Manhattan artist George Deem is remembered for referencing the history of painting by re-imagining Old Masters in a contemporary context. He re-configured iconic pictorial images through visual ploys such as repetition and erasure, or through the addition of components of contemporary life and art. [Read more…] about George Deem, Bulldozers and Stalinist Suppression
Literature
The Corset Maker: The Story Of A Courageous Jewish Teen
This week on The Historians Podcast Annette Libeskind Berkovits discusses her historical novel The Corset Maker which tells the story of a courageous Orthodox Jewish teen, Rifka, who was living in Warsaw, Poland, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. [Read more…] about The Corset Maker: The Story Of A Courageous Jewish Teen
Stephen Crane’s Monster: A Story About Community Courage
In the summer of 1898, Harper’s Magazine published a novella by the noted author Stephen Crane entitled, The Monster. It is one of the first pieces of American fiction to realistically deal with racism and discrimination.
Crane, in the aftermath of the meteoric rise to fame that accompanied the publication of his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage some three years before, was living in England when the story was published, but both his and the story’s ties to Upstate New York are undeniable. [Read more…] about Stephen Crane’s Monster: A Story About Community Courage
Lake George Battlefield, More Than Just A Setting for Cooper’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’
In February 1826 one of America’s seminal works of historical fiction, James Fenimore Cooper‘s The Last of the Mohicans, was first published. Last of the Mohicans has also been adapted to film at least eight times, most recently in 1992 starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. The novel is one of five Cooper wrote that make up the Leatherstocking Tales series, all of them set in Upstate New York between the years 1740 and 1804.
Warren County, NY is where many of the real-life actions of 1757 depicted in the novel occurred, including at what is now Lake George Battlefield Park, the location of several other important historical events. [Read more…] about Lake George Battlefield, More Than Just A Setting for Cooper’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’
The Black Cyclone & The Unbearable Whiteness of Cycling
The invention of the wheel has been celebrated as a hallmark of man’s drive for innovation. By the 1890s, Europe and America were obsessed with the bicycle. The new two-wheel technology had a profound effect on social interactions. It supplied the pedal power to freedom for (mainly white) women and created an opportunity for one of the first black sporting heroes.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, bicycle racing as a sporting event reached feverish popularity both amongst the public and within artistic circles. In the early twentieth century racing developed as a distinct facet of modernity. The bicycle was the pre-eminent vehicle of the avant-garde. [Read more…] about The Black Cyclone & The Unbearable Whiteness of Cycling
Jonathan Swift’s Oyster Test: Oysters, Sex and Culture
At least since Roman times oysters were associated with sex. The most obvious reason for this association is the oyster’s resemblance to the pudendum. Raw oyster was praised as an aphrodisiac. Giacomo Casanova boasted to have eaten fifty at breakfast together with a lady of his fancy.
European painters used oyster as a symbol of fertility and sexual pleasure. Aphrodite (Venus), the Goddess of love and lust, was blown over sea on an oyster shell landing at either Cythera of Cyprus (both islands were regarded by the Greeks as territories of Venus). In “The Birth of Venus” Botticelli painted her approaching the shore on a giant oyster (clam) shell. By then, the associations with female beauty and physical love were well established. [Read more…] about Jonathan Swift’s Oyster Test: Oysters, Sex and Culture
Two Capital Region Literary Orgs Merging Into Hudson Valley Writers Guild
Albany Poets and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild have announced plans to combine organizations and operate as the Hudson Valley Writers Guild moving forward. [Read more…] about Two Capital Region Literary Orgs Merging Into Hudson Valley Writers Guild
The Joy of Eating: Billy Possum, Fat Men Clubs & Obesity History
Weightism is a bias or discrimination against people who are overweight. It is based on a set of stereotypes about the abilities of overweight individuals and includes prejudices that they are self-indulgent, socially inept, and mentally slow. Obesity was judged to be incompatible with intelligence and acuity.
The weight stigma is a relatively modern one. Fat shaming started in the 1950s. In March 1954, Life magazine featured an article entitled “The Plague of Overweight” in which obesity was described as the most serious health problem of the day. Without any further consideration the condition was linked to gluttony. At the time, only around three percent of Americans were considered overweight.
From the Renaissance onward, obesity had suggested wealth and power. It pointed at the means to supply and enjoy the luxury of food. Plumpness equaled prosperity. If one’s body was a temple, then being the size of a cathedral signaled status. Physical proportion was a badge of economic and physical well-being, both in individual and national terms. [Read more…] about The Joy of Eating: Billy Possum, Fat Men Clubs & Obesity History
Saratoga’s ‘Fanny the Flower Girl,’ Gotham Book Mart Founder
Frances Steloff was the daughter of a Russian immigrant and itinerant rabbi who, in an age of rising anti-Semitism, was one of the early Jewish settlers in Saratoga Springs. The large family lived in dire poverty.
After the death of her mother, Frances was “informally” adopted by a wealthy Boston couple. Having run away from her foster parents, she made her way to New York, worked in a Brooklyn department store selling corsets, before establishing a tiny bookshop in Midtown Manhattan. On her death, after eighty-one years in the business, she was revered as one of America’s most influential booksellers and bibliophiles. Founder of the Gotham Book Mart, she turned her establishment into a center for avant-garde literature. [Read more…] about Saratoga’s ‘Fanny the Flower Girl,’ Gotham Book Mart Founder
NYS Writers Institute Issues Latest ‘Trolley’ Journal
The new issue of the NYS Writers Institute’s Trolley journal is now online with essays, stories, poems, and flash fiction from more than 70 contributors, including more than two dozen UAlbany alumni, faculty and retired faculty. [Read more…] about NYS Writers Institute Issues Latest ‘Trolley’ Journal