I just sent another message to Governor Tina Kotek that is published below.
Above are two works by my late sister, Christine Rosamond Benton, who signed her work by her middle name, Rosamond. She gave me credit for her amazing success, by allowing her to look over my shoulder while I painted, and by showing her books on my favorite artists, The Pre-Raphaelites.
Office of Oregon GovernorTina Kotek
Share Your Opinion
Thank you for contacting Governor Kotek’s office. Due to the heavy volume of e-mails sent to Governor Kotek, we may be unable to respond personally to each one, but please know that your input means a great deal to her.
Siddal is best known for her appearance in John Everett Millais’ famous work “Ophelia,” further casting her in a tragic light.
The exhibition places works by Siddal and Rossetti side-by-side to demonstrate her influence on his work. Madeleine Buddo/Photo © Tate© Provided by Africanews
Clerk Saunders by Elizabeth Siddal, 1857
Dear Governor.
I implore you to send me to the Tate Gallery in London so I can see the show ‘The Rossetti’s. This would be the climax of my long study of the Pre-Raphaelites, began in 1969 when I declared myself a New Pre-Raphaelite and let my hair grown long as did members of the Brotherhood in imitations of the Nazarene Artists if Germany. I have been posting on your Facebook as John Nazarite. I was named after John the Baptist who was a Nazarite as was Samson, who let his hair grow long.I am nt sure you can see these posts from my newspaper ‘Royal Rosamond Press’ “A newspaper for the arts” that may be the largest blog in the world. I get no monies or funding. If you can contact funded art groups in Oregon, and have some of them look at my latest post, then they will agree I have an astounding legacy to bequeath to the State of Oregon, so it can be preserved from the dark forces that have gone after Disneyland. Lat night on MSNBS there was an item on Governor DeSantis being inspried by Viktor Borgan. May I suggest an alliance with Governor Neusome who is close to the Getty family who have ammased a huge art collection. My late brother-in-law, Garth Benton, did the murals at the Getty Villa.
It would be wonderful if you could contact the Tate Gallery and arrange for the Rossetti show to come to the Schnitzer gallery. The Road to England begins near Coburg, where Joaquin, and George Miller grew up. Joaquin graduated from Columbia college in Eugene and wrote for this cities first newspaper. George married Lizzie Cogswell and owned a magazine that was going to carry Jack London’s diary of The Snark. Oregon can be the new home for the sober Jack.
Joaquin Miller had dinner at the home of Dante Gabrielle Rossetti and proposed marriage to the muse, Emma Brown. Miller dedicate his book of poems To The Rossetti’s. This is a shoe-in a real Glass Slipper that will bring much European Culture to Oregon including the work of J.R. Tolkien that was insprie by William Morris a co-founder of the Pre-Rapahelite Brotherhood, that is also a Sisterhood.
I own a mountain of information that needs to become a book sponsored by the Governor of Oregon. I implore you to put together a team of artists and writers so this creative legacy can be secure and protected for generations to come. I just founded a guilt…
The Brother and Sisterhood of Oregon Artists and Writers
Sinceltely
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Siddal
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/elizabeth-siddal-tate-britain-untold-art-history/index.html
London’s Tate Britain opened a new exhibition last week entitled The Rossettis. It includes works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the Pre-Raphaelite group of English artists and poets still usually dubbed a “brotherhood.”
But the show turns the spotlight on an overlooked female member of the artistic circle, Elizabeth Siddal. According to the curators, The Rossettis is the most comprehensive exhibition of her work for 30 years
Tate Britain’s latest major exhibition charts the romance and radicalism of the Rossetti generation – Dante Gabriel, Christina and Elizabeth (neé Siddal) – showcasing their revolutionary approach to life, love and art. Moving through and beyond the Pre-Raphaelite years, the exhibition features over 150 paintings and drawings as well as photography, design, poetry and more.
Although the Tate has a collection of Rosetti paintings, this is the first time they’ve held a Rosetti exhibition, and it looks beyond the familiar paintings to the poetry and campaigning work, and the other less famous members of the family.
This is also the first retrospective of Elizabeth Siddal for 30 years, featuring her rare surviving watercolours and important drawings.
Despite his modern fame, Dante Gabriel Rosetti rarely exhibited when alive, preferring to work for private patrons than to show in galleries. Today he is more famous than his sister, while the roles were reversed in life.
The exhibition opens with the poems than the paintings, and after a look at their early works, swiftly moves onto the combination that was intrinsic to Gabriel’s practice as a painter-poet.
More personal forms of revolution are explored through the Rossettis’ refusal to abide by the constraints of Victorian society. Works such as Dante Gabriel’s Found begun 1854, Elizabeth Siddal’s Lady Clare 1857 and Christina’s poem The Goblin Market 1859 show how they questioned love in an unequal and materialist world.
In a sense, if you’ve come here for the trademark Pre-Raphaelite paintings that the Rosetti’s are so famous for, then the exhibition opens slightly disappointingly. More informative undeniably, but you have to go through a few rooms before the red headed ladies in voluminous dresses to appear.
The exhibition takes a fresh look at the myths surrounding the unconventional relationships between Dante Gabriel, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris. The portraits from the later part of Dante Gabriel’s career, are shown in the context of the achievements and experiences of the working women who inspired them.
Somewhat unexpectedly, the exhibition also includes comics, looking at how the Pre-Raphaelites have inspired subsequent artists.
If you visit the gallery arriving via Pimlico tube station, then you might have a preview of the exhibition on the walls, which are decorated with paintings from the Tate’s collection. One of them is the very famous painting, The Beloved, which is in the exhibition, but here in the tube station, has been cut to fit the space and is shown as it so often is, cropped. In doing so though, the image crops out the most troubling aspect of it — the representation of a boy in the foreground, chosen mainly to be as black as possible simply to contrast with the English whiteness of the five ladies behind.
Little is known about the boy who is so often cropped out of the painting, as it has been in Pimlico tube station, but the exhibition gives him a long overdue prominence.
The exhibition, The Rossettis is at Tate Britain until 24th September 2023
.
My Kinship With Liz, The Gettys, Ian Fleming
Posted on September 17, 2019 by Royal Rosamond Press
I am now going to concentrate on promoting myself in a professional manner. I taught my famous sister how to paint. She married into the famous Benton family of artists. I am kin to Augustus John.
Joaquin Miller And Emma Brown
Posted on September 4, 2019by Royal Rosamond Press
I learned yesterday that Joaquin Miller proposed to Pre-Raphaelite Muse, Emma Hill, who became the wife of Ford Maddox Brown. Joaquin spent some time in Maddox’s famous home at 37 Fitzroy Street that is regrettably owned by Scientology. Some of the greatest artists, poets, and writers of Britain met here, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, of which I declared I was one in 1969. I shared these artists with my late sister, the world famous artist known as ‘Rosamond’ who took up art in 1972. I have posthumously titled Christine a Pre-Raphaelite Artist. One of the artists that spent time at William Morris whom had a great influence on J.L. Tolkien. The painting Brown rendered are moviesque. I will try to get the director of my movie ‘Hromund’ to use the work of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Joaquin Miller was friends with William Michael Rossetti, and his brother, Gabriele. William married Lucy Maddox Brown. If Joaquin had married Emma, then he would be kin to the most literary and creative people in the West. For years I have been trying to get City Manager, Neil Laudati, interested in making Springfield Oregon, the Home of the Pre-Raphaelites, because the Miller family lived down the road apiece, and were Oregon Pioneers. My family knows nothing about this history. Since Christine’s death, Drew Benton, Shannon Rosamond, and Shamus Dundon have not written and published ONE WORD about the Artists and Writers in their family, yet, they claim so much! This is an astounding Creative Legacy that will be recognized by Great Britain, once they are made aware of it.
I modeled Royal Rosamond Press after The Germ. I elevated the famous commercial success of Drew and Shannon’s mother, and I have never been thanked. Christine said she owed her success to me, her teacher. The proof of this is evident.
Yoni Noguchi was at the Fitzroy House and lived with Miller in the Oakland Hills. My family knew Miller who may have modeled his Bohemian enclave after the Pre-Raphaelites and the creative souls who knew the Brown family. Yoni appears to have been a Japanese Spy sent by the Emperor to learn Western Culture through poetry. This is so Tolkienish! Here is the Japanese Bilbo who travels to a strange land and bonds with Gandalf. Joaquin write about their small statue. More of his “brown” people came to the Hights.
So soon after I gave my family a flash of bright light, there are dark problems about why I was not told Vicki died ten days ago. It has been suggested I was both the mother and father to my parents, and my siblings. I have been avoiding the possibility I am……..The Family Giver…………and I have been severely ripped off? Or is it a case of the naughty stupid children hiding everything from their brilliant parent who may be their superior, and a genius. No one but me took the time to learn anything about art, and, literature!
Joaquin Miller was the editor of Eugene’s first newspaper – before there was a Springfield. His brother George married a Cogswell who are the founders of the Eugene Register Guard. There’s newspaper men surrounding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Sisterhood. George could have been the brother-in-law of Emma Hill.
Joaquin put the make on English Women dressed as a cowboy, or, Californian Hippie. He came to conquer – with poetry! I would like to employ Miller’s poetry in my book and movie the same way Tolkien did with the poetry of William Morris. Joaquin did his best to wed English Literature to the Wild West. Joaquin’s influence on the culture of Japan needs a collegiate study. The Invasion of Pearl Harbor may have contained Miller’s poetry.
“The Californians like to laze about all day reading poetry to one another, and painting pretty picture. Then, when the mood strikes them, they roll over on one another and fornicate like beasts. Our Imperial Marines will make quick work of them. Bonsai!”
The Beauty that Joaquin really wanted to roll over one, was Mathilde Blind. But, he met his Waterloo! Alas I think I have found the Teutonic Woman that broke Miller’s heart. Did he propose to Emma after Blind body-slammed his cowboy ass in the Bohemian Cage of Pathos, Life, and Death? Our Orgonian was out of his league. There is no Pathos, here, here! Lucy Maddox Brown did a portrait of Blind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Madox_Brown
With the passing of my sister my thoughts went to the loneliness of Rena Victoria Easton, my Waterloo. It is this connectivity that motivates and moves these Bohemians across a flowery dance floor seeking first the attention of their Sisters and Brothers. Here are the original Hobbits and Hippies, the timeless root of the New Cooperation.
The other day, when my beloved sister came to me while I took my old man nap, she thanked me! From heaven she could behold the Big Picture now that her artistic siblings allowed her to be a part of. She was – wowed! She could not believe her good fortune, and the great choice she made, to be born from the same Rosy womb!
Are those California poppies? Did Joaquin bring a pot of them, over there, on a ship?
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
Copyright 2019
Honoring The Visions of George Miller
Posted on May 30, 2016 by Royal Rosamond Press
I will be going out to Coburg today to plant another flower at the grave of George Miller, the brother of Joaquin Miller, a honorary member of the Bohemian Club that was a place for Bay Area Journalists to gather and compare notes. If Miller lived in the Bay Area, then he too would be a honorary member.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=29810634
Elizabeth Maude “Lischen” or “Lizzie” Cogswell married George Miller. Lizzie was the foremost literary woman in Oregon. On Feb. 6, 1897, Idaho Cogswell, married Feb. 6, 1897, Ira L. Campbell, who was editor, publisher and co-owner (with his brother John) of the Daily Eugene Guard newspaper. The Campbell Center is named after Ira.
The New Path of The New Brother-Sisterhood
Posted on May 28, 2015 by Royal Rosamond Press
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_House,_London
Morris and Mary White Ovington
Posted on August 17, 2016 by Royal Rosamond Press
Mary White Ovington was inspired by William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites and became a Socialist. This led to he being a co-founder of the NAACP. Jane Morris was the Muse to several Pre-Raphaelites.
Elsie Whiteaker Martinez was a Muse to many of the Bohemian Artist and Writers of Oakland. Her daughter, Micaela, was a Socialist who studied art under Ralph Stackpole who befriended the Marxist Artist Diego Rivera, and his famous wife, Kahlo.
‘Modern Day Desperate Romantics’
Posted on July 17, 2016 by Royal Rosamond Press
My friend Ben Toney and I can be titled ‘Modern Day Desperate Romantics’. Ben is more reluctant to beat his own drum, than I, and thus I have been pounding his drum – more loudly – of late! It is not polite to do this yourself. Long ago, I left politeness at the door, and ventured forth into the Great Hallway of Greatness. I felt the Eyes of the Reluctant upon me. But, here come a Sinclair or two rushing past me to crate and rubber stamp all the Gargoyles.
“It’s off to Scotland with ya – Lads!”
We are not long for the world. No kitty feet in the London Fog for us. We have made too much noise. We have awoken the Dead. No fading of the light and going into the good night – if I can help it! There is enough light for a handful. But, don’t rush the door. We all want to be immortal. We all want to live forever. Most of us know what the alternative is.
The Germ of Goblin Market
Posted on February 26, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
Juanita Miller brought the Pre-Raphaelites to Oakland, the City I was born in during a shower of stars.
