“Amidst the attention given to the sciences as how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered ‘useless,’ will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously.”
~John Maeda, RISD President, via The universe will fly like a bird
I heard this wonderful interview with Mike Nichols who is currently directing a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman, Linda Emond as Linda Loman and Andrew Garfield as Biff Loman.
Mike Nichols: ‘Salesman’ By Day, Artist Always
Interviewed by Robert Siegel
National Public Radio, All Things Considered
March 9, 2012
Photo: Matt Sayles/AP
Here is a very interesting synopsis of Bob Dylan’s September 10, 1975 performance on The World Of John Hammond tribute show courtesy of the examiner.com
On September 10, 1975, Bob Dylan participated in the videotaping of a PBS special for the program Soundstage. The all-star show was a tribute to the man responsible for signing Dylan to Columbia Records in 1961. In 1975, a television appearance by Bob Dylan was big news. Not only was he having a career renaissance, with number one albums and a successful U.S. tour with The Band, but Dylan had rarely appeared on the tube, especially since his 1966 motorcycle accident. In fact, he was probably most known for not appearing on television, walking off The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963. The World Of John Hammond taping took place at WTTW-TV Studios in Chicago. It was broadcast as a two-part special in December of that year, with the show simulcast on some FM stations. An edited version was shown the following year, with Dylan’s “Oh Sister” edited out. The other guests, including Hammond discoveries Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, George Benson, and Helen Hume, had confirmed that they would appear way in advance. Typically, Dylan waited until September 7 to respond to the invitation. On September 9th, Dylan recruited Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth, and Scarlett Rivera from the recent Desire sessions, telling them “we’re doing a gig there” before flying to Illinois. The musicians knew nothing about the TV show, or what songs they would play.
Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]
By Charles Olson
I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city,
to the right, it fell to the sea
I was so young my first memory
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
the druggist they’d told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then
is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle
of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming
from all that I no longer am,
yet am, the slow westward motion of
more than I am
for my inheritance.
to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.
that I am one
with my skin
Plus this—plus this:
that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compell
backwards I compell Gloucester
to yield, to
change
Polis
is this
Source: The Poetry Foundation & The Maximus Poems (University of California Press, 1985) Charles Olson, “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]” from The Maximus Poems. Copyright © 1968 by Charles Olson. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Charles Olson.
Gift / Dar
By Czeslaw Milosz
A day so happy.
Dzien taki szczesliwy.
Fog lifted early, I walked in the garden.
Mgla opadla wczesnie, pracowalein w ogrodzie.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
Kolibry przystawaly nad kwiatem kaprifolium.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
Nie bylo na ziemi rzeczy, która chcialbym miec.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Nie zualem nikogo, komu warto byloby zazdroscic.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
Co przydarzylo sie zlego, zapamnialem.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
Nie wstydzulem sie myslec, ze bylem kim jestem.
In my body I felt no pain.
Nie czulem w ciele zadnego bólu.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
Prostujac sie widzialem niebieskie morze i zagle.
From The United States of Poetry episode “A Day in the Life.”
Copyright Washington Square Arts, 1995.
Just who is Vinnie “T” Testeroni, the would-be daredevil spokesperson for “The Furniture Guy”? And why doesn’t “The Furniture Guy” appear in his own commercial? Whoever Vinnie “T” is, director Paul Thomas Anderson went to great lengths to recreate his character in the 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love. In fact, the main antagonist in the film, Dean “The Mattress Man” Trumbell, played here by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was based on the above commercial blooper for “The Furniture Guy.” Interestingly, this re-enacted scene, which inspired Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in the first place, was deleted from the final film. Fortunately, this lovely re-enactment was found on the cutting room floor. Either way it served its purpose as muse to director Anderson.
