Jay Vissers's blog

While looking through the "Personalities" reference files in the Picture Collection, I happened across this official portrait of a proud, confident man in a tightly-buttoned uniform with waist sash and epaulettes.

Portrait of Francisco Solano Lopez, President of Paraguay (Born 1827-Elected president 1862-Died 1870). From the French magazine "L'Illustration", November 29th, 1862.

This sort of uniform, along with the feather-decorated cocked hat that went with it, was very much the norm in its day, but now evokes thoughts of Ruritanian romances and comic operas. The portrait was of Francisco Solano Lopez, the president of the South American republic of Paraguay from 1862 until 1870. He was the dictator of his nation during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), during which his country's small army fought, and was eventually defeated by, the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in a war which bankrupted his homeland and left most of its male population dead or wounded.

I remembered being fascinated by this war as an undergraduate in college. The bloodiest conflict in South American history ostensibly began as a dispute over navigation rights on the Rio de la Plata, but was also fueled by issues of national pride which contributed greatly to keeping it going for six years. Large battles were fought by men in colorful Victorian-era uniforms using the strategies and tactics of the Napoleonic wars, featuring infantry delivering massed volleys of rifle fire, cavalry charging with drawn sabers, and barrages from horse-drawn artillery pieces. More terrible fighting ensued during the storming of forts and networks of trenches. Naval engagements took place on rivers as ships fought one another while dueling with fortifications on river banks and trying to pass huge chains stretched across the waterways. (Picture Collection has copies of a series of official paintings from the Brazilian navy depicting some of these battles.) The desperate bravery of the soldiers and sailors combined with the ferocity of the close-quarters fighting to produce horrific casualties, only made worse by the appallingly primitive state of military medicine at the time (think of Civil War doctors sawing off limbs without anesthesia).

Bird's-eye view from a balloon of the defenses of Humaita, the Paraguayan fortress guarding the water approaches to their capital of Asuncion. Here were fortifications and army camps along the banks of the river as well as several gigantic iron chains stretched across it to prevent the passage of enemy ships. Humaita served as Lopez's headquarters in the field as well as a sort of unofficial capital during parts of the war. From the American magazine "Harper's Weekly", May 9th, 1868.

Thousands of families across a continent learned of the death or maiming of their men. After initial victories, Lopez's army was eroded in battle after battle, and his small nation suffered the agonies of pillage, starvation and refugees driven from their homes. Finally Lopez, fleeing into the hinterlands with his government ministers and the remnants of his army, as well as his Irish-born wife Eliza Lynch (whom some blame for inflaming Lopez's ego to the point where he started the war), was killed by a lance carried by a Brazilian cavalryman while trying to cross a river. Like many dictators, opinions on the legacy of Francisco Solano Lopez are profoundly mixed, largely depending on the nationality of the person passing judgment on him. To historians writing in the nations which fought against Paraguay, he is seen as the quintessential jumped-up, "tin pot" tyrant, leading his doomed country into a battle it could not win for the sake of his own ego. But to many Paraguayans, he was a brave nationalist, standing up for the rights of a small state against the overweening sway of its larger neighbors.

Thinking about Lopez's image, I started wondering about how any great man or woman's persona is demonized or burnished in remembrance with the passing years. Looking at Francisco Solano Lopez staring from the piece of hundred-and-fifty-year-old paper in my hand, I can imagine someone like Robert E. Lee chivalrously seeing himself defending a lost cause, or a Pol Pot driven to reshape his nation to an idea of greatness even if it must be broken or perish outright in the process. I looked away from the picture and, for a brief moment, imagined the person in the engraving standing on a balcony, watching his army march by to the music of a band and the "Viva!"s of a cheering crowd.

There are two recent, rather episodic and impressionistic novels which attempt to give a sense of Lopez, his nation and his war. They're worth reading in parallel, comparing how they describe the same incidents. They are "The News From Paraguay" by Lily Tuck, and "The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch" by Anne Enright.

This is one of my favorite images from the million and a half items held by the NYPL’s Picture Collection. Of course, I haven’t seen them all, and if you ask my co-workers they’ll tell you that I usually work with pictures about ships, airplanes, battles and weird animals like bats, insects and snakes. But this image really stirs me. Every few months I take it from its folder (labeled FAMILY LIFE – 1950s) and revisit it to remind me of the evocative power of art from another time. This picture stands for all the reasons we save it and other pictures for the public to use and enjoy.