John Presco
What I discovered was a pamphlet announcing Joaquin Miller Day. A musical drama was performed at the Woodminster Amphitheater on September 24, 1944. There was going to be the planting of memorial redwood trees around the equestrian statue of Joaquin Miller. On stage was a replica of the studio and garden used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt. The Poet, Christina Rossetti was played by Jeanne Jardin. Elizabeth Siddal Hunt’s model and muse is played by Helen Kraum. Carmencita Sanchez and her Mexican dancers, performed. In Scene Two we have the Bonaparte and Queen Victoria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germ_(periodical)
Menacing Beauty – Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (preraphaelitesisterhood.com)
Pre-Raphaelite Reflections – Page 2 – A blog devoted to the PRB (wordpress.com)
“TO THE ROSSETTIS”
Posted on April 3, 2014 by Royal Rosamond Press
Yesterday I received in the mail a book I ordered on E-Bay. I quickly scanned it to see if their were any illustrations or photographs. Then, I found it, what amounts to my personal Holy Grail. Joaquin Miller dedicated his book of poems ‘Songs of The Sun-Land’ to the Rossetti family that includes Gariel, Michael, and, Christine. Gabriel was a artist and poet, Michael, a publisher, and Christine, a poet.
“TO THE ROSSETTIS”
Joaquin Miller – Friend of The Rossetti Family
Posted on May 5, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
A statue dedicated to Joaquin Miller in Hoo Hoo Park in McCloud, California
Songs of the sun-lands.: By Joaquin Miller. (umich.edu)
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/AAS1313.0001.001/61?rgn=full+text;view=image
I can not tell you enough how important the friendship of Joaquin Miller, and the Rossetti family, is, to the history and future of Oregon and California. Miller grew up ten miles from Springfield Oregon. He would travel to Britain and have dinner with the Pre-Raphaelites. He had Japanese Poets living on his Bohemian Mecca in Oakland. Takeshi Kanno was a guest. He was on a cultural mission of the Emperor of Japan. There is talk about Russia and Japan having another war. Today, Japan and Britain signed a pact that resembles the one that Chruchill instigated. Everything has come – to fruition!
All my hard work – is not it vain. I am going to approach Disney about making a trilogy about Joaquin Miller, who was a flawed white man – of Tomorrowland. Many Americans are asking why we are over there again – helping Ukraine fight a war with Russia. Millions of black people want the money spent on war – spent at home. Today, we have allies that we fought against in World War Two. All Americans need and deserve an explanation, a presentation of our Mutual Cultural Ambitions. Hollywood has helped define Who We Are – in the past!
Who are we?
John Presco
Candidate for Governor of Oregon
May 5 (UPI) — Japan and Britain have agreed to a new defense deal that will allow their militaries to work together more closely, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Thursday.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met with Johnson on a state visit to Britain, where the two leaders signed a “landmark new defense agreement to deepen military ties in the Indo-Pacific,” Downing Street said in a statement.
King Under Oregon Mountain
Posted on February 26, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
Mount Hood reflected in Enid Lake
On this day, February 6, 2022, I John Presco, Republican Candidate for Governor of Oregon, found ‘The Bohemian Guild of Mount Hood. This will be a guild of journalists and writers known as ‘The Wolves of Mount Hood’. Once a year we will meet. We will come from all over the Free World to celebrate our victory over the Russian Wolf of Darkness. We will be wearing deep blue capes -with hood! We will stand on the edge of Enid Lake just after sunset…..ad when the first star appears in this blue lake, we will take off our hoods, and one by one, speak our name while large speakers play the sound of our brothers and sisters.
President Biden has given three hundred and fifty million dollars to the President of Ukraine to help defeat Dark Putin – who is waging war on the press of Russia! The free press – will be his undoing! Zelensky wants ammunition and arms. From what nations will they come? I believe the Czech-Republican will try to make a delivery.
Above is a photograph of members of the Bohemian Club spreading Juaquin Miller’s ashes on a pyre that he built to have his body consumed by flames. But the City of Oakland would not allow this. Miller might have met William Morris at Rosetti’s home. Morris had a powerful influence on Tolkien. The King Under The Mountain Tale – is coming true!
“Around a fire they gathered, at the base of Mount Hood, a refection of a star, in a lake. They took turn through the night, reading…The House of the Wolfings.”
John Presco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Wolfings
Exploring the legend of Joaquin Miller in Canyon City | lifestyle | bendbulletin.com
Cogswell-London-Kerouac-Miller | Rosamond Press
The Bohemian Club was originally formed in April 1872 by and for journalists who wished to promote a fraternal connection among men who enjoyed the arts. Michael Henry de Young, proprietor of the San Francisco Chronicle, provided this description of its formation in a 1915 interview:
The Bohemian Club was organized in the Chronicle office by Tommy Newcombe, Sutherland, Dan O’Connell, Harry Dam, J.Limon and others who were members of the staff. The boys wanted a place where they could get together after work, and they took a room on Sacramento street below Kearny. That was the start of the Bohemian Club, and it was not an unmixed blessing for the Chronicle because the boys would go there sometimes when they should have reported at the office. Very often when Dan O’Connell sat down to a good dinner there he would forget that he had a pocketful of notes for an important story.[12]
Journalists were to be regular members; artists and musicians were to be honorary members.[13] The group quickly relaxed its rules for membership to permit some people to join who had little artistic talent, but enjoyed the arts and had greater financial resources. Eventually, the original “bohemian” members were in the minority and the wealthy and powerful controlled the club.[14][15] Club members who were established and successful, respectable family men, defined for themselves their own form of bohemianism which included men who were bon vivants, sometime outdoorsmen, and appreciators of the arts.[11] Club member and poet George Sterling responded to this redefinition:
Any good mixer of convivial habits considers he has a right to be called a Bohemian. But that is not a valid claim. There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism. The first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts; the other is poverty. Other factors suggest themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as young, as radical in their outlook on art and life; as unconventional, and, though this is debatable, as dwellers in a city large enough to have the somewhat cruel atmosphere of all great cities.[16]
Despite his purist views, Sterling associated very closely with the Bohemian Club, and caroused with artist and industrialist alike at the Bohemian Grove.[16]
Oscar Wilde, upon visiting the club in 1882, is reported to have said “I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life.”[17]
Alas I have traced my grandfather’s mother, IDA LOUISIANA ROSE, to WILLIAM ROSE, who sailed for Cowes Isle of Wight, with William Penn. William and his wife, Jane Sarah Ridgway, landed in Philadelphia in December 3, 1699. They sailed on the Canterbury, perhaps the most important ship that sailed the waters of the Isle of Wight.
Alas, the TWO ROSES are joined in my ROSY FAMILY TREE. This makes my family one of the foremost PATRIOTIC AMERICAN FAMILIES in history. We fought off pirates to arrive here, so we could practice RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.
Master Miller’s Artist and Poet Colony
Posted on June 8, 2014 by Royal Rosamond Press
On April 17, 2014, I found a Pre-Raphaelite Grail at the Lane County Historical Society, that hopefully will change the way we look at things today, and the way we live and communicate with one another. I beheld the beautiful master plan put forth by the Miller Brother Prophets, who are right out of the Lord of the Rings.
What I discovered was a pamphlet announcing Joaquin Miller Day. A musical drama was performed at the Woodminster Amphitheater on September 24, 1944. There was going to be the planting of memorial redwood trees around the equestrian statue of Joaquin Miller. On stage was a replica of the studio and garden used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt. The Poet, Christina Rossetti was played by Jeanne Jardin. Elizabeth Siddal Hunt’s model and muse is played by Helen Kraum. Carmencita Sanchez and her Mexican dancers, performed. In Scene Two we have the Bonaparte and Queen Victoria.
When we were children we would call up Juanita Miller who we knew as ‘The White Witch’. She gave advice if you had problems. At thirteen, Bill Arnold, Nancy Hamren, and myself adopted the Beat Scene, Jack London and George Sterling, and as Hippies we understood Joaquin Miller was the source of our Bohemianism that some claim is the fastest growing religion in the world. In Eugene Oregon there is a worship of Ken Kesey. Now add to this the images of the Pre-Raphaelites and J.R. Tolkien, and you have the most powerful imagery outside of the Christian Church.
But, we are not done! Joaquin Miller was approached by Japanese Poets who asked if they could live with Joaquin and treat him like their master. There were several Japanese houses built on ‘The Hights’ that was also named ‘The Fremont Ranch’. Fremont is in my family tree because he married Jessie Benton whose father was the proprietor of the Oregon Territory. My later sister was the world-famous artist, Christine Rosamond Benton who had a gallery in Carmel a Art Colony that Elsie Martinez and her husband help found.
Joaquin Miller had dinner at Rossetti and ate with many of the Pre-Raphaelites. I suspect William Morris was present. In 1969 I began to render images on furniture after Morris whose novel ‘The House of Wolfings’ was the main inspiration for Tolkien.
Christine Rosamond Benton and I were drawn into Tolkien’s Trilogy. The artist known as ‘Rosamond’ could not put these books down, nr could I. This caused our mutual friend, Keith Purvis, a British subject, to comment;
“She doesn’t know these books are real.”
We three were original hippies who took the Lord of the Rings to heart as we modified the modern world, made it over more to our liking, we oblivious to what normal folk were about. This is exactly what William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brother and Sisterhood did. They – returned!
I discovered the Pre-Raphaelites in 1969 and let my hair grow long for the first time. I gave up drugs in 1967 and was looking for a spiritual format. I came under the spell of the Rossetti family who were friendly with Joaquin Miller. We Presco children knew Miller’s daughter as ‘The White Witch’ and we would call her for advice. Miller’s home ‘The Abbye’ was above our home in the Oakland Hills. Our kindred were friends of Miller, who was also a friend of Swineburn, who wrote ‘The Queen-Mother and Rosamund’ and ‘Rosamund Queen of Lombards. Tolkien was inspired by the Lombards.
Filed away in Rosamond’s probate is my plea to the executor to allow me to be my sister’s historian. I mention Miller and Rossetti. I saw myself in the role of Michael Rossetti who had his own publishing company. He published Miller and other famous poets. When I was twelve, my mother read evidence I might become a famous poet.
I was twelve when I came upon the Woodminster amphitheatre. I was put in a trance by what I beheld. I sensed I had entered the real world, the one I belonged in. Juanita Miller was the visionary for this outdoor theatre where plays inspired by her father were performed. Redwoods were planted around Woodminster. George Miller planted many trees in his visionary city, Fairmount. Nearby, my great grandfathers had picnics. Note the rifle hanging in the tree. The Stuttmeister farm lie just below this structure that is right out of Lord of the Rings.
Yesterday I presented to Mayor Kitty Piercy my idea for the New Eugene Celebration that would be centered around the Cuthbert Amphitheater and the Mill Race that I see as flowing from the Woodminster Amphitheater Cascade. I see O Lake as a reflecting pond. I see a Japanese arch at the end of a pier where is docked a Japanese boat. Up the hill is a Zen Garden and the cottages rescued from Columbia Terrace located in the lost city of Fairmont platted by George Melvin Miller, the brother of Joaquin.
There is a Writer’s Grove planted next to the cascade. I see a similar grove planted near the Cuthbert. Where will sit the two Craftsman housed rescued from Columbia Terrace. Once house will be a Miller Brother’s Museum, and the other a Museum of Bohemian Art and Literature. Ken Kesey lived in one of the barracks that was moved from Fort White. I see a Museum to Peace, with Kesey and Hippie memorabilia. Our Mayor should contact officials I Japan to see if they see these barracks that once housed soldiers destined to go to war with Japan, of historic significance.
The Calm Waters of Peace, Poetry, and Art, flow underground all the way from Oakland California, and surface in a New Arcadia in Eugene. From brother to brother. let there be a New Cultural Unity!
Jon Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Presss
Copyright 2014
Fair Mountain
Posted on September 1, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
With the new proposal for Downtown Eugene, arises my old proposal that was ignored, or, not promoted enough – by me! In this post made two years ago, emerges my idea for the next James Bond movie, and, the birth of the next Tolkien book, and/or movie. All the elements are in place.
What I see in the old EWEB plant, is a Newspaper Museum, with George Miller’s flying machine suspended in air. Joaquin Miller was the editor of The Eugene City Democratic Register, The Oregon State Journal, and the Eugene City Review. Joaquin took part in a debate at Eugene’s Columbia College whether or not the Pacific States should become a separate nation – before Oregon and California became States. Here is Fairmount, the city that George Miller platted, along with Florence.
There is a good chance Joaquin met William Morris, who inspired Tolkien. This building can be a Castle of The Free Press, standing at the Gate of the McKenzie. There is room enough for a Logging Museum. Wood pulp made newsprint. Before the coming of the silicon chip, this is how good men got the News to the American People.
Freedom Loving People from all over the world will come to pay homage. There should be a Japanese torii on the river, and a grand piano where the compositions of Henry Cowell can be played. Guest pianists will come from all over the world to play Henry’s music.
Eugene can have a very magical and specialized history based upon facts, and not left to the whims of radicals fighting over Ken Kesey Square. Here is a suitable Dream, that was made manifest, then, made invisible. Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsprint
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045535/
Joaquin Miller had dinner with the Pre-Raphaelites, and was my grandmother’s friend. This history is being compiled for the grant I am applying for. Miller built a monument to my kin, John Fremont, the first Presidential Candidate for the Abolitionist Republican Party, and the first to emancipate slaves, forcing Lincoln’s hand. It is time to erase the history of Joseph Lane from Oregon. He was a traitor and a butcher of Native Americans. He was for human slavery. His son was just the opposite, and thus I suggest a proclamation making Harry the bearers of the Lane name in Lane Country.