The original “The Furniture Guy” commercial poses more questions, however. Does Vinnie’s middle initial “T” stand for Testosterone? Is he a real life honest-to-goodness guitarist or a stunt man? Or perhaps a stunt guitarist? Who knows? I searched high and low, but I couldn’t find any information about Vinnie “T” online. What we do know is that Mr. Anderson has an acute eye for the sincere detail, or “truthlikeness,” in every scene. To illustrate this, here is a list of details for this scene, showing their appearance in the original “The Furniture Guy” (FG) commercial and in “The Mattress Man” (MM) re-enactment:
| Scene Description | FG | MM |
| Ambient white freeway noise | X | X |
| Unamplified perfunctory guitar strumming | X | X |
| Black leather jacket with flames on the sleeves | X | |
| Mop of hair/wig resembling a condemned rodent’s nest | X | |
| Mop of hair/wig secured in place by a Karate Kid black head band | X | |
| Phone number is 351-3900 | X | |
| Awkward hesitation before opening line of dialog | X | X |
| Sad parrot infested “Southland” palm trees in background | X | |
| Red racing trailer parked oddly across 6 parking spaces | X | X |
| 5 mattresses piled on roof of early 1980s Stretched Lincoln Town Car | X | X |
| Awkward walking and talking tracking shot | X | X |
| “…got queen mattresses sets for 99 dollars” | X | X |
| “…and king sets for 129″ | X | X |
| Sack of potatoes ‘Foley’ thump when body hits mattress | X | |
| Account Executive with gray pants and compulsory “power” suspenders | X | |
| Stretched gold Lincoln Town Car adorned with red flames along the front fender to driver’s door | X | |
| Short cast shadows suggest mid-morning or mid-afternoon video shoot | X | X |
| Full name is obscured on the side of racing trailer | X | X |
| Production Assistant in mandatory black polo shirt holding note pad | X | |
| Videographer with obligatory “correspondent’s” vest and requisite mullet hairstyle | X | |
| Account Executive’s first response is to pick up the guitar cord | X | |
| Videographer’s first response is to steady the guitar | X | |
| Production Assistant’s first response is to adjust/reposition the mattress | X | |
| Videographer: “Try your arm and stuff” | X | X |
| Production Assistant: “He’s wearing leather” | X | X |
| Fallen Protagonist: “Did you get it on film?” | X | X |
| Videographer: “Yea” | X | X |
| Fallen Protagonist: “Alright” | X | X |
| Total running time in seconds | 40 | 50 |
Screen shots of Zabriskie Point. Click to enlarge.
Concluding my recent obsession with Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film, Zabriskie Point, here is the grid of 40 screen shots I mentioned working on in my previous Zabriskie post:
Every frame of this film is a work of art, and perhaps the best way to appreciate it is through stop-motion, frame-by-frame viewing of the DVD, something that was not possible to viewers back in 1970. That’s what I did, after first watching the film “normally,” in an effort to figure out how this thing was constructed. (I even shot a bunch of photos of individual frames, some of which I am putting together into a composite image for a follow-up blog post, to try to express visually this feeling I had while watching the film.)
Well, that “follow-up” post is now here. I took over ten times as many screen shots as you see above, so editing the grid down to this group of 40 images was challenging. You could easily make many other equally interesting composites out of different selections of images, and you might even find the task as interesting and enjoyable as I did.
As the narrator of the original Zabriskie Point trailer says, “Zabriskie Point. How you get there depends on where you’re at.” These 40 images represent where I’m at with this film, at this moment in time.
This is a video of a great television documentary, hosted by Bill Moyers, of the photographer Garry Winogrand, most likely from the early 1980s. The camera follows Winogrand as he walks city streets in Texas and Los Angeles taking photographs, and featuring a nearly steady running commentary by the photographer. It is a great insight into Winnogrand’s work, and the photographic and artistic process. Here are some of the thoughts Winnogrand expresses in this documentary:
“When I’m photographing I see life, that’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally when I want to snap the shutter, and I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna’ look I let that take care of itself. You know we know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again.”
“I’m very subjective in what I photograph. When things move I get interested, I know that much.”
“To make a photograph more theatrical than the subject’s own theatricality is a hell of a problem.”
“Let say a picture is about what’s photographed and how that exists in the photograph, so that’s what we’re talking about–what can happen in a frame. ‘Cause photographing something changes it.”
