Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

A THOUSAND WORDS - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward's blog on pictures, plants, politics and whatever else is on his mind.

Lessons on the piny

Saturday, April 30, 2016

George Boziwick, Chief at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts wrote two lovely blogs about Emily Dickinson's musical life which included playing the piano.

Here are the two blogs:

Blog One

and the previous one

Blog Two

I had to lift this from Blog One so I can justify placing here Katheryn at the Piano.

“I also was much pleased with the news [your letter] contained especially that you are taking lessons on the ‘piny’, as you always call it,” fourteen year old Emily wrote to her friend Abiah Root in 1845, “but remember not to get on ahead of me. Father intends to have a Piano very soon. How happy I shall be when I have one of my own.” In August of that year Edward Dickinson purchased a piano through his brother William in Worcester.

Ample make this bed
How happy is the little stone
Sleep is supposed to be
The shutting of the eye
I dwell in possibility
when Sappho was a living girl
In a library
A light exists in spring
The lady dare not lift her veil
I took my power in my hand
I find my feet have further goals
I cannot dance upon my toes
The Music of the Violin does not emerge alone
Red Blaze
He touched me, so I live to know
Rear Window- The Entering Takes Away
Said Death to Passion
We Wear the Mask That Grins And Lies
It was not death for I stood alone
The Music in the Violin Does Not Emerge Alone
I tend my flowers for thee
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
Pray gather me anemone!
Ample make her bed
His caravan of red
Me-come! My dazzled face
Develops pearl and weed
But peers beyond her mesh
Surgeons must be very careful
Water is taught by thirst
I could not prove that years had feet
April played her fiddle
A violin in Baize replaced
I think the longest hour
The spirit lasts
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/03/i-left-them-in-ground-emily-dickinson.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/01/i-felt-my-life-with-both-my-hands.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/currer-bell-emily-dickinson-charlotte.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/and-zero-at-bone-with-dirks-of-melody.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/05/charm-invests-her-face.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/tell-truth-but-tell-it-slant.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/theres-certain-slant-of-light.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/then-mashes-it-to-death.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/adjusted-to-tomb.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/i-could-not-see-to-see.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/blonde-assasin-passes-on.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/dirk-commemorate-itself.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/lawful-as-equilibrium.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/there-is-no-frigate-like-book.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/light-is-sufficient-to-itself.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2012/11/thanatos-two-tiny-rhododendrons.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2012/12/you-almost-bathed-your-tongue.html

Link to: Lessons on the piny

The Little Black Dress - Vastly Overrated

Friday, April 29, 2016

Gabrielle “Coco”Chanel created successful looks for women through the 1920s and ’30s. In 1926, American Vogue likened Chanel’s “little black dress” to the Ford, alluding to its almost universal popularity as a fashion basic. In fact, the concept of the dress suitable for day and evening did become both a staple for Chanel throughout subsequent seasons and a classic piece of twentieth-century women’s wear.

Link to: The Little Black Dress - Vastly Overrated

Swatting Flies

Thursday, April 28, 2016

A few weeks ago in Buenos Aires I was walking down Rodriguez Peña Street on my way to the corner with Calle Corrientes. A DVD store on that corner had the only known halfway decent copy of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s remarkable1968 Martin Fierro. The film, one that Rosemary and I saw in Mexico City in 1968 (shortly after we were married) is an adaptation of the 1872 epic poem by José Hernandez which was followed in 1879 by a sequel called La vuelta de Martín Fierro. This epic, all in verse is seen as the definitive work about life in the Argentine Pampa in the 19th century and the fight the army waged against the fierce Argentine indigenous peoples who were protecting themselves from the encroachment of the white man’s expansion into the interior of the country.

Suddenly, before I arrived at Corrientes I felt something eerie and I stopped. I looked up and I thought, up there is where my abuelita (grandmother used to live). My mother and I would take tram 35 from our home near Nahuel Huapi and Melián to visit her.There we were met up with warmth. I can assert here that I was mostly educated by my grandmother.

I did not want to take a picture of the apartment with the balcony overlooking the street. I just moved on feeling like a pigeon that had temporarily roosted home.

But I was moved by the coincidence of the apartment and my purchase of the Martín Fierro.

My grandmother was most modern. She never told me not to do this or do that. Her method was to say, “If you do this, the consequence will be that.” For many years she gave me that kind of advice. I was much too ignorant to realize that her advice came from maxims uttered by Sancho Panza in El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha.

