Perhaps I should start making one of these for my MIA submissions....hmmmmm.....(title...dates....)

Fascinating. And I am now going to have the musical theme from the opening credits of PBS' "Mystery!" running through my head all day, along with the Edward Gorey artwork that derived so much inspiration from mourning pictures.

It could be far worse. This is fun.

Especially since the link has 1811, there is perhaps a small typeaux?

The bit about willow trees as symbols of resurrection is new by me. Neat!

The Poor Orphan
The Pathetic Widow
The Miserable Amputee
The Touching Plight of the Baby Bird
O, Can Such Things Happen?
The Hideously Affecting Ballad of the Wronged Son
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
All Dead On The Battleground
The Dead Child
The Dead Family
Mummy's in Heaven and We're All Sick
Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me A Bow Wow

I'd go on, but I'm crying on my lunch already.

But nah, I always sniggered at Kip's quips.

No, really. Taste: "Little Andrew;" "Ashtabula Disaster;" "Little Minnie;" "I Wonder Where My Papa Is?"

I am sad to report that the annual bad-poetry contest held in her memory is no more, dead at age eleven. Which is only fitting.

That one was much better, being a bit of needle point, almost Goreyesque, and full of mood and vbrance. It also had a willow, but much more prominently, so much so that it drooped over the tomb, and the mourners, entering the foreground. The overall effect was somber, but not doleful.

Then again, the artist seemed to have a better sense of everything than this one does.

Terry

What gets me is the samplers - gorgeous little pieces of stitchery created by eleven year olds who obviously had more manual dexterity then than I do at age 28.

I was barely two stanzas into "Little Andrew" when I had to stop.

Oh, barf, as we've been saying in other threads.

Two things stick out: one, she seems to think 'nice' rhymes with 'raft', and two, it can be sung to the tune of the 4th movement of Beethoven's 9th. Or Mack the Knife, at two tune-verses per stanza.

The horror, the horror... At least I wasn't sitting in a poetry appreciation chair.

Alex

I can't even conceive of the work involved in figuring out, stitch by stitch, how a 300-year-old sampler was created - including the mistakes. I could browse their catalog for hours. As soon as I finish my current project, I'm starting this.

Maybe they just thought they were rendering their own medieval design? Or maybe it \was/ the equivalent of clip art? I can see students being told -"Draw a picture copying the elements posted around you [at any size except close enough to look like tracing]"-. it's also possible that Litchfield valued a faculty member's ability to appear well-behaved (always uncertain with artists?) above the ability to draw realistically.

Hmmm.

Actually, I have no idea what Alter signified to the ancient Hebrews.

Psalm 137
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?

The bitter withe will rot at its heart (see Old Man Willow in The Lord of the Rings). Traditionally, the bitter withe provided the branches with which the Virgin Mary thrashed the Christ child.

Willow-bark tea cures fevers.

http://www.wmich.edu/english/txt/Moore/Lord.Byron.html

The best comment on her is probably from Bill Nye: "Julia is worse than a Gatling gun; I have counted twenty-one killed and nine wounded, in the small volume she has given to the public."

Note: In stanza 2 I have corrected "An this little child" to "And this little child".

It wasn't enough.

From the second book's preface:

"Thanks to the Editors that has spoken in favor of my writings; may they ever be successful. The Editors that has spoken in a scandalous manner, have went beyond reason [...]"

And: "Literary is a work very difficult to do," which would make a great T-shirt for writers' workshops.

(Information from the indispensable THE STUFFED OWL, by Charles Lee and D.B. Wyndham Lewis.)

There's a lovely magazine called "Sampler & Antique Needlework Quarterly," of which the most recent issue (Vol. 34, Spring 2004) has some mourning embroideries in it, as well as a discussion of "knitting sticks or needleholders."

Speaking as an embroiderer, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those willows appeared because they're, er, dead easy to stitch: for each branch you need a line of stem stitch and two rows of lazy daisies, and Bob's your dearly departed uncle. You can also do satin stitch for the long trailing leaves.

Possibly, because she knows I've been working on my current cross-stitch project since our honeymoon, and we're approaching our fifth anniversary.

