1906: Art and Music

Aug19

On October 22, 1906 Paul Cezanne, one of the most influential of the Impressionist painters, died at the age of 67 at his family home in Aix-en-Provence, France. Claude Monet, another Impressionist, was aging (66), but still painting in 1906. This painting, by Monet, is called Waterlilies, 1906:

'Claude Monet - Waterlilies 1906' photo (c) 2008, Tony Hisgett - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

As for music, The English Hymnal, 1906 was an important landmark in 20th century British hymnody. Ralph Vaughan Williams edited the hymnal and contributed several tunes of his own composing, including SINE NOMINE, a favorite of mine. From the preface to The English Hymnal, 1906:

No doubt it requires a certain effort to tune oneself to the moral atmosphere implied by a fine melody; and it is far easier to dwell in the miasma of the languishing and sentimental hymn tunes which so often disfigure our services. Such poverty of heart may not be uncommon, but at least it should not be encouraged by those who direct the services of the Church; it ought no longer to be true anywhere that the most exalted moments of a church-goer’s week are associated with music that would not be tolerated in any place of secular entertainment.

Ah, the worship wars. They’ve been going on for quite a long time, haven’t they?

Rick Perry: Not the Candidate for Me

Aug18

Disclaimer: I am not a member or supporter of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-Day Saints, nor am I a polygamist. However, I decided back in 2008 that I could not support Governor Perry for any higher office. I thought the action against the FLDS group in Eldorado, TX was a travesty of justice and a disservice and a danger to all Texas families. I still think so.

The mass kidnapping of 464 FLDS children from their community in Eldorado, Texas, instigated by a crank call from a looney-tune named Rozita Swinton, took place during his watch. An operation of this magnitude could not have been launched without approval at the highest levels of state government. Worse yet, Gov. Perry defended the actions of CPS after the fact; on May 15th, 2008, Perry spokeswoman Krista Piferrer said the governor retained full confidence in the agency, noting that “The governor is very proud of the work being done by CPS…CPS has handled a very complex situation both professionally and compassionately.”

That so-called “professionalism” and “compassion” were called into question just one week later on May 22nd when the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that Texas child welfare authorities acted improperly in removing the children from the FLDS Church’s YFZ Ranch in Eldorado. Ultimately, 440 children were returned to their parents. Wikipedia contains a more detailed chronology of the operation.

The estimated price tag for the entire operation was set at $12.4 million, which did not necessarily include ongoing fees of caseworkers and lawyers. Thus a governor who marketed himself as pro-family and an economic conservative ended up squandering $12.4 million of public money on an anti-family operation.

From Voice of Deseret blog, Memo To Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Mass Kidnapping Of 464 FLDS Children Disqualifies You From The Presidency.

Governor Perry acquiescence in this judicial kidnapping, not to mention his participation in the Guardasil fiasco, makes me very hesitant to support his candidacy for president. Please can we have a better, more thoughtful and truly conservative candidate to oppose Barack Obama in 2012?

1906: Events and Inventions

Aug18

February 10, 1906. The biggest and fastest battleship in the world, the HMS Dreadnought, is launched in Britain by King Edward VII. Also in February, the Japanese government announces that it will double the size of its navy within the next three years. For more information about these huge warships of the early twentieth century, read Robert Massie’s Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War.

'Retro Cornflakes Box.' photo (c) 2008, Rex Roof - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/February, 1906. William K. Kellogg forms a company to market and distribute his corn-based breakfast cereal, called Cornflakes.

March, 1906. At the Spanish seaport of Algeciras, a conference is held to determine what European power will govern Morocco (in Northern Africa). THe conference recognized France’s “special position” in Morocco and gave the French and the Spanish joint responsibility for overseeing the government of Morocco.