“It’s interesting–I don’t have to have any storytelling responsibility to what I’m photographing. I have a responsibility to describe well…the fact that photographs–they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looked like but you don’t know what is happening…. A piece of time and space is well described, but not what is happening. I don’t think there’s a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability–any of them. They do not tell stories–they show you what something looks like, to a camera. The minute you relate this thing to what was photographed, it’s a lie–it’s two-dimensional, it’s the illusion of literal description. The thing has to be complete in the frame–whether you have the information, the narrative information, or not, it has to be complete in the frame. It’s a picture problem, it’s part of what makes things interesting.”
“If I’m in the viewfinder and I know that picture, why take it? I’ll do something to change it, which is often a reason why I may tilt the camera or fool around in various ways. You don’t learn anything from repeating what you know, in effect, so I keep trying to make it uncertain.”
“When I found out…photographing…the more I do it the more I do. When you’re younger you can only conceive of trying a limited amount of things to work with, and the more I work the more subject matter I can begin to try to deal with. So the more I do it the more I do–it’s nuts.”
“The nature of the photographic process–it is about failure, most everything I do doesn’t quite make it. But failures can be intelligent, they don’t have to be stupid, but nothing ventured nothing gained. Hopefully you’re risking failure every time you make a frame.”
“Seeing an enlargement–which is again different than seeing a contact, and it should be an adventure in seeing.”
“I don’t lay myself down on a couch to figure out why I’m photographing either this or that. Whatever it is, I can’t seem to do enough of it. It’s a pleasure.”
Winnogrand’s comment that it should be an adventure in seeing perfectly summarizes the passion, commitment and joy he brought to his work. As we’ve written here previously, by the end of his life, Garry Winnogrand had distilled his art down to the essence of seeing, to the point that pressing the shutter was enough, and he no longer even needed to develop his exposed film.
See also:
Philitas of Cos, or just Philitas, was an ancient Greek scholar and poet; in fact, as far as is known, he was the first person to be called “poet as well as scholar.” Little is known of Philitas’ life. Ancient sources refer to him as a Coan, a native or long-time inhabitant of Cos, one of the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea. Philitas created one of the first dictionaries, or glossaries (Átaktoi glôssai), and gave it the fantastic title, Disorderly Words; it explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, and technical terms. Sadly, this work, along with most of his poetry, has not survived the ages; only fragments and commentary about it remain.
The ancient author Disorderly Words was thin and frail, and may have suffered and died from a wasting disease. Wikipedia notes that “Athenaeus later caricatured him as an academic so consumed by his studies that he wasted away and died.” After his death in Cos, sometime in the 280s BC, his pupil Hermesianax wrote that a statue erected of him by the sculptor Hecataeus depicted him as “frail with all the glosses.” Was that an anceint Greek pun on “glossary,” which Philitas had created with his Disorderly Words? Oh behave, Hermesianax, you rogue. The Philitas Wikipedia page continues:
A 2nd century AD Greek author, Athenaeus of Naucratis, wrote that Philitas studied false arguments and erroneous word-usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death. St. George Stock analyzed the story as saying Philitas studied the Megarian school of philosophy, which cultivated and studied paradoxes such as the liar paradox: if someone says “I am lying”, is what he says true or false? Stock wrote that Philitas worried so much over the liar paradox that he died of insomnia, and translated the epitaph as follows:
Philetas of Cos am I,
‘Twas the Liar who made me die,
And the bad nights caused thereby.A more literal translation suggests that the invented epitaph pokes fun at Philitas’ focus on using the right words:
Stranger, I am Philitas. The lying word and nights’ evening cares destroyed me.
You could say that this Coan lover of paradox had become his own koan — “a paradoxical anecdote or a riddle that has no solution; used in Zen Buddhism to show the inadequacy of logical reasoning,” says OneLook. Whatever the questionable value of that pun (and I might as well throw the Coen brothers into the mix, for extra extra punishment), we have added a small morsel of information to our paltry knowledge of St. George Stock, who I wrote about recently (Who was St. George William Joseph Stock?) and who we’re still looking for among the shadows of history.
One last little anecdote about Philitas, from Wikipedia: “The 3rd century AD Roman author Aelian skeptically passed along a story that Philitas was so thin that he put lead weights in the soles of his shoes to avoid being blown away by a stiff wind.” Probably just a little Roman humor at the expense of a Greek, but it does make for a great image.