Maybe they covered it, too.
The reggae version of Psalm 137 "Rivers of Babylon"
(Melodians, 1968? 1970?) was a big hit about 1978
for the Euro-reggae/disco band called 'Boney M'.

This is the translation in my Gutenberg copy of the King James' Version Bible. Would that have been from original Hebrew or Aramaic, or a Greek version thereof, or a later Latin one, I wonder?

The KJV was "diligently" translated from Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament), as it says on the title page of a print copy. (All the print copies of the KJV I've ever seen have pretty much the same wording on the title page, and I believe it goes back to the original 1611 edition.)

Psalm 137
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.

As also 'set' by - was it "Earth, Wind and Fire"?

There was a reggae version but I can't remember who did it.

I also wonder where this sits in relation to the changing history of our understanding of the concept of physical space. I've read that until about the 14th century physical space was not thought of as being a volume of nothingness, but instead the surrounding surface of objects (after Aristotle). So artists drew concrete objects with an illusion of depth, but not the intervening areas between objects. Then artists began developing linear perspective as a way of representing objects in 3-D space on a 2-D surface, giving an early expression to the scientific understandings of space being a physical void that came a bit later. I understand from Margaret Wertheim's book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet the concept as a whole took some centuries to really become the accepted one that we know today. So I wonder how adept at perspective drawing teachers at a girls' academy would have been in 1811.

Epacris: I think you're thinking of the Don McLean song "Babylon". It was on the same album as "American Pie". (iTunes is marvelous for double-checking one's memory on these things.)

Kip: I would pay money, although not a lot, to hear "Mummy's in Heaven and We're All Sick". Lest you think the early twentieth century was any better, I give you this excerpt from Dorothy Parker's review of The Best Short Stories of 1927:

Their compiler shows himself, in this volume, to be more than ever the unsung hero. In the back of the book, where he lists all the short stories of the year, and grades them, unasked, according to his notion of their merits, you may gain some idea of what the man has been through. I give you some of the titles of the stories that he has wrestled with:

"Vomen is Easily Veak-Minded"; "Ma Bentley's Christmas Dinner"; "Archibald in Arcady" (there is always one of those, every year); "Fred and Circuses"; "Willie Painter Stays on the Level"; "Sylvia Treads among the Goulds"; "Betty Use Your Bean"; "Daddy's Nondetachable Cuffs"; "Ann 'n' Andy"; "Freed 'Em and Weep" (I bet that was a little love); "Jerry Gums the Game"; "Blue Eyes in Trouble"; "Grandflapper" (you can practically write that one for yourself); "She Loops to Conquer"; "Yes, Sir, He's My Maybe"; and "Dot and Will Find Out What It Means to Be Rich," which last sets me wondering into the night just what were the titles that the author threw out as being less adroit.

They say Mr. O'Brien makes ample money, on his sales of these stories written by others, and I hope it is true. But no matter how much it is, he deserves more.

--- With the sincerest apologies, You Know to Whom.

I'm thinking of far too many book covers that use standard elements combined and recombined in various ways to give a quick browsing-guide to a volume's genre and general contents.

Fantasy: Guy In Armor. With A Sword. On A Horse. Dragon and/or Castle In Background.

SF: Guy In Spacesuit. With A Raygun. In A Flying Car. Planet and/or Spaceship In Background.

Bodice Ripper: Girl In Disarrayed Low Cut Dress. With A Hottie. On A Moor. Pirate Ship and/or Full Moon In Background.

My point (if I have one) is that using standardized/symbolic elements in art is a tradition of long standing. Not necessarily good or bad, tho' frequently boring.

The skill level shown in the Litchfield mourning images isn't that much worse than what I've seen show up in high-school level art shows.

I could see some experienced, professional artist (Kinuko Craft, perhaps?) turning out a striking piece of art using mourning imagery.

This made me giggle a really lot.

I don't mean to harp, or call you a lyre, just nitpicking to be polite.

Miss Moore . . . wrote a large number of poems, all more or less saturated with grief and damaged syntax. She is now said to be a fugitive from justice. We should learn from this that we cannot evade the responsibility of our acts, and those who write obituary poetry will one day be overtaken by a bob-tail sleuth hound or a Siberian nemesis with two rows of teeth.

