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  • Eva Zeisel, The Shape of Life Exhibit: ‘Look! Our dishes!’

    Riverside China Company
    The exhibition, Eva Zeisel: The Shape of Life, showcased close to 100 pieces designed by the Hungarian-born artist who revolutionized ceramic design throughout the world and brought an original brand of modernism into American homes beginning in the 1940s was held in 2001. It was held at the Tyler Museum of Art in Tyler, Texas from September 13–December 9, 2008.

    The Shape of Life exhibit, organized by Erie Art Museum in Erie, Pennsylvania, spanned more than 70 years in the broad and accomplished career of Zeisel, the legendary Eastern European artisan who continued to produce household and industrial designs. Zeisel was 102 when this exibit was held.

    She died on December 30th, 2011 in New York City and was 105 years old.

    “Eva is perhaps best known in the design world for bringing warmth and feeling to the cold formalism of Bauhaus, and what is most remarkable about her work in general is the emotional connection,” TMA Curator Kentaro Tomio said in 2008. “Her designs, no matter how modernistic or intricate, display a genuine intimacy and distinct personality. Anyone can own and use the pieces based on her designs, yet they beautifully illustrate how artistically designed, mass-produced objects can be comparable to fine art.”

    The exhibition guided the viewer through Zeisel’s vast array of design ideas and changes of style since the late 1920s, as well as narrating her long and eventful life — which included escaping a death sentence in the Soviet Union after being falsely accused in a plot to assassinate Josef Stalin. (That experience later was recounted in the novel Darkness at Noon by her friend Arthur Koestler.)

    The Shape of Life includes Eva Zeisel’s well known ceramic work for Hallcraft, Sears and Red Wing Pottery, as well as glass, metal and furniture design, and examples of her famed Town and Country series of modern stoneware. The exhibition also showcased her work for companies such as KleinReid, The Orange Chicken, and Crate and Barrel, the latter of which in 2005 introduced “Classic Century,” a reissue of her 1952 china collections. (Editor’s note: Crate and Barrel continues to carry Zeisels’ work today.)

    “Zeisel’s mid-20th century ceramic designs were considered avant-garde at the time but are now recognized as classic,” Pearson said. “Her timelessly elegant dinnerware from that era looks at home in today’s kitchen, especially with the current revival of modernist design. It’s amazing how many of her designs – and wares inspired by her designs — are in use today all over the world.”Western Stoneware

    Born to a wealthy Hungarian family in 1906, Zeisel’s artistic influence spanned the globe for eight decades. She served as artistic director of the China and Glass Industry in the Soviet Union until her untimely arrest for the Stalin plot, and is credited with teaching the first course in the US on ceramic design for mass production when she accepted a post at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute shortly after emigrating to this country to flee Nazi persecution in 1938. Her work was the focus of the first one-woman show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, after the venue commissioned her Castleton Service porcelain dinnerware in 1947.

    In addition to having her work exhibited in major museums throughout the world, Zeisel’s designs appear in permanent collections including the MoMA, Metropolitan Museum, British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Brohan Museum in Berlin, continuing to attract widespread acclaim for their uniquely utilitarian beauty. As she entered her second century, she remained “a maker of useful things.”

    “We feel differently, more intimately, about dishes than we do about shoes or chairs or forks,” Zeisel said upon the unveiling of the exhibition at the Erie Art Museum. “If we unexpectedly come upon a chair like we used when we were children, we say, ‘We had a chair like that at home.’ But if we come upon dishes like we used on the dinner table with our parents, we will surely exclaim, ‘Look! Our dishes!’”

    Eva Zeisel on the playful search for Beauty at the TED conference:
    http://www.ted.com/talks/eva_zeisel_on_the_playful_search_for_beauty.html

    Photographs:

    1. Design by Eva Zeisel for Riverside China Company, Riverside, Calif. Glazed earthenware. Erie Art Museum, Erie, Pa.

    2. Design by Eva Zeisel (Hungarian, 1906 – 2011) for Western Stoneware. Bird salt and pepper shakers (black and white), c. 1950s. Erie Art Museum, Erie, Pennsylvania.

  • Successful Aging and Sexual Satisfaction Remains Positive in Older Women

    A study by researchers at the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California, San Diego finds that successful aging and positive quality of life indicators correlate with sexual satisfaction in older women.  The report also shows that self-rated successful aging, quality of life and sexual satisfaction appear to be stable even in the face of declines in physical health of women between the ages of 60 and 89.Romeo and Juliet

    The study looked at 1,235 women enrolled at the San Diego site of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study, a major ongoing research program funded by the National Institutes of Health which, since 1993, has addressed causes of death, disability and quality of life in more than 160,000 generally healthy, post-menopausal women.

