The Lost and Found Art: Reviving the Pictorial Webster

The Pictorial Webster's, as arranged, printed and bound by John M. Carrera

I love books with pictures. So I now find myself asking why it is that I never knew about the pictorial Webster's dictionaries being printed in the 19th century. These large books with thousands of thin pages displayed pictorial definitions rather than traditional verbal definitions. Several years ago, John Carrera discovered a copy of a pictorial Webster's under his late grandfather's favorite reading chair. After falling in love with the beautifully detailed images, he set about finding where the original typeset blocks for these images ended up. Covered with dust in drawers in Yale's library, Carrera discovered the tens of thousands of engravings that the Merriam-Webster company had gifted the institution. Over the course of the next ten years, Carrera cleaned, restored, and used the engravings to create by hand his own recreation of the pictorial Webster's. The result of his work is absolutely astonishing.

"Polypheme" to "Peach" in John Carrera's pictorial Webster's

"Acute Angle" to "Adelphia" in John Carrera's pictorial Webster's

"Rat" to "Rattlesnake" in John Carrera's pictorial Webster's

The following video shows the incredible process he uses to create these masterpieces, of which he created 4,000 by hand. Using a 1938 Model A Linotype machine, he cast the engravings on large sheets of paper, hand cut the pages, sewed the bindings, decorated the fore-edges, and added a stamp and gold leaf to the leather binding.

What an intense labor of love! I absolutely adore book arts and John Carrera's project is truly a masterpiece. It serves as a great reminder of the importance of paper-based reading materials, even though we all love our e-readers.

In that spirit, I'd like to leave you with this hilarious commercial that also extols the virtues of paper... Enjoy, my rustlers of petticoats! Until next time!

Distant Footsteps

Peruvian poet, César Vallejo

Recently, a friend of mine gave me a wonderful gift: the Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. Oh, what an amazing present! If you are unfamiliar with César Vallejo, he is one of the most renowned poets of 20th century Latin American, gaining popularity posthumously, and is credited with reinventing the ways in which Spanish, language, and poetry could be written.

This gift has come at a perfect moment, too. As the whirlwind of the end of the semester pulls me into a torrent of writing, reading, and grading, I find myself procrastinating in the most wonderfully productive way-- reading poetry. When my friend gave me the book of César Vallejo's poetry, I had an immediate impulse to recite my favorite of his poems but realized, to my dismay, that I could not even remember the poem's title. The other day, I picked up the book and decided it was high time that I find, re-read, and memorize my favorite Vallejo poem. (Besides, its national poetry month!)

César Vallejo in Nice, France in 1929

For the sake of brevity, I will only post the poem's English translation, which was done by Clayton Eshleman. The Complete Poetry is actually a bilingual edition with side-by-side Spanish/English text, so if you are interested in reading/seeing it in both languages, I highly recommend this book!
I hope you enjoy this beautifully anguished poem as much as I do.

"Distant Footsteps" from The Black Heralds (1919) 

  My father is asleep. His august face
expresses a peaceful heart;
he is now so sweet...
if there is anything bitter in him, it must be me.

  There is loneliness in the house; there is prayer;
and no news of the children today.
My father stirs, sounding
the flight into Egypt, the styptic farewell.
He is now so near;
if there is anything distant in him, it must be me.

  My mother walks in the orchard,
savoring a savor now without savor.
She is so soft,
so wing, so gone, so love.

  There is loneliness in the house with no bustle,
no news, no green, no childhood.
And if there is something broken this afternoon,
something that descends and that creaks,
it is two old white, curved roads.
Down them my heart makes its way on foot.
***

You can purchase the book here. 

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Until next time, fair rufflers of petticoats!
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UPDATE: I found a reading of this poem in Spanish, if you're interested in listening to it!

Autotune the Classics

Pre-autotune. 

The music industry resounds with the robotic twang of autotuned human voices. Autotuning is a technology applied to vocals so as to either correct a singer's pitch or to distort the singer's voice and turn it into an electronic instrument.

Autotune software was created originally by a guy named Dr. Andy Hildebrand, a classically trained flautist and geophysicist. He serendipitously discovered that he could use the same digital signal processing software he used to help oil companies locate drilling spots as a way of looping music samples and correcting pitch in recordings. (For a complete history of auto tune, see this article.)

