the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt three)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Maybe it’s because I’m a nonbeliever who used to work in radio, but the one Quaker meeting I had been to, at Arch Street Friends in Philadelphia, was like listening to a whole lot of room tone. I sat there for two hours and no one said a thing. Or rather I thought it had been two hours when in fact I lasted precisely fourteen minutes. Not because it was boring, but because it was the opposite of boring—tense, in fact. At one point I crossed my legs and the sound of denim on denim was so loud, my knees seemed to be plugged into some imaginary amp. Which did make me appreciate how growing up in this hushed Quaker atmosphere could make a person denounce war for purely acoustic reasons. If the noise of one antsy visitor squirming in her seat was that jarring, how evil must actual gunfire sound? In the meeting, I found myself wishing for something interesting to listen to that might also drown out the ambient sneezes, as well as something we could all look at to avoid the awkward eye contact. I left when I realized that sort of communal spiritual experience does exist. It’s called the movies.

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt two)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Just as he was dead-on about the eventual stability of America’s postwar government and the dangers of colonial powers ignoring colonists’ understandable desire for independence, Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: “War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform which is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the State and for the relief of the people.”

In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt one)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject—that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States—kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people have never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian schoolchildren heeded FDR’s call to scrounge up rubbed for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot—not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people’s privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington’s army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen’s pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other’s nerves is our right.

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt ten)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

The train curved toward them from a distance, almost the same shade of gray as the darkened air it moved through, and a number of cars flashed past before it shrieked to a stop. There didn’t appear to be a quiet car, as far as Denny could tell. He boarded through the nearest door and chose the first empty seat, next to a teenage boy in a leather jacket, because he knew he had no hope of sitting by himself. First he heaved his luggage into the overhead rack, and only then did he ask, “This seat taken?” The boy shrugged and looked away from him, out the window. Denny dropped into his seat and slipped his ticket from his inside breast pocket.

Always that “Ahh” feeling when you settle into place, finally. Always followed, in a matter of minutes, by “How soon can I get out of here?” But for now, he felt completely, gratefully at rest.

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt nine)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Years ago, when the children were small, Abby had started a tradition of hanging a row of ghosts down the length of the front porch every October. There were six of them. Their heads were made of white rubber balls tied up in gauzy white cheesecloth, which trailed nearly to the floor and wafted in the slightest breeze. The whole front of the house took on a misty, floating look. On Halloween the trick-or-treaters would have to bat their way through diaphanous veils, the older ones laughing but the younger ones on the edge of panic, particularly if the night was windy and the cheesecloth was lifting and writhing and wrapping itself around them.

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt eight)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Sawyer Road took so long to show up, he started worrying he had passed it. He could have sworn it was closer. He crossed to the other side of the pavement so he’d be sure not to miss it, although the other side was low-growth fields and he would be easier to spot there. He heard a fluttering overhead and then the hoot of an owl, which for some reason struck him as comforting.

Much, much later than he had expected, he came across the narrow pale band of Sawyer Road and he turned onto it. The gravel was vicious, but he had stopped bothering to mince as he walked. He trudged heavily, obstinately, taking a peculiar pleasure in the thought that the soles of his feet must be cut to ribbons.

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt seven)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

“Well, I tell Redcliffe, I say, ‘Whatever you do in life, do your best. I don’t care if it’s hauling trash, you do it the best it’s ever been done,’ I say. ‘Take pride in it.’ Getting fired? It’s a black mark on your record forever. It’ll hang around to haunt you.”

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt six)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Mr. Whitshank was holding forth on Billie Holiday. She had died a couple of days before and Mr. Whitshank couldn’t see why people were so cut up about it. “Always sounded to me like she couldn’t hold on to a note,” he said. “Her voice would go slippy-slidey and sometimes she’d mislay the tune.” He had a way of rotating his face slowly from one side of the table to the other as he spoke, so as to include all his listeners. Abby felt like some sort of disciple hanging on her master’s every word, which she suspected was his purpose. Then she altered her vision—she was good at that—and imagined she was sitting at a table of threshers or corn pickers or such, one of those old-time harvest gatherings, and this cheered her up. When she had a home of her own, she wanted it to be just as expansive and welcoming as the Whitshanks’, with strays dropping by for meals and young people talking on the porch. Her parents’ house felt so close; the Whitshanks’ house felt open. No thanks to Mr. Whitshank. But wasn’t that always the way? It was the woman who set the tone.

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt five)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

“I guess Merrick must be feeling kind of tense these days,” Abby said after a moment.

