Online Art History Videos

Here's another item lifted from my homeschooling blog, the online videos at Smarthistory.org. Smart History posts short art history videos, each featuring one or more works of art with voice over discussion by a couple of knowledgeable art history professionals. These videos usually run under ten minutes each.



I generally find that the commentary on technique is more useful and interesting than the interpretive remarks, but that may be a function of my having looked at art for a long time and having a tendency to rely on my own judgment over the analysis of expert observers. On the other hand, the commentators sometimes explicate a painting in the way I'm more accustomed to seeing critics take apart a literary work, and their insights can offer a fresh way of seeing or a level of detail I had missed. Taken altogether, these art history videos move beyond the merely informational to teach a way of looking at art objects, an attitude of mind or an approach to shaping perception and response that enriches the experience of viewing art. The presenters pack a lot of value into the short discussions.

Harvard Course, _Justice_, Online at YouTube

The doldrums in book blogging here can be attributed not only to faint enthusiasm for the books I've been reading lately but also to the time devoted to my other blog, Homemade Education, where I have been posting online and other resources collected while homeschooling my teenaged children through high school. The posts have also strayed into topics of interest to a college parent, and when a current homeschooling resource presents itself, that gets added to the collection as well.

Looking over those posts about homeschooling and college life, I see some items that could interest readers who read the same type of books I do. The next few posts here will feature a few of those topics from my other blog.



A famous Harvard University course, known to attract close to a thousand students to each lecture, is now being broadcast in selected public television markets. Those of us whose local station did not pick up the broadcast of Michael Sandel's "Justice" (Moral Reasoning 22) can now view all 12 episodes on YouTube. If anyone had told me I would ever be tempted to read Jeremy Bentham, I would have laughed, but now after viewing the first segment, I am glad to see a Bentham reading posted at the Justice web site.

Sandel kicks off the course by presenting scenarios requiring moral judgments and leads students to consider both consequentialist and categorical moral reasoning.

A Slowed Pace

Since my last book post I've read several thousand pages, none of which inspired any blog commentary. First it was a long Swedish noir thriller, well written and plotted and with strong characters, but dealing with criminal brutality of a type I do not care to address. I'll not follow up with reading the sequels to that one. Too ugly.

Then I read an even longer contemporary American novel that had its strengths and weaknesses, but I liked the voice of the author enough to seek out another of her books, while preferring to leave my reservations about this one unstated. I'll just skip it.

Several older Irish short stories have offered more rewarding reading, but I'm reluctant to recommend them, since I believe my interest in these stories may be rather idiosyncratic. The fascination for me lies partly in the tension between pagan and Christian elements, that is, I am reading for social history more than for literary value. A general reader, who was not enchanted by the intense Irishness of the stories, with the ornery characters and colorful language, could find them tiresome. I am loving them but am not going to suggest that anyone else follow my reading example.

I flew through another Swedish mystery, an offbeat police procedural that I liked enough to read more by this author, but not enough to write about it.

At present, I am going through a reading phase, where a wish to move beyond my old reliable genres and authors has resulted in some reading that leaves me cold as a blogger. I do not like or dislike most of these books enough to recommend or pan any of them, and they do not seem worth taking the time to describe.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this reading experiment is that I should stick to the tried and true, if regular blogging is the goal, or else I must accept that the blogging will be intermittent for some time as I try new things, which may not turn out to be workable as blog fodder. It is difficult to work up any enthusiasm for writing about books that I don't much care for or that I only moderately enjoy. On the other hand, when a book turns out to be unsatisfactory, I get this sense of having wasted enough of my time on it already. Why spend even more time writing about it? I'm not writing reviews on a deadline; there is no compulsion about it. As a blogger, I can abstain.

Well, gentle readers, if the blog has been quiet for a while, now you know why.

Simon's Cat Videos

Thanks to Mary at Mary's Library for pointing out the Simon's Cat videos at YouTube.

The Sunday Salon: Irish Tales

Today for The Sunday Salon I picked up Great Irish Short Stories, edited by Vivian Mercier in 1964 and re-published by Barnes & Noble, Inc. First up was "The Brown Man" by an author I had not read, Gerald Griffin (1803-1840). This turned out to be a vampire tale, not my thing, but it was well told and full of all the creepiness and crawliness you might desire, if such escapades you do desire.

