July 18 to July 24, 2021

Daily Entries for the week of
Sunday, July 18, 2021
through
Saturday, July 24, 2021

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It’s Saturday, July 24, 2021
Welcome to the 1,168th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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1.0 Lead Picture
by Gauguin, Paul

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Paul Gauguin - http://lettrines.net/dotclear/index.php?post/2013/02/11/L-homme-entre-civilisation-et-barbarie
Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

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2.0 Commentary
The next few weeks will be unsettled for me with daughter Katherine coming and going.
Final departure date is August 28 when she moves to NYC to set up with her boyfriend.
Meanwhile she leaves on Friday morning for a week in NYC to return for dinner next Thursday.
Gets us into August.
That a peripatetic month for her, (not only she coming and going but a slew of her friends), leaving me in her wake.
Then she’s gone and things will get very quiet for me.
How will I replace the excitement?

After several days of excellent sleep, last night I slept only three hours.
I did some early morning shopping and then rested for ten minutes.
I’m spending 40 minutes at the apartment writing the blog and my manuscript and then I’ll field a call from my good friend Gary, who calls me every other Thursday at 10.00am.
We talk for half an hour about his progress on Echobatik, his medical devices company for the visually impaired. And I feel free to share my own thoughts with him. He’s intelligent and sympathetic. It’s a nice moment in my schedule.

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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
“I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.”
~Dave Barry

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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Tuesday night Katherine and I shared an Eggplant Parmesan sandwich and a couple of spare ribs, leftovers all.
It was a delicious and easy dinner.

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7.0 Blog Meister’s Picture of the Day

Myself, far left, then Katherine, her mom and her stepfather.

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By 1890, Gauguin had conceived the project of making Tahiti his next artistic destination. A successful auction of paintings in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in February 1891, along with other events such as a banquet and a benefit concert, provided the necessary funds. The auction had been greatly helped by a flattering review from Octave Mirbeau, courted by Gauguin through Camille Pissarro. After visiting his wife and children in Copenhagen, for what turned out to be the last time, Gauguin set sail for Tahiti on 1 April 1891, promising to return a rich man and make a fresh start. His avowed intent was to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional".Nevertheless, he took care to take with him a collection of visual stimuli in the form of photographs, drawings and prints.

He spent the first three months in Papeete, the capital of the colony and already much influenced by French and European culture. His biographer Belinda Thomson observes that he must have been disappointed in his vision of a primitive idyll. He was unable to afford the pleasure-seeking life-style in Papeete, and an early attempt at a portrait, Suzanne Bambridge, was not well liked. He decided to set up his studio in Mataiea, Papeari, some 45 kilometres (28 mi) from Papeete, installing himself in a native-style bamboo hut. Here he executed paintings depicting Tahitian life such as Fatata te Miti (By the Sea) and Ia Orana Maria (Ave Maria), the latter to become his most prized Tahitian painting.

Many of his finest paintings date from this period. His first portrait of a Tahitian model is thought to be Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower). The painting is notable for the care with which it delineates Polynesian features. He sent the painting to his patron George-Daniel de Monfreid, a friend of Schuffenecker, who was to become Gauguin's devoted champion in Tahiti. By late summer 1892 this painting was being displayed at Goupil's gallery in Paris. Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews believes that Gauguin's encounter with exotic sensuality in Tahiti, so evident in the painting, was by far the most important aspect of his sojourn there.

Gauguin was lent copies of Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout's [fr] 1837 Voyage aux îles du Grand Océan and Edmond de Bovis' [fr] 1855 État de la société tahitienne à l'arrivée des Européens, containing full accounts of Tahiti's forgotten culture and religion. Gauguin was fascinated by the accounts of Arioi society and their god 'Oro. Because these accounts contained no illustrations and the Tahitian models had in any case long disappeared, he could give free rein to his imagination. He executed some twenty paintings and a dozen woodcarvings over the next year. The first of these was Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), representing Oro's terrestrial wife Vairaumati, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His illustrated notebook of the time, Ancien Culte Mahorie [it], is preserved in the Louvre and was published in facsimile form in 1951.

In all, Gauguin sent nine of his paintings to Monfreid in Paris. These were eventually exhibited in Copenhagen in a joint exhibition with the late Vincent van Gogh. Reports that they had been well received (though in fact only two of the Tahitian paintings were sold and his earlier paintings were unfavourably compared with van Gogh's) were sufficiently encouraging for Gauguin to contemplate returning with some seventy others he had completed. He had in any case largely run out of funds, depending on a state grant for a free passage home. In addition he had some health problems diagnosed as heart problems by the local doctor, which Mathews suggests may have been the early signs of cardiovascular syphilis.

