptions of archival collections. Seems a very useful resource for particular uses.

I put in the term Tunney, Gene and one of the results is

[Portrait of Gene Tunney] Author: Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964, photographer. Publication: 1934 Resource Type: image; image; image; Data Contributor: Library of Congress Digitized Historical Collections;

Clicking on the hyperlink shows details, including Access: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/van.5a52892
Clicking on that hyperlink shows the thumbnail of this picture

Amazing. This technological advance is impressive.

George Bellows

New York, 1911















The Sawdust Trail, 1916





















The Lone Tenement, 1909 (one of a series of works in a chapter entitle "The Real New York")













My House, Woodstock, 1924














Dempsey and Firpo, 1924



















The White Horse, 1922













Massacre at Dinant (from the War series), 1918












Splinter Beach, 1916
















Snow Dumpers, 1911


















The Bridge, Blackwell's Island, 1909
(Roosevelt Island)















The Paintings of George Bellows / Michael Quick ... [et al.] ; with an introduction by John Wilmerding. [ART] Q 759.13 Bellows P

His use of geometry for his sketches and paintings is remarkable. Look at his "The White Horse."

Travel guide: Ireland

Ireland (Eyewitness travel guides). New York, N.Y. : DK Pub., c1995-

Recommended by a patron, responding to my question if he knew about Rick Steves. "His is more budget travel, this is more intellectual."

Something to keep in mind.

Forgotten positives

Wordsmith.org has a link to a New Yorker story from back 25 July 1994: How I met my wife. The full story is accessible via digital reader, and not as text. At any rate, the story illustrates the theme of the week of May 4-8: forgotten positives.

Wordsmith's choices: evitable, wieldy, exorable, gainly and corrigible. The story's beginning illustrates the concept of dropping prefixes quite well.

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do. Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion. So I decided not to rush it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings. Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory char- acter who was up to some good. She told me who she was. "What a perfect nomer," I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

HWV

A regular patron, who almost always asks for music, asked about the libretto for Haendel's Saul. It is missing -- but I did find that the Great Neck Library owns it. On that record, the alternate title is listed as: Saul : oratorio in three acts, HWV 53.

So, what is is HWV? The Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis (abbreviated as HWV) is the Catalogue of Handel's Works. Aside from the Wikipedia entry, there is (of course) a website devoted to Haendel's works.

What I was actually thinking about was BWV: Bach's works, for which there are defintions and websites.

Writer’s violent end, his activist legacy

The Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

“I had a surprising call this week,” the author Richard North Patterson told the audience that had gathered last weekend as part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. It was former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Patterson’s new novel, “Eclipse,” is based on the case of the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Mr. Clinton spoke of a phone call he had made 14 years ago to Gen. Sani Abacha of Nigeria, asking him to spare Mr. Saro-Wiwa from the hangman.

Mr. Clinton said General Abacha “was very polite,” but “he was cold,” Mr. Patterson related. “Clinton took away from that, among other things, that oil and the need for oil on behalf of the West and other places made Abacha, in his mind, impervious.”

The event’s moderator, the Nigerian novelist Okey Ndibe, added an unexpected epilogue. A friend in the Abacha cabinet said the general later boasted: “All these pro-democracy activists run to America and expect America to save them. But the U.S. president himself is calling me ‘sir.’ He is scared of me.”

Mr. Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.

Ken Wiwa, son of the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, says his father’s legacy has influenced his own life and career choices.


PEN, an international association of writers dedicated to defending free expression, along with Guernica , the online literary magazine, sponsored the panel with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Ndibe and Ken Wiwa, Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s son, to discuss Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s literary and political legacy.

Shawshank library

King, Stephen. Different seasons. New York: Viking Press, 1982.

Contents: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption
Apt pupil
The body
The breathing method.
Genre: Horror tales.



Th prison library is a central component of the movie plot.

A good dog

This is funny. A patron called, looking for A good dog : the story of Orson, who changed my life / by Jon Katz. Dog, Katz.

Always interesting

Ms. Goldsmith comes in nearly every Friday, and always has interesting questions. She wants information about organizations connected with Arab-Israeli, Arab-Jewish dialogue. Today she told me that earlier this year the Kennedy Center had had a show on arts of the Arab World. Indeed, Arabesque.

She wanted to know about its sponsors.

Presenting Underwriter: HRH Foundation (it's the charitable foundation of a firm named HRH)

Major Contributors:
A. Huda and Samia Farouki (They're part of the DC social circle, "movers and shakers," she said; I agreed)
The State of Kuwait
The State of Qatar
The United Arab Emirates Embassy in Washington, D.C.