Run For Your Lives, It's Queen Anne

I guess we're going to have to explain ourselves right up front.

I'm not exactly sure how to explain Queen Anne architecture properly. It doesn't really have anything to do with Queen Anne, for starters. In America, we'd call furniture and architecture related to Queen Anne's salad days as Jacobean, or William and Mary style. Queen Anne is a Victorian era style, just to confuse things further. And to place the capstone of intellectual delirium tremens on this edifice of misnomers, Queen Anne architecture means something different in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.

From about 1880 until World War I, Queen Anne was the pre-eminent style of architecture in America. It supplanted Second Empire. It had all sorts of subtypes, including generally the style we featured yesterday: Stick.

That's the Haas-Lilienthal House in San Francisco right there at the top of the page. It's a Queen Anne on steroids. I have older pictures of it, too, without the Volvos in the picture, and there's another Victorian wonder next door instead of the bland, shabby box you see off to the right.

Here's a closer look at the fabric of the place. The visual density of the wall surfaces is very high. You can see how there is a kind of dynamism of the grouping of the interior rooms that show through to the outside, rippling along the facades, jutting out and retreating here and there, each wrinkle or bulge an opportunity for embellishment. The houses look like they're dancing around on the foundation. How far we'd come from the staid rectangular symmetrical assemblages of rooms and the chaste Greek and Roman themes of the colonial styles:

We've lost the knack for laying on decoration like this. It's really hard to get it all on the house like that. Each layer of filigree is like upping the ante; and the proportions, placement, and prominence of each design elements affects the whole thing. It's like playing a piano. It's easier to be interesting playing with all ten fingers, but much harder to do than chopsticks.

We've lost all sorts of other knacks besides embellishment, too. The wrap around porch is a lost art, for one.
So we'll talk about Queen Anne for a few days. We'll have to divvy it up into Spindle Style, and Free Classic, and Mock Tudor, and Shingle Style and... well, pull up a chair. A Queen Anne chair, if you've got one.

Sticking With Stick Style

A timber- Lumber that is nominally 5 inches or more in least dimension.

A plank- a heavy thick board, especially one 2 to 4 inches thick and at least 8 inches wide

A board-Lumber that is nominally less than two inches thick and two inches or more wide.

A stick- A long slender piece of wood

A Stick Style house:
Not "A" Stick Style house. More or less, it's "The" Stick Style House. the Carson House in Eureka, California. It's still there, too:

I literally am having trouble comprehending this shack. It's like the world's wedding cake or the hood ornament on the universe or something. The Library of Congress has some more pictures. The place has the effect on me that flashing lights have on people prone to epilepsy. I'm slack-jawed looking at it.


Click on the pictures and look at it large. It has an almost impenetrable amount of surface decoration. The effect is somehow airy, though.


William McKendrie Carson ran a lumber mill. A redwood lumber mill. Redwood is rare and unusual today in house construction, but it was the early equivalent of pressure treated wood. The heartwood from redwood is as impervious to rot and unattractive to bugs as the nasty greenish southern yellow pine treated lumber you're all familiar with now, giving you splinters on people's decks. Along with some types of cedar, it was used in places where rot would be a problem, like house sills and various exterior millwork. Thirty years ago I'd still see it used for here and there in that fashion.

Here's the good part: Just like many people in the building trades now, when things got slow at the millwork plant, Carson decided to give his employees something to do instead of laying them off. This is why all general contractors houses are elaborate and unfinished, generally. In 1885, he sent his workers to build him a house. And just to numb my mind further, since he had a lot of it on hand, of course, he had them make this whole house -- framing, siding, all those gew-gaws-- out of redwood.


We like to go to the Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, and poke around what passed for a summer cottage for the Vanderbilts. It's an enormous pile of marble hard by the Atlantic Ocean. I think it would be cheaper to build the Marble House now than the Carson house. After all, marble is just rocks. Redwood's really expensive. And marble doesn't need painting. I bet this does:

The inside is an insane riot of woodwork too, of course. Carson probably thought he saw plenty of redwood all day long at work, so the interior woodwork is made from an enormous lot of a wood called "primavera" that he had imported for the place. I'm sure the architect and the owner knew that redwood would make for a very dark, plain interior. Primavera is also called white mahogany. It's insanely rare and expensive now, too.


I could never live in the Carson House. I'd just sit in there, drooling a bit, and gape at the place, trying to conjure in my mind the scale you'd use to weigh the effort and material used to build this thing. A man's gotta go out from time to time.

Impress Your Friends. Call It The Stick Style

[Editor's Note: We've been talking about American House Styles, if you just came in. We ran out of gas at the Second Empire about two weeks ago. We're going to press on like a fake nail]
(Author's Note: There is no editor. Raise your hand when you're tired of that joke.)
Look disparagingly at your companion. Affect a haughty tone. Rear up to your full height and drone the following through your nose:

My dear sir or madam. A Queen Anne? I think not. Anyone can see that is a Stick Style manse. Please refrain from offering your defective architectural surmises until you have educated yourself amongst the tribes of the Eastlakes. Harrumph.

The problem is that things are getting subtle. Queen Anne covers a lot of ground. To many, anything plainer than Second Empire after the Civil War is a Queen Anne. Not exactly.
We're still wallowing in the gothic, more or less, and in the picturesque. From about 1860 'til the turn of the 20th century, you could find the Stick Style from New England to San Francisco. Actually, mostly in New England and San Francisco. The first picture is the Westerfield House in San Francisco, for instance. There's a lot more like that there to this very day.

The Stick Style is like a bridge between the affectation of medieval gothic picturesque styles and the Queen Anne style which would blanket the United States from the 1880s until WW I. They're all mixed up together sometimes, and they share a lot of millwork styles, too. And there was a lot of millwork. Eastlake decoration is common. He was another bridge between the medieval and the modern.
The idea was to achieve a riot of surface patterns. They'd apply "stickwork" to the wall surfaces in all sorts of directions and widths and depths and patterns, some mimicking the timberwork of medieval facades, some just going with geometric intricacies. They all generally show a big, steeply pitched gable to the street, with decorative trusses in the peaks; or my favorite version has a great big tower. There's brackets and exposed rafter ends and Eastlake trim and polychrome painted surfaces going in every direction enough to make any prospective housepainter call his yacht broker.
And therein lies the problem. They could build them, but they couldn't keep after them. Little by little, or sometimes all at once, the detailing was stripped away and simplified because it was too labor intensive to keep up. You mostly have to recognize the style on the remaining examples by a sort of detective work -- a decorative timber truss on the steep gable; maybe some brackets at the front door. Here's a picture of one in Newport, Rhode Island I snapped while out walking this spring:
They were very exuberant, and the polychrome possibilities made them very picturesque, but eventually they became associated with a kind of dustcatcher broken-down haunted house vibe. You know, sorta like this:
The Victorians had all the fun. Did you speak French, bubbele?

