a switch on Mitch / present but not really voting

Philip Stevens photograph on Wikipedia

Oh, for heaven's sake. How strange. A friend of mine just shared a dream in which he visited University College in London. In the student center there (this is factual, not a joke), on public display in a large glass case (shown here), is the preserved body of the famous English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), quietly seated in a chair, so that, even in death, he might still attend meetings ("present, but not voting").

It was Bentham's original wish that his head would also be displayed, but its mummification (albeit successful technically) "left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull." While no longer on display (it had become the "target of student pranks"), there is a photograph of the head on Bentham's Wikipedia article, as well as elsewhere online.

Enough of that. Back to the dream of my dutiful friend: in his nocturnal misadventure, when he visited Bentham's case, it was not his body on display. Instead, it had been inexplicably switched with that of American congressman Mitch McConnell, the "sitting senator" from Kentucky. How bizarre. Fortunately, no votes were taken during the dream.

we drank irish usquebaugh—and fired a volley

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Bell Jar. Digital montage, © 2021.

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John Fontaine, Diary, excerpted in David Colbert, ed., Eyewitness to the American West (New York: Penguin Books, 1999)—

We had a good dinner, and after it we got the men together, and loaded all their arms, and we drank the King's health in champagne, and fired a volley—the Princess's health in Burgundy, and fired a volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret, and a volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of liquors, viz., Virginia red wine and white wine, Irish usquebaugh, brandy, shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne, canary, cherry, punch, water, cider, &c.…

At seven in the morning we mounted our horses, and parted with the rangers…

a modern art museum, telephone and a martini

Donald Barthelme (in “Brain Damage” in City Life, 1976)—

The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree. They have a kinship system which is very similar to our kinship system. They address each other as “Mister,” “Mistress,” and “Miss.” They wear clothes which look very much like our clothes. They have a Fifth Avenue which divides their territory into east and west. They have a Chock Full o’ Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a martini, one of each. The martini and the telephone are kept in the Museum of Modern Art. In fact they have everything that we have, but only one of each thing... They can conceptualize but they don't follow through. For instance, their week has seven days—Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, and Monday. They have one disease, mononucleosis. The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.

be ruthless with opponents of modern painting

Cover of Hampton's Magazine (1910)

Stephen Potter, "Notes on Exhibitionship" in The Complete Upmanship (New York: New American Library, 1978), p. 202—

Be fairly ruthless, I think, with opponents of "modern" painting. If you are lucky enough to find a man who still says: "I don't know about pictures, but I know what I like," point out to him that because he does not know about pictures he does not know what he likes, and repeat this in a thundering voice. If he whimpers back something about it all being too advanced for him, point out exactly how many years Cézanne died before he was born, and the precise date of the exhibition of the first Modiglianis in London. Exaggerate both these dates and say, "After all, Matisse and your great-grandmother are exact contemporaries." If your man says of some picture, "Yes, but what does it mean?" ask him, and keep on asking him, what his carpet means, or the circular patterns on his rubber shoe-soles. Make him lift up his foot to look at them.

RELATED LINKS
How Form Functions
Other sources

Entangled threesome | a walking Läocoon

Coles Phillips "fadeaway" magazine cover illustration (1916)

Above Magazine cover illustration for the October 1916 issue of Good Housekeeping by Coles Phillips (1880-1927). As shown in this example, he was especially known for paintings in which edges of the figure merge with the background. Tragically, he died of tuberculosis at the early age of 47. We reproduced another work of his in an earlier blog post.

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Ford Maddox Ford as quoted by Simon Nowell-Smith, compiler, The Legend of the Master (London, Constable, 1947), p. 44—

I was once walking with him [Henry James] and Mr. John Galsworthy…[whose] dachshund Maximilian ran sheep, so, not to curtail the animal’s exercise, the Master had provided it with a leash at least ten yards long. Mr. Galsworthy and I walked one on each side of James listening obediently while he talked. In order to round off an immense sentence the great man halted…He planted his [walking] stick firmly into the ground and went on and on and on. Maximilian passed between our six legs again and again, threading his leash behind him. Mr. Galsworthy and I stood silent. In any case we must have resembled the Laocöon, but when Maximilian had finished the resemblance must have been overwhelming. The Master finished his reflections, attempted to hurry on, found that impossible. Then we liberated ourselves with difficulty. He turned on me, his eyes fairly blazing, lifting his cane on high and slamming it into the ground: “H…” he exclaimed, “you are painfully young, but at no more than the age to which you have attained, the playing of such tricks is an imbecility! An im…be…cility!”

Ice cream, drinks and the half and half Iowa man

Above An advertising postcard featuring a tavern owner from Bonair IA named John Pecinovsky (1899-1942). After opening his tavern in the late 1930s, he attracted wide attention, was sought after by tourists, and was featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not, when he began to wear an outfit that was dark-colored on one half (bearded) and light on the other (clean-shaven). He was buried dressed the same way in nearby Cresco IA. See our earlier, related post.

Bonair has all but vanished now, but there is an American writer (she teaches writing in France) named Janet Hulstrand, whose relatives were from Bonair, who is in process of writing a memoir about her Midwestern origins called A Long Way from Iowa. See her post from 2014 titled A Little Town Called Bonair. I believe it was in Cresco (or was it Decorah?) that my father (who grew up near Ossian IA) saw Buffalo Bill and his Wild West extravaganza, c1912.