    As the researchers expected, sexual activity and functioning (such things as desire, arousal and ability to climax) were negatively associated with age, as were physical and mental health.  However, in contrast to sexual activity and functioning, satisfaction with overall sex life was not significantly different between the three age cohorts studied: age 60 to 69; 70 to 70; and 80 to 89.

    Approximately 67 percent, 60 percent, and 61 percent of women in these three age groups, respectively, reported that they were “moderately” to “very satisfied” with their sex lives.

    “Contrary to our earlier hypothesis, sexual satisfaction was not significantly associated with age,” said Wesley K. Thompson, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry with the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, and co-lead author along with UC San Diego medical student Lindsey Charo, BA.  “Although the levels of sexual activity and functioning did vary significantly, depending on the woman’s age, their perceived quality of life, successful aging and sexual satisfaction remained positive.”

    Sexual activity was significantly lower in older age cohorts. Of the women who were married or in an intimate relationship, 70 percent of those aged 60 to 69, 57 percent of those aged 70 to 79, and 31 percent of those aged 80 to 89 reported having had some sexual activity in the previous six months. While women who were married or living in an intimate relationship engaged in higher rates of sexual activity than those who were not in such a relationship, sexual activity still decreased across age cohorts.

    The findings of this study confirm earlier published research from the UCSD Stein Institute suggesting that self-rated health changes little with age even when objective health indicators show age-associated decline.

    “What this study tells us is that many older adults retain their ability to enjoy sex well into old age,” said Thompson. “This is especially true of older adults who maintain a higher level of physical and mental health as they grow older.  Furthermore, feeling satisfied with your sex life — whatever your levels of sexual activity — is closely related to your perceived quality of life.”  He added that “while we cannot assess cause and effect from this study, these results suggest that maintaining a high level of sexual satisfaction may positively reinforce other psychological aspects of successful aging.”

    Additional contributors to the study include Ipsit V. Vahia, MD, Colin Depp, PhD, Matthew Allison, MD, and Dilip V. Jeste, MD, all with the UCSD School of Medicine.

    Painting: Representing the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.  The 1884 painting is by Frank Bernard Dicksee, and from Wikipedia.

  • Rancho Bernardo Heart and Disease Study Observes 40th Year

    By Elizabeth Marie Himchak

    This year marked the 40th anniversary of the Rancho Bernardo Heart and Chronic Disease Study, a research project that involved 6,629 of an estimated 10,000 Rancho Bernardans in 1971.

    Rancho Bernardo Heart and Chronic Disease Study participants, from left, Margo Pagnini, Joyce Bruun and Stephen Apple, with Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, who has led the research project for 40 years. Photo by Elizabeth Marie Himchak

    What made the milestone remarkable — in addition to numerous medical conclusions drawn from the RB data — is that as of last summer, more than 1,800 of the participants were still answering health questions and at least half periodically return to the Bernardo Center Drive clinic to undergo free medical tests.

    The study was conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. She and her team went door-to-door recruiting Rancho Bernardans (mostly 30 years old and over ) for a medical study on a little-known health factor: lipids. They wanted to know if there was a connection between lipids and heart disease.

    Barrett-Connor, who still leads the project, said she chose Rancho Bernardo because it was promoted as a place where healthy individuals live. She said there was credence to the community developer’s claim since at the time Rancho Bernardo was isolated from downtown San Diego, there were few doctors in the immediate area and the closest hospital was in Escondido, a considerable drive then. Few with medical issues were likely to live so far from immediate medical care.

    Due to Rancho Bernardans’ affluence and education, Barrett-Connor said they were also ideal because “they had enough money to see a doctor if needed.”

    Because Barrett-Connor included questions and tests beyond lipids, data has answered questions about heart disease, diabetes, bone density, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease and testosterone.

    “More than 400 … scientific publications have reported discoveries largely unknown when we started,” she said. “Many of these discoveries (due to the RB data) are modifiable risk factors now shown in clinical trials to be associated with improved risk factors and the potential for more healthy life years.”

    What makes this four decades of data (including frozen blood samples) especially valuable is that in the ‘70s and ‘80s it was collected before participants started changing their health and lifestyle patterns, and taking medications to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Lipids and cholesterol were not household words then, she said.

