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Photograph of Keith McCutcheon outside at a stone wall at Taliesin, c. 1932.

Letters from Keith McCutcheon to Franklin Porter

Posted on 06/23/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A photograph looking (plan) northeast at, apparently, Keith McCutcheon (1904-1968) in the Garden Court of Taliesin. The stone wall to his right was built while Wright reconstructed Taliesin after its second fire. Wright removed it in 1933.

Since we are close to Gay Pride Day, I thought I would write about: an employee of Frank Lloyd Wright’s who was gay; Wright’s nephew, Franklin Porter (1910-2002); and some letters.

Start at the start:

Years ago, I was trying to get the office printer to work in the office while I was the historian at Taliesin Preservation. I went to this dusty printer and found a bit of a mess around it. I needed to remove all of its surrounding debris to figure out how to get it printing.

Near the printer there was an in-out tray,¹which had pieces of paper, including all sorts of envelopes and folders. These things had been placed there by some members of the Preservation Crew. They had worked in the room for years, using it as a stable, warm place to write reports, track their hours, or get other things done.²

After I settled things with the printer, I decided to figure out what to do with all those pieces of paper.

I’m not a stickler for “a place for everything and everything in its place”, but it does help.

When I was done, I was left with a folder of things that belonged to Franklin Porter. Porter was the son of Jane and Andrew Porter. Jane Porter was Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister. Frank Lloyd Wright had designed Jane and Andrew’s house, Tan-y-Deri. “TYD” is across the hill from Taliesin. Below is a photograph that I took, looking from the edge of Taliesin’s Hill Crown toward Tan-y-Deri, which is under the arrow:

The story behind this:

The Preservation Crew found these things years before when working in one of Tan-y-Deri’s second-floor bedrooms. Frank Lloyd Wright purchased “TYD” in 1955 from his nephew, Franklin. The preservation at TYD started over 20 years ago. And, whenever there was money and time, the Preservation Crew restored/preserved/fixed it, and preservation managers at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation worked on plans for the building’s complete restoration. Its restoration was complete in 2017. I took the photo of it, below, the next summer:

Along with

the plumbing, roofing, electricals and woodwork, the Preservation Crew fixed all of the interior plaster.

The man at the wall was the Taliesin Estate manager,³ and the photograph was taken by a member of the Preservation Crew. The crew took (and take) photographs constantly.

Pieces of paper fell down behind one of these walls. It seems these came from when Franklin Porter was probably in college. His parents lived near him where he went to college in Pennsylvania. But they kept Tan-y-Deri as a summer home. So, the Preservation Crew picked up these things while working at TYD and finally put them in the office.

To give you a sense of things:

One of the finds was a ski lift ticket:

p.s.: that picture above it not the actual ski ticket. I just put it in for “flavor”.

And a letter that Franklin’s mother, Jane Porter, sent her son telling him to bring his laundry home so she could wash it.

Plus three letters to Franklin from Keith McCutcheon.

McCutcheon was living not that far from Taliesin, in the village of Arena. He worked for Frank Lloyd Wright as a draftsman I think, starting in the late 1920s.

Keith met Franklin at Tan-y-Deri, after Jane Porter invited him over. It totally makes sense: Jane met Keith (working for her brother), and understood how out-of-the-way they all were (and are).

Keith wrote Franklin afterwards. And, based on what the two had said to each other that first evening, Keith suggested they write. In Keith’s first letter, dated September 5, 1932, he used a lot of adjectives. I got the real sense from the letter that Keith was smitten:

“[H]aving met so momently yet truly it most seemed I knew you – except the sound of voice, your size, and general mien…, Frankly, and I hope you like this candor, I’m rather fond of you – in truth, I like you….“

Keith expressed the desire to hear back from him.

I read the letters once or twice.

Then transcribed them⁴ and showed them later to my boyfriend. In essence, I said: “I don’t want to be judgmental, but doesn’t this sound like what someone would write to the person they were attracted to romantically?“

He agreed.

Keith sent poetry in the first letter, too:

This was a set of poems called, “Lyrics of the night: Poems of Passionate Weakness”. The first one is

“Taliesin: The home of Frank Lloyd Wright”:

Upon a rounded crest of sun warmed hill,
Not far from the Wisconsin’s riffles’ gleam,
Reclines, in cat-like stealth, a house – a dream
Crouching along the ridge as if to fill
Itself among the rocks ‘tis made of: spill
Itself unnoticed midst the trees, and seem
More as a part of Nature’s own than scheme
Of cunning mind and power of man’s will.

A rambling residence that fills the heart
With far flung dreams, and vague desire. Hush
Of countryside is here; the spring-time lush:
Summer serene, and Autumn’s golden glow,
And then it’s blanketed beneath the snow –
Each season, Life reflected played its part . . .⁵

Franklin didn’t respond

I knew this because Keith began his second letter, written over a month later, with an apology for the first one. He characterizes that first letter to Franklin as his “moment’s madness”. And, while apologizing through the rest of the letter, Keith included another poem.

Keith sent his third, and last, letter in January 1933.

In it, Keith thanked Franklin for a Christmas card that Franklin had sent, and appreciates being remembered. And he extended well wishes to Franklin’s mother.

I didn’t really know what to do with what I had read, but I put them back in their folder and figured I would deal with them the next weekday that I was at work.

Here’s what stood out to me about this:

In small-town Wisconsin in the 1930s, a man (Keith) expressed an attraction to another man.

Keith got nowhere with it.

But I think it’s possible that—in small-town Wisconsin in the 1930s—had he wanted to, Franklin Porter could have sent a bunch of guys to Keith’s house to beat the hell out of him. But Franklin was kind enough (or cool enough) to not do that, and remembered to send Keith a Christmas card.

I did not know if the letters were overly flirty, of just expressed the desire for close male friendship. But, related or not, Keith McCutcheon was gay.

I know this because

after I did research for today’s post, I looked Keith McCutcheon up in Google. Through that, I came across this by Elisa Rolle. Rolle has been writing about gay people in small books. Her post on McCutcheon told me that McCutcheon settled in Madison, Wisconsin where he lived on the city’s “near east side” with his longtime partner, Joe Koberstein. The two are buried next to each other.

Additionally, Keith and Joe were mentioned in a write-up of We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History, by R. Richard Wagner. “We’ve Been Here” was published in 2019.

A few days later:

I gave everything to the onsite collections manager for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Items from Tan-y-Deri aren’t directly connected to Frank Lloyd Wright, but the Foundation does own them, since they came from a building on the Taliesin estate. Tom (the collections manager) put everything into folders, separating them with acid-free paper. He then stored them with the other collections.

First published June 23, 2023.
The photograph of Keith McCutcheon at Taliesin is the property of Randolph C. Henning. Thanks to Henning for giving me permission to use it.

Notes:

1. oddly, while stackable trays are all over the internet, I can’t find any photos of “in-and-out” trays without stealing via a screengrab. There’s nothing at Wikipedia, or a website with free images. I really do not want Amazon.com on my a** just to get a photo of those hard, plastic, black trays. Who knew?

2. for those who work in the Hex Room at the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center: the tables in the room that end in bookcases are thanks to the Preservation Crew, who designed and built them.

3. That was Jim, who is in the article, “Wright Place, Wright Time“, by Andy Stoiber.

4. I transcribed it because it was such an unusual letter that I didn’t want to have problems recalling the letter later.

5. Thanks to Craig Jacobsen for sending me a copy of the poem.

The Chicago Day Book December 21, 1911. In the public domain.

Was Mamah Borthwick the love of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life?

Posted on 06/14/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Drawing of Mamah Borthwick.