“Oh, no, that’s just how she is,” Mrs. Whitshank said cheerfully. She had finished slicing the okra. She stirred the slices around in the milk, using a slotted spoon. “She was a snippy little girl and now she’s a snippy big girl,” she said. “Nothing much I can do about it.” She began transferring the okra slices to the cornmeal mixture. “Sometimes,” she said, “it seems to me there’s just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over. Merrick’s always put me in mind of my granny Inman. Disapproving kind of woman; tongue like a rasp. She never did think much of me. You, now, you’re a sympathizer, same as my aunt Louise.”

“Oh,” Abby said. “Yes, I see what you’re saying. It’s kind of like reincarnation.”

Mrs. Whitshank said, “Well …”

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt four)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Red told his sons that he’d heard somewhere that after a man’s wife dies, he should switch to her side of the bed. Then he’d be less likely to reach out for her in the night by mistake. “I’ve been experimenting with that,” he told them.

“How’s it working?” Denny asked.

“Not so very well, so far. Seems like even when I’m asleep, I keep remembering she’s not there.”

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt three)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

This porch was not just long but deep—the depth of a smallish living room. In her early years here, when she was a gung-ho young housewife, she had ordered an entire suite of wicker furniture varnished the same honey-gold as the swing—a low table, a settee, and two armchairs—and arranged them in a circular “conversational group” at one end of the porch. But nobody wanted to sit facing away from the street, and so gradually the chairs had migrated to either side of the settee and people once again sat in a straight line gazing outward, not at each other, like passengers on a steamship deck. Abby thought that summed up her role in this family. She had her notions, her ideas of how things ought to be, but everyone proceeded as he or she liked, regardless.

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt two)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt one)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

She jumped up from the bed and started pacing back and forth, up and down the Persian runner that was worn nearly white in the middle from all the times she had paced it before. This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt fourteen)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

After Eleanor Ward refused to show his aluminum sculptures in 1959, Noguchi remained determined to exhibit this body of work. New York’s prestigious Knoedler Gallery offered to show them in spring 1961. To get his sculptures ready, Noguchi decided to take them to Troy, Ohio, to have them anodized. When Priscilla heard about his plan she said, “IF you are driving West, I’m going with you.” Noguchi tried to dissuade her but Priscilla could think of nothing better than to accompany the man she loved on a road trip, and eventually persuaded him. Noguchi wrapped his aluminum sculptures carefully and packed them into a rented truck. Priscilla remembers he wore a beret and drove too fast on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was not a good driver. A trooper stopped them, but he turned out to be a Nisei, so after a bit of conversation he let Noguchi off with a warning. The next fracas happened when they arrived at the motel where they would spend the night and Noguchi, forgetting that he was driving a truck, drove right into the building’s overhang. Priscilla played peacemaker with the angry motel owner.

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt thirteen)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

The creation of a studio/dwelling at 33-38 Tenth Street in Long Island City, Queens, became for Noguchi a central preoccupation in the early 1960s. To turn the factory into a studio with living quarters he had the help of Yukio Madokoro, a skilled carpenter from Japan, and of a young sculptor named Nobu Shiraishi. “The three of us started in the dead of winter to build within the anonymous space my own environment, free of whatever there was outside.” With cement block walls they divided the eighty-by-forty-foot area into three sections: a place to work, a place for storage, and a place to live. Downstairs there was a living room and kitchen with Noguchi-designed tables and a simple foam rubber sofa with bolsters. In the bathroom he installed a traditional Japanese wooden tub. A flight of stairs led to a bedroom that Noguchi arranged in Japanese style with shoji screens (fitted with fiberglass instead of paper) and a low bed. At the foot of the stairs was a tsukubai, or stone basin, for washing ands, and, level with the floor, a flat stone carved to look like the sole of a foot. This was the designated spot where guests took off their shoes and put on Japanese sandals before mounting the stairs. Noguchi’s new space was, he said, “A workshop with living quarter . . . not exactly a home.”

