My Hunt for Emily Dickinson

 I keep reading about the new Emily Dickinson show at the Morgan Library& Museum in Manhattan and I can't wait to see it.  It's called  "I'm Nobody!  Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson". (It's there until May 21.)  It has all sorts of news and gossip about the mysterious and reclusive poet.  As the NY Post commented "This is shaping up as a good year for the "Belle of Amherst" who never married and died, aged 55...In April we'll see Cynthia Nixon play her in the film 'A Quiet Passion.'"  Reading this inspired me to re-post a photo essay I published seven years ago about my near miss at acquiring a photographic image of Emily--which, to antique photo collectors like myself, would be the equivalent of finding the Holy Grail.
 



(Please click on the photos to enlarge them.)


There are a few photographs of long-dead celebrities that are so rare, people will pay close to a million dollars for them. If you come across a previously unknown image of, say, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, to name a few, you have discovered a real treasure.

One of these iconic images would be a new portrait of Emily Dickinson. That’s what a professor at the University of North Carolina, Philip F. Gura, thought he had found on an E-Bay auction that he won on April 12, 2000. It was an albumen photograph (the bottom row above).

Later Gura wrote a delightful description of his torturous six-month search to validate the image. It’s called “How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay.”

Read it on http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-02/gura/

Gura wrote about Emily Dickinson: “Even though she lived when the new invention of photography was changing the ways people thought about themselves, there is only one known photographic likeness of her, taken by William C. North. It was made between December 1846 and March 1847, and shows a thin teenager suffering from what her family took as the first symptoms of tuberculosis.

“A second photograph of Dickinson has long been the Holy Grail of artifacts for scholars in my field…”

Gura paid $481 to win the albumen photograph with “Emily Dickinson” written on the back. As soon as it arrived from the eBay seller, the professor set about trying to validate it. He soon had calls from The New York Times and the New Yorker, who were vying to be the first with the news of his discovery.

Then NPR and many papers around the world were knocking at his door. After much trouble, Gura finally found a forensic anthropologist who was able to measure and compare various anatomical landmarks on the two faces (the original verified dag above left and the new-found albumen photo in the third row). This seems so much quicker and easier on TV shows like CSI and Bones!

Meanwhile two historians of costume analyzed the sitter’s clothing and determined that the albumen photo was a copy of an original daguerreotype taken sometime between 1848 and 1853.

In the one verified image of Emily — the daguerreotype at the upper left-- she is either sixteen or 17 years old. It was taken at Mt. Holyoke and is in the possession of Amherst College.

After all his research, Prof. Gura still doesn’t have a positive "yes" answer. But he believes that it is indeed Emily and quotes one reporter: “Although the forensic analysis of Gura’s photo strongly suggests the woman is ED, no one can say for sure. By the same token, no one apparently can say that the woman is NOT Dickinson.”

Something that was not reported by international media, (but is reported here exclusively on A Rolling Crone), is that I had a very similar experience to Philip Gura’s. But it happened exactly four months earlier. On Jan. 13, 2000, I purchased on eBay a 1/6 plate daguerreotype of a young woman who looked strikingly like Emily Dickinson. The famous verified Emily image is on the left above, on the right is my dag, which I purchased for $127.50 from a seller in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

The eBay auction had the title “Fine Dag – Lovely Woman – Emily Dickinson???”

But the seller was not making any claims that he couldn’t prove: “Purchased some time ago from an estate auctioned [sic] near Amherst, Mass. A fine daguerreotype…an intriguing and attractive young woman. …Some say she is, some say she looks like, Emily Dickinson. And some say not. Draw your own conclusion (there is one surviving dag of this noted Amherst author.) A fine daguerreotype either way.”

I studied the small photo on eBay and tried to compare it to the one verified dag. Like Philip Gura some months later, I waited in suspense for it to arrive. I imagined the excitement, the glory, the press attention if it proved to be an actual second image of the Belle of Amherst.

You must admit, looking at the two dags side by side, that the resemblance is striking. Even the style of dress and hair and the pose itself. (Emily is near a book and holding what I think is a flower in the official dag. In my image the woman has an adorable beaded bag hanging from her arm. They even seem to be wearing the same kind of dark bracelet, which may or may not be a mourning bracelet made of human hair.)

