too late / sick, dried up, and have no strength

Vachel Lindsay album cover

Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1959—

From Cambridge, Massachusetts, the psychologist and philosopher William James acknowledged receipt of The Tramp’s Excuse and War Bulletin Number Three [which the poet Vachel Lindsay had sent him without asking]. Lindsay had read James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, pondering it in the light of his [own] visions, and James was touched that this unknown youth should turn for “comradeship” to an academic personage like himself.

Only it was, he said, “too late, too late!”

He [James] was writing in October 1909, ten months before his death. “I am sick, dried up, have no strength to read aught but the barely needful for my own tasks, have grown, moreover, positively to hate poetry in these last years. I can only stand old poems learned by heart in my childhood and adolescence. How then should I shoot the rapids and ride the whirlwind and tramp the wilderness with you?”

James was not at all sure that he understood the “Map of the Universe.” “I do think Bulletin No. 3 anarchistic; I do think it incoherent; but I do think it may represent an excellent personal religion. Don’t enter the Catholic priesthood, whatever you do! Your semi-automatic inspirations are very interesting, in conjunction with your free attitude toward them…

“Go in peace and God be with you, brilliant being that you are, and leave me to my decrepitude.” [pp. 160-161].

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[Sixteen years later] In Washington [DC], in the dining room of the Wardman Park Hotel, a brown-skinned bus boy in a white jacket ignored senators and oil magnates, sidled shyly up to the wall table at which the only poet in the crowded room sat opposite his wife and laid a slim manuscript by [Vachel] Lindsay’s plate, That evening Lindsay opened his recital in the little theater of the hotel by reading the poems the boy had given him. It was the beginning of fame for the young Negro poet Langston Hughes” [p. 353].

Banality epidemic | a nationwide memory loss

Poster (©2017) Roy R. Behrens

Studs Terkel in Touch and Go: A Memoir. New York: The New Press, 2007, p.232 and 236—

“Banality” is the operative word…

Britney Spears, a pop singer, shaves her head and goes into rehab. Most Americans know her name. She is a celebrity. None of the contestants in a recent episode of Jeopardy, a popular TV quiz show, knew who Strom Thurmond was. For most of the twentieth century, on the floor of the Senate, he was the drum major of segregation. Not even his fathering a black child was within the ken of the Jeopardy participants. Nor did they know the name of Kofi Annan (the newly former United Nations secretary general).…

What happens to all Alzheimer’s sufferers is tragic. What I’m talking about is what I call a national Alzheimer’s—a whole country has lost its memory. When there’s no yesterday, a national memory becomes more and more removed from what it once was, and forgets what it once wanted to be.

We’re sinking under our national Alzheimer’s disease. With Alzheimer’s you forget what you did yesterday. With Alzheimer’s finally, you forget not only what you did, but also who you are. In many respects, we [in the US] have forgotten who we are.

We’re now in a war [in Iraq] based on an outrageous lie [about “weapons of mass destruction”], and we are held up to the ridicule and contempt of the world. What has happened? Have we had a lobotomy performed on us? Or it it something else? I’m saying it is the daily evil of banality.

life is an ever-shifting network of categories

Poster (© 2019) Roy R. Behrens

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts. New York: Chilton Books, 1965—

Our lives are bathed in a continuous flow of signs which we interpret to catch the world in an ever-shifting network of categories. The condition of human life is continuous categorical metamorphosis. We are forever engaged in constructing around us an architecture of categories as fluid and yielding to our interests as the air. There is nothing man has not sacrificed, including millions of his fellow human beings, in the vain effort to fix that architecture, to stabilize his categories. But all knowledge, all science, all learning, all history, all thought are unstable, cannot be made static, even by the majesty of the law armed with the power of brute force.

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos

Zerubavel | perhapstheyshouldhavetrieditearlier

Event poster (©2016) Roy R. Behrens

In view of the many painful events and discussions that are currently on-going, were I asked to name a book that everyone (young and old) could benefit from reading, I would strongly recommend Rutgers sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel’s The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1991). This is one of its many powerful thoughts (p. 80)—

It is society that helps us carve discrete islands of meaning out of our experience. Only English speakers, for example, can “hear” the gaps between the separate words in “perhapstheyshouldhavetrieditearlier,” which everyone else hears as a single chain of sound. Along similar lines, while people who hear jazz for the first time can never understand why a seemingly continuous stretch of music is occasionally interrupted by bursts of applause, jazz connoisseurs can actually “hear” the purely mental divides separating piano, bass, or drum “solos” from mere “accompaniment.” Being a member of society entails “seeing” the world through special mental lenses. It is these lenses, which we acquire only through socialization, that allow us to perceive “things.” The proverbial Martian cannot see the mental partitions separating Catholics from Protestants, classical from popular music, or the funny from the crude. Like the contours of constellations, we “see” such fine lines only when we learn that we should expect them there. As real as they may feel to us, boundaries are mere figments of our minds. Only the “socialized” can see them…

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RELATED LINKS
Eviatar Zerbavel, Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable
Eviatar Zerbavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance
Roy R. Behrens, On Slicing the Cheese and Treating the Menu Like Stew: On Creativity and Categorization

Leacock Peacock | Entrapped by duplicity now

Montage / collage website

Stephen Leacock, Humor: Its Theory and Techniques, with Examples and Samples (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1935)—

He is the [jack]daw with a peacock's tail of his own painting. He is the ass who has been at pains to cultivate the convincing roar of a lion.