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt twelve)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Although Noguchi and Yamaguchi were very much in love, there were problems. The way they lived was Noguchi’s choice: “I was placed in a different world that I did not know at all,” wrote Yamaguchi, “and I tried to absorb everything about it.” Both were fiercely intense and stubborn. And there were cultural disparities. From her point of view, Noguchi was very much an American. “When we lived together there was a distinct difference between East and West, a big culture gap . . . little differences on the surface made a crack in our feelings and that crack grew.” Noguchi did not speak much Japanese and Yamaguchi spoke little English. “It was,” she said, “difficult to give nuances of meaning. Noguchi was very strict with himself, with his friends, and of course with his wife.” Noguchi insisted that they wear kimonos and he forbade Yamaguchi to cut her hair. “When we lived together in Rosanjin’s farmhouse even the shoes that we wore had to be in accord with the tone of the house. The shoes were Zori, sandals made of wood and straw. They were very rough and they didn’t fit my feet. My skin peeled off and I bled when I wore them but he did not allow me to wear any other shoes.” Once when Yamaguchi came home from working in Tokyo wearing a pair of pink plastic sandals, Noguchi flew into a rage. “What is this?” he cried, and, Yamaguchi recalled, “without listening to my explanation, he threw my sandals away in the rice field. Art and life—he did not tolerate anything that did not match with his aesthetic . . . It was hard for me to become a work of Isamu.” Noguchi was always telling the Japanese not to imitate Western culture. And here was his wife wearing plastic sandals—the epitome of tacky American commercialism. According to Yamaguchi’s brother-in-law, Hiroi, the episode of the plastic sandals was the crack that eventually split Noguchi and Yamaguchi apart.

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt eleven)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Adding to Noguchi’s unhappiness was the suicide of Arshile Gorky in July 1948. Gorky had achieved a measure of critical success after being taken on by the Julien Levy Gallery in 1945, putting behind him the two disasters that befell him in 1946: cancer and the studio fire. Feeling that time might be short, Gorky worked harder than ever in the summer of 1947. He was like a phoenix, friends said. But he exhausted himself, painting day and night, and by the fall he too was at an artistic impasse. His depression was black. His marriage faltered. In June 1948 Gorky discovered that Agnes had had an affair with his close friend Matta. He was convinced that she would leave him. When his neck was broken in a car accident and his right arm was temporarily paralyzed, he feared he would not be able to paint again. In mid-July, frightened that Gorky might harm her or her children, Agnes took their two daughters and went to Virginia to stay with her parents.

The day after Agnes left, Noguchi was awakened by Gorky’s voice calling from his MacDougal Alley studio’s garden gate: “Isamu! Isamu! Isamu!” Half awake, Noguchi thought he was dreaming, but “the calling came again like a song.” Noguchi went to open the gate and found Gorky in tears. He was holding a papier-mâché bird that he had intended to give to a friend, but he’d gone to the friend’s house and, according to Gorky, the friend would not open the door. “Nobody loves me,” he told Noguchi. “He felt that people who had pretended to be his friends were not his friends. He felt that he had been completely abandoned, betrayed by his friends, his wife, this one and the other, that people were laughing at him and they had no further use for him because he had this operation.” Perhaps Noguchi projected his own feeling of having been taken up by society but never really belonging to it. “I thought he had come to me as a fellow immigrant out of his past.”

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt ten)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Appalachian Spring, the last of Graham’s dances based on American themes, is about a young pioneering couple taking possession of a newly built house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. “New land, new house, new life; a testament to the American settler, a folk theater,” was Noguchi’s summary. His set consisted of a spare structure of wooden poles that stood for the framework of a rudimentary house, a canvas panel painted to look like a clapboard wall, a tree stump, a log fence, and a semiabstract rocking chair placed on a raised area that stood for a porch. “I attempted through the elimination of all non-essentials to arrive at an essence of the stark pioneer spirit, that essence which flows out to permeate the stage. It is empty but full at the same time. It is like Shaker furniture.” Graham recalled that to show Noguchi what she wanted for Appalachian Spring she took him to the Museum of Modern Art to see Giacometti’s 1932 Palace at Four a.m. “He was not very happy about going, but we went. And he understood immediately the quality of space I was looking for.”

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt nine)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

The military finally authorized Noguchi’s release from Poston on November 2, 1942. A week later Noguchi wrote to Ailes: “It’s taken me three months to get this permit to go out, so now I have a furlough and you will be seeing me for a while at least . . . We will have a lot to talk about and I will tell you what I have gone through . . . it’s so indescribable, the life here, so removed from the reality of New York . . . I feel like Rip Van Winkle.”

The camp director issued Noguchi a thirty-day furlough on November 12. Noguchi never went back. That night he got in his station wagon and drove to Salt Lake City, where he stopped to see John Lafarge and Larry Tajiri, managing editor of Pacific Citizen, the official publication of the Japanese American Citizens League. He then moved on to Chicago and to Wisconsin to visit Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home near Spring Green. He had invited Wright to visit Poston and Wright had written a letter recommending Noguchi’s release. “I went there to thank him. And his place was swarming with conscientious objectors. He read me excerpts from the books that he was writing. One of them was his esteem for this German philosopher called Heidegger, who was accused of bring friendly to the Nazis. But he didn’t care. Frank Lloyd Wright was a man who did not give a shit, because he felt that he was an American.”