April 18, 1906, The San Francisco Earthquake: “At almost precisely 5:12 a.m., local time, a foreshock occurred with sufficient force to be felt widely throughout the San Francisco Bay area. The great earthquake broke loose some 20 to 25 seconds later, with an epicenter near San Francisco. Violent shocks punctuated the strong shaking which lasted some 45 to 60 seconds. The earthquake was felt from southern Oregon to south of Los Angeles and inland as far as central Nevada.”

April 27, 1906. The British and the Chinese agree that no foreign powers will be allowed to do business in Tibet without British permission. The agreement is meant to keep the Russians, in particular, out of Tibet. (The Tibetans, including the Dalai Lama, are not consulted.)

May 10, 1906. The Duma, Russia’ first democratically elected parliament, opens at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

July, 1906. Czar Nicholas dissolves the Duma because the members dared to suggest governmental and agrarian reforms. The more radical members of the Duma then meet in Finland and issue a manifesto calling on all Russians to refuse to pay taxes or serve in the army.

August 18, 1906. An earthquake in Valparaiso, Chile kills thousands and levels the city. Santiago also suffers severe damage.

September-October, 1906. Following disputed elections, the first president of Cuba, Tomás Estrada Palma, faces an armed revolt by independence war veterans who defeat the meager government forces. The U.S. intervenes in the civil war by sending troops to Cuba to restore peace.

December 24, 1906. The first known radio broadcast is made in the U.S. by R.A. Fessenden from a radio tower in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. He broadcasts Christmas music and a reading from Luke, chapter 2, in the Bible.
Ken Burns’ Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio is a two hour documentary on the history of radio. Engineer Husband and I found it fascinating.

1906: Books and Literature

Aug17

Giosuè Carducci was an Italian poet and teacher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906. He was strongly anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian. One of his most famous, and controversial, poems was called “Inno a Satana” (or “Hymn to Satan”.) He died in February, 1907 after receiving the prize in December, 1906.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Winston Churchill, Coniston
2. Owen Wister, Lady Baltimore
3. Robert W. Chambers, The Fighting Chance
4. Meredith Nicholson, The House of a Thousand Candles An early mystery genre story by an Indiana author.
5. George Barr McCutcheon, Jane Cable
6. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle. I read this one in high school, and I remember certain details quite well. I became a vegetarian for an entire month after reading The Jungle. Now that’s some influential muckraking literature!
7. Margaret Deland, The Awakening of Helena Ritchie
8. Rex Beach, The Spoilers
9. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
10. Ellen Glasgow, The Wheel of Life

Critically Acclaimed or Historically Significant:
William Graham Sumner, Folkways
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. I love Chesterton, and I think this book quite the best thing I’ve ever read about Charles Dickens.
Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children, The Story of the Amulet. I’ve read Nesbit’s earlier Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and I may have read The Story of the Amulet. However, I’ve never read or seen the movie version of The Railway Children, which it turns out is partly a spy novel. Anyway, Nesbit wrote over sixty boks fr children, and she was a co-founder of The Fabian Society in England.
Across the Page: Dragons Galore, Reading E. Nesbit to modern American children.
Librivox audiobooks of E. Nesbit.
John Galsworthy, The Man of Property. This one is the first volume in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, and I read it earlier this year. I never wrote anything about it because I thought I would finish the saga and then write. Also, I’m not too sure what I think. However, others think wel of it: Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 on the strength of his many novels about the Forsyte family.

Set in 1906:
Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O’Neill. Random House, 1933. Set in July, 1906.
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. A YA novel about a girl torn between her family and her future, set in 1906 in the Adirondacks. A review at One More Page.
Earthquake at Dawn by Kristiana Gregory. Semicolon review here.
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975) is set in New York City in 1906, actually from 1902-1917. A lot of peoople swear that this novel is one of the best they’ve ever read. I hated it, and only managed to read about a fourth of the book. The book (fiction) is full of actual characters from the early 1900’s: Harry Houdini, Robert Peary, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, Harry Kendall Thaw, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Countess Sophie Chotek, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Theodore Dreiser, Jacob Riis and Emiliano Zapata. But I thought it was downright nasty; I am to Ragtime as Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn was to Balzac in The Music Man.