Gauguin later wrote a travelogue (first published 1901) titled Noa Noa [ca], originally conceived as commentary on his paintings and describing his experiences in Tahiti. Modern critics have suggested that the contents of the book were in part fantasized and plagiarized. In it he revealed that he had at this time taken a thirteen-year-old girl as native wife or vahine (the Tahitian word for "woman"), a marriage contracted in the course of a single afternoon. This was Teha'amana, called Tehura in the travelogue, who was pregnant by him by the end of summer 1892. Teha'amana was the subject of several of Gauguin's paintings, including Merahi metua no Tehamana and the celebrated Spirit of the Dead Watching, as well as a notable woodcarving Tehura now in the Musée d'Orsay. By the end of July 1893, Gauguin had decided to leave Tahiti and he would never see Teha'amana or her child again even after returning to the island several years later.

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It’s Friday, July 23, 2021
Welcome to the 1,167th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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1.0 Lead Picture
Pauline Viardot

Bust of Viardot 2004 by Birgit Stauch in Baden-Baden
Photographer: Frank C. Müller - Upload by Frank C. Müller
Skulptur des Kopfes der Pauline Viardot

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2.0 Commentary
I define a café as being a restaurant wherein coffee drinks dominate. Dominate, especially in the sense of producing a product of the highest quality. I rank a city’s livability by the number of cafes it encourages and supports.
Now comes a variation on the theme as many American cafes join the ranks of French and Italian cafes in which full menus are offered for every meal. The food offered is certainly not complex and of Guide Michelin quality, but the food plenty serviceable and reasonably priced.
In Boston, Tatte ranks among the best. They do lay claim to the best baguettes and the best chocolate brownies, with nuts, in the city. And that includes Flour Bakery, perhaps the best bakery.
At the Tatte on Pier Four Blvd., I was recently served the best cortado I’ve had since the pandemic abated. A welcome find since my coffee these last few weeks has been poor. I draw a sharp exception here: the pre-pandemic baristas trained at the Thinking Cup are still around and when you catch one of them you’ll get a great cup. And Tatte has a great menu which I’ve reproduced here.

My granddaughter’s class will start in two weeks. We’ll be reading the Underground Railroad.
There’s still time to join up. Email me here and I get you the link.

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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
“Thinking of emoji as gestures helps put things into perspective if we're tempted to start thinking, "If words were good enough for Shakespeare, why aren't they good enough for us?" We can pause and realize that plain words weren't actually good enough for Shakespeare. A lot of what Shakespeare wrote was plays, designed not to be read on a page, but to be performed by people. How many of us have struggled through reading Shakespeare as a disembodied script in school, only to see him come to life in a well-acted production?”
~Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Monday night I created a recipe I’m calling Italian Clam Chowder.
It was delicious.
It’s not for publication yet: I want to make it again to smooth out the presentation.
Basically it employs my idiom of three liquids in a stew, sauce, or soup (here, they are canned tomatoes in a food chopper, white wine, and clam broth.)
As well as my idiom for a paste as the flavoring ingredient of the stew, sauce, or soup.

It’s great for calorie counters (compared to the heavy cream my NE Chowder recipe calls for.)
And it’s great for the lactose intolerant.

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7.0 Blog Meister’s Pictures with Captions
Here is the menu board from Tatte.

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Pauline Viardot (18 July 1821 – 18 May 1910) was a leading nineteenth-century French mezzo-soprano, pedagogue, and composer of Spanish descent.

Born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García, her name appears in various forms. When it is not simply "Pauline Viardot", it most commonly appears in association with her maiden name García or the unaccented form, Garcia. This name sometimes precedes Viardot and sometimes follows it. Sometimes the words are hyphenated; sometimes they are not. She achieved initial fame as "Pauline García"; the accent was dropped at some point, but exactly when is not clear.After her marriage, she referred to herself simply as "Mme Viardot".

She came from a musical family and took up music at a young age. She began performing as a teenager and had a long and illustrious career as a star performer.

In 1837, 16-year-old Pauline García gave her first concert performance in Brussels and in 1839, made her opera debut as Desdemona in Rossini's Otello in London. This proved to be the surprise of the season. Despite her flaws, she had an exquisite technique combined with an astonishing degree of passion.

At the age of 17, she met and was courted by Alfred de Musset, who had earlier been taken with her sister Maria Malibran. Some sources say he asked for Pauline's hand in marriage, but she declined. However, she remained on good terms with him for many years. Her friend George Sand (who later based the heroine of her 1843 novel Consuelo on her) had a role in discouraging her from accepting de Musset's proposal, directing her instead to Louis Viardot (1800-1883).