It’s an illustration from an elementary school level reading book, and it shows a family getting ready to leave after a visit to relatives on a farm. It’s dated 1951, but still has a strong late-40’s feel, especially in the car with its small-windowed, round-fendered “roadster” look so unlike the plumper, chrome-adorned autos we associate with the Eisenhower era and which turned into the big-finned “land yachts” of the Kennedy years. Look how the artist has captured the behavior of the animals: the dog pulls back from the baby’s outthrust hand, while the cat leans into the ear-scratching given by the little girl. A chicken comes running to see what all the fuss is about. Father is opening the trunk of the car. He has his jacket and hat ready to go with those suit pants because, even though he may have gone around with his tie off and top button of his shirt undone, he’s going back the city now, and men have to dress for this. The young boy wears a straw hat as a memento, but his Mom has a hat and high heels. Grandpa (in overalls) and Grandma (in her apron) are bringing a farewell gift of fresh vegetables and eggs to take back to the suburbs.

Yes, it’s idealized, and even a little corny (no pun intended!), but it speaks to me in so many ways. I love the trim neatness of the farm buildings against the blue sky. I feel the undertones of modest prosperity and the strength of family ties. I’m reminded that there’s a whole country beyond the borders of New York City, with real people whose work feeds us all, and whom we often dismiss from our lofty urban perch. It all makes me try to imagine the classrooms where this book would have been used. What did the kids there do after school? Where did their parents work, and what did they watch on TV? It’s almost too clean and perfect, and all the faces are white.

It’s very much a product of its era, and I know this. But it still suggests how America wanted to see itself at the time it was made. To me, it’s as evocative of its era as anything by a Greek black-figure vase painter, Breugel or David Hockney. It’s an America I just missed seeing, and perhaps that’s why it appeals to me so strongly.

I live for the day when some person who’s regarded as an arbiter of cultural taste is asked to name their favorite books. “I know you’re expecting an answer like Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, but, truth be told, the one story that really sums up the human condition for me is issue number 55 of The Amazing Spider-Man.” They then proceed to deliver a literate, succinct defense of their preference which would do credit to an Oxford professor’s deconstruction of Beowulf. I know this might sound weird, but then I also hope for the day when the consumers of culture, and not a coterie of critics, decide what they want to read, see, and hear.

Hidden treasures are what make looking for materials on the Mid-Manhattan Library’s Art and Literature floor so interesting. Three-quarters of the books and DVDs that people request will be about art and plays and architecture and novels and cartoons and poems and buildings I’ve never heard of until today. That’s why it’s interesting to flip through the pages of each book that’s pulled from the shelves. I want to see what kind of sculpture Antoine-Louis Barye produced (more on this later), what factors influence the design of an airport, and just what sort of poem is “Aniara” by Harry Martinsson (more on this later, too).

When I was a kid, I knew that grown-ups used big words with meanings I didn’t understand. There was always the assumption that as I got older, I’d learn these as a matter of course. In the meantime, however, I could always make up definitions based on other words I knew that sounded like the new one. Some of them still stick with me because, in my opinion, they’re better than the real things. For example …

I heard that someone had “matriculated”. This is a rather pompous way of saying that he or she had signed up for college, but I didn’t know that. So, what did it sound like. The main elements seemed to be “may”,”trickle” and “late”. “MAy TRICkle Until it’s too LATE” suggested itself very quickly thereafter. What could trickle until it’s too late? Aha! Matriculate means to bleed internally for a long time without knowing it until you suddenly keel over dead on the spot. I was already writing my epic, never-to-be-published story of an imaginary empire, so this new word fit effortlessly into the growing, convoluted plot.

“Old King Uzz was taking a bath when he banged himself rather sharply on one of the faucets. He looked down and saw only a small bruise on his side, but he didn’t know he had busted his thyrax and it was bleeding into his divercreas. He went about his daily business hunting dinosaurs and reviewing his army in the nude. All the while his blood was running inside, drip, drip, drip. In the evening he went to a huge state dinner in his palace in the city of ‘Poo. After eating he burped up a big bubble of blood and fell dead with his face in a cake. The palace doctor said he must have matriculated for hours.”