But I didn’t have to consult forensic anthropologists and costume historians to validate my image when it came. I took one look at the actual dag that lay in my hand and I realized she couldn’t be the real Emily, because, judging from the one true photograph, Emily had dark brown eyes and the woman in MY image had pale blue eyes.

I should have known this, because Emily once wrote to an admirer (who asked for a portrait) this description of herself: “I…am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur-and my Eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the guest leaves – would this do just as well?”

So mine is not a priceless iconic image, and the world’s press is not about to come calling — as it did four months later when Professor Gura discovered his image of ED on eBay. But I like ”my” Emily anyway and would never part with her, because this woman was a contemporary, perhaps a neighbor — perhaps even a relative -- of the real Emily. She certainly has a remarkable resemblance to the mysterious and secretive Belle of Amherst, who wore white and refused to come out of her room in the last years of her life, talking to visitors through a closed door.

And then after her death, her sister Lavina discovered the 1800 poems hidden away in her drawer. The first volume was published four years after Emily died in 1886 at the age of 55.

A Grammar Rant to Start the New Year

Last Friday, the first day of 2016, I sent the following letter to the Public Editor of The New York Times.    I knew I was beating a dead horse.  I understood that ranting about the proper use of "lie" and "lay" is a lost cause, but I did it anyway:

"To the public editor of The New York Times:

It happened again yesterday, Dec. 31.  In an article on the front of the Arts section by Doreen Carvajal describing an installation at the Pompidou Center, the second paragraph begins: “Waves of undulating sand are dotted with upright slabs of mushrooms.  A rusting machine gun lays across a hospital gurney…..”

It also happened on Nov. 29, 2015 in a laudatory review of the book “Like Family” by Paolo Giordano, written by Jennifer Senior: “All while Mrs. A. lays dying—the ultimate solitary experience….”

As a professional journalist, I flinch every time I encounter a grammatical error like this in my beloved Times.  (Interestingly, when I looked up the Senior book review on line today, the error had been corrected.)

Three years ago I wrote on my blog “A Rolling Crone":

It's always an error in The New York Times that sends me off on a grammar rant -- and there was another one today (Thursday, March 28). In the Style Section, in a large, bold pull-quote from an article about photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith taken in the 1960s, I read: "After laying dormant for decades, a second life for photographs taken of a pair of artists on the cusp of fame." Of course, it's supposed to be: "after lying dormant...”

In the olden days, when I was being trained in New York Times style at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, these errors would have been caught by people called copy editors, but I can only imagine that, in this very difficult period for all print media, The Times has been forced to fire all its copy editors for economic reasons. 

That thumping noise you hear is the late, lamented Times editor Ted Bernstein spinning in his grave. Once upon a time, Theodore M. Bernstein was the watchman of the venerable Great Gray Lady as well as a professor at Columbia J School. After he died in 1979, Time Magazine noted, "Theodore M. Bernstein, 74... served as the paper's prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism... In a witty Times house organ called 'Winners and Sinners,' the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act."

At Columbia J School we often saw Bernstein's "Winners and Sinners" newsletter. Somewhat like the judges on American Idol, Ted Bernstein would periodically praise a brilliant headline or turn of phrase in the NYT and chide and make fun of grammatical and syntactical lapses.."
 
You might reply to me that nowadays, when almost no one uses “lie” and “lay” correctly, the readers of The Times don’t care about grammatical errors.  That’s what I thought too.  But when the blog post quoted here was published on the Huffington Post, on April 4, 2013 it received 958 likes, 243 shares and 728 comments—by far the largest response I’ve ever had to a post.

Please hire a copy editor!  The Times was the last bastion (in the U.S.) of proper English.

Watch Out—The Robots Are Coming!

Paro, an interactive robot that calms people with dementia--Beck- Agence France Press

I have seen the future, and it is robots.

Because I am old and did not grow up gazing at electronic screens or playing with high-tech toys like I-pods and I-pads, I may be among the last to come to this realization-- that the human race is seriously threatened by the creation of ever more sophisticated robots.  But I want to warn my fellow senior citizens, those who still don’t know how to text or to hook an attachment onto an e-mail.

Last May I wrote a blog post called “Do You Want to End your Days Talking to a Robot?”    This was inspired by an article in The New York Times  detailing new kinds of robots being created to care for weak and confused old folks.  The robots included “Cody” who was “gentle enough to bathe elderly patients”, HERB who can fetch household objects, Hector, who reminds patients to take their medicines, Paro, who looks like a baby seal and calms patients with dementia, and PR2 who can blink, giggle and interact.  The article quoted a professor at MIT who said she was troubled when she saw a 76-year-old woman telling her life story to the baby seal robot.  I was troubled too.

