"[Jill] Biden is a longtime English professor who casually uses the correct group noun for starlings ('murmuration')."

"She quotes many writers here — Albert Camus, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, James Salter — but the author the book recalled most vividly to me, in its careful catalog of small details, was William Carlos Williams, who in his epic poem 'Paterson' wrote 'no ideas but in things.' This tracks, because Biden acknowledges the help of Ada Calhoun, the author of [a book] about Frank O’Hara. Indeed, Biden’s description of being hustled for security reasons through the service entrance to hotels made my O’Hara stand on end, so cleanly could it be broken into stanzas, if you’ll forgive the liberty: 'right by garbage cans/ reeking of rotting room service leftovers/mixed with discarded mini shampoos/ — an odor so sour and pungent/that it almost knocks you down.'"

So writes Alexandra Jacobs in "Jill Biden’s New Memoir Shows Off a Sharp Eye, if Not a Sharp Elbow/Beyond a few pointed digs at her husband’s successor, 'View From the East Wing' largely sticks to the head-spinning details of first lady-hood" (NYT).

Speaking of "no ideas but in things," we're told that, in her new memoir, her second, Jill Biden "marvels at the perks of the office, the masses of flowers, attentive staff and fine art, such as 'Morning on the Seine, Good Weather,' the oil painting that Angela Merkel said Trump called 'my Monet.' ('Our Monet,' Biden corrects, meaning the American people’s.)"

I looked it up. Here's "Our Monet":

According to The White House Historical Association's Facebook page: "On December 4, 1963, the family of John F. Kennedy donated the painting 'A Morning on the Seine; Good Weather' to the White House collection in memory of the late president." That was 2 weeks after the assassination. I'm only noticing this painting now, because I'm reading about Jill and Donald verbalizing possessively about it. And now I feel as though I can see, in that fuzzy image, 2 profiles yelling at each other. And both look like Trump.

Oh! The derangement! An odor so sour and pungent....

ADDED: Did Trump say "my Monet"? It's hearsay — at least double hearsay. Jill Biden is asserting that Angela Merkel said that Trump said something. There's room for mishearing, misquoting, misinterpreting, and lying from Merkel (supposedly hearing Trump) and Biden (supposedly hearing Merkel) and from anyone else who's passed this statement along.

Interestingly, Trump has used the phrase "my Monet," but not to refer to an artwork by Claude Monet. Trump has called one of his golf courses "my Monet": "I have friends who buy Monets. Turnberry is my Monet and it’s far more beautiful." But that quote too is hearsay. Eric Trump wrote it in a book, it says here: "Donald Trump: Turnberry is my Monet — and it’s more beautiful/US president ‘obsessed’ with details about his golf courses in Scotland and continually makes suggestions to improve them, according to his son Eric’s book" (London Times).

Googling for more reporting of Trump's use of the phrase "my Monet," I got a good laugh:

 

I'd like to hear the "Apprentice" theme song with "Monet!" taking the place of "Money!":

"The delicate problem is restoring a sense of historical truth to the place to better convey a deeper understanding of who Monet really was. I don’t want it to become Disneyland. We’re not going to put in things that did not exist."

Said Alain-Charles Perrot, director of the Maison et Jardins de Claude Monet, quoted in "For the love of Monet: record crowds threaten impressionist’s centenary/In Giverny, up to a million visitors are expected this year but can the village balance the artist’s legacy with the pressures from mass tourism?" (London Times).

Giverny, now with its bus parks and columns of art pilgrims flowing over Monet’s green Japanese bridge, became the epicentre of the modern mania for impressionism soon after la Maison Monet was opened to the public in 1980. A recent social media-era surge was compounded when Emily strolled... over the water lily bridge... the Netflix series Emily in Paris.

Critics are often rude about the “Monetisation” of the art world, referring to its merchandise, immersive shows and the way the impressionists as a brand have eclipsed that of other art movements. “Claude Monet has become the sacred and milk cow of the art world,” Marianne magazine noted.

