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Los Angeles Times
19-03-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Have we forgotten how to say thank you?
For me, the daughter of small business owners, winter and the holidays meant more family time at the dining table, not just to eat but to handwrite thank you notes to our customers. My brother would climb up to the attic to bring down bins full of greeting cards my mother and I had purchased the previous year after Christmas, when the holiday clearance sections at local stores offered boxes and boxes of them for 75% off. My father, a mechanic, would come home from a long, hard day of work at his auto repair shop, change out of his clothes and pick up a pen with his cracked, chapped hands to spend the last few hours of the day writing thanks. Thank you for being our customer. Thank you for trusting us with your car. Thank you for your loyalty. I was as young as 10 or 11 when I joined this tradition. At that age, my penmanship was not very impressive, but that was never the point. The point was to take time to communicate our gratitude in writing. I now teach writing at Harvard, a place where no one seems to have enough time. Students are always running out of it: They need more time to study, research, write and meet deadlines. Teachers are always wishing they had more of it. If only we had more time to return papers, more time to conference with students. In a place where there's never enough time, it's easy to lose small gestures like thanking someone in writing, even in a writing class. So when an opportunity presented itself, I took it. My class had two sessions outside of our usual classroom. The first was at Lamont Library, where we learned how to conduct research. The second was at the Harvard Art Museums, where we went on a tour to help us start thinking about art and objects as primary sources. Of course, we thanked both the librarian and the research curator in person and offered a round of applause at the end of each class. But I found it important to also thank our instructors in writing. The following week, I walked to CVS in Harvard Square to pick up two thank you cards so that students could write in them. I was shocked, first by how few thank you cards there were (I saw just three on a wall full of birthday, baby and wedding cards) and second, by the options available for purchase. One card simply stated: 'Thank You for Being My Person.' According to the Greeting Card Assn., Americans purchase around 6.5 billion cards each year. Unsurprisingly, birthday cards make up more than half of those sales. But thank you cards rank at third place, making the lack of options I encountered all the more confusing. What I thought would be a five-minute errand resulted in me scurrying from one store to another for the next hour, desperately seeking a decent card. Of course, I could have purchased a 'blank inside' card, but the absence of designated thank you cards troubled me. It felt like a sign that we don't know who to thank and what to thank them for. Have we stopped thanking people? Do we do it by email or text now? Has it become too complicated in our technology-driven world to search for and buy a card, write by hand and then give or mail it to someone? Or have we simply stopped being thankful? Perhaps my Harvard Square experience is an anomaly. But even so, it's worth paying attention to: If gratitude is missing in a college town, what lessons could we expect our students to pass on to future generations? My parents taught me early on that there is a difference between saying thank you and writing thanks. The spoken thank you is fleeting — not to say that it's meaningless, but extending thanks in writing makes it more intentional, more thoughtful, a sort of archived gratitude that doesn't expire, a moment you could return to. In the end, it was at Bob Slate Stationer, a small business in Harvard Square, where I finally found a vibrant selection of thank you cards to choose from. The one I selected stated, 'I want to thank you in writing.' With a Sharpie, I turned the 'I' into a 'We,' and asked my students to spend the last few minutes of our class writing thanks. Some wrote brief notes while others wrote thank you in their native languages, including Ukrainian and Choctaw. I'm not your writing teacher, but I have a suggestion for you. The next time someone does you a solid, take a moment to slow down. Go looking for a thank you card and write to them. They might seem small, these businesses, these moments, these gestures, this lesson. But the bigger picture looks less promising without them. Taleen Mardirossian was raised in Torrance and currently lives in Cambridge, where she teaches writing at Harvard University. She is working on a collection of essays about the body and identity.
