Let's write about collecting great stuff

The One-Bedroom Museum

Enjoy this echo essay by Design Editor Wendy Goodman: Meet Thomas Lollar — ceramicist, teacher, and, most of all, collector — can always find space for a new discovery, published in New York Magazine (Intelligencer).

The Living Room: The secretary by the back wall is Charles X, found in Baltimore*. The painting above of the lyre player (possibly Bacchus) is French Empire. The headless sculpture in the foreground is a Jim Dine silver Venus. The etching over the sofa is by Sandro Chia. Photo: Jason Schmidt

(Maine Writer: Neither have I.....) So, I'd never even heard of a strigil (a tool for the cleansing of the body- who knew?)... before my visit to the ceramicist, Thomas Lollar’s apartment. 

But, his living room is a consolidated museum tour — an orderly jumble of all manner of curiosities, including Roman keys; a traveling sundial; silver Italian Futurist objects; a Georgian English Paul Storr tureen; and a pair of silver entrée dishes belonging to the Duke of Cumberland, brother of King George III — holding a 2,000-year-old bronze grooming device that looks like an archaic shoehorn. Lollar explained that strigils were used in ancient Greece and Rome to scrape off dirt, sweat, and the oil that was applied before bathing. “Some scholars think that perhaps physicians would pick up the dead skin cells and use them to repair wounds,” he tells me as I examine the curved blade he’d taken off a nearby wall.

Lollar’s fascination with the past is part of his present-day curriculum teaching studio art at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where he has been on the faculty since 1988. Eight years after taking that position, while also working at Lincoln Center as director of visual arts, he bought this 500-square-foot one-bedroom, attracted by its unusual layout and very high ceilings, in a prewar building nearby.

He’s been filling it up with what interests him ever since — to the point where it’s hard to imagine he’d ever find room for more. And yet he does. He is interested particularly in “utilitarian objects, handled by the people of the time,” he says. “Ancient hand mirrors, silver spoons, cutlery, and utensils such as the patera: a saucepan-like object sometimes worn by soldiers for eating in the theater of battle.”

The impetus for his collecting was a visit to his uncle in Cornwall, England, as a teenager. “I was gardening one day, and I found a silver medallion that had the date of 1706 on it,” he says, “and that made me very interested in medallions commemorating great events in culture and history.” 

Since then, he has amassed close to 400 of them, in bronze and silver.

Lollar brings in pieces from his collection to show his students. “They are making objects, so what will those objects say about the period in which they are creating them? What can we learn about the objects that were made in other eras, and what do they say about the history of that time?” Everything in his apartment tells a story about long-ago everyday lives. “I collect ancient mirrors,” Lollar says, holding up an Etruscan one that would have been highly polished bronze when new. “Reflection in the ancient world had a different meaning than today. It was a rare experience to see one’s image 2,000 years before the introduction of plate glass or cheap mirrors as we know them today. To see one’s reflection in an ancient Roman mirror is haunting when realizing that someone 2,000 years ago was doing the same thing!”

His own sculptures (in collaboration with Ricardo Arango) are inspired by those very old hand mirrors and will be exhibited at the Venice Biennale next year. These days, Lollar makes his work in a studio in Riverdale. But, he lives amid his collection. 

For example, the kitchen off the entry hall is barely noticeable, and the oven has never been turned on; in fact, it’s hard to make out where the oven is. And lest you think he’s slowed down, during our shoot for this report, Lollar held up an 18th-century French lock he said he recently found in a junk shop and gleefully reported that it still worked. 

“I don’t know what I am going to do with this,” he mused, surveying the rooms. Minutes later, it had found its place in the entryway, hanging by a collection of keys that range from Roman to 19th century.

The Bathroom:  Fornasetti plates cover the walls. The fragment of the 1748 Nolli map of Rome on the ceiling was applied by hand by Lollar, who made a copy of it in an architect’s office, had it printed on large sheets, then cut it “in various ways. When I take a bath, I walk through sections of Rome. Before the pandemic, I spent a month a year in Rome.”

The Galley Kitchen: Has never been used for preparing or cooking food.

Maine Writer Post Script: This descriptive essay could easily have been written about my home, although I have managed to fill up 2,800 square feet! Thank you Thomas Lollar and Wendy Goodman.