    “We studied how everyday characteristics — body size and fat distribution, good and bad cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose, physical activity, alcohol intake, cigarette smoking, diet and family medical history were related to common chronic diseases,” Barrett-Connor said. “We studied the reasons for gender differences in heart disease and diabetes — our first questions — plus chronic arthritis, headaches, lung disease, liver disease, kidney disease, cancer, and cognitive, mental and functional health.”

    As for what motivated residents, reasons varied. Participants mentioned a curiosity to see if Rancho Bernardans were healthier and obtaining a “track record” of their health as they aged or getting health information to pass on because they were adopted. Some said the program was interesting due to its uniqueness and their good rapport with researchers with the program over two and three decades.

    Now, study participants’ average age is 86. Data collection will naturally come to an end since study parameters prevent participants being added. However, because of the wealth of raw data obtained over 40 years, for decades researchers can make more conclusions.

    To fund future discoveries and training, UC San Diego Health Services established the Rancho Bernardo Study Foundation. To donate, contact Harvey Green at 619-543-3121 or hagreen@ucsd.edu.

    Editor’s Note: Seniorwomen.com has received  permission to reprint the article which appeared in the Pomerado News which includes  the Poway News Chieftain and Rancho Bernardo News Journal

  • Short-staffed and Budget-bare, Overwhelmed State Agencies are Unable to Keep Up

    By Melissa Maynard, Stateline Staff Writer, Pew Center on the States

    Backlogged
    After years of budget cuts, layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes, the everyday work of state government is piling up. This Stateline series examines what causes backlogs, who is hurt by them and how states can dig themselves out.

    On the face of it, the backlog the Hawaii Public Housing Authority is experiencing seems a simple matter of supply and demand. Some 11,000 families are on the authority’s waiting list, hoping against the odds that they can get one of only 6,295 public housing units. In a state where housing is notoriously expensive, the only people with a real shot at getting a unit are the homeless and survivors of domestic abuse. Even for them, the waiting can take years. “The waitlist is so extensive and the homeless problem is so great that a lot of people are getting preference over working families,” explains Nicholas Birck, chief planner for the Hawaii Public Housing Authority. “They never make it to the top.”

    But there’s another, hidden problem at play in Hawaii’s housing backlog. Lately, the authority hasn’t had enough employees to manage turnover in vacant units. As a result, 310 homes have been sitting empty, even with all the people languishing in waitlist limbo. For many of the vacant units, all it would take is a few simple repairs and a little bit of administrative work to give a family a home — and get the authority’s backlog shrinking rather than growing.

    The situation is a byproduct of big budget cuts in Hawaii and a hiring freeze that wasn’t lifted until earlier this year. A handful of employees in the housing authority’s property management office retired, and the hiring freeze made it impossible to fill the vacant positions. For a while, there was only one person overseeing the office’s far-flung portfolio spanning four islands. “It was a very difficult position for her to be in,” Birck says. Today, the office’s ranks are back up to six employees, but both the number of vacant units and the size of the waiting list have continued to grow since a state audit first brought attention to the issue in June.

    Hawaii isn’t the only place where the everyday tasks of state government are piling up. A Stateline investigation found that agencies across the country are seeing growing backlogs of work, as increased demand for state services in a weak economy bumps up against the states’ efforts to cut their payroll costs. From public housing to crime labs, restaurant inspections to court systems, four years of layoffs, furloughs, hiring freezes and unfilled vacancies are beginning to take their toll. At its most benign, the result for taxpayers is a longer wait for things like marriage licenses or birth certificates. At its most dangerous, growing backlogs are threatening the lives of vulnerable children, elders and disabled persons, as overwhelmed protective services agencies face delays investigating reports of abuse and neglect.

    The size of some backlogs growing in state government is staggering:

    • The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which investigates teacher misconduct, has 3,240 open cases, involving allegations of teachers doing everything from committing felonies to sexually abusing children. More than 1,000 of those cases have been open for more than a year. The commission has struggled to keep up with its work amid state-level hiring freezes — which until recently prevented it from filling vacancies — as well as furloughs that had been keeping employees home three days per month.

    • In Arizona, the state child protective services program is working through a backlog of 9,903 cases that have been flagged as “non-active,” a situation the agency blames on high levels of turnover and staff vacancies. This year, at least seven children who have had previous contact with Arizona’s child protective services system have died of abuse or neglect. Caseloads are 50 to 60 percent above state standards, with many investigations remaining open for more than six months. Investigators receive two to five reports each week but are only able to close one. A Child Safety Task Force convened by Republican Governor Jan Brewer is expected to provide recommendations about how to improve the system later this month.