Do Flowers Grow On Pork Chop Hill?

He gazes out of the photo, mute, enigmatic, not quite smiling, and speaks to me across the decades.

When I was a little boy, amusements were few and far between. Television was still in black and white for us, and after the reruns of Gilligan's Island and The Three Stooges, not much was on the idiot box, as my father called it.

I remember my father and me trying to watch a hockey game broadcast from the west coast featuring the California Golden Seals, who were setting a new low in sports sumptuary and getting pasted by our mighty Boston Bruins -- Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and Pie McKenzie and... well, I can still recite all their names down to the most obscure, even Garnet (Ace to his friends)Bailey. On a thirteen inch black and white TV with rabbit ears. We might as well have used the Etch-a-Sketch.

Eisenhower's X-Box, the Etch-a-Sketch was.

And so it always seemed a real treat when we could wheedle our mother to drag out the elegant but battered silverware box, left from some set our family never owned, filled with the family photographs. The pictures were mostly black and white too, the current cutting edge of photography being Polaroid's prehistoric b&w instant photos. They'd come out of the camera, and you'd count to a now forgotten tempo, and pray, and pull off the cover paper to expose the image and stop the developer, and smear your clothes, and hope the picture was vaguely done.

We'd see the usual babies on the shag carpet, buns up; confirmation and communion suits that fit like either a tent or a rubber glove, never any degree in between; little girls in their Easter jumpers and patent leather shoes, with their mothers wearing a hat, a real hat, ready for church. Father, grim, unsmiling in his workday suit, a little shiny at the elbows and knees.

Those photos were only the littlest bit interesting after a while, because they were for the most part, well -- us. The exotic ones were always deeper in the pile, instantly recognizable as special by that magnificent sepia tone that photos used to have, and spalling and cracking like a fresco in damp cathedral.

There they'd be, the southern Italian or Irish immigrant faces, looking stoically at the camera, surrounded by extended family on a stoop in Cambridge or Dorchester or Roxbury Massachusetts, or perhaps Antigonish, Nova Scotia. They had their hard lives written all over their faces. But always calm looking. Serene, really; not introspective or egoist. And they looked into the lens in a way that we never do. Not at it, but through it.

Our parents would strain to remember all the names, and who did what and from where, and why and when. And I figure, with the small wisdom that I've accumulated with age, that when we pestered them too much about someone obscure, they made stuff up.

And then his face would turn up. Handsome, mysterious, forever young. Forte.

Who's that?

That's my brother Bobby, my mother would answer. And that was that.

I was young, and still in the thrall of my parents, and sensed it. Here is a place you do not go.

The years passed, and the TV was in color, and my wrists and ankles began to show from my hand-me-down cousins' clothes. And the box came out less often. But when it did, the tantalizing face, handsomer than all the others, undiminished by time or care, resplendent in a uniform, always caught your eye. He died before I was born I learned, by osmosis I think, I don't remember ever having the nerve to ask, and I'm sure it wasn't offered.

In Korea.

And the earth spun, and the seasons changed, and then I was a man.

One day, my mother came to me. She had a picture. it had lain stored and untouched for fifty years, coiled, and she couldn't unroll it without destroying it. We slowly, ever so carefully unrolled it, the flecks of black and white popping off, as I stared at the faces. Hundreds and hundreds of faces. Five rows, stretching right off the page, four feet long, all in identical infantry uniforms, except the six cooks dressed all in white. C Company 506- Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Camp Breckinridge, KY. December 27, 1952.

And there was only four ways to stand out in that mob of faces. The cooks, of course. One man in the hundreds wears an officer's hat, and looks ten minutes older than the rest. One man is holding drumsticks over a military style snare drum. And in the very center, in the very front, one man holds the company colors on a lance. Two crossed muskets, a Capital "C" and a "506."

And he has the face that speaks to me.

Now when I was in college, on a lark, my friends and I went skydiving. We trained all day in a sweltering hangar in upstate New York amongst the farms. They strapped army surplus gear on us, hung us on straps depending from the hangar roof, and shook us around violently by our heels until we demonstrated that we could unbuckle our main chute from the straps on our shoulders, then pull the cord on our belly chute. Fun.

We climbed resolutely into a DeHavilland Beaver, which now seems to me an odd name for a plane, and knelt in rows in the fuselage. A few long minutes later we launched ourselves, some with difficulty, out the open hole in the side and into a whirlwind far over the patchwork quilt of the fields. A tether pulled our chute for us, and we drifted down and found a place with a liquor license.

I called my father, and told him what I had done. Expecting praise, I guess, or some such. And he called me, gently, the fool I was.

I protested: but you were in a bomber plane. They must have made you jump. And he told me, son, if that plane was on fire, filled to the brim with rabid rats, and piloted by a dead man, I'd still take my chances in the plane. And to jump from a perfectly good one, he said, is foolish. Click.

My father was in the Army Air Force. Ball gunner, hanging in a plastic bubble under a B-24J, Les Miserables, over the Pacific. Air Medal. Distinguished Flying Cross. After I pestered him enough, he once told me a sort of a story about the war. He reeled off the names, Tarawa. Pelelau, Kwajalein, Tinian. He mentioned, in an offhand way, that after some island had been bombed flat, they later landed on it. It looked like the island had been picked up ten feet, he said, then dropped. His CO told them that some planes were coming. On these planes were some people. They were coming from somewhere. They were going somewhere else. When the planes landed, my father and his compatriots were instructed not to talk to these men, or even about them; and if he said so much as hello to one of them, or said "boo" about them to anyone else, he would spend the remainder of the war in a military prison, incommunicado. My father lost his desire, if he had had any, to speak about those men. He surmised some of them later flew a plane named the Enola Gay.

My father seldom talked much about being in the military.

And my mother never talked about the brother in the photographs.

