I’m an idiot. Which is to say, I often do not see the forest for the trees.

The ongoing search for “Agincourt” images yielded this beauty, a Sunday school “Rally Day” parade in Davenport, Iowa. All my attention was focussed on how I could photoshop “Davenport” into “Agincourt”. Same number of letters and the last two are the same (“rt”). Should be relatively easy for someone skilled in PhotoShop—which I am not.

Staring at the image (which is more than a little faded), I finally zeroed in on the store fronts and signage. Damned if the first of them Isn’t “THE BEE HIVE”, which is often the name of a department store. And that’s why I’m an idiot.

DE BIJENKORF

One of Marcel Breuer’s lesser known buildings is the De Bijenkorf Department Store in Rotterdam. De Bijenkorf is the Nordstrom’s of the Netherlands, though that may be an insult to the Dutch. I saw it briefly, as I passed through Rotterdam on the way to see a Rob van ‘tHoff house in a small upscale village called Huis ter Heide—which, not incidentally, I could not pronounce sufficiently well to alert the bus driver that’s where I wanted to go. Flash forward to one of our AFS exchange students, Tjipke Okkema, a young man from the Netherlands. One day I asked him about De Bijenkorf (a branch of which you will find in every major Dutch city) and whether it was a family name (like Nordstrom) or something else. He looked at me oddly and informed me “de bijenkorf” means “the bee hive”. Duh!

Suddenly the Breuer building made perfect sense, when I recalled that he’d veneered the exterior with hexagonal panels of limestone.

I’m an idiot.

Coincidentally, Agincourt has a small-town department store with exactly that name, founded around the turn of the century by Dutch emigrants to that part of Iowa. So, this very expensive eBay postcard from Davenport could serve double duty: emblematic of a street festival and Agincourt’s own home-grown department store.

Jewish immigration to the U.S. occurred in three stages: Sephardic Jews from Iberia and Brazil during the Colonial and Federal periods; German Jews during the 1840s; and Eastern European Jews between about 1880 and the First World War. Each group brought with it specific attitudes about the emerging divisions within the faith and the role of temple in civic life. None of the sources I found said very much, if anything, about emigration from places like France or Britain. So I’m relatively comfortable taking some latitude considering emigration outside those general parameters.

The discovery of the M. Zilbermann auto agency (in New Orleans) and his identity as Michel Zilbermann opened the door for consideration of emigration from France and the possibility that a major cultural event like the Dreyfus Affair could have stimulated it. Zilbermann arrived in Louisiana in 1904, uncannily close to the dates of the Dreyfus case and its eventual resolution by 1906—which divided French culture and exacerbated a streak of antisemitism that has resisted extinction.

Michel Zilbermann was a child of Leon and Doris Zilbermann, born at Paris, France on 04 March 1877, so his arrival at the Port of New York in September 1903 makes him twenty-six. He must have settled in New Orleans soon after, because he married Rachel Pailet there in the spring of 1904; their son Rene was born in ’05. Two sons were born at New Orleans: Rene in 1905 and Leon in 1922. But there is also evidence of an extended family into the third generation and their distribution across the United States. One wonders: 1) what was the motivation for emigration? and 2) what was the family’s status in France, i.e., what resources could they have brought with them for a new start in the U.S.? The sophistication of the auto agency in Louisiana speaks well for their achievement.

Don’t broach the subject of “End Times” with someone approaching their seventy-fifth birthday. It’s already in the forefront of our thinking.

We can trace the current fascination with End times theology back to the Holy Spirit’s movement across the land during the 1920s—the phenomenon that brought us the Scopes “Monkey Trial”, a.k.a., the source for the powerful drama you’ll recognize as “Inherit the Wind”. So it is safe to believe there would have been some evidence of this in small-town Iowa.

I’ve already written a blog entry titled “Slain in the Spirit“, laying the groundwork for the appearance of a revivalist’s tent or rude frame tabernacle on some open site outside town. Now that religious conservatives are claiming the Trump Administration’s recognition of Israel’s occupation, nay annexation, of the Golan Heights as an important step toward the Rapture, guess I have to revisit the topic.

Tabernacle, Knoxville, IA / circa 1920

As eBay for postcards under the search term “tabernacle” and a bazillion images of the Mormon Tabernacle in SLC will appear. And while I admire that building for its acoustics and innovative wood-laminate construction, it’s a far cry from the sort of facilities Agincourt would have seen. Buildings like this tabernacle from Knoxville, Iowa is typical. In some cases it is difficult to say whether these were purpose-built or adaptations of earlier structures, farm buildings, for example.

