The Saunterer

Miriam Beard on the value of travel

    Live a shut-in life and be narrow and shallow, or do as Miriam Beard suggests:

    Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

    (Miriam Beard, from her book Realism in Romantic Japan, is quoted from page 1 of How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm, by Mei-Ling Hopgood. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012.)
    For a bit about Miriam Beard, click here.
    For a brief biography of Mei-Ling Hopgood, click here. For images of or relating to Mei-Ling Hopgood, click here.

Mary Francey on work discrimination against women

    Women wanting to work have always had men turn the odds against them. Mary Francey reminds us how much so in the 1930s:

    A Gallup Poll taken in 1936 revealed that 82% of the respondents disapproved of married women working if their husbands were capable of supporting them. Discriminatory legislation in Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island removed married women from State controlled jobs, while twenty-eight other States attempted to pass similar laws. However, in light of the fact that 42% of American families were living marginally on less than $1,000 a year, there was a clear need for women to add whatever they could to the family income. Many supervisors justified paying women as little as five cents an hour by reasoning that they had the advantage of working in the comfort of their homes, eliminating the need for child care. After a long, grueling day in a factory, young women often took materials for making artificial flowers home to work on as a way of adding to their meager earnings.
    In general, women worked long hours at menial jobs for appallingly little pay. Social Security Administration figures for 1937 reveal that women’s annual pay was $525.00 compared with an average of $1,027.00 for men. Married women were allowed to work only in a severely restricted sense; for example, the National Economy Act of 1932 prohibited more than one family member from working for the civil service. A National Education Survey that contacted 1,500 school districts in 1930 [found that many districts] prohibited the hiring of married women teachers for new positions, and 63% of the school districts in the country dismissed women teachers when they married. New Deal policies, too, discriminated against married working women to the degree that the League of Women Voters was compelled to issue a statement on discrimination in 1936 that warned that “an attack of this sort on married women soon becomes an attack on employment opportunities for all women.”

    (Quoted from pages 7-8 of American Women at Work, by Mary Francey. J. P. Realty, Inc., 2000.)
    Mary Francey is Professor Emerita of Art and Art History, University of Utah. To read an essay of hers about print makers employed by the Federal Art Project (FAP), a division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, click here.

George Perkins Marsh on humans killing Nature

    Although he doesn’t say it, overpopulation is our big stick of killing people, animals, plants, climate, and Earth’s beauty:

    The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic creatures; and she avenges herself on the intruder, by letting loose on her defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces destined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he has unwisely dispersed and driven from the field of action.

    (Quoted from page 68 of Altered Environments: The Outer Banks of North Carolina, by Jeffrey Pompe. The University of South Carolina Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of George Perkins Marsh, click here. For images of or relating to George Perkins Marsh, click here.
    For information about Jeffrey Pompe, click here. For images of or relating to Jeffrey Pompe, click here.

Ingrid Newkirk on why you are probably unaware you abuse animals

    We are anything but kind hearts when we let others do the killings for us. Ingrid Newkirk:

    Most of us can’t imagine picking up a firearm to slaughter a deer or a rhino. We never meet or come to know the animals we ourselves harm, directly or, far more likely, through strangers. Because we haven’t really thought much about it, or don’t imagine there is a choice in the matter, we buy products and services that provide the funds to pay others to put harsh chemicals down beagles’ throats, to castrate lambs without anesthetic, to shoot mother orangutans out of trees, and to build tiny cages in which foxes and lynx live until their necks are snapped and their pelts turned into the fur trim on winter jackets and gloves. These experiences are all very real to these animals, who aren’t lulled into acceptance, as we are, by the myths about humane treatment and necessity, and who aren’t distracted, as we are, by the pretty packaging, alluring descriptions, and upbeat marketing that surround almost everything we buy, from floor cleaner to circus tickets.

    (Quoted from page 7 of The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights, by Ingrid Newkirk. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Ingrid Newkirk, click here. For images of or relating to Ingrid Newkirk, click here.

Max Eastman on how a little difference can make a big difference

    Citing the example of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, Max Eastman writes:

    Charles Dana Gibson is the original discoverer of the psycho-physical law that an anatomically impossible amount of space between the eye and the eyebrow of the female produces a romantic reaction in the male.

