OH,
THE JOY OF A BOY (or two) in the sun-warmed sandbox after a long, wet and wintry early spring.
Spring Sunshine, Not a Moment Too Soon
The Lively Letters – and Interesting Times – of My Cousin Lillie
By David Fay Smith

Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone’s author photo for her first memoir, taken in about 1908. She studied with the same voice teacher as Jenny Lind had, and sometimes sang duets with her at private dinners, but Lillie did not want a life upon the public stage like Jenny Lind’s.
I RECENTLY OPENED A BOX OF BOOKS that had been in storage – usually a dubious proposition – and discovered a copy of In the Courts of Memory by Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone, a second cousin several generations removed. (Her mother and my great-great-grandmother were first cousins, but only a Hobbit would care.) Lillie Greenough was born into a musical family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was well known there at a very young age for her remarkable soprano voice. In 1859, at the age of 15, her mother took her to London so she could be trained by Manuel Garcia, a famous voice teacher of the time.
By 1862 she is living in Paris, married to Charles Moulton, a wealthy American banker, and partying at the Second Empire – as the court of Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie was known – all the while writing letters to the folks back home, detailing who was there, what they wore, what they did for entertainment, what music was performed, and what she sang, for she was almost always asked to sing. For example, in June 1867, she entertains Franz Liszt, Prince and Princess Metternich (the Austrian ambassador) and 25 other people, including the composers Daniel Auber and Jules Massenet. Auber brought along a manuscript, which Liszt glanced at, “and said ‘C’est très jolie.‘ After dinner, and a cigar in the conservatory, ìhe went to the piano and played the ‘jolie‘ little thing of Auber’s.” From memory!
“He seemed extraordinarily amiable that evening,” she wrote, “for he sat down at the piano without being asked and played a great many of his compositions. One has generally to tease and beg him, and then he refuses. But I think when he heard Massenet improvising at one of the pianos he was inspired, and he put himself at the other (we have two grand pianos), and they played divinely, both of them improvising.”

Known as the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind studied with Manuel Garcia in 1841, and became world-famous for her operatic soprano. P.T. Barnum brought her to tour the US in 1851, and later she made her own very successful tour circuit. Dress, hair, and even furniture styles were named for her.
Lillie has a sharp eye (and ear) for detail (and for human nature), and provides a vivid, sometimes acerbic image of the life and times of the very, very rich. Imagine Downton Abbey, but with appearances by people like Massenet, Liszt, Gounod, Rossini, Wagner, Jenny Lind (with whom she sings duets), and Sarah Bernhardt – not to mention all the royalty and near-royalty. Lillie is in France during the Franco Prussian War (1870) and in Paris during the Paris Commune (1871), an uprising of anarchists and Marxists who depose Napoleon III and rule the city for 72 days of chaos and bloodshed. A few years after her husband, Charles Moulton, dies, she marries the Danish minister to the United States, and travels with him to diplomatic posts in Stockholm, Rome, Paris, Washington, and Berlin.
My cousin Lillie lived in interesting times, and often had a good vantage to observe the people and events. In the Courts of Memory is only the first volume, covering 1858-1875. The second is The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912, which was not in our storage box and I intend to read on my iPad. (Both are available as free e-books at Project Guttenberg.)
Brooklyn Artisan Contributor David Fay Smith is the author of A Computer Dictionary for Kids and Other Beginners, and a former columnist for Publishers Weekly.
A Wing and a Latte: Backstory on a Visual Pun
ADDENDUM TO CHALK TALK: Look closely at the center of the Intelligentsia winged insignia. In place of the customary propellor or star between the wings, this clever image seems to show an artisanal coffee with a curl of cream on the top. The “wing and a prayer” phrase has been kept alive in American culture – at least among old-movie buffs – by a black-and-white movie that occasionally turns up on PBS or late-night television: Starring Dana Andrews and Don Ameche, this war propaganda film won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1944. It took its title from a number-one hit song of 1943, “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,” sung by the Song Spinners. Other number-one songs in that year: Bing Crosby, “White Christmas”; Harry James, “I Had the Craziest Dream (Last Night)”; Glenn Miller, “That Old Black Magic”; Benny Goodman, “Taking a Chance on Love”; Dick Haymes, “You’ll Never Know (How Much I Love You)”; Tommy Dorsey, “In the Blue of the Evening”; Mills Brothers, “Paper Doll (To Call My Own)”; and Al Dexter, “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” Quite a song list for a single year!
Moore’s Law: How the Future Came To Be Stuffed in a Stocking
By David Fay Smith COMING UP ON 30 YEARS AGO, I WROTE A BOOK called A Computer Dictionary for Kids and Other Beginners (Ballantine, 1984), to explain bits and bytes to children and their parents. This Christmas, my wise wife gave me a copy of iPads for Seniors. And so it goes.
At Costco recently, I bought flash drives for Christmas stocking stuffers: $10 each for SanDisk 16 GB flash drives – solid state gizmos with retractable USB connections that will bayonet into practically any fairly modern PC or Mac and provide a convenient means of backing up or transporting files from one computer to another. These are about 1 ½ inches long and weigh a third of an ounce.
Just to be clear, 16 GB is 16 billion bytes (actually 16, 384,000,000, but who’s counting?) A byte is equivalent to a single character or letter, so 16 GB amounts to some 2 billion 8-letter words or about 40 typical 50,000 word novels. [Read more…]
Call Me, Ishmael, Or Pls Txt Detls: Moby Marathon
OMG, starts 2day.
THIS-FIRST-TIME-IN-NYC MARATHON READING of Herman Melville’s classic white-whale tale – a book, not a drink – has its multiple readers all lined up; walk-in listeners welcome. Starts tonight, Friday, Nov. 16, at Brooklyn Word (reception at 5 pm, reading at 6pm). Tomorrow the reading moves to Housing Works Bookstore Cafe (10am to 3 pm), returns to Brooklyn’s shores for the evening read at Molasses Books, back to Housing Works on Sunday, 10am to 4pm.
As a young boy living on Bleeker Street, Melville liked to go down to the battery to stare at the sea. What would he have thought – or written – about Superstorm Sandy?
Thank You, Open House New York
THANKS TO OHNY.ORG, Brooklyn was buzzing with extra activities over the weekend. Though – as some know – it is at the center of the universe, Kings County ‘s events comprised only one slice of a citywide effort that was started as Open House New York by Scott Lauer in 2001. It, in turn, is part of a global network. Official Open House events take place in Dublin, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Slovenia, Melbourne, Helsinki, and six other cities.
Lauer’s particular mission is to educate the public about New York architecture and design. An October event annually since 2003 , Open House New York invites the public into “hundreds of New York’s most architecturally and culturally significant spaces and places, many not usually open to the public, in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs,” its site says. Brooklyn events are managed by “a hardy band of 15 OHNY volunteers,” says Susan Katz, a blogger and tourism consultant with MsGuided Tours NYC and herself a 10-year veteran volunteer: “We like to think people appreciate it.”
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