Kenneth Gogel | Recalling a wonderful teacher

Above Kenneth Gogel, The Nervous System. Collage (1973). Permanent Collection of Art, University of Northern Iowa. Among his most memorable artworks is Gogel's portrayal of “the [very] nervous system” of US President Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal. Gift of Roy R. and Mary Snyder Behrens.

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In the late 1960s, when I was an undergraduate art student at the University of Northern Iowa, one of my favorite teachers was an art education professor named Kenneth Gogel. He had been a student of Victor Lowenfeld at Pennsylvania State University. He was particularly interested in children’s drawings, and what those might reveal about (in Lowenfeld’s words) their “creative and mental growth.”

Part of the reason I liked him so much was his eccentricity. He had "a mind of his own,” so his comments were often surprising. His artwork was equally unpredictable. He wasn’t committed to staying within a consistent approach to art-making, whether medium, style, or subject matter. In one of his experiments, he used photo booth self-portraits and xerox (innovative at the time). In another, he rigged up a kind of terrarium, the sides of which were covered with a card-like material punched with random circular holes; inside the terrarium were ladybugs, which changed the pattern of the holes (on-or-off, like digital punch cards) as they climbed up and down the interior walls.

Of the artworks he was making then, one I especially admire is a large mixed media work titled A Bride and Her Father Visit the World’s Largest Turtle, dated c1968 (below). It is now in the UNI Permanent Collection of Art. Gift of Roy R. and Mary Snyder Behrens. The original source for the turtle is the vintage print at the bottom of this post.

Kenneth Gogel (c1968), mixed media

Ken and I remained in contact now and then after I graduated, by exchanging cryptic notes. His were usually whimsical observations he made during lengthy faculty meetings or peculiar things he’d run across while nosing around in the library. One time, he sent me the patent diagram for a mechanical drawing device by Jean Tinguely. He was forever looking around at thrift shops and used bookstores, then sending me things that he thought I could use. He sent me my very first vintage World War I photograph of a dazzle-camouflaged ship, the USS Leviathan.

He even wrote to me when I was (miserably) in the US Marine Corps. When I answered candidly, he saved the letter (he saved nearly everything, repurposing the slightest scraps), then simply mailed it back to me fifteen years later.

Years later, when I was teaching temporarily at an awful art school in the South, I was surprised to hear his voice when I answered the phone one day at home. When I asked where he was calling from (I had heard that he was touring the country alone in a recreational vehicle), he replied, “Oh, I’m just a couple of blocks from your house. If you’re going to be there, I’d like to stop by briefly, just to say hello.” Moments later, he arrived, and, in spite of my insistence that he stay for a few days, we talked briefly and off he went. That time, I think he gave me a copy of Karl Gerstner’s A Compendium for Literates.

As an undergraduate, my major was Art Education, so that later, I would teach grades 7-12 for most of a school year, until the draft board broke my contract and sent me off to be a Marine. But in the last year before graduating with a BA degree, I was a student teacher for the first nine weeks of one semester. During the remaining half of that semester, Ken Gogel was my advisor for a full-time research project in which I proposed to read about the role of perception in visual art. I met with Ken only a few times, with the agreement that at the end of the term I would turn in a substantial paper about what I had discovered.

The paper I turned in was titled Perception in the Visual Arts. It anticipated many of the subjects that I would research and write about for the next fifty years. Although I was only an undergraduate, on a whim I submitted it to Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association, the foremost journal in the field. It was published there in March 1969, just weeks in advance of being ejected from the classroom (not having a bone spur) and sent off to an unjust war. I am the same age as the man who now pretends to be the US President.

Public domain

Salvador Dali's Dreams of Iowa Fields in 1952

Few people know the story about the visit of surrealist artist Salvador Dali to the University of Northern Iowa campus (Iowa State Teachers College at the time) in February 1952. Not surprisingly, it has moments of hilarity. An updated version (enlarged and redesigned) is now available online at this link.

The worms are now eating dead Ernest again

Above and below: Two photographs that surfaced only recently in the post-retirement agony of downsizing. They appeared side by side in an issue of The Northern Iowan, the student newspaper at the University of Northern Iowa, on October 14, 1975. I was an assistant professor then, and, as part of the freshman foundations program, had initiated a student competition called the Rube Goldberg Drawing Machine Contest, in which students were challenged to invent absurd self-operating contraptions that would somehow result in a "drawing" (loosely defined). I was also one of the judges, as shown above. The caption for that photo reads: "A judge at the Rube Goldberg content, Roy Behrens, did not seem to get a great deal of sleep the night before the contest, or he just saw a great looking piece of art." In the photo at the bottom, I have been joined in the judging by writer Robley Wilson (who was editor of the then-famous North American Review), who is attired in a fine-looking British judge's wig. The caption for that photo reads: "A large crowd was on hand…and some of them are shown looking at the first place entry in the drawing machine contest." I still remember the first-place winner, invented by a student named Mark Mattern. At the end of a sequence of absurdly unrelated events, it made a silhouette of a dog—with gun powder.

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A memorable humorous passage from David Meyer's memoir of his friend Ernest Summers, in Ernie and Me (c2003)—

His name was Ernest Summers and he told this joke about himself: When he was dead the marker on his grave would read, "The worms are eating in dead Ernest."