Sometimes when we have breakfast outside, a mockingbird lands on the Japanese maple in front of the house, then hops down to the porch flower box and eyes our plates. After an offering of scone or toast, he/she flies off with it, then returns for more. I wonder if there are little ones in a nearby nest? One morning I had my sketchbook with me.
I’ll bet you thought I was about to announce an alternative to fossil fuels, or at least an exciting new political candidate.
No, tonight is the opening reception for a new exhibition in the Bob Hope Gallery at the Library of Congress on which my husband has been working for the past several months. It’s one of many history exhibitions he’s created for the LOC over the years. Hope for America: Performers, Politics & Pop Culture explores the involvement of entertainers in politics throughout the 20th century, often through satirical commentary, sometimes through direct participation. There is also a moving segment on Hope’s work for the USO entertaining troops all over the world, which he did for SEVENTY YEARS. The exhibition features film and television clips and radio broadcasts as well as photos, letters, sheet music, and other artifacts to tell the story.
If you are in the DC area, come visit! I’ll bet you could use a few belly laughs. (This is the cover of the brochure I designed for the exhibit.)
Agnès
From my sketchbook. The neighborhood pool has opened, and one of its most attractive features is the large flowering potted plants. They have done well in the recent rainfall. Watch out.
Erna
Here is Al, sketched “without my permission!” as he put it, after a dinner party. Today is his birthday, and he has a life of unusually useful work to celebrate: years as a Civil Rights Movement lawyer in the South (the stories he can tell!), and many more years leading the ACLU’s National Prison Project. He’s usually on the road somewhere, fighting for prisoners’ rights, the abolishing of torture, and the improvement of dreadful prison conditions in the U.S. and all over the world. (He believes prisoners are human beings, which is not a universally shared opinion.)
Although Al may look like (and can be when necessary) Mr. Tough Guy, which has certainly come in handy in his work, under that rough-hewn exterior beats the heart of a cupcake. Maybe that’s a clue to his choice of profession. Also he’s an awesome chef. Happy Birthday, Al! I know you won’t have to bake your own cake.
Al
From my sketchbook. It’s the season of graduations, and weddings, and the perpetual hankie in the hand and lump in the throat.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses, As if to reject my thought and its easy figure. A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking, And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago; How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it; And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody, For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back, Beating a smooth course for the right window And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling, Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder.
—Richard Wilbur
Jude
For two years my daughter has been taking piano lessons from the artistic and ever-cheerful Emily, whose birthday it is today. And so I post a sketch of Emily’s house, one of the secret magic places in the Federal City—a green and flowery bower even in the whiteness of winter, colorful with painting, sculpture, and pottery from her hand and her travels, cozy with paisley and pillows, and suitably furnished: baby grand in the corner, dog napping on his pillow, cat queening it on the windowsill. To repose here through the Wednesday lesson is to enjoy a brief weekly vacation from stress.
Now it’s time for some music: Happy birthday, dear Emileeee, happy birthday to you!
Emily
One of the projects of our homeschooling Botany block, which we began just before the spring equinox (and which looks like it will continue for a year, if we want to get a rounded view of plant life) has been a Tree Study. My daughter chose a tree in its winter state, down the street on the grounds of the hotel, and we sketched its bare branches and made crayon bark rubbings. Spring arrived; we sketched other, now-budding, even flowering and leafing trees; did other bark rubbings. Our Chosen Tree remained mystifyingly and unashamedly bare in a forest of showy blossoms and new green leaves. Good grief! Was it even ALIVE? Yet the reddish branch tips were springy, not dry.
One day the tips seemed a bit longer. The next day more so. Still no green, but increasingly long. Finally each tip gently opened to reveal a glimpse of…GREEN! Then, long clusters of large, fresh leaves unrolled themselves day by day, impossibly, from the formerly slender twiggy tips. In a few days the tree bore a bright and bushy yellow-green crown wider than it was high, well worth the wait. We sketched it in its new glory. Some of you must be familiar with this type of tree, but I only recognize a handful of varieties. Our neighbor Jason, seeing the sketch, revealed its identity: it is a hornbeam.