One she often quoted when I had been hit by some unfortunate event was, “Donde una puerta se cierra otra se abre,” or “where a door closes another opens.” Another when I would refuse to finish the food on my plate was, “El burro que se acostumbró a no comer, se murió,” or “The donkey that refused to eat died.” Similar but funnier in my mind was, “El que por su gusto se muere cantando lo entierran,” or “He who dies by his own pleasure will be buried in song.”

There were two more that are etched in my head are, “Hacete amigo del juez,” or “Make friends with the judge,” and “El diablo sabe por diablo. Pero más sabe por viejo,” “The devil knows because he is the devil. But he knows more because he is old.”

When I would complain to Abue that I was bored she would tell me, “Chúpate el codo,” “Suck your elbow.” If I was idle she would tell me, “El diablo cuando no tiene nada que hacer con el rabo espanta moscas,” “When the devil is bored he swats flies with his tail.”

And on and on it went and I don’t remember her looking at me in anger. In fact I was saved from many a whipping (with a Filipino slipper a chinela) from my mother because Abue would interject, “You don’t understand Alex. He is an artist like I am.”

While watching Martín Fierro I heard an old crotchety protagonist, el Viejo Viscacha utter the maxim of making friends with the judge and the one about the the devil knows more because…

And so, many years later, I have come to know that my grandmother also read the Martín Fierro.

Why am I using these two photographs of Katheryn Petersen? Why not? But I do have a reason. My grandmother was a product of having been born in the Victorian age. Euphemisms were used for body parts. My fave (it is difficult to translate into English as espalda means a person’s back where the spinal column I located), “Donde la espalda pierde su nombre,” or loosely, “Where a person’s back becomes their rear end.” “La cara fea,” or “the ugly face” was another reference to that nether part. And the evacuation point of the rear end was, “El ojo que no ve,” or “the blind eye!”

Quoting a variation from Hamlet she would go to that special doctor to deal with the Paises Bajos or Lower Countries.

Link to: Swatting Flies

The Water Baby

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Many of my childhood memories are a haze in my head. Borges often says that our life is really the remembrance of that which we forget.

The fact is that in that muddle of mine I do remember my father reading to me the Reverend Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies – A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby. I remember the tone of his voice and the fact that most of his reading to me happened in bed.

I have maintained often in these blogs my idea that what makes us human is our ability to associate stuff from disparate images or events from our life.

When I was looking at contact sheets that I took long ago in the rocks of Lighthouse Park of the lovely Katheryn Petersen I noticed these two images that managed not to show offending little parts. The first thought that came into my mind (is it not disparate?) was my father reading the Water Babies.

Link to: The Water Baby

Ample make this bed

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Because we lived in a small house I believe I slept in a crib until I was at least four. The crib was in my parent’s home in Coghlan, Buenos Aires. There is a conflicting memory in my mind that places me in that crib while copying the cover of Llanero Solitario (The Lone Ranger) comic book. Perhaps I may have been even older.

After that I was moved to some sort of sofa in the living room. A few years later my father fixed up a room upstairs (supposed to be for a live-in maid) and I finally had my own bed.

I cannot remember ever having a bed with a headboard. Rosemary complained of this in our Athlone house. We had to place many pillows on the two windows that were behind us that face the north side of our garden. We both painfully bumped our heads in the process.

When we were about to move to our new little home in Kitsilano we decided to splurge on a very good Stickley queen-sized bed at Jordan’s Interiors. It has a headboard!

We all know that Dickinson was not writing about a bed with a headboard in the poem bellow. It was about death and the grave. I will ignore that so I can illustrate the blog with a photograph that I took of Katheryn in the best room of the former Marble Arch Hotel.

Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.
Emily Dickinson

How happy is the little stone
Sleep is supposed to be
The shutting of the eye
I dwell in possibility
when Sappho was a living girl
In a library
A light exists in spring
The lady dare not lift her veil
I took my power in my hand
I find my feet have further goals
I cannot dance upon my toes
The Music of the Violin does not emerge alone
Red Blaze
He touched me, so I live to know
Rear Window- The Entering Takes Away
Said Death to Passion
We Wear the Mask That Grins And Lies
It was not death for I stood alone
The Music in the Violin Does Not Emerge Alone
I tend my flowers for thee
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
Pray gather me anemone!
Ample make her bed
His caravan of red
Me-come! My dazzled face
Develops pearl and weed
But peers beyond her mesh
Surgeons must be very careful
Water is taught by thirst
I could not prove that years had feet
April played her fiddle
A violin in Baize replaced
I think the longest hour
The spirit lasts
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/03/i-left-them-in-ground-emily-dickinson.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/01/i-felt-my-life-with-both-my-hands.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/currer-bell-emily-dickinson-charlotte.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/and-zero-at-bone-with-dirks-of-melody.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/05/charm-invests-her-face.html