Now the picture, the coiled picture, was ruined. But then, we don't watch black and white TV any more, do we? My mother took that picture, and a bankroll, and had a necromancer or an alchemist or something at a digital photography studio restore it, perfectly, and make copies for all of us nephews. Mine hangs today over my kitchen table.

He watches over me.

I was forty years old. My mother told me, Uncle Bobby hated his real name.

His real name?

Francis, she said.

My middle name is Francis. I never knew.




(Editor's Note: Sippican Cottage will return on Tuesday. Have a pleasant Memorial Day Weekend)
[Author's Note: There is no editor]

What Can I Do To Help?

Something is broken in American housing. I don't know how to fix it.

The problem we face is a good sort of problem to face. We are well housed. As far as I can gather, better than anywhere else on Earth. And no fair telling me you'd rather live in an apartment in Paris and eat baguettes from the corner bakery every day. You're rich if you live like that. People of very modest means can afford to live decently in the United States. That's what I'm referring to. Rich people can live well just about anywhere. I've been to Europe and seen how the lower middle class lives. Hint: hot water, clean water, working toilets, cooling and heating intermittent if not downright optional.

So the utilitarian aspect is more or less covered. But a house represents a lot more than running water. It is the symbol of a society. It's got a great big anima in it. It represents things, to and about its occupants, neighbors, community and country, planet. It's not just a box to live in. Or it shouldn't be. I'm afraid that's what it's becoming, though.

There have been various periods of boom and bust in American architecture. The most interesting work I ever did out in the landscape was always restoring things that had come and gone, and now come again. I liked places that are invested with the zeitgeist of their times. You can sort of feel it while you're banging on it.

I've offered an overview of American architecture here on this page. We got as far as Second Empire, and will return to that magnificent skein of building style vivisection shortly. But while I was doing it, going over it, writing about it, wallowing in it, I realized it was all being lost.

Not the particular items themselves, exactly. It's hard to tear down anything that's notable, or just plain old anymore without a picket line immediately forming in front of it. People often lovingly restore notable things now, and have enough funds to do it, too. That's not the problem.

We've lost our way in another way. It's the approach to building things that we've lost. Post-modernism has killed the soul of American architecture. And I'd like it back, please.

Post-modernism is the idea that everything is just an affectation, and so you can pull it apart and make little jokes out of the bits. I reject the approach, and not just in architecture. The problem with the Daily Show and Colbert is not that they are smarmy wags, it's that they derive their smugness from making fun of a establishment that no longer exists, if it ever did. Yes, everything sucks. But I hate to break it to you: You're the everything now.

Every radio station is "alternative" now. The problem is there is nothing much to be the alternative to anymore. Mindless oppositionism is stupid. A little stupid is fun. When the preponderance of anything is stupid, the fun's gone and it's just stupid.

Architecture in America has always been an assemblage of affectations. And don't kid yourself; the lack of ornamentation that was pursued as a fetish for the last 70 years by the modernist is neither modern nor a lack of fussiness. And listen up you rich ascetics: There's nothing fussier than trying to achieve absolute plainness.

So the 1860s church was not really a Greek temple, after all, it just used that affectation as a symbol. But what a symbol; what an affectation. They understood the meaning of the things they applied to the fabric of the buildings, and the proportions and materials and finish and everything. They didn't paste a bunch of Greeky crap on a weird box to get a laugh.

I'm growing sad that the average American house has become a three car garage with an enormous rubbery box of a house nailed on the ass end of it. We used to do better. We can do better again.

Where Do You Take Your Children?

There's a fetish for hating children afoot.

That's not an exaggeration. If you want an opinion about children in restaurants, on airplanes, in movie theaters, pretty much any public place, scout the internet, and bring smelling salts. And don't bring more than one child, or you'll be reminded it's a not a clown car, lady.

The problem- and there is one- is not the children. It's the adults. I meant to type: "adults," with the quotation fingers going. There aren't any real adults involved.

There are two kinds of "adults" involved. One is the parents of children who do not know how to behave themselves in public, and the other is anyone that doesn't want to see a kid anywhere they go.

The second group is easy to place on the couch and figure out. They're jealous that they have to act adult -a little- and a kid gets a pass. They are like little children themselves, just bigger and pushier and equipped with credit cards. They have no better interpersonal skills than the hellion in the back seat on a long car ride, and can't stand to see anybody doing anything that they can't do. Real adults who see children misbehave in public places feel sorry for the children, not themselves.

The first group is just the second group, only they have their own children. And they have never bothered to teach their children how to behave in public, because they don't know how themselves. They're afraid to teach or enforce any standards of decorum for their children, as they know that means they'll be expected to adhere to them as well. We're all just big children living together in a house, undifferentiated, now, aren't we? I'm not foregoing R rated entertainment just because my kid's in the room. It's much easier to call anybody who calls for any standard of decorum a Nazi and do whatever I want.

When I was small, my parents brought me places. Serious places. We didn't all go to Disneyland in flip-flops and tatty t-shirts. We went to museums. We went to Mount Vernon. We went to the library three times a week. We went to Plimouth Plantation. Serious places like that. Many of them had a profound and life-long effect on me.

Don't get me wrong. We went to the ball game and threw peanut shells on the deck like everybody else, too, and things of that nature. And I'm not dumb enough not to understand that part of the allure of those serious places was undoubtedly that many of them were cheap -or free. But the very first things we learned were how to behave in public. And we were taught how to be polite and deferential towards others, especially adults. We didn't go to the Newport Mansions and jump on the beds. The idea of being polite and deferential to your parents is quaint now, apparently. Paying any attention to or displaying manners of any kind whatsoever to adult strangers is now a bizarro-world concept.

I brought my four-year-old to the Marble House in Newport once. The docent took one look at him and grabbed me by the arm and whispered: "Are you sure this is appropriate for him?" What they really meant was that it was assumed he wouldn't know how to behave himself, and so, well, beat it.

Why don't you ask him yourself? I said.

Do you want to go in the nice museum? You must be very quiet and not touch anything, okay?

His clothes were clean and not spangled with semi-scatological slogans or cartoon mice, and his finger was not in his nose. He stood up straight, looked her full in the face and politely said: "I'd like to see your museum and I know how to behave." In faultless diction. That was the end of the questions.

I found a pamphlet I had saved from the 1960s from a visit to Mount Vernon. I leafed through it, and I remember everything about that place. We were not wealthy people, and I can only imagine what it cost my parents to manage that excursion. As I said, we were poor, and I was young, but I can't imagine my parents were ashamed of me. I know I wasn't ashamed of them.

