Monthly Archives: August 2019

Summer Sky ’19

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No chance of seeing the Perseids this year from northern Illinois: overcast skies for the last few days. Not that seeing the light streaks is that impressive here in the light-washed suburbs, anyway.

But some days, the summer sky at dusk makes up for all that. Such as a few weeks ago.

Not all the glory of seeing with your eyes, but some of it. The glow was exceptionally ephemeral. I walked outside and noticed the color. I happened to have a camera in my pocket. About five minutes later, after I finished my outside business — taking out the trash —  the glow was almost gone.

Gentlemen Who Invented Pharmacy

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Not long ago I was finally inspired to find out something that has eluded me for many years. Maybe eluded isn’t the word. I haven’t tried to nail down the information very hard. Or at all, because it isn’t that important.

Non-importance shouldn’t be an obstacle to curiosity, however. So I did some looking around and found out that the statue mentioned in passing by the wisecracking and ever-so-tight Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises — literally in passing, since the characters are walking by it — is that of Pelletier and Caventou, which in the mid-1920s was on the Boulevard St. Michel.

Wiki: “In 1820, French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou first isolated quinine from the bark of a tree in the genus Cinchona – probably Cinchona officinalis – and subsequently named the substance.”

Sun (Chapter 8): “We walked down the Boulevard [St. Michel]. At the juncture of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau with the Boulevard is a statue of two men in flowing robes.

” ‘I know who they are.’ Bill eyed the monument. ‘Gentlemen who invented pharmacy. Don’t try and fool me on Paris.’ ”

This is what that statue looked like in the time of Sun, courtesy of a card from the collection of Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé. Erected in 1900.
As far as I can tell, Rue Denfert-Rochereau — actually Avenue — doesn’t meet Boulevard St. Michel in our time. Close, but not quite. Either the streets have been reconfigured in 90 years or Hemingway was wrong.

In any case, the statue of two men in flowing robes is gone. One of many Paris bronzes melted down by the Germans during the occupation, various sources tell me. Now Pelletier and Caventou have a less literal memorial, or at least they did as of last summer, according to Google Street View.

A reclining figure on a plinth at Boulevard St. Michel and Rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, evidently part of a fountain, since the memorial is called La fontaine des pharmaciens. Maybe the figure’s stricken with malaria. If I ever make it back to Paris, I’ll make a point of walking by. But I probably won’t be tight.

RIP, Donald Ault

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The other day I learned that Donald Ault died in April at 76. Sad to hear it. Among my college professors, he was one of the more interesting.

Besides being a William Blake scholar of renowned, Ault also had an early academic interest in comics, especially the work of the talented Carl Barks. Most of the rest of the VU English Department didn’t think much of that — comics (and balloons) is for kiddie-winkies, after all — and a few years after I took his class, Donald Ault was off to the University of Florida. That was a better fit for him than Vanderbilt, where he had come to from Berkeley.

Ault said so himself in a short memoir republished by the International Journal of Comic Art blog. An appreciation for Ault by another former VU student is here, better than anything I can write about him.

Ault taught the last English class I took at Vanderbilt, in the spring of 1983, whose formal title I don’t remember. But I do remember an assignment for that class that had me write an interpretation of a Carl Barks’ Donald Duck story. Out of a number of ideologies to choose from in doing the paper, I picked a Marxist interpretation. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember having fun with it.

We also watched some videos — items in those pre-Internet days that were hard to find. One in particular was J-Men Forever, an insane romp of a thing put together by a couple of members of Firesign Theatre. As it happened, I’d heard of Firesign because a couple of their records were floating around my freshman dorm hall, but I’d never heard of J-Men Forever.

RIP, Dr. Ault.

The House of Prime Rib, 1973

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I went with my family to the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco in August 1973, picking up a souvenir postcard at the same time.
House of Prime Rib postcard ca 1973I remember the place seemed dark. Low-light restaurants weren’t something I knew except maybe from TV. More exotically, servers carved the meat at a cart near our table. There was a dessert cart as well. Every now and then around the dim room, flambé erupted. Quite a place for a 12-year-old with ordinary tastes.

The House of Prime Rib, which is still open, wasn’t the sort of restaurant we usually patronized. The only place we visited remotely like it (that I can think of) was Old San Francisco — which was in San Antonio, and still is. We went there two or three times.

Except for the fact that Old San Francisco served upmarket beef like the House of Prime Rib, there wasn’t much similarity. Old San Francisco wanted to evoke those giddy Barbary Coast days before 1906; the House of Prime Rib had a Old England vibe. It was a midcentury fancy restaurant.

We were on vacation, hence the indulgence. My mother and brothers and I flew to Los Angeles that August, spent a few days there, drove up the coast on California 1 in a rental car, and spent a few days in San Francisco, flying back to San Antonio from there.

