For dining and lodging reservations and a schedule of riverboat cruises and craft workshops, call or write Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, 3501 Lexington Road, Harrodsburg, KY 40330 (Tel: 606-734-5411). The Kentucky Department of Travel Development can supply brochures about other historic sites in the area. Its toll-free number is 1-800-225-TRIP.
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SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
“Partial list of Articles to be Sold at Shaker Village, near Harrodsburg, Ky., July 12th, 1922, Beginning at 11 o’clock,” reads the poster in a book on my lap:
"About 27 beds, six children’s beds, about 40 cherry chests, about 10 chests of drawers, a number of chairs, a number of tables and candle stands, several stoves, a number of spinning and flax wheels, a number of rugs, two corner cupboards, several clocks, a number of other small articles manufactured and used by the Shakers. Shaker Village lies seven miles Northeast of Harrodsburg on the Lexington pike. A good lunch can be secured on the grounds."
It is not easy to be non-partisan about a confrontational politician like Newt Gingrich, but I think it’s reasonably objective to say that he has elevated the job of Speaker of the House to a level of visibility that is rare in its two centuries of existence. That he was given free television time for a speech at the end of the first hundred days of the 104th Congress—as if he were the president—is itself remarkable. But it was only the climax of a post-election period during which the media seemed to reduce every day’s Washington news to no more than a new round in a slugfest between Gingrich and Clinton.
It is not often that even the most ardent believer in capitalism mourns the passing of an economic institution, unless, of course, he or she has personally lost money as a result.
After all, the people involved are still around even if the institution is gone. So, too, are the capital assets, if now in other hands. What is actually lost is just such stuff as lawyers make, the corporate or partnership agreement that governed the way the parts made up the whole. To be sure, one of the miracles at the core of capitalism is how the whole always exceeds the sum of those parts.
I have been haunted by the same nightmare for some 20 years now. In it, I am running through long dimly lit corridors in a basement somewhere. My father’s father is said to be dying in a room off one of them. I somehow have the power to save him if I can just get there in time, but I haven’t his room number and no one is around to help me. The empty halls intersect, shoot off at odd angles, seem to turn back on one another. And all the time the clock is ticking. Then I wake up, sweating, and remember that my grandfather, to whom I was very close, is long dead, that when he did die I was halfway across the continent. I wished then, I clearly still wish, that I could somehow have kept him alive forever.
As a journalist who has been working for several years now on a biography of James T. Farrell (to be published by Holt), I am naturally pleased to see American Heritage show an interest in him (“American Characters,” April). Unfortunately, however, Gene Smith merely compounds the injustice he did to Farrell thirty-five years ago in a profile published in the New York Post (“Portrait of the Artist as a Middleaged Man,” October 9, 1960).
Mr. Smith, in my view, is as wrong now as he was the first time to regard Studs Lonigan as being Farrell’s only worthwhile work. That point, obviously, is arguable, but there are some readily available facts about Farrell’s life as a writer in his final decades that Mr. Smith ignored.
Joseph Belka, a photographer in north St. Louis, knew just the way to lure his young customers in the fall of 1928. As our reader John M. Stevens explains it, “One afternoon my sister Peggy was walking home from her first-grade class. As she passed Mr. Belka’s studio she paused to look at the small model of Charles Lindbergh’s plane standing outside, and Mr. Belka promptly materialized to ask if she would like to climb into the cockpit and have her picture taken. He did not have to ask twice. An hour or so later Mr. Belka walked over to the house with the finished photo and sold it to my mother.”
All her mature life, Clara Bow had insomnia nothing could relieve—not sedatives, liquor, endless psychiatric intervention, electric shock therapy. She dated it from the moment she awoke in her family’s one-room cold-water Brooklyn flat to find her mother holding a butcher knife to her throat.
Sin awaited someone who wanted to be a movie actress, the mother said. It was better that her daughter die and so escape damnation. The girl jumped up and ran, her mother after her with the knife.
directed by Ray Müller, Kino Video, 181 minutes . No one interested in World War II should ignore this profile of the German director Leni Riefenstahl, who for six decades has defended the brilliant and notorious film work she did for the Nazi regime. In making this fascinating movie, the director Ray Müller found her as commanding an actress in her nineties as she was in the 1930s German “mountain” films that first brought her Adolf Hitler’s admiration. Her romantic climbing pictures mixed heroism with German fable, and Hitler hired her to do the same for his Party Congress of 1933, resulting in Victory of the Faith —a film Riefenstahl now repudiates on aesthetic grounds—and later Triumph of the Will and Olympia , which remain potent and infamous masterworks. Olympia , her epic tribute to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, produced many of the innovations that made modern sports coverage possible, even while it did the Nazis’ work.
written and directed by Murray Grigor, Direct Cinema, 75 minutes . It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother, a schoolteacher, who wanted him to be an architect, and his father, a clergyman, who taught him that “a symphony was an edifice of sound.” Wright grew up to become both our greatest architect and our most prominent articulator of the art as well. Early on, he said, “I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypocritical humility.” He chose the former, and this film by the Wright Foundation (narrated by his granddaughter, the actress Anne Baxter) backs him up. The film follows the evolution of Wright’s art more than of his life, the camera panning lovingly through each structure while Baxter’s cultured voice or the architect’s (from his wonderful recorded lectures) explains his discoveries.