I wrote this when I was twelve years old and felt mighty proud of it then. I still do, and I haven’t lost my affinity for puns and other wordplay. Every odd word I hear automatically goes through the rolling and smelting mill of my mind where it’s compared to other words and filed away for future use. People’s names evoke a particularly strong response and, by their mere sound, can evoke responses ranging from euphoria to something akin to having smelled something nasty. This may verge on something called “synesthesia”, but that’s another story.

The whole point of this posting is to encourage people to learn lots of new words. Find out what they really mean, but make something up on the way to the dictionary. It’s lots of fun, and often what you invent is way better than the real thing.

There is a saying that some of the most precious moments in our lives are special just because we didn’t know that they were important at that time.

I mention this because for the past few weeks I’ve been experiencing a resurgence of interest in the topic of famous fires, a subject that has fascinated and haunted me ever since I happened across a book on the topic at the library at MacDill Air Force Base (Tampa, Florida) when I was eleven years old. I remember sitting in the aisle between the shelves, utterly spellbound by black and white photos of the aftermaths of great conflagrations. There I learned for the first time about the Iroquois Theater in Chicago (1903), the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York (1911), and the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston (1942). Even at that age, I could fill the images of the blackened and scorched buildings with visions of crowds of people being burned and trampled as they tried to escape. I saw in my mind’s eye the mingled bravery and helplessness of the firemen and could imagine the unavailing anguish of the victims’ families. I never forgot about that red-covered book whose name I cannot now recall, for it engendered an interest in me that resurfaces whenever a new book is published on the subject of a famous fire.

Habermann, Franz Xaver (1721-1796) - Engraver
“Representation du Feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck”
In: The Eno Collection of City Views
Published: 1776

Books on Famous Fires

I recently read the books “Chicago Death Trap” and “Tinder box” (both available from New York Public Library), about the Iroquois Theater fire. They are very well written, and it is easy for their readers to imagine themselves in the audience watching the musical comedy “Mister Bluebeard” on that fateful December afternoon shortly after Christmas.

One frame in life’s endless ribbon of events

And here is the core of this entry. The families and couples and shopgirls and children who filled the hall to capacity and beyond that day had no idea while watching a song-and-dance number called “In the Pale Moonlight” that a stage lamp being used to flood the theater with a beautiful blue light was sparking and setting one of the scenery curtains afire. Half an hour after this moment of ignition, over six hundred of the audience would be dead, many more trampled than burned in a terrible stampede to the narrrow exits. I am haunted by this last moment before the fire and the panic. I replay it in my mind’s eye and can iris in like a camera on any and every detail. …The ornate theater, newly opened. Men in celluloid collars and vests sitting next to their wives in corsets, high-button shoes and immense feathered hats. Children excited by the performance or bored and wishing they were home playing with their new toys. Audience members standing behind the last rows of seats or sitting in the aisles. The excited cast and crew members backstage readying sets, props and costumes. The gasps of wonder from the viewers as the theater fills with artificial “moonlight”. Aerialist Nellie Reed waiting high above the stage, ready to swing out over the audience during her number where she’ll scatter flower petals over the crowd. (She will be one of the few cast members to perish when she is forgotten on her perch after the fire breaks out.)… It’s all so poignant and pregnant with portent … to me, because I know what’s going to happen next! None of the people there in the theater that afternoon knew that they would soon be fighting for their lives. Until the fire brought its tragedy, this was an average performance in a typical theater for everyday people. I use my imagination to crystallize a moment into a myth that is very powerful for my mental picture of the world. I can put myself virtually into the audience and freeze that instant in time, viewing it from every angle. But in real life, this is just one “frame” in life’s endless ribbon of events, no more or less special than any other.

I know that events can’t really be frozen into a bell jar or vitrine. Logic says that there was nothing remarkable about the last distribution of pay envelopes that Saturday afternoon at the Triangle factory, or singer Goodie Goodell playing the piano atop a revolving platform that night in the Melody Lounge at the Cocoanut Grove. But I choose, emotionally, to focus on and reflect on them, combing them for meaning and sometimes being reduced to tears at the evocative power of their sheer ordinariness. To return to the theme of this post, these things and moments were special because they were not important at their time. I have the luxury of living later and being able to “stop the film”, so to speak. The people caught up in these events were forced into and through them and did not have this choice. Maybe this is why I think so much about them.

The Burning of Rome : descriptive march and two-step / E. T. Paull, c1903
From the “Treasures of the Performing Arts” digital project