No, please, don't make me a member of the club!

The interesting series of reading that I enjoyed and suffered this week, as a part of my strange way of living in my new situation, happy like a bookworm in a library and tired like a bear in his cave, proposed to me a number of topics to follow.

The two most interesting in my personal (and in the case of the blog de facto indisputable) opinion are:

·       a repetition of last blog’s thematic of “history and memory for the big public: the fundamental and yet misleading role of media in shaping our sense of the past”

·       house museums: on the verge of beauty and boredom

·       radical chic art and the futility of the hipster history.

(They are three, I know; but the third is so heavily charged by my personal, wrong and shameful distaste for performing art and everything remotely linked to Duchamp that I can’t purposely write about it).

This two, as I said, arguments by themselves couldn’t represent the readings properly, so let’s mix them together.

I remember a good number of house museums that I visited: a farm with a reconstruction of the life at the time, Washington’s Mount Vernon, the birth house of Napoleon in Ajaccio, a marvelous palace of Cardinal Spada, which is perhaps one of the first of his kind, being there without any major modification from the Seventeenth Century.

But the one that is connected the most with the readings is the house of an academic. A very sophisticate man, art critic, English literature scholar, his name was Mario Praz. I had to read one of his books for an undergraduate class of mine. The book is almost esoteric and often difficult to decrypt, but express clearly a deep love for objects, and indeed he was also a great collector.

The first time I went to the house I went because of the name: my entire life I was attracted by anything that was military, thing that perfectly collide with my pacific attitude (I hope so), but drove me and my poor parents with me all around the most unvisited museums. No museum was as disappointing as the Napoleonic one: indeed it was a house, full of art and dusty stuff apparently piled in the most disorganized way. Only after ten years, when I read the book for class and I had to go again to the museum, I understood the strange logic of beauty behind the collection and only learning from the text the history of some objects I could understand their value.

Literature, readings and emotional connection: objects and rooms are nothing but meaningless junk if there is not knowledge, interpretation and interest. I was impressed to read about the displays in Mark Twain’s house (ok ok Mr. Clemens) and I wandered what a little bit of imagination could have done in Mario Praz’s house.

Imagination and entertainment are at the center of the other idea that was twisting around in my mind while I was reading. Trying to learn English while I was waiting for the clearance of my Visa Status, I went to the right place: YouTube. I found a very neat program “The Edwardian farm”. Despite it suffered the capital sin of being a reality tv show and the even worst one of having historians and archeologist as actors it was a really educative series that was easily putting the audience in the context of the everyday life of a farmer of the late Nineteenth early Twentieth Century.

Intellectual and sophisticate beauty or reality tv show: I don’t know what is the correct answer, if there is one. In a perfect world everyone would see a very beautiful and educational reality tv show, one that increase not only the knowledge, but also the perception of the world; everyone would be an historian and everyone would read the kind of heavy military history books that I like. But I would not like to be in a world like that perhaps because as Marx (Groucho) said once “I would never be part of a club of a which I am a member”.

Rhapsody in Blue

Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place and Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation: that is all that I will say about the books. However, what I will say is sometimes in the books.

I always liked nostalgia. It is a double-edged sentiment that shapes the memory and link the people to the past but at the same time recreate the past with colors tinted by sour or sweet feelings. Nostalgia pushes perhaps the first steps of every historian and crooks their neck on the back, influencing once and for all their going. Nevertheless, nostalgia is not owned by historians, it infects every human being, and, by my experience, even cats, if I think on how my black furry companion was searching around the house for his old places when we moved here in Philly.

Peoples, communities and neighborhood share with a common memory also a common nostalgia, often mixed with pride or mystification of the reality of the past, but together these people are also the matter that constitutes the past, or at least of its remains.

Museums and galleries, even if beautiful, require a certain detach, sort of an intellectual journey that filters the community out and leaves the visitor alone with his mind in front of the little altars of knowledges  and their descriptions on the walls.

Not all the art rests enclosed in the walls though. Interaction in the street creates interesting connections between memory, place and community that can build or characterize the common memory and “remind” the past to the present.