I have been thinking a lot about autotune recently, especially as a potential metaphor for artistic, performative, and literary production in the 21st century. Many detractors of autotune worry that the near-ubiquitous "pitch-perfect" vocals of contemporary music will train our ears to only appreciate in-tune music.

Lightnin Hopkins, blues musician and complete badass. "You know the blues is jus' a funny feelin-- people call it a mighty bad disease."  

Autotune's detractors have raised what I believe to be a very important consideration, indeed. Not least of all because I believe the blues to be one of the major cultural contributions this country has made to the world-- a genre of music that resists classical pitch formalism in favor of the emotional outpouring through the voice of the human experience. Another example is Brazilian bossa nova, whose flagship aesthetic message was encapsulated in the song "Desafinado" ("out of tune"). What a terrible tragedy it would be to lose an appreciation for this music because of the obsession with perfect (inhuman) pitch.

But autotune is also used by artists trying to create a new aesthetic, and I want to appreciate this new sound, too. As I think more and more about the adjustments and innovations of autotune in music, I can't help but wonder if a parallel phenomena is creeping into performance and literature.

In particular, I'm curious about all the movie adaptations of classic literature and folk tales that has recently swept Hollywood. From Jack and the Beanstalk to the Great Gatsby, the beloved tales of literature are being transformed one by one into two hour CGI thrill rides.

Image from "Jack the Giant Slayer," a movie adaptation of the English fairytale "Jack and the Beanstalk" 

This all leads me to ponder: if autotune can train our ear to only appreciate pitch-perfect music, can movie adaptations of literature train our imaginations to visualize scenes and events from literature in CGI?

Image from the movie "Snow White and the Huntsman," adapted from the German fairytale "Schneewittchen" 

Although the recent onslaught of movie adaptations is not necessarily unprecedented; filmmakers and Disney have been producing movie versions of fairytales and literary classics for decades. But Disney and now this new CGI generation of adaptations have all propagated the moralized, happy-ending versions of the tales-- eradicating the possibility that children (and adults for that matter) should learn a lesson from these tales.

The moralized, bleached endings manipulate the ability of the story to edify: a dark and sinister conclusion is erased and the moralized versions only permit viewers (readers) to be temporarily entertained, while still be comforted by the imminent return to status quo. That is, what we are left with is temporary entertainment and permanently altered imagination (in the form of CGI). Or am I being to touchy??

And, like I said, Hollywood is not simply making-over fairytales. They are using the latest graphic imaging technology to bring to life Jane Austin, J.R.R. Tolkien, F. Scott Fitzgerald novels... the best screenplays, it seems, comes from the tried and true stories that gild literary canons.

Image from film adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma 

Image from film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit

Image from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

For many of these literary classics, it is not the first time they have been adapted to the screen. But the lush visuals possible with today's technology makes them more extraordinary than ever. So allow me to admit: I LOVE THESE MOVIES (okay, not all of them, but certainly the Tolkien movies). Yet, I want to be conscious of the ways in which I allow them to affect the way my mind's eye visualizes characters, scenes, magic, blood, triumph, and defeat. This I owe to myself, and to the authors whose imaginations first glimpsed these fantastic realms.

On a final note, I'd like to add that fairytales were originally part of an oral tradition; this orality seems to place fairytales' origins in a middle ground-- neither literature nor movies-- that makes for an even more interesting angle to the question. ...

Do you think that movies are autotuning our imaginations? What do you think about Hollywood's adaptations of literature? I for one cannot WAIT for the next installation of The Hobbit...and that's ok, right!?
...but what do you, my fair petticoat rustlers, think?
***

Until next time-- keep rustling!

Neo Fantasy Music

Still from Woodkid's video Run Boy Run

After decades of music videos in which musicians stare directly into the camera, lip synching to their songs, and dancing about in bizarre wardrobes or their own clothing line, we have finally begun to move toward what I would like to refer to as neo-fantastical popular narrative, resulting from a productive integration of visual and auditory vocabulary. I find that the new music and short films envisioned by Woodkid is an exceptionally well done example of this phenomena. 

Still from Woodkid's video Iron

Please don't get me wrong- I adore so many music videos that are a simple, straightforward films of the musicians in the act of making music. In fact, most of my favorite musicians' videos depict them performing their hearts out, allowing the expression of the music itself to be all the visual narrative necessary to convey the poetry of their sound.

