Posts Tagged ‘Henry James’
“What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”*…
Studying the display of personal wealth across time can help us better understand the history of socioeconomic inequality. Tim Brinkhof explains…
To ask what it was like to be rich in the past is about more than comparing the lifestyles of modern-day billionaires like Elon Musk to Mansa Musa or Marcus Licinius Crassus. When you study the history personal wealth, you are also learning about the history of income inequality, and the economic developments that allowed these upper-class individuals to build their private fortunes.
According to the historian Peter V. Turchin, who relies on mathematical modeling to make sense of the societies past and present, those developments turn out to be cyclical rather than linear, with patterns in the global financial system repeating themselves across centuries. In other words, Musa and Musk may have more in common than you’d think…
A fascinating account: “Here’s what being filthy rich in Europe looked like in 1000 BC, 1 AD, and 1000 AD,” in @bigthink.
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we contemplate how the other half lives, we might spare a thought for a chronicler of upper class, Henry James; he died on this date in 1916. Considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language, he was a successful purveyor of ghost stores (most notably, his novella The Turn of the Screw); but he best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between upper class emigre Americans, the English, and continental Europeans– e.g., The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove.
His later works were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character’s psyche. (Perhaps not coincidentally, his brother was psychologist and philosopher William James.) For their unique ambiguity and other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to impressionist painting– and he is considered by many a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism.
Gotham…
In the late 1940’s, before he found fame as a filmmaker, a teen-aged Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look Magazine, shooting around Manhattan (and often working alongside Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee). The Museum of the City of New York has over 8,000 of his photos in their collection– at once a window on post-war New York and an early peek at the aesthetic that we’d all come to recognize in Dr. Strangelove and Clockwork Orange (and, if less directly, in 2001 and The Shining).
Read the backstory (and see more snaps) at Gothamist, here and here.
Kubrick in his days as a photographer for LOOK
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As we mutter “redrum,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1905 that Henry James returned to the United States for the first time in 25 years. The son of theologian Henry James, Sr. and brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James was raised on both sides of the Atlantic. After finishing Harvard Law School (and deciding that he preferred writing fiction to legal briefs), he left the U.S. for France, where he lived briefly, then the U.K., where he settled and wrote the works on which his reputation rests: Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors. After his return, James worked mainly on the “New York Edition” of his works and on his autobiography.
James’ work was a break from the Romantic tradition embodied in the novels of Dickens and Thackeray; indeed, with William Dean Howells, George Eliot, and Stephen Crane, he pioneered the Realist novel.
Gumby: “Do you want to try it, Pokey?” Pokey: “No thanks, I prefer grass”…
source: L.A. Times
If you have a heart, Gumby’s a part of ***YOU!***
– Gumby Theme Song
Art Clokey, the creator of the whimsical clay figure Gumby, died in his sleep Friday at his home in Los Osos, Calif., after battling repeated bladder infections, his son Joseph said. He was 88.
Clokey and his wife, Ruth, invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after Art had finished film school at USC. After a successful debut on “The Howdy Doody Show,” Gumby soon became the star of its own hit television show, “The Adventures of Gumby,” the first to use clay animation on television.
After an initial run in the 1950s, Gumby enjoyed comebacks in the 1960s as a bendable children’s toy, in the 1980s after comedian Eddie Murphy parodied the kindly Gumby as a crass, cigar-in-the-mouth character in a skit for “Saturday Night Live” and again in the ’90s with the release of “Gumby the Movie.”
Today, Gumby is a cultural icon recognized around the world. It has more than 134,000 fans on Facebook…
Instead of flowers, the family suggests contributions in Gumby’s name to the Natural Resources Defense Council, of which Art Clokey was a longtime member.
“Gumby was green because my dad cared about the environment,” his son said.
Read the whole story in the L.A. Times (January 9, 2010), more about Art here, and more about Gumby here.
As we recall that in the end we’re all “just clay,” we might raise a toast to the Pragmatist-in-Chief– American psychologist and philosopher William James (brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James); William was born this date in 1842. James’ theories of interrelations– recognized in his day as importantly novel, but problematically weird– seemed, on the heels of Einstein’s work, to have been positively prophetic.
When radio goes wrong…
source: Pandora
From radio broadcasts around the U.K. and the Empire: bloopers, blunders, and embarrassment– all collected at RadioFail.
One should turn one’s volume up and consider, for example, this report of nuclear proliferation…
Or this breathless eyewitness account…
Or (your correspondent’s favorite), this dispatch on an attack against Israel.
Much, much more at RadioFail.
As we twiddle our dials, we might draft a long and involved, dramatically-arched sentence or two, as today is the anniversary of the publication of Henry James’ first novel, Roderick Hudson (1875).
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