British Defence Staff USA
Posted on August 2, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
Treacherous Republican-Christians, and their disgraced ex-president, tried to end our alliance with Britain, formed by the artist , Winston Churchill.
John Presco
British Defence Staff in the USA
Location:USAPart of:Ministry of Defence
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) protects the security, independence and interests of our country at home and abroad.
We work with our allies and partners whenever possible. Our aim is to ensure that the armed forces have the training, equipment and support necessary for their work.
The MOD works with the United States on joint overseas operations and contingency planning, bilateral defence co-operation, interoperability and engages on defence trade.
Our team in the United States assists this work and communicates the broader transatlantic defence relationship, elevates the UK’s interests and reputation and provides high-quality advice and reporting to the UK on all aspects of defence business.
Responsibilities
The MOD is responsible for: defending the UK and its overseas territories, providing strategic intelligence, providing nuclear deterrence, supporting civil emergency organisations in times of crisis, defending our interests by projecting power strategically and through expeditionary interventions, providing a defence contribution to UK influence and providing security for stabilisation.
The British Defence Staff in the United States comprises some 750 military and civilian MOD personnel based in over 30 states across the US. Their mission is to protect and advance the UK and its interests by reinforcing the transatlantic defence and security relationship.
Priorities
Preserving global peace & security — The UK and the US co-operate to address the world’s most pressing security challenges.
Supporting trade and investment — Driving forward industry, the UK works with the US on facilitating defence trade and investment.
Co-operating in science, innovation, energy and higher education — The UK and the US collaborate in science and innovation; including advanced defence technologies.
Creation Dawn
Posted on May 27, 2016 by Royal Rosamond Press
My semi-autobiographical novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ begins at the Golden West Saloon
May 1, 2012
This won’t show in anyone else’s Feed unless you share it
Joaquin Miller, William Morris & Me
Posted on August 5, 2013by Royal Rosamond Press
Christine Rosamond Benton and I were drawn into Tolkien’s Trilogy. The artist known as ‘Rosamond’ could not put these books down, nr could I. This caused our mutual friend, Keith Purvis, a British subject, to comment;
“She doesn’t know these books are real.”
We three were original hippies who took the Lord of the Rings to heart as we modified the modern world, made it over more to our liking, we oblivious to what normal folk were about. This is exactly what William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brother and Sisterhood did. They – returned!
I discovered the Pre-Raphaelites in 1969 and let my hair grow long for the first time. I gave up drugs in 1967 and was looking for a spiritual format. I came under the spell of the Rossetti family who were friendly with Joaquin Miller. We Presco children knew Miller’s daughter as ‘The White Witch’ and we would call her for advice. Miller’s home ‘The Abbye’ was above our home in the Oakland Hills. Our kindred were friends of Miller, who was also a friend of Swineburn, who wrote ‘The Queen-Mother and Rosamund’ and ‘Rosamund Queen of Lombards. Tolkien was inspired by the Lombards.
Filed away in Rosamond’s probate is my plea to the executor to allow me to be my sister’s historian. I mention Miller and Rossetti. I saw myself in the role of Michael Rossetti who had his own publishing company. He published Miller and other famous poets. When I was twelve, my mother read evidence I might become a famous poet.
All my imput has been ruthlessly ignored, because petty un-creative minds have forced our families creative legacy down the tiny holes of their hidden agendas, into the mouths of worms and parasites, because these ignorant people sensed I and the real Art World, did not let them in the door – would never admit them into our circle, our ring of genius!
Jon Presco
Copyright 2011
William Morris had a major influence on J. R. R. Tolkien. As John Garth points out, unlike most authors traumatized by the experience of World War I, Tolkien did not “discard the old ways of writing, the classicism or medievalism championed by Lord Tennyson and William Morris. In his hands these traditions were reinvigorated so that they remain powerfully alive for readers today” (40). His love of Morris, in particular, goes back to his undergraduate days when he turned from studying the Greek and Latin classics to the the northern traditions — the language and literature of the Scandinavian and Germanic past. According Garth,
William Morris, from the late 1870s on, decided to “remedy” the defects of the real historical record by producing specific works of “pseudo-history,” fully-fleshed stories that he could present as “re-discovered” manuscripts of ancient tribal lore. So eager were the Germanic speakers of 19th century Europe to know more about their ancestors, that sometimes even academically trained scholars would be fooled by the books Morris wrote, and asked him for his sources, and wanted to read the original saga manuscripts themselves. To which requests Morris replied “Doesn’t the fool realize, that it’s a romance, a work of fiction — that it’s all lies!” (from May Morris, daughter of W. Morris recollections).
JRRT, a generation later than Morris, got in on the tail end of this nationalistic/ romantic period, and became as fully enmeshed in its allures as Morris. Tolkien went on to “sub-create” his own “pseudo-histories,” manufacturing his versions of the source myths that would allow a richer understanding of the Nordic tradition, especially the Anglo-Saxon phenomena of England. Between them, as much by accident as firm intent, Morris and Tolkien established an entire genre of pseudo-history that has, by now in the 21st century, become one of the most popular fields of literature.
“These two men knew either much (Morris) or most (Tolkien) of all that was known about these [northern] people and their lives. They used that wealth of knowledge to create ‘dreamed realities’ (Morris) or an ‘imaginary history’ (Tolkien) about what it might have been like to live in those days. While what they wrote wasn’t necessarily true in a strict sense, both knew enough about the past and were talented enough as writers that what they wrote created a strong sense that they described what might have been.” ( Michael W. Perry, More to William Morris, p. 7, 2003)
So, the question then becomes, for Tolkien readers, how does Morris stand up to JRRT? Is it worth the money to buy Morris’s books? Will I get the same, or at least a very similar thrill from reading them as I get when running through the pages of LotR and The Hobbit? Well, that’s what I am trying to decide in the next few installments of this topic. How do the works of the two authors compare, in what ways are they similar, in what ways do they differ?
http://tolkiensring.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=authors&action=display&thread=675
Joaquin Miller looked me up at Somerset House, and left with me
the remaining proofs of his forthcoming volume. He showed me the dedication, ‘To the Rossettis.’ I strongly recommended him to write direct to Gabriel as to the matter before anything further is done. I mentioned the dedication to Christina. She feels some hesitation in sanctioning it, not knowing what the book may contain. If she makes up her mind to object, she is to write to Miller. I looked through the proofs and noted down some remarks on them. They include a series of poems about Christ, named Olive Leaves, implying a sort of religious, or at least personal, enthusiasm, mixed up with a good deal that has more relation to a sense of the picturesque than of the devotional. These poems, though far from worthless from their own point of view, are very defective, and would, I think be highly obnoxious to many readers and Reviewers. I have suggested to Miller the expediency of omitting them altogether. – Christina, I find, has already read these particular poems, and to some considerable extent likes them, which is so far in their favour as affecting religious readers”
The wider world of Victorian London is present: Turgenev comes to dinner, Browning sends his new volumes, Swinburne arrives drunk, and the American poet and adventurer Joaquin Miller makes himself known to the Rossetti circle. Nine appendices include five devoted to Poems and one to the Fleshly School controversy.
Joaquin Miller Cabin is located in Washington, DC. The Hights, the Oakland home Miller built at the end of his life, is currently known as the Joaquin Miller House and is part of Joaquin Miller Park. He planted the surrounding trees and he personally built, on the eminence to the north, his own funeral pyre and monuments dedicated to Moses, General John C. Frémont, and the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Japanese poet Yone Noguchi began his literary career while living in the cabin adjoining Millers’ during the latter half of the 1890s. The Hights was purchased by the city of Oakland in 1919 and can be found in Joaquin Miller Park.[42] It is now a designated California Historical Landmark.
Miller went to England, where he was celebrated as a frontier oddity. There, in May 1871, Miller published Songs of the Sierras, the book which finalized his nickname as the “Poet of the Sierras”.[22] It was well-received by the British press and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti.
While in England, he was one of the few Americans invited into the Savage Club along with Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The younger Hawthorne referred to Miller as “a licensed libertine” but admitted him “charming, amiable, and harmless”.[
The Savage Club was formed to supply the want which Dr Samuel Johnson and his friends experienced when they founded the Literary Club. A little band of authors, journalists and artists felt the need of a place of reunion where, in their hours of leisure, they might gather together and enjoy each other’s society, apart from the publicity of that which was known in Johnson’s time as the coffee house, and equally apart from the chilling splendour of the modern club.
At present, there are 315 members. The club maintains a tradition of fortnightly dinners for members and their guests, always followed by entertainment. These dinners often feature a variety of famous performers from music hall to concert hall. Several times a year members invite ladies to share both the dinner and the entertainment — sometimes as performers. On these occasions guests always include widows of former Savages, who are known as Rosemaries (after rosemary, a symbol of remembrance).
Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.
He was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and became the movement’s unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood’s literary magazine The Germ which published four issues in 1850 and wrote the poetry reviews for it.
It was William Michael Rossetti who recorded the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at their founding meeting in September 1848:
1. To have genuine ideas to express;
2. To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote;
4. And most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.
Although Rossetti worked full time as a civil servant, he maintained a prolific output of criticism and biography across a range of interests from Algernon Swinburne to James McNeill Whistler. He edited the diaries of his maternal uncle John William Polidori (author of The Vampyre and physician to Lord Byron), a comprehensive biography of D. G. Rossetti, and edited the collected works of D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.
Rossetti edited the first British edition of the poetry of Walt Whitman, which was published in 1868; however, this edition was bowdlerized.[1] Anne Gilchrist, who became one of the first to write about Whitman, first read his poetry from Rossetti’s edition, and Rossetti helped initiate their correspondence.[2]
In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. They honeymooned in France and Italy. Their first child, Olivia Frances Madox, was born in September 1875, and her birth was celebrated in an ode of Swinburne.
William Michael Rosetti was a major contributor to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica; his contributions on artistic subjects were criticised by many reviewers at the time and since, as showing little evidence of having absorbed the mounting body of work by academic art historians, mostly writing in German.
Dinner at Rossetti’s
by Joaquin Miller
________________________________________
There is no thing that hath not worth;
There is no evil anywhere;
There is no ill on all this earth,
If man seeks not to see it there.
September 28. I cannot forget that dinner with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, just before leaving London, nor can I hope to recall its shining and enduring glory. I am a better, larger man, because of it. And how nearly our feet are set on the same way. It was as if we were all crossing the plains, and I for a day’s journey and a night’s encampment fell in with and conversed with the captains of the march.
But one may not gave names and dates and details over there as here. The home is entirely a castle. The secrets of the board and fireside are sacred. And then these honest toilers and worshippers of the beautiful are shy, so shy and modest. But I like this decent English way of keeping your name down and out of sight till the coffin-lid hides your blushes–so modest these Pre-Raphaelites are that I should be in disgrace forever if I dared set down any living man’s name.
But here are a few of the pearls picked up, as they were tossed about the table at intervals and sandwiched in between tales of love and lighter thoughts and things.
All London, or rather all the brain of London, the literary brain, was there. And the brain of all the world, I think, was in London. These giants of thought, champions of the beautiful earth, passed the secrets of all time and all lands before me like a mighty panorama. All night sol We dined so late that we missed breakfast. If I could remember and write down truly and exactly what these men said, I would have the best and the greatest book that ever was written, I have been trying a week in vain, I have written down and scratched out and revised till I have lost the soul of it, it seems to me; no individuality to it; only like my own stuff. If I only had set their words down on the next day instead of attempting to remember their thoughts! Alas! the sheaves have been tossed and beaten about over sea and land for days and days, till the golden grain is gone, and here is but the straw and chaff.
The master sat silent for the most part; there was a little man away down at the other end, conspicuously modest. There was a cynical fat man, and a lean philanthropist all sorts and sizes, but all lovers of the beautiful of earth. Here is what one, a painter, a ruddy-faced and a rollicking gentleman, remarked merrily to me as he poured out a glass of red wine at the beginning of the dinner:
“When travelling in the mountains of Italy, I observed that the pretty peasant women made the wine by putting grapes m a great tub, and then, getting into this tub, barefooted, on top of the grapes, treading them out with their brown, bare feet. At first I did not like to drink this wine. I did not think it was clean. But I afterward watched these pretty brown women” and here all leaned to listen, at the mention of pretty brown women– I watched these pretty brown women at their work in the primitive winepress, and I noticed that they always washed their feet after they got done treading out the wine.”
All laughed at this, and the red-faced painter was so delighted that he poured out and swallowed another full glass. The master sighed as he sat at the head of the table rolling a bit of bread between thumb and finger, and said, sitting close to me: “I am an Italian who has neven seen Italy. Belle Italia!…”
By and by he quietly said that silence was the noblest attitude in all things; that the greatest poets refused to write, and that all great artists in all lines were above the folly of expression. A voice from far down the table echoed this sentiment by saying:”Heard melodies are sweet; but unheard melodies are sweeter.” “Written poems are delicious; but unwritten poems are divine,” cried the triumphant cynic. “What is poetry?” cries a neighbor. “All true, pure life is poetry,” answers one. “But the inspiration of poetry?” “The art of poetry is in books. The inspiration of poetry in nature.” To this all agreed.