My post elicited a number of e-mails from around the world describing devices which truly do improve elder care—the “Betty” tablet that caregivers use to inform each other and family members of a patient’s daily activities and condition, video games that increase cognitive ability, and devices—a wristwatch and something called Trax, which both use GPS, Wi-Fi and smart phones to track pets, children and demented elders who wander out of a pre-set digital area.

I began to think I was being paranoid about robots.  But I wasn’t.

As 2013 continued, Amazon announced that they were working on a delivery system that would fill the air with drones able to drop a package on your doorstep a half hour after you ordered something on line. This inspired a newspaper cartoon showing a discouraged Santa trying to sell his sled and reindeer while the sky overhead buzzed with package-carrying Amazon drones.

And we’ve all heard that in the near future we will have automobiles that drive themselves and are too smart to collide with each other.  That left me wondering—what if the self-driving car encounters an old-fashioned car, driven by an imperfect human, who is texting or adjusting the radio?

Delivery drones and self-driving cars don’t sound so bad, but then on Dec. 26, The New York Times told me that you can now have sex with your computer. 

The article, “’Interactive’ Gets a New Meaning” by Alex Hawgood,  began by describing the sex scene from the movie “Her” which stars Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore, an insecure, rather nerdy man who falls in love with Samantha—who is a voice in his computer—an app, I guess you’d call it.  She clearly resembles Siri, the female voice in my husband’s I-phone who can answer questions like “What is the population of Seattle” but gets evasive when you ask her things like “What is the meaning of life?”

But Samantha—the voice in “Her” is smarter than Siri because she is interactive--she can change and evolve to please Theodore.  According to the NYTimes, there is a sex scene in which  “after returning home from a failed blind date …it shows Theodore gently edging Samantha into arousal by telling her what he wishes to do to her body.  As things become increasingly explicit, the screen turns black, leaving the audience lingering in darkness as the characters reach their aural climax.”

That strikes me as very sad—falling in love with a computer app that has no body. 

The Times article goes on to list many computer sex toys already available—one, called “Real Touch” allows two people to have sex over the internet, no matter how physically far apart they are.  Designed by a former NASA engineer, “It comes in two parts, one modeled after a woman’s lower anatomy and one modeled after a man’s.”

There is a list of interactive computer sex toys already on the market, some meant for two people to use, some to use on your own.  A report by a trend-forecasting firm in New York, according to The Times, “makes the case that forward leaps in augmented intelligence and video-game interactivity will let people ‘get attached to and develop real relationships with their hardware and software.’”

But can they take them to the office Christmas party?

LovePlus, a dating simulation game for the portable Nintendo DS console, “allows a player to caress another’s hair using a touch pad…these virtual sweethearts modify their personas in real time based on the player’s likes and dislikes.”

So you don’t have to spend time and money searching for Mr. or Ms. Right—you can create and train one all by yourself.

And on December  29, on the front page of The New York Times, there was the scariest article yet, titled “Brainlike Computers, Learning from Experience” by John Markoff.   Here’s the first sentence:  “Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.”

In 2014, according to the article, a new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released that can learn from its errors to evolve and increase its skill at a task.  This computer is based on the biological nervous system.  This will create a new generation of artificial intelligences that can “see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning.”

The article went on to elaborate on how this works, using words like “algorithm” , “neural network” and “biological synapses” which cause my aging eyes to glaze over, but while the explanation is over my head, I’ve seen enough science fiction movies to know what happens after computers and robots  can imitate and even improve on the functions of the human brain and body.  Which is why I’ve concluded that in 2014, in addition to worrying about global warming, our environmental footstep and terrorism, we should also watch out for the new generation of  robots that is being born.

My Hunt for Emily Dickinson

(This was originally posted in April of 2010, but a comment about it from Jenny the Pirate arrived just a few days ago and inspired me to re-post the saga below.)



(Please click on the photos to enlarge them.)

There are a few photographs of long-dead celebrities that are so rare, people will pay close to a million dollars for them. If you come across a previously unknown image of, say, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, to name a few, you have discovered a real treasure.