(The picture is Athena protecting the muses of Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture by John Singer Sargent in the magnificent Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Mass. My parents brought me there when Johnson was president.)

Update: Pat at Stubborn Facts has some additional thoughts on the matter, with many interesting comments here.

Planting Season

We have a tradition here at the Sippican Cottage. And the tradition has been born and tweaked and upheld for over a decade now, and has offered me a perspective on what tradition really means, if only in a small way.

Neither my wife or I had any idea what to do in a garden when we were first presented with the miserable patch of ground outside our exurban door. Our childhood experience was suburban, but our families, like most suburban families of the last generation, were essentially of the urban mindset, if not location. They moved from third floor walkups to suburban ranches, but there was more than a little bit of the rented flat about them forever.

My own father was not a gardener, by any stretch. He mowed the patches of wan green in between the vast stretches of brown on our lawn like a good citizen, but that's as far as it went. He always had the air about him of a man who should have a newspaper and a pot of tea on a table surrounded by cobblestones -- he's no farmer.

My mother is much more adept in the garden, but I got none of it. There was always something of the urban in her gardening too; more windowbox gaudy than sedate pastoral charm. I was of no use to her as a child, and only learned the simplest things about planting: mix dung and peat in the hole and water it. It was enough, in a way.

I read a lot of gardening books. Some were very serious. You can tell a serious gardening book; it doesn't have any pictures.

The mass of books I looked at, the ones with nothing but pictures, had the whiff of the fast food restaurant to them. The old advice: "If the menu has pictures of the food on it, it's not likely to be haute cuisine" applies to gardening as well.

There's a kind of cognitive dissonance to most gardening in the suburbs, because the whole layout of the houses and the surroundings is flawed, generally, and the visual confusion it engenders leads to a kind of Home Depot delirium tremens in landscape design as well. The home might be put on a kind of country manor house lot, but looks like an urban design, or a home that belongs in a desert is stuck in a jungle, and so forth. Fill in your own stucco nightmare here. A sort of incoherence seeps into the proceedings, garden included.

We've murdered enough plants to get Gaia knocking on our door with a mob of woodland nymphs with pitchforks and torchs, while we tried to figure out what to do, where. But while we are not born wise, we learn -- if haltingly -- what works, and what looks appropriate, and what helps to blur the distinction between in and out, and porch and lawn, and lawn and woods, and woods and world. Just between you and me, the books without the pictures help some, but the beating the world gives you trying desperately to grow things is the real education. I'd skip the Feng Shui picture books altogether, if I were you.

So every year, we put the geraniums in the pots on the front step, and in the window box on the shed, with some vinca vine to trail down and wave hello in the breeze a bit. We divide the hostas and put them around the yard, in the shade, here and there. We tend to the rhododendrons and barberrys we had the presence of mind to plant in the right place a decade ago, getting dividends we earned the hard way which almost banish the cruel thoughts of all those shrubs that did not survive an immediate razoring to the ground by hungry deer. We mow the grass in gentle curves, as nature intended, not laid out as if by laser like a farm plot. We hang a few dipladenias outside windows we want hummingbirds to favor, and we steal the tall phloxes' freeseeded progeny and the bottomless well of pachysandra one plant provides, and we know it will work, and we know how to work it. We caress the lamb's ear to remind it to carry on. We leave great swaths of our property wild, and only clean out the buffer between, a little, to provide the transition.

Tradition is a kind of faith; you trust it will work because you trust it will work. I bet many traditions, like ours, are born every day. Sometimes you wish that someone could have told you what to do, instead of having to figure it out yourself; but would you have listened anyway, if the book did not have pictures?

You Could Put Your CD Jewel Cases In Them, I Suppose

I've made a hearty handful of China closets. Some freestanding, some built in. It's a fascinating bit of architecture.

People don't know what to do with them anymore, generally. The fill them up with all sorts of things now. The idea of having a magnificent set of dishes that are displayed until someone worth setting them in front of shows up for a meal is as dead as a Pharaoh, I guess. They seem to mostly be filled with dishes too gaudy or valuable to ever be eaten from, or television sets or something else incongruous. Let's resurrect them, right now. My antique Flintstones juice glasses with the lead paint on them should look stunning in there.




That last one is Maine.

Maine wins.

A Sip Of Dad's Beer

It's grey and gloomy here. And I'm stuck in the concrete workshop anyway. But the Red Sox game will be on the radio to pass the time. I don't care if they win or lose, really. Never much did. In my youth only little children and the odd addled adult would plaster their lives with the memorabilia of an athletic team. Baseball cards and autographs were fun, and so worthless. You can't be both.

My mind drifts back to the game wafting out of the crummy AM transistor radio on a lazy summer afternoon while my father mows the nasty brown patch of grass he kept in front of our house. We sit occasionally for a short moment in the shade of the big pine together on cheap lawnchairs made from aluminum tubing and nasty fibrous strapping that cut into your legs.

Ken Coleman's voice would wash over us, and the polyglot names of each of the batters would come in their turn, and Dad would wordlessly give me a sip of his beer right from the cold, steel can.

I wonder if my own son will ever remember anything so fondly about me as that.

Pelargonium? I Don't Think So (Revisited)

[Editor's Note: This is a re-run from a year ago]

{Author's Note: There is no editor}

We're simple gardeners here at the Sippican Cottage. While we share your admiration for those whose gardens are overburdened with exotic cultivars, and on whose lips Latinate names trill, we just don't want to pay too much attention to what we're doing.

There's more to it than that for me, perhaps. To be an expert, you have to know so much about something that you can't even look at it for the pure joy that's in it anymore. If you've ever been in the office of a really accomplished specialist doctor, you can always spot them looking at you -- eventually, if not right from your greeting -- as the bundle of bones and guts you are. As they say in the mafia movies, it's not personal, it's strictly business.

I worry about doctors that take too much of an interest in me personally anyway. I'd be in a tavern if I wanted commiserating companionship, after all. And the medicine in the tavern is more efficacious, generally. The best and most competent doctor I ever met told me the worst news in the most businesslike manner, and left the room to leave me alone with my wife. He tended to his business, and left us to tend to ours. We need more of that, and not just in the medical profession.

