Behind the Scenes Minis: Tamara and Isaac

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about tomorrow d'lmpica this week. Oh she's a lot. Yeah, I have such mixed feelings about her. Yeah. Boy, her art is spectacularly beautiful.

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Speaker 2: YEP.

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Speaker 1: So there's the part where we read a quote that she had said that was sort of like I was the first woman ever to do this, and I was like, hmm, really because the name did not ring a bell. And then I googled and I was like, Okay, this is incredibly distinctive visual artwork. You're not the first woman ever to be an artist, But I kind of see what you're saying about, right, what's distinct about it? Yeah, it is. It's so distinctive, and it is really exceptionally beautiful, especially if you really like that like slightly surreal art deco look. Right. But yeah, like I said, if I had one tenth of her confidence, m I'd be scared of myself. I think.

00:01:31
Speaker 2: She.

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Speaker 1: I didn't include it in the episode, but she does bump up against other people we have talked about on the show, including she was apparently a pretty regular attendee at Natalie Clifford Barney's get togethers Okay, makes absolute sense. I could see the two of them rolling together, no problem, Like, Okay, those are two women that are friends. I just wrote a whole fiction in my head. Yeah. Yeah, I am ceaselessly fascinated, heartbroken, curious about her relationship with Today's and how they continued to kind of keep going together even though they both clearly didn't like their marriage. And you know, it really is one of those things of like two people who are very broken but in ways that do not work. You know, a lot of times people will say, if you go through as a couple some particularly harrowing experience, it either brings you very close together and galvanizes you, or it tears you apart. And it's like theirs tore them apart. But also they weren't apart, so they just kind of tortured each other for the next number of years, which is awful. She was so controlling not only her husband, child, et cetera. I mean, forget the double standard of by the way, I can have affairs as often and as blatantly as I want, but you meet one person and you have betrayed me, right, I have a whole girl. Get over you with that whole thing. But she was controlling with people she had no business being involved in their lives kind of situation. She is one of those people. This is really going to grind your gears. I can just tell you up front. At things like dinner parties, she didn't have to be the host. She would start clearing people's plates before they were done and talking about how like Americans were all too fat. Oh yeah. Apparently she was at I don't know who this quote is attributed to, because the account I read kind of is sparing the person who said it from being revealed because it could be considered very I don't know if rude is the right word, but just you know, not appropriate things to say at dinner. Even though they're responding to someone being very inappropriate, it evolves a threat, which is probably why. But apparently she was at one of these dinners in New York in the late nineteen sixties and started clearing people's plates, and one of the guests, who was also a woman, is my understanding, turned to her and said, baroness, if you touch my plate, I will break your arm. I'm like that, I would like to think that would be me, but I don't know. Yeah, but just like, I mean, you have openly described yourself as food aggressive. I am food aggressive, So I really would break her arm. But I just like, I cannot imagine if that happened to me, If that happened to someone else and I saw it, I think I would lose my mind, like, no, it's not your job or your your place to be taking people food? What like? What are ough? And then I really I will I will say this. So I think I have mentioned before on the show that when I was much younger in my twenties and working at a hair salon, we had a client, a regular that came in every week to get her shampoo, sett who was mean as a snake. She was mean to me, she was mean to her hairstylist, she was mean to everyone. She was just really kurt and brusque and unkind. And I remember thinking like, damn, you are unpleasant. And then one day she was paying and I saw the numbers tattooed on her wrists, and after that I was like, you can be as mean as you want, like you've been through it. All, I don't. I will never judge you again. And I kind of felt that way researching tamoraw like, I understand you went through this big watershed moment where you lost everything, like the life you thought you were building for yourself got ripped out from under you. But Dad, it's like a she's she's getting later on in her life and she's doing things like telling her daughter she should be visiting her instead of caring for her husband, who is a cancer treatment. I'm like, oh, no, you are actually kind of a monster, right, My forgiveness has worn out on you. I can't. I don't have it anymore. Yeah, like Grace has been siphoned, I don't. It's a wild one. Yeah. She did, incidentally, not leave her house in Cornovaca to her daughter. She sold it very cheaply to one of her close friends before she died because she, I guess, just wanted to be spiteful. There is a lot of the accounts of the end of her life. She definitely sounds like someone who recognizes that she is out of step with a changing world, and her reaction is to become very spiteful and angry about all of it. Right, Please don't let that happen to me, Please, please please. I already feel out of step with the world half the time anyway, so hopefully that transition won't be too anyway. I love her art. It is, Yeah, it is very striking. I love it. I mean, that's good art. I am really really kicking myself that I can't make it out to the de Youong in time to see it before they take it down, because it is a really extremely comprehensive look at her whole life as an artist. I did buy their big book that they published their I mean, calling it a catalog feels like a lie because it's really a big, beautiful art book. But I won't get to see it in person and umbummed. But Kristin, I hope this was everything you want it. We talked about Isaac Pittman and his shorthand this week. Yep. He is a delightful and fascinating creature to me.