Boston Globe
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Edvard Munch and the painting lost at sea, at Harvard Art Museums
Advertisement Edvard Munch, 'Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),' 1899, printed circa 1917. Woodcut. © President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums The truth, likely, is a bit more complicated. Munch, Norway's most famous export, was himself an expert self-promoter, leveraging his melancholic biography into a keystone of his renown ('sickness, anxiety and death were the dark angels that guarded my cradle,' he once wrote with great flourish, a reference to losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis as a child). It worked, to be sure. 'The Scream,' his absurdly famous 1893 calling card aside, Munch's tense, melancholic oeuvre made him not just an art-history icon, but during his own lifetime, a genuine star. There's no separating the artist — any artist — from lived experience, though 'Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking,' just opened at Harvard Art Museums, does its best. A showcase for the museums' own remarkable collection — and specifically, Edvard Munch, 'Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),' 1899, printed circa 1917. Woodcut. © President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums That may sound dry, and it might even be, but for the preternatural force of Munch himself; the exhibition's wealth of technical information enhances but can't overtake its visual experience, irrepressibly haunting and dire as it is. But the show is also an intriguing lesson in prototypical branding; Munch's material experiments reveal an artist attuned to the reputational — and commercial — power of images everywhere all at once. He was Modern in many ways, and his devotion to reproducing his work was surely one of them. Advertisement 'The Lonely Ones' is emblematic of Munch's material enthusiasm and marketing savvy. When the original painting was lost in 1901, Munch was well aware of its potential. It's the centerpiece of the exhibition's first gallery, and in so many forms that it's almost on its own. In 1894, not long after the painting was finished, Munch made a copperplate etching of it, which is here; the plate itself sits in a vitrine nearby, ghostlike with the silver sheen of the steel facing Munch fitted to it. The Harvard Museums' exhibition displays the steel-faced copperplate for Edvard Munch's 'Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),' 1894. © Munchmuseet / Halvor Bjørngård An array of woodcut prints made between 1899 and 1917 followed, five of which are here; the same image is repeated with stark and dynamic differences: One with a black beach riven with the dramatic contrast of bright white seaweed and stone set against a deep teal sea; two more with pale waters, one lavender, the other chartreuse. (The woodblock itself is here, too, giving the contact high; rough gouges in its surface anchor the inkiness of the prints in the visceral act of Munch's labor.) Made before and after the accident at sea, the breadth of their timing pokes holes in an otherwise compelling narrative of quixotic obsession to reclaim what was lost. More likely, Munch just liked the piece — and so did audiences. Either way, it was a gift that kept on giving. A 1906-08 painting recreates the scene again, with Munch's heavy strokes almost like an anchor to something definite; another, from 1935, is light enough to almost be an outsize sketch, like a partly remembered vision. In this one, Munch flips the figures, putting the woman on the right — a dissonant gesture that upended expectation and might have fed his by-now well-developed brand as an experimental free spirit. Advertisement Edvard Munch, 'Train Smoke,' 1910. © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums Munch's incessant fiddling beguiles. 'The Lonely Ones' was surely special to him, but 'Technically Speaking' crafts a broader take of an artist given to spontaneous explorations. A central gallery focuses on Munch's technical curiosity, and perhaps too much. One print, 'Vampire II,' Sacrificed in this, maybe, is a discussion of the artist's choice to title an image that to me appears to be of a tender and consoling embrace — a woman cradles a man's head in her arms — as one of emotional trauma. (The painting is of one of the artist's unrequited loves, Dagny Juel, the wife of his friend Stanislaw Przybyszewski; they were among the many members of the Berlin avant-garde Munch palled around with in the 1890s..) Edvard Munch, 'Vampire II,' 1902 or later. Lithograph and woodcut. © President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums 'Technically Speaking' isn't about such things, though; its take-home is a handy pamphlet with a glossary of a few dozen technical terms. Laser-focused as it is on the artist's virtuoso skills, you can think of it as another element in the recent effort to broaden Munch's legacy beyond 'The Scream,' a worthy effort that's opened a window into the artist's wider mastery. It follows ' Advertisement Inevitably, there's plenty of Munch-iness, technical focus or not. 