The Philosopher (c. 250–200 BC) from the Antikythera wreck illustrates the style used by Hecataeus in his bronze "gloss" of the "glossarist" Philitas.
“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.”
~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The New York Times published a book review last Sunday by Dani Shapiro (The High Road), of “Wild,” a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl Strayed. I want to quote part of the review, which quotes a passage from the book about how the author created her name:
To begin to understand something about Cheryl Strayed, know that Strayed is not her given name. We never find out the name she was born with, but we are made to understand with absolute clarity why she chose to change it, and just how well her new name suits her. Contemplating divorce, she realized that she couldn’t continue to use the hyphenated married name she’d shared with her husband, “nor could I go back to having the name I had had in high school and be the girl I used to be. . . . I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with Cheryl. . . . Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild. . . . I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”
This is a beautiful expression of what it feels like when you discover the perfect name, whether it be for a company, product or service, or, as in this case, for someone’s own identity. Sounds like a great book.
“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
~James Joyce, discussing Finnegans Wake
Hamish Fulton, Mankingholes on the Pennine Way, 1973
Hamish Fulton (British, born 1946) is one of my favorite artists, all the more remarkable since I have never seen his work in person. Nor, for that matter, has anybody else. That’s because Fulton is a “Walking artist,” whose primary artworks are solitary walks he undertakes in (often) remote places all over the world. The work he exhibits and sells in galleries and museums, books and essays, are the abstracted photographic, diagrammatic and concrete poetry descriptions of his walks, which he is the first to admit are no subsitute for the initial experience, his true artwork.
Nevertheless, I am equally fascinated by Fulton’s “indoor” artworks, though these too I have never seen in person. Here is a description of a 2002 Fulton exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, from a Guardian review by Jonathan Jones (The road to Utopia):
Walking Journey is an arresting, tantalising show. In an act of foolhardy generosity, Tate Britain has given over a vast exhibition space to an artist who has nothing to show except some framed photographs with reticent texts, cases of cards and artist’s books and wall paintings using commonplace words against unexceptional colours. And just in case you start savouring the classic beauty of his photographs of Himalayan boulders and American riverbeds, or appreciating the graphic ingenuity of his wall paintings, be advised that none of this is the core of his art, which is the walking – what you see is evidence that his art happened, that he walked from point A to point B.
What makes the repetitiveness, dryness, silence of this exhibition so triumphant is not some chic pleasure in nothingness but something more difficult to accept and impossible to let go. Fulton’s art is a goad. Its purpose, seen in a gallery in one of the densest cities on earth, is to make you realise that this is not where it’s at. There are other places. There is another pulse – that of the wilderness, that of nature. There are, still, ways of inhabiting the earth that make you feel small, transient, mortal. And this recognition is political.
Foolhardy generosity, yes, very well said Mr. Jones. And what a wonderful contradiction Fulton’s work embodies: the actual work is all about the “here and now,” while the documentation of that work points to something else–something very much not “here and now” as you stand contemplating the work in a museum–as being the truly authentic work. Many artists dally with contradiction and paradox, but I can’t think of any others who have made it the core of their work. The one who comes closest, in my mind, is the artist On Kawara, whose daily “date paintings” and “I got up” postcards perform a similar magic of alluding to something that is not there, that has been experienced by the artist alone and can only be transmitted by facsimile to the viewer, distant in time and space, never here, never now.
Fulton’s museum and gallery works are all about his walks, and can only begin after a walk has been completed. The artist has stated, “If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art,” summed-up with this simple statement of intent: “no walk, no work.” There is great joy in Fulton’s unwavering insistence that the abstractions must always be grounded in the true, authentic experience that begets them. Later in his Guardian review, Jones writes:
His photograph-and-text pieces are the ultimate holiday postcard. Just as a postcard from someone else’s exotic holiday can only ever make the recipient envious, Fulton’s photographs tease and frustrate. A road vanishing in the desert, a boulder encountered in the mountains, a milestone. A track through leafy England has the pastoral seductiveness of Constable’s east Sussex dirt track in his 1826 painting The Cornfield. Yet where Constable’s painting, which hangs in the National Gallery, brings the country into Trafalgar Square, giving you a nostril full of cow dung, Fulton insists that his picture is no more than an inadequate souvenir of the walk to which it alludes. Underneath the photograph is one of the laconic texts that point to his experiences: “A nine and a half day coast to coast walk from Norfolk to Dorset travelling on country lanes and paths. The Peddars Way – The Icknield Way – The Ridgeway. England July 1997.”