People have asked me this question about Mamah

former wife of Edwin H. Cheney, and the woman for whom Wright first designed Taliesin south of Spring Green, Wisconsin. And who was murdered on August 15, 1914.

Since Mamah’s birthday is June 19, I am addressing this question in this post.¹

Or “pondering” I guess. Since this is all my opinion. Did you ever think it wasn’t? Well, I didn’t, I can tell you that.

Plus, I’ve no idea what Wright would have thought or felt about this

even though I so wish that he was interested—beyond the grave—on my thoughts about things.

But, really:

was Mamah Borthwick the love of Wright’s life?

Determining who was “the love of” someone’s life is kind of like determining who someone’s “soulmate” is. Altho, dammit, the press continuously referred to Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah as “soulmates”!

As for those two

I think they loved each other terribly. I’ll bet it was the out-of-your-mind crazy love. Of course, tempered by the fact that they were both married with children. Which came with a lot of excitement because they lived in Oak Park and everyone would know if they were fooling around.

And

if Wright had also been murdered at Taliesin in 1914, I think Mamah would have been counted as the love of his life. Which you can definitely say for her. You can see that especially when you look at research in Mark Borthwick’s book:

A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Distant cousin Mark Borthwick detailed how Edwin H. Cheney pursued Mamah for years. From what Mark Borthwick explored, it’s not certain that Mamah thought of ever marrying before becoming Mrs. Edwin H. Cheney in 1899. Mark Borthwick wrote:

Apparently sober, constant, and determined, to judge by his years-long courtship of Borthwick, [Edwin Cheney] lacked the vivacious spark she herself nurtured…. Probably none of the men in her class measured up to her standard, but she no longer had the luxury of time.

A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, by Mark Borthwick (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2023), 60.

In addition, when the press found Wright and Borthwick at Taliesin, Wright confessed that he and his then-wife Catherine were too young when they married.

Ok,

as for that choice: aside from the fact that everyone told them not to get married that young, they were in love, it was the 1880s, and it’s not like they were the only people to ever do that. After all, “Marry in haste and repent in leisure” was put into writing almost 500 years ago.

So,

they married in 1889 and Kitty gave birth to their first child in 1890 (Lloyd).

Then again in 1892 (John).
And in 1894 (Catherine).
Then in 1895 (David).
Then a break and in 1898 (Frances).
And another break and their youngest in 1903 (Llewellyn).
- Here’s part of what Wright in his Autobiography:

Architecture was my profession. Motherhood became hers.

Fair enough, but it was a division.

The young architect’s studio or workshop was within a few years built on Chicago Avenue. The young mother’s home and kindergarten had continued and still kept on—on Forest Avenue….

The handsome children were well born. They, each and all, were fine specimens of healthy childhood. They were curly-headed, blue-eyed, sunny-haired, fair-skinned like their beautiful mother. They all resembled her.

Every one of them was born, so it seemed, directly in his or her own right. You might think they had all willed it and decided it all themselves.

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 109.

Then Wright and Mamah got close during the commission of her and Edwin’s house (commissioned in 1903).

So, MAN, Keiran

– you’re dancing around the answer here, aren’t you? Just say what you think: was Mamah the love of Wright’s life?

Here’s my two cents:

I don’t think so.

I don’t think it’s possible to say that someone was the love of a person’s life when they died just after your halfway mark.

Wright met Mamah when he may have just been “going through the motions” in his marriage. Then they flee to Europe, which is followed by all the front-page news when they came back (which just bound them together I’m sure). And three years later, there was the horrible murder in 1914.

And then Wright lived over 44 years more. Therefore, he lived a lot of life after Mamah. I don’t think you can say that a man who continued to create incredible, deeply felt art, was emotionally stilted.

i mean, well yes, the man said and did some things sometimes where it’s like, hmmmm. but…

And I’m not saying Wright didn’t love Mamah. But I think we’re looking for the wrong thing if we point at her and say, “That was it. She was ‘The One.'”

In 1924, after his relationship with Miriam Noel (his second wife who I wrote about recently) rounded to its close, he met Olga Lazovich Milanoff.

Olgivanna was also with him through some extremely difficult times. There’s Taliesin’s second fire; the pursuit following the birth of their daughter, Iovanna; and the years in the latter 1920s with difficulties followed by the Great Depression. And she was with him and brought him to the last part of his life, and revival of his career.

Back to Mamah

As I grow older, I have come to understand that love and relationships are a lot more complicated. I mean, Romeo and Juliet is a great love story when you read it as a freshman in high school, but…

So I’ll end with what I wrote to myself in April 2005.

After the marriage of now-King Charles III to Camilia Parker Bowles (now Queen Camilla):

[Charles] loves a woman, Camilla. He joins the navy (1971-76) and Camilla marries someone else. He can’t ask her to get divorced: it’s the 1970s and he’s still required to find a virgin.

So he finds Diana Spencer. She’s a little unstable. They don’t fit…. and he’s still in love w/Camilla. Diana starts having lots of torrid affairs and vomiting and cutting herself.

I’m saying:

neither party in that marriage was entirely innocent.

And then Diana died….

If I were in his position and my ex-wife, “The People’s Princess” died, seriously, one of the first things I would have thought would have been, “Oh cr*p, now I can’t marry Camilla.”²

Now, at least, he gets to marry her, which from what I’ve heard, is what he wanted 35 years ago.

To me, in the end, this is actually a very romantic story, about 2 people who loved each other and now finally get to be together, formally, in the eyes of the world….

They still hang out and do stuff. Presumably, they still make each other happy.

That is one cool story, if you ask me.

And that’s what I’ll say. Mamah Borthwick was a love of Wright’s life.

First published June 14, 2023.
The image at the top of this post was published in the Chicago Day Book, December 21, 1911. It’s available at this link.³

Notes:

1. She was born in 1869.

2. Or “oh bloody hell,” because I’m Prince (now King) Charles and not a dirty commoner.

3. I changed my original image from the front page of the Ogden Standard, which was a story published after Taliesin’s 1914 fire/murders on September 5 (find it here). That’s because I learned that the woman in the photo on that page is not Mamah Borthwick. The photograph shows Catherine Wright, his wife at that time. Thanks to Allen Hazard for correcting me.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s birthday

Posted on 06/03/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867.

If you’re in the Wrightworld you know this.

Read my post, “Keiran don’t try to correct the internet“, about how people originally thought he was born in 1869.

In today’s post, I’m going to write about traditions within the Taliesin Fellowship connected to Wright’s birthday.

In addition to giving him a reason to have a party, Wright’s decision to celebrate his birthday with the Fellowship was cohesive.

The Fellowship was founded in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression. So, Wright’s birthday gave the “boys” and the “girls” a celebratory purpose during the Fellowship’s hardscrabble years. After all, from 1932-35, the house for Malcolm and Nancy Willey in Minnesota was the only commission that Wright had.

In addition, Wright’s birth date, June 8, can be really nice in Wisconsin.

(and hopefully the mosquitoes aren’t in full force)

Here’s what an apprentice wrote about celebrating Wright’s birthday in 1934:

AT TALIESIN, June l4, l934

Birthday celebrations would be really celebrations if we became one year younger instead of older each time – that is, if we didn’t start too soon. We really celebrated last Friday when Mr. Wright became one year younger and said that next year he will be in his fifties. Equipped with everything possible and impossible we drove through the country to a rocky pine-covered hill and had a magnificent picnic.

From At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937 (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), edited and with commentary by Randolph C. Henning. Page 51.

Then, in 1936, they held a scavenger hunt.