Viardot, an author and the director of the Théâtre Italien and twenty-one years Pauline's senior, was financially secure and would be able to provide Pauline with much more stability than de Musset. The marriage took place on 18 April 1840. He was 39 or 40, she 18. He was devoted to her and became the manager of her career. Her children followed in her musical footsteps. Her son Paul became a concert violinist, her daughter Louise Héritte-Viardot became a composer and writer, and two other daughters became concert singers.

Her marriage did not stop the steady stream of infatuated men. The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev in particular fell passionately in love with her after hearing her rendition of The Barber of Seville in Russia in 1843. In 1845, he left Russia to follow Pauline and eventually installed himself in the Viardot household, treated her four children as his own, and adored her until he died. She, in turn, critiqued his work and through her connections and social abilities, presented him in the best light whenever they were in public. The exact status of their relationship is a matter of debate. Other men closely linked to her included the composers Charles Gounod (she created the title role in his opera Sapho) and Hector Berlioz (who initially had her in mind for the role of Dido in Les Troyens, but changed his mind, which led to a cooling of his relations with the Viardots).

Renowned for her wide vocal range and her dramatic roles on stage, Viardot gave performances that inspired composers such as Frédéric Chopin, Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns (who dedicated Samson and Delilah to her, and wanted her to sing the title role, but she declined on account of her age 8), and Giacomo Meyerbeer, for whom she created Fidès in Le prophète.

She spoke fluent Spanish, French, Italian, English, German, and Russian, and composed songs in a variety of national techniques. Her career took her to the best music halls across Europe, and from 1843 to 1846 she was permanently attached to the Opera in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

She spent many happy hours at George Sand's home at Nohant, with Sand and her lover Frédéric Chopin. She was given expert advice by Chopin on her piano playing, her vocal compositions, and her arrangements of some of his mazurkas as songs. He in turn derived from her some firsthand knowledge about Spanish music. In July 1847, Sand's and Chopin's relationship came to an end. Viardot tried to heal the rift and get the two back together, but to no avail.

She arranged instrumental works by Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms as songs. She was the mezzo-soprano in the Tuba mirum movement of Mozart's Requiem at Chopin's funeral at Église de la Madeleine in Paris on October 30, 1849, which she performed together with a soprano, incognito behind a black curtain.

She sang the title role of Gluck's opera Orphée et Eurydice at Théâtre Lyrique in Paris in November 1859, directed by Hector Berlioz, and she sang this role over 150 times. She was well acquainted with Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano and philanthropist, who had been a student of her brother.

A notable remark of hers was made to the English soprano Adelaide Kemble when they attended the late concert in London by the great Italian soprano Giuditta Pasta, who was clearly past her prime. Asked by Kemble what she thought of the voice, she replied 'Ah! It is a ruin, but then so is Leonardo's Last Supper'.

In 1863, Pauline Viardot retired from the stage. She and her family left France due to her husband's public opposition to Emperor Napoleon III and settled in Baden-Baden, Germany. In 1870, however, Johannes Brahms persuaded her to sing in the first public performance of his Alto Rhapsody, at Jena.

After the fall of Napoleon III later in 1870, they returned to France, where she taught at the Paris Conservatory and, until her husband's death in 1883, presided over a music salon in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Her students included Ada Adini, Désirée Artôt, Selma Ek, Emma Engdahl-Jägerskiöld, Marie Hanfstängl, Yelizaveta Lavrovskaya, Felia Litvinne, Emilie Mechelin, Aglaja Orgeni, Mafalda Salvatini, Raimund von zur-Mühlen, and Maria Wilhelmj. See: List of music students by teacher: T to Z#Pauline Viardot. Her pupil Natalia Iretskaya later became the teacher of Oda Slobodskaya and of Lydia Lipkowska, who in turn taught Virginia Zeani. She was also the godmother of Artôt's daughter Lola Artôt de Padilla. In 1877, her daughter Marianne was briefly engaged to Gabriel Fauré, but she later married composer Alphonse Duvernoy.

On 11 April 1873 she appeared at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris in the first performance of Jules Massenet's oratorio Marie-Magdeleine.

From the mid-1840s, until her retirement, she was renowned for her appearances in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, an opera with which her family had long been associated (see "Early life" above). In 1855, she had purchased Mozart's original manuscript of the opera in London. She preserved it in a shrine in her Paris home, where it was visited by many notable people, including Rossini, who genuflected, and Tchaikovsky, who said he was "in the presence of divinity". It was displayed at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, and at the centenary exhibition of Don Giovanni's premiere in 1887. In 1889 she announced she would donate it to the Conservatoire de Paris, and this occurred in 1892.