Love, Charleston by Beth Hart Webb

Aug16

This novel had a couple of strikes against it going in as far as I’m concerned: I don’t read romance novels, and I especially don’t read Christian romance novels, even though I am a Christian. However, it was nominated for the INSPY awards in the “general fiction” category, and although it turned out to be what I would call a romance novel, it was a pretty darn good romance.

Charleston’s Anne Brumley has long dreamed of romance while ringing the bells at St. Michael’s, but those dreams are beginning to fade. Her sister Alicia and cousin Della encourage her to strike out and make her own way—after all, she’s thirty-six. But the tall redhead is sure God said, “Stay here and wait.”

Widower Roy Summerall has happily ministered to the country folks of Church of the Good Shepherd for years. So why would the Lord call him and his daughter away to Charleston—the city that Roy remembers from his childhood as pretentious and superficial? Surely the refined congregation of St. Michael’s won’t accept a reverend with a red neck and a simple faith.

Meanwhile, Anne’s sister, Alicia, struggles with her husband’s ambition which seems to be taking him further and further from their dreams of a happy family together. And Cousin Della’s former fiancé has returned to Charleston, making her wonder if she chose the wrong path when she married her gifted but struggling-artist husband.

So the strongest part of this three strand plot is the story of Licia, who, spoiler here, ends up suffering from postpartum depression. Of course, mental illness manifests itself differently in different people, and Licia’s illness turns out to be a particularly vicious and hard-to-cure form of postpartum depression. She needs the help and support of not only her doctors, but also her husband and her life-long friends, Della and Anne. I applaud Ms. Hart for tackling this difficult subject, and I believe she did so quite realistically and sympathetically. As I said, Licia’s part of the story is the strongest and the most engaging.I really wanted to know what would happen to her and her husband and their three children.

Anne and Della have issues, too. But I didn’t sympathize with Della much, and Anne’s problem was resolved a little too neatly and predictably. Still, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this story of three friends coping with life through faith in Charleston, South Carolina.

Saturday Review of Books: August 13, 2011

Aug12

“Once a man commits himself to murder, he will soon find himself stealing. The next step will be alcoholism, disrespect for the Sabbath and from there on it will lead to rude behaviour. As soon as you set the first steps on the path to destruction you will never know where you will end. Lots of people owe their downfall to a murder they once committed and weren’t too pleased with at the time.” ~Alfred Hitchcock

Ok, so this week’s quote has nothing to with reading or books, but it does come from a man who was a reader. Or at least he took his movies from books. How many books with their authors can you name that Hitchcock turned into film? How many of them have you read? Leave your answers in the comments, and enjoy today’s edition of the Saturday Review.

This fascinating excursion into Hitchcockian booklore is courtesy of the fact that Mr. Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899. Happy Birthday, Hitch!

SatReviewbuttonIf you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can just write your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

Two YA Books by Sarah Dessen

Aug12

Gina at The Point: Youth Reads asked me to review the new Sarah Dessen book, What Happened to Good-bye. I agreed for a couple of reasons: my teen and young adult daughters all read Ms. Dessen’s books, and one of them happened to have a copy of the latest. However, said daughter took the book with her to Slovakia for the month of July, and I was without a review copy.

So I decided to read some of Ms. Dessen’s earlier books for the sake of comparison and research. I read This Lullaby and Lock and Key (because those were the ones that were available at the library), and lo! and behold, they turned out to be the same book. Well, they’re not exactly the same, but quite similar in tone and plot. I liked the narrator in Lock and Key better.

Plot: Girl with family problems, messed-up mother, absent father, guards her heart with a hard exterior and a bad attitude. Girl meets boy who breaks through the hard exterior to prove that love is worth the risk.

Theme: It’s a hard world and parents aren’t very trustworthy, but loving someone is worth the risk of having your heart broken.