'Vampire,' whatever he chose to call it, is haunting, oblique, and morose, despite its hue; 'The Kiss,' 1897, appearing here as a series of prints on unconventional surfaces like the grainy face of raw board, goes beyond intimacy to consumption, as the lovers' faces merge into one. Edvard Munch, 'Winter in Kragerø,' 1915. © President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums A handful of paintings, presented as examples of the artist's impulsive, exuberant flow of ideas, all but vibrate with bursts of his personality; 'Train Smoke,' 1910, a murky green landscape simmering with nervous vitality, carries blots and squibs of paint in odd places — simple studio accidents, maybe, that Munch embraced. A pair of icy seascapes hang close to one another; they depict the same scene, but are ruptured in entirely different ways. In Winter in Kragerø, 1915, an inchoate mass of pale paint simmers at the center of the frame — likely a mistake roughly painted over, though Munch highlights it with a slash of bright green. In 'Old Fisherman on Snow-Covered Coast' 1910-11, the nominal figure is in the foreground; roughly blotted out is the obvious outline of another figure beside him that Munch barely bothers to conceal. It's like watching him think his way through the composition in real time. His 'Melancholy' series — I, II, and III; examples of each are here — is a case in point, and 'Technically Speaking' has the remarkable woodblocks used to make them, which Munch did backward, forward, and in whimsical departure. In at least one strange permutation, the central figure, a glum-looking fellow in the corner with his head slumped in his hand, is swallowed by a shoreline and obscured with another figure, a woman in a red dress, long hair draped in a thick veil. The lasting impression is of an artist for whom a thought never really needed to be finished, and continuum, not completion, was the most compelling thing about making art. Advertisement EDVARD MUNCH: TECHNICALLY SPEAKING Through July 27. Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. Murray Whyte can be reached at
Boston Globe
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Eight ways to celebrate Women's History Month around Boston
PORTRAIT OF A LADY The Harvard Art Museums are home to various portraits of 19th-century American women, including ' March 6, 12:30 p.m. Free. 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. Get Love Letters: The Newsletter A weekly dispatch with all the best relationship content and commentary – plus exclusive content for fans of Love Letters, Dinner With Cupid, weddings, therapy talk, and more. Enter Email Sign Up Last year's TogetHER panelists. This year's panel will be held at Legacy Place in Dedham. Haley Abram Advertisement LISTEN AND LEARN Legacy Place in Dedham is celebrating International Women's Day with TogetHER 2025, a panel of female industry leaders. Beginning with a pre-panel social event, ticket-holders are encouraged to mingle, snack on appetizers, grab a sweet treat, or sip on a cocktail, before panelists take the stage. Moderated by Kiss 108's Billy & Lisa co-host Lisa Donovan, the event will feature Courtney Cole, a WBZ-TV anchor; Liza Levy, a music industry professional and co-founder/president of the artist development organization product and merchandising officer of the shoe brand HEYDUDE. Those interested can buy tickets at the March 6, 6-8:30 p.m. $25. Showcase Cinema de Lux, 670 Legacy Place, Dedham. "Gardener at Day's End" oil by Andrea Petitto, who will be featured at Addison Art Gallery's "Artful Women in Song & Paint" event. Andrea Petitto ARTFUL WOMEN IN MUSIC AND PAINT The March 8, 5-7 p.m. Free. 43 South Orleans Road, Orleans. Advertisement A GLOBAL NETWORK The United Nations Association of Greater Boston is highlighting female leaders during its 'Empowering Environments' panel, bringing together a group of local women inspiring change. The lineup includes Phyllis Barajas, founder and CEO of Latino leadership network March 11, 5:30-8:30 p.m. $10-$20. Boston Public Library, 700 Boylston St. The Museum of Science will hold a Women's History Month celebration on March 22, highlighting various female STEM leaders with "Meet the Scientist" events. Ashley McCabe TILL YOU DROP Female entrepreneurs have brought vibrant storefronts, personalized products, and carefully curated services to the Boston area. At Boston Women's Market at Night Shift Brewing, more than a dozen vendors will set up shop — find everything from locally formulated skincare from March 15, 12-5 p.m. 87 Santilli Highway, Everett. Advertisement WOMEN IN STEM Women have been contributing groundbreaking ideas and work to the STEM field for centuries. The Museum of Science will celebrate these contributions with local STEM leaders for its Women's History Month programming in collaboration with the March 22, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Museum of Science, 1 Science Park. WOMEN GO FAR Soon after the start of spring, an unsanctioned women-only 10-mile and 5K run will kick off at DICKS'S House of Sports Boston. Participation requires a March 30, 8:30 a.m. $35. 760 Boylston St. Marianna Orozco can be reached at