One of these iconic images would be a new portrait of Emily Dickinson. That’s what a professor at the University of North Carolina, Philip F. Gura, thought he had found on an E-Bay auction that he won on April 12, 2000. It was an albumen photograph (the bottom row above).

Later Gura wrote a delightful description of his torturous six-month search to validate the image. It’s called “How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay.”

Read it on http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-02/gura/

Gura wrote about Emily Dickinson: “Even though she lived when the new invention of photography was changing the ways people thought about themselves, there is only one known photographic likeness of her, taken by William C. North. It was made between December 1846 and March 1847, and shows a thin teenager suffering from what her family took as the first symptoms of tuberculosis.

“A second photograph of Dickinson has long been the Holy Grail of artifacts for scholars in my field…”

Gura paid $481 to win the albumen photograph with “Emily Dickinson” written on the back. As soon as it arrived from the eBay seller, the professor set about trying to validate it. He soon had calls from The New York Times and the New Yorker, who were vying to be the first with the news of his discovery.

Then NPR and many papers around the world were knocking at his door. After much trouble, Gura finally found a forensic anthropologist who was able to measure and compare various anatomical landmarks on the two faces (the original verified dag above left and the new-found albumen photo in the third row). This seems so much quicker and easier on TV shows like CSI and Bones!

Meanwhile two historians of costume analyzed the sitter’s clothing and determined that the albumen photo was a copy of an original daguerreotype taken sometime between 1848 and 1853.

In the one verified image of Emily — the daguerreotype at the upper left-- she is either sixteen or 17 years old. It was taken at Mt. Holyoke and is in the possession of Amherst College.

After all his research, Prof. Gura still doesn’t have a positive "yes" answer. But he believes that it is indeed Emily and quotes one reporter: “Although the forensic analysis of Gura’s photo strongly suggests the woman is ED, no one can say for sure. By the same token, no one apparently can say that the woman is NOT Dickinson.”

Something that was not reported by international media, (but is reported here exclusively on A Rolling Crone), is that I had a very similar experience to Philip Gura’s. But it happened exactly four months earlier. On Jan. 13, 2000, I purchased on eBay a 1/6 plate daguerreotype of a young woman who looked strikingly like Emily Dickinson. The famous verified Emily image is on the left above, on the right is my dag, which I purchased for $127.50 from a seller in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

The eBay auction had the title “Fine Dag – Lovely Woman – Emily Dickinson???”

But the seller was not making any claims that he couldn’t prove: “Purchased some time ago from an estate auctioned [sic] near Amherst, Mass. A fine daguerreotype…an intriguing and attractive young woman. …Some say she is, some say she looks like, Emily Dickinson. And some say not. Draw your own conclusion (there is one surviving dag of this noted Amherst author.) A fine daguerreotype either way.”

I studied the small photo on eBay and tried to compare it to the one verified dag. Like Philip Gura some months later, I waited in suspense for it to arrive. I imagined the excitement, the glory, the press attention if it proved to be an actual second image of the Belle of Amherst.

You must admit, looking at the two dags side by side, that the resemblance is striking. Even the style of dress and hair and the pose itself. (Emily is near a book and holding what I think is a flower in the official dag. In my image the woman has an adorable beaded bag hanging from her arm. They even seem to be wearing the same kind of dark bracelet, which may or may not be a mourning bracelet made of human hair.)

But I didn’t have to consult forensic anthropologists and costume historians to validate my image when it came. I took one look at the actual dag that lay in my hand and I realized she couldn’t be the real Emily, because, judging from the one true photograph, Emily had dark brown eyes and the woman in MY image had pale blue eyes.

I should have known this, because Emily once wrote to an admirer (who asked for a portrait) this description of herself: “I…am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur-and my Eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the guest leaves – would this do just as well?”

So mine is not a priceless iconic image, and the world’s press is not about to come calling — as it did four months later when Professor Gura discovered his image of ED on eBay. But I like ”my” Emily anyway and would never part with her, because this woman was a contemporary, perhaps a neighbor — perhaps even a relative -- of the real Emily. She certainly has a remarkable resemblance to the mysterious and secretive Belle of Amherst, who wore white and refused to come out of her room in the last years of her life, talking to visitors through a closed door.

And then after her death, her sister Lavina discovered the 1800 poems hidden away in her drawer. The first volume was published four years after Emily diedin 1886 at the age of 55.