Here’s the beginning of its description:

AT TALIESIN, June 12, 1936

That the apprentices, regardless of years, should have the spirit of youth is a cardinal qualification of membership in the Fellowship. Nothing has brought that quality to the surface more than the “treasure-hunt” we held on the occasion of Mr. Wright’s birthday. While the treasure hunt lasted we were all children very young in spirit. Don’t laugh at us for being childish until you have tried the hunt yourself. You will find that you will leave most of your dignity and all of your reserve at home or lose it on the road.
By Earl Friar

From “At Taliesin” edited and with commentary by Randolph C. Henning. Page 207.

Check out the whole scavenger hunt on pages 207-210 in the “At Taliesin” book. It’s a blast that includes a live turkey gobbler!

But in 1937-38, Wright started the desert camp, Taliesin West, in Arizona.

Subsequently, celebrating his birthday became an even bigger deal.

The “birthday formal” would become the first big gathering with invited guests the group could have after they had returned from the desert. Check out this photo of men and women in Taliesin’s Garden Court during Wright’s birthday formal in the 1950s:

Exterior summer party at Taliesin in Wisconsin with men and women in formal dress. — By Richard Vesey. Courtesy, Wisconsin Historical Society. Richard Vesey photographs and negatives, 1955-1963

Plus, Wright and the Fellowship knew the party wouldn’t be sullied by chilly/damp rain

or snow

Seriously—Prince was not exaggerating:

sometimes it does snow in April:

btw: I embedded this song for a chuckle about its title; not to get you depressed about a lost friend. Prince was from Minnesota and knows that sometimes it snows in April. But, seriously: since the song starts with the words, “Tracy died…” do not listen to this song if you want to remain chipper. Just be amused by Prince’s half-shirt.

And by June it’s usually warm and dry.

Time for a party!

With time, Wright’s birthday became more formal

Check out my photo below of all the fancy people:

I took this photograph in Taliesin’s Garden Court during Wright’s birthday formal in 2019. If I’d been thinking, you would see a photo of me in my fancy dress, too.

In addition, Wright’s birthday became the time for one of the year’s

Box Project presentations.

The Box Projects were really important for the Taliesin Fellowship as a learning institution.

Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Wright’s wife, explained the Box Projects well:

The Box is a tradition in the Fellowship, occurring twice a year, at Christmas and at the birthday. It consists of designs by the young people, plans, abstractions, models, paintings, weaving and ceramics….

After giving Wright their projects as Olgivanna explained:

Each one explains that he has done and Frank gives him the benefit of his criticism, indicating to him the direction he should take….

The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright: From Crna Cora to Taliesin; from Black Mountain to Shining Brow, compiled and edited by Maxine Fawcett-Yeske, Ph.D. and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, D.H.L. (ORO Editions, 2017), 186.

Therefore, the Box Projects allowed Wright to check on the development of the work by apprentices.

Everyone did a project—

even the spouses of apprentices.

During Wright’s birthday Box in 1943, Priscilla Henken (the wife of apprentice/architect David Henken) gave a floor plan for a school (even though she wasn’t a draftsmen). I got a photo of the plan from her published diary:

This drawing was published on page 176 of Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Priscilla Henken (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, London, 2012).

Moreover, Priscilla noted some very nice things that Wright said about her drawing:

About my plans, which FL looked at after tea, he said that I had a lot of common sense, that I took the school as it was made an extraordinarily good thing out of it; that I had a lot of brains under this hair of mine; that now he knew I was busy during a lot of the time he couldn’t account for me; that I was the surprise… package of the box.

Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Priscilla Henken, 175.

The Box Projects and Wright’s birthday celebration are an interesting way to mark how Frank and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright created the culture of the Taliesin Fellowship.

Culture:

The CliffNotes website gives a good definition of it under “Sociology“. Culture, it says:

consists of the beliefs, behaviors, objects, and other characteristics common to the members of a particular group or society. Through culture, people and groups define themselves, conform to society’s shared values, and contribute to society. Thus, culture includes many societal aspects: language, customs, values, norms, mores, rules, tools, technologies, products, organizations, and institutions.

In 1994 when I started in tours, the Fellowship still had the Box Project presentations around Wright’s birthday. But that was changed in the mid-late 1990s. The reason for that was the difficulty apprentices had with moving from Arizona in the midst of their preparation for “the Birthday Box”. Consequently, they switched the presentation to September. That way, they could spend all summer working on it. And didn’t have to drive all that way from Arizona on little sleep, or worry about smashing the models or losing the computer files in the migration.¹

First published on June 3, 2023.
The photograph at the top of this page was taken for The Capital Times in Madison for Wright’s birthday in 1957.

Note:

1. They changed the Box Presentation in Arizona, I think, to March or April.

Photo of artist Wafaa Bilal with photoshopped yellow paint blotches. In part by Keiran Murphy.

Memorial Day, Wafaa Bilal, and art:

Posted on 05/26/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

This is a screenshot with yellow paint blots. I wrote “I support Wafaa” at the bottom of the photo. He’s the man I wrote a lot about, below.

This post isn’t going to be about Frank Lloyd Wright. Today I want to write about a work of art and how it made me appreciate Memorial Day more than I had before.

In May, 2007 my boyfriend alerted me to something on digg.com. This was an interactive, on-line artwork named “Domestic Tension“: a.k.a. “Shoot an Iraqi”. This was a performance piece by the Iraqi-born American artist, Wafaa Bilal.

As I recall,

Michael said something along the lines of, “Hey, there’s this artist who’s allowing people to shoot him online with a paintball gun.” I imagine that I reacted to this announcement with confusion, then, “Oh, sh*t – the guy’s gonna get everyone and their mother wanting to shoot him.”

Here are some details:

from an article on Bilal by J. Howard Rosier:

For a month, he locked himself in a small room at Chicago’s FlatFile Gallery, where he could be seen around the clock through a camera that he had connected to the web. Bilal set up a remote-controlled paintball gun that viewers could use to shoot him at any time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230129113320/https://www.saic.edu/magazine/fall21/wafaa-bilal-explores-power-technology

Wafaa Bilal used yellow paintballs. It was based on “tie a yellow ribbon“.

I’ve got a screenshot of what someone would see if they came to the Domestic Tension website:

On the top half of the web page,

you see the rectangular, real-time image of Wafaa Bilal sitting in the gallery with the computer. Below that, you see three icons. Those were the buttons you used to aim the gun and shoot. btw: you could not block anyone from shooting.

The lower left-hand side of the screenshot:

showed you the previous ten shooters, with their IP addresses (their computer addresses), and their locations.

The lower right-hand side of the screenshot:

showed the ongoing chat (with the IP addresses). For the most part, Wafaa just observed (although occasionally he interacted with those—including me—who chatted).

The shooting, and chatting, went on continuously for the 31 days that Wafaa was undertaking this art project.

He only left the room an hour or two every day, usually so that he could attend to personal business (like eating), and post videos on YouTube. His bed was behind a glass partition in the room.

Two more details about the piece:

It was silent.
And the color on the walls eventually “washed out” to white.

So, when you looked at the web page, intellectually you knew that there was a constant drumming of shots of yellow paint. However, you could not see the individual shots or hear them. Unless you drove to Chicago to see him in the gallery, or checked out his daily videos in YouTube updates.

I was utterly fascinated.

I thought his work was:

part performance art,

Performance art because he went through this for a month.

part conceptual art,

Conceptual art because (from what I remember from my art history classes) there was a breakdown of the “project”, due to the vast amount of information that is being collected. That is, there were the IP addresses of everyone who shot, and an online chat 24/7, for a month.

and part visual art

The visual art that was created in the gallery space where Wafaa stayed: the yellow paint on the walls (and the constant bombardment) was, itself, a piece of art.