League of Women Voters \ Hard Won Not Done

Of related interest, see The role of American women in the development of camouflage during World War I (an exhibition), and Chicanery and conspicuousness: social repercussions of World War I ship camouflage (an illustrated essay).

Frederick Douglass Poster | Libby Schwers

Above This wonderfully eloquent poster is the work of Libby Schwers, graphic design student in the Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa. She designed it in connection with her internship (working under Sarah Pauls) in the Marketing and Promotions section of the Office of the Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Sciences (2018).

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UNI Frederick Douglass POWER OF WORDS Festival. September 18-22, 2018 at the Rod Library on the UNI campus. Social Justice | Human Rights.

Constitution and Equal Protection for All

Poster © Roy R. Behrens

Above Poster for Constitution Day event, titled The Constitution and Equal Protection: Black Lives Matter, sponsored by the American Democracy Project and Office of the Provost at the University of Northern Iowa. Poster designed by Roy R. Behrens © 2016.

League of Women Voters Poster 2016

Women's Equality Poster © Roy R. Behrens

Above It's always gratifying to use ones skills and expertise in promoting worthy causes, the equal rights of women in this case. The story of the struggle for equal rights (for women and others) is a fascinating history, and one that is always on-going. This is a poster we designed pro bono to announce Women's Equality Day (August 20, 2016), on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Black Hawk and Bremer Counties in Iowa.

Buffalo Bill in Sioux City

Mailer designed by Connie Jones (2014)

UNI Art History Symposium | Roger Shimomura

Symposium Poster |  Desiree Dahl (2013)

About eight years ago, art historian William Lew (who was once my department head) produced an exhibition catalog about the artwork of Japanese-American artist Roger Shimomura. During World War II, simply because of their ethnicity, three generations of Shimomura's family (as a child, he was among them) were imprisoned in an American concentration camp, called Minidoka, in south central Idaho, about 20 miles from Twin Falls. That catalog, titled Minidoka Revisited: The Paintings of Roger Shimomura, was published by the Lee Gallery at Clemson University (2005), where Lew was teaching at the time. It was beautifully designed by one of our former students, Jessica Barness, who now teaches graphic design at Kent State University. I reviewed it for Leonardo Reviews, which I saw as an opportunity to remind myself and others of that deplorable episode in American history.

On Friday, April 19, on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa, there will be another chance to remember these injustices, in relation to the artwork of Roger Shimomura. Through the efforts of two UNI colleagues, art historians Charles Adelman and Elizabeth Sutton, William Lew is coming back to serve as the juror and guest lecturer at the UNI Department of Art's 3rd Annual Art History Symposium. The evening's events (to be held in the auditorium of the Kamerick Art Building) begin at 5:30 pm, with scholarly presentations by two current undergraduate art history students, Carlton James Miller ("Mauricio: For an Eye an Eye") and Brittany Deal ("Romare Bearden: The Great Migration as a Black Odyssey"). Following that, at 6:00 pm, will be the announcement of juror's awards, and the keynote address by William Lew, titled "Messages: An Asian American Perspective (The Art of Roger Shimomura)." This annual symposium, which is always interesting, is free and open to the public.

One final note: A hint of Shimomura's work can be seen on this web page, where I've posted two variations on the symposium poster, designed by Desiree Dahl, one of our current graphic design students who works as an intern in the publicity section (directed by Sarah Pauls) of the Dean's Office of the College of Humanities, Arts and Sciences. The second version (below) was the one that was actually published, but the first one is equally poignant, and, like King Solomon, I could not choose between the two.

Symposium Poster | Desiree Dahl (2013)

Susan B. Anthony | Morgan Johnson

Portrait of Susan B. Anthony (2012) © Morgan Johnson

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. A number of the students chose historic civil rights leaders, as in this portrayal of suffragette Susan B. Anthony by Morgan Johnson.

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Anon, in Ida Husted Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (originally published in the Denver News)—

The press sneers at Miss Anthony, men tell her she is out of her proper sphere, people call her a scold, good women call her masculine, a monstrosity in petticoats; but if one half of her sex possessed one half of her acquirements, her intellectual culture, her self-reliance and independence of character, the world would be better for it.

Victoria Woodhull | Megan Vande Lune

Portrait of Victoria Woodhull (2012) © Megan Vande Lune

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. I thought I knew quite a bit about the struggle for American women's civil rights, but I had never heard of Victoria Woodhull (1938-1927), an important leader of the suffrage movement, and the first woman to run for US President. This is a provocative portrait of her by Megan Vande Lune.