Osteology is the science of bones. Like most of our scientific terminology, it derives from the Greek: ὀστέον ‘bones’ and λόγος ‘study’. William Plane Pycraft [1868–1942] was renowned for his work in both osteology and zoology. But it’s the rare scientist who can share their knowledge with youngsters without “talking down” to them. Pycraft was that rarity.

One of his best publications for children was Pads, Paws & Claws, which gains some of its charm from the illustrations of his near contemporary John Edwin Noble [1876–1941]. And it is bones which seem to have bonded these two men, because Noble himself wrote about the anatomy of animals as an aid to drawing them proportionately, accurately, convincingly. Pads, Paws & Claws may be the perfect collaboration. I found and bought my first copy of the book at a flea market in Rochester, Minnesota, and it was the first of several other books illustrated by Noble, including more produced with Pycraft.

I sat down one day to expand the business life of Agincourt and realized that any rural community of modest size was likely to have a veterinarian and that “P,P&C” was the near-perfect name for a veterinary practice. “Near-perfect” because the only thing missing is hooves. And so it is that northwestern Iowa acquired its animal doctors — though I can’t at the moment tell you their names. Working on it.

Suggestions are always appreciated. As is constructive criticism.

[Hard to believe this is blog entry #1499!]

PS: Most readers will know that I find “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” to be a pessimistic point of view; it’s usually more like two or three degrees. One of Noble’s artistic predecessors and mentors was Sir Edwin Landseer [1803–1973]. Landseer’s name was passed along to the son of a friend; that child became Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, renowned Edwardian architect.

A long-standing dream of mine is to have sung backup in a 60s group, “Toody Lipschitz and the Dipshits“. Our first album “Loose Bowels” was premiered at the Yellow Brick Road House in Agincourt. Don’t you wish you’d been there.

“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one’s country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called “homesickness.” Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe (“I yearn for you,” “I’m nostalgic for you”; “I cannot bear the pain of your absence”). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don’t know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don’t know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m’ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s’ennuyer is weak, cold — anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Psych(ot)ic notions of karma and inevitability, as opposed to mere coïncidence, are part of me, always have been. I’ve lost count of cases where “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” has stepped up to kick me in the ass: “See? I told you. But would you listen? No.” Now, I’m no great fan of Mr Bacon — not that he’s a bad actor; maybe it’s the films that lack luster — but I could easily bypass a “Kevin Bacon” film festival. One of those “coïncidences” occurred a few years ago while I was living in Belgium.

My friend Richard came for a visit and we rented a car for a trip across northern France, a day-trip. We intended to travel as far as an anachronistic English country house by Sir Edwin Lutyens at Varengeville-sur-Mer, a rural commune just beyond Dieppe. But the first stop, the true beginning of our westward journey, was at Lille, technically at Croix, an upscale suburb.

Architect Rob Mallet-Stevens was contemporary of LeCorbusier, though history books don’t see it quite that way. Though just one year separated them, it was Corbu who became a thing, the darling of the Modern Movement, part of a trinity which included Mies van der Rohe and the somewhat older Frank Lloyd Wright. What is it about threesomes?

Mallet-Stevens began his career in 1907, about the same time as Corbu, and though he was successful in monetary terms, attracting wealthy and influential clients, time has not treated him well. Which may have something to do with his death in 1945, while Corb lived on until 1969; those twenty-four years made the difference, if the work did not.

In 1932 Paul and Lucie Cavrois commissioned the design of a large suburban home from Mallet-Stevens for a site in Croix — definitively on the proper side of town for “bourgeois domestic architecture,” according to one source. Cavrois was a Roubaix textile entrepreneur with both money and a taste for the shockingly modern, a good fit with the showman architect. The product of that collaboration was Villa Cavrois, 1840 m² (nearly 20,000 square feet) of sleek modern exterior and custom fittings. There isn’t anything deprived of Mallet-Stevens’ touch. After having become derelict, the house and grounds were acquired by the city of Croix and restored to their 1932 glory, the year the project was complete. This was the destination for Richard and me that spring morning.

Finding the place from space is no problem; it can literally be distinguished from its context in google.earth. Finding it on the ground is another matter, particularly since neither Richard nor I speak French. When we chanced on a lady returning from market, the best I could manage was “veel cav-wah” and a shrug of the shoulders signifying ignorance. She point in a direction and said something about “une chapelle”. With little more than a keen sense of direction — like homing pigeons — we located the villa, surrounded by chain-link fence, in mid-restoration, which was not unexpected. You can find the house today, fully restored and open for tours (as soon as the pandemic has passed) at the intersection of Avenue du Président John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Avenue François Roussel.

Other intermediate stops on our pilgrimage included several WWI cemeteries designed by the aforementioned Lutyens, during his “classical” period. But our ultimate goal that day was the country house “Bois des Moutiers” at Varengeville-sur-Mer, as spectacular an exercise in Edwardian Arts & Crafts (though geographically misplaced) as the Villa Cavrois was to the Art Deco. Two iconic houses were the brackets of our journey.

And so, we duly arrived at Varengeville with as little knowledge of the house’s location as we had at Croix, except this time there were hints of signage that took us down a single-track road with no shoulder or space for parking. The house was a tremendous experience, again equal to our first stop but here the setting had been provided by the landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll, a cousin of architect Lutyens and frequent collaborator. The interiors of the house have been inaccessible for some time but the grounds were worth the drive and we had an excellent chat with the owners, who doubled as admittance staff. We learned that Bois des Moutiers is embroiled in French inheritance court, shares of the property owned by two dozen cousins of contrary opinion on what should be done with the place — a perfect “tear-down” site for a bunch of McMansions. But as we turned toward the car, our host admonished us to drive right, rather than left, and visit the village church at the end of the road.