In 1910, Pauline Viardot died, aged 88. Her body is interred in the Montmartre Cemetery, Paris, France. The Villa Viardot in Bougival, near Paris, was a gift to the Viardots by Ivan Turgenev in 1874.

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It’s Thursday, July 22, 2021
Welcome to the 1,166th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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1.0 Lead Picture
Thomas Carlyle

Japanese print depicting Carlyle's horror at the burning of his manuscript of The French Revolution: A History

Japanese Department of Education - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g10399/

DATE CREATED/PUBLISHED: Japan : Japanese Department of Education, [between 1850 and 1900] MEDIUM: 1 print on hōsho paper : woodcut, color ; 33 x 23 cm. (block), 36.5 x 25.7 cm. (sheet)
SUMMARY: Japanese print shows Carlyle horrified to see his manuscript burn after his dog upsets a lamp.
REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZC4-10399 (color film copy transparency) RIGHTS ADVISORY: No known restrictions on publication. CALL NUMBER: FP 2 - Chadbourne, no. 29 (A size) [P&P] REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA NOTES: Annotations, stamps, etc. on verso of print: 181; 47623a (white label); LC2585; 43. Earlier control number: 236.3-29. Gift; Mrs. E. Crane Chadbourne; 1930; (DLC/PP-1930:47623a). Forms part of: Chadbourne collection of Japanese prints (Library of Congress).

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2.0 Commentary
I found the Basquiat exhibition at the MFA exciting and gripping.
It redefines art for me.
Art no longer has to be the enthralling, gripping classical masterpieces of Pollack or Donatello or Corot that invite you to linger and become absorbed.
At can be a one and done.
Quick to create.
Quick to view and respond to.
Quick to move on from.
Although the works of Basquiat are more compelling, with more to say than his peers.

Long walks are an aggressive defense against the encroaching deterioration of old age.

As is regular exercise of any kind.
And don’t forget to continue to work towards a healthier diet.

My rewriting of my manuscript is moving along well. It’ll be another six months before I am close to finished.

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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
Thomas Carlyle in 1854 wrote On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.

Carlyle moved towards his later thinking during the 1840s, leading to a break with many old friends and allies, such as Mill and, to a lesser extent, Emerson. His belief in the importance of heroic leadership found form in the book in which he was seen to compare a wide range of different types of heroes, including Odin, Muhammad, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, William Shakespeare, Dante, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns, John Knox, and Martin Luther.
These lectures of Carlyle's are regarded as an early and powerful formulation of the Great Man theory of historical development.

For Carlyle, the hero was somewhat similar to Aristotle's "magnanimous" man – a person who flourished in the fullest sense. However, for Carlyle, unlike Aristotle, the world was filled with contradictions with which the hero had to deal. All heroes will be flawed. Their heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of these difficulties, not in their moral perfection. To sneer at such a person for their failings is the philosophy of those who seek comfort in the conventional.

Carlyle called this "valetism", from the expression "no man is a hero to his valet."

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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
On Tuesday night Katherine and I had a North End Gravy with rigatoni pasta and a plate of Eggplant Parmesan for me and a simple Baked Eggplant for Katherine.
Dinner was opulent.
Delicious.
We made the dinner healthier by roasting the eggplant before the baking rather than frying the eggplant as most cooks do.
There is absolutely no loss of flavor.

This is a picture I took of Niagara Falls. The occasion was about three years ago on my three week
existential solo auto trip to the Grand Canyon.

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7.0 Blog Meister’s Pictures with Captions


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Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a Scottish historian, satirical writer, essayist, translator, philosopher, mathematician, and teacher.
In his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841), he argued that the actions of the "Great Man" play a key role in history, claiming that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men".
Other major works include The French Revolution: A History, 3 vols (1837) and The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, 6 vols (1858–65).

His 1837 history of The French Revolution was the inspiration for Charles Dickens' 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, and remains popular today.
Carlyle's 1836 Sartor Resartus is a notable philosophical novel.

A noted polemicist, Carlyle coined the term "the dismal science" for economics, in his essay "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question", which satirically advocated for the reintroduction of slavery to the West Indies to highlight his perceived hypocrisy of British abolitionists' indifference to domestic child-labour and slave-like working conditions in contemporary factories.
He also wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia.

In mathematics, he is known for the Carlyle circle, a method used in quadratic equations and for developing ruler-and-compass constructions of regular polygons.