Tone: Bitter and somewhat romantic. Both at the same time?

So we’re talking chick-lit for young adults, mostly for girls. Ruby, the narrator in Lock and Key, is closed, guarded, ungrateful, and a bit hostile, but it’s possible to see underneath her unfriendliness, a heart and a childlike vulnerability. Remy, the narrator in This Lullaby, is closed, guarded, promiscuous, anal-retentive, and quite hostile. Her surrender to the charms of Dexter, the lead singer in a boy band, doesn’t ring quite true, not as believable as Ruby and Nate in the first book anyway.

Artiste Daughter tells me that these two aren’t the best of Ms. Dessen’s books, so I’m reserving judgement. However, so far I’m not impressed. They’re O.K., but nothing I would recommend or push on anyone. There’s a sprinkling of crude language in both books, not too much, but annoying nonetheless. Most readers probably won’t notice. There’s also an assumption, especially in This Lullaby, that teen, unmarried sex is a given in any dating relationship. It’s only a question of how long after the first date the relationship will be consummated. Although both the language and the promiscuity are probably true-to-life in some circles, I didn’t like it. It always makes me sad to read about girls in particular selling themselves so short.

I did read Along for the Ride, also by Sarah Dessen, a year or two ago, and although I don’t remember many details, I do think I liked it better than I did these two. It’s another girl-meets-boy teen romance, but without the sex, language, and bitterness issues, as I remember.

On August 29 and after, this post will be a part of the new Carnival of Young Adult Literature.

1905: Music and Art

Aug10

“In My Merry Oldsmobile” is a popular song from 1905, with music by Gus Edwards and lyrics by Vincent P. Bryan.

Verse 1
Young Johnny Steele has an Oldsmobile
He loves his dear little girl
She is the queen of his gas machine
She has his heart in a whirl
Now when they go for a spin, you know,
She tries to learn the auto, so
He lets her steer, while he gets her ear
And whispers soft and low…
Verse 2
'1905 Curved-Dash Oldsmobile' photo (c) 2007, Don O'Brien - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/They love to spark in the dark old park
As they go flying along
She says she knows why the motor goes
The sparker is awfully strong
Each day they spoon to the engine’s tune
Their honeymoon will happen soon
He’ll win Lucille with his Oldsmobile
And then he’ll fondly croon…
Chorus
Come away with me, Lucille
In my merry Oldsmobile
Down the road of life we’ll fly
Automobubbling, you and I
To the church we’ll swiftly steal
Then our wedding bells will peal
You can go as far as you like with me
In my merry Oldsmobile.

Automobubbling? Will my students know what it means to spoon or spark? Do you think they can tell from the context?

Also in 1905, Henri Matisse and a group of artists now known as “les Fauves” (the wild beasts) exhibited together in a room at the Salon d’Automne. The paintings expressed emotion with wild colors and a disregard for realism. This painting by Matisse is called “Woman in a Kimono”, and it displays the style of les Fauves.

'Henri Matisse - Woman in a Kimono 1906' photo (c) 2010, Tony Hisgett - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

For more information about the culture and times of one particular place, Boston, in 1905, take a look at this blog: Dateline: Boston, 1905.

1905: Events and Inventions

Aug9

January 22, 1905. Bloody Sunday. In St. Petersburg, 10,000 workers and their families march to the Winter Palace to petition Czar Nicholas II for better working conditions. Cossack troops fire on the unarmed crowd, killing over 100 of the demonstrators and injuring many hundreds more.

January 25, 190. Frederick Wells, a mine supervisor in Transvaal, discovers the largest diamond ever found, weighing 3106.75 carats or 1.33 lbs. Transvaal (now called South Africa) was a British colony in 1905, and the jewel eventually became part of the British Crown Jewels after it was presented to King Edward VII on his birthday in 1907. The diamond is called the Cullinan diamond or The Star of Africa.