    • Iowa has fallen behind on annual safety inspections of elevators and boilers across the state, according to a September audit. Iowa Workforce Development, the agency responsible for conducting the inspections, was found to be as many as nine years delinquent on elevator inspections; 68 of 100 elevators reviewed by auditors hadn’t received an annual inspection.

  • The Guest at the Feeder, Accompanied by Finches; Participate in the Next Great Backyard Bird Count

    Woodpecker

    By Ferida Wolff

    Look who we found on the bird feeder! Quite a big guest compared to the usual denizens. And what a treat to see — a Red-bellied Woodpecker. That would explain the different kinds of bird voices I have been hearing lately. I think I saw both a male and female chowing down. Woodpeckers are common in Eastern woodlands but as more woodland is being used for human habitats, I guess my slightly wooded backyard may have drawn them in.

    As the weather cools down the crowd on the feeders heats up. Often the feeders are packed with finches and sparrows but there are others that find a meal here, too. Cardinals are regular visitors and now that the leaves have fallen, the brilliant red of the male cardinal is like a beacon on the bare branches. We see goldfinches (New Jersey’s state bird), chickadees, and nuthatches on a regular basis. There are wrens and cowbirds and the occasional hawk. And I mustn’t forget to acknowledge the blue jays — there are currently several of them visiting the feeders. Right now I am listening to a finch symphony from the forsythia bush on the side of my house.

    I love seeing the variety of colors and personalities on the feeders. I think it is important for people to be sensitive to other life forms. Birds are usually a pleasing connection for most of us (though a raid by grackles on the black oil seed can prove costly). I think being aware of others helps us to be more expansive within ourselves. So peck away, woodpecker, and thank you for dropping by.

    For info, sounds, and photos, this site by Cornell University is terrific:

    http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/browse_tax.aspx?family=45

    ©2011 Ferida Wolff for SeniorWomen.com

    Editor’s Note:

    Participate in the next Great Backyard Bird Count, February 17 – 20th. There’s an instructional video and a list of the most reported birds in a recent count at the bird count site:

    “The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent. Anyone can participate, from beginning bird watchers to experts. It takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the event. It’s free, fun, and easy — and it helps the birds.”

    The GBBC is a Joint project of Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Audubon and Bird Studies Canada.

  • Helen Frankenthaler: “For me, being a ‘lady painter’ was never an issue. I don’t resent being a female painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint.”

    Mountains and Sea“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it — well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that — there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”

    —  Barbara Rose’s Frankenthaler

    Helen Frankenthaler, whose career spanned six decades, has died. She had long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the 20th century. Heir of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, she brought together in her work — always with prodigious inventiveness and singular beauty — the idea of the canvas as both an arena of gesture and a formal field. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar abstract American painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. One of the foremost colorists of our time, she produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound.

    Frankenthaler, daughter of New York State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthaler and his wife, Martha (Lowenstein) Frankenthaler, was born on December 12, 1928, and raised in New York City. She attended the Dalton School, where she received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949, she graduated from Bennington College, where she was a student of Paul Feeley, following which she went on to study briefly with Hans Hofmann.

    Frankenthaler’s professional exhibition career began in 1950, when Adolph Gottlieb selected her painting Beach (1950) for inclusion in the exhibition titled Fifteen Unknowns Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was presented in 1951, at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and she was also included that 2 year in the landmark exhibition 9th Street: Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture. Renowned art critic Clement Greenberg immediately recognized her originality. Her work went on to garner growing international attention. As early as 1959, she began to be a regular presence in major international exhibitions, and in 1960 she had her first museum retrospective, at The Jewish Museum, in New York City.

  • Dutch and Flemish Art Flourish in a Texas Winter

    One of the world’s finest private collections of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, including masterworks by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Jan Steen and others, will conclude a national tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

    Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection presents over 60 paintings that are exceptional for their quality, condition and historical interest. As exemplars of the Dutch Golden Age, the works are distinguished not only for the glowing quality of light achieved by many of the most talented artists of the time, but also for their role in an unsurpassed period of artistic, cultural, scientific and commercial accomplishment in the Netherlands.