Bad Santas Hit New York City

Last Saturday we were in New York, staying down at the bottom of Fifth Avenue, a stone’s throw from Washington Square Arch, which looked magical with its sparkling Christmas tree as snow began to fall.  I went out early for coffee and the papers, and as I approached a Starbucks several blocks to the east, I passed a half dozen young people, three men and three women, all dressed as Santa Claus.  Salvation Army bell ringers? I wondered.  Department store salespeople?

Inside the Starbucks I saw more Santas, but didn’t ask anyone why, because I didn’t want to reveal myself as an out-of-towner.  But when I read the papers it became clear.  Even though I’ve lived for nearly 20 years in the City (a while ago), I knew nothing about SantaCon which happened on Saturday, an event that was causing lots of controversy among New Yorkers.

An op-ed piece by Jason Gilbert in The New York Times last Thursday had the title “Bring Drunken Santas Under Control”.  It began “On Saturday, a festive, besotted mob of 20- and 30-somethings, decked out in various measures of Santa Claus dress and undress, will descend on the bars of lower New York City and rain down Christmas cheer like spoiled eggnog.  This obnoxious event is SantaCon.”

I learned that tens of thousands of people gather in Manhattan every year on SantaCon for a day-long pub crawl to designated bars, many of the Santas eventually ending up in Brooklyn or passed out on a bench somewhere.  They gather about ten a.m. near Tompkins Park on the lower East Side to get their secret instructions on the bar crawl route.  Many bars in Manhattan last Saturday had signs in the window like this one: “Alcohol Soaked Father Christmas themed flash mob not welcome here.  Take your body fluids and public intoxication elsewhere.”   Some signs were more succinct: “No Santas allowed.”

The Long Island Rail Road, Metro North and New Jersey Transit all announced that no alcohol consumption would be allowed on their trains for 24 hours, starting at noon on Saturday.

Aware of the growing dislike of SantaCon, the organizers, who refused to give their names to the press, warned participants by internet to tone down their antics this year and remember that unwanted sexual advances on passing females are wrong: “Dirty ol’ Santa or Ho Ho Ho, just remember No Means No.”

The anonymous organizers of the event pointed out to The New York Times that for every bar that doesn’t want Santas, there are many that do.  Every establishment on the tour has pledged to donate a percentage of the day’s profits to Toys for Tots, and last year the event raised $45,000. (Participants are encouraged to donate $10 each.) They also said that this year there will be many “helper elves’ assigned to guide Santas who stagger off the designated route.

The first recorded SantaCon in the U.S. United States was in San Francisco in 1994, conceived as a subversive expression of anti-commercialism.  Now SantaCon has forgotten about being anti-commercialism. It takes place in more than 300 cities in 44 countries. The biggest gathering is in New York City, which had an estimated 30,000 bad Santas last year.

Around noon I boarded a subway in the East Village to travel to the Upper East Side, because I knew there was little chance of getting a taxi amid the Christmas rush and the snowy weather.  I got out at Union Station to transfer to the Lexington line and stared in wonder at all the Santas around me (most of them headed downtown.)  There were not just Santas, but elves and reindeer.  A group of Santas across the way periodically shouted out “Ho! Ho! Ho!” in unison like cheerleaders, but I didn’t see any signs of misbehavior—perhaps because it was still early in the day.  Along with rotund Santas of the male variety, I saw a number of chic-looking female elves in fetching red and white miniskirts and peaked caps.

Perhaps because I didn’t see the Santas later in the day, when their Christmas spirits had overpowered their good sense, my first encounter with SantaCon has left me less outraged than The New York Times and more inclined to agree with the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who told the press, “This is an event that we support.  It’s what makes New York New York.”

The Last Surviving Grouchy Grammar Nut

You know how, in World War II, the Marines employed Navajo code talkers to transmit radio messages because no one but another Navajo could understand the language?  Now there is fear that some of these obscure Native American languages will disappear when the last of the elderly code speakers passes on.

Well I’m 72 and I suspect that I’m the last person on earth who knows the proper usage of “lie” and “lay.”  Not that I would dream of correcting anyone, such as my fabulously flexible and toned Pilates teachers who say about a dozen times an hour, “Now everyone lay down on your mat with your head facing the mirror.”