But I am fascinated by what Woodkid (alias of Yoann Lemoine--French-born musician, graphic-designer, and video director) is accomplishing with the unison of visual and musical narrative. He makes use of many symbols that have recently become integrated into the pop-vernacular, namely wild animals, feathers and fur, and geometric angles. These symbols have risen to prominence thanks to the hipster aesthetic, which has recently appropriated and re-narrativized americana imagery. The way in which the Woodkid videos compile and set into motion these images seems to create a fantastical world with a defined black-and-grey sensibility.

Still from Woodkid's video Iron

What is appealing about this world is that it is the site of an epic struggle-- not necessarily between Good and Evil, but rather between youth and mortality. The violence of living in the world is enacted often through the perspective of a child and his resistance to the unstoppable arrival of the age of reason. Other times, a man appears to be in a foreign land where, regardless of the fact that he does not speak the same language as its inhabitants, music bridges the gap between the land's urbanity and the abyss of nature.

Still from Woodkid's video I Love You

I would love to know what you think about these videos, and if you know of any other artist creating synchronized visual/musical ex nihilo in this way. Here are the three videos I refer to in the post (I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!): 

Until next time, fair petticoat rustlers!! 

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On the (Fore) Edge

Horse Race scene painted on the fore-edge of an 1811 version of Songs of Chace
Image via Boston Public Library site

Speaking of cross-dressing, here are some books posing as gorgeous paintings.

Woman and House scene on the fore-edge of Education of Henry Adams

Today I came across the Boston Public Library's collection of books with fore-edge hand painted artwork. I fell in love not only with the elaborate detail of the paintings themselves, but the way in which the books must be manhandled fanned in order to reveal the image. According to the website,  If the page edges are themselves gilded or marbled, this results in the image disappearing when the book is relaxed. When re-fanned, the painting magically re-appears. Here is an example of the books being twisted into just the right angle so as to display the painted fore-edge:

So these books actually have both a gilt edge to look fancy on the shelf or the reading table and the hidden painted fore-edge to entertain the reader with a scene that may or may not have anything to do with the book's content.

Man fishing scene on fore-edge of The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton

The website has a wonderful zoom function that allows you to get a pretty close look at the intricacies of this lost art.

But hold on to your petticoats for one second, because it gets better. There is such a thing as the "Two-Way Double" in which the book's pages, when fanned one way reveal one painted scene and a completely different scene when fanned in the opposite direction.

From there, you have the "Split Double" which has two paintings per fan direction (resulting in a total of four paintings), and finally there is the grandaddy of them all: the ALL EDGE.

There are lots more to look at, my fair petticoat rustlers! Enjoy! 

People Playing Chess scene painted on Analysis of the Game of Chess

The Golden Age of Cross-Dressing

Clothes make the man (even if you're a woman).
Still from a production of Life is a Dream (1635) by Calderón de la Barca. Image credit

Hello, dearest petticoat rustlers! I am happy to report that I've made it through the written exams and will move on to the oral exam coming up in the first week of April. Although the thrill of battle continues, I will be back to regularly posting here again!

Over the course of the past month, I've feverishly been reading, taking notes, reading notes and buying used paperbacks like some kind of literary doomsday-prepper. This was all in preparation for those 4 hours I was given in which to convince my professors that I understood what I had read and could string some coherent thoughts together about groups of books from certain geographic and historic categories. The questions I was asked were fantastic, and I really did have a great time writing responses for them. 

And yet, after a month of round-the-clock studying, intravenous coffee supply, and total immersion in the literature, I left the exam room feeling that there was so much more I was obsessed with longed to say about these books in which I'd been living. Chances are good that I'm not going to get any questions about cross-dressing in Golden Age literature, so I decided to regale you with some of my favorite gender swap scenes of 17th century Iberia. 

A scene from "Don Gil of the Green Breeches" by Tirso de Molina

Perhaps the most wonderful example of the glory of Golden Age cross-dressing comes from the hilarious play, Don Gil of the Green Breeches (c. 1615) by Tirso de Molina (author of The Trickster of Seville, a play about Don Juan's naughty--and fatal--sexcapades). The very crux of this play is the protagonist's skill in crossdressing and disguise. Doña Juana has been spurned by her lover, Don Martín after he and his father hatched a plan to marry him off to the far richer Doña Inés. 