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It’s Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Welcome to the 1,165th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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1.0 Lead Picture
Shay’s Rebellion

An early 20th century portrayal of Daniel Shays forces fleeing from Federal troops in an attempt to lay siege to the Springfield Arsenal with only 4 killed and virtually no musket fire; they would regroup later in Amherst, Massachusetts
C. Kendrick - The people's history of the world, Edward Sylvester Ellis; vol. VI

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2.0 Commentary
I’m getting a bit more familiar with adding the photos taken with my cell phone to the Squarespace platform I use for the blog. Thinking the personal photos will be a positive addition.

It’s raining. Looked at the ten day: except for Tuesday, the 20th, expect no sunny days through July 28th. That’s a bummer for most of us who planned to spend a good deal of time by the beach. And the service industry that’s struggled through the pandemic hoping that the summer will help them rebound.

Roast eggplant instead of frying it.
Slice the eggplant lengthwise into ⅓” thick slices.
Place on lined trays and brush each side of every slice with olive oil.

Bake in a 400* oven for 35 to 40 minutes until the eggplant is lightly browned.
I don’t care for the skin of the eggplant so I invariably use my vegetable peeler to take off at least half of the skin before slicing it.
And you do wash all vegetables before you cook them, don’t you?
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Here is a picture of a well-done pre-pandemic Cortado in a glass. Few baristas in Boston can do this post-pandemic. A pity. But perhaps in a month or two…

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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring barque,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

~William Shakespeare
Great Sonnets

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5.0 Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

Talking to family about an upcoming party hosted by the cousins, the offspring of myself and my siblings. They thought they’d organize annual parties without the controversy and drama that was endemic to holiday parties hosted by our generation. While the four siblings always had three arguments that had to be resolved or put aside for the duration, the sixteen cousins only have three controversies of the “if he/she is coming, I am not,” variety. A sharp improvement. With this proviso: every holiday party saw each of us siblings in attendance. The cousins have a hands-off approach. No cajoling. No negotiation.

Blog meister responds: So as broken our system was, we always had perfect attendance at our events. Less than that was simply not acceptable. And I suppose we all knew that going into the season.

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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
I found myself alone on Saturday night so I treated myself to a dry-aged steak.
Prepared simply: slow-roast and then seared/broiled.
Of course, delicious, accompanied by sauerkraut.

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Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes both on individuals and their trades. The fight took place mostly in and around Springfield during 1786 and 1787. American Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led four thousand rebels (called Shaysites) in a protest against economic and civil rights injustices. Shays was a farmhand from Massachusetts at the beginning of the Revolutionary War; he joined the Continental Army, saw action at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Battle of Bunker Hill, and Battles of Saratoga, and was eventually wounded in action.

In 1787, Shays' rebels marched on the federal Springfield Armory in an unsuccessful attempt to seize its weaponry and overthrow the government. The confederal government found itself unable to finance troops to put down the rebellion, and it was consequently put down by the Massachusetts State militia and a privately funded local militia. The widely held view was that the Articles of Confederation needed to be reformed as the country's governing document, and the events of the rebellion served as a catalyst for the Constitutional Convention and the creation of the new government.

There is still debate among scholars concerning the rebellion's influence on the Constitution and its ratification.

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It’s Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Welcome to the 1,164th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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1.0 Lead Picture
Lassie

television series filming on location in Florida (1965)

Credit: State Archive of Florida - http://fpc.dos.state.fl.us/prints/pr07251.jpg
First uploaded to en.wikipedia by FinFangFoom under PD.
Original image: en:Image:Lassie.jpg.

Lassie filming movie on location in Florida

Permission details

Released to public domain by Florida Memory Project, provided credit is given to State Archive of Florida, pursuant to Section 257.35(6), Florida Statutes.

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2.0 Commentary
Eight of the ten days from Sunday the 18th to Tues the 27th are slated to be cloudy and/or rainy.
It’s up to ourselves to make the best of this.
Book a trip to the MFA!

I must say that I really love spending my mid-days at the MFA, writing my blog and my manuscript, snacking, and visiting a gallery.  A Dual membership is under $200.00. A terrific value.

Sadly, an illness has caused the cancellation of a visit from one of our friends.
Life happens.
 

Taking my twice-daily long walk to the Public Garden,
I was treated by the company of this bird.
Really, a lovely bird.
Our national bird if Ben Franklin had his way.

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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
“You taught me that risking loss makes life much more precious.”
~Karen Grey
What I'm Looking For

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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Friday night my cousin Lauren, daughter Katherine, and I had a first course of Spaghetti with an anchovy sauce: a can of anchovies, 3TB olive oil, a dash of white wine vinegar, 8 cloves of garlic, lots of fresh parsley and basil, freshly-ground pepper, all into a food chopper. Drain the al dente pasta, toss it with the anchovy sauce and serve. A knockout!
I pan-fried the salmon, most of the time with skin-side down, and topped it with a sauce that featured vinegar peppers, mustard, and a soupcon of mayonnaise.
Also delicious.