In some venues, revivalists might have rented facilities at the county fairgrounds. I’m imagining the adaptive use of a farm building on the south side of Crispin Creek (which itself had been the scene of revivals and full-immersion baptism. But the whole issue becomes embroiled in terminology: What (the hell), for example, is dispensational premillennialism? You’d be amazed how concepts like this, all of them drawn from close readings of the Old and New Testaments, can set evangelicals on one another and, especially, pentecostals. Puts my head in a spin.

Tabernacle, Elkhart, IN / date unknown

Impostors

Notice in the morning mail of a new book—Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller—got my attention and struck a chord, or at least the title did. Literature lends itself to hoaxurie, as does art, far more than architecture, though architectural forgery isn’t beyond possibility. But first things first.

There have certainly been far more literary fabrications than I am aware. Howard Hughes’s “diary”, for example, or the counterfeit poem by Emily Dickinson that put its actual author Mark Hofmann behind bars for decades—not for his audacity in simulating the signature literary style of a renowned and reclusive author which itself wasn’t a crime), but for attempted murder to conceal his unraveling spree of literary crime. Arguments surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays will smolder well beyond my own life, and then, of course, there are those who speculate on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hoaxes like these and other sorts can be driven by financial gain or the simple pleasures of putting one over on academics and literati.

“A RIDDLE, WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY, WRAPPED IN BACON”

Among my favorite literary hoaxes is one by self-confessed forger Paul LaFarge, who wrote (among other wondrous works) The Facts of Winter — which title, by the way, is based on a French homonym, “les faits de l’hiver”, there being two other phrases with different spelling and totally different meaning but which sound identical. Apparently the French language is rich with this sort of thing. The LaFarge book is, ostensibly, his translation of the work of a 19th century French author who has himself transcribed the dreams of several others—except, the dreamers and their dreams are fake, as is their transcription.

I’ve already used two words somewhat interchangeably here, hoax and forgery, but only one of them has legal implications. A “hoax” falls in the same bin as conspiracy theory—like a second gunman in Dallas or disgusting suggestions concerning Sandy Hook—disreputable, yes, but only illegal when used for some nefarious purpose beyond the questionable enjoyment of mere controversy. Some of us need to have such nonsense swirling about us.

“Forgery”, on the other hand, connotes the creation of value where there was none, and that value maybe financial or simply reputational. The academic, say, who discovers a previously unpublished Shakespeare sonnet has nothing to “sell” except appearance on the Chicken Salad Circuit, enhancing reputation and possibly cementing a promotion. [Ask me about that some time.] If true, it is of inestimable cultural value, but little monetary. Mark Hofmann, on the other hand, sold his fake Dickinson poem for a bundle of cash.

Were someone to pen a study of architectural hoaxes, what would its table of contents include—or exclude, for that matter? Are there even enough examples to warrant more than a few paragraphs in an obscure mimeographed, stapled, and three-ring-bound newsletter of limited circulation? In one category, there are the faint hopes for finding a lost, misidentified, or previously unknown design by the phenomenally productive Frank Lloyd Wright, author of hundreds of projects in a seventy-plus-year career. Yet they do appear, even if with exceptional rarity.

Several years ago a young scholar of the great H. H. Richardson identified a commercial building in central Boston as his design. Early works of LeCorbusier are now included in lists of his projects; not lost or forgotten, but simply overlooked, “inconvenient” in the canon of Early Modernism. Early works by Frank Lloyd Wright, on the other hand, projects that date from his contractual terms of employment with Adler& Sullivan, were suppressed by the young architect himself as violations of that agreement; so suppressed that even Wright himself had lost track of them. Preparation for the project list in In the Nature of Materials by Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1942) illustrates Wright’s own faulty recollection. William Allin Storrer has not only “corrected” the list, but also added several works which had slipped Wright’s memory altogether. Enlargement of even this expanded list has become a cottage industry among Wright scholars and oficionados.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is yet another Early Modern being revisited in recent years, which involves speculation about projects from his apprenticeship and early partnership, but also late works from the final years of a practice dissolved into (again) orthodox Modernism—thanks largely to the writing of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner—where Mackintosh’s reliance upon ornament and the quainter aspects of the Arts & Crafts made him an inconvenient figure, worthwhile only as an interruption in the flow of historicism, a necessary belch at the end of an overly rich meal. Perhaps that is the value of revisionist history: the opportunity to fill gaps, patch ellipses, and balance the conventional, overly convenient narrative of orthodoxy.