I can't enjoy recorded music if it's a selection I've learned to play myself. I see the bones and the guts of it, arrayed like cadavers in the music morgue, when I should be getting the lilt. I have gone way out of my way to avoid ever deconstructing any of the music of a certain soul singer, because I never want the magician to show me his trick after he performs it, and I don't want to peek either. I don't want to ruin it by understanding it.

I don't want to ruin it by understanding it. Hmm. Music. Gardening. Love.

It's a geranium. It not the genus Pelargonium of the Kingdom of Plantae of the Division of Magnoliophyta of the class Manoliopsida of the order Geraniales from the family of Geraniaceae.

I think when the sun comes out, I'll sit with my wife on that brick step next to the pots of geraniums, and open the window a little so we can hear, indistinctly perhaps, Al Green sing on the box.

End of story.

Desperate End-Stage Monomaniac Cape Cod Fireplace Delirium

Yesterday, astoot reader and commenter Pastor Jeff remarked on our Cape Cod fireplace photos:

The third one from yesterday looks a lot like my in-laws' den in Wisconsin.

You can feel the room from the photo -- the squeak of the leather, probably a slightly musty, comfortable smell, the crackle of the fireplace, an odor of smoke, possibly the feel of a cool glass in one's hand, the rustle of a newspaper or the turning of the page in a novel already read many times. Very nice -- a room for quiet reading or pleasant conversation -- a hobbity sort of room.

That's a lovely picture he's painted there. Makes you want to go to Wisconsin and go fishing and get a sunburn and so forth. But I'm not sure it's very Cape Coddy.

Well, of course it can be Cape Cod recently, but it's because we're living in the shambles of an earlier civitas. The original fireside of the Cape Cod house has a spare, almost chaste quality to its appearance. There's a sort of nobility to the plainness of it; a kind of luxurious asceticism. Grim, humorless bonhomie. They'd put out traps for hobbits.

The scene our internet friend has described reminds me more of the freshwater version of the fireside we've got around here; Lake Winnepesaukee. Egad, don' t get me started about that. Let's have Cape Cod one more day.



And out into the world, in our crooked way, we go:

Full-Blown Obsessive-Compulsive Cape Cod Fireplace Syndrome

I'm so far down this rabbit hole at this point, the rabbits are talking Mandarin. I can't help myself. I want to look at fireplaces from Cape Cod until ten suns wink out. Or until I get to Race Point. Whatever comes first.

I Can't Help Myself -More Cape Cod Fireplaces

I'm in a sort of Cape Cod Fireplace Psychosis now. I can't think of anything else.

I came in at the tail end of Cape Cod as a sort of summer sinkhole of tourists and a desolate spit of sand, fish, and cranberries the other three seasons of the year. I remember distinctly walking along the little aretes between the bogs to get from my grandmother's tiny cottage to the little local market. The bogs are all houses now, and there's a supermarket there instead of a tiny store.

Everybody lives everywhere now. I don't begrudge anybody the things I want for myself. But it was piquant to summer among the scrub pines and sit in the old houses by the fire in the early evening, cast away from the scrum of everyday workaday life.

Cape Cod Fireplaces

It's cool in the mornings this time of year on Cape Cod.

In the evening, too. People who remember when Cape Cod had real seasons, because it didn't have a substantial year-round population, remember what it's like to be in a lonesome cottage by the shore before the tourists show up. The tourists live there all the time now. And it's never cold because the houses are modern and weather is something you watch on television.

The old-fashioned locals know that summer doesn't begin, really, until July Fourth. Memorial Day is a head fake. You might as well swim at the Arctic Circle as Nauset in May or June.

Locals don't swim, anyway. They have boats, and sit by the fire in the evening, or in the morning in the milky early sunshine, and wait for the visitors to come. Or to go.

Thoughts Of Summer- The Ice Cream Man

(Editor's note: This is from two years ago. Since it was warm and pleasant for Mother's Day yesterday, it got me to thinking about hot, glorious summer to come. Got me to thinking about the ice-cream man)
[Author's note: There is no editor]

Howdy.

We attended The Queen's family reunion over the weekend. She has a large extended family, and they gather once a year at one home to gab and gambol and make googoo eyes at the newest babies. It's quite pleasant.

There is a stale Hollywood and literary formula about gatherings such as these, always highlighting internal tensions and conflicts. Everybody's always dysfunctional, and fight like scorpions. Well, it just ain't so. Everybody loves one another at the one I attended, anyway. They have an appetite for simple games that can be played in the yard, like horseshoes and badminton, and everyone jostles and chats amicably, all eased by the simple fun of the activities, and the cold can.

And because I married into it, I am slightly less involved than those born to it, I guess. They make me feel welcome, of course, but I get more of an outsider's perspective. And it occurs to me that the stale formula I mentioned might be spot on for the kind of people who write movie scripts, because they go through the motions of reuniting with their family, but it's a hollow and staid occasion, and there is no feeling of blood, and kin, and shared experience, and commonality that enlivens the gatherings of families who really do care for one another like my wife's family does.

The only really familial situations Hollywood finds any more are mob weddings and poolside gatherings at porn movie maker's homes. Meh. They never seem to find "family" where it actually is.

Because I was not part of the "war effort," the important business of seeing that everyone was fed, and covered in sunscreen, and so forth, I was able to wander away unnoticed for a time, and walked the street in cousin's central Connecticut neighborhood. It was a languid, hot, sunny day, more Alabama than New England, and the street has no traffic, so you could walk right down the middle of the hot pavement, watched out only for morning doves in the trees.

The street's lined with small ranches, built in the fifties and sixties, all cared for by their owners, who would wave as you passed before returning to their flower beds. I was struck by how little the houses had changes in the intervening fifty years. There was a satellite dish, next to the TV antenna it replaced on the roofs, and there were no Dodge Darts with push button transmissions on their dashboards in the drives anymore, but it was about the same as it ever was. It looked like the sort of place that people who got on with their lives, got on with their lives. No pretension, but nothing gone to seed either. There are rooms inside my house messier than the flower beds I saw. It looks essentially like where I grew up, preserved in amber.

Then I heard it. I hadn't heard it in so many years. I thought it was a joke, some hipster had it for a ringtone on their phone or something. The Ice Cream Man music.