"On this date, a thin waning crescent Moon (about 6% illuminated) formed a striking conjunction with Venus and the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo..."

"... visible in the eastern sky about 40-60 minutes before sunrise for most observers in the Northern Hemisphere. Venus shines at a magnitude of -3.9, making it appear as a dazzling white point of light—far brighter than any star and easily mistaken for a 'dot' close to the Moon's position. This alignment was a highlight of the month's pre-dawn sky, with the trio creating a beautiful triangle-like grouping low on the horizon. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere or a more northerly latitude, the view might have been slightly different, but Venus was the standout object globally."

That's Grok, responding to my question: "What was that white dot next to the moon this morning?

Here's my photo, from 6:12 a.m.:

I fake-raged at Grok: "What do you mean easily mistaken for a 'dot'?! It is a dot. To call it a dot is only to describe how it looks, not to claim it has any particular substance inconsistent with a planet. I assumed it was Venus, but I don't like to say what I don't know, so I said what I did know. It IS a dot! I don't like being told I've made a mistake when I'm actually taking pains to be super-accurate."

Grok abjectly apologized and claimed not to have meant to say I'd made a mistake. Own it, Grok.

ADDED: Grok seemed to want to prove itself by helping me, so I asked what was my genuine next question, a veer away from astronomy and into the topic of writing:

French Impressionism explained at long last: It was the air pollution.

From "Scientists confirm long held theory about what inspired Monet" (CNN).

I thought it was going to be cataracts, but, no... air pollution.

"In general, air pollution makes objects appear hazier, makes it harder to identify their edges, and gives the scene a whiter tint, because pollution reflects visible light of all wavelengths" [said Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University].... 

The team looked for these two metrics, edge strength and whiteness, in the paintings — by converting them into mathematical representations based on brightness — and then compared the results with independent estimates of historical air pollution.

Don't you love it when something you thought was a human being's inspiration turns out to be an outside force, something that happened to him? It's especially demoralizing when it's some malady or misfortune.

"Before I get to the meat of the puzzle, a word about the title. Well, three words: I hate it. Like, viscerally."

"It's a vicious, stupid, and ultimately inapt title," writes Rex Parker, about the NYT Sunday Crossword, which is titled "Step on it."

Click to spoil the theme of today's puzzle.

"Audience members were treated to author Haruki Murakami serving as a disc jockey while playing the works of jazz great Stan Getz and talking about his music."

"Murakami played records from his own extensive collection during a session held Nov. 13 at the Waseda International House of Literature in Tokyo.... In the shadows of his spectacular and extensive musical career, Getz continued to suffer from alcoholism and drug addiction his entire life. 'Music is there like an independent form of life unto itself,' Murakami said. 'It keeps evolving even if it lives in a host who is so messed up.'"

From "Murakami spins best of Stan Getz while he talks about jazz great" (The Asahi Shimbun).

A reader sent me that link, and I greatly enjoyed reading it here at my computer with access to Spotify to listen to, notably, “Corcovado” from “Getz/Gilberto."

 

I made a bookmark for The Asahi Shimbum, where I was pleased to see that the biggest front-page item was "Pigeons figure the odds to perch where safety is assured"...

The unusual sight of 30 or so pigeons perched on the rooftop of a parked car on a road in central Tokyo, rather than an adjacent small park, seemed like an unlikely place to congregate. But in fact it made perfect sense.... It turns out that pigeons take two factors into account when they pick where to perch, according to Shigeru Watanabe, professor emeritus of animal behavior at Keio University who won... the Ig Nobel award, which honors “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think,” for showing that pigeons can distinguish between paintings by Picasso and Monet by showing 10 pictures of each to them.

I who was lost and lonely/Believing life was only/A bitter tragic joke, have found with you, the meaning of existence, oh my love....

"If purple walls and a red tinted window surrounded you for a month with no color but purple around you, by the end of that time you would be a mad-man."

"No matter how strong your brain might be it would not stand the strain, and it is doubtful if you would ever recover your reason."