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An early depiction of Lassie is found in British writer Elizabeth Gaskell's 1859 short story "The Half-brothers". In the story, Lassie is described as a female collie with "intelligent, apprehensive eyes" who rescues two half-brothers who are lost and dying in the snow. When the younger brother can no longer carry on, elder brother Gregory, Lassie's master, ties a handkerchief around Lassie's neck and sends her home. Lassie arrives home, and leads the search party to the boys. When they arrive Gregory is dead, but his younger half-brother is saved. Thus, Gaskell apparently originated the character Lassie, and at the same time defined the "Lassie saves the day" storyline that is the essence of subsequent Lassie tales.

World War I incident

According to writer Nigel Clarke in the "Shipwreck Guide to Dorset and South Devon", the original Lassie who inspired so many films and television episodes was a rough-haired crossbreed who saved the life of a sailor during World War I.

Half collie, Lassie was owned by the landlord of the Pilot Boat, a pub in the port of Lyme Regis. On New Year's Day in 1915 the Royal Navy battleship Formidable was torpedoed by a German submarine off Start Point in South Devon, with the loss of more than 500 men. In a storm that followed the accident, a life raft containing bodies was blown along the coast to Lyme Regis. In helping to deal with the crisis, the local pub in Lyme Regis, called the Pilot Boat, offered its cellar as a mortuary.

When the bodies had been laid out on the stone floor, Lassie, a crossbred collie owned by the pub owner, found her way down amongst the bodies, and she began to lick the face of one of the victims, Able Seaman John Cowan. She stayed beside him for more than half an hour, nuzzling him and keeping him warm with her fur. To everyone's astonishment, Cowan eventually stirred. He was taken to hospital and went on to make a full recovery. He visited Lassie again when he returned to thank all who saved his life.

When the officers heard the story of Lassie and what she did to rescue Cowan, they told it again and again to any reporter who would listen as it was inspirational and heart-warming. Hollywood got hold of the story, and so a star was born.

Eric Knight short story and novel

The fictional character of Lassie was created by English author Eric Knight in Lassie Come-Home, first published as a short story in The Saturday Evening Post in 1938 and later as a full-length novel in 1940. Set in the Depression-era England, the novel depicts the lengthy journey a rough collie makes to be reunited with her young Yorkshire master after her family is forced to sell her for money.

Movies and television

In 1943, the novel was adapted into a feature film, Lassie Come Home, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) that starred Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor. The movie was a hit and enjoyed favorable critical response.[3] MGM followed this with several additional films, including a sequel entitled Son of Lassie (1945), starring Peter Lawford and June Lockhart, and Courage of Lassie with Elizabeth Taylor. A radio series, Lassie Radio Show, was also created, airing until 1949.

Lassie television series filming on location in Florida (1965)

Between 1954–1973, the television series, Lassie was broadcast, with Lassie initially residing on a farm with a young male master. In the eleventh season, it changed to U.S. Forest Service rangers as her companions, then the collie was on her own for a season before ending the series with Lassie residing at a ranch for orphaned children. The long-running series was the recipient of two Emmy Awards before it was canceled in 1973. Lassie won several PATSY Awards (an award for animal actors).[4] A second series followed in the 1980s. In 1997, Canadian production company Cinar Inc. produced a new Lassie television series for the Animal Planet network in the U.S. and YTV in Canada. It ran until 1999.

In 2005, a remake of the original Lassie Come Home movie was produced in the United Kingdom. Starring Peter O'Toole and Samantha Morton, Lassie was released in 2006.

Lassie continues to make personal appearances as well as marketing a line of pet food and a current pet care TV show, Lassie's Pet Vet on PBS stations in the United States. Lassie is one of only four animals (and one of very few fictional characters, such as Mickey Mouse, Kermit the Frog, and Bugs Bunny) to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—the others being silent-film stars Rin Tin Tin, Uggie and Strongheart. In 2005, the show business journal Variety named Lassie one of the "100 Icons of the Century"—the only animal star on the list.