    “No other nation matched the Netherlands in the 17th century for quality and quantity of painting,” said Edgar Peters Bowron, the MFAH Audrey Jones Beck curator of European art. “The Van Otterloo collection contains extraordinary works by the leading artists of the age in every genre, from architectural interiors, floral arrangements, still lifes and works based on biblical and classical texts, to land- and seascapes. The level of craftsmanship and specialization is outstanding, and these paintings are rightfully renowned for their careful observation, meticulous rendering and virtuoso.”

    “Of special note for local audiences will be the Rembrandt portrait of an older woman from the Van Otterloo collection, which provides a fascinating comparison with a portrait of a young woman, painted by the artist a year earlier, which is in the MFAH collection.”

    The tour marks the first time that the Van Otterloo collection has been on view in its entirety. The exhibition opened at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, where it was organized, and then traveled to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will be the final venue, with the collection on view until February 12, 2012.Rembrandt portrait in MFA, Houston collection

    The exquisite paintings in the Van Otterloo collection — portraits, still lifes, landscapes, history paintings, maritime scenes, city views and genre scenes — were created in the 1600s as the Dutch Republic increased in maritime strength and dominated international trade.  Elsewhere in Europe, the nobility and the Catholic Church were the principal patrons of the arts, but in the Netherlands, merchants supported artists in unprecedented numbers. All of these works graced domestic spaces in the Netherlands as people began to invest enthusiastically in fine art and welcome it into their homes.

    THE EXHIBITION

    Great works of art transcend categorization, but to provide context for the vast flowering of Dutch and Flemish art in the Golden Age, the exhibition is organized to reflect the principal themes that artists explored in this period.

    Dawn of the Golden Age

    Lured by religious freedom and a better economic climate, many artists fled northward from cities such as Antwerp, Brussels and Bruges to escape persecution and the war with Spain in the late 1500s and early 1600s. They introduced sophisticated new painting styles and together with Dutch artists created a climate of artistic excellence in the Dutch Republic.

    Artists emphasized the horizon line and changing weather conditions of the Dutch countryside, often populating scenes with engaging details of daily life. From the 1560s to the 1620s, Northern Europe endured an extremely cold period known as the “Little Ice Age.” Inspired by the winter landscapes of Flemish artists who had fled to Amsterdam, Hendrick Avercamp elevated the subject to a new genre in works such as his Winter Landscape Near a Village.

  • Health and Fitness: Staying Active In All Seasons and Without Spending a Dime

    To help you get started and keep moving, NIH (National Institutes for Health) brought together some of the nation’s leading experts on aging, exercise and motivation. They developed a guide to exercise for older adults. The guide serves as the basis for a new national exercise and physical activity campaign for people ages 50 and older. It’s called Go4Life.Balance exercises

    “Older adults can exercise safely, even those who have physical limitations,” Dr. Richard J. Hodes, director of NIH’s National Institute on Aging, says. “ Go4Life is based on studies showing the benefits of exercise and physical activity for older people, including those with chronic health conditions.”

    Go4Life exercises are designed to be done safely at home without special equipment or clothing. The free book, Exercise & Physical Activity: Your Everyday Guide from the National Institute on Aging, is the core resource for the campaign. Other free materials, such as an exercise DVD and tip sheets, are also available. Workout to Go, a mini exercise guide, shows you how you can be active anytime, anywhere.

    Staying Motivated to Stay Active

    Be Physically Active Without Spending a Dime

    Have Fun! Be Active With Your Dog!

    These are just a few of the tips sheets that adults 50 and older can read on the website. Go4Life tip sheets provide a wealth of information to help older adults add exercise and physical activity to their daily routine and have fun at the same time.

    Actividades familiares divertidas y saludables (Family Activities…) (547.43 KB) Actividades para todas las estaciones del año (Activities for All Seasons)(748.14 KB)

    Activities for All Seasons (257.24 KB)

    Be Physically Active without Spending a Dime (483.93 KB)

    Beneficios prácticos del ejercicio y la actividad física (Real-Life Benefits…) (1.08 MB)

    Building Up the Benefits (372.75 KB)

    Caregivers and Exercise—Take Time for Yourself (192.76 KB)

  • New Year’s Peeve

    by Rose Madeline Mula

    Am I glad I didn’t live in Babylonia four thousand years ago.  There the New Year celebration lasted eleven days.  One is bad enough.  By the eleventh day, the  Babylonians must have had prodigious hangovers.  They probably weren’t even fully conscious for the first month of the new year.  That’s not for me.  It would mean missing all those great post-holiday sales.Hanging gardens of Babylonia

    When I was young, I hated New Year’s — the whole shebang, beginning with New Year’s Eve.  The forced gaiety.  The pressure to be HAPPY!  It was all so depressing.