In that way, it reminded me of artists in the early 20th century, and some of the kooky things they did.

The chat:

The online discussion ranged from ridiculous to funny to caring, sublime or disturbing. Its silliness came from people speaking to each other at all times from various parts of the world.

Eventually, a solid group of people organically came together to keep Wafaa intellectually safe.

The conversations concerned questions on the backgrounds of each person participating, but also questions on: was this art, was this provocation, to questions on the war in Iraq, war in general, art in general, et. al.

A volunteer with Wafaa eventually created an “FAQ” page, which was filled in with all of people’s basic questions.

That is: who was he, where did he come from, why was he doing this, how was the project funded, etc.?

After all, the “regulars” knew the answers and didn’t want to have to stop to answer the “newcomers”.¹

The gun:

As anyone on the planet could shoot at any time, the paint gun only stopped shooting for about two hours every day. That is: nobody shot when it was nighttime over the Pacific Ocean.

Now, these were only paintballs and originally, he wasn’t against being shot with them. However, getting shot did hurt and he realized this wouldn’t work for a month.

So he mostly stayed below the aim of the gun. But, imagine what it’s like to hear shots at any time for one solid month. Particularly when he couldn’t go outside, or sleep deeply, which had a toll on his mental health.

This caused one portion of “the chatters” to band together and “click left”. That is: they kept clicking the “Left” targeting button to kept the gun pointed away from Wafaa. This group called themselves the “Virtual Human Shield” (or VHS).

The VHS gave birth to another online discussion regarding censorship.

I was amused by all of those who were against the VHS; accusing them of taking away the “point” of Wafaa’s project. I thought, “What, you’re upset because the art isn’t doing what you think it should? Too bad, because this is still the art piece.”

And there were disturbing things:

There were people who came to the chat and called Wafaa a towel-headed camel jockey and every-other-bigoted-slur you can think up for someone from the Middle East.

Or writing in to explicitly say they wanted to shoot the f-ing dirty terrorist Iraqi. Or that they wanted to rape Wafaa’s mother or sister (and I don’t know if he had a sister).

This violent rhetoric was another thing the consistent chatters tried to keep away from Wafaa. I recall times in which chatters began posting lines of poetry, or passages from Shakespeare, in the hope that they would “drown out” those posting violent and racist things.

What does this have to do with Memorial Day?

Wafaa’s work, in the month around Memorial Day, made me think very deeply about the lives of everyone living with the violence in Iraq (and Afghanistan); both civilians and military personnel. And it made me feel close to all of those in Iraq who had to live in that war zone. And, lastly, I thought about the men and women in the military, who had to live with the fear of death through snipers and IEDs.²

After all, Wafaa was inspired to create “Shoot an Iraqi” after seeing footage of someone in the United States who was in the military controlling remote bombs in Iraq. The person could detonate the bombs, but couldn’t hear anything.³ Wafaa’s project (imo) put every person who observed his site into the position of that military person on the other side of the drone and/or bomb.

In addition, Wafaa’s confinement in the gallery alerted those observing him to the sense of confinement felt by those in Iraqi cities and towns.

Some final thoughts:

60,000 paintballs were fired during Domestic Tension. I seem to remember that, with more than a week to go on the art piece, Bilal’s friends drove all over the state of Illinois looking for paintballs. Because of Wafaa, areas of Illinois were completely devoid of the yellow ones. In addition, those chatting created over 3,000 pages of conversations.

See Wafaa:

Take a look at the short video of Wafaa talking about the project, why he started it, what he hoped for it, and what he discovered while doing it:

At the very end of this 2 minute 21 second Youtube segment, he says that the art piece:

… gave me hope in humanity. It gave me hope that when we build a platform for people to have a conversation, they will come and participate.

Wafaa in January 2020, talking in detail about the project:

The follow up question-and-answer portion of Wafaa’s lecture in 2020 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6We3S8lEIWM

Pages from Wafaa Bilal’s website about Domestic Tension.

The image at the top of this page is a screenshot, where I took yellow blobs and added them. I don’t recall when I did this, but it was probably the summer of 2007.
Originally posted May 26, 2023.

Notes

1. I did not write any of the answers in the FAQ page.
2. After Wafaa’s project, I have given money to the USO on Memorial Day and Veterans Day whenever I can.
3. I’m reminded of the smart bomb videos from Desert Storm.

Photo looking west in Taliesin's garden court. Taken in 1929 by Architect George Kastner. Courtesy Brian A. Spencer, Architect.

Things I don’t know at Taliesin

Posted on 05/14/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

In 1929, architect George Kastner (then, a draftsman for Frank Lloyd Wright) took the photograph at the top of this post. It looks west in Taliesin’s Garden Court while stonemasons lay the wall that separates this courtyard from the other courtyards at Taliesin. This wall insured that this courtyard would be free from cars.

Today I will write some other things that I’ve not been able to figure out at Taliesin.

It’s part of the enjoyment all over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate (and all of its buildings): there’s just so much to know!

I will just concentrate on the Taliesin structure (not the entire estate).

First of all:

while I thought you Frankophiles out there would like the photo at the top of this post

I am going to talk about what’s behind the wall you see under construction in the photograph at the top if this page. The photo is great, but there are things behind it that I haven’t figured out.

I’ll show two photos taken behind that wall that show what I can’t explain:

You’re looking at the door into Taliesin’s Front Office. Its windows look onto Taliesin’s Entry Court.¹

I put the arrows in the two photographs to show you the part that I’m curious about. The arrows point at pieces of wood embedded in the two piers. So it looks like something was there that was maybe horizontal. Was it a wooden gate?

The pieces of wood are gently worn and don’t look like they’ve been hacked off. But they’ve been there for a long time. And I cannot figure out when they were put there, or what their original purpose was. The piers might have something to do with the drawing from the Taliesin II era (1914-1925), below, but I do not know:

Cropped version of a floor plan for Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home and studio. — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Drawing #1403.016.

But they do not appear in drawings, and photographs give me no clue of their purpose or use.

Another Taliesin change:

There was something that Wright changed to the west of this area. It’s on the south side of the old cow barn.

Wright placed the cow barn under Taliesin’s original hayloft. I’ll point you to the area in the photo below, taken in 1912:

Photograph looking west in Taliesin's Garden Court (then the forecourt). — Wisconsin Historical Society: Photo by Henry Fuermann and Sons.
Collection: Henry Fuermann and Sons Taliesin I and II photographs, 1911-1913, 1915.

Looking west. Taliesin’s hayloft, the horizontal part of the building under the roof, is in the background. Further beyond that is a cow with a baby calf. They’re past where Taliesin ended at that time.

At the ground level,

under the hayloft, you see the outline of a stone pier under the left-hand side. The stone pier is on the south wall. Now, Wright changed this area, but I don’t know when. However, you can see the change in the stone, like in the photo that I took, below:

Looking (plan) southeast. I took this on August 12, 2005.

If you look at the stone wall, I drew over the two vertical lines in the stone that show change. The arrow on the top is pointing out a wooden window. The window must have been put there fairly early because it shows up in a photograph from 1914. I posted about it in my second part of “What is the oldest part of Taliesin“. I’ll show that photo again:

Postcard of crowd at Taliesin. Caption on card: "WEST WING. WRIGHT'S BUNGALOW". Property: Patrick Mahoney — Property: Patrick Mahoney. Published in “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, Illustrated by Vintage Postcards”. Ed, Randolph C. Henning. Page 39.
Unknown photographer.