An animated TV series was made based on the dog. It was called "The New Adventures of Lassie". In this animated TV series Lassie was a dog that was owned by the Parker family in a national park. The animated TV series is mainly a traditionally animated (2D hand-drawn animated) TV series with some CGI animation (vehicles) in it. The TV series was shown on TVOntario in Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2016. Lassie was an animated TV series entitled: "Lassie's Rescue Rangers" created by Filmation Associates TV-G | 30min | Animation, Adventure, Family | TV Series (1973–1975)

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It’s Monday, July 19, 2021
Welcome to the 1,163rd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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1.0 Lead Picture
Still Life with a Curtain (1895) Paul Cezanne

illustrates Cézanne's increasing trend towards
terse compression of forms and dynamic tension between geometric figures.
Paul Cézanne - Hermitage Torrent (.torrent with info-hash)

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2.0 Commentary
I did some more editing on my first ten pages.
These will set the standard for the other 300 pages and many issues have to be worked out before proceeding pell-mell into the body of the manuscript.
Dialog is a big edit today. My protagonist will speak in shorter sentences. Her friend’s sentences will be more ponderous.

At the museum, I visited the small but thoroughly excellent exhibition on the influences on him and those he influenced. It’s a really well-conceived and illustrated event. Far superior to the overly large Monet exhibit.

I’m doing the typing in the Courtyard of the MFA where people take their lunches.
Very pretty. Outdoors. Passersby all happy to be here. A nice feeling.

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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
“I've acted all my life. All the world's a stage.'

‘It's not.' Bressac tapped his nose thoughtfully. 'There's no rehearsal, no proper audience, no intermission, one performance only. Behind the scenes there are only more scenes. You can't tell if it's a tragedy or a comedy, but you know that, sooner or later, it'll be an historical. Daggers have solid blades and the blood is real.”

~Daniel O'Mahony, Doctor Who: The Man in the Velvet Mask

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5.0 Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

A good deal f discussion today on the poor summer weather. But perhaps a day trip to Ogunquit is a good idea. But let’s wait a week for the poor weather to pass. And let’s not go on a weekend when its extra crowded.

Blog meister responds: Love Ogunquit. At least one visit a year. Sometimes a winter holiday drive up to have Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner at the White Barn Inn.

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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Dinner on Thursday was St. Louis Spare Ribs with sauerkraut and baked beans.
An unusual combination for us but well-appreciated.
I simmered an ordinary can of baked beans with some chicken stock and some small pieces of the butt end of a leg of prosciutto for which I paid $5.00.
Everything was well-appreciated.

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11.0 Thumbnail
Paul Cézanne (19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century.

Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials: he wanted to "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or orange a sphere, for example).
Additionally, Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of perception led him to explore binocular vision graphically, rendering slightly different, yet simultaneous visual perceptions of the same phenomena to provide the viewer with an aesthetic experience of depth different from those of earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective.
His interest in new ways of modelling space and volume derived from the stereoscopy obsession of his era and from reading Hippolyte Taine’s Berkelean theory of spatial perception.
Cézanne's innovations have prompted critics to suggest such varied explanations as sick retinas, pure vision, and the influence of the steam railway.

Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of color and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects. Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne "is the father of us all".

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It’s Sunday, July 18, 2021
Welcome to the 1,162nd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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1.0 Lead Picture
Catcher in the Rye

Cover features a drawing of a carousel horse (pole visible entering the neck and exiting below on the chest) with a city skyline visible in the distance under the hindquarters. The cover is two-toned: everything below the horse is whitish while the horse and everything above it is a reddish orange. The title appears at the top in yellow letters against the reddish orange background. It is split into two lines after "Catcher". At the bottom in the whitish background are the words "a novel by J. D. Salinger".

Michael Mitchell; the credit "Jacket design by Michael Mitchell" is found on the right jacket flap (the left panel). (For jurisdictions that do not recognize the rule of the shorter term, and define copyright term based the date of the author's death plus a set number of years: according to this post at Cal Arts, Mitchell died in 2009.) - Nate D. Sanders auctions (direct link to jpg). Retouched by uploader.

First-edition cover of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by the American author J. D. Salinger.

On a visit to the Gardner I took this pic of the lovely courtyard.

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2.0 Commentary
New look: Thanks to a suggestion from my daughter Katherine and some technical support from my friend Tucker at Microsoft I will be adding a daily photo that I have taken at one time or another. The good news is that it will be MY photograph. The bad news is the same.
Today’s photo is of the Gardner Museum Courtyard.
This is the first format change I’ve made in several months and I am excited by it.
Some of you will remember that I have used my own photographs before. However, the process I used was tedious and added a good deal of time to the daily post. The cloud shortcut I just learned knocks 50% off the time.

Sleep issues I will always have with me.
However, I’ve added another arrow to my quiver: my great Mistral chair. I can sit in it and get so drowsy it may even qualify as entry level sleep.
That’s what happened last night.
Not a panacea but definitely an option.