Then the master very quietly spoke: “And yet do not despise the books of man. All religions, said the Chinese philosophers, are good. The only difference is, some religions are better than others, and the apparent merit of each depends largely upon a mans capacity for understanding it. This is true of .poetry. All poetry is good. I never read a poem in my life that did not have some merit, and teach some sweet lesson. The fault in reading the poems of man, as well as reading the poetry of nature, lies largely at the door of the reader. Now, what do you call poetry?” and he turned his great Italian eyes tenderly to where I sat at his side.
To me a poem must be a picture,” I answered.
Proud I was when a great poet then said: “And it must be a picture–if a good poem so simple that you can understand it at a glance, eh? And see it and remember it as you would see and remember a sunset, eh?” “Aye,” answered the master, “I also demand that it shall be lofty in sentiment and sublime in expression. The only rule I have for measuring the merits of a written poem, is by the height of it. Why not be able to measure its altitude as you measure one of your sublime peaks of America?”
He looked at me as he spoke of America, and I was encouraged to answer:”Yes, I do not want to remember the words. But I do want it to remain with me a picture and become a part of my life. Take this one verse from Mr. Longfellow:
“And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.’”
“Good!” cried the fat cynic, who, I am sure, had never heard the couplet before, it was so sweet to him; “Good! There is a picture that will depart from no impressible clay. The silent night, the far sweet melody falling on the weary mind, the tawny picturesque Arabs stealing away m the darkness, the perfect peace, the stillness and the rest. It appeals to all the Ishmaelite in our natures, and all the time we see the tents gathered up and the silent children of the desert gliding away in the gloaming.”
A transplanted American, away down at the other end by a little man among bottles, said: “The poem of Evangeline is a succession of pictures. I never read Evangeline but once.” “It is a waste of time to look twice at a sunset,” said Rossetti, sotto voce, and the end man went on: “But i believe I can see every picture in that poem as distinctly as if I had been the unhappy Arcadian; for here the author has called in ail the elements that go to make up a perfect poem.”
“When the great epic of this new, solid Saxon tongue comes to be written,” said one who sat near and was dear to the master’s heart, “it will embrace all that this embraces: new and unnamed lands; ships on the sea; the still deep waters hidden away in a deep and voiceless continent; the fresh and fragrant wilderness; the curling smoke of the camp-fire; action, movement, journeys; the presence–the inspiring presence of woman; the ennobl- ing sentiment of love, devotion, and devotion to the death; faith, hope and charity,- and all in the open air.”
“Yes,” said the master thoughtfully, ‘no great poem has ever been or ever will be fitted in a parlor, or even fashioned from a city. There is not room for it there.”
“Hear! hear! you might as well try to grow a California pine in the shell of a peanut,” cried I. Some laughed, some applauded, all looked curiously at me. Of course, I did not say it that well, yet I did say it far better, I mean I did not use the words carefully, but I had the advantage of action and sympathy.
Then the master said, after a bit of reflection: “Homer’s Ulysses, out of which have grown books enough to cover the earth, owes its immortality to all this, and its out-door exercise. Yet it is a bloody book a bad book, in many respects–full of revenge, treachery, avarice and wrong. And old Ulysses himself seems to have been the most colossal liar on record. But for all this, the constant change of scene, the moving ships and the roar of waters, the rush of battle and the anger of the gods, the divine valor of the hero, and, above all, and over all, like a broad, white-bosomed moon through the broken clouds, the splendid life of that one woman; the shining faith, the constancy, the truth and purity of Penelope–all these make a series of pictures that pass before us like a panorama, and we will not leave off reading till we have seen them all happy together again, and been assured that the faith and constancy of that woman has had it reward. And we love him, even if he does lie!”
How all at that board leaned and listened. Yet let me again and again humbly confess to you that I do him such injustice to try thus to quote from memory. After a while he said: “Take the picture of the old, blind, slobber-mouthed dog, that has been driven forth by the wooers to die. For twenty years he has not heard the voice of his master. The master now comes, in the guise of a beggar. The dog knows his voice, struggles to rise from the ground, staggers toward him, licks his hand, falls, and dies at his feet.”
Such was the soul, heart, gentleness of this greatest man that I ever saw walking in the fields of art….
Miller earned an estimated $3,000 working as a Pony Express rider, and used the money to move to Oregon. With the help of his friend, Senator Joseph Lane, he became editor of the Democratic Register in Eugene,[7] a role he held from March 15 to September 20, 1862.[8] Though no copies survive, it was known as sympathetic to the Confederacy until it was forced to shut down.[9] That year, Miller married Theresa Dyer (alias Minnie Myrtle) on September 12, 1862, in her home four days after meeting her[10] in Port Orford, Oregon.
Swinburne Meets Joaquin Miller.” New York Times (10 May 1931) [Online: BR5]
Picture with the text: “Once Joaquin Miller and a British Writer Called on Swinburne, Whom the Englishman Claimed as an Intimate Friend. They Announced Themselves as Joaquin Miller, the American Poet, and a Friend. Swinburne Sent Down Word to ‘Bring the American Poet Up and Tell the Friend to Go to Hell.’” [MCK]
Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, April 5, 1837 – London, April 10, 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909.[1]
At Oxford Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. After leaving college he lived in London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti was delighted with his ‘little Northumbrian friend’, a reference to Swinburne’s diminutive height—he was just over five feet tall.[citation needed]
The first of Rosamond’s five scenes is the most forceful in demonstrating Swinburne’s debt to troubadour conventions as well as to Pre-Raphaelite stylistic influences. Courtly love preoccupations and the medieval setting overshadow elements of Jacobean revenge tragedy throughout the play. Swinburne’s Rosamond, rather than the historical queen of the Courts of Love, espouses the religion of love and, as a result of her lived creed, is poisoned by Eleanor out of jealousy.
Swinburne’s choice of the “rose of the world” as one of his first subjects for verse suggests that he associated his conception of Rosamond with courtly love allegory, specifically the Roman de la Rose, in which the rose is the eternal symbol of the beloved and of the perfect beauty that is fearfully transient but simultaneously immortal.3 As in Swinburne’s later lyrics “Before the Mirror” and “The Year of the Rose,” Rosamond’s central symbol is the rose, and, like them, this play recapitulates the major preoccupations of courtly love poetry: the apotheosis of beauty; love as the necessary consequence of beauty fear of mutability; and a final insistence on the immortality of both love and beauty, which can be attained, paradoxically, only through death.
[39/40] The first scene of Rosamond characterizes its heroine as simultaneously enchanted with her own beauty, exalted by her love affair with Henry, and insecure about the permanence of her beauty and her love. Surrounded by the ephemeral rose blossoms with which she identifies in the maze at Woodstock, she is alone with her maid, Constance. Here Rosamond reveals her concern with the world’s slanderous gossip about her, and as the scene progresses she attempts gradually to rebuild her self-confidence-in her beauty, in Henry’s continuing devotion, and in the unassailable value of beauty and of love. At first, she is defensive:
See,
If six leaves make a rose, I stay red yet
And the wind nothing ruins me; who says
I am at waste? (Tragedies, I, 231)
Is thy name
Babe? Sweet are babes as flowers that wed the sun,
But man may be not born a babe again,
And less than man may woman. Rosamund
Stands radiant now in royal pride of place
As wife of thine and queen of Lombards–not
Cunimund’s daughter. Hadst thou slain her sire
Shamefully, shame were thine to have sought her hand
And shame were hers to love thee: but he died
Manfully, by thy mightier hand than his
Manfully mastered. War, born blind as fire,
Fed not as fire upon her: many a maid
As royal dies disrobed of all but shame
And even to death burnt up for shame’s sake: she
Lives, by thy grace, imperial.
ROSAMUND.
I know it.
I leave thee not the choice. Keep thou thy hand
Bloodless, and Hildegard, whom yet I love,
Dies, and in fire, the harlot’s death of shame.
Last night she lured thee hither. Hate of me,
Because of late I smote her, being in wrath
Forgetful of her noble maidenhood,
Stung her for shame’s sake to take hands with shame.
This if I swear, may she unswear it? Thou
Canst not but say she bade thee seek her. She
Lives while I will, as Albovine and thou
Live by my grace and mercy. Live, or die.
But live thou shalt not longer than her death,
Her death by burning, if thou slay not him.
I see my death shine in thine eyes: I see
My present death inflame them. That were not
Her surety, Almachildes. Thou shouldst know me
Now. Though thou slay me, this may save not her.
My lines are laid about her life, and may not
By breach of mine be broken.
Biography
From 1902 Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale worked both as a painter and illustrator of fine books, among them Alfred Tennyson’s Poems in 1905 and Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes in 1908. She was the first female member of the Institute of Painters in Oils in 1902, a member of the RWS and also taught at the Byam Shaw School of Arts.
To Arms Ye Wolfens
Posted on February 28, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
I have failed to get the Mayor and City Council of Eugene and Springfield interested in the real connection between the Miller Brothers, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, and J.R. Tolkien. This would be a boon for all of Lane County – and Oregon! I am not sure what the problem is, but, if I press The Mighty Proud & Ignorant’ they will try to hurt me, like the Kimites and Alleyites, who insist they own all the answers.
“No need to look anywhere else – buster! The days of your curiosity are over. so get back in your little cell, Old Man! Prophet – my ass!”
I think jealousy in involved, because this looks like Big Stuff, and, it is not being presented and exploited by Big People, thus the Wee Ones can own permission to get on board in a safe and puny way. I will pay a penalty for making them look – small! If I would just die, or, go away, then there tiny input will suffice. The feeding frenzy over Nothing, will go on. The ongoing homeless problem will define us. They are all powerless! Not I. I came up with a solution for one homeless person. I did my Civic Duty. Consider Gulliver’s Travels.
J.R. Tolkien was deeply influenced by William Morris’s The House of Wolfen. Morris was a Pre-Raphaelite and great friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose last name is translated thus in French…..ROSAMONDE. I will be safely accused of self-grandizing by invoking this name that was popular amongst the Brotherhood. Rossetti painted a version of Fair Rosamond, and his friend, Swineburne wrote…..ROSAMUND QUEEN OF THE LOMBARDS.
I have been so busy running my little town newspaper, and being a real prophet out to thwart the Mad Man in The White House, that I have neglected the little essay Joaquin Miller wrote about his Dinner with Rossetti. I had not noticed the mention or the poem Evangeline written by Longfellow the friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote about my ancestor, John Wilson, in The Scarlet Letter. This work, and the writing of Washington Irving inspired me to write ‘A Rose Among The Woodwose’ which is a continuation, a splicing, a Time Machine that takes up where Longfellow left off….the telling of the Great American Tale and Spirit…that the Mad Woodwose and Wood Master, Jaquin Miller took to England, at the suggestion of Ina Coolbrith, the head of the Oakland Library. Did she know Jack London?
Cease! I have written too much! The Candy-coated Consumer can only take so much. They want QUICK BITES of candy full of Stars. Many want Quick Jesus Candy from a Con Artist and Lunatic. They want A Hit and a Toke! They want to swallow The Ring, then, go for The Ten Minute Ringtone Crown.
Miller’s dinner with Rossetti preceded Tolkien’s discussions with his friend C.S. Lewis. This is my discovery that connects Lane County with Britain. This is an amazing cultural link that has to be ignored and rejected because it makes me powerful.
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangeline
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,—
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o’er the ocean.
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pré.
Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.[16][17][18]
To me a poem must be a picture,” I answered.
Proud I was when a great poet then said: “And it must be a picture–if a good poem so simple that you can understand it at a glance, eh? And see it and remember it as you would see and remember a sunset, eh?” “Aye,” answered the master, “I also demand that it shall be lofty in sentiment and sublime in expression. The only rule I have for measuring the merits of a written poem, is by the height of it. Why not be able to measure its altitude as you measure one of your sublime peaks of America?”
He looked at me as he spoke of America, and I was encouraged to answer:”Yes, I do not want to remember the words. But I do want it to remain with me a picture and become a part of my life. Take this one verse from Mr. Longfellow:
“And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.’”
“Good!” cried the fat cynic, who, I am sure, had never heard the couplet before, it was so sweet to him; “Good! There is a picture that will depart from no impressible clay. The silent night, the far sweet melody falling on the weary mind, the tawny picturesque Arabs stealing away m the darkness, the perfect peace, the stillness and the rest. It appeals to all the Ishmaelite in our natures, and all the time we see the tents gathered up and the silent children of the desert gliding away in the gloaming.”
A transplanted American, away down at the other end by a little man among bottles, said: “The poem of Evangeline is a succession of pictures. I never read Evangeline but once.” “It is a waste of time to look twice at a sunset,” said Rossetti, sotto voce, and the end man went on: “But i believe I can see every picture in that poem as distinctly as if I had been the unhappy Arcadian; for here the author has called in ail the elements that go to make up a perfect poem.”