Having given away her honor (virginity) in exchange for the promise of marriage, Doña Juana sets out to make Don Martín hold up his end of the bargain. She decides to foil his plans with Doña Inés by dressing up as a gentleman and courting her under the alias Don Gil--the very alias Don Martín planned to use (he couldn't have used his own name after already having announced his engagement to Doña Juana). 

Doña Juana, dressed in green breeches arrives first and presents herself as "Don Gil" to Doña Inés and her sister, Clara. Both women immediately become smitten with the crossdressed Juana. Don Martín shows up later and introduces himself as Don Gil, too, but the ladies claim to have already fallen in love with the Don Gil wearing green trousers. 

The plot then becomes extraordinarily twisted and complex, as Doña Juana dons other disguises, dressing as a lady of high society and moving in next to Doña Inés to befriend her and learn her secrets. 

Doña Juana beautifully manipulates everyone around her and executes so many unexpected tricks of wit both in and out of her green breeches. Towards the end of the play, everyone has become so jealous of the smooth-talking Don Gil that in one scene the majority of the characters (men and women) have all dressed up as Don Gil of the green breeches--and a very funny sword fight ensues! In the end, Doña Juana gets to reveal her many identities and the cunning way she got what she wanted-- as a man and as a woman. 

Segismundo, in chains.
Image source

Another example of a spurned woman dressing as a man in order to get back at a lover is found in the brilliantly intellectual play by Calderón de la Barca: Life is a Dream (1635). The cross-dressed woman in this play is not the protagonist; her narrative unfolds alongside the story of Segismundo, a man who grew up in chains in a secluded mountain tower, after his mother died during childbirth and his father, King Basilio, received prophetic warnings about his son taking over the kingdom violently. 

Rosaura (our cross-dresser) is out to get her ex-lover -- none other than Astolfo, Duke of Moscow. He'd promised to marry her, taken her honor, and then run off as to marry his cousin, Estrella, a princess of King Basilio's court. Basilio was getting old and seeking a successor; Astolfo and Estrella thought they could share in the inheritance of power by marrying. But when they arrive at the castle, the king informs them that he indeed had a son (and therefore successor) but that, like a complete cad, he'd kept the poor boy chained in a tower. 

The king's plan, then, was to drug Segismundo and transport him to the castle to test his temperament and see if he was fit to inherit the kingdom which was lawfully his. But this king was very cautious, and so he told everyone to remind Segismundo while he was in the castle that "this could all be a dream," so that if he behaved badly, they could simply take him back to the tower and tell him he'd dreamed the castle, the clothes, the servants, the sight of women. 

The play calls into question the construction of reality and the unstable relationship between dreaming and waking. The story of Rosaura shifts the idea of gender into this unstable plane-- when the play opens, she is dressed as a man, prepared to kill Astolfo for having spurned her love and made off with her virginity. In the middle of the play, she dresses as a lady-in-waiting for Estrella, as she tries to gather more information and get close enough to murder Astolfo. Finally, at the end of the play, a war has broken out and Rosaura dresses openly as a woman, but wearing masculine battle garments. It seems then, that her truest outward expression of gender is neither here nor there. 

"Decameron" by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

 Finally, the Golden Age text that most surprised and horrified and delighted me was The Disenchantments of Love (1637) by María de Zayas. Although many women wrote poetry, plays, and stories in Golden Age Spain, there was a stark disparity between the publishing rates of men and women. The works that we have today by María de Zayas are treasures of literature, not only because they represent an important part of a small number of texts published by female authors, but also because de Zayas was an incredible writer. 

Maria de Zayas, author of The Disenchantments of Love 

The Disenchantments are a series of 10 intensely violent, sexual, and tragic tales related by the female storytellers of a frame story that is itself full of tangled love triangles and vengeful plots.

After suffering a terrible heartbreak and subsequently life-threatening lovesickness precipitated by the fickle attentions of don Juan, Lisis, the protagonist of the frame story, begins regaining strength through the intersession of female friends and the marriage proposal of don Diego. On the three nights leading up to what was intended to be her wedding celebration with Diego, Lisis arranged for a group of her women friends to entertain and “disenchant” gathered spectators, whose numbers swell each night, until becoming a veritable crowd brimming with disapprovingly curious, novelty-seekers, and fellow disenchanted women. 