I read the books, they made me think and then I remembered. I was not in the U.S. for most of my life and the sidewalk monuments of this new world were not part of my experience; I had my load of Garibaldi’s statues and marble signs reminding to me the events that signed the lives of my city’s people, but nothing of America’s past life. Or perhaps it is not true.

Radio days, the intro of Manhattan with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Once upon a time in America; the list could continue long with the scenes full of color, sentiment and even a sort of smell. For the still images Hopper and his urban humanity or Will Eisner of Dropsie Avenue or A contract with God with his characters that show with their own point of view the general personality of the city or of the neighborhood.

Personal point of view, this is the core: memories, experiences and emotions, in a single word the life of the people that built the place and that gave it the tactile and concrete presence in our life today.

I wonder if the memory frozen in the movie, the painting or the comic book is a lesser memory than a monument on the street or on the wall of a temporary art exhibit. Moreover, are all these part of history or are part of memory?

Will Eisner, Dropsie Avenue: The neighborhood.

I had a memory of the past, well now it is history.

In class last time we had a good discussion on the difference between past and history. I finally could wear my elegant senatorial toga with the crimson stripes so en vogue in the hipster community nowadays, put on the table my Greek and Latin dictionaries and pontificate on the subtle differences between the past that’s past, the one that’s history, the presence of the past in history’s stories. Too bad that there was not a theater outside participating to the awe of the class and the enthusiastic applause of the teacher. But perhaps my memories differ a little bit from the reality.

In the introduction to his A Shared Authority, Michael Frisch touches the interesting topic of Memory. He underlines the double nature of this elusive but omnipresent principle in which coexist both the value of the “remembered past” and of the “deeply cultural artifact” subject to manipulation.

The historical value of Memory is out of discussion, but Memory, like a sponge, has a structure that revolves around voids. The past, long or short gone, is the same: it leaves footprints all over the place like a lovely cat in his solitary adventures in the house. What about History? The historian is the one that tries to find out where the cat is and what he did in the meantime.  The relationship between past, memory and history probably seems an academic problem, but it is not. The interpretation of the past and of the memory, seen as a collective or personal view on the past, do not influence only the historian. Indeed the view of the past strongly modifies societies, communities, countries, in one word it influence and modify the present and the future with it.

Obviously the past is the main field and minefield of the historian. He can either try to follow the sacred grail of objectivity or dismiss it as impossible, but he has to deal with the process of the interpretation of the past. Reading The Oral History Manual you can have the impression that the structured techniques provide an objective terrain to start a study, reading Frisch and his analysis of Author and Authority you can almost think that the copyright of the study should be of the interviewed people, but the truth is that at the end of all, what makes the research are the questions that the historian makes and his answers, which are, like every memory, an interpretation.  

Post Post

Let’s forget about the past. I know it is impossible for an historian, or at least it would be probably the end of his career, but in this case it should not be so problematic.

The last post, the one on the cute remembrance of the commercial past of Society Hill, was wrong. Not in the meaning that the content was wrong, it is still (I hope) plausible and firmly founded on pictorial evidence, but it is wrong on the fact that it is not a Reading Post of a, surprise surprise, a Reading Blog.

Confessions of a compulsive industrial’s heritage collector* is an interesting book on a very interesting topic: how people of Pennsylvania interprets and feel the memory of the past.

She sails in multiple different seas, some more problematic, others less. Museums, memorials, thematic parks, touristic areas. To be more precise I should say that her insatiable craving for new experiences on the field led her across oceans of situations, not seas, but perhaps I am indulging too much on the metaphor.  The common ground of these manifestations of interest is the memory of the industry; she chose a broad meaning of the word, including farming and in general everything that put men to work.

Other than writing practically an encyclopedia on the argument, the author shows some interesting analysis, drawing the attention on some delicate matters.

Two M come out from the distillation: myth and money. Two words fundamentally important in the world of public history and both coming from the same origin, people.

The uncomfortable position of the public historian princess is indeed caused by the pea of the necessity of dealing with a public. Academia dwell in the comfortable sheets of its ivory tower, but not the poor public historian. Public means money, simply because they pay and you need to provide a product that has to be interesting to the common plowman. Showbiz! History is surely educational, sometimes interesting, but not always entertaining. How much the entertaining aspect, so much needed in dealing with public, dilute the educative role of the study of the past? To not speak about the highly influencing ability of the money coming from donors or (ahi ahi) owners.

