Mildred Huie Wilcox—Portrait of an Artist As a Georgian Lady

I’ve got Georgia on my mind… That isn’t just a line in a song. It’s a lingering sentiment that haunts anyone who has spent any time there, I think. When I attended the Scribblers’ Retreat Writers’ Conference on Saint Simon’s Island in Georgia a few weeks ago, I was treated to its renowned homespun hospitality and had the fortune to meet one of Saint Simon’s Island’s most venerated citizens: Mildred Huie Wilcox, Community Arts Advocate, Humanitarian, and International Art Scholar.

Mildred opened The Left Bank Art Gallery on Saint Simons in 1964 and later the Mildred Huie Museum at Mediterranean House. A former international model and fashion designer (she modeled in Rome, Paris and New York), this elegant and very classy lady showcases an eclectic collection of European and local art in her gallery; art guaranteed to delight your senses and promote enchanting stories from the gallery owner herself (every painting has a story). She also writes a monthly art column in the local paper, Coastal Illustrated, has written several books on Georgian history, and frequently speaks to art and writers groups.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Mildred spotted me as I made a clumsy late entrance at the conference and waved me on to join her table, where participants were already engaged in feasting. As I took my seat next to her, I found myself entranced with her Georgian gentility flavored with the international patina of the well-travelled dilettante. As I surmised from her vibrant elegance, Mildred was not only full of stories—she was a story herself.

Pearls Before Breakfast

After hearing my laments about returning from Paris, France, to “the speed of life” in North America, my good friend, Margaret, passed on to me an interesting article in the Washington Post; something I’d like to share with you:

In it, staff writer, Gene Weingarten, asked the question: Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?

Weingarten then proceeded to answer it with an experiment, using internationally acclaimed virtuoso violinist, Joshua Bell, who’d agreed to play anonymously as a street performer at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station in Washington DC. It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by; and virtually all of them kept walking.

Bell’s performance, arranged by The Washington Post, was an experiment in context, perception and priorities – as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

Bell played masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls. “The violin,” says Weingarten, “is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.”

Weingarten describes Bell as a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, with a dose of the “cutes”, that, onstage, elides into “hot”, his thick mop of hair is a strategic asset: because his technique is full of body—athletic and passionate—he's almost dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies.” Interview magazine wrote that his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live."

Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection. "Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete," Bell said, "but he, he just . . . knew."

Bell began with Chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."

Bach's Chaconne, according to Weingarten “consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.”

Weingarten describes what happened: “Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something. A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened. Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.”

Bell had not expected this reaction and was frankly a little dismayed. He says that as he plays he is capturing emotion as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story…It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ." The word doesn't come easily. ". . . ignoring me."… ignoring his story…

Mark Leithauser, curator at the National Gallery, suggested that we shouldn't be too ready to condemn Metro passersby as unsophisticated. Context matters. In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Immanuel Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

Would it have been different if people had recognized Bell? Perhaps that is a loaded question; to recognize Bell would be to already have joined a “club” per se and to have no doubt seen him in concert. Moreover, it brings up yet another question about North Americans as a culture: do we need someone else to tell us what is beautiful and worthwhile?

Weingaraten describes the one case of someone who did recognize Bell:

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.

Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.

"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?"

“We're busy,” says Weingarten. “Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.” If this had been staged in a Paris Metro, say Châtelet Métro Station, I assure you that the level of appreciation—lack of it, that is—would not have occurred. As I scaled the stairway to the Station lobby, I would have encountered an appreciative crowd surrounding this virtuoso musician, who plays like an angel. I have seen more attention given to a middle-aged local French chanteur (who sang with a so-so voice, but with passion) at Saint-Michel Métro Station in Paris than was apparently shown for young international star Joshua Bell in l'Enfant Plaza Metro in Washington, DC.

Not much has changed since Tocqeville’s visit to America, says Weingarten. “Pop in a DVD of Koyaanisqatsi, the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere.” See my own post on this movie as part of a dissertation on the speed of life. "Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word that means "life out of balance."

British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world in his 2003 book entitled Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, Lane suggested, “not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.”

"This is about having the wrong priorities," said Lane. And losing one's balance of life.

Weingarten ends with this dark reflection on our culture and cautionary note: “If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that—then what else are we missing?”



Much of the text was excerpted from an article by Gene Weingarten that appeared in the Washington Post, Sunday, April 8, 2007. Read the entire article and watch the heart-breaking videos here. Gene Weingarten can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

Falling for Paris

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast

—Ernest Hemingway

It’s been a week since I left Paris and came home. My heart aches like a lost lover. You could call it jet lag, but I prefer to believe that I’ve fallen head-over-heels in love: dazed with haunting visions of a city that opened me like a bracing wind sweeps open the shutters of a window to light my soul with wonder.