A postcard looking (plan) northeast at the western façade of Taliesin’s hayloft, summer (the hayloft is under the roof). Because the collection of people are unexpected at a farmhouse, Randolph C. Henning (who put this postcard in his book about Taliesin postcards), thinks this was taken the day after Taliesin’s 1914 fire and murders.

I don’t know why he did this, but a change appears in a drawing.²

That drawing is below.

I expanded the stone pier in the drawing:

Crop of floor plan showing Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio, Taliesin. — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.009.

On the drawing, you can see where I wrote the words “cow barn”. At the corner on the right in the cow barn, you can see the drawing of a door swinging inward. The pier to the right of that door is hand drawn.

Here’s my thought: maybe he expanded the cow barn and added the door there. But I don’t know why. Then he didn’t need it anymore so he covered it up.

Now, the last thing –

This was at Taliesin in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

This is a change that makes me go, “Uh… Mr. Wright?…

“wth are you doing?”

For reasons that I do not know,

Frank Lloyd Wright removed the wall corner one floor under Taliesin’s living room.

That wing of the building was rebuilt after Taliesin’s 1925 fire.

But later Wright removed a portion of the supporting wall at the corner on the ground floor of Taliesin’s living quarters.

For years.

Then, he changed it back to what it looks like today, with a foundation at the ground and walls, like you can see in the drone footage below:

This photograph comes from the drone footage in “Taliesin in Spring Green, WI”. That’s available on Travel Wisconsin’s YouTube page.

Well, except for the ivy growing on the stone. Man! stuff grows so much in a Wisconsin summer.

So here’s what happened:

Wright rebuilt Taliesin in 1925 after that second fire, and the building looked like it does now. Then, for some reason, he removed a corner on the first floor of that wing.

So, the corner of the building, under Taliesin’s Living Room, was cantilevered. It shows up in a drawing better than it shows up in most photos.³ Check out the drawing, #2501.015:

Elevation showing Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin Home and Studio, Taliesin. — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

[Yeah yeah yeah: I know I tell you to not trust Taliesin’s drawings …. Unless I tell you to trust the drawings.]

It looks like that corner cantilevered there by 1936.

I theorize this based on photographs taken by Edmund Teske in 1936 while at Taliesin. Teske’s photographs show changes around that area of Taliesin’s north façade. It’s occurred to me that maybe Wright was checking on cantilevering? It’s not like he’d never done it before….

Maybe he was thinking about something else?

This is why

I never ask those questions (“why did he do that?”). Still, I’ve had this one question—regarding this cantilever—for… 15 years?

Anyway, I’ll try to show it to you. The good thing is that photographer Pedro Guerrero took a photograph at Taliesin in the early 1950s in which you can see the cantilevered corner, hidden underneath the summer growth.

This photograph was published in the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly magazine (v 8, n 3, Summer, 1997), p. 16-17. Here’s my copy of the photo:

You can find this photograph at Guerrero’s website. You click on the portfolio for Guerrero’s Taliesin photographs and keep clicking through until you come to it.

Although the reason why Wright changed it back is clear:

it has to do with sculptor Heloise Christa.

“Heloise” was a member of the Taliesin Fellowship for almost 70 years.

In 1990, she told the Administrator of Historic Studies of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Indira Berndtson, that Wright changed that corner in 1957. She knew that because the change was under Wright’s direction the year that she became pregnant with her son, Christopher.

Wright wanted to open up the space on the floor where Heloise lived so she had room with Christopher.³

First published May 14, 2023.
My thanks to Brian A. Spencer for allowing me to publish the photographs taken by George Kastner. That includes the one at the top of this post.

Notes

1. It wasn’t called the Front Office in Wright’s lifetime. It was sometimes referred to as the “back studio” (its space flows from Taliesin’s Drafting Studio to the east).
2. wow: something at Taliesin that exists in a drawing. It’s rare, but you can trust Taliesin’s drawings. Sometimes.
3. I know – once again a drawing at Taliesin seems to match reality. Strange stuff. For me, anyway.

First page of the Feature Section in the Washington Herald newspaper, on November 28, 1915. Includes drawings, letters, and photograph of the face of Miriam Noel.

What about the second wife?

Posted on 05/02/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Yah: what about Wright’s second wife? That’s who I’ll write about today.

Years ago, a group of coworkers and I performed a comedy sketch for a friend who was leaving Taliesin Preservation. At one point in the sketch, we voiced common questions that folks ask when they take a tour. Among them were “how tall was he?” and “why are all the ceilings so low?”

[which is simply hi-larious lemme tell you]

But my favorite made-up question was from the co-worker who said the title of today’s blog post. I found it such a brilliant, off-hand “joke for the world’s smallest audience”.

But that begs the question: what about Frank Lloyd Wright’s second wife?

Those in the Wrightworld know

She wasn’t Mamah

Wright and Borthwick never married.

That was in part because Wright’s first wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce. I think that Wright would have married Mamah, despite the fact that he spoke a lot at that time about changing roles of marriage and women, due to their reading of Swedish feminist, Ellen Key. Key promoted the concept that women should not be the property of their husbands.

Yet, he understood at that time that he needed to place Mamah “under my protection” (as he said) at Taliesin.

The woman of the couple “living in sin”

would be in a terrible position to earn a living. The Dodgeville Chronicle newspaper reported in its January 5, 1912 article that Wright told them:

“The only circumstance which is the basis for the statement that I eloped with another man’s wife or deserted a wife or abandoned my children will be found in the fact that I neglected to inform the newspapers of Chicago of my intentions and the arrangements which had been made honestly with all who had any right to be consulted.”

No: Wright’s second wife was Maude “Miriam” Noel.

While I touched on her once before, I will be writing about her in this post. That’s because her birthday is May 9 (she was born in 1869).¹

She was born Miriam Hicks in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, and took the last name of Noel after her marriage to Emil Noel. They might have married when Miriam was 15.² The two of them moved to Chicago, where Miriam had their three children. Miriam and Emil later divorced.³

She went to Paris in the first decade of the 20^th century,⁴ and became a sculptress (although nothing of her work survives). Apparently, she left Europe at the start of World War I to return to Chicago and live with her daughter, Norma.⁵ Now, WWI starts in full force by early August, 1914, and the fire and murders at Taliesin happened on August 15. Noel read about the murders, which recapped Wright’s personal scandals (etc. etc., plus ça change).

The papers, then, were inundated with the stories of the lives lost at Taliesin.

While Wright wrote years later in his autobiography that he destroyed piles of sympathy letters, he did read some of those sent to him. That’s because, while he was receiving too many sympathy letters to count, there were still business correspondence that he had to attend to.

So, Wright instructed his draftsmen in Chicago to go through the letters and contact him with anything of importance. Apparently, one of the men thought he would be cheered by this letter of sympathy that said that, as an artist who had suffered loss, she understood where he was. Wright received the letter in December, 1914.

The architect acknowledged it, so Noel wrote another one. According to biographer, Finis Farr, in the second letter, Noel suggested they meet:

[A] few days later Miriam Noel sat opposite Wright’s desk…. He saw a woman who was no ordinary person, and who retained much of what had evidently been great youthful beauty. Richly dressed, with a sealskin cape, she had a pale complexion contrasting with her heavy dark red hair….

“How do you like me?” Miriam Noel asked.

“I’ve never seen anyone remotely resembling you,” said Wright.⁶

Wright was in a very delicate spot.

Years later, regarding his mourning for Mamah, he wrote that,

A horrible loneliness began to clutch me, but I longed for no one I ever loved or that I had ever known. My mother was deeply hurt by my refusal to have her with me. My children—I had welcomed them always—but I did not want them now. They had been so faithfully kind in my extremity. I shall never forget.