A charming Romanesque church, the église de Varengeville-sur-Mer, and its burial ground, tottering on the edge of a cliff above La Mance or what the English so rudely claim as their “Channel.” Come back in twenty years and both chapel and grounds will have collapsed into La Manche, taking its inmates along for the ride. 

The church was interesting but the tombs and the view their inmates couldn’t appreciate were a late afternoon spectacle not to be missed. Wandering among the memorials, hoping to find we knew not what, I was drawn to an impressive grave. And was stunned to learn that it is the final resting place of French composer Albert Roussel. Why he should be found in such an out-of-the-way cemetery and not nobly interred at Pere Lachaise, is a mystery. But I took great personal satisfaction that the brackets of our architectural tour had each been houses of iconic status on streets associated with French musicians bearing the surname Roussel: Francois (1510–1577) and Albert (1869–1937).

I rest my case. And, thank you, Kevin Bacon.

[#1494]

“Although the tribe are friends with the coca leaf, mescal, ayahuasca, yagé, the titular milk of river toads in the mating season, marijuana, peyote and Salvia divinorum, none of these are as potent for them as the power of a story.

“This tribe are storytellers, and stories are their drugs. For them, stories are not mental escapades, but are lived, richly, fully, viscerally. Every person in the tribe, man, woman and child, has the power; once they begin to recount, the others fall into trances. There are some figures, elders of the tribe, the Tellers, whose power to do this is even stronger…. Unusually, apart from their creation myth, there is no canon, and stories beget stories, in endless circulation, endless supply, one folding into another and generating a third, fourth, fifth, the characters always recognisable but always changing. Every story is told anew, nothing is ever repeated. And the fount of all these stories is that creation myth: a leopard, drunk on the milk of the river toad, brought the world into being with a story, and will end it again when the story finishes.”

— C. D. Rose, Who’s who when everyone is someone else.

In my world, the story never ends, so long as there is someone to pick up the thread. My part is almost over; my chapter.  Who will take it on?

If serendipity were acknowledged here as often as it has happened, it would be the most frequently used word in these nearly 1500 entries. As “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way,” I ought to be the happiest of my kind, for chance has pervaded the Agincourt Project from the beginning. The choice of “Agincourt” itself as the name of our imagined community generated so many adjunct topics and tangents that I have lost count. And so another happy accident arose this morning.

Habitués of the blog will know that the hero of the story (though he himself was unaware of that status) Anson Tennant, designer of the Agincourt Public Library & Tennant Memorial Gallery, celebrated the near-completion of the project — when loose ends were being safely tied off — took a well-deserved break from his labours and set sail for Liverpool on May 1st, 1915, intent on paying homage to the founders of the Arts & Crafts movement which, in its American guise, had formed the foundation of his architectural point of view.

William Morris, the Founder of the Feast, had died nineteen years previous, but other key characters of the movement were still active, even if in the twilight of its British form. Ernest Gimson, C.F.A. Voysey, and others were still producing work, though their sun was setting. But that, I suppose, is the seductive beauty of twilight: wrapped in its mellow tones, we forget that the day will soon be at an end and may be taking us with it. But the youthful enthusiasm of someone like young Tennant hadn’t seen that prospect when he boarded the Lusitania for what would be its final voyage. For Anson, of course, the ship’s tragic sinking opened a second chapter in his life, even if it did not for the 1,198 shipmates who did not survive.

Quite beyond the experience of visiting the principal sites of the Arts & Crafts and the opportunity to speak with some of its founders and chief practitioners, the voyage itself held out possibilities which Anson may not have appreciated — until it was too late, of course. Imagine the conversations at dinner or in the lounge; making circuits of the deck, even if Edwardian sensibility separated passengers by class. For a gregarious young person like Tennant, each encounter was an experience; each new acquaintance a prospective correspondent and even a client.

I had not realized the breadth of those possibilities beyond a few of the most famous passengers. Consider an exchange over lunch with Elbert and Alice Hubbard, of East Aurora, New York, founders of “The Roycrofters” and its influential publications. Or crossing the path of Theodate Pope (later Theodate Pope Riddle), one of America’s first female architects, who survived the sinking; she had apprenticed in the office of McKim Mead & White. But I hadn’t realized that one of the characters in the William Halsey Wood narrative — which has had occasional tangencies with Agincourt — was also aboard: Rev Basil Maturin [1847–1915], Irish-born Anglican priest who was a key figure in the High Church party among Episcopalians and would have shared that perspective with Anson and other members of his Anglo-Catholic family.

Something tells me I need to inspect the Lusitania passenger list more carefully.

[#1491]

An old friend, how sadly gone and become a treasured memory, had been the archivist of what a former mayor of our town called “a local newspaper”. She was the go-to person for obtuse questions of local history. I tended to think the archive she managed  consisted largely of clippings, filed in some arcane way, cross-referenced, and searchable in a variety of contexts.

Lately, on eBay, I’ve noticed sellers who seem to have acquired files of newspaper photographs. This makes perfect sense as professional photographs make the transition from film-based to digital records and it opens a new source of images for my long-term projects. And so, I spent an hour today searching among those images and choosing a few that can be easily adapted to the Agincourt narrative. The category “Disasters” came immediately to mind.

How much photoshopping do think would be required to adapt this image to the Agincourt story? The question, I suppose, it what sort of narrative would fit? Disasters are more common than we might hope. But they beg several questions — of cause and effect; loss of life and property; determination of fault. This interurban accident could have been responsible for a single headline in the evening edition of The Plantagenet. But it could just as reasonably have evolved through investigative journalism — not all of which involves the raking of muck.

At this point, I’ll just say the wheels are turning.

[#1490]