I thought I was sketching this police officer most discreetly from my table at Panera. After a while, though, he began to look around nervously. Finally he gathered up the remaining half of his lunch and departed. Oops.
Uncle Ken
(If this picture is baffling, please see the news story on the Texas school board’s decision to eliminate Thomas Jefferson from its textbooks.)
Continued from Library of Congress–Part 2, May 7th
Spofford proposed a separate building for a library that would equal (or surpass! he suggested temptingly to Congress) the great libraries of Europe. It took about 15 years to hold a design competition and authorize funds, but at last, between 1886 and 1897, an astonishing team of architects, engineers, artists, and craftspeople created the Thomas Jefferson Building, probably the most magnificent structure in Washington, DC, and certainly the most labor-intensive per square inch.
The award-winning design was a building in the style of the Italian Renaissance, “efficient, beautiful, and safe,” and its thoughtful embellishment and finishing—despite a hovering Congress with its eye on the budget—is a suitable tribute to that period of cultural flowering. Stroll through and marvel at the multi-layered ornamentation, in paint, marble, and mosaic, depicting images and figures historical and mythological honoring the higher achievements of humanity: philosophy, natural science, music, art, theology, astronomy, law.
And these many wonders house a collection even more wondrous. Who could have foreseen, on that day in 1800 when John Adams signed the appropriations bill, what would develop from an initial purchase of 740 books and three maps? This is from the Library’s own website:
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with nearly 145 million items on approximately 745 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 33 million books and other print materials, 3 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.3 million maps, 6 million pieces of sheet music and 63 million manuscripts… The Library receives some 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily… In 1992 it acquired its 100 millionth item.
Not only that, but at the Library you will find:
Works in 470 languages. Four Hundred and Seventy.
Newspapers in many of those languages, from all over the world.
Over 5,000 books printed BEFORE 1500, including a Gutenberg Bible.
Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, with Talking Books and other resources available free of charge.
The Center for the Book, created to promote literacy and reading, with affiliates in all 50 states.
The American Folklife Center, with 4,000 collections of stories, music, and oral history.
An ongoing program of lectures, symposia, exhibitions, concerts, book-signings, films, and tours both general and specific.
The Library of Congress also sponsors the popular annual National Book Festival on the Mall, bringing authors and readers together for readings and discussion.
Whew! And that’s not even all….for the rest of it you must go to the website to discover. Or to the Library itself.
The Library of Congress remains a work in progress, an almost unimaginable organizational, classification, conservation and retrieval challenge. Its evolution from modest beginnings is astounding. It has survived fires, civil and world wars, recessions and depressions, and an international information explosion.
And you, dear Reader, should you manage to make it to Washington, DC, and if you are at least 16 years of age (high school students must show that they have first exhausted their other sources for research) and have a valid identification card, such as a driver’s license: YOU are eligible for a Library of Congress Reader Identification card, and you may pursue your studies, with access to hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge and beauty, in the splendid Reading Room of this marvelous, this amazing, this thank-your-lucky-stars national treasure.
Connie
This sketch is from a Mothers Day hike at Carderock a couple of years ago, and I’m posting it as an excuse to tell you Washingtonians about another hike entirely, on Saturday, May 22nd, sponsored by the Audubon Naturalist Society. Melanie Choukas-Bradley and Tina Brown (respectively, author and illustrator of Sugarloaf: The Mountain’s History, Geology and Natural Lore) will lead a hike at Sugarloaf Mountain while simultaneously discussing the botany, wildlife, geology, and history of the area. (They must have better lungs than I do!) At the lunch break, Tina Brown will give a nature-sketching demonstration, so carry your sketchbooks.
Some of you may have attended Melanie Choukas-Bradley’s wonderful Earth Day talk about the botanical highlights of the Washington area, which was entertainingly intertwined with local history and biography. If you didn’t make it to the talk, you can look for her book, City of Trees. (It’s not often I can find three of my favorite subjects in ONE book.)
You can find more details about the hike at the Audubon website.