Said the Boston Globe in a 1903 article titled "Dangerous Tints: Some Colors Will Drive a Person Mad if the Eyes Are Continually Looking at Them," quoted in "15 Perfectly Safe Things That Were Once Considered Dangerous" (Mental Floss).

[Purple] wasn't the only color to avoid. Scarlet could push you into a murderous rage, while blue “excites the imagination and gives a craving for music and stagecraft, but it has a reaction that wrecks the nerves.” Meanwhile, “Solitary confinement in a yellow cell … will weaken any system and produce chronic hysteria,” and “sheer dead white, unbroken, will destroy your eyesight.”

Sounds like the key is to vary your colors. What drives you mad is the monotone. Do we really know the effect of one-intense-color interiors on people who stay inside all the time?

This question makes me think of Monet's all-yellow (almost) dining room at Giverny:



I love that, but if you lived there, you wouldn't be in a solitary confinement cell. Look at those open doors. You can un-yellow at the first frisson of hysteria. Just run out into the green. "Green is the king of colors... and no amount of it can do any harm."

"A game of brinkmanship began when the Musée d’Orsay here invited Julian Schnabel to choose paintings from its 19th-century collection to exhibit alongside his own works of art."

"At a certain moment the museum said: You can’t have this or that painting, so I said I can’t do it,' Mr. Schnabel said in a recent interview at the museum. 'I thought, if I can’t pick the paintings, there’s no reason for me to say that I picked the paintings.' The American artist and filmmaker, 66, had his eye on works by four artists in particular — Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Cézanne — which the museum did not want to move from their usual places."

In the end, Schnabel got everything but the Cézanne for the show, described here, in the NYT.

The article doesn't say which Cézanne was so firmly unmoveable, and I don't think it's the Cézanne mentioned in this paragraph (which confused me):

The earliest of [Schnabel's] works in the show is the large-scale “Blue Nude with Sword” from 1979, the first figurative, as opposed to abstract, plate painting that Mr. Schnabel made. It hangs alongside Cézanne’s much smaller tableau “La Femme Étranglée” (“The Strangled Woman,” 1875-1876), with which it shares a similar red, white and blue palette.

I was struck that the NYT would allow such a blurry, distanced hint at violence against women in this article. Women are strangled, not just in the Cézanne painting...



... but in the newspaper that also, when it's in the mood, tells us about the women protesters who scream about our subordination. But in the museum, the men dominate as usual. Schnabel is a man with the power to compare himself to anyone he likes and he likes all men — Van Gogh, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne.

But at least Schnabel's nude woman isn't strangled but wields a sword. No! Faked you out: Schnabel's "Blue Nude with a Sword" is a man:


What's he aiming that sword at? A curled up red dog? A pile of shit? I don't know, but why, with all those phallic symbols — the pillars, the sword — do we see no genitalia between his legs? Or is that the point — "Blue Nude Without Testicles"?

Are you enjoying the Gender Studies at Althouse this morning?

Searching for "average."

The software... the blurriness... which — no matter what you think of Claude Monet — is not what "artistic" means.

"If this video doesn't inspire you to plan a trip, nothing will."

Buzzfeed offers this "Facts That Will Make You Want To Travel." Since questioning traveling is a big theme on this blog, I'm going to embed this before watching it. I'll get back to you on whether it consigns me to the category Buzzfeed considers uninspirable.



UPDATE: Second-by-second reaction.

The Romanian woman who burned a Monet, a Matisse, a Gauguin, and a Picasso.

It's possible that those bits of cinnabar, chromium green, lazurite, and tin-lead yellow found in Olga Dogaru's wood-burning stove are not what's left of the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of paintings for which her son was arrested for stealing from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. But why lie and say you burned them? And yet, why burn them and not lie?

If you're hardcore enough to burn these things, why are you not hardcore enough to lie to the police?

Who knows what techniques the police in Romania use to extract confessions? It's one thing to crush fine art into the incinerator one night in a desperate frenzy, quite another to hold up to endless questioning. The impulse to have it over explains the burning and the confessing. It's not hardcore to burn and then not to lie. It's the weak combination. To resist destroying the evidence of your son's crimes because the art is beautiful and then also to resist the demands from the police for confession — that is the strong combination. That is hardcore.