Re. Moore: In your small- to medium-sized towns, the classified ads often include an "In Memoriam" column, usually near the thanks to St. Jude. The tradition of truly awful mourning poetry is still alive, heartbreakingly tempered by the fact that these are your neighbors, they're hurting, and this is the only way they know to show it.

But I shouldn't babble on any more. My friends say I have a leeky mouth, especially with a captive audience.

The version I'm most familiar with was written by the Melodians in 1969, and covered quite regularly since, notably by Steve Earle, and Sublime.

On a side note, I work for a large state university art department and we crank out major amounts of "art" (lowercase and quotes intentional) in our pursuit of the education of the masses. The masses seem quite happy with it, I on the other hand, am not. At least both sexes can be freely kitchy now.

Oh, those Russians...

Terry

'Rah, Rah, Rasputin' is definitely a floor-filler e'en now. Some years back there was a production of 'Rasputin: The Musical" (it may have had a different Official Title) in the State Theatre, Sydney -- a very grandolinquent (marble, velvet, mirrors, statues, sweeping staircases, chandeliers) 1920s picture palace. Went well with Romanovs. Alas, it closed fairly soon. Have always regretted missing it, however gruesome 'twas, just to be able to say "I was there".

Re High-school art: Annually for a decade or two, selected 'major works' by Higher School Certificate art students (New South Wales final secondary exam, in the twelfthish year of school at about 18 years old) have gone around the state's art galleries in an exhibition called "Art Express". They tend towards adolescent angst, but are interesting to see, and often some are quite striking.
It must be quite a blast to see your own work on the same walls in the same halls as acknowledged masters of your calling. This year it overlapped with a Caravaggio exhibition, and the dramatic sense had similarities. (Hmm. Earlier still was 'Picasso after Sixty' -- the other end of life. Hadn't struck me 'til now.)
Hope everyone's viruses are weakening.

Sylvia -- I'm only one person away from Rasputin: that is, I met someone who met him (she was Olga Ilyin, a novelist, who met him when she was 6 and commented on how his piercing eyes were something she'd always remember).

Never, IMO. Icons on book covers are usually custom-drawn to make a plausible composition. I'm sure you can point to cut-and-paste cases; IIRC there was a notorious pair of SF covers ~20 years ago, but I think that involved taking an entire work and cropping/flipping. There are also cases that look like they use clipart deliberately, to create a fragmented tone -- although the fragments may in fact be original work. Teresa noted a striking feature of the posted work: uprights (e.g. masts) in the far background aren't, suggesting that it was simply copied from somewhere else and rotated to fit (the established line of the river bank).

Now somebody who actually \knows/ something about art can comment....

Apropos of the time period discussed herein, for the Con circuit this year I've been making an 1878-1883 "natural form" dinner suit. In researching said project I kept wondering why so many of the museum exibit dresses were black or dark brown. How drab, especially given that the styles were so ornate and flashy.

Now I know: because mourning colors were the fashion. The Queen said it must be so. Still drab. Blech. I mean, I wear more black than anybody I know, but I still manage to get some color in my wardrobe.

Something else that costumers should note: black does not photograph well. If you dress is black, no one will be able to see all the kilometers of ruffles you hand-pleated into place.

As far as biblical references go, it's worth noting that the sort of big, handsome weeping willows don't really show up in the mideast. What you get is a sort of shrub, which tends to show up on riverbanks and in moist valleys. And, just about all the times it shows up in the texts, it's pretty explicitly linked with rivers or wadis.

So, it seems as though for the ancient Hebrews, willows were a feature of rivers; the symbolic value of rivers, particularly in the psalm refered to is another matter -- Babylon was famous for its rivers, while Israel, particularly Judea, wasn't.

As far as Alter goes, sadly, it doesn't show up in Ancient Hebrew at all. It means "immediately" in the Talmud, and in Yiddish it means "elder" -- like "Chaim" (life), it's a name that gets tacked on to a sickly baby, in the hopes of encouraging it to live longer, and I'm named after someone who was named after someone who was sickly as a child.