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Speaker 2: Uh huh.

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Speaker 1: One of the things that I learned about him in one of the biographies that I looked at was that he was one of those people who had learned a lot of things because he read them in books, but he didn't know how to actually say them. Oh sure, and he realized this when he was still pretty young, that he was kind of talking about things that he knew a lot about, but he didn't sound as smart as he was because he was saying them incorrectly, and so he made a very concerted effort to try to correct that, and as a consequence, he apparently had very distinctively enunciated and good speech like Okay, he was kind of the perfect person to develop a phonetic writing system, as he was so focused on how words sounded because he had made such a study of it, which is pretty interesting. One of the things we did not talk about was how a big part of why his method took off was because of his relationship with Bagster. Okay, and I read one quote that pretty nicely sums it up, which is that, as has been more than once pointed out, the success of the method was without doubt greatly promoted by the fact that it was issued by the eminent Bible publisher whose name was a guarantee that it was of a meritorious kind and not of a catchpenny nature. So basically, like the biggest and most respected Bible publisher in Britain at the time putting out this phonetic system. Book made people go, well, it must be good because it must be fine. Bagster did it, and they don't do even though had they known that, like thirteen year olds sewed it together in a schoolroom, he might feel differently. Yeah. I also found a really cute poem that Bagster wrote about Isaac Pittman's work. It's four lines. It's super cute, which is artists and scribes no more delight their arts imperfect. Found Dagair now draws by rays of Lights, and Pittman writes by sound. I love that he was likening him to Dagaer in terms of like how important his invention was. Yeah, which was pretty great.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: His biography by his brother Ben is really interesting because Ben, like a brother, clearly adored Isaac, but also does not always pull punches about talking about him, and he notes at one point he was somewhat deficient in esthetic taste. That's funny, and he was like people always thought my brother had really good taste, but it's because his first wife, Mary was wealthy and had good taste, and so she had bought all of these nice things, and even after she died, he still had like these amazing pieces of furniture in his house and it was all because of that. Okay, it's time to talk about the intrigue, Okay, and this is also thanks to Ben. Ben, And I'm trying to remember I should have written this down. I don't remember if it's one of their sisters or one of the brother's wives. Discovered at one point a cash of letters, and they are very clearly love letters between Isaac and a woman whose name starts with EM but was apparently not his wife, Mary. And though these were apparently being written while he was married to Mary, and that these two members of the family had seen them, knew what was up. You know, not necessarily that there was any sort of like physical relationship or anything, but clearly these were two people that felt very emotionally romantically attached to one another. And so when Isaac married Isabella, they were like, what because we thought after Mary died, you were going to marry this other lady who you clearly loved and loved you back, like, why are you not marrying her? And we don't know, but this was apparently a family intrigue that no one ever asked him outright, like no one ever said to him, Hey, we know you're actually in love with somebody else, and no one ever asked him, hey, why didn't you marry that woman that you clearly were in love with. Yeah, but they waited till after he died and put it in his biography. Yeah, that's very carefully written. I want to say, it's not written in a scandalous way. It's more like a we have always wondered. Clearly, he had very strong and ardent feelings for this person, and it seemed reciprocated, and we just don't know why those two didn't make a go of it. So presumably she was available, right because otherwise, I mean, this was not a family that was going to be living the tomorrow Olimpica, like I will just have I'll just be with people. I'm not married too, So we don't know. But that's the intrigue that I stumbled across very late in the game. And we do know that it was a woman, yes okay, yes, like they knew who she was. Oh okay, okay. Her name is withheld in the biography to not scandalize her. I understand I had interpreted what you were saying, is like we weren't actually sure who the letters No they knew, but we don't. Okay, they kept that a secret. Yes, I see, in the interest of propriety, they invoked no one's name, but they all apparently liked this woman and knew her fascinating and didn't understand why he didn't marry her.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it's interesting.