But strange faces were best and I walked among them.

I do not understand this any better now than I did then. But so it was. Months went by, but they might have been, and I believe they were, for me, a lifetime.⁷

IMO,⁸ Miriam, whether she planned it or not, was the perfect person for him at that point. Wright was probably among the walking dead in those months after August 15, 1914. And along came this sensuous stranger, who he probably engaged with physically very early. The emotions, and intensity, probably distracted him emotionally.

In fact, very quickly the two were plunged into drama. By August of 1915, she wrote him these letters that implied already that they were having emotional fights. If you want to see some of this, read the November 28, 1915 edition of the Washington Herald newspaper (available via Chronicling America from the Library of Congress). The story includes part of one of the letters that Miriam had written in August 4. The writing is… turgid:

“I went to pieces at mention of the things that were going on at Taliesin. The disappointment was too horrible. I shall always go to pieces like this, I know. Your letter has just come. For God’s sake do not torment me by relating your life as it is at Taliesen [sic].

Fears Her Own Emotion.

“Do not come. I cannot see you again. It will simply precipitate another outburst. Your carnivals at Taliesin are not for me. I do not want to be in them nor do I want to be told of them. A merry party of debauchers using your house for purposes too shocking for words—invited for that purposes. . . . if you write me again about it, I don’t think I shall be able to read the letter.

Why are you reading these “turgid” letters?

That’s because of a woman named Nellie Breen.

Nellie Breen was Wright’s housekeeper. Wright unfortunately left her in charge of his home on several occasions. At that time Breen got a hold of letters written by Noel to Wright. Due to this, Breen went to the United States Department of Justice and filed charges against Wright. These charges were for Wright’s violation of the Mann Act.

Created in 1910, the Mann Act

“criminalizes the transportation of any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

Or: another thing I learned while working at Taliesin.

Breen said Wright was violating the Mann Act by bringing Noel into Wisconsin from Illinois. And Wright had the charges dismissed due to the work by the lawyer Clarence Darrow

– yes it’s true! Wright really was related to ever-y-thing!

Ok, coming back from that

Thanks, Clarence!

Wright would stay with Miriam, from this time, and into his work in Japan on the Imperial Hotel. I theorize that Wright’s responsibilities on his commission kept him busy enough to get along with Noel for periods of time.

Wright’s son, John, had a front row to the relationship:

I remember… when Dad soft-shoed into the drafting room and read her note to me. He thought it wonderful. I thought it terrible. Dad viewed the occasion so lightly, he smiled when the poetess faced him, he winked and the poetess chased him. He had an empty place with him and he felt a need to fill it up with something that is a little like love, or was it poetry? But, as the drama developed and the meaning of the poetry became clear to Dad, it was too late.⁹

The last of the relay race:

Wright finished the Imperial Hotel, and he and Miriam came back to Taliesin by August 1922. That November, his first wife, Catherine Lee Tobin Wright, granted him a divorce. Then Wright and Miriam married in November 1923.

The second Mrs. Wright left him by May of the next year (1924). The two began divorce proceedings, which were stopped when, apparently, Miriam found out about Olgivanna (who I wrote about regarding Taliesin’s 1925 fire).

Which ignited Miriam’s revenge.

That a surprise? Look at the damned letter in the Washington Herald that she apparently wrote after they’d only been together for 8 months!

And on.

The relationship between Wright and Miriam twisted and tangled up, losing Wright his clients, more dignity within the American press, and Wright ended up being thrown in jail in 1926.

Lastly

If you want to read about Miriam, there are the biographies by Meryle Secrest, Brendan Gill, and Finis Farr that I wrote in the Notes, below.

In addition, author TC Boyle made her into a hell of a character in his book,

or an annoying PITA, depending on your viewpoint; both of which are legitimate

The Women (Penguin Books, New York, 2009).

One of our staff members read it to us at lunch. I wrote about this when I related some of what we did at my old job during the Winter.

First published, May 2, 2023.
The image at the top of this post comes from the cover of the November 28, 1915 Feature Section in the Washington Herald newspaper.

Notes

1. Miriam Noel died on January 3, 1930.

2. Meryl Secrest Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 238.

3. Brendan Gill. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (G P Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1987), 235.

4. Secrest, note on page 581. According to Secrest, Emil Noel died in 1911. Secrest didn’t write whether Emil and Miriam were living together at the time, or if Miriam had left for Paris without her husband in 1904.

5. Meryl Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 237-238. I’ve taken the basic biography of Miriam Noel from Meryle Secrest’s biography. Noel appears in the chapter, “Lord of Her Waking Dreams.” That title is a modification of what Noel wrote to Wright in a letter.

6. Finis Farr. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Charles Scriber’s Sons, New York, 1961), 146, 147. Farr wrote that David Robinson, the Office Manager, gave him the letter. Ok: so that’s the guy we can blame for Wright meeting Miriam.

7. Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 191.

8. and, if I haven’t said this before: the tenor of this post is pretty much all imo. Not that I’m wrong, I just don’t want you to think that this is the lasting authority.

9. John Lloyd Wright, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (originally published as My Father Who is on Earth (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946; Dover Publications, Inc., New York; 1992), 108-109.

Headline describing the April 20, 1925 fire at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home

What a Way to Begin

Posted on 04/19/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Have you ever fallen in love with someone, were blissfully going along, and then

something crazy-bad happened

outside of the control of either of you?

It’s a test of your mettle. And you move beyond your fears and you are all there for that person. It’s a test and you’ve aced it, in this binding experience.

Well,

that is, in short, my completely unauthorized and totally subjective start of the story of Olgivanna Milanoff Hinzenberg (later, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright) and the dashing, brilliant architect, Frank Lloyd Wright¹ in the aftermath of the fire that ripped through Taliesin on April 20, 1925.

So, that’s what I’m going to talk about in this post. Because the anniversary is right around the corner.

Let’s go back in history

In 1924, Frank Lloyd Wright was living back in Wisconsin, after his supervision and building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo Japan, followed by designing and building in California.

He referred to most of these California homes as the Textile Block homes. Wright had a cool idea with these homes. They would be made out of specially-designed concrete blocks, that used material from the site. This way they would be less expensive, and use local material as the aggregate that would normally be displaced during construction. Plus, Wright was trying to think of a way to beautify the “gutter rat” (as he said) of concrete. They were “textile block” because of the way they were “knitted” together. He tried to do this once more in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t as easy or as inexpensive as he thought they would be.

Then, by mid-May, 1924

he was newly single after his second wife, Miriam Noel, had left.

About 6 months later, in late November, Wright went to Chicago and visited friend Jerry Blum. Wright says in his autobiography that Blum was a “diamond-in-the-rough painter” who had been “spoiled” by his parents giving him “too much easy money.”² Blum brought Wright to an afternoon ballet performance in Chicago.

Afternoon ballet performances might not be the common thing nowadays, but then again, this was 1924. After all, my parents used to drive us to NYC in the late 1970s/early ’80s to see matinees on Broadway on Sunday afternoons. It was inexpensive, but mom made sure we all held hands because at that time, Times Square could be a little sketchy, to say the least.

The theater was packed and Wright and Blum sat in the box seats with one free seat. That’s where Wright and Olgivanna

had a meet-cute.

She was brought in to the only free seat in the theater just as the performance began. Wright wrote that he was drawn to this striking woman with no jewelry, and with dark hair worn straight down on either side of her face. He wrote in his autobiography in 1943 about this chance meeting:

Suddenly in my unhappy state something cleared up—what had been the matter with me came to look me in the face—it was, simply, too much passion without poetry… that was it, the best in me for years and years wasted—starved! This strange chance meeting was it… poetry? I was a hungry man.