“When the great epic of this new, solid Saxon tongue comes to be written,” said one who sat near and was dear to the master’s heart, “it will embrace all that this embraces: new and unnamed lands; ships on the sea; the still deep waters hidden away in a deep and voiceless continent; the fresh and fragrant wilderness; the curling smoke of the camp-fire; action, movement, journeys; the presence–the inspiring presence of woman; the ennobl- ing sentiment of love, devotion, and devotion to the death; faith, hope and charity,- and all in the open air.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2137/2137-h/2137-h.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Wolfings
The House of the Wolfings is a romantically reconstructed portrait of the lives of the Germanic Gothic tribes, written in an archaic style and incorporating a large amount of poetry. Morris combines his own idealistic views with what was actually known at the time of his subjects’ folkways and language. He portrays them as simple and hardworking, galvanized into heroic action to defend their families and liberty by the attacks of imperial Rome.
Morris’s Goths inhabit an area called the Mark on a river in the forest of Mirkwood, divided into the Upper-mark, the Mid-mark and the Nether-mark. They worship their gods Odin and Tyr by sacrificing horses, and rely on seers who foretell the future and serve as psychic news-gatherers.
The men of the Mark choose two War Dukes to lead them against their enemies, one each from the House of the Wolfings and the House of the Laxings. The Wolfing war leader is Thiodolf, a man of mysterious and perhaps divine antecedents, whose ability to lead is threatened by his possession of a magnificent dwarf-made mail-shirt which, unknown to him, is cursed. He is supported by his lover the Wood Sun and their daughter the Hall Sun, who are related to the gods.
Joaquin Miller had Japanese poets living on his land in the Oakland Hills. Some of them were sent by the Emperor who wanted to make inroads into American Culture. Here are the roots of Pearl Harbor.
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press.
Creation Dawn | Rosamond Press
Dear Governor Kotek; I have been posting on your Facebook ideas how the J.R. Tolkien Legends can come to Oregon, and Oregeon be seen as a co-owner of a Literary and Artisti Genealogy and Legcy that I have come to own in so many amazing ways. I am seventy-six yearss of age, and will not live forever. However, my Family Legend will. How do I make the State of Oregon Hier to my visions and work. I have worked with the homeless and would like us to find a way that any monies realized from this Literary Etate, can go for lowcost housing for the homeless. Will this housing be on a money-making real estate market – eventually? Has a new way to make invesments in housing the homeless yet to be dicovered?
I just read an article that suggests there was unehtical business practices in Amazon securing a billion dollar tax free haven in Marrow. This dovtaile nicele with the La Motal ethics scandal. I appialed the resonation of Fagan and the seard for new Ethical Frontiers.
Amazon doesn’t actually have the rights to The Silmarillion. This means the series will be based on The Appendices at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Which, admittedly, does overlap in stories between the two books, but if it is mentioned in The Silmarillion and not in the Appendices, it is off-limits. And this has to do with the rights from the Tolkien Estate and from J.R.R. Tolkien himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Japan
http://www.thelab-lab.com/ishigaki/
http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Eitaro_Ishigaki/10027161/Eitaro_Ishigaki.aspx
Share this:
Joaquin Miller – Friend of The Rossetti Family →
Fairyland – The Restored Kingdom
Posted on May 5, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
The attacks by Governor DeSantis on Disneyland, is an attack on my family heritage and family business. My great grandfather, Carl Janke, may haver operated the first theme park in California. My grandmother took her grandchildren to Fairyland. Finding the lost family crypt in 2000, opened the door to our lost magical history that I have restored – all by myself!
John Presco
Candidate For Governor of Oregon
Walt Disney toured many amusement parks in 1950, including Children’s Fairyland, seeking ideas for what turned out to be Disneyland.[1][2] He hired the first director of Fairyland, Dorothy Manes, to work at Disneyland as youth director, in which position she continued from the park’s opening until 1972.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Baynes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Cory
My grandmother took her four grandchildren to Fairyland.
OZ at Children’s Fairyland
Posted on May 13, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
Capturing Beauty
by
John Presco
This morning as I awoke I had a image of my grandmother taking her grandchildren to Oakland’s Fairyland. She did so once a year. I was puzzling over why the Belmont Historical Society was only showing the top half of the photograph of the carousel and perhaps the sons of Carl Janke. When I saw the children gathered on the bridge, to I assume is the entrance to Carlmont Land, I then added the pictures in these giant oaks, the claim that my great, great grandfather built a place for drunks to come and get drunk – faded away! Carl had built a Turnverein Hall in San Francisco where I am sure beer was consumed in large quantities, but Belmont was going to be a special place for….The German Children of The Future…..and all Children! I google Children’s Fairyland…and I am blown away! Alas, I am home!
On this day, May 13, 2021, I add a Children’s Fairyland to Sarsaparilla Pier. When you add the images of Corey, who encouraged Royal Rosamond to take up writing, then we have arrived at Disneyland. What will be – will be! Follow the Yellowbrick Road. I beseech my daughters Heather Hanson apologize to me, and accept her heritage. I told her from the beginning
“All’s well, that ends well!”
I had a vision of the brownie camera Melba Charlotte Broderick owned and she forever taking pictures of the Presco Children. She has us pose in front of the oak trees at the entrance to Fairyland, and then there were many pics taken insider the FIRST CALIFORNIA THEM PARK that Walt Disney used as a model. I wondered what happened to them. Then I recalled her only child, my father, telling me his mother burned our photos and letters because we had neglected her. Th reason we did that, was, Melba had this HIDDEN AGENDA that Vic was made aware of. Rosemary did not not have a clue who those people were sitting in a forest that I now suspect is Twin Peaks Park. My mother said those were our “Bohunk kin”. Vic did go on about our German heritage, but it was distorted not full of any facts. Since I got into recovery thirty-four years ago, and then into therapy, I talked about how THE CHILDREN were supposed to figure out what THE ADULTS were fighting about, why we were always mentioned. They were fighting for – our sake! To be met with a rude non-greeting by members of BHS, perhaps because, I posted on Vice President Kamala Harris and her families connection to the Black Panthers?Did Kamala and Huery Newton go to Oakland’s Children’s Fairyland?
I have made numerous references to Sleeping Beauty, who Grimm named ROSAMOND, and how I might be the New Walt. Spooky Noodles has compared me o Disney. Three days ago I said I was a Ring Master in the Belmont Circus, and was bringing all the history I have gathered under….THE BIG TENT….like the striped one you see over the Janke Carousel.
Yesterday I discussed with my therapist about authoring MY REVENGE BOOK to destroy those who tried to destory me – and my late sister – who drowned on her first sober birthday! I have refrained from posting too much about OUR MAGICAL CHILDHOOD lest The Art Parasites come and steal that too! This morning at 8:39, I own a theme to my autobiography…
The Magical Children of Beautiful Mountain
I just posted this on the facebook of my frriend, Ed Howard, who has made a historic film about Oakland.
“Ed, do you have any pics of Fairyland? I would like the testimony of black people who may have felt unwelcome at Fairyland. There is much evidence my grandfather’s had their theme park taken from them at the end of world war one because they were Germans. The Belmont Historical Society snubbed me and was very rude to me when I posted on Kamala VP connection to the Black Panthers. If any former Panther went to Oakland’s Fairyland, I would like to hear your story. The Jankes were Turnverein Germans who put Lincoln in office, and nominated my kin, John Fremont. They were abolitionists.”
John Presco
Copyright 2021
President: Royal Rosamond Press: Belmont Soda Works, California Barrel Company.
Children’s Fairyland – Wikipedia
Yes, Oakland, there’s still a black Santa Claus at Fairyland (sfchronicle.com)
Oz was born in Hereford, England; the son of Frances (née Ghevaert; 1910–1989) and Isidore Oznowicz (1916–1998), both of whom were puppeteers.[6] His father was also a window trimmer.[2][7] His parents moved to England after fighting the Nazis with the Dutch Brigades. Oz’s Dutch-Polish father was Jewish, and his Flemish mother was a lapsed Catholic.[3][8][9][10] They left England when he was six months old and lived in Belgium until he was five.[11][12] Oz and his family moved to Montana in 1951.[7] They eventually settled in Oakland, California.[2] Oz attended Oakland Technical High School and Oakland City College. He worked as an apprentice puppeteer at Children’s Fairyland as a teenager[13] with the Vagabond Puppets, a production of the Oakland Recreation Department, where Lettie Connell was his mentor.[14]
Career[edit]
Puppeteering[edit]
Oz is known for his work as a puppeteer, performing with Jim Henson‘s Muppets. As a teenager, he worked with the Vagabond Puppets at the Children’s Fairyland of Oakland,[15] which is how he first met Henson.[16] He was 19 when he joined Henson in New York to work on the Muppets in 1963.[17] His characters have included Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, and Sam Eagle on The Muppet Show, and Grover, Cookie Monster and Bert on Sesame Street.
Children’s Fairyland, U.S.A. is an amusement park, located in Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt. It was one of the earliest “themed” amusement parks in the United States.[1] Fairyland includes 10 acres (4.0 ha) of play sets, small rides, and animals. The park is also home to the Open Storybook Puppet Theater, the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States.[2]
Fairyland was built in 1950 by the Oakland Lake Merritt Breakfast Club, a local service club.[3] The park was immediately recognized nationally for its unique value, and during the 1950s it inspired numerous towns to create their own parks. Walt Disney toured many amusement parks in 1950, including Children’s Fairyland, seeking ideas for what turned out to be Disneyland.[1][2] He hired the first director of Fairyland, Dorothy Manes, to work at Disneyland as youth director, in which position she continued from the park’s opening until 1972.[4]
Numerous artists have contributed exhibits, murals, puppetry, and sculptures to the park. Some of the better-known artists are Ruth Asawa and Frank Oz, who was an apprentice puppeteer in the park as a teenager.[2]
Contents
- 1Origins of the park
- 2The original park
- 3Puppet theater
- 4The park today
- 5Aesop’s Playhouse
- 6Bibliography
- 7References
- 8External links
Origins of the park[edit]
On a 1947 trip to the Detroit children’s zoo in Belle Isle Park, Oakland nurseryman Arthur Navlet saw a collection of small nursery-rhyme themed buildings, and wanted to create something similar in Oakland’s Lake Merritt Park. His hope was to create much larger sets that children could climb in and interact with. After getting the backing of the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club, a civic organization devoted to improving the park, he took his ideas to William Penn Mott Jr., then director of Oakland’s parks department. Mott and the Breakfast Club were able to raise $50,000 from Oakland citizens. Contributing sponsors included Earl Warren, Clifford E. Rishell, Joseph R. Knowland and Thomas E. Caldecott.
Navlet hired fantasy artist and architect William Russell Everritt (1904–1978) to design the original 17 sets. Everritt originally presented models which followed a standard fantasy architecture: straight-sided, “precious” buildings in gingerbread and candy. When told his models were too staid, he delightedly destroyed them and came back with buildings with no straight sides and outré colors and textures. It was exactly what Navlet was looking for.
The original park[edit]
The park opened on September 2, 1950. Admission was 9 to 14 cents, depending on age. The original guides to the park were a dwarfish married couple dressed in glamorous Munchkin-style costumes. The park was reported on nationally, with numerous newsreels shot in the park. The original sets included Pinocchio‘s Castle, Thumbelina, Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Merry Miller, The Three Little Pigs, Willie the Whale, and several others. The entrance to the park was through the shoe illustrating the Old Woman in the Shoe. The entrance through the shoe was sized for children, so that adults had to bend over to go through. The park thrived, and in 1956, the City of Oakland Parks and Recreation Department hired Burton Weber to promote the wonders inside Fairyland’s gates. Weber created a program for young children called Fairyland Personalities, which is still part of Fairyland’s Children’s Theater program.
Fairyland is also home to the original “Magic Key” and Talking Storybook Boxes. Oakland television personality Bruce Sedley would often make appearances at the park to tell the stories of the sets. The constant strain of speaking threatened his voice, and he invented a system of talking books with recorded stories on tape. The boxes were activated by a plastic key. Sedley took the system he developed at Fairyland to zoos and children’s parks across the country, where they are still used extensively. The Magic Key system is still in effect at Fairyland.
Puppet theater[edit]
Fairyland’s Storybook Puppet Theater, which opened in 1956, is the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States. The theater presents three performances a day, year round, from a repertoire of more than 150 puppet shows. Most of the shows are based on classic fairytales and folk tales from around the world, including The Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, and The Pied Piper. All of the puppets – including bunraku, shadow puppets, hand puppets, rod puppets, and marionettes – are constructed at the theater by the puppet director and apprentices.
The theater structure was designed by the park’s original architect, William Russell Everitt, with the assistance of members of the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild.[5] It accommodated hand and rod puppets. For the theater’s 50th anniversary, in 2006, the building was redesigned with a storage area, workshop, and higher ceiling for dramatic effects.[6]
Many accomplished puppeteers have worked at Fairyland’s puppet theater, including Tony Urbano,[7] Luman Coad,[5] and Frances and Isadore (“Mike”) Oznowicz.[8] The Oznowiczes’ son, Frank, performed at the theater when he was a teenager; he later shortened his name to Frank Oz and went on to perform with The Muppets and to direct many Hollywood films. Muppet performer Alice Dinnean also got her start at Fairyland’s puppet theater. Lewis Mahlmann, who served as the puppet theater’s director from 1967 to 2005, authored four books about puppetry, and twice served as president of the Puppeteers of America.[9]
The current theater director is Randal J. Metz,[10] who apprenticed with Mahlmann while he was still in grade school. Metz shared the director’s job with Mahlmann beginning in 1991, and became sole director upon Mahlmann’s retirement in 2005.