I remember it well: Disneyland in the days of A-E tickets, the Huntington Library, a side trip down to see Mission San Juan Capistrano, perhaps because my mother remembered one version or another of the song, the smoggy LA air, the winding coastline, our disappointment in not getting to see the Hearst Castle, Big Sur, climbing the hills of San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the Cannery, the cable cars, my brother Jay ordering octopus at a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant, a boat trip around the Bay (Alcatraz was still closed at the time). A nothing out-of-the-ordinary tourist week in California. What a good time.

Chicagoland’s Most Obscure Statue

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Just south of I-90 in the major Chicago suburb of Schaumburg is a district populated almost completely by small- and mid-sized businesses that don’t have any consumer-facing operations, or if they do, they’re elsewhere. It’s a district of single-story office properties ringed by parking lots and connected by streets that are only busy early in the morning or late in the afternoon.

Since this is a reasonably prosperous suburb, some attention has been paid to landscaping, with trees, bushes and grass growing between the buildings and among the lots. But there’s no escaping the fact that the area is an office space equivalent of the 20th-century residential areas of the village, which are spread out. Fashionably dense, the area is not. You need a car around here.

Not long ago I had some business to attend to in the area, and I happened upon a small street named Penny Lane. If you’re the right age, that’s going to make you smile a little, though on this Penny Lane there’s no barber showing photographs or banker with a motorcar or fireman with an hourglass.

But this is on Penny Lane.
American Foundry Society's statueI had to stop for a minute and look at that. Luckily, Penny Lane doesn’t have much traffic. None besides me at that moment, in fact. The plaque on the plinth says:

Presented to
THE AMERICAN FOUNDRYMEN’S SOCIETY
by
THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COMPANY
Designed and sculpted by patternmaker Bob Jones
and cast by the employees of the Louisville Foundry Div.
December 3, 1984

On the statue itself, on the receptacle receiving the molten iron, is the following:

FIRST IRON POURED
JAN 17 1949
LOUISVILLE FOUNDRY

The iron statue is on the grounds of the American Foundry Society’s headquarters on Penny Lane. Formerly it was the American Foundrymen’s Society, which sounds like a workers’ organization, but it is (and always has been, I think), an industry trade organization for metalcasting.

The statue was among the last items cast in the Louisville foundry, which IH closed in 1983. Iron’s a little unusual for such a work, but it looks painted and well-tended by the organization. Even better, it has to be the most obscure statue, at least among those on public view, in the Chicago area.

Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery

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I had a little time to kill before The Comedy of Errors started in Aurora on Saturday, so I consulted Google Maps and found a nearby cemetery to visit. Riverside Cemetery, which is south of Aurora in the town of Montgomery, Illinois, and which is also on the Fox River.

Not bad. Some trees, many upright stones. Not much in the way of land contour or funerary art, though.

Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery IllinoisRiverside Cemetery, Montgomery Illinois

Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery IllinoisI found what are probably the oldest stones: 19th century.
Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery IllinoisRiverside Cemetery, Montgomery IllinoisAs far as I could see, only one obelisk of any size.
Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery IllinoisMarking the burial site of one V.A. Watkins. Big fish in this little pond.

Later I read that, according to Find A Grave, there’s one noteworthy person buried at Riverside: Bernard Cigrand (1866-1932). I didn’t happen across his stone. He rings no bells. Not even a slight tinkle. He was a dentist, but his stone also says FATHER OF FLAG DAY.

GAR Memorial Hall, Aurora

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There are a lot of statues memorializing Union veterans, but the Grand Army of the Republic, Post 20, which was in Aurora, Illinois, decided that a building would be a better way to honor the fallen, since it would also be useful for the living. Reportedly the post got the idea from a similar building in Foxborough, Mass.

Completed in 1878, the GAR Memorial Hall still stands on Stolp Island in Aurora.
The octagonal structure is of local limestone and designed by one Joseph Mulvey, who is fairly obscure. Not this fellow (probably), but someone who did other (razed) work in this part of the country. The GAR had meetings there and for a while it housed Aurora’s public library.

These days GAR Memorial Hall is a small museum with limited hours — namely Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. I arrived at about 3, in time to look inside, and get out of the heat besides. Inside, you can see the tall stained-glass windows.

Plus a few artifacts of the war, such as these medicine bottles. The dark one was specifically for quinine.
GAR artifacts.
A number of exhibits were devoted to the 36th Illinois Volunteer Infantry and the 8th Illinois Cavalry, both largely composed of men from the Aurora area. The 36th fought at Pea Ridge, Murfreesboro, Missionary Ridge, Chickamauga and in the siege of Atlanta, among other places. The 8th was at Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Brandy Station, Gettysburg and Monocacy, among others.

An amusing aside, according to the museum: “The 8th Illinois Cavalry’s first fight was not against people but alcohol. At their first encampment in St. Charles, Illinois, some of the citizens of the town brought liquor to the young soldiers, and this threatened the discipline of the regiment [I’ll bet it did]. Without orders, a group of soldiers from the 8th marched into town and smashed the windows of the offending shops, pouring the liquor into the street.”