ARCHITECTURAL IMPERSONATION

Discovering a new Nicholas Hawksmoor Church is unlikely, whereas the re-attribution of one previously linked to another architect would make ripples, if not actual waves.  A Louis Sullivan bank on the other hand is highly unlikely to have avoided notice: his practice was public; his ornament so particular that its manufacture would be a matter of corporate record and its presence on Main Street hard to ignore. A preliminary drawing, however, for an unbuilt commission would be a major discovery,  and its sale at auction a matter of note in the architectural and art historical press. Frankly, I’d like to meet someone capable of forging a Louis Sullivan drawing. Hell, I’d like to be that person.

Our former department chair Cecil Elliott laughed at accusations a student had plagiarized the design of another; architecture was, in Cecil’s mind, a mode of expression not only based but dependent upon imitation. Philip Johnson would be unknown were it not for his uncanny ability to remake the efforts of others his own. Johnson was forever (in Elliott’s estimation) running after the stylistic train as it departed the station, shouting “Wait, I’m your leader!” Do you suppose the friendly feud between Johnson and Wright—a veritable love fest—might have grown from the younger Johnson’s envy that Wright was so highly capable of digesting precedent and making it his own. [Sorry for the “poop” analogy.] But back to Christopher Miller’s new book.

Agincourt is the essence of imposture. An invitation to openly engage the work of another or of a whole movement and be subsumed. Subsumption—is that even a word—is more often required for religious conversion. But I’m not going there.

When I was a kid, Antonín Dvořák’s symphony “From the New World” was numbered #5. Since then the discovery of four early symphonic works has bumped his best known symphony to #9. I’m still getting used to that.

Much of the #5/9 was written, or at least sketched out, during the summer of 1893, while the Dvořák family visited the Czech faming community of Spillville, Iowa. His near contemporary Leoš Janáček — a Moravian, whereas Dvořák was Bohemian, though they spoke mutually intelligible dialects of the Czech language — had no particular reason to have visited Iowa, let alone Agincourt. But I’m thinking about him this evening, along with Janáček and the Hungarians Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók for three reasons: 1) the were all born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (though Bartók’s birthplace is now in Romania) ; 2) their collected names have an inordinate number of oddly accented letters (oddly, that is, from our limited American perspective); and most important 3) because all of them approached music from varying degrees of anthropological perspective.

Somewhere here in the house, in the collection of vinyl recordings that will be with me until my estate sale, despite the turntable’s inability to turn, there is a Janáček album with a liner note about his visit to London. In it he observed to a traveling companion the speech patterns of the hotel bellboy, saying something like “There is the true language of the English people!” Until I can find that recording note, this hazy paraphrase will have to stand. The point is that Janáček’s music was drawn from speech patterns, and to that extent he preferred that his operas be performed only in Czech, believing translation would make the work inauthentic.

Janacek’s style was shaped not just by the music but by the speech patterns of Moravia. He was absorbed with Moravian speech, which he once called ”as soft as if it were cutting butter.” Indeed, his fascination with speech of all kinds was such that he was forever jotting down the tones and rhythms of the way people talked – or birds sang -even in languages he did not otherwise understand. The most moving instance of this came in 1903, as he sat helpless at the bedside of his dying daughter, Olga; his notebook consists of pitiful musical notations of her last words, down to the final, sighing, ”aja. …” [from: Tiina Vainiomäki, The Musical Realism of Leoš Janáček, p178]

I am no student of language, barely literate in the English of my childhood. Times without number I have attempted to learn a foreign language — French, German, and Scot’s Gaelic are among those efforts — and each was a dismal failure. Whether the fault was mine or the mode of instruction I cannot say. [Though I must admit the usual method, where the instructor jauntily enters the room and breezily introduces him or her self in the language du jour, is the wrongest possible way for me to learn. I’m a Capricorn, for fuck’s sake, and require structure. Stand at the blackboard, diagram sentences, show me parts of speech and discuss the rules of the connectivity. Treat language like a goddam Erector Set, give me that degree of order and I might actually have succeeded.] Perhaps that is why I am so fascinated by language.

Like the four Austro-Hungarian composers invoked above, I have to believe that the speech patterns of Agincourt weren’t necessarily unique to that community. But also that they were essential to its identity. There have been opportunities to express that idea, here in the blog and elsewhere, but there need to be more, a theme on which I need to expend some thought.

If Agincourt had been a country, Donald Evans would have been its philatelic designer.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

FURNISS, Allan (1883–1942)

“Edinburgh Castle”

colored graphite on paper / 7.3 inches by 10.3 inches

ca1940

Born at Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1883, Allan Furniss eventually emigrated to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. During WWI, Furniss enlisted in the 83rd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He is buried at Regina Cemetery.