It was real, alright, and I traced the progress of the music, and the unseen truck, through nearby streets like a bloodhound. Pavlov couldn't come up with anything that talked to me, that affected my very brain stem, like that sound. Every single hot, dusty summer day in the sixties came rushing back to me at the same time, our manifold noses lifted to the air like dogs to a scent, the whispered question: Did you hear that? And the shushing, and waving, and the faraway gaze with the head cocked to capture the sound, and use your inborn direction finder. And the crazy tune all those trucks played would come into range, and you'd all sprint for home, to ululate at your mother: The Ice Cream Man, The Ice Cream Man, Hurry up Mom,! I mean, can I have a quarter? Hurry, please please please.

And you'd gather in the scrum of kids at the window of the truck, and get a popsicle, and it was like water in the desert on Christmas Day for five minutes. And when you were done, you'd sharpen the popsicle stick to a point by dragging it back and forth on the curbstone, and show it to your friends; and that was all the danger you'd ever have in that little neighborhood.
I went back to the yard, and everyone of a certain age commented on the Ice Cream Man, and how long it had been since they'd heard it, and how wonderful it was to recall their childhood instantly from that little tuneless tune those trucks played.

Someone got a bright idea and said: "Hey kids, the Ice Cream Man is coming!" Let's go!

The kids turned, and looked at us like we had enrolled them in Latin classes at a Reform School.

They had ice cream in their refrigerator, every day, ten kinds, and watched DVD movies in their cars on the way to the party. They were swimming in a pool we would have coveted fiercely when we were young, and bounced on a trampoline we couldn't have even imagined having in someone's yard 40 years ago. They had whirligigs and cameras, (film, what's film?) and fifty delicacies laid out to try to tempt them to eat just one more.

And I realized that Ice Cream Man Music is just used in the soundtracks to bad horror movies these days, when someone's reaching for a carving knife, not a sharpened popsicle stick, and no kid in their right mind who's got a freezer full of Ben and Jerry's wants to haul ass out into the street to get a Creamsicle made by the low bidder, served to them by a moody loner who's registered at the police department, and has an GPS ankle bracelet.

Time marches on. I am glad for the easy prosperity I enjoy, and our children have. But I wonder what will be my boys' version of the Ice Cream Man music. The actual thing ain't cutting it.

Astoot Readers

I'm thinking of changing the name of the blog to "Astoot," so you can all claim to be Astoot readers. It occurred to me to spell it "Asstoot," instead, but that doesn't have the same jenn-air says quark, or something.

Anyhow, I have astute readers and commenters, and they've pointed out a few lovely items I should share with you.

Ron over at Fluffy Stuffin' enjoyed our travelogue of doors that would have been slammed in my face if the occupants got the opportunity, and sent me a link to some Ann Arbor, Michigan local flavah: Fairy Doors

I'm a lover of anachronism, but I'm giving the nice people involved a pass for spelling it "fairy" instead of "faerie." I bet they don't spell haemoglobin properly either. At any rate, I love this sort of local tradition. It's always difficult to predict in advance what will captivate a young child. These things seem to grow organically from the original modest, charming idea. Lovely.

By the way, Ron's earlier take on Cinco de Mayo is a tour-de-force of the genre.

On another front, hyper-super-astute-massive-google-fu reader and occasional commenter "lohwoman"has determined the current status of the Fickie mansion, which as you no doubt remember was our idea of the ultimate Second Empire house. Well, the neighborhood has indeed continued to creep up on it, but it's still there. And its... a fraternity house for a chiropractic college now.

I don't know why, but that strikes me as funny.

Oh, we got trouble
Right here in River City
Right here in River City
With Greek Alphabet"D" and that rhymes with 'smelter' and that stands for 'subluxation'
That stands for subluxation
We surely got trouble
We surely got trouble
Right here in River City
Right here

Gotta figure out a way to keep the young ones
holistic after school

Spoken:
Mothers of River City,
heed this warning before it's too late
Watch for the tell-tale signs of subluxation
The minute your son leaves the house
does he manipulate his bones below the knee?
Is there a insurance co-pay stain on his index finger?
A medical textbook hidden in the corncrib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes
from St. Elsewhere?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like... swell?
And... 'osteopath'?
Well if so, my friends...

Then we've got trouble...

Saturday Is For Cartooons

I've got telephone problems now, as a welcome respite to being inconvenienced by an interruption of my internet access. And my digital camera died. As Rodney Dangerfield says: "I'm afraid to go to the bathroom." Anyway, we soldier on. Cartoons! I always preferred early Bugs. He was much more vicious. He even had more of a ferretty face back then.

Here's one I always liked too. Pay attention to the work of the least known but perhaps most talented of the Bugs team. Outside of Mel Blanc, who's in a sort of class of his own, THE MAN was Carl Stalling, doing the music:

Enjoy! Just don't try and call me to tell me how much you liked it.
(Updated: Phone fixed! Green wire, black wire...whatever!)

I've Got My Spear And Magic Helmet

Patrick, my blogfriend over at Stubborn Facts, seems to have taken exception to my choice of Wackiki Wabbit as the finest example of the Bugs Bunny milieu. And he's brought out some heavy artillery in the caricature wars - The Rabbit of Seville. But of course, that's not even the best Bugs Bunny short feature about an opera. This is:

But let's not get carried away. We are simply asking, more or less: "Do you like the ceiling, or the marble guy with the slingshot?" to devotees of Michelangelo.

50 State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Continued: All The Way To The Virgin Islands

(Editor's Note: We're having our internet and phone service upgraded. I won't be able to answer my mail for a little while. I don't need the interruption right now, but what are you going to do?)
[Author's Note: there is no editor]
Here's the final installment of our Fifty State tour of American front doors. We've thrown in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands too. Now you all know what's it's like to be a Fuller Brush Man.

South Carolina:
South Dakota:
Tennessee:
Texas:
Utah:
Vermont:

Virginia:
Virgin Islands:
Washington:
West Virginia:
Wisconsin:
Wyoming:

50 State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Continued: Mostly New,Some North,It's Not An Island

We're continuing our fifty state tour of old front doors. It tells us a lot about our front door heritage, which is to say: not very much.

New Jersey:
New Mexico:

New York:

North Carolina:
North Dakota:

Ohio:

Oklahoma:

Oregon:

Pennsylvania:

Puerto Rico:

Rhode Island:
I'll run out of states soon, so I'm contemplating "Drainage Ditches Of The Near East," or perhaps "Garden Gnomes Of The Marianas Islands" as a theme for next week. I'm open to suggestions, of course.