I’ve also given up on “its” and “it’s”.  And of course there’s “two, to and too,” all of which are texted as “2”.  In fact, now that texting is ubiquitous, I suspect that all language will soon be written phonetically using numbers, symbols, emoticons and perhaps bar codes.

It’s always an error in The New York Times that sends me off on a grammar rant—and there was another one today (Thursday, March 28.)  In the Style Section, in a large, bold pull-quote from an article about photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith taken in the 1960’s, I read:  “After laying dormant for decades, a second life for photographs taken of a pair of artists on the cusp of fame.”  Of course, it’s supposed to be: “after lying dormant…”

This “laying” was the last straw after last week, when I saw in The Times a large headline about the economic troubles of Cypress(!) even though, throughout the text of the piece, the economic troubles were ascribed to the island of Cyprus, rather than a species of tree.

In the olden days, when I was being trained in New York Times style at  Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, these errors would have been caught by people called copy editors, but I can only imagine that, in this very difficult period for all print media, The Times has been forced to fire all its copy editors for economic reasons. 

That thumping noise you hear is the late, lamented Times editor Ted Bernstein spinning in his grave.  Once upon a time, Theodore M. Bernstein was the watchman of the venerable Great Gray Lady as well as a professor at Columbia J School. After he died in 1979, Time Magazine noted, “Theodore M. Bernstein, 74…served as the paper‘s prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism…In a witty Times house organ called ‘Winners and Sinners’, the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act.”

At Columbia J School we often saw Bernstein’s “Winners and Sinners” newsletter. Somewhat like the judges on American Idol, Ted Bernstein would periodically praise a brilliant headline or turn of phrase in the NYT and chide and make fun of grammatical and syntactical lapses.  The “Cypress” debacle would probably have sent him into overdrive.

Three years ago, on April 14, 2010, in a post called “Michelle Obama, the Grammar Police and a Cranky Crone”, I gently chided the First Lady for a lapse in grammar.  Although I think I did it in a friendly way, it almost got me expelled from a women’s group I belonged to, as one particularly vehement member insisted it was heartless and morally wrong to criticize the First Lady for anything except her political actions.  (That blog post was also reprinted in a book called “Grammar Rants”—and they did not mean that in a good way.)

The funny thing is, I am a huge admirer of Michelle Obama.  Her photograph stands on the top of my desk. And the same day I published that post, I e-mailed it to her office.  Evidently no one there who read it was offended, because ever since, nearly every week, I get an e-mail from the office of the First Lady, or from the President himself asking my opinion of something, or sometimes it’s just from “The White House”.  If the White House had been as offended as my fellow club members by my post, certainly they wouldn’t have put me on their mailing list?

Anyway, I’ll reprint below some of what I said about the First Lady and grammar and let you decide whether I was being  “heartless.”  And thanks for sticking with me through this current grammar rant.  I feel a lot better now.

Today [April 14, 2010] I read in all the news media about Michelle Obama’s surprise visit to Haiti during her first official solo trip abroad.

I applaud her for her compassion and for bringing public attention to the devastating needs that still have to be met, especially for the Haitian children.

I’m a huge fan of Michelle’s and admire her more than any first lady since, say, Eleanor Roosevelt. But I did wince when I read the statement that she made to the press about her trip. Her insight was perfect but her grammar was not.

“I think it was important for Jill and I to come now because we’re at the point where the relief efforts are under way but the attention of the world starts to wane a bit, ” she said.

What’s wrong with that? Take out Jill and you have “I think it’s important for I to come now.” It’s supposed to be: “It was important for Jill and ME.”….

…You don’t expect perfect grammar from a baseball player (or from Bob Dylan…writer of “Lay, Lady, Lay”),  but maybe you do from a First Lady who’s a lawyer, educated at Princeton and Harvard.

Kids acquire an ear for correct grammar by hearing it spoken by the adults around them; their parents and their role models. But now that young people mainly communicate by texting in a phonetic code, both spelling and grammar are becoming as antiquated as the Model T.

It’s great that Michelle Obama is encouraging kids to eat smart and get out there and exercise, but let’s encourage them to mind their P’s and Q’s and their prepositions, nouns, verbs and grammar as well.

Why I’m Going to Miss Newspapers

I’ve said it before:  my favorite time is when I sit down in the morning with my first cup of coffee and start to read the three newspapers that I devour every day.