An Autobiography (1943 edition), 509³

The photograph below is Olgivanna, apparently on her first visit to Taliesin:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

She’s standing in front of the south wall of Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

Shortly after the new year, Olgivanna moved into Taliesin with her daughter, Svetlana.

Then, just over 3 months later,

on April 20, 1925, Olgivanna, Wright, Svetlana, and a few others were eating in Taliesin’s dining room up on the hill. At that time, a fire began in Taliesin’s living quarters and would destroy them.

I wrote just about the this fire two years ago, in this post.

Olgivanna wrote about Taliesin’s 1925 fire, later published in her autobiography:

One evening while the three of us were having dinner in the little dining room up on the hill, separate from the residence, I smelled smoke. The telephone rang incessantly. The housekeeper and her husband did not bother about it and said later that they were not conscious that the smoke might spell fire. “There must be something wrong,” I said. “Don’t you think we had better find out? Frank,” I insisted, “I think we had better go down and see what is going on. The smell of smoke is growing stronger.”

We stepped out and saw Taliesin in flames. We ran down fast. The neighbors began to arrive….

They all fought the flames for hours until rain came, dousing them. Yet, while the studio and offices were untouched, the living quarters, and almost everything in them, were destroyed mostly down to stone.

Olgivanna wrote that Wright had been so concerned about stopping the fire, that he argued against people removing objects from the building. So, he sat on the hill blaming himself for all of the lost art.

Continuing her story,

Olgivanna wrote:

I moved close to him and said, “We will get more works of art. We have each other. Nothing can stop us. We will rebuild Taliesin. you will make it more beautiful now. Let us look at it as a truly fresh beginning of our life, all new. Great opportunities lie before us.” “And,” I whispered to him, “I’m going to have a baby.”

…. He put his hands around me and said, “Nothing matters but you and me – now we will be welded together.”

After this, there would be lots of problems in the press, and with money, and, you know, that weekend Wright spent in jail.

Helped, or created, by problems with Miriam Noel.

But according to Olgivanna, her push (and optimism) immediately after the fire helped him start to rebuild. Talk about a test by fire, man.

First published April 19, 2023.
The newspaper headline at the top of this post is from the New Britain Herald and was printed on April 21, 1925.

Notes:

1 Re: Wright as “dashing” – his widow’s peak seen in the photo below is quite respectable. It’s got a flavor of Christopher Walken:

Frank Lloyd Wright with draftsmen outside of Taliesin. — Photograph published in *Big Little Nobu. Right No Deshi Josei Kenchikuka Tsuchiura Nobuko*

Back: left to right: Kamecki Tsuchiura, Nobuko Tsuchiura, with Silva Moser behind her husband, Werner Moser.
Seated are: Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, with Richard Neutra in the front.

2. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 508. I don’t know why Wright wrote that about Blum, but it’s amusing to read.

3. You may have read about this meeting in the book by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman: The Fellowship: The Unknown Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship. And, yes, I have opinions about it.

In fact, my major opinion is that if you haven’t read it, please don’t.

Photograph on April of Taliesin in the distance. Taken by Keiran Murphy.

Buying the hill

Posted on 04/09/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 2 minutes

On April 10, 1911, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother, Anna, purchased 31.65 acres of land in The Valley south of Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, which cost $2,274.88, is where Wright would build the structure you see in the photo above: his home, Taliesin.

I put a copy of the warranty deed below:

Warranty deed is reproduced on page 99 in Wright Studies, volume one: Taliesin, 1911-1914, ed. Narciso Menocal.

Ostensibly, Anna bought the land so that her son could build a home for her.

Of course, it wasn’t for her. It was for himself and Mamah Borthwick. Haven’t you been paying attention?

He was building the structure there by May of 1911. We know this thanks to a note in the Weekly Home News (Spring Green’s newspaper). I wrote about this news piece in my post, “This Will Be A Nice Addition“.

The “Home News” on the purchase:

It said that Wright’s mother, “is building her home in Hillside valley, adjoining the old homestead, a little north and west of the old millsite. This will be a nice addition to the neat home in the valley.”

But Frank Lloyd Wright, of course, was eloquent about that piece of land in The Valley. On this anniversary, I will print some of his writing on the piece of land from his An Autobiography, first published in 1932.

Wright from his autobiography:

Taliesin was the name of a Welsh poet. A druid-bard or singer of songs who sang to Wales the glories of Fine Art. Literally the Welsh word means “shining brow.” Many legends cling to the name in Wales.

TALIESIN

This hill on which Taliesin now stands as “brow” was one of my favorite places when I was a boy, for pasque flowers grew there in March sun while snow still streaked the hillsides.

….

I knew well by now that no house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other.

….

The world had appropriate buildings before–why not more appropriate buildings now than ever before. There must be some kind of house that would belong to that hill, as trees and the ledges of rock did; as Grandfather and Mother had belonged to it, in their sense of it all.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932). 170, 171.

Draftsman Taylor Woolley took photographs of Wright’s new-built home in 1911-12. They exist at the Utah Historical Society. You can find them through this link.

First published April 10, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this post on April 11, 2015.

Photo by Henrikke Due on Unsplash. Girl prone on ground with bored look on her face.

I was a slush pile reader

Posted on 03/27/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I regret that I did not get practice in the field of professional writing while I was in college getting that degree.

I had one great writing teacher who required us to read and critique submissions by our classmates. I still remember Dennis saying that, “you will write nothing worth a damn until you are at least 30 years old.”

Although I went to the same college where the directors of Oscar-winning film, Everything Everywhere All at Once went, so that’s gotta mean something, right?

Yes, I agree it doesn’t mean anything.

But I have a degree from the same school as classmates (and old friends) who have written plays, and/or won awards, and published books. Which puts me into a great collection of people.

But in my post today, I’ll write about another learning experience: when I was a slushpile reader.

In the aughts

I worked for the online magazine, Absinthe Literary Review.

The magazine is on the Wayback Machine,

See – I use that page on the internet archive a lot.

and is also saved at LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). That’s good, because cyber-squatting happened to the original “ALR” site. So, ALR is further protected through Preservation by Distribution.

My experiences at ALR made me felt better about my writing abilities…, and also a little bit worse. But I did find some enjoyment through the experience.

Here’s some good things I learned about getting writing rejections:

When someone writes that your submission didn’t work for their publication, it really doesn’t.

When a person says, “It’s just not right for this issue,” sometimes it actually means just that.

When they write that it was a hard choice, they honestly mean it.

The first time I read for ALR

The editors of the magazine gave me 55 entries. Out of these, I was to whittle them down and out of those, send them 5 “hopeful” submissions. With my job of picking one out of 11 entries, I really spent time on some, wondering if they went in the “possible/not possible” pile.

But first, I had to find, in those 55, which were “possible/not possible” that I would send to ALR; and which were, “OMG ABSOLUTELY NOT THAT ONE.”

That’s because some of the writing on these submissions was just, really, bad. Those that I knew, within a page, sometimes in the first paragraph, that this was not a good story.

In that case, I did not waste any of my energy writing the rejection letter. In that case, I just copied and pasted the rejection. Those rejections are the ones that stay with me.

Those in the first paragraph:

Were closely inspired by George Orwell’s novel, 1984.

Where the author intentionally spelled things incorrectly. To either amp up the feeling that this was taking place far in the future, or indicate the narrator’s lack of education.

Or a story, say, with a giant praying mantis, in which I figured out that there was going to be a giant praying mantis from the 2nd page of a 9-page story.