Fifty State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Day Three: MMMMMMMNNNH

It's day three of our quixotic quest to codify a pack of portals from fitty states. Today we linger over the M's a good long while. Beware the arm. Ask not for whom he holds the door. He holds for you.
Maryland:
Massachusetts:
heh
Michigan:

Minnesota:

Mississippi:

Missouri:

Montana:
Nebraska:
Nevada:
New Hampshire:
New letters being added daily! Get fresh alphabet tomorrow!

Fifty State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree Part Two

We're trying to find a doorway worth looking at in all Fifty States, at least fifty years old. So far so good. Pretend you're the paper boy.

"Collecting!"

Georgia:
Hawaii:

Idaho:
Illinois:
Indiana:
Iowa:
Kansas:
Kentucky:
Louisiana:
Maine:

And just because we love Maine, a two-fer -- because I want to spend every possible waking hour of five eternities lingering at a doorway that looks like this one in Wiscasset, Maine:More tomorrow, and until one of us gets bored.

50 State Ring-And-Run Crime Spree

I wondered if there was a way to visit every state in the Union without actually going there. Those rectangular ones with two time zones and one congressman are sort of daunting to a denizen of the coast. Mysterious. But every state has a vibe, more or less; and no matter what anyone tells you about how uniform the culture is getting, I've always been struck by how different the same thing can be depending on where you are. So, we offer humbly, the same thing in fifty places at least fifty years ago. Not sure what it's all like now. That would involve leaving my house.

Alabama:
Alaska:
Arizona:
Arkansas:
Californi-ay:

Colorado:
Connecticut:
Delaware:
Washington, D.C. :
Florida:More tomorrow, and until one of us gets bored or I get to Samoa.

I Wanna Be Nefarious

Someday I'm going to be really rich... an OVERLORD! Yeah, that's the ticket. An EVIL overlord at that. Plottin' and schemin' and living in a fortress of solitude or sostenudo or whatever the hell you call that cave with all the computers that evil dudes keep in the Arctic Circle or wherever they are where's it's all ice outside but nice and comfy in the cave. And I'm going to have a heliport so I can flit all over the globe at a moment's notice, doin' evil and whatnot.

And I'll have a phalanx of leggy supermodels with guns with elaborate pointing devices involved, yeah... both the guns AND the women will have elaborate pointing devices! And lasers. Gotta have lasers. And nunchucks. Like Ghaddafi, but I don't wanna write right to left. What am I, Da Vinci?

And with all the money I get from all that evil --evil pays good doesn't it? I don't really know... I guess it does; but they all seem to be evil for the love of it anyway, but maybe they invest wisely and just do the evil as a sort of hobby -- I dunno--anyway, with all the evil money I get from all my evil...

Strike that! -- I wanna be nefarious. Nefarious sounds so much cooler than just evil. Can you imagine calling a good restaurant and tellin' them you're coming on down and you're freaking nefarious? Huh? Oh man, they'd tell the lame evil people they'd have to move them to another table even though they're halfway through an arugula salad with balsamic and shaved cheese and they'd put me right down front and the evil guy's dates would nudge their elbow and say: "How come you don't lay a beatdown or a fatwa or whatever on that guy if you're so evil?" And they'd just fidget in their chair and look shifty and mutter:" No way... that guy's nefarious!" And then his chick would slip me her number when they slink out after the fish course and she'd be all wanting to join my cadre or army or gang or whatever, as long as it's nefarious and not just evil. And if she's hot and looks like Emma Peel in one of those good Avengers episodes with not so much of the fruity dude with the brolly and a whole lot of Emma Peel in a leather jumpsuit it's welcome aboard, baby!

Anyway, with all my nefarious evil ill-gotten gains I'm gonna hire this guy to walk around behind me playin' this all the live-long day while I'm nefariating all evil-like:

I'm warning you: If you try to tip him or call him over to your table and ask for Besame Mucho or something I'm going to have to get medieval on you.

Saturday Morning Cartoons Deux

Well, it's Saturday morning. You know what that means: Cartoons!

Crazy Frog!



Pink Panther!

And the greatest cartoon, ever, from the greatest cartoon character ever:

Happy Saturday! Now mow the lawn.

Lady And The Tramp's House

If it looks like Lady and the Tramp, it's Second Empire.

That's the Fickie Mansion in Davenport, Iowa. It's magnificent, ain't it? I can't find out if it's still there. There's an ominous looking strip mall behind it with a muffler place in the background. It was the fate of many such places to be too central to a well established business district for their own good. Well-to-do people used to live where they worked. Now they'd live out in the landscape and drive in every day. Iowans, let's hear it. Is it still there? Man, it's got everything a Second Empire house would have.

Mansard roof, "cresting" along the rooflines, towers, a cupola, ganged windows, window bays, bracketed windows...bracketed everything, really; patterned multicolored roof, porches.

It was essentially an urban style, but "urban" would look a lot like a village to the modern eye in many cases. From the end of the Civil War until the end of the 1880s, this was the predominant style of the Northeast and the Midwest.

It lent itself to straight-up commercial buildings, too. Here's a Second Empire building in Portland, Maine I've walked by a hundred times:

It was a dry goods store then. More or less, it still is. Retail and offices, anyway. If you went up to the third floor toilet, there were cartoons of U.S.Grant and Buffalo Bill drawn on the wall. That's double funny, as Second Empire was referred to as "General Grant Style" by a lot of people then.
They were hard to keep up. I'd work on them here and there twenty-five years ago, and all the slate roofs were gone, some replaced with painted wood sidewall shingles, or worse- asphalt tab shingles. I've even seen them vinyl and aluminum sided. Jesus wept.
It wasn't a west coast thing, much. Most of the post-bellum houses out there are Stick Style, or Italianate. They're similar in many ways. A lot of millwork--doors, windows, interior trim, brackets and so forth-- was more or less interchangeable in those styles.

The style wasn't big down south. It did make it down to Charleston, South Carolina, though; here's the Ingrahm House for one:

"Second Empire" refers to the reign of France's Napoleon III. It wasn't a revival, like Greek or Italianate or Gothic. It was considered quite modern at the time.

And here's how what was once the predominant style in a great swath of the United States for thirty years can become fairly rare in short order:

The nature of the urban landscape changed. Big old houses became apartment buildings and were cut up and run down, or the land beneath them became so valuable they were demolished to make way for much larger structures.

