Lady With A Unicorn, by Raphael

I just wrote about the wonders of Dover Publications. With some of the samples they e-mailed me this week came a painting from their 120 Italian Renaissance Paintings CD-ROM and book called Lady With A Unicorn, by Raphael. Amazingly, last week Emma Alvarez posted a very interesting and informative article about unicorns on her blog entitled Unicorns, Symbols of Purity .

With unicorns mentioned in a number of cultures, literature, and even nines times in The Bible, did these mythical animals really trot and gallop here on earth?

Romance and Beauty Offered By Dover Publications

Amazon.com gets plenty of attention from many book lovers like myself, but Dover is a rare treasure that is probably overlooked.

I discovered Dover Publications a number of years ago after running across a copy of one Andrew Lang's colorful fairy tale books at the public library. Lang's fairy tale series is published by Dover, and after getting four of his books, I went on to purchase other books on the subject of Islamic art.

Dover publishs books on a wide range of subject matter. If you are particularly interested in the arts, literature, and just the plain Romantic, Dover provides items for plenty of escapism, craft, artistic, literary, and learning ideas. Since I ordered several items from them last summer, including the Braun and Schneider book on historical fashion on which my Monday post was about, Dover sends me weekly e-mails of samples from some of their book and CD-ROM collections.

Below is what I have recently received.

If you are an aficionado of the Romantic and the beautiful go to Dover and explore other interesting and inexpensive rarities.

From Erte's Theatrical Costumes

Nautical Vignettes

Pet Illustrations

Celtic Stencil Designs

Geometrical Patterns and Designs for Artists and Craftspeople

African Designs

Victorian Houses

Historic Textile Design

Mehndi Designs

Floral Ornament

Fashion of the 1930s

Murasaki of Japan

Long ago in the mists of time in feudal Japan a daughter was born to a provincial governor and his wife. They named her Murasaki Shikibu.

Not only was the governor an official, but he was also a scholar. The traits of the enjoyment of learning and curiosity was passed on to his daughter who from a young age showed a remarkable ability to grasp and understand literature and languages. This was a miracle and a source of pride and disappointment for Murasaki's father who once said to her, "If only you were a boy, how happy I should be!"

Murasaki's brother, unlike her, did not display her swiftness in learning. In ancient Japan, women were allowed to do some basic learning, but the realm of the classics which were in Chinese was the province of men. Being a man with an open mind and appreciating his daughter's singularity, Murasaki's father allowed her to sit in on her brother's private tutoring sessions.

When Murasaki came of age, she was married off to a distant relative. She bore him a daughter. In time, plague appeared in the land, and Murasaki's husband was carried off in the epidemic. Alone, except now for her daughter, Murasaki began to write a book. Since she was the daughter of a prominent man and quite a curiosity herself, she captured the attention of the empress. She was brought to court, where she became the special companion to the empress, even teaching her Chinese in secret. She is given the title of "lady."

Lady Murasaki continues to write her book which is about a prince named Genji, getting ideas for the plot from her surroundings. She also keeps a diary which is a vivid description of life at the Japanese court and also expresses her distaste for what she sees as a vapid existence of nobles intriguing, backbiting, and focusing mainly on the silly and trivial. She writes one day in her diary, "Pretty and coy, shrinking from sight, unsociable, fond of old tales, conceited, so wrapped up in poetry that other people hardly exist, spitefully looking down on the whole world-such is the unpleasant opinion that people have of me. Yet when they come to know me they say that I am strangely gentle, quite unlike what they had been led to believe. I know that people look down on me like some old outcast, but I have become accustomed to all this, and tell myself, 'My nature is as it is."Despite her indifference and dislike of court life she becomes a reluctant celebrity when her novel, The Tale of Genji, is discovered. It is presented as a serial and read orally. Lady Murasaki writes this in her diary, "His Excellency saw The Tale of Genji laying about in the Empress's apartments. He made his usual stupid jibes, and then handed me a poem written on a piece of paper to which he had attached a branch of plum-blossom: 'What with these ardent tales of love, little can I think that men have passed you by, as they might this plum-tree's sour fruit.' And so I replied, 'If no man has tasted, who can say if the fruit is sour, or if the writer of these tales herself has known such love?'' Is the novel's hero, Prince Genji, Lady Murasaki's alter ego?

Unlike most at court who live only for the moment, Lady Murasaki knows winds of change are moving inside Japan. The decadent lifestyle of the court will eventually be swept away by the samurai who will install a military dictatorship ruled by a shogun.

