Rachel's 2005 Crew Schedule

Nota bene, there are 3 local races this year (Marietta and Parkersburg)!

• 4/09 Parkersburg South HOME


• 4/16 Lindamood Cup Regatta Marietta


• 4/23 Occoquan, VA


• 4/30 Culver, IN


• 5/6-5/7 Wyandotte, MI


• 5/14-5/15 Midwest Cincinnatti


• 5/21 Parkersburg Parkersburg


• 5/26-5/27 Nationals (for qualifying boats) Princeton, NJ

Old Friends: Rediscovering the Pre-Raphaelites

This painting, called "The Blind Girl," by John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was part of a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit at the Cleveland Art Museum a few years ago. The PRs were an avant guarde group of artists and writers who rebelled against the prevailing ideas about art by recapturing a medieval aesthetic of riotous color, mythical themes, escapism, and sensuality. Rereading Swinburne and the Rossettis after all these years has been like meeting old friends--a real treat.

Tennyson (1809-1892) was not a PR, but this love poem has a certain PR sensibility. It's from his Songs from the Princess. This lyric has one of the most beautiful lines in English literature, "Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars"--an allusion to the manifestation of Zeus to Danae as a shower of gold (I don't know what inspired the king of the gods to take on such a poetic physical form, but it was rather a nice change from horny bulls and swans).

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

 

The Crystal Palace

The glass and steel Crystal Palace, marvel of Victorian ingenuity and centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the world's first trade show), exemplified the type of architecture Ruskin deplored. Another non-fan was Carlyle, who called it a "big glass soap bubble." 

Ruskin and the Work of Human Hands

In Brit Lit we read excerpts from John Ruskin's Stones of Venice: social criticism thinly disguised as a treatise on Gothic architecture. In this essay, Ruskin disparages the modern buildings of his time, made with perfect, machine-made materials, and praises the magnificent, hand-made, imperfect, unsymmetrical Gothic cathedrals as the ultimate in aesthetically and morally pleasing architecture. The moral dimension is that he wants Art to have evidence of the human hand in it--a terrible problem confronting England during the Industrial Revolution of the Victorian era, when the dehumanizing nature of factory work, and its accompanying dire social problems were becoming apparent to social critics like William Blake, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, and, of course, Karl Marx.

Dr. Hares-Stryker gave a marvelous lecture on Ruskin and the horrors of newly industrialized England. She showed us photographs from the period: children queued in front of a factory entrance, waiting to work their 12-hour day; a London street scene featuring trash on the sidewalks, as well as a homeless woman holding a baby (human beings as rubbish); a woman and her four young children on a city street, waiting with buckets to catch manure from passing horse-drawn vehicles--manure they could sell so they could have food to eat. Hares-Stryker also read to us from the court transcript of an inquest concerning the death by starvation of a cobbler, whose wife left his dead body in their tiny room for days rather than move to the workhouse, because, she explained to the judge, once there, she and her son would not have a place (read "little hovel") to call their own. And all of these things were happening in what was then the richest country on Earth: England at the height of Empire. The modern parallels are disturbing, to say the least.

Hares-Stryker finished her discourse by challenging our modern American desire for perfect things made by machines, using jeans as an example. No imperfections in the fabric, no broken seams, no irregularities in appearance are acceptable. Seemingly, we don't want to know that any real human being was involved in the manufacture of our clothing, or other material items. And yet, I thought, after this tour-de-force presentation of ideas, what about Martha Stewart? Not her mass-produced merchandise, but the leisurely, meticulously hand-crafted and home-made lifestyle she promotes with her publications? There is an undercurrent of protest against mass production in which unique, handcrafted things are celebrated and desired. And what about Slow Food? Some people want to sit down to a meal prepared with care and attention--one that isn't being eaten by thousands of others. Like Ruskin, we want to see evidence of the human hand in the things around us.  

Papa Hemingway's Home in the Keys

My friend Michael and his family just returned from a lovely weekend in Key West, where this photo was taken. One of the advantages of living here was its proximity to the local lighthouse, which helped to steer old Ernest home after many a night of carousing. Michael says there are 61 cats living on the premises now; we'll have to take his word for it, since there isn't a single cat in any of the photos he sent! I love those Southern wraparound porches (I'm sure there is some more elegant architectural term to describe this feature); it must be nice to live in a climate that doesn't have an abrupt change in temperature from indoors to outdoors.