I bet that last place burned ten times before they gave up and built something else.

What The Hell Is A Victorian House?

Beats me.

Everybody will give you a different answer. Forget asking a Real Estate agent. They call anything that they don't call Colonial a Victorian.

Let's ask Wikipedia, which is generally edifying if not always supremely accurate.

• British Arts and Crafts movement
• Gothic Revival
• Italianate
• Jacobethan (the precursor to the Queen Anne style)
• Neoclassicism
• Neo-Grec
• Painted ladies
• Queen Anne
• Renaissance Revival
• Romanesque Revival (includes Richardsonian Romanesque)
• Second Empire
• Stick-Eastlake
• Industrial architecture

All that happened while Queen Victoria was parked in a palace, but I'm not sure that's exactly what defines the term. And America is different than the British Empire, of course. Arts and Crafts in America is decidedly post-Victorian, but it was born in Britain with the old girl still on the fancy chair in the drafty castle. And we'd call Jacobethan "Jacobean" here.

In architecture school in the 1970s, the short answer was: anything after the mansard roof showed up. (That's a mansard roof in the picture at the top of the page. It appears Dillinger is parked outside the house.)That's Second Empire style. I know, that' s a little odd, as the "empire" they're referring to was Napoleon III, not the lady from the gin bottle. But I don't make the rules, I just report 'em.

Others lump in Greek Revival. I don't. I prefer the definition best summarized in the term: "picturesque eclecticism." Before that was simply Revivals: Greek, Gothic, Romanesque, Renaissance. I have a book published in 1973 called "Victorian Houses- A Treasury of Lesser Known Examples" that I refer to often. Victorian houses were way out of favor in 1973. The less-is-more brutalist zeitgeist was raging then, and urban renewal schemes had been bulldozing Victorian houses by the neighborhoodload and putting up concrete dovecotes for humans in their place. The introduction for Victorian Houses puts it bluntly:

The architectural monstrosities of the Victorian period have been created by twentieth-century ignorance. Ignorance, the root of religious bigotry, racial prejudice, dread of divergent social systems, and repulsion to unfamiliar forms in music, drama, art and architecture, is a deficiency in the perceiver, not it the thing perceived. Modern people, subscribing to the organic principle in building (whereby outer forms follow inner function), naturally would lack understanding of the Victorian practice of arranging rooms in masses built for pictorial effect. ..The traditional theory in Western culture is that architecture is style... applied to structure. The Victorians brought the concept to its logical conclusions. Theirs was a world rich in the accumulated motifs of past civilizations, from which they borrowed copiously, and -- it must not be overlooked--to which they added creatively...Contemporary critics accuse the Victorians of needless complexity, of extraneous clutter. But is this not a frank admission of the 20th century failure to comprehend the 19th century attraction to design articulation? Theirs was an architectural vocabulary full of meanings to which our eyes and ears have become insensitive, and of which our minds have become ignorant.

Wow. Preach it, brother. You've poisoned your minds towards the Victorians, and it ruined your appreciation of their architectural accomplishments. People in America began to associate Victorian houses with a life that vanished in the Depression. Inchoate blame was ascribed. Victorians were the haunted houses in every movie.

Anyway, we have lost a little perspective on Victorian architecture. If you need proof of what's been lost in the less-is-more fetishism of the last fifty years, take a look at what happens when folks try their hand at adding decoration to their homes in an attempt to acieve any sort of Victorian, or even just mildly picturesque, effect. They paste on a few gewgaws and lose interest. It's much harder than you think to make a dense riot of decoration. A high style Victorian is a very sophisticated thing, and required a deft touch, and a lot of nerve.

At any rate, we can wander around the world of the cobweb-catcher Victorian home for quite a while. There's lots to look at and be interested in. That's what the Victorians thought about the whole wide world, after all.

Entr' Acte

I am weary from New Orleans. I cannot take on the Second Empire without a rest. Quick, someone play a guitar with too many strings:

Lovely. Anastasia Bardina.

She is unknown to Amazon, and barely referenced anywhere on Google. But everybody on Earth knows who Britney Spears is.

Charlie Pride The Undertaker , The Witches, And The Wisdom In Between

It's the names that tumble out of these houses in New Orleans that fascinate me.

Here's one in the Garden District: The Brevard House. It's a mess of styles mashed together, like so much of New Orleans is, and was. It's got French, Spanish, Italianate, some Greek Revival smashed on there. The gallery with all the iron work is pretty much everyone's default idea of the Crescent City. It's a gallery, not a balcony, by the way. If the supports for it reach to the ground it's not a balcony.

It was really plush right away. It was built in 1857 for $13,500.00 for a merchant named Albert Hamilton Brevard. That's not the good part. The good part is the contractor: "Charles Pride, Esquire; Master Builder, Contractor, and Town Undertaker of This City."

For a business card, don't that beat all? Cradle to grave, Pride is your man.

It's very elegant inside:




Brevard's daughter sold it to a clergyman named Clapp after her father died, and the Clapps lived there from 1869 until 1934. They added the ironwork gallery and some other additions in 1869. Think of all the history that rolled by the windows.

Someone named Smith owned it for a dozen years after the Clapps. The name "Smith" is like a dish of sorbet, namewise, but the heavy courses are coming back, as the occupant after was a judge. Judge John Minor Wisdom.

Judge Wisdom? Judge Minor Wisdom? Who wouldn't want to be brought before a Judge Wisdom? Why it's enough to make a man commit infelicities and crimes just for the privilege of being sentenced by a man with such a Solomonic handle.

It might have been best to wait until 1959 to see Judge Wisdom, as until then he lived in the house without air-conditioning, and he might have been a touch cranky. Or commit your crimes in the cool of the winter.

The record got a little cold there. I got to wondering if the house was still there, and what condition it's in if is. A little poking around on the net, and I see that it was owned from 1989 -2004 by Anne Rice. That Anne Rice? I guess so. Small world.

So Anne Rice put the house in her books as Mayfair Manor, and filled it with witches and so forth. Spooky New Orleans.

Why bother making anything up about New Orleans? It's like bringing sand to the beach. Can any witch you can conjure up compete with Pride the Undertaker, or Judge Wisdom, or Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, or the chess champion who died of taking a bath, or Henriette de Lille turning her back on the quadroon ball, or Police Chief Hennessey opening another barrel, or...