At age 50, Lady Murasaki asks to retire from the court, leaving it for the peace and serenity of a convent. Finally, she is at peace.

This is my personal rendition of the life of Lady Murasaki (973-1025?) She is believed to have written the first modern novel, The Tale of Genji. Both Genji and the Diary of Lady Murasaki can be purchased on Amazon.com. The quotes listed in my tale are from Lady Murasaki's diary.

In 2001, Liza Dalby, an anthropologist and the only westerner to have been trained as a geisha, wrote the novel The Tale of Murasaki which is a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu.

Ideas for the writing style in this post were inspired by entries in the blogs The Victorian Era and Emma Alvarez Site, Hans Christian Anderson, The Brothers Grimm, and The Thousand and One Nights.

Flowers In Africa

This is bougainvillea which was a flower both Africans and expats planted at their homes when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana. Africainement, a blogger in Senegal, posted some unusual and beautiful flowers native to various African countries on her blog last week. You can see them here. Africa is known for its fauna (animal life), but its' flora (plant life) is overlooked.

Well, it is too delightful and Romantic looking for me to overlook:)

The Romance of Historical Fashion

When I was a child I would spend hours looking in the historical fashion section of our Britannica and Collier encyclopedias. I am fascinated by historical costumes from ancient times on up to the early 20th century. My favorite period of historical dress was during the Empire and Regency periods of the late 18th and early 19th centuries when women let go of so much tight corseting and put on dresses and gowns inspired by the ancient Romans and Greeks. The high Empire waist line from that time is currently back in style again, and I love it.

In the last 4 decades, fashion has basically been recycled over and over. This was not the case through the centuries. Braun and Schneider's historical fashion plates published in the late 1880s attested to diversity of fashion throughout the ages. Last year I bought Dover's edition of Braun and Schneider's work called Historic Costume in Pictures which can be seen here. All 125 plates which were published from 1861 until 1880 can be seen online. A prelude to all of the costumes are the ladies dancing above, these Turkish Ottoman ladies and an ancient Egyptian ruler and his servants.

Enjoy!

Excerpt From The Africans: A Triple Heritage

Yesterday in my post Ali A. Mazrui: Intellectual and Romantic, I mentioned his documentary The Africans: A Triple Heritage. On YouTube I was able to locate an excerpt from the 9 hour documentary where Dr. Mazrui explains why Africa has failed to advance technologically. I am sure there have been many changes since 1986 when this series was produced, but Africa still lags behind many places.

Shirley Chisholm: The Forgotten Presidential Candidate

We Americans are not very good about recalling events and people from very far in the past. Many young Americans tend to see anything prior to the 1980s as nearly prehistoric, so when the name Shirley Chisholm is mentioned a blank is probably drawn. I remember her well because she was the first serious African American candidate to run for president. This was before Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton who both lacked even the appeal she had over 35 years ago. In 2005 the year when she died the documentary Chisholm 72: Unbought and Unbossed premiered on PBS.

Like Barack Obama, Shirley Chisholm came from an exotic background. Her mother was from Barbados and her father was from Guyana.

Though many Americans may have forgotten her, a little over two years ago one of my Turkish students named Musa proved he had not. A man in his 50s, he told me that he was a great admirer of Shirley Chisholm. I was very moved to hear this.

Three Coliseums

The University of Georgia where I did both my undergraduate and graduate studies periodically sends me travel brochures of their annual trips around the world. The trips are always to exotic and beautiful locations dripping with Romance and history. Two years ago, I received a brochure that stunned me. On it was a photo of a structure that the average person is probably not aware of. Most everyone has heard of and seen photos of the coliseum in Rome, famous for its gladiatorial fights and notorious for the martyrdom of many early Christians. I was stunned to see on a brochure about a trip to Croatia that there is another ancient coliseum still in existence which is in better condition than the one in Rome. This second coliseum is located in the city of Pula and can be seen here.


Even in my mundane southern town, there is also a coliseum on the campus of my old university. Here is an old post card of it. It can be said that I graduated from high school in a coliseum because the building below is where I and my 12th grade classmates gathered on evening in early June to end one phase of our lives and to begin another.