One reason this is such a guilty pleasure is the contrast to my first job, in public relations at Lever Brothers in New York, when I had to walk into an empty office at 8 a.m. carrying five newspapers, then read and summarize all the business news of interest to the company’s executives, who would get a mimeographed newsletter from me when they drifted in around 10 a.m.  Now, of course, all executives can get their own news summary on their I-phones right in the taxi or commuter train on the way to work.

The paper that I read first with my coffee is the local paper—the Worcester (MA) Telegram & Gazette.  I need the comfortable perspective of the T&G before I tackle the increasingly depressing first page of The New York Times.

 The T&G on Monday, March 11, for example, devoted much of the front page to Sunday’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade-- photos and the title “Smilin’ Skies” with two subtitles “Sun Shines on St. Pat’s Parade” and “One band finds itself out of step.” Inside on page three was a feel-good story and photo about how the library in Hardwick is sponsoring a seed exchange, lending seeds as well as books to its patrons, who are expected to bring seeds back from their crop for the next year’s sowing.  That’s the kind of uplifting local story that I like.

While The New York Times likes to lead with photos of mass graves and starving refugee children, the T& G has featured page-one photos of firemen rescuing a cat from a telephone pole.  When I’ve finished the T&G and checked to see if anyone I know has died or been arrested, I go through The New York Times methodically, section by section.  Often the obituaries of fascinating people I’d never heard of are my favorite part.

 I need a second cup of coffee before I tackle The Times, and when I’m through, I go about my chores. But sometime during the day I go out and track down a copy of the New York Post, which is famous for its lurid headlines like “Headless Body in Topless Bar” (that one was voted a readers favorite.  Here are some more below.) 

 People often ask me “Why on earth would YOU read the Post every day?” (Meaning—since I’m an educated professional with presumably better taste.)  But I reply truthfully that I need my daily gossip fix, and often I find my New York friends and acquaintances and their misadventures chronicled on Page Six.  Where else but in the Post would I find articles like the one last Monday about: “Why does everyone hate Anne Hathaway?” 

 My kids and their friends get all their news on line.  And I understand and respect their reasons why I shouldn’t read the print version: it kills trees, it gets your hands and furniture dirty, and by the time the paper appears in the driveway at 6:30 a.m. (usually in a plastic bag landing in the snow), it’s already out of date.

But I love handling the newspapers; the smell of the ink that smudges my hands.  I love being able to tag with post-it notes and later cut out articles I think would be of interest to my kids.  I regularly send them clippings, which I suspect they never read (but if I forward the article by e-mail I sometimes get a comment back.)

Today we get breaking news via internet the instant it happens—and we also get all the confusion and fear and wrong information gleaned by bystanders.  Think about the Newtown massacre and how many wrong “facts” were reported until, by the afternoon, the terrible truth was pinned down and rendered into print for the next day’s papers.

I graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and I realize the serious dangers of broadcasting breaking news while it’s still rumor. I understand how easy it would be to cause mass hysteria , serious injury and even death using no more than your Twitter or Facebook account.   Look what Orson Welles did with “War of the Worlds” on the radio in 1938, before the days of television.

The ability of bystanders to report the news on line is also a good thing—it can uncover and document police abuse, domestic abuse, all kinds of criminal acts. But I still prefer my news on paper, evaluated and fact-checked by the reporters of the Great Gray Lady presenting “all the news that’s fit to print.” 

I know we’re approaching the end of the road for print media. Newsweek is gone, except for on-line. The Boston Phoenix just folded after 47 years. The New York Times, suffering financially like everyone else, is trying to find someone to buy the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. One day soon there won’t be any more news delivery people or any more newspapers landing in the snowdrift at the end of our driveway.  And millions of trees will have been saved.

When I was born on Feb. 4, 1941, my parents saved the entire Milwaukee Journal: (“Score Hurt as Big Locomotive Explodes in Streets of Denver”.)  In September of 1970 I cut our wedding announcement out of The New York Times and put it in an album. Like everyone else, I saved the paper from Nov. 23, 1963, about Kennedy’s assassination.  That was the first time the nation pulled together to mourn a tragedy as it was taking place on television, but, still in grad school, I didn’t have access to a television, but stood over the teletype machine in Columbia J School’s newsroom as crumbs of information were typed out at an agonizingly slow pace.

When all the newspapers are gone and news comes beeping through our phones and computers all day long, my first cup of coffee in the morning won’t taste the same.  And as one friend asked, what are we going to use to pack up the china and line the birdcage?