*Baltimore: My home town....

Let's write about Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

Echo essay published in Book Riot written by Annika Barranti Klein

The Strange Posthumous Journey of Dorothy Parker's Ashes

If you had to guess, where would you say that Dorothy Parker’s ashes were? I bet you’d say the Algonquin Hotel, wouldn’t you? 

I would have guessed as much, even though I’ve been there and the plaque on the front of the building only mentions the Round Table. But the real story of Dorothy Parker’s ashes and their unexpected journey is much more interesting — and less likely to get a visit from the health department.

In the later part of her career she moved to Hollywood with second husband Alan Campbell. They co-wrote the screenplay for the 1937 A Star is Born with Robert Carson, and she worked on a number of other screenplays. She also fought fascism through World War II and the Cold War and was, of course, suspected of being a communist. When she left Hollywood following the accusation and subsequent blacklisting, she returned to New York and wrote book reviews for Esquire. She died of a heart attack on June 7, 1967, at age 73.

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild on August 22, 1893, in Long Branch, New Jersey, where her Manhattan-based parents summered. She spent the first part of her career in New York City, selling her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914. She married Edwin Pond Parker II shortly before he deployed with the Army in World War I. They divorced in 1928.

Parker is probably best known as a founding member — with Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, whom she met while filling in for P.G. Wodehouse as the theater critic for Vanity Fair — of the Algonquin Round Table*, a group of literary giants that at various times included Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Harpo Marx, Noel Coward, Tallulah Bankhead, and Alice Duer Miller, among many others. During this time she had a magazine column and published poetry and short stories.

In the later part of her career, she moved to Hollywood with her second husband Alan Campbell. They co-wrote the screenplay for the 1937, A Star is Born with Robert Carson, and she worked on a number of other screenplays. She also fought fascism through World War II and the Cold War and was, of course, suspected of being a communist. When she left Hollywood following the accusation and subsequent blacklisting, she returned to New York and wrote book reviews for Esquire. She died of a heart attack on June 7, 1967, at age 73. 

That’s where things got…not necessarily weird, but unexpected.

A fervent supporter of civil rights, she left her entire estate to Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had never met. 

He was assassinated about a year later (April 4, 1968, Memphis, TN). Luckily, her will stipulated that in the event of his death, her estate would go to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in support of their work. Great, okay, but what about her…remains?

Her body was cremated in Westchester County, New York, where her ashes sat unclaimed until about six years later, when they were sent to her lawyer; he had retired, and the urn lived in his colleague Paul O’Dwyer’s office for the next 17 years. In 1987 O’Dwyer revealed the location of the urn to biographer Marion Mead. 

Thereby, the NAACP claimed responsibility for the ashes and Dorothy Parker was interred in a special memorial garden built for that purpose at NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1988.

But, in 2020 the NAACP moved their headquarters to downtown Baltimore, with a further move to Washington, D.C., planned. Parker’s living relatives requested that her remains come back to New York, where her father had reserved a spot for her at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. She was exhumed on August 18, 2020, with remarks from NAACP executives; the Kaddish was said by a rabbi in attendance. Her ashes were then brought to Woodlawn where a private burial was held on her birthday, August 22.

In August 2021, a headstone was placed, paid for with money raised by the Dorothy Parker Society through the sale of special T-shirts and gin. Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Dorothy Parker Society, who had personally transported her remains from Baltimore to Woodlawn by train, said a few words in a small ceremony attended by no fewer than two Dorothy Parker “impersonators” (I use quotes because the word seems insufficient for their devotion — both are actresses who have played Parker on stage)

The epitaph, approved by Parker’s three grandnieces, isn’t exactly Parker’s suggestion of “Excuse my dust,” but neither is it too far off. The headstone is engraved with the last four lines of her poem “Epitaph for a Darling Lady”:

Leave for her a red young rose,
Go your way, and save your pity;
She is happy, for she knows
That her dust is very pretty.

So there you have it. Dorothy Parker’s ashes — her dust, if you will — are at Woodlawn in the Bronx. And they took a very circuitous route getting there.

*Algonquin Round Table-  Graphic Dorothy Parker (left):A gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle", as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons, they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country.

P.S. A great deal of the pre-1988, information in this article comes from Marion Mead’s biography of Parker, What Fresh Hell is This?