The more mundane combinations are: 1. Burn the paintings and lie about it, and 2. Don't burn the paintings and, when confronted by the police, rat on your son. These 2 options are easiest to understand. #1 is the criminal mind, the sociopath. #2 is the virtuous person. These are the familiar and conventional types.

In her statement to the police, Mrs. Dogaru said she panicked when she realized the works would be used as evidence against her son. With officers combing the village, she told the authorities that she had looked frantically for places to hide the works, which were all in a large plastic bag.

She hid them in various places, including her sister’s home and her garden. Then, she said, she buried them at the village cemetery.... Fearful that the works could still be discovered... Mrs. Dogaru said she lighted a fire in the stove and went to the cemetery to get the works. “I put the whole package with the seven paintings, without even opening it, into the stove, and then placed over them some wood and my plastic slippers and waited for them to fully burn,” she said. “The next day I cleaned the stove, took out the ash and placed it in the garden, in a wheelbarrow.”

Congratulations to the police who extracted this confession? No. The police are to blame for arresting Dogaru the son, unleashing he mother Dogaru.

Art heist in Rotterdam.

Stolen: Pablo Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; Claude Monet’s 1901 “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London”; Henri Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow”; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait,” around 1890, and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work “Woman with Eyes Closed.”

Marinello said the thieves have limited options available, such as seeking a ransom from the owners, the museum or the insurers. They could conceivably sell the paintings in the criminal market too, though any sale would likely be a small fraction of their potential auction value.

The problem selling these things is obviously not protection enough to keep thieves from bothering.



IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

From the link: the idea that an unscrupulous private investor might have commissioned the works’ theft was far-fetched. 'That’s something that comes from Hollywood movies,' he said.

Should they blame a Hollywood video or lax security?

UPDATE: Confession of destruction.

The law-and-fashion news.

"Designer Christian Louboutin can claim trademark protection for the red outsole on his women's shoes, but not if the rest of the shoe is also red, a federal appellate panel ruled yesterday, allowing rival Yves Saint-Laurent to continue selling an entirely red shoe."

Louboutin's iconic high-end, red-soled shoes, introduced in 1992, have been spotted on celebrities including Sarah Jessica Parker, Victoria Beckham and Rihanna. The shoes sell for up to $1,000 a pair.

YSL's shoes are entirely red, including their outsoles, and are part of a line of similarly monochrome shoes, also in purple, green and yellow....

[The district judge had said] that a color, being an essential element of fashion design, could not be trademarked, despite the strong connection in the public mind between red soles and Louboutins. The judge compared the suit to Pablo Picasso suing Claude Monet to assert a trademark for a particular shade of blue....

However, the [appellate] panel found that the "evidentiary record further demonstrates that the Louboutin mark is closely associated with contrast," not just the red color, and that the trademark must be narrowed to cover only situations where the red sole of a shoe contrasts with a differently colored upper part.

So maybe you can have a trademark in a particular color. (I note that Tiffany, which has a particular shade of blue, filed an amicus brief supporting Louboutin.) But Louboutin didn't own red or even red soles. What distinctively said Louboutin was red soles contrasting to the rest of the shoe.

The Louboutin side of the argument thus won something important upsetting the trial judge's per se rule against fashion-industry trademarks in a color.

Goodbye to Maurice Sendak.

We were just talking about his saying "Go to hell"... and now he's gone. Not to hell, I'm sure. He was 83.

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never did learn to draw feet, he often said.

Here's an excellent, recent interview with him:

The term "children's illustrator" annoys him, since it seems to belittle his talent. "I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person." He and Eugene never considered bringing up children themselves, he says. He's sure he would have messed it up. His brother felt the same way: after their childhood, they were too dysfunctional. "They led desperate lives," he says of his parents. "They should have been crazy. And we – making fun of them. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me and his eyes were all teary. And he said, 'Why were we so unkind to Mama?' And I said, 'Don't do that. We were kids, we didn't understand. We didn't know she was crazy.'"