Ali A. Mazrui: Intellectual and Romantic

I am a great admirer of Dr. Ali A. Mazrui, and have been so since I first became familiar with him when I was a university student in the 1980s. Dr. Mazrui came onto the American scene through the PBS series The Africans: A Triple Heritage produced by the BBC and shown on the Public Broadcasting System here in the states. Alex Haley’s Roots got Americans both black and white thinking about our collective heritage here in the US. Ali A. Mazrui’s The Africans showed the world, especially we Americans who have little or no knowledge of the outside world and who have long held a profound fear of “Darkest Africa” that Africa has many little known and positive aspects. In my encounters with Africans over the years, I have marveled at the differences between their drive and ambition and the often lack of drive and ambition which too many African Americans display, especially in the younger generation whose credo has become “under achievement, mediocrity, indifference, and having a good time.” When I was Peace Corps I met Africans who were pained by what they saw as too many African Americans focusing far too much on racism and not on using the opportunities which at lay at hand in the most prosperous nation in the world. They wished with all their hearts that their countries offered opportunities like America

Getting back to Ali A. Mazrui. He was born in Mombasa, Kenya and is Swahili and Sunni Muslim. Dr. Mazrui received his doctorate from Oxford University. He has taught in Africa, Europe, and the US and is one of the world’s top intellectuals. His series The Africans: A Triple Heritage also has a companion book. Dr. Mazrui is a liberal Muslim who has written a number of books and hundreds of articles about Africa and how capitalism as it is now practiced exploits and cripples Africa. He is a critic of the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis and compares what is happening in Israel to the apartheid system which once reigned over black South Africans. Also he is a critic of fundamentalist Islam, but praises aspects of it which is anti-imperialistic. In his opinion, Islamic sharia law is not compatible with a modern democratically structured society. I do not agree with all of Dr. Mazrui’s views, but we do have much common ground which is shared. Here is a very thought provoking article by him written over 10 years ago called Islamic and Western Values.

In recent years Dr. Mazrui has been targeted by a neoconservative student group here in the US and has been labelled as a left wing extremist and an anti-Semite because of some of his comments. Also he has been targeted by the Department of Homeland Security and the US State Department, not for any links to terrorism, but for allegations of corruption.

I think Dr. Mazrui might be the victim of the paranoid and fearful climate that developed after September 11th. The climate has abated to a degree and the intense fear mongering that was driving everything has been toned down especially since so many supporters of President Bush and his star chamber has lost most of its’ public support.

I also have long thought that Ali A. Mazrui looks very much like my late uncle Robert, which everyone called “Rag.”

Dr. Ali A. Mazrui, a world class and classy, exotic intellectual, scholar, an African and a Romantic.

Cutely Romantic: Barack Obama

He may not get the Democratic nomination for president and become the next president because despite all of our greatness and advancement America still has not matured in certain areas, but I have the optimism that if the world stand we might get there. Nevertheless, Barack Obama is the first serious, mainstream, and classy African American candidate we have had in a long, long time. In a post tomorrow I will mention the other long forgotten serious black candidate.

Because presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is using her husband as her own personal attack dog and the mud is really flying now from the direction of the Clinton camp, Barack Obama has told his African American supporters to not get angry and bitter and view the Clintons as racists because this is politics, not something that should be perceived as personal. I agree with him, because Barack Obama knows our people must stop being stifled and stopped by words or even something as hideous and sick as an empty noose. We must start back progressing the way we did in the days of Dr. King. There can be no retreat for us; we must keep our eyes on the prize.

What Barack Obama is doing is symbolic and will open the doors for more progressive blacks in the future if we hold on. I am very proud of him. He is a symbol of hope at a time which often seems bleak, trivial, hopeless, and unRomantic. The other week a news clip showed him speaking in that deep mellow voice of his, and when someone in the audience fell behind him he forgot about himself and what he was saying, but turned around and asked, “Is everybody OK?” What a sweetie and a Romantic and cute to boot and so is his wife Michelle and his kids.
My mother thinks that Hillary has a secret crush on Barack Obama, and all this picking and mudslinging has a Romantic element. We both think Hillary has never fully forgiven Bill for his Don Juan escapades but ambition makes her hold on to him. Now that Bill is not cute anymore, she really has a crush on Obama. Mom jokes that Hillary says she is only using Bill to get what she wants, and once she gets in the White House, Bill can move to Harlem if he wants. I very seriously doubt that she will get in the White House again. Bill knows this, but is playing the game with her being the devoted husband. Once she is defeated and destroyed by the Republicans, Bill knows she will need him and Chelsea more than ever. He might even have to put Hillary in mental health treatment for awhile, but he cares for her and will always be there for her even though she rides a VERY high horse.