That’s all we get: a document banal in its lack of emphasis, were it not for the grave, quiet loveliness of tone. All the things he must have seen and heard in a walk across England from coast to coast are for us to imagine. We are in the position of Coleridge in his poem This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, when he imagines the delights of a party of friends who have gone for a walk he cannot join because of an injury: “Well, they are gone, and here I must remain/This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost/Beauties and feelings, such as would have been/Most sweet remembrance…”
Like Coleridge, we didn’t have that experience, see those beauties, hear that bird sing on the Ridge way that morning, after the rain; and our prison is not even a lime-tree bower but a museum.
What a beautiful description, of a quietly beautiful description, of the original artwork. Twice removed, we are fully in the realm of poetry, moodiness, daydream, nostalgia, desire, and a half-mad aestheticized longing for an unknown adventure. To say Fulton’s work is “quiet” is a gross understatement–like Cage, his is operating in the silences between the clang and banter of the modern world. His is the margin world, the in-between world, the world of direct experience, feeling, earth, moss, ghosts. An increasingly alien world to our non-stop Internetted, virtualized senses.
In this world of poetic feeling, it makes absolute sense that the way Fulton documents his walks has shifted from the straightforward photographic documentation of his early career to the more recent, abstracted wall-painted text pieces. Again, Jonathan Jones:
The fact of another place is all Fulton wants to tell us about – not show, but tell; not give, but promise, in that we can go his way, follow his road. Text paintings tell us this with superb economy, big letters arranged in visual analogy to what he saw. Strangely these works, without even photographs to help us picture the scene, are the closest to the pleasures of traditional landscape art. The layering of the word “clouds” over “stones”, for example, says enough about a walk in Wyoming to make you picture a desolate glory.
The fact, indeed the promise, of elsewhere. The poetry of existence and elegy reduced to its most economical essense. Fulton doesn’t want to spend too much time aestheticizing his documentation, though of course he has done so, in his spare way. But he does so always with the aim of pointing, in a variety of interesting and even beautiful ways, back to the thing that excites him most.
I thought about Hamish Fulton while reading a New Yorker profile of the British (and fellow hiker) novelist Ian McEwan, The Background Hum: Ian McEwan’s art of unease:
We ascended the crop field; behind us, solar panels on the roof of McEwan’s cottage glistened in the sun. Entering a fern-carpeted wood, McEwan joked that he places his friends along a divide: those who enjoy hiking (Barnes, Michael Frayn) and those who consider it a fatuous premodern practice (Amis, Christopher Hitchens). McEwan relishes the mental restoration that comes from being in nature. “The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” he said. “It has knock-on effects when you go back to work.”
Much of McEwan’s best writing can be tied directly to a long walk….
The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” is a beautiful description of what Fulton must be experiencing on his solitary walks. It is the in-the-moment feeling I myself have when hiking, and even more so when skiing. I don’t ski very well, or very often, but what I love about it is the focus of concentration that this sport demands of me: if I don’t give what I am doing 100% of my attention, I could be horribly injured or killed. Really good skiers and snowboarders may be able to do it blindfolded, but for me, a barely passable intermediate slope tumbler, exhilaration and terror are bound at the wrists and poised at the edge of a cornice, awaiting my push.
Though I have never been a soldier, I think this feeling must have something in common with the oft-mentioned notion that many soldiers fighting in wars feel most alive when their lives are most threatened. I don’t think it’s a case of being more or less “alive” at any given moment, only that certain situations provide us with a moment of focus and clarity where we are really paying attention to our immediate moment-by-moment reality to a much greater degree than we normally do in our daily lives. This is certainly what Zen Buddhism and mediation point toward, but for me I find it easier and more natural to achieve this state while flying down a steep snowy mountain nearly out of control, than sitting cross-legged on a mat “trying” to “not try” to think of anything beyond the moment. While skiing, I don’t have to “try” to think of nothing but the task at hand; such extraneous thoughts are simply gone from my mind for those blissful moments that I am “trapped fiercely in the present.” Being forced by circumstance to fully confront the moment is powerful, and can be enlightening.