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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
“Shakespeare could do anything with words.
You are not more intelligent than he--so don't try to fix his writing.
Try to understand it.
If the language is clumsy or contradictory--consider why?
Every word was deliberately chosen.
Trust me.”
― Ethan Hawke

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5.0 Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

Yesterday we dealt with a variety of tech issues.
Lucky to get a fellow from Microsoft who was patient and knowledgeable.
As an added fillip, a neighbor was able to get a nagging issue of her own resolved.


Blog meister responds: Tech issues ye shall always have with you. Bless the tech meisters on the spot to help for they shall be called tech responders.
 

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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Wednesday night Katherine and I had Tuna Salad Sandwiches.
The definition of a sandwich is a good loaf and Iggy’s makes a perfect ciabatta square and it’s close enough to lactose-free that Katherine (lactose intolerant) can eat it without any ill effects.
We used an expensive jar of tuna, a wonderful product for a main course.
Celery with leaves, lettuce, pickle, olives, and tomato added their personalities.
Mayo, evoo, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper made the dressing.
A lighter dinner but just as satisfying as any.

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11.0 Thumbnail
Catcher in the Rye attempted adaptations to film

Early in his career, Salinger expressed a willingness to have his work adapted for the screen. In 1949, a critically panned film version of his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was released; renamed My Foolish Heart, the film took great liberties with Salinger's plot and is widely considered to be among the reasons that Salinger refused to allow any subsequent film adaptations of his work. The enduring success of The Catcher in the Rye, however, has resulted in repeated attempts to secure the novel's screen rights.

When The Catcher in the Rye was first released, many offers were made to adapt it for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn, producer of My Foolish Heart. In a letter written in the early 1950s, Salinger spoke of mounting a play in which he would play the role of Holden Caulfield opposite Margaret O'Brien, and, if he couldn't play the part himself, to "forget about it." Almost 50 years later, the writer Joyce Maynard definitively concluded, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."

Salinger told Maynard in the 1970s that Jerry Lewis "tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden," the protagonist in the novel which Lewis had not read until he was in his thirties. Film industry figures including Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have tried to make a film adaptation. In an interview with Premiere, John Cusack commented that his one regret about turning 21 was that he had become too old to play Holden Caulfield. Writer-director Billy Wilder recounted his abortive attempts to snare the novel's rights:

Of course I read The Catcher in the Rye... Wonderful book. I loved it. I pursued it. I wanted to make a picture out of it. And then one day a young man came to the office of Leland Hayward, my agent, in New York, and said, "Please tell Mr. Leland Hayward to lay off. He's very, very insensitive." And he walked out. That was the entire speech. I never saw him. That was J. D. Salinger and that was Catcher in the Rye.

In 1961, Salinger denied Elia Kazan permission to direct a stage adaptation of Catcher for Broadway. Later, Salinger's agents received bids for the Catcher film rights from Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg, neither of which was even passed on to Salinger for consideration.

In 2003, the BBC television program The Big Read featured The Catcher in the Rye, interspersing discussions of the novel with "a series of short films that featured an actor playing J. D. Salinger's adolescent antihero, Holden Caulfield." The show defended its unlicensed adaptation of the novel by claiming to be a "literary review", and no major charges were filed.

After Salinger died in 2010, Phyllis Westberg, who was Salinger's agent at Harold Ober Associates, stated that nothing has changed in terms of licensing film, television, or stage rights of his works. A letter written by Salinger in 1957 revealed that he was open to an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye released after his death. He wrote: "Firstly, it is possible that one day the rights will be sold. Since there's an ever-looming possibility that I won't die rich, I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy. It pleasures me no end, though, I might quickly add, to know that I won't have to see the results of the transaction." Salinger also wrote that he believed his novel was not suitable for film treatment, and that translating Holden Caulfield's first-person narrative into voice-over and dialogue would be contrived.

In 2020, Don Hahn revealed that Disney had almost made an animated movie titled Dufus which would have been an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye "with German shepherds", most likely akin to Oliver & Company. The idea came from then CEO Michael Eisner who loved the book and wanted to do an adaptation. After being told that J. D. Salinger would not agree to sell the film rights, Eisner stated "Well, let's just do that kind of story, that kind of growing up, coming of age story."

Banned fan sequel

In 2009, the year before he died, Salinger successfully sued to stop the U.S. publication of a novel that presents Holden Caulfield as an old man. The novel's author, Fredrik Colting, commented: "call me an ignorant Swede, but the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned books". The issue is complicated by the nature of Colting's book, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which has been compared to fan fiction. Although commonly not authorized by writers, no legal action is usually taken against fan fiction, since it is rarely published commercially and thus involves no profit.

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