Stories with words we need to retire:

betwixt
tresses
- Actually, I hadn’t seen those words in 15 years, at least. But making a list of words to retire might have just been evidence that I was getting cranky.

Or this story

Which began:

“Breath of my breath, keeper of my soul. My angel and my demon. My sacrament and my damnation: Violetta.“

…. I didn’t even know what to think about that one.

Not to be hoity-toity, but that’s a cover version of the beginning of Nabokov’s Lolita.

Still, I tried to give things an honest shake. Sometimes I knew to set things aside so I could look later with fresh eyes. Although the story with the giant praying mantis? No. But I might have put the story with the word “resplendent” away for a little while before coming back to it later.

There were many levels of understanding

on whether to pass the piece back to the editor.

I sent him a .pst file with everything—including my rejections—in case there is some question at a later date from the writer. But the editor only got the complete submission on items I was sending up the chain.

The reason this made me feel worse:

When I read something (even the take-off on 1984) from someone who, in the intro letter, told me that they had previously been published.

Even multiple times!

Re-reading that, after looking at a submission that was, well, terrible, just depressed me. I thought: am I wrong? Am I dumb? Do I not have the wherewithal to submit my writing so that I could be published multiple times?

In the end I decided to just not read the intro letters until after I read the story.

It’s kind of like when I take the snacks off the counter so that I’m not tempted to cheat.

In the end, I divided the pieces sent up the chain into three:

a piece that I loved
a piece that might be something good, but I didn’t know whether it was right for the mag or not, and
almost interchangeable with the 2nd level. It’s sort of an imprecise thing…. More of a feeling.

Although when it was horrendously bad, I kept the example in my brain. Like, worse than the bastardization of Lolita. But something that still makes me laugh.

I am not alone in coming across bad writing. There is, after all, the Bulwar Lytton Fiction contest:

[P]articipants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Our whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

In the end, I really wrote this today for 2 selfish reasons.

One reason is that I want to impart this line from one writer’s submission letter. He wrote this to describe the basic plot of his story:

“Daniel falls in love with a robot—a lesbian robot!!!”

[sic]

I checked, and that line

– even in after the movie, “Her” in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an operating system –

still makes me laugh.

And the second reason I wrote:

I want to give the link to this one piece that I sent “up the chain” at ALR. It’s a short piece written by Nathan Radke, entitled “Dot“.

When I read the piece today and still enjoy it.

I’m proud of that, like I’m proud of that “B+” that Dennis McFarland gave me in the last creative writing class I took from him.

First published March 27, 2023
The photograph at the top of this post is by Henrikke Due and was published here on the site for public domain images, Unsplash.com.

Photograph of landscape around Taliesin in late winter. Grass, trees, and the building in view.

My March Madness

Posted on 03/16/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I took this photograph in March 2005, showing the landscape around Taliesin. There was a work-related reason for it: I was photographing the area to see how it matched up with Taliesin in 1911. That’s because the Wisconsin Historical Society had just won the bid for “The Album” of Taliesin photos from 1911-1912 (here’s my post on The Album).

I think if I were standing at that spot today, it would be a little duller and

[as I look out the windows to confirm]

it would be cloudy. And there would be more blobs of snow. Of course, there has been (and continues to be) lots of snow on the East Coast, so I imagine that others are getting tired of the winter, too.

But what I am writing about today is not winter. I want to write about March Madness.

Not the March Madness

those in the United States know. That is, rooting for men’s and women’s college basketball teams during the NCAA championship tournaments.

No.

For me, March Madness has to do with Frank Lloyd Wright

I know that’s a surprise to my readers.¹

But at least it helps explain the photo of Taliesin that’s at the top of this page.

You see, for decades following 1994 (when I started working at Taliesin), I came to expect tour dreams in the late winter/early spring.

That is:

I would have dreams in the spring about giving tours at Taliesin.

Now, I know that for many other adults, they have dreams in which they find themself back in high school, with a bunch of stressful things happening.

Trying to get to class
Finding out that there’s a huge test that they didn’t prepare for
Or that there’s a big test in a class that they never even showed up in

- I think being naked is sometimes in there, too.

For me, however,

My stress dreams involved, ostensibly, leading tours and things all going wrong.

Although, just to get this out there: I never had a dream where I was giving a tour naked.

I had TWO FLAVORS of tour-stress dreams each spring:

1.) I was doing something wrong

Most often, I would dream that I was leading a tour and was outrageously late.

How late?

SO LATE.

Like, I would be one-and-a-half hours into leading a two-hour tour and I wasn’t near the front door. Yet–despite that fact that my dreamself knew this–I could never get the group closer to the inside of the building.

Although, we did have this one guide IRL. I’ll call him Tom. He would be so late on his tours that the bus drivers regularly left him and his group on the Taliesin Estate.

Let me tell you: all the shuttle bus drivers were really patient with guides. So, you know that someone has to be really chronometrically-challenged for bus drivers to regularly leave them.

In fact, one time Tom was left at Hillside on the south end of the Taliesin estate. When he walked out of Hillside and his shuttle bus driver wasn’t there, he just WALKED with his group to Taliesin (which is about half a mile away).²

The other dream subjects:

2.) Either staff or visitors messed with me

Most of the time, these dreams were just where visitors did things they should not do on tours.

Like, people sitting in chairs they shouldn’t sit in.³ That is: people on my tours plopping down on the original, delicate, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “barrel” chairs (like the chairs in the foreground of the photo below) –

Frank Lloyd Wright's bedroom. Photo by Maynard Parker, Huntington Library-Parker Collection. — Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Call Number photCL MLP 1266

At least one of my dreams included someone leaning back on one of Wright’s barrel chairs, and they almost tipped backwards. Oh, in this case, into the Chinese painting you see in Taliesin’s Guest Bedroom, below:

That photo reminds me:

one time I had a dream where a student at the School of Architecture⁴ took over the Guest Bedroom (the room in the photo). When I walked into the room with my group, the room looked like any college dorm room. There were empty food plates on the floor and posters on the walls.

There was one dream where someone on the tour was eating Doritos.

In one dream, something happened at tickets:

I was escorting my tour group onto the shuttle bus to take us all to the Taliesin estate. But the line wouldn’t stop: people just kept walking past me toward the shuttle. I went to the ticket seller to ask and she replied,

“Oh! Well 45 Japanese tourists came in, so I just put them on your tour.“

I think–hope–that in all these dream-tours I tried to keep the peace.

Instead of, you know, using foul language, a.k.a., four-letter-words.

Like this [NSFW] guy.

Amazingly,

I don’t have these dreams anymore. I dreamed almost nightly about Taliesin and giving tours in 2020, the year of Covid. So I assumed I would just keep having tour dreams.

Well, one of my last tour dreams took place in that year (2020). I wrote about this dream on a social media site:

I had a dream last night that I was taking people on a tour of Taliesin, but when I got out of the bus and started walking with these people, I could never find it. We walked through all of these marble rooms and just kept going on, thinking it was through the next door.

I can’t explain it. Hopefully I’ll dream of it again. Preferably happy dreams. And when spring finally comes to Wisconsin.

Posted originally on March 16, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in March, 2005.

Notes:

1. that was a joke.

2. To those who are reading this who I used to work with: “Tom” was there in the 1990s, so most of you never met him.

3. We had a few places where people could sit at Taliesin. Mostly in Wright’s Living Room. But, while members of the Taliesin Fellowship could sit in the chairs, we couldn’t let those on tours do so. In part because we had thousands of people coming through every tour season.

4. Formerly the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. They used to live on the Taliesin Estate in the summer.