The park today[edit]
The park continued to grow through the early years, adding the Open Storybook Puppet Theater, also designed by Everritt, in 1956, as well as other sets. In 1994, with help from the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club, Fairyland applied for and received 501(c) (3) nonprofit status to allow it to apply for grants, receive bond funds, and solicit donations.
In 2006, the Storybook Puppet Theater celebrated its 50th anniversary with a near-complete renovation including the addition of a new facade and workshop. The current master puppeteer is Randal Metz.[11]
In addition to exhibits, the park today has rides such as the spiderweb Ferris wheel, a carousel, and the Jolly Trolly (a train). For safety reasons, Fairyland admits adults only when they’re accompanied by children and children only when they’re accompanied by adults.[12]
Fanny Corey
Posted on August 4, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
Fanny Corey could have worked for Walt Disney. Were they aware on one another? Fanny and her brother encouraged my grandfather to become a writer. Fanny’s magical illustrations were known all over the world. Her books came out about 1920. The Hobbit was published in 1937. The Chronicles of Nania were published around 1954. I will be putting Fanny in the Liz Taylor Society I am forming.
John Presco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Baynes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Cory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Meredith
Moy Mell
Posted on August 4, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
The Avatar of Moy Mell
Posted on February 23, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
Here is the post that Rena Easton responded to.
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/royal-rosamond-fanny-y-cory/
I am a very spiritual and religious person. All my letters and writing are protected by a special copyright for ministers. To destroy my letters and words may constitute a hate crime.
Jon the Nazarite
“Rosamond recalls that Jack Cory and his sister Fanny Y. Cory, cartoonist, started him on his writing career.”
In looking for traces of my Muse, Rena Easton, in Montana, I found what can be described as the Rosamond Holy Grail in Helena Montana. My grandfather lived in Helena and says he was inspired to write by Jack Cory, a political cartoonist and equestrian artist, and his sister Fanny Y. Cory, a famous illustrator who lived in a secluded ranch in Montana.
There was an art show of four generations of this family. This is the vision I had for my family when I became a Pre-Raphaelite. Christine Rosamond Benton did several Fairy paintings, as did Drew, who is employed rendering avatars for fantasy games.
Alas we have a true genealogy that traces the Rosamond Family Muse from the Cory family, to my grandfather, to me, to my sister, and to her daughter Drew Benton whose father was the famous muralist, Garth Benton, the cousin of the artist, Thomas Hart Benton. This is the convergence of three creative families – that is unheard of! The Great Muses are at work here. Consider our DNA!
If I had not been following my Muse wherever she leads me, then I would not have made this profound discovery that cast out the outsider from Rosamond Creative Legacy, those parasites who dare title themselves “caretakers” of Rosamond’s art and life story. If my grandfather came back from the dead, he would take a bullwhip to these usurpers – of his history! Fanny was a very famous woman artist – before Christine was born!
Thank you my dear grandfather, whom I never met, for laying down the true stepping stones of our family history.
Royal wrote a short story about a bullfight in Montana where his sister lived. It appears their father adopted these sibling out to W.S. Spaulding after his wife died.
The top two images were done by Drew Benton. The boy with dragon was done by Drew’s mother, Christine Rosamond Benton. The connections I just made – with no ones help – increase the value of all my families creative efforts. This is what real Art Books look like!
I’ve considered doing illustrations for most of my books. C’mon Rena. Show yourself. Do it for Montana! You were Rosamond’s Muse. This is your State History. You got some major bragging rights! Put this in your resame. At least send me copies of photos of you that I can work from to illustrate
‘Capturing Beauty’. I want your side of the story! I will got to the Governor and have you declared Montana’s State Treasure who brought the history of Royal Rosamond and Fanny Cory, together!
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/meeting-drew-at-moy-mell/
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/rendering-rena-as-the-high-priestess/
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/happy-birthday-meher-baba/
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/beautiful-cultural-warfare/
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/the-arcadian-tentmakers-of-america/
Jon Presco
Copyright 2013
I also found an article about a Royal Rosamund, who was said to be the son of W.S. Spaulding – I do not know if that was the same person as the Frank Rosamund who is the coach driver with the family in 1900, but the ages match.
INDEPENDENT RECORD NOVEMBER 26, 1950
Royal Rosamond, Helena native, is Planning Book About
Home City, Chamber Is Told
Royal Rosamond, widely known
author and Helena native, is planning
a book about the city according
to a letter received by the
Helena Chamber of Commerce
from the resident of Oklahoma
City.
Rosamond said the book will
be based on recollections of his
childhood in the city. He asked
the chamber for assistance with
additional material about the city
and the surrounding area.
Rosamond said his parents followed
my grandfather, John L.
Reese, to Helena from Missouri
In the spring of 1884.” The family
lived in the Sixth ward for three
years before moving to the Sanford
and Evans building.
His father, W. S. Spaulding,
and Gary Cooper’s father were
Business partners with a shop on
the lot where the post office now
stands. When he was six years old,
Rosamond said, he was a playmate
of Tommy Cruse’s little boy,
about the time the elder Cruse
was financed with a grub stake by
a local grocer and struck it rich
at Marysville. .
Rosamond asked the name of
the grocer and wanted to know
the Cruse boy’s name. The letter
said Rosamond attended Hawthorne
school when he was six,
seven and eight years old. “There
was not a bob sled in town that
I had not ridden. . . . I was on
speaking terms .with every horse in
every barn in town. . . . I doted
on pigtailed Chinamen but failed
to win their friendship except for
one, a merchant up the gulch,” he
said.
A frame residence built hy Rosamond’s
father at the head of Walnut
still stands. .The author
visited the city In 1945.
His mother died when he was
nine years old and he moved to
Missouri until he was 18 when he
returned to Helena. Rosamond recalls
that Jack Cory and his sister
Fanny Y. Cory, cartoonist, started
him on his writing career.
Rosamond asked for information
about the earthquake, early gold
operations, a map of the city and
other information which he expects
to include in his book.
One of his novels, “Bound in
Clay” is available at the Helena
public library. He has been called
“Oklahoma’s greatest living humorist,”
and is holder of the international
Mark Twain award for
his contribution to literature.
Hollywood and the “Dunites,” 1934
Meher Baba returned to Hollywood in 1934, avoiding publicity and instead working with a number of screenwriters and filmmakers on proposed film projects. During the earlier 1932 visit he had met a spiritual seeker named Sam Cohen, a Theosophist and resident of a loosely knit freethinkers’ community named “Moy Mell” nestled among the dunes on the beach at Oceano, California. The benefactor of this group of intellectuals, spiritual seekers, artists and social misfits was Chester Alan Arthur III, grandson of the 21st President, who went by the name of Gavin. For a time Gavin published a magazine called the Dune Forum, which included articles by such notables as Stuart Edward White (author of the spiritualist classic, The Unobstructed Universe), and photographic contributions by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston (whose dune photographs are well-known).
Gavin would frequently entertain the intellectual and artistic elite of America at his cabin in the dunes. Although accounts differ somewhat, it appears that Baba sent disciple Meredith Starr and his wife to Moy Mell in 1932, and that they stayed on for a period of time (this was approximately a year and a half before Meredith’s defection). When Baba returned to Hollywood in 1934, he agreed to visit the “Dunite” community. On the evening of Christmas day (accounts different as to the exact days), Baba arrived with eighteen of his followers, including Norina Matchabelli, wife of Georges Matchabelli, known for the popular perfume brand. Norina had previously arranged for a special cabin to be built for Baba, but he chose instead to stay in Gavin’s cabin. Gavin was not in Moy Mell at the time, and it was decided that he wouldn’t mind.
There was also a Theosophical center called the Temple of the People in nearby Halcyon, founded in 1904 with the intent of preparing for the arrival of the next incarnation of the Avatar, but there is no record of Baba visiting it.(21)
Three weeks ago I exchanged words with my niece, Drew Benton, for the first time in a cyber Land of Make Believe – that will go unnamed lest our worldly enemies track us down and snatch the secret key from us. Let us call this place ‘Moy Mell’ after a Faire Land far over the sea, where only………
The Dunites called their Bohemian community Moy Mell, a sanctuary for folks who had left the beaten path, could not cope, or, were just following their dream. It has been suggested that most people who can’t cope, become dreamers. But, it is a matter of what came first, the chicken or the egg. Whatever, we are not eggs or chickens. Usually wer are poets and artists, mystics, and hermits, who at an early age considered ourselves Foundlings.
I am a Foundling, after my grandfather, Royal Rosamond, who took his third born daughter Lillian down to the dunes in Ventura where there was another shanty town built by Bohemians and odd fellows.
“These are my people!” Royal proudly exclaimed as he he did an Irish Jigg to the music an old Scotsman played on his violin. My kindred had just had tea in a little shack in Ventura by the Sea.
When I interviewed Lillian for my autobiography, she told me her father took her to the top of hill overlooking Ventura where she and her three beautiful sisters had grown up. Royal had been away, and had come home……………just to say goodbye!
Mary Magdalene Rosamond had banished her husband from his home where dwelt the Faire Roses of the World. My grandfather was a very poor provider. Mary was making hats to support her children. However, there was a man lurking about, a dark man whose history did not survive for some reason. Perhaps it is because he sired no children. Uncle Conrad was Mary’s brother. He owned several home in the Ojai Valley, and the home the Rosamond’s lived in. He was a landlord.
With tears in her eyes, Lilian told me how her father imparted his dream to her, when he affixed her gaze out to sea, over the horizon, to the land of eternity, where the noblest attributes of humankind, dwell – a land where poets and artists are not punished for creating their beloved sanctuaries.
I met Drew Benton for the first time at her mother’s house, the day before Christine Rosamond Benton’s funeral in Carmel by the Sea. She had come over to play video games with her cousin, Shamus. Vicki Presco introduced us. Drew turned to look me in the eyes, did not speak, and went back to play in cyber world. When we met in Moy Mell, our Avatars, she approached this grey haired warrior and exclaimed with her computer keyboard;
“My long lost uncle!”
Fanny Y. Cory, Grandmother of Ann Cory on her mother’s side
Now I will go back in time. I will go back to one of the dearest people in my life, my grandma.
Today her art work is bought and sold today on e-bay and other sites and she is noted in books about illustrators of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Her art name is Fanny Y. Cory, although sometimes she signed with FYC and other versions of her name. The one thing that never changed, though, was that she signed her art vertically and with carefully formed capital letters.
Fanny Y. Cory was someone who always drew from the time she was old enough to hold a pencil. One of her early memories was lying on the floor of her home drawing away with adults patiently stepping over her.
She drew so much and so well that not only could she draw anything she saw but anything she wanted to materialize out of her fertile imagination.
Fanny Y. Cory’s brother, Jack Cory, a well-known political cartoonist, paid her way to attend the Metropolitan School of Fine Arts in New York City.
She took part in the Artists Student Legue there but soon needed to earn money from her art to support her darling sister who had consumption.
Many times as I grew up I heard her tell the story about her beginning attempt to sell her illustrations. The first journey at 17 up the ”well-worn iron stairs” into the unknown world of “Scribners” was frightening.
“The young man at the desk flipped carelessly through my portfolio. Then he looked up and said to ‘Come back when you became known’ ”.
“I thanked him kindly and then walked across the hall to “Century” and they took my illustrations right away.”
Before long Fanny Y. Cory was known as the “Sweetheart of the Century Company,” and became one of the best known illustrators in the country.
She did covers and illustrations of St. Nicholas, Life, Scribner’s, Century, Harper’s Bazaar and The Saturday Evening Post.
She also illustrated many books during this time among them Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1902) by Lewis Carrol, and several books by Frank L. Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz.
Fanny Y. Cory married a Montana rancher whom she had gotten to know in earlier years via his sisters and moved to his ranch at Canyon Ferry, Montana.
They raised their children there and she continued her illustration work on a limited basis.
After Fanny Y. Cory’s children become older, it was apparent that they needed college training.
Fanny Y. Cory had always done her art for the good of others and to help her children have their dreams, she threw her talents into a new art field: two syndicated comic strips which she did for 25 and 30 years respectively.
One was “Little Miss Muffet,” a daily strip that King Features ran originally as their answer to the very popular “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit
Aesop’s Playhouse[edit]
Aesop‘s Playhouse performance, 2008
In 2008, Fairyland opened Aesop’s Playhouse, a dedicated children’s theater funded by Oakland City bond measure DD. It is a Greek theater-style outdoor amphitheater seating 215 people. Fairyland had a long tradition of plays put on by local children ages 8–10, but they were performed on the smaller Emerald City Stage.[13] Previous plays have included The Monkey King’s Journey to the West, Brer Rabbit, The Wizard of Oz, Cuoi, the Boy in the Moon, Ohana Means Family, Little Red Riding Hood, Lost in Fairyland, Hip-Hop Pinocchio, The Panchatantra, Méxica, Aesop’s Fables, The Girl Who Lost Her Smile, Harvest at the Lake, Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type, The Cat in the Hat, and Five Little Monkeys.