Rolling Crone and Elizabeth Keckley together in The New York Times On Line

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The three verified images of Elizabeth Keckley

           Last Thursday I got on a plane for Miami, just missing the blizzard called Nemo.  This long-planned trip brought me to South Beach to help babysit granddaughter Amalia while daughter Eleni was traveling to South Carolina to promote her newest book “Other Waters.”

           On the same day I left Boston, Feb. 7,  the New York Times on-line published an article I wrote for them about Elizabeth Keckley, the mulatto former slave who became  the dressmaker and confidant of Mary Todd Lincoln.  Here’s where you can see it:

   http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/mrs-keckley-has-met-with-great-success/

          The article, “Mrs. Keckley has Met with Great Success”, appeared in a section of The Times’ “Opinionator” section called “Disunion” which “follows the Civil War as it unfolded.”  Appearing in this section inevitably brings a crowd of readers and many comments, some of them from experts in every detail of the Civil War (which I am not!)

          I first discovered Elizabeth Keckley – an extraordinary woman who bought freedom from slavery for herself and her son with her skills at sewing—when, in 2007, I bought on E-Bay a cased ambrotype portrait of a mixed-race woman. Pinned to the velvet lining was a scrap of paper with the words “Elizabeth Keckley, Formerly a Slave”.  Researching her story was a revelation to me—of what a woman born into slavery managed to achieve in the nineteenth century. I posted my first story about her in “A Rolling Crone on Sept 27, 2009.

 http://arollingcrone.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-black-woman-in-white-house.html

          A month later, in Oct. 23, 2009, I wrote a second post on Keckley, comparing the only three known images of her to the woman in the ambrotype I had bought.  Here’s the post: 

http://arollingcrone.blogspot.com/2009/10/story-behind-photo-elizabeth-keckley.html

         In the end I realized sadly that my image of “Elizabeth Keckley” was not authentic—there was too much disparity between the verified images of Keckley and the one I bought.  But I didn’t mind that much, because buying the image had introduced me to such a fascinating person.

          I read two books about Keckley’s life and I tried unsuccessfully to interest The New York Times in publishing  an article about Keckley, but did not succeed.  Then, a few months ago, the film “Lincoln” appeared and snapped up a lot of nominations for the Oscars.  Evidently many who saw the film were intrigued by the character of Elizabeth Keckley,  (portrayed by actress Gloria Reuben)  in a relatively minor role, and they wanted to learn more about her. 

           I knew this was true because the number of hits on my old posts about Keckley suddenly soared as people began Googling her.  I tried again to interest The Times in a piece about her and last Thursday it appeared in “Disunion.” (And yesterday’s Sunday Times Book Review contained a full-page ad for the new novel “Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker” by Jennifer Chiaverini, which is already number 11 on the Best Seller list.)

           So far my essay in “Disunion” has received 34 comments—some critical, some favorable.  The most common complaints claim that it’s inaccurate to say that Mary Todd Lincoln was institutionalized by her son Robert when she  “descended into total madness”.   He did commit her to an institution for fear that she would harm herself, but evidently she was not completely insane and was later released.

 

         Another criticism that frequently pops up when I write about racial issues is that it’s wrong to call mulattoes like Elizabeth Keckley or apparently-white former slaves like her son George, “African American” or  “black.”  I completely understand and agree with this point, but as one Stephen D. Calhoun wrote after a comment from the always-irate A. Powell on my “Disunion” piece:  

 

          In 1858 the rules of the laws of Maryland classified all mulattoes as negroes. Within the rules and laws of that era, the classification is not anachronistic. It is accurate.

 

         The comments I liked best were, of course, the many positive ones, especially this one from Ole Holsti in Salt Lake city, UT:

         This entire series is wonderful, and this is one of the best. Many thanks!

 

          Eventually, I’m told, The Times will publish a book including selected essays from the “Disunion” series, and I’m hoping that my piece on Elizabeth Keckley might be included.  Meanwhile, I’m optimistic enough to hope that in future I can interest The Times’ editors in some other essays on my special area of interest:  how the Abolitionists (as well as pro-slavery advocates) used the fairly new “science” of photography to create propaganda to promote their views.  (Some essays I've already written on that subject for "A Rolling Crone" are listed at right under the heading "The Story Behind the Photograph".)