The stories these women tell contain the most sadistic punishments of the female body, the depths of the wickedness of both men and women who carry out unspeakable acts against innocent female victims. There is only one happy ending in all ten of these stories, and the favorable outcome is only due to the direct intervention of the Virgin Mary. The rest of the stories all end with the blood of a young woman.

The cross-dressing in the Disenchantments is different than the two dramaturgic examples described above. For instance, in one of the stories, it is a man who dresses as a woman so as to get close to the object of his desire-- he seduces her dressed as a woman. There are so many other little moments in these stories that are worth writing about-- so many that it would require another post! So my recommendation in the meantime: read this book! 

You look handsome, ma'am.
Image source

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And so my dear petticoat rustlers, the variety of cross-dressing characters in these three examples alone leads me to believe that there is something more complex at work than the simple theatrical value of a woman putting on breeches or a man donning a dress. 

The definition of gender in the 17th century relied heavily upon wardrobe choices. Perhaps it is this very fact that enabled men and women to more readily break with the established gender roles. So much about gender was connected to one's ability to perceive reality through the use of their senses-- if she looked like a man, she was a man. 

And yet, in Life is a Dream, Segismundo learns that you cannot trust your senses in discerning what is a dream and what is real life. He rejects his ability to learn the truth through outward observations. The developments in physics at this time began questioning the efficacy of the senses in drawing accurate conclusions, as well. 

This is significant, as it has implications for the way we interpret the other gender-swap cases we've discussed: not only is it easy to pretend to be something you're not, you have in truth become that "other" thing based on the consensus of your community, if they use only their senses to evaluate who you are. (Eat your heart out, Judith Butler!) 

Ultimately, the (excessively) repeated mutilation of the female form in de Zayas' stories abuse and punish the senses. Women are tortured and murdered and suffer in horrible ways in each one of the stories (the protagonist of the one with the happy ending still has her eyes put out and is forced to live in a cave for 8 years). There is pain inscribed in the female body, and the impulse to cross-dress may present the promise of alleviating this pain. But whether dressed as a woman or dressed as a man, one cannot rely on their senses to know the truth--the female body as an object of desire but also an object of violent scorn underscores the tragedy of acting upon only one's fickle senses.
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What are your favorite cross-dressing moments in literature? 

Until next time-- keep the petticoats a'ruffling! 

Mistress of Arts

This is me right now. 

Fair rustlers of petticoats! It has been too long... And partly because I am cooking up some really great posts... but also because, in three short weeks, I will take my comprehensive exams for my Master's degree. That means I've been boning up on a couple of books... namely everything significant that was written from the year 1100 till the year 2000 in either the Iberian peninsula or Latin America. If I pass these exams, I will move on to take an oral exam, where I will face the firing squad...er... committee of professors that will ask me questions on pretty much anything they fancy. Finally, if I pass all of those tests, I will become a Mistress of Arts.

In the meantime, I will be absent from the blog but have you, my band of wild petticoats, ever in my mind. The things I'm reading are oh-so-wonderful and there are many posts in the wings...

Medieval marginalia

I will leave you with a taste of something I read this weekend... it is from an incredibly naughty, raucous poem written by a picaresque little priest from Medieval Spain. Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, in El libro de buen amor (The Book of Good Love) offers most inventive and wild advise--in lyric form--for how to be successful when seducing shepherd girls, married women, nuns, and go-betweens. The text is full of bizarre fables in which anthropomorphic woodland creatures provide the reader (or listener, as they were traditionally sung in court or homes) with a strange and often less-than-obvious moral.

Here is a little morsel of one of his rhymes, taken from the "Parable of Two Lazy Men Who Would Marry One Woman" (translation by Elisha Kent Kane), in which a woman being courted by two ugly old men, slyly asks them who is more lazy. They fight over which of the two of them is more lazy- at which point the clever girl declares they've tied and, because she can't marry two men, will have neither. This parable (and several others before and after it) are used by the Archpriest to show how the 7 deadly sins not only kill your soul, but also your ability to have an active amorous life...

The moral to this tale, Messire, I beg you to remember
Because it shows how hateful sloth is to the female gender,
Since sloth can never passion fan into a glowing ember,
Hence, be not slothful anywhere--above all in your member.

Ahem. Right, then. 

Until next time, fair petticoat rustlers! (Wish me luck!)