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Speaker 1: This is definitely a case where one of the few things I did not get a feel for him about was his married life. To either of his wives. He seems like he was a you know, certainly a dedicated husband, but his work kind of came first. He worked really long hours, Like we mentioned during the episode, that he would rather work for free on these correspondence lessons he was giving than let somebody else charge for them. And I still don't know if this is a case where he just thought that kind of information and help should be free, or if he really was like, no, you will mess it up. I am the arbiter of these things, or if there's something else in play. It's a little unclear. Yeah, but he's very fascinating to me. Yeah, it was a very busy beat. I love that note that he wrote to the minister at the end of his life. I just tell everybody was peaceful. I'm fine, I've made peace with it. And all of the accounts that I have read by people that knew him support that, like he wasn't. They were like, well, you knew he was dying, but he was very pragmatic about it, and was just kind of like, Okay, I'm gonna enjoy the time I have left, and when the moment happens, it happens. I'll just do my best while I got it. And he was, you know, certain he was going on to and afterlife, so he really did just see it as a transition. Just such a beautiful way to look at it, and he seemed so calm about the whole thing. I'm like, hmm, yeah, can I borrow that? That sounds great? Yeah, anyway, Isaac Pittman, you know, perhaps we'll do an episode on Greg later and his version of stenography. Maybe. Any did you grow up with anybody in your house using shorthand? No? No, it was something that I knew about from like novels and gotcha, something in my head that I thought would be useful for me to know because when I was a kid, when it was time to learn to write, I could not tell you what hand I used. To like color with or whatever. But when it came time to learn to write, and the teacher was like, put the pencil in the hand where it feels most comfortable. I was like, I don't know what you are talking about. Oh, this is a weird foreign object that feels bad in both hands. Yeah, So I just imitated my classmates and started writing with my right hand. Gotcha. And I've always wondered if that was right, because writing was laborious, and it has always been laborious and it continues to be laborious. And then I had to learn cursive and that was laborious, and it just like writing with a pencil or a pen was so time consuming and difficult that I would hear about this system called shorthand, and you can see it and it really just looks like little sketches and like not things that look as complicated as letters in a lot of cases, like the symbols can be really simplified. And I was like, man, if I knew how to do that, this whole writing thing would be so much easier. It turns out, though, the thing that really was a help was learning to touch type in high school, in which I took a typing class literally in preparation to be writing papers in college. And while I initially learned to do this by looking at my fingers, at some point it clicked of how to do it by touch, and I've always typed monumentally faster than writing. Yeah, I mean that the typewriter is often cited as one of the things that you know, led to the drop off in stenography being used it for a long time. It became kind of associated with things like secretarial work or court reporting times when you need to be keeping and maintaining a written record of things. People say that's as accurate as possible, but it's interesting. I think the most recent one that I read where I saw this in the comments was an article from two thousand and nine, which is now sixteen years ago. Not possible, but this article was talking about a recent book that had been written that talked about how nobody used stenography anymore because you know, we have typewriters and we have electronic media, and there are a million other ways that you could do it. And there was somebody in the comments that was like, my work for a law firm, we still use it, and I was like, WHOA. I wouldn't have thought even that late that that was still going on. And I presume it's still happening in places today. I'll ask a couple of lawyer friends and see what they say about it. Yeah, there are always some old school people in any office, so right, right, well, And it's also some of this is just you know, kind of vibes. But if you are interviewing a person, especially if you're interviewing a person about something that is painful or difficult or sensitive, it can feel like you have a more human connection with them if you are, you know, sitting at a table or something and somebody has a pen and paper instead of being separated by a laptop and a screen. And so I can see there being kind of a value in somebody that's like doing a lot of interviewing or whatever, taking their notes in shorthand rather than typing them. Yeah, I mean, I feel like for me, I'm going to default to a recorder then, like I'll just put my iPhone on the table or something. Sure, but I think that is a good point. But you know, Mina Harker knew how to write in shorthand. I have so many questions now for Bram Stoker. I want to go back and be like, were you just fascinated with short hand? And I mean, if you're going by his novel right eighteen ninety seven, not everyone knew it, and Mina specifically had to seek it out and learn it so that she could be helpful, right right, And even very educated people didn't always know it. So it's interesting. I would love to see statistics, and I did. I searched around and didn't find any. I imagine for the obvious reason of like, this isn't necessarily something that was recorded. Was like, how many people at very points in time have learned and are using shorthand, whether professionally or personally. But so much of it is personal. It's not like people are like there's a sensus of do you no shorthand? But I would love that data if we could ever get it. So m hmm, there's part of me that wants to learn it just for the weirdness of it at this point. Yeah, but also I have stuff to do, going to go so instead. Probably so that is Isaac Pittman, who just fascinated me and kind of charmed me, even though I think probably he would think I was a little too raucous as a human being and drank way too much because I drink it all. But I do like that he, you know, was like, it turns out I can't kill animals, and if I can't kill animals, should be eating animals, So I'm going to be a vegetarian. I really love that. It's very sweet, Isaac Pittman. I hope that if you have any work to do this weekend, that someone has deviced the system that makes it faster and easier for you. If you have time off, I hope that you get to relax in whatever way makes you delighted and gives you some relaxation and helps you connect to the world in a way that's meaningful and helpful to your heart and your mind. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have a brand new one. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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