Next I passed over Lady Gregory's "The Only Son of Aoife," which she published in Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), a collection of Irish legends I had read a couple of years ago and am not yet ready to revisit, although it is highly recommended to readers who enjoy the old Irish tales.

The collection includes two versions of a tale of marital betrayal, told first in this collection by Douglas Hyde (1862-1949), the first President of Ireland under the Constitution of 1937. In "Leeam O'Rooney's Burial," the title character is fooled into delivering his wheat not to market, but to a big house in the neighborhood that has mysteriously appeared out of nowhere. Drugged into sleep at dinner, Leeam's physical body is replicated by "the enchanter," who sends the copy home in place of the original, whereupon the facsimile immediately dies and is buried.

Rather than waiting a decent interval, the widow decides to remarry within a week, but the living Leeam awakens and returns home, taking with him the money he had been paid for his wheat. Much confusion results, as everyone had believed Leeam dead, but the remarriage is dissolved, and a trip to the graveyard ensues to determine who or what is buried in Leeam's grave. A large, black dog leaps from the opened grave and runs away. Leeam lives a long a prosperous life. The end. You can easily imagine this story being read aloud in the family circle in front of the fireplace on a cold winter night, with many exciting plot moves serving to entertain the listeners.

A second version of the story is told by John Millington Synge (1871-1909), the great Irish author of The Playboy of the Western World. Synge made several trips to the Aran Islands and collected stories heard there, including this one, "He That's Dead Can Do No Harm." Synge's version runs less than 2 printed pages and jumps right to the central conflict between the husband who is laid out for burial, although he still lives, and the young man who is about to seduce his wife. When the wife and her would-be lover leave the non-corpse and go to the bedroom, the husband gets up, follows them, and does violence to his wife's young man.

This short version of the tale skips the magic and hones in on the scintillating plot move of the impending adultery and the alarming element of the dead man who is not really dead. It is told by a Stranger who has stopped at the house to escape the pounding rainstorm.

I preferred Hyde's chattier telling of the tale; Synge's version, in its brevity, seems moralistic and intended primarily to shock and teach a lesson and only secondarily to entertain.

Old tales continued to mark the literature of Ireland in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, and these antiquated stories are fun to read. These two were just right for a short blast of fiction on a Sunday afternoon.

A Trip East

Two weeks ago I flew to Boston to see my son settled into his dorm room and also to visit my daughter, who lives and works not too far away. Stepping across the square from the university, I visited a local bookstore where books written by faculty are on display. This says it all concerning the resident brain power.



The campus was covered with parents delivering their children for fall term. I never saw so many happy and smiling middle-aged people in my life as were present on freshman move-in day.



The family went to the Boston Common after a delicious brunch of dim sum nearby.



Fabulous university. Memorable trip. Now home, and I'm back to book blogging.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

This is the cover of the exhibition catalog for Those Telling Lines: The Art of Virginia Lee Burton, at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, March 24 - June 21, 2009. I finally got around to reading Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, her 1939 children's classic, which she both wrote and illustrated. This sparkling book escaped my notice as a child. I wonder if the sex-role stereotyping of the time made a book about a steam shovel look uninteresting to a female child. For whatever reason, the omission was terrible, and I'm pleased to have discovered Burton at this late date.

Burton's illustrations look deceptively primitive, almost like drawings a child could execute. Her drawings exude warmth and movement and fun. Mike Mulligan is a dedicated working-class guy, who depends on his beautiful steam shovel, Mary Anne, to get the job done. They excel at the work, moving mountains when necessary, and together they have accomplished great things. Then technological innovation makes them obsolete, and they must struggle for survival.

Man and steam shovel take on a difficult project, digging the basement of a town hall in a small town, and before the story ends, all the people of the town have become involved, the town curmudgeon has become a friend, and Mike and his steam shovel live happily in their new found home. What a marvelous children's story! I can imagine a 3 or 4-year-old, who has not become jaded by too much television, being enthralled by the excitement of the plot. This book speaks to the sweetness of innocent children and their love of adventure and a good challenge. The illustrations communicate friendliness and celebration. It is a wonderful book by an author who loves children and understands how to capture their imaginations.

Thanks to the readers of the Boston Globe who brought this book to my attention when they placed it 11th on their list of favorite New England books.