The Comedy of Errors

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Went to Aurora, Illinois, on Saturday evening for a performance of The Comedy of Errors, the only one in the suburbs this year by Chicago Shakespeare in the Parks.
The play’s the trope-namer, though I expect the idea is much older even than Plautus, and in fact Errors owes a lot to Plautus. It’s a trope big enough to include comic high points like Fawlty Towers (also a comedy of manners) as well as such excrescences as Three’s Company.

Free Shakespeare in the 21st century packs ’em, I’m glad to report.
The Chicago Shakespeare Company, full of talented young actors, handled the material well, including lots of slapstick and wordplay. I suspect some of the more obscure jokes were removed and other points smoothed out, though I’m not an expert on the play. No matter. It was funny.

The show began when the sun was still hot, so Shakespeare-shaped hand fans were available. By the time Errors ended, it was dusk and pretty comfortable there at RiverEdge Park.

Acrobatics and juggling punctuated the play, which I figure is true to the spirit of the earliest performances. And to the staging by the Flying Karamazov Brothers, for that matter. The goal was (is) to entertain, after all. So it does, in competent hands, 400+ years later.

The biggest laughs came when one of the Dromios described being pursued by the other Dromio’s girlfriend, a kitchen wench.

Dromio: Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen wench, and all grease, and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light. If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.

Antipholus: What complexion is she of?

Dromio: Swart like my shoe, but her face nothing like so clean kept. For why? She sweats. A man may go overshoes in the grime of it.

Antipholus: That’s a fault that water will mend.

Dromio: No, sir, ’tis in grain; Noah’s flood could not do it.

Antipholus: What’s her name?

Dromio: Nell, sir, but her name and three quarters — that’s an ell and three quarters — will not measure her from hip to hip.

Antipholus: Then she bears some breadth?

Dromio: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.

Jaume Plensa, Here and There

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Here’s a line from The Sun Also Rises that I didn’t much appreciate until recently. In one of the many conversations among the protagonists, the subject of the character Mike’s bankruptcy is broached:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

A lot of things happen that way. Learning often happens that way. Or at least awareness. Fortunately, I don’t have the experience of bankruptcy in mind. Still, a minor example of gradually-suddenly just happened to me.

Back in 2008, we visited the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Mich. One of the works was by Jaume Plensa, “I, you, she or he…”
In 2014, I took note of Plensa’s monumental head, temporarily placed in Millennium Park in Chicago, “Looking Into My Dreams, Awilda.” I also knew at the time that the Catalan artist had also done Crown Fountain in the park as well.

Interesting that the vitriol against “Dreams” in the comments of this Chicago Reader item obsesses about the size of the head. When I happen across public art, I judge it by an admittedly subjective standard: does it make the space more interesting? By that standard, all the Plensas I’ve seen are successful works.

Today I was looking at pictures I’d taken in August 2013, and happened across these — two images of the same work in Chicago.
Self Portrait With Tree - Chicago - Jaume PlensaSelf Portrait With Tree - Chicago - Jaume Plensa“Self Portrait With Tree,” by none other than Plensa. I’d forgotten about it, and when I took the picture, probably didn’t associate it with the other works of his I’d seen. “Self Portrait” was next to the Hancock Tower on E. Chestnut St. I checked the Street View of that block, dated July 2018, and the work is gone. It was put up by the nearby Richard Gray Gallery, so perhaps it found a buyer.

All that is the gradual part. Somehow or other, Plensa hadn’t made much of an impression on me over the years. But when I looked at the 2013 images, I suddenly wanted to know more about him, since I don’t make a close study of sculpture or public art. If I had, I would have known how widespread his works are. (Had we walked further along Buffalo Bayou in Houston in May, we’d have come across yet another.)

Is it important that I know this? Maybe, maybe not. But better to err on the side of knowing something, however small.

Idea Garden, Champaign

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Besides Decatur, we spent some time over the weekend in Champaign, including a short visit to the Idea Garden of the University of Illinois Arboretum.Idea Garden, Champaign

Back in the spring, the Idea Garden was mostly just that, notional, but since then volunteers have brought the place to full flower. Literally.
A small structure mid-garden was being used for an informal gardening class when we passed by. Something about garden pests. Sunflowers reaching to the sky. Taller than a grown human being. One of the volunteers told me it was a special kind that grows tall. Not a lot of gardeners like them, he said, but he did.

Elephant ears!
I have fond memories of large elephant ears when I was a child.
The picture is ca. 1970, of my brother Jim and I and the front-yard elephant ears. I might have been small, but that’s not why I remember our elephant ears as large — they were objectively large. That’s the way they grew for a few early years at our house in San Antonio. In later years, they came up smaller and eventually disappeared.