The second M is myth, and it is very interesting. The public deliberately undergoes the multiple tortures of an exhibit or any historical-linked activity mostly not because they feel the emptiness of their lack of knowledge, but because they already have ideas and feelings for the argument.

But we know how hard is to hurt the feelings of someone.

-I am sorry ma’am, but Pocahontas did not have any raccoon friend.

-Are you sure son? She was Native American; she surely had a special connection with the nature!

-Yes ma’am… no ma’am: it is complicated.

*To be a correct historian and going to the Chicago:

Carolyn L. Kitch, Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

Vendors' shouts

Yesterday, in a hotel room, I stopped my poor wife that, like a whirlwind, was getting ready to go out. She had the make up in one hand, the shoes in the other and the husband still on the computer, but she actually stopped for a second and answered. In that moment I had again my obvious answer to the philosophical dilemma of the historian: “What do I need to finish the research?”. New Evidence? Another trip to the archives? My only answer is patience: the patience of the wife.

But I think and hope that was not only patience that stopped my wife for a moment behind my shoulder. She seemed indeed interested to the black and white photo on the monitor. I just asked her what street of Philadelphia was on the picture, and the answer was very interesting to me.

“The Italian market!”

The large street in the photo was clearly bending on the left and I said that the Italian market, if I was not mistaken, is on a narrow and perfectly straight road.

Docks St. 1908. Lib of Congress.

I was right: it was not 9^th Street. My spidey sense of historian helped again in the path to the truth (and the very descriptive caption on the bottom too). But I missed the point. Indeed my wife in a way was right and I was wrong: it was indeed a market, a busy street crowded by customers, piles of boxes, barrels and carriages parked nearby the big sunshades that extended the shops on the streets. Nothing resembled Docks Street of today, with the fancy-cut stone on the ground, the pretty trees and grass on the side and the modern like houses behind the curtains of the leaves.

Docks St. today.

This past has been erased and has left few other traces than the name of the street. So when I told my wife that this was the street that disturbed our poor bottoms of bike riders the other day, she was surprised and interested, at least for the 20 seconds that she could dedicate to it before reminding me that we had to leave the room (and this, my friend, is the privilege of who are living in the past and the curse of the ones living around them).
Last Tuesday we had the lesson at Powel house on 3^rd Street. We will work on some projects on the House in this semester. A pleasant bike ride from my place, the house has a pretty but not stunning façade, a big old door and the stone steps consumed by age. Inside there is a more that decent house, owned by one of the richest men of the Colonies and of the infant U.S.

On the ground floor, his parlor suggests a rich but not lavish life, made of business and appointments. The mahogany stairs remind us, step by step, how it is made a well-made work of an artisan that knows his trade. On the first floor, bright and luminous, the ballroom: a magnificent room with stuccos and mirrors, a beautiful chandelier hang in the center of the ceiling, it is easy to imagine it with his load of candles in an elegant night. On the fireplace the coat of arms of Samuel Powel: “Proprium decus et patrum” - Pride of yourself and of your fathers- (you betcha dude, clearly you don’t like to show off!) and on the side the chairs that gave some rest to Samuel Adams’ or Washington’s feet during the dances.

Yes I said Washington. The saint patron of U.S.A. came here multiple times and was a family friend. But I don’t care: I can, I am Italian and my saint patron is Garibaldi. What really got me was the view from the windows. A couple of skyscrapers and a less than attractive block of houses from the ‘60s. Someone pointed out how should have been at the time: roofs with smoke climbing out of the chimneys, some green fields on the right, where only a couple of blocks to the south the city ended, the masts of the ships on the Delaware all lined on the horizon trying to hide New Jersey on the other side of the river. My mind traveled for a moment and saw the mud on the streets with the people walking with a hand on the cocked hat in a windy day, the noise of the carts rolling around and the voices in the markets screaming their prices. The same voice, on different goods and different times, that my wife heard in the photo of Docks Street in 1908.