    To see the physical stimulus in Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings, click here.

    (Quoted from page 42 of Journalism Versus Art, by Max Eastman. Alfred A. Knopf, 1916.)
    For a brief biography of Max Eastman, click here. For images of or relating to Max Eastman, click here.
    For a short written biography of Charles Dana Gibson, click here. For a five-minute video biography of Charles Dana Gibson, click here.

Edith Wharton on dress and the birth of the female conscious

    If some do not understand the effect on little girls of dressing up, Edith Wharton does:

    It was always an event in the little girl’s life to take a walk with her father, and more particularly so today, because she had on her new winter bonnet, which was so beautiful (and so becoming) that for the first time she woke to the importance of dress, and of herself as a subject for adornment -– so that I may date from that hour the birth of the conscious and feminine ME in the little girl’s vague soul.

    (Quoted from page 89 of The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America, by Diana DiPaolo Loren. University Press of Florida, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Edith Wharton, click here. For images of or relating to Edith Wharton, click here.
    For a short biography of Diana DiPaolo Loren, click here. For images of or relating to Diana DiPaolo Loren, click here.

Boethius on music

    Music, Boethius knew, satisfies our inborn need for harmony:

    That which is most knowable is most harmonious; only quantities, magnitudes, forms, essences, are knowable, and the discipline of music concerns itself with essences consisting of related quantities; those related quantities which are easiest to know are the proportions, the essences, and the most harmonious sounds.

    (Quoted from page 3 of A Concise History of American Music Education, by Michael L. Mark. Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Boethius, click here. For images of or relating to Boethius, click here.
    For a bit about Michael L. Mark and his book, click here. For images of or relating to Michael L. Mark, click here.

Junichiro Tanizaki on how to make gold leaf be exquisitely beautiful

    Dark shadows and a light ray, Junichiro Tanizaki tells:

And surely you have seen, in the darkness of the innermost rooms of these huge buildings, to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold leaf of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness, like the glow upon the horizon at sunset. In no other setting is gold quite so exquisitely beautiful. You walk past, turning to look again, and yet again; and as you move away the golden surface of the paper glows ever more deeply, changing not in a flash, but growing slowly, steadily brighter, like color rising in the face of a giant. Or again you may find that the gold dust of the background, which until that moment had only a dull, sleepy luster, will, as you move past, suddenly gleam forth as if it had burst into flame.

    (Quoted from "In Praise of Shadows," by Junichiro Tanizaki. Page 348 in The Art of the Personal Essay, by Phillip Lopate. Anchor Books, 1994.)
    For a brief biography of Junichiro Tanizaki, click here. For images of or relating to Junichiro Tanizaki, click here.
    For information about Phillip Lopate, click here.

D. H. Lawrence on craftsmanship

    Craftsmanship is the subject of D. H. Lawrence’s poem, Things Men Have Made:

Things men have made with wakened hands,
and put soft life into are awake through years with
transferred touch,
and go on glowing for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

    Profound phrases, don’t you think, are "put soft life into" and “with transferred touch.”

    (Quoted from page 108 of On Craftsmanship: Towards a New Bauhaus, by Christopher Frayling. Oberon Books, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of D. H. Lawrence, click here. For images of or relating to D. H. Lawrence, click here.
    For a brief biography of Christopher Frayling, click here. For images of or relating to Christopher Frayling, click here.

William Gass on great memorials

    Most emblems, notes William Gass, point to a specific thing, but when the emblem is a great memorial it is versatile:

    Great memorials are curiously non-committal. Remove Lincoln’s statue and put in FDR’s. No problem. Greek temples are quite general. Liberty’s torch can stand for Victory. Or Fidelity. Or Truth. . . . The Sphinx says nothing to us; it is blank in its stare as the sky and silent in its posture as the sand –- or, if you wish: sky silent/sand blank . . . the monumental monument tends to be, in this way, an open emblem. It tends to be FOR RENT.

    (Quoted from page 12 of Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, by Marina Warner. University of California Press, 1985.)
    For a brief biography of William Gass, click here. For images of or relating to William Gass, click here.
    For information about Marina Warner, click here. For images of or relating to Marina Warner, click here.