The Pyre of The Woodminster
Posted on February 18, 2019 by Royal Rosamond Press
Joaquin Miller built a pyre where he wanted fellow members of the Bohemian Club to cremate his body after death. This was an attempt to lure the Quinotaur to the watery home they made for him. From the Hights, they could see the rising tower of Portreo. On a certain night, copper was poured into the furnace under the boiler, and a bluish green flame shot a hundred feet into the air! This constitutes the first lightshow.
https://www.thoughtco.com/how-to-make-blue-fire-606194
On the night of October 8, 1962, The Ballet Bolero was danced in the Woodminster amphitheater. At the same time, the Dance of the Owl was being performed at the Potrero Electric plant. The attempt to raise Baphomet, failed, but the consciousness of the entire Bay Area, was raised – up! We could not get – high enough!
The Family Stone lived together in the Oakland Hills. They played at WOODSTOCK!
If Meg Whitman has affixed her name to the CBCLLC Deed, or, knows the owners, she must call for a news conference, and confess her ignorance, and the ignorance of the team who works for her. She should call up her allies at Dreamworks, and let them know she erringly tapped into The Source, that can’t be capped like an oil well, for the benefit of a few. The High and Mighty Owl wings home, and, a shadow cross the face of the moon.
Long Live the Bohemian Wood Empire!
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
https://www.bejart.ch/en/ballet/bolero/embed/#?secret=CNUNf38JW3#?secret=hgDH0iVEY1
https://localwiki.org/oakland/The_Funeral_Pyre
Woodminster Amongst the Redwoods
Posted on April 18, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
I was twelve when I came upon the Woodminster amphitheater. I was put in a trance by what I beheld. I sensed I had entered the real world, the one I belonged in. Juanita Miller was the visionary for this outdoor theatre where plays inspired by her father were performed. Redwoods were planted around Woodminster. George Miller planted many trees in his visionary city, Fairmount. Nearby, my great grandfathers had picnics. Note the rifle hanging in the tree. The Stuttmeister farm lie just below this structure that is right out of Lord of the Rings.
Jon Presco
https://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/projects/woodminster-amphitheater-and-cascade-oakland-ca/
Woodminster Cascade flows from the base of Woodminster Theatre and falls over 100 feet through a series of pools. The cascade and theatre were conceived by Juanita Miller, daughter of Joaquin Miller, and were constructed by the Works Progress Administration as a memorial to California writers and poets. During their construction in 1939-40, William Penn Mott was starting his career with the Oakland Parks & Recreation Department. He was responsible for the original landscaping, roads, parks and picnic grounds in the area we are now working to restore.” – http://www.wpamurals.com/oakland.htm
http://oaklandwiki.org/Joaquin_Miller_Park
http://oaklandwiki.org/Woodminster_Amphitheater
http://www.woodminster.com/Webpages/Ticketbuying/schedule.html
William Morris and Joaquin Miller
Posted on August 1, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
Joaquin Miller had dinner with the Pre-Raphaelites and was my grandmother’s friend. This history is being compiled for the grant I am applying for. The history of the Pre-Raphaelites has not been discarded, thus, Kehinde Wiley has no right to claim it and hand it out to NOBODIES who don’t deserve it! I don’t give a rat’s ass what the color of their skin is, and how badly they were oppressed. Let them work for their bragging rights. Just because Wyley thinks he has immortalized these non-artists, does not give them any titles. I will see to that.
Miller built a monument to my kin, John Fremont, the first Presidential Candidate for the Abolitionist Republican Party, and the first to emancipate slaves, forcing Lincoln’s hand.
Honoring The Visions of George Miller
Posted on May 30, 2016by Royal Rosamond Press
I will be going out to Coburg today to plant another flower at the grave of George Miller, the brother of Joaquin Miller, a honorary member of the Bohemian Club that was a place for Bay Area Journalists to gather and compare notes. If Miller lived in the Bay Area, then he too would be a honorary member.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=29810634
Elizabeth Maude “Lischen” or “Lizzie” Cogswell married George Miller. Lizzie was the foremost literary woman in Oregon. On Feb. 6, 1897, Idaho Cogswell, married Feb. 6, 1897, Ira L. Campbell, who was editor, publisher and co-owner (with his brother John) of the Daily Eugene Guard newspaper. The Campbell Center is named after Ira.
The Wedding of John Cogswell to Mary Frances Gay, was the first recorded in Lane County where I registered my newspaper, Royal Rosamond Press. Idaho Campbell was a charter member of the Fortnightly Club that raised funds for the first Eugene Library.
George Melvin Miller was a frequent visitor to ‘The Hights’ his brothers visionary utopia where gathered famous artists and writers in the hills above my great grandfather’s farm. The Miller brothers promoted Arts and Literature, as well as Civic Celebrations. Joaquin’s contact with the Pre-Raphaelites in England, lent credence to the notion that George and Joaquin were Oregon’s Cultural Shamans, verses, he-men with big saw cutting down trees.
A year ago I received in the mail a book I ordered on E-Bay. I quickly scanned it to see if their were any illustrations or photographs. Then, I found it, what amounts to my personal Holy Grail. Joaquin Miller dedicated his book of poems ‘Songs of The Sun-Land’ to the Rossetti family that includes Gabriel, Michael, and, Christine. Gabriel was a artist and poet, Michael, a publisher, and Christine, a poet.
“TO THE ROSSETTIS”
Gabriel, who had Joaquin over to his house for dinner, where he met several members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Miller sends Michael a photograph of himself, and is sent a photo. This photo may be the famous one taken by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known as Lewis Carrol the author of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. If Joaquin had glued this portrait to a piece of paper, then we might have seen it on the dedication page.
What is going on here is extremely profound. Miller has exported his vision and lifestyle to the England, where he wrote Song of the Sierras, and now he is importing to America a cultural brand that contains Grail and Arthurian subject matter that was at the epicenter of the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Lewis Carrol posed two children as Fair Rosamond and Queen Eleanore. I associate Fairmount with Rosamond. Johnnny Depp is starring in another Alice in Wonderland movie. Eugene can celebrate our Land of Make Believe, our White Rabbit made famous by the Jefferson Airplane. I stood before the Mayor of Eugene and suggested a Newspaper Museum at Kesey Square wherein is a model of Miller’s Fantastic Flying Machine. We could build a parade around this contraptions, a world contest that would bring creative people to our Fair City. Children would love this! They too would be in costume for the White Rabbit Run!
Here is what amounts to MY FANTASTIC MOVIE shot in Eugene. What an Amazing Journey is has been!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Club
Juanita Miller ‘The White Witch’
Posted on December 6, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
Joaquin Miller, William Morris & Me
Posted on August 5, 2013by Royal Rosamond Press
Christine Rosamond Benton and I were drawn into Tolkien’s Trilogy. The artist known as ‘Rosamond’ could not put these books down, nr could I. This caused our mutual friend, Keith Purvis, a British subject, to comment;
“She doesn’t know these books are real.”
We three were original hippies who took the Lord of the Rings to heart as we modified the modern world, made it over more to our liking, we oblivious to what normal folk were about. This is exactly what William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brother and Sisterhood did. They – returned!
I discovered the Pre-Raphaelites in 1969 and let my hair grow long for the first time. I gave up drugs in 1967 and was looking for a spiritual format. I came under the spell of the Rossetti family who were friendly with Joaquin Miller. We Presco children knew Miller’s daughter as ‘The White Witch’ and we would call her for advice. Miller’s home ‘The Abbye’ was above our home in the Oakland Hills. Our kindred were friends of Miller, who was also a friend of Swineburn, who wrote ‘The Queen-Mother and Rosamund’ and ‘Rosamund Queen of Lombards. Tolkien was inspired by the Lombards.
Filed away in Rosamond’s probate is my plea to the executor to allow me to be my sister’s historian. I mention Miller and Rossetti. I saw myself in the role of Michael Rossetti who had his own publishing company. He published Miller and other famous poets. When I was twelve, my mother read evidence I might become a famous poet.
All my imput has been ruthlessly ignored, because petty un-creative minds have forced our families creative legacy down the tiny holes of their hidden agendas, into the mouths of worms and parasites, because these ignorant people sensed I and the real Art World, did not let them in the door – would never admit them into our circle, our ring of genius!
Jon Presco
Copyright 2011
William Morris had a major influence on J. R. R. Tolkien. As John Garth points out, unlike most authors traumatized by the experience of World War I, Tolkien did not “discard the old ways of writing, the classicism or medievalism championed by Lord Tennyson and William Morris. In his hands these traditions were reinvigorated so that they remain powerfully alive for readers today” (40). His love of Morris, in particular, goes back to his undergraduate days when he turned from studying the Greek and Latin classics to the the northern traditions — the language and literature of the Scandinavian and Germanic past. According Garth,
William Morris, from the late 1870s on, decided to “remedy” the defects of the real historical record by producing specific works of “pseudo-history,” fully-fleshed stories that he could present as “re-discovered” manuscripts of ancient tribal lore. So eager were the Germanic speakers of 19th century Europe to know more about their ancestors, that sometimes even academically trained scholars would be fooled by the books Morris wrote, and asked him for his sources, and wanted to read the original saga manuscripts themselves. To which requests Morris replied “Doesn’t the fool realize, that it’s a romance, a work of fiction — that it’s all lies!” (from May Morris, daughter of W. Morris recollections).
JRRT, a generation later than Morris, got in on the tail end of this nationalistic/ romantic period, and became as fully enmeshed in its allures as Morris. Tolkien went on to “sub-create” his own “pseudo-histories,” manufacturing his versions of the source myths that would allow a richer understanding of the Nordic tradition, especially the Anglo-Saxon phenomena of England. Between them, as much by accident as firm intent, Morris and Tolkien established an entire genre of pseudo-history that has, by now in the 21st century, become one of the most popular fields of literature.
“These two men knew either much (Morris) or most (Tolkien) of all that was known about these [northern] people and their lives. They used that wealth of knowledge to create ‘dreamed realities’ (Morris) or an ‘imaginary history’ (Tolkien) about what it might have been like to live in those days. While what they wrote wasn’t necessarily true in a strict sense, both knew enough about the past and were talented enough as writers that what they wrote created a strong sense that they described what might have been.” ( Michael W. Perry, More to William Morris, p. 7, 2003)
So, the question then becomes, for Tolkien readers, how does Morris stand up to JRRT? Is it worth the money to buy Morris’s books? Will I get the same, or at least a very similar thrill from reading them as I get when running through the pages of LotR and The Hobbit? Well, that’s what I am trying to decide in the next few installments of this topic. How do the works of the two authors compare, in what ways are they similar, in what ways do they differ?
http://tolkiensring.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=authors&action=display&thread=675
Joaquin Miller looked me up at Somerset House, and left with me
the remaining proofs of his forthcoming volume. He showed me the dedication, ‘To the Rossettis.’ I strongly recommended him to write direct to Gabriel as to the matter before anything further is done. I mentioned the dedication to Christina. She feels some hesitation in sanctioning it, not knowing what the book may contain. If she makes up her mind to object, she is to write to Miller. I looked through the proofs and noted down some remarks on them. They include a series of poems about Christ, named Olive Leaves, implying a sort of religious, or at least personal, enthusiasm, mixed up with a good deal that has more relation to a sense of the picturesque than of the devotional. These poems, though far from worthless from their own point of view, are very defective, and would, I think be highly obnoxious to many readers and Reviewers. I have suggested to Miller the expediency of omitting them altogether. – Christina, I find, has already read these particular poems, and to some considerable extent likes them, which is so far in their favour as affecting religious readers”
The wider world of Victorian London is present: Turgenev comes to dinner, Browning sends his new volumes, Swinburne arrives drunk, and the American poet and adventurer Joaquin Miller makes himself known to the Rossetti circle. Nine appendices include five devoted to Poems and one to the Fleshly School controversy.
Joaquin Miller Cabin is located in Washington, DC. The Hights, the Oakland home Miller built at the end of his life, is currently known as the Joaquin Miller House and is part of Joaquin Miller Park. He planted the surrounding trees and he personally built, on the eminence to the north, his own funeral pyre and monuments dedicated to Moses, General John C. Frémont, and the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Japanese poet Yone Noguchi began his literary career while living in the cabin adjoining Millers’ during the latter half of the 1890s. The Hights was purchased by the city of Oakland in 1919 and can be found in Joaquin Miller Park.[42] It is now a designated California Historical Landmark.
Miller went to England, where he was celebrated as a frontier oddity. There, in May 1871, Miller published Songs of the Sierras, the book which finalized his nickname as the “Poet of the Sierras”.[22] It was well-received by the British press and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti.
While in England, he was one of the few Americans invited into the Savage Club along with Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The younger Hawthorne referred to Miller as “a licensed libertine” but admitted him “charming, amiable, and harmless”.[
The Savage Club was formed to supply the want which Dr Samuel Johnson and his friends experienced when they founded the Literary Club. A little band of authors, journalists and artists felt the need of a place of reunion where, in their hours of leisure, they might gather together and enjoy each other’s society, apart from the publicity of that which was known in Johnson’s time as the coffee house, and equally apart from the chilling splendour of the modern club.
At present, there are 315 members. The club maintains a tradition of fortnightly dinners for members and their guests, always followed by entertainment. These dinners often feature a variety of famous performers from music hall to concert hall. Several times a year members invite ladies to share both the dinner and the entertainment — sometimes as performers. On these occasions guests always include widows of former Savages, who are known as Rosemaries (after rosemary, a symbol of remembrance).
Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.
He was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and became the movement’s unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood’s literary magazine The Germ which published four issues in 1850 and wrote the poetry reviews for it.
It was William Michael Rossetti who recorded the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at their founding meeting in September 1848:
1. To have genuine ideas to express;
2. To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote;
4. And most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.
Although Rossetti worked full time as a civil servant, he maintained a prolific output of criticism and biography across a range of interests from Algernon Swinburne to James McNeill Whistler. He edited the diaries of his maternal uncle John William Polidori (author of The Vampyre and physician to Lord Byron), a comprehensive biography of D. G. Rossetti, and edited the collected works of D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.
Rossetti edited the first British edition of the poetry of Walt Whitman, which was published in 1868; however, this edition was bowdlerized.[1] Anne Gilchrist, who became one of the first to write about Whitman, first read his poetry from Rossetti’s edition, and Rossetti helped initiate their correspondence.[2]
In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. They honeymooned in France and Italy. Their first child, Olivia Frances Madox, was born in September 1875, and her birth was celebrated in an ode of Swinburne.
William Michael Rosetti was a major contributor to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica; his contributions on artistic subjects were criticised by many reviewers at the time and since, as showing little evidence of having absorbed the mounting body of work by academic art historians, mostly writing in German.
Dinner at Rossetti’s
by Joaquin Miller
________________________________________
There is no thing that hath not worth;
There is no evil anywhere;
There is no ill on all this earth,
If man seeks not to see it there.
September 28. I cannot forget that dinner with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, just before leaving London, nor can I hope to recall its shining and enduring glory. I am a better, larger man, because of it. And how nearly our feet are set on the same way. It was as if we were all crossing the plains, and I for a day’s journey and a night’s encampment fell in with and conversed with the captains of the march.
But one may not gave names and dates and details over there as here. The home is entirely a castle. The secrets of the board and fireside are sacred. And then these honest toilers and worshippers of the beautiful are shy, so shy and modest. But I like this decent English way of keeping your name down and out of sight till the coffin-lid hides your blushes–so modest these Pre-Raphaelites are that I should be in disgrace forever if I dared set down any living man’s name.
But here are a few of the pearls picked up, as they were tossed about the table at intervals and sandwiched in between tales of love and lighter thoughts and things.
All London, or rather all the brain of London, the literary brain, was there. And the brain of all the world, I think, was in London. These giants of thought, champions of the beautiful earth, passed the secrets of all time and all lands before me like a mighty panorama. All night sol We dined so late that we missed breakfast. If I could remember and write down truly and exactly what these men said, I would have the best and the greatest book that ever was written, I have been trying a week in vain, I have written down and scratched out and revised till I have lost the soul of it, it seems to me; no individuality to it; only like my own stuff. If I only had set their words down on the next day instead of attempting to remember their thoughts! Alas! the sheaves have been tossed and beaten about over sea and land for days and days, till the golden grain is gone, and here is but the straw and chaff.
The master sat silent for the most part; there was a little man away down at the other end, conspicuously modest. There was a cynical fat man, and a lean philanthropist all sorts and sizes, but all lovers of the beautiful of earth. Here is what one, a painter, a ruddy-faced and a rollicking gentleman, remarked merrily to me as he poured out a glass of red wine at the beginning of the dinner:
“When travelling in the mountains of Italy, I observed that the pretty peasant women made the wine by putting grapes m a great tub, and then, getting into this tub, barefooted, on top of the grapes, treading them out with their brown, bare feet. At first I did not like to drink this wine. I did not think it was clean. But I afterward watched these pretty brown women” and here all leaned to listen, at the mention of pretty brown women– I watched these pretty brown women at their work in the primitive winepress, and I noticed that they always washed their feet after they got done treading out the wine.”
All laughed at this, and the red-faced painter was so delighted that he poured out and swallowed another full glass. The master sighed as he sat at the head of the table rolling a bit of bread between thumb and finger, and said, sitting close to me: “I am an Italian who has neven seen Italy. Belle Italia!…”
By and by he quietly said that silence was the noblest attitude in all things; that the greatest poets refused to write, and that all great artists in all lines were above the folly of expression. A voice from far down the table echoed this sentiment by saying:”Heard melodies are sweet; but unheard melodies are sweeter.” “Written poems are delicious; but unwritten poems are divine,” cried the triumphant cynic. “What is poetry?” cries a neighbor. “All true, pure life is poetry,” answers one. “But the inspiration of poetry?” “The art of poetry is in books. The inspiration of poetry in nature.” To this all agreed.
Then the master very quietly spoke: “And yet do not despise the books of man. All religions, said the Chinese philosophers, are good. The only difference is, some religions are better than others, and the apparent merit of each depends largely upon a mans capacity for understanding it. This is true of .poetry. All poetry is good. I never read a poem in my life that did not have some merit, and teach some sweet lesson. The fault in reading the poems of man, as well as reading the poetry of nature, lies largely at the door of the reader. Now, what do you call poetry?” and he turned his great Italian eyes tenderly to where I sat at his side.
To me a poem must be a picture,” I answered.
Proud I was when a great poet then said: “And it must be a picture–if a good poem so simple that you can understand it at a glance, eh? And see it and remember it as you would see and remember a sunset, eh?” “Aye,” answered the master, “I also demand that it shall be lofty in sentiment and sublime in expression. The only rule I have for measuring the merits of a written poem, is by the height of it. Why not be able to measure its altitude as you measure one of your sublime peaks of America?”
He looked at me as he spoke of America, and I was encouraged to answer:”Yes, I do not want to remember the words. But I do want it to remain with me a picture and become a part of my life. Take this one verse from Mr. Longfellow:
“And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.’”
“Good!” cried the fat cynic, who, I am sure, had never heard the couplet before, it was so sweet to him; “Good! There is a picture that will depart from no impressible clay. The silent night, the far sweet melody falling on the weary mind, the tawny picturesque Arabs stealing away m the darkness, the perfect peace, the stillness and the rest. It appeals to all the Ishmaelite in our natures, and all the time we see the tents gathered up and the silent children of the desert gliding away in the gloaming.”
A transplanted American, away down at the other end by a little man among bottles, said: “The poem of Evangeline is a succession of pictures. I never read Evangeline but once.” “It is a waste of time to look twice at a sunset,” said Rossetti, sotto voce, and the end man went on: “But i believe I can see every picture in that poem as distinctly as if I had been the unhappy Arcadian; for here the author has called in ail the elements that go to make up a perfect poem.”
“When the great epic of this new, solid Saxon tongue comes to be written,” said one who sat near and was dear to the master’s heart, “it will embrace all that this embraces: new and unnamed lands; ships on the sea; the still deep waters hidden away in a deep and voiceless continent; the fresh and fragrant wilderness; the curling smoke of the camp-fire; action, movement, journeys; the presence–the inspiring presence of woman; the ennobl- ing sentiment of love, devotion, and devotion to the death; faith, hope and charity,- and all in the open air.”
“Yes,” said the master thoughtfully, ‘no great poem has ever been or ever will be fitted in a parlor, or even fashioned from a city. There is not room for it there.”
“Hear! hear! you might as well try to grow a California pine in the shell of a peanut,” cried I. Some laughed, some applauded, all looked curiously at me. Of course, I did not say it that well, yet I did say it far better, I mean I did not use the words carefully, but I had the advantage of action and sympathy.
Then the master said, after a bit of reflection: “Homer’s Ulysses, out of which have grown books enough to cover the earth, owes its immortality to all this, and its out-door exercise. Yet it is a bloody book a bad book, in many respects–full of revenge, treachery, avarice and wrong. And old Ulysses himself seems to have been the most colossal liar on record. But for all this, the constant change of scene, the moving ships and the roar of waters, the rush of battle and the anger of the gods, the divine valor of the hero, and, above all, and over all, like a broad, white-bosomed moon through the broken clouds, the splendid life of that one woman; the shining faith, the constancy, the truth and purity of Penelope–all these make a series of pictures that pass before us like a panorama, and we will not leave off reading till we have seen them all happy together again, and been assured that the faith and constancy of that woman has had it reward. And we love him, even if he does lie!”
How all at that board leaned and listened. Yet let me again and again humbly confess to you that I do him such injustice to try thus to quote from memory. After a while he said: “Take the picture of the old, blind, slobber-mouthed dog, that has been driven forth by the wooers to die. For twenty years he has not heard the voice of his master. The master now comes, in the guise of a beggar. The dog knows his voice, struggles to rise from the ground, staggers toward him, licks his hand, falls, and dies at his feet.”
Such was the soul, heart, gentleness of this greatest man that I ever saw walking in the fields of art….
Miller earned an estimated $3,000 working as a Pony Express rider, and used the money to move to Oregon. With the help of his friend, Senator Joseph Lane, he became editor of the Democratic Register in Eugene,[7] a role he held from March 15 to September 20, 1862.[8] Though no copies survive, it was known as sympathetic to the Confederacy until it was forced to shut down.[9] That year, Miller married Theresa Dyer (alias Minnie Myrtle) on September 12, 1862, in her home four days after meeting her[10] in Port Orford, Oregon.
Swinburne Meets Joaquin Miller.” New York Times (10 May 1931) [Online: BR5]
Picture with the text: “Once Joaquin Miller and a British Writer Called on Swinburne, Whom the Englishman Claimed as an Intimate Friend. They Announced Themselves as Joaquin Miller, the American Poet, and a Friend. Swinburne Sent Down Word to ‘Bring the American Poet Up and Tell the Friend to Go to Hell.’” [MCK]
Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, April 5, 1837 – London, April 10, 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909.[1]
At Oxford Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. After leaving college he lived in London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti was delighted with his ‘little Northumbrian friend’, a reference to Swinburne’s diminutive height—he was just over five feet tall.[citation needed]
The first of Rosamond’s five scenes is the most forceful in demonstrating Swinburne’s debt to troubadour conventions as well as to Pre-Raphaelite stylistic influences. Courtly love preoccupations and the medieval setting overshadow elements of Jacobean revenge tragedy throughout the play. Swinburne’s Rosamond, rather than the historical queen of the Courts of Love, espouses the religion of love and, as a result of her lived creed, is poisoned by Eleanor out of jealousy.
Swinburne’s choice of the “rose of the world” as one of his first subjects for verse suggests that he associated his conception of Rosamond with courtly love allegory, specifically the Roman de la Rose, in which the rose is the eternal symbol of the beloved and of the perfect beauty that is fearfully transient but simultaneously immortal.3 As in Swinburne’s later lyrics “Before the Mirror” and “The Year of the Rose,” Rosamond’s central symbol is the rose, and, like them, this play recapitulates the major preoccupations of courtly love poetry: the apotheosis of beauty; love as the necessary consequence of beauty fear of mutability; and a final insistence on the immortality of both love and beauty, which can be attained, paradoxically, only through death.
[39/40] The first scene of Rosamond characterizes its heroine as simultaneously enchanted with her own beauty, exalted by her love affair with Henry, and insecure about the permanence of her beauty and her love. Surrounded by the ephemeral rose blossoms with which she identifies in the maze at Woodstock, she is alone with her maid, Constance. Here Rosamond reveals her concern with the world’s slanderous gossip about her, and as the scene progresses she attempts gradually to rebuild her self-confidence-in her beauty, in Henry’s continuing devotion, and in the unassailable value of beauty and of love. At first, she is defensive:
See,
If six leaves make a rose, I stay red yet
And the wind nothing ruins me; who says
I am at waste? (Tragedies, I, 231)
Is thy name
Babe? Sweet are babes as flowers that wed the sun,
But man may be not born a babe again,
And less than man may woman. Rosamund
Stands radiant now in royal pride of place
As wife of thine and queen of Lombards–not
Cunimund’s daughter. Hadst thou slain her sire
Shamefully, shame were thine to have sought her hand
And shame were hers to love thee: but he died
Manfully, by thy mightier hand than his
Manfully mastered. War, born blind as fire,
Fed not as fire upon her: many a maid
As royal dies disrobed of all but shame
And even to death burnt up for shame’s sake: she
Lives, by thy grace, imperial.
ROSAMUND.
I know it.
I leave thee not the choice. Keep thou thy hand
Bloodless, and Hildegard, whom yet I love,
Dies, and in fire, the harlot’s death of shame.
Last night she lured thee hither. Hate of me,
Because of late I smote her, being in wrath
Forgetful of her noble maidenhood,
Stung her for shame’s sake to take hands with shame.
This if I swear, may she unswear it? Thou
Canst not but say she bade thee seek her. She
Lives while I will, as Albovine and thou
Live by my grace and mercy. Live, or die.
But live thou shalt not longer than her death,
Her death by burning, if thou slay not him.
I see my death shine in thine eyes: I see
My present death inflame them. That were not
Her surety, Almachildes. Thou shouldst know me
Now. Though thou slay me, this may save not her.
My lines are laid about her life, and may not
By breach of mine be broken.
Biography
From 1902 Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale worked both as a painter and illustrator of fine books, among them Alfred Tennyson’s Poems in 1905 and Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes in 1908. She was the first female member of the Institute of Painters in Oils in 1902, a member of the RWS and also taught at the Byam Shaw School of Arts.
Rosamond Press 