Fun with mirrors.

We go to the Austin Museum of Art to see the Roy Lichstenstein show — which we loved — and get sidetracked into the hands-on kid's area where we take a lot of pictures in a tunnel of mirrors (and stick a few plastic dots on the white walls):









Okay, now stop that and tell me what dots and mirrors have to do with Roy Lichtenstein? Seems more like Wonder Bread and the funhouse.

The dots are the dots from newspaper printing that he enlarges and emphasizes for distinctive effect. Don't you think our children need to get more excited about dots so they can appreciate pop art? I do! I dot!

The mirrors relate to some of the prints on display, especially a series called "Reflections" that has as its subject matter works of art partly obscured by reflections, like this one called "Reflections on Minerva." I'm thinking Roy went to museums and got annoyed — and then inspired — by the glass that covers so many works of art and makes them hard to see.

Roy Lichtenstein seems to have a mania for processing images. You get the feeling he might look at anything — good or bad — Monet's haystacks, a stock photo of 1970s interior decoration — and want to work his set of artistic tricks on it just for the pure delight of taking one thing and making it into something else.

Intentional and accidental.

Writing before dawn, I keep my eye on the Manhattan skyline. I've been watching the effect of the sun on those reflective buildings for months. I've taken a lot of photographs of the same buildings, but — like Claude Monet looking at the Rouen cathedral — I keep thinking now, the light makes it different. When it does, I pick up the camera and go out on the terrace and take some more pictures of the same thing. This is what moved me today:



But as I was picking up the camera and noticing I'd left it on, aiming at nothing, I clicked the button to test the battery. Later, I see it looks like this:



Which amuses me. I upload it and send to the flickr group ROTHKOesque.

Holes and crime.

1. Someone punched a hole — a big fist-sized hole — in "Le Pont d'Argenteuil," an "invaluable," "magnificent masterpiece" by Claude Monet. Why? "It appears they were drunk," says the French Culture Minister. No one could just hate Impressionism that much. Imagine breaking in to a great museum — this was the Musee d'Orsay — and feeling like punching out one of the works of art. Is there a painting or sculpture out there that seems to you to be asking for it?

2. Meanwhile, in Farmington, Missouri, Scott A. Masters faces up to 30 years of prison after shoplifting a doughnut — or so it appears if you pick up your news from headlines. They also say he shoved the store clerk who tried to stop him, which makes it "strong-arm robbery." I'm sure there have been murders committed over doughnuts — and $5 Stetson hats. You go to prison for the murder. Masters — a fool — is talking to the press: "Strong-arm robbery? Over a doughnut? That's impossible. I've never had a violent crime in my life. And there's no way I would've pushed a woman over a doughnut." Any food you would push a woman over?

"When this girl at the museum asked me whom I liked better, Monet or Manet, I said, 'I like mayonnaise.'"

"She just stared at me, so I said it again, louder. Then she left. I guess she went to try to find some mayonnaise for me."

-- Jack Handey. "Deepest Thoughts."

Picasso looks way more photographic on line than in the print edition. The print edition has a bit more to do with the real thing. When I see a painting I'm used to seeing reproduced I'm always impressed, once again, by what paint looks like. The images on line are fascinating--I've got some of my own to post some day--but they are only things that resemble paintings. The texture (metrotexture) is different, and the size often seems absurd.

But I really want to quibble about grammar. The New York Times writes: "The collection includes works by Manet, Degas, Monet and Sargent as well as a rare Rose Period Picasso, 'Boy With a Pipe.'"

Isn't every painting rare? There's one. That's the height of rarity. Rose Period Picassos may be rare, but "Boy With a Pipe" is no more rare than any given Clown Painting From the Collection of Diane Keaton.

I know they mean "The collection includes works by Manet, Degas, Monet and Sargent as well as a rare Rose Period Picasso. The Picasso is 'Boy With a Pipe.'"

Why stick to logic if you might have to write two sentences? Just go ahead and cram more information into one sentence.