Word: cottoning
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Although French, Degas had a substantial chunk of family in Louisiana. Ripe for a change of scenery, Degas eagerly agreed to accompany his brother Rene, newly established as a New Orleans cotton merchant, back to the New World in 1872. A transatlantic passage and a snaky voyage through the eastern United States dropped the Degas brothers at the New Orleans train station, where Edgar Degas met his cousins, the Mussons, for the first time, Rene, who had married a Musson daughter, had warned the family to expect a "g-r-r-r-eat artist," but Degas was cousin first...
...Cotton Mather saw evidence of ghosts, witchcraft and "dia-bolical handling" in the morally rarefied air of 17th-century Boston. He reports, "An army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center, and after a sort, the first-born of our English settlements: and the houses of the good people there are filled with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants, tormented by invisible hands, with tortures altogether preternatural." Strangely familiar? Who has not heard "doleful shrieks" through the walls of their room as reading period wanes? Who has not felt opposed...
...Perhaps he never left. Likewise, perhaps none of the ghosts of Harvard have departed. As their stories fade into oblivion, the memories and pictures seem more foggy in the minds of both those who try not to forget them as well as those who refuse to see them. As Cotton Mather, Class of 1678, insisted, there are a thousand "preternatural things" every day before our eyes.FM
...reason for the scarcity of popular American titles, he explains. "True art can surface anywhere...you can see a TV commercial that's a work of art." But he hastens to add, "I find commercial film-making akin to drug peddling." Switching metaphors, he continues, "it's like eating cotton candy--it might be nice once a year...but you're not getting a real meal, you're not getting real sustenance...
Thomas B. Cotton's column appears on alternate Fridays...