Hamish Fulton has found a way to make a career out of exploration, contemplation, and open-minded living in the moment. He goes alone to other worlds and sends back postcards and signs, diagrams and descriptions, of experiences we can never hope to have unless we leave the gallery and go out into the wild world. His work is a gift to the human imagination.
From the Naming Manifesto, number 18: It’s a very simple calculus: if your competitors are all doing the same thing, then you will stand out if you do something different. And the first and most visible point of differentiation is with your name.
It is rare to encounter a published author from the relatively recent past for which almost no biographical information can be found online. I have found such a person, in the form of a philosophy scholar by the curious and intriguing name of “St. George William Joseph Stock.” Who gets named “Saint,” or did he give himself that moniker? When was he born, and when did he die? Where did he live? Trying to suss out the life of this enigmatic “Saint George” is maddening.
Four of Stock’s books are available as free ebooks from Google Play (and elsewhere): Attempts At Truth (1882), Deductive Logic (1888), Selections From The Septuagint: According To The Text Of Swete (1905) and Stoicism (1908). These might not sound like the most exciting reads, but could something saucier be in the offing? I found a book on Amazon called The Romance of Chastisement; or, Revelations of the School and Bedroom, by “An Expert.” The pseudonym, “An Expert,” was later identified as one “St. George H. Stock.” St. George “H.” Stock? Where did the “H”come from? Can this be the same “St. George Stock,” and if not, just how many “St. George Stock”s are there floating around in the mists of lost time and forgotten history?
The Romance of Chastisement; or, Revelations of the School and Bedroom is arguably the most sophisticated, most literary, and most amusing mid-Victorian fictional text focusing on flagellation. A collection of short stories and verse sparkling with sexual suggestion and wit, it was first published by John Camden Hotten in 1871 in a volume bearing the false imprint date 1870. It was reprinted by Edward Avery in 1888. An earlier book with the same title was issued by William Dugdale in 1866. This work had a different sub-heading: Revelations of Miss Darcy. The Victorian bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee suggests that both books were written by the same author, whom he reveals to have been St. George H. Stock. Formerly a lieutenant in the 2nd or Queen’s Royal Regiment, Stock issued his work originally in episodes from Dublin. Hotten purchased 200 sets from him and bound them into a single volume. St. George H. Stock also wrote the four short flagellant works that constitute Rosy Tales! (1874) and contributed to The Whippingham Papers (1888 [1887]), which are also available from Birchgrove Press.
Rosy Tales! Whippingham Papers! Could it be that a young St. George Stock, having already achieved personal sainthood, but still going by the middle initial “H” (Herbert? Hector? Haldric?), penned a smutty whip-smart book about flagellation, only to feel guilty as he grew older, for which he punished himself by flogging many books and articles about arcane corners of philosophy? This is purely speculative, mind you, but what else do I have to go on? The man’s a cipher.
Other than a bunch of sites that carry the Stock ebooks, Google has nothing on this guy. I even tried the U.K. National Archives, but found no entry for Mr. Stock. Google Books has a book, The Apology of Plato, from “pre-1923,” which includes an introduction by one “St. George Storck.” Looks like the “storck” has brought us another Stock baby. Can’t this lowly Saint get any respect?
Good old St. George Stock has even made the leap to iTunes, but you still can’t find any information about who he is. Maybe I’ll have to read his Attempts At Truth to get to the truth about his identity. Perhaps he’s divulged it all there, in code!
Somebody please answer this question: Who was St. George William Joseph Stock? If there are any philosophers or classical scholars out there with knowledge of this vanished Victorian scholar, this missing Saint, please post it in the Comments of this blog. Perhaps together we can solve this mystery, and return St. George William Joseph Stock to the historical record, with or without his whip.
“It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.”
Ian Mcewan