To fall in love is to open oneself completely and be changed. Paris changed me.

When I returned home, several people asked me what struck me the most about Paris. I was challenged to provide a single highlight and realized that everything coalesced into a larger phenomenon that encompassed the attractive people, neo-classical architecture, quaint cobble streets, complex fragrances and ambience that is Paris.

Paris is a beautiful, complex city that cannot be described or defined without giving oneself totally away.

Shakespeare & Company in Paris

In the current historical fantasy I'm writing (which brought me to Paris to do some research) my two main characters, Vivianne and François, pass a rather famous bookstore located in the heart of Paris on Rue de la Bucherie, on the Left Bank just opposite Notre Dame Cathedral: Shakespeare and Company.

Shakespeare & Company is situated in the Latin Quarter, which for centuries has been the centre of bohemian Parisian creativity and intelligentsia. For over fifty years, the bookshop has housed numerous writers and hosted readings by published and unpublished authors. Run by Sylvia Whitman, daughter of the legendary George Whitman, the bookstore looks like something in a Harry Potter movie, with stacks upon stacks of all sorts of literature.

Upon entering, you'll find yourself in a place Henry Miller described as "A wonderland of books".

Shakespeare and Company is open evey day from 10:00 to 23:00. If you're touring Paris go check it out. The selection of English books is impeccable, with many by local writers. If you're a young traveling writer looking for a place to crash, Sylvia might put you up too!

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

Getting Lost in Paris

On my third day in Paris, I got lost. I didn’t mean to; it just happened.

I’d started early and joined the morning crowd at the Musée d’Orsay. After a breathtaking journey through the visions of French Impressionists, I ventured by bus to the Champ du Mars and climbed the Eiffel Tower to see Paris from the perspective of the Gods: a wheeled mosaic of art, magic and scene. Then I decided to walk home from there. I thought my adventure was over; in truth, it had just begun…

As I wound my way down a tree-lined street, the flower blossoms rained down with the fragrant breeze, painting the cobblestones in pale shades of diaphanous pink. A young couple sat wrapped around each other on a bench, kissing.

It suddenly struck me that I was in Paris in the springtime; and I was alone.

It was just an observation. It didn’t make me sad or uncomfortable; I’ve traveled a great deal on my own and have enjoyed the edgy play on my mind and soul that solitude in a strange place brings.

Philosopher Mark Kingwell wrote, “travel is a drug, and not just because it can be addictive. More because it alters consciousness, dilates the mind and maybe even rewires the cerebral cortex…going somewhere different from home [is] the best way to challenge your habitual ways of thinking.”

I’d come to Paris to research the current book I was writing—ironically about a young girl who can alter history. Why ironically? Because, somehow, I firmly believe that my experience in this beautiful and evocatively artistic city has altered my “history”. Certainly my perspective. Paris, with its Neo-Classical architecture, quaint cobble streets, and stylish Parisians, lends itself to a wandering eye and finally to introspection. For Kingwell, “somewhere beyond the contrived, comfortable cityscapes, we’ll encounter a potentially more profound version of ourselves.” Paris, like the Parisians, is a seductive dance. It is so attractive to view. But ultimately one must participate to fully experience it.

I don’t know when I finally noticed that I had no idea where I was. It just happened. Along one of Paris’s charming narrow cobble streets as the Hausmann-style buildings blushed in the sunset, I found myself utterly lost.

The sky’s light shades of peach gave way to a deeper shade of ochre as I walked on, feeling more and more a stranger and more and more self-conscious that I was. I wasn’t dressed fashionably. Oh, I had the obligatory scarf and stylish leather jacket; but I lacked the finesse of these Parisians who glided confidently along the darkening streets that were familiar to them. The sounds, sights and smells of this foreign city heightened in a frisson of increasing tension. I refused to let the darkness take me, though, and let my feet lead me on, confident that I would find something. This was Paris, after all…

“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” A school for questions, not answers, says Kingwell. I’d come to Paris with questions, many questions; some of which I would not answer. Perhaps the most important ones. I’d come with the hubristic ambition of defining Paris. But I humbly discovered that to define Paris is to define life…and oneself.

Paris unfolds like an impressionist canvas, to be interpreted through experience. She is an aria, both exquisite and haunting, like the lingering aftertaste in the back of my throat of a complex bitter-sweet Bordeaux. I lost myself willingly to her mystery. “Real travel,” says Kingwell, “means we must surrender expectations and submit to chance, to challenge our desires, not merely satisfy existing ones…Leaving home ought to be, above all…that plunge into otherness. Becoming strange to ourselves is the gateway to seeing how dependent on strangers we are for our identities…Getting lost to yourself might be the best way to find out who you are.”