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt eight)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

The art world in Mexico was vibrant. Friendships were passionate, as were enmities. The latter were often political, given the conflicts between the various leftist ideologies, and muralists wielded not only brushes, but pistols. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were at the center of this bohemian world. Their home in the San Angel district of Mexico City was alive with visitors—old friends and new ones from all parts of the world. Rivera was a well-known philanderer and female travelers were often the objects of his attentions. Kahlo entertained this mixture of artists, writers, composers, and globe-trotters with festive meals at a long table decorated with flowers and Mexican folk crockery. Sometimes her pet spider monkey added to the commotion by stealing fruit or her parrot, Bonito, waddled about the tabletop and pecked at the butter. In her habitual Tehuana costumes and with flowers and ribbons decking her hair, Kahlo was a colorful presence. With a few copitas (cocktails) her wit could become outrageous and she deployed swear words as freely as a mariachi.

One day, while riding in a taxi with Noguchi, Rosa Covarrubias, wife of Vanity Fair illustrator Miguel Covarrubias, spotted Kahlo on the street and they stopped to say hello. “Rose introduced us. And somehow or other, we went dancing.” Noguchi was enchanted. Kahlo, at twenty-eight, was at the height of her beauty, and the two soon struck up a love affair. With her voluptuous lips and her dark, penetrating eyes beneath joined eyebrows, she was far more alluring to Noguchi than women of more conventional prettiness. She was passionate, affectionate, and both strong and vulnerable. She had a mordant sense of humor and loved to laugh. In spite of being a partial invalid as a result of a near-fatal bus accident in her youth, she was determined to fight pain with joy. Noguchi recalled that Kahlo loved to sing and dance. “That was her passion, you know, everything that she couldn’t do she loved to do. It made her absolutely furious to be unable to do things.” Beyond the charm of her personality and beauty, Noguchi admired Kahlo’s work and recalled that she gave him a painting, but, years later, he could not remember where it was.

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt seven)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Although Noguchi enjoyed the high life as he courted rich patrons, he also witnessed the misery and humiliation of breadlines and tent communities in Central Park. Like many other artists and writers in the 1930s, he became politicized: “These contrasts of poverty and relative luxury made me more and more conscious of social injustice, and I soon had friends on the Left. But Left or Right, it was a communion with people that I was interested in.” He wanted to find a way to make abstract sculpture, “but I wanted other means of communication—to find a way of sculpture that was humanly meaningful without being realistic, at once abstract and socially relevant . . . My thoughts were born in despair, seeking stars in the night.”

Noguchi was determined to make sculpture part of lived experience, a shaping of a space: “In my efforts to go beyond what I then considered the entrapment of style in modern art and its isolation, I conceived of a Monument to the Plow,” This huge earthwork was to be “a triangular pyramid 12,000 feet at base—slopes 8 degrees to 10 degrees to horizontal—made of earth on one side, tilled in furrows radiating from base corner—one side planted to wheat and a third side half tilled soil with furrows radiating from apex and half-barren, uncultivated soil.” The plow at the top of the pyramid would be a “symbol of agriculture.” Noguchi hoped that Edward Rumely, who had contacts with John Deere, might be able to persuade the company to build his monument. He proposed that it be built “in the middle of the West Prairie,” or somewhere in Oklahoma. “But I was a little ahead of the time.”

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt six)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

One of the beautiful women whom Noguchi encouraged to sit for him in 1932 was the socialist and aspiring actress Dorothy Hale, with whom he had a love affair early the following year. In a 1965 letter to Noguchi his friend Kay Halle recalled what might have been an act of courtship: after dining with Halle and Hale, Noguchi sculpted a “wonderful phallus” as a gift for Hale. The two went on a Caribbean cruise, and she accompanied him to London and Paris in June 1933. “She was a very beautiful girl,” Noguchi recalled. “All of my girls are beautiful.” Though the romance seems to have petered out, they remained friends until her suicide in 1938. “Bucky and I were there the night before she did it. I remember very well, she said, ‘Well, that’s the end of the vodka. There isn’t any more.’ Just like that, you know. I wouldn’t have thought of it much, except afterward I realized that that’s what she was talking about. Dorothy was very pretty, and she traveled in this false world. She didn’t want to be second to anybody, and she must have thought she was slipping.” That night Noguchi gave her a corsage of yellow roses. Unhappy in love and disappointed in her acting career, she jumped from a high window of Hampshire House on Central Park South, an event recorded in one of Frida Kahlo’s most dramatic portraits. Pinned to the black evening gown she had worn that final evening was Noguchi’s rose corsage.