February 17, 1905. As his carriage passes through the Kremlin gates in Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the uncle of Czar Nicholas II and one his chief advisors, is killed by a bomb thrown onto his lap.

May 28, 1905. The Japanese navy sinks twelve Russian warships in the Strait of Tsushima, ending Russian hopes of winning the war with Japan at sea. The war continues to go badly for Russia on land as well, and the Czar and his government face continued civil unrest at home as peasants and workers demand the right to vote and to be democratically governed.

July 24, 1905. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Czar Nicholas II meet in Russia and agree to conclude a secret treaty of alliance between the two countries. They plan to invite France to join this secret defensive alliance, but Russian ministers opposed such an alliance.

August 13, 1905. Norway votes to end its union Sweden which dated back to the 1814 Treaty of Kiel. Norway becomes (again) an independent country and in November the Norwegians invite Prince Charles of Denmark to become their new king.

September 5, 1905. President Teddy Roosevelt of the United States is instrumental in bringing the Russians and the Japanese to sign the treaty of Portsmouth, ending the war in Korea and Manchuria. The Japanese and the Russians agree to withdraw from Manchuria, but the Japanese are to have free rein in Korea and in the formerly Russian ports of Dalny and Port Arthur in Manchuria.

September 7, 1905. More than 1000 people have died in the oil fields of Baku (Azerbaijan) as fighting continues between the Armenians and Tartars, encouraged by Turkish propaganda. The Russian government has not taken action to reconcile the two groups, and oil production is being destroyed by raging fires as a result of the fighting.

October 30, 1905. In a new manifesto, Czar Nicholas II promises Russians limited civil and voting rights and an elected parliament, the Duma.

October, 1905. British suffragettes Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney prefer to go to prison rather than pay fines for an assault conviction. The suffragettes say that they are tired of waiting for the right to vote and they are willing to use violence and hunger strikes in prison to gain their victory.

1905: Books and Literature

Aug8

The Noble Prize for Literature was awarded to Henryk Sienkiewicz. Kirjasto calls him a “Polish novelist, a storyteller, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.” Also, “His strongly Catholic worldview deeply marked his writing.” He wrote the historical fiction novels With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Pan Michael, and Quo Vadis?.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Mary Augusta Ward, The Marriage of William Ashe Love and marriage in British society turns into disgrace and death as William Ashe and his nineteen year old bride, Kitty, wreck their marriage with jealousy and bad decisions.
2. Alice Hegan Rice, Sandy
3. Robert Smythe Hichens, The Garden of Allah A Trappist monk runs away from his vows into the North African desert.
4. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman This book was the inspiration for DW Griffith’s 1915 silent movie The Birth of a Nation. It was a novel (and a movie) that glorified white supremacy, racial segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan.
5. George Barr McCutcheon, Nedra
6. Katherine Cecil Thurston, The Gambler
7. Katherine Cecil Thurston, The Masquerader (alternate title: John Chilcote)
8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth I think Edith Wharton is almost as good a writer and observer of human nature as Jane Austen. Here are my thoughts on House of Mirth.
9. C. N. and A. M. Williamson, The Princess Passes
10. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rose o’ the River

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity
Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities
Mary Chesnut, Diary from Dixie I have Ms. Chesnut’s diary, but I haven’t read it. Ken Burns quoted from Mary Chesnut’s diary extensively in his Civil War series, and she seems to have been a keen observer of the Southern civilian experience during the war.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Because fans were reluctant to let him go, this collection of short stories about the famous detective resurrects him from the dead and brings him back to entertain more readers.
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel This one is really fun. Set during the French revolution, the novels chronicles the adventures of a British lord who goes undercover to rescue French nobles who are bound for the guillotine. Read with A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens for a taste of the British perspective on those crazy “Frenchies.”

“We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven? — Is he in hell?
That damned, elusive Pimpernel.”

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics and Orthodoxy. Semicolon thoughts on Orthodoxy and G.K. Chesterton.