    The worst part was that if I didn’t have a date for New Year’s Eve, it cast a pall on the next twelve months.  One year, to avoid the social ignominy of being dateless on the Big Night, a girl friend and I fled to Manhattan to mingle with the throngs in Times Square so no one could tell that we were unescorted.  No one, that is, except a couple of sleazy characters who latched onto us and tried to entice us back to their pad to “start the new year off with a bang.”  Did we really look that desperate?  When we adamantly refused, a drunk who had been eavesdropping berated us for “spoiling the boys’ new year.”  Give me a break!  That was even more disheartening than being home with the old folks watching Guy Lombardo on TV.

    Now that I’m an “old folk,” I miss Guy Lombardo; and I don’t hate New Year’s Eve any more because I no longer feel pressured to party.  Instead, I can go to bed early and sleep through the countdown.  It’s wonderful!

    But when I wake up, it’s New Year’s Day, which is not so wonderful, because I feel compelled to make those cursed resolutions that I know are doomed to failure.  If I didn’t lose those stubborn ten pounds last year, why will turning a page on the calendar help me shed them this year?  (Could you hand me that last brownie, please?  And don’t be stingy with the ice cream.)

    And why would I think that taking a new pledge to hike three miles a day is going to work when it never did before?  It’s too cold to go out and walk anyway.  It’s January in New England, for heaven’s sake!  I’ll start in April when it warms up a bit.  Or maybe not.  What would be the point?  I would have already blown three months.

    Don’t look at me like that.  I know I really must cut down on sweets and ramp up my exercise.  And I will.  But making a resolution on January 1 and then giving up completely the first time I weaken isn’t going to do it.  Eating a hunk of cheesecake and foregoing the mall walk on January 2 should not give me an excuse to stuff myself and flop on the couch every day for the rest of the year.

  • Canine Connections, Atop a Yosemite waterfall or Peering From a Wicker Carriage

    A new book from the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library gives fresh meaning to the term “dog days” by celebrating the powerful connections between people and their canine companions.

    Everyday Dogs shows the special bonds between humans and their pets. The idea for 
    Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays and Other Notable Dates by Mary Scott, Susan Snyder     (Heyday Books) arose unexpectedly in 2005 when Mary Scott and Susan Snyder were sifting through the vast Pictorial Collection at The Bancroft for images for an exhibit on California women.Everyday Dogs

    “By chance we began finding some wonderful photos of dogs with their people,” said Scott, graphic designer for the campus’s Doe and Moffitt libraries. And they found more, and more.

    Among the hundreds of photos discovered by Scott and Snyder, public services director at The Bancroft, those chosen for the 152-page book had to relay “a still palpable connection between the people and their dogs,” said Scott. “That’s what a photo needed to make the final cut — be it a crusty old prospector or a famous newspaperman,” she said.

    The cover is a professional photo by noted 19th-century California photographer Carleton E. Watkins, of a dog named Guardian peering alertly from a wicker carriage, but the book contains snapshots, too. Altogether, the book contains 75 evocative black-and-white photos taken between roughly 1870 and the 1940s.

    The images are of ordinary and extraordinary people and their pooches at home, in the wild, on the farm, atop a Yosemite waterfall, and occasionally even in a formal photo studio.

    There’s a 1891 shot of a boy dressed in a suit of short pants, jacket and tie with his arm draped over the neck of his “best buddy Spaniel,” who seems to be mugging for the camera. In another, media tycoon William Randolph Hearst sits with his dachshund Helen by an elegant fountain at his castle in San Simeon, Calif. A snapshot shows a boy standing in front of a fence, with a dog almost as big as himself. A few images show 1906 San Francisco earthquake victims in their makeshift tent cities, family dogs in tow.

    Accompanying the images are literary tributes and warm, often humorous and insightful observations and quirky quotes – also found in The Bancroft collections — about the human-canine relationship by letter writers, journal keepers and famed scribes such as California poet Robinson Jeffers (owner of Haig the House Dog), Gertrude Stein (pal of Basket) and Jack London (companion of Rollo and creator of the legendary Image from Amazon
    The Call of the Wild by Jack London     sled dog Buck).

    A sampling of quotes and proverbs includes:

    “My goal in life is to be as good of a person as my dog already thinks I am.” Anonymous.

    “Dog. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship.” Ambrose Bierce.

    “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.” Franz Kafka.

    “No matter how little money and how few possessions you own, having a dog makes you rich.” Louis Sabin.