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt five)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

For Isamu, life as a medical student was miserable. He was “totally isolated, no friends . . . Attending class, that’s all . . . And hating it.” The only professor he remembered well was Raymond Weaver, who taught a course on Dante. “He gave me a passing grade no matter what I did. He thought I deserved it.” When Isamu asked Hideo for advice, the doctor said it would be better, and more honest, for him to become an artist like his father. “He himself was an amateur painter—painted fish on his vacations—and he was very enthusiastic about my becoming a sculptor and really tried to promote it. In fact, he tried to get me to do a head of him; he offered me three hundred dollars. But I thought there wasn’t enough dignity in his head.”

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt four)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Rumely warned Isamu that he would not be able to make a living as an artist. “He said, you’d better be a doctor, like he was . . . And so even before, while [I was still] going to high school he got a job for me at one point working in a laboratory.” Isamu had done brilliantly in chemistry, biology, physics, and math—an aptitude for science that would stand him in good stead years later when he designed technologically complex public monuments. But Rumely was broadminded enough to let Isamu try his hand at art, so that first summer after Isamu’s graduation, Rumely organized an apprenticeship for him with his friend the academic sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had not yet carved the heads of presidents on Mount Rushmore.

When Isamu arrived at Borglum’s estate in Stamford, Connecticut, in the summer of 1922, Borglum was working on the first of his gigantic sculptural projects, a memorial to the heroes of the Confederate Army to be carved on the face of Stone Mountain in Georgia. It was to be a high-relief frieze of a group of equestrian figures, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, followed by a column of soldiers. That summer Borglum was busy with the sculpture’s clay and plaster models. (Borglum had only finished Lee’s head when, thanks to his irascible, authoritarian personality, he fought with the project’s commissioner and, in a rage, smashed his models and abandoned the project.)

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt three)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

As the weeks went by the scrawny toddler that Yone had welcomed in Yokohama turned into a plump, healthy boy. He came to love Japanese food. After eating breakfast with his parents he would go into the kitchen and share a second breakfast of rice with the servants. He also liked wheat gluten candy made in the shapes of animals. Every morning the candy salesman would walk along the street beating a drum to advertise his wares. “Donko, don, donko, don, don,” Isamu would cry in imitation of the drumbeat. He would then insist that one of the servant girls carry him on her back with his bottom perched on her obi (a wide sash worn with a kimono), as is customary for Japanese children.

Isamu quickly picked up Japanese words and customs: when a guest departed he would call “Sayonara,” and when an uncle gave him an American and a Japanese flag he shouted “Banzai!” Soon he ventured out beyond the garden to play blindman’s buff with the neighborhood children who at first had looked at him as an oddity. When children passed the house they would should “Baby san,” thinking that was Isamu’s name.

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt two)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Leonie’s decision to go to Japan may have been prompted by California’s change in attitude toward Japanese immigrants. Americans had been pro-Japanese during the Russo-Japanese war, but Japan’s postwar expansionism in China met with American disapproval, especially in California. Already in 1905 a law prohibiting marriage between Caucasians and “negroes” or “mulattoes” had been amended to include “Mongolians.” The influx of Japanese laborers incited angry protests in some San Francisco labor unions, and the press was full of alarmist talk of the “Yellow Peril.” In 1906 the San Francisco school board ordered the children of Japanese immigrants to attend segregated schools. California farmers established the Asiatic Exclusion League and orange growers around Pasadena set up signs saying that no Japanese or Chinese would be hired. For a mother with fierce pride in her son, who wanted to protect him from the sting of racial prejudice, these changes were surely disheartening.

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt one)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

After this marriage declaration, Leonie appears to have moved in with him at his apartment at 121 West Sixty-fourth Street. Their cohabitation probably lasted about half a year. (There are no letters from him to her during this period.) In February she became pregnant, but neither this nor his “marriage” to Leonie prompted Yone to end his relationship with Ethel. Indeed in June 1904, when Leonie was four months pregnant, he wrote to Stoddard that he was still planning to marry Ethel. On August 3, 1904, Yone left New York, traveling by train first to Birmingham, Alabama, where he stayed with Ethel’s family for four days, and from there to San Francisco, where he boarded the Manchuria bound for Japan. He appears to have had little regret at leaving the six-months-pregnant Leonie behind.