Mark Kingwell’s latest book is Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

Paris Tour--Part 2

It was already on my second day in Paris that I'd discovered my "outside office": a café on la Place Saint-Michel, presided over by an impressive fountain of Saint Michael slaying the Devil.

Located on the Rive Gauche off the Pont Saint-Michel to Ile de la Cité, the square has a perfect view of Notre Dame and the spire of Saint-Chapelle behind the Palais de Justice. Place Saint-Michel is a crossroads for several major boulevards and colourful narrow alleys which spill a constant flow of tourists, pilgrims and locals into the open square.

By the third day, I'd already acquired my obligatory scarf (90% of Parisiennes wear them, along with gorgeous shoes, being stylish dressers) and was getting very comfortable in this beautiful city. I had settled in my corner of the café with a pastis (an anise-flavoured liqueur) and café creme and was reading le Monde when a gaggle of tourists from Rhode Island swept into the café. As one bumped up against my chair, she excused herself in broken French. I had a revellation: they thought I was a local! I responded in English, which ended in a wonderful conversation and this picture of me, where I confess I have done some of my best work... (that pastis was very nice!).

Paris Tour—Part 1

Bonjours de Paris, La Ville-lumière. I’ve dropped by momentarily to give you a little report of my research progress on my current book, a historical fantasy about a girl, Vivianne, from medieval Prussia, and a boy, François, from modern-day Paris (see my previous post).

Toulouse and I settled in very nicely in a little apartment on Rue Princesse, just off Boulevard Saint Germain in the 6ieme arrondissement. Once the hangout for bohemians and intellectuals, this neighbourhood underwent gentrification and is now newly chic, with upscale boutiques, art galleries, and restaurants.

Paris: City of Light--Friday Feature

Today’s Friday Feature is Paris, the City of Light. I’m heading there with my friend, Toulouse (napping on my shoulder in the photo below). He isn’t too excited because he’s, well, French. But it’s my first visit to this splendid city and I have to admit to you that I am randy round the bend ecstatic. Paris is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, with over 30 million foreign visitors per year. And for good reason.

Paris has been a beacon of culture and art for centuries, long considered a world capital of art, fashion, food, literature and ideas. Paris is a symbol of all the fine things human civilization can offer. Says Rick Steves, “Come prepared to celebrate, rather than judge, the cultural differences, and you’ll capture the romance and joie de vivre that Paris exudes.” He adds, “Paris offers sweeping boulevards, chatty crepe stands, chic boutiques, and world-class art galleries. Sip decaf with deconstructionists at a sidewalk café, then step into an Impressionist painting in a tree-lined park. Climb Notre-Dame and rub shoulders with gargoyles. Cruise the Seine, zip up the Eiffel Tower, and saunter down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees.”

Paris is known as the "The City of Light" (La Ville-lumière), from its fame as a centre of education and ideas and its early adoption of street lighting. "Modern" Paris is the result of a vast mid-19th century urban remodelling. For centuries the city had been a labyrinth of narrow streets and half-timber houses, but beginning in 1852, the Baron Haussmann's vast urbanisation levelled entire quarters to make way for wide avenues lined with neo-classical stone buildings of bourgeoise standing; most of this 'new' Paris is the Paris we see today.

I’m actually going to Paris to research my latest book, a historical fantasy, about a young girl from medieval Prussia who learns that she can alter history (which is partly why she ends up in slightly future alternate Paris). The day is June 14th, 1411. It’s Vivianne’s 14th birthday and she’s been promised to this nasty foreign dude 30 years older than her and who she’s never met; the day is also the eve of one of medieval time’s greatest battles, “The Battle of Grunwald”. (This battle between the arrogant Teutonic warrior monks and the peasant Lithuanian and Polish armies should have been an easy victory for the Teutonic knights, who were far superior in weaponry, tactics and ambition than the peasant rag-tag armies. It wasn’t; they were all but wiped out. But, what if they hadn’t been?…)

It’s still the eve of the battle and, after being hunted as a witch for being “different”, young Vivianne flees through a time-space tear into an alternate future Paris…one in which—you guessed it—the Nazis currently rule (because they had the chance to evolve sooner, thanks to the survival of the Teutonic Order in a world where intervention—involving Vivianne—allowed them to prevail and see-in an early Germanic Nazi regime).

So, here I am… heading to Paris to see what Vivianne sees. Oh, and to drink and eat too! Ah, the wine… the cheese… the bread… You know what the French say: “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin…”
I’m not sure if we’ll have time to post. So I will leave you with a short story. But either Toulouse or I may come on with an update of our rigorous research. Otherwise, see you in two weeks! Come back tomorrow to read my short story.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.