Behind the Scenes Minis: Opera and Joyous Research

Holly talks about an opera based on the life of Eadweard Muybridge. Tracy and Holly talk about how they learned about periods as kids.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Edward Moybridge this week. Yep, Oh,
Edward Moybridge. So I will confess this is not a

(00:24):
name that I recognized. Yeah, but as soon as you
started talking about the photography he did, I immediately could
bring to mind that horse running, the horse running especially. Yeah,
he's a fascinating one. I'm glad I got into this.
This one was one that almost became a two parter,
but since we just did the Sewing two parter, I

(00:45):
was like, Holly, slow your role. They cannot be two parters,
and then unearthed two parter immediately after sewing right, and
I was like, no, but I could have gotten You know,
there's part of me that wants to read every trial
document because yeah, yeah, it was such a wild thing,
and I want to talk about that in a minute.
But one of the things that just came up in
my research that I hadn't thought about, and I was like, oh, duh,

(01:10):
was that his work was contextualized in one of the
books I read that book, River of Shadows by Rebecca
Soulnet in terms of how a number of people were
writing about how to be cultured and how to bring
culture into your home, including like Luisa may Alcott, and
one of the things that they suggested was, you know,

(01:30):
to have landscape imagery in your home, because that suggested
you were refined, and they would. I think there's a
Luisa may Alcott article where she mentions she named checks
both Moibridge's photography and Beerstatt's paintings in the same group,
and I was like, oh, I didn't even think about
the fact that I've been on a landscapee the landscape

(01:51):
ee kick. That was just a magical accident. I'm scrolling
through Google image results of just his name. So many
of these other motion studies I have foreshore seen before
does the time. I mean, they're really really interesting and famous,
and they get used a lot in like as stock

(02:12):
footage where people are talking about motion and film history
and whatnot. We read that kind description of Leland Stanford.
We did not read just this one line. I feel
bad because I didn't notate what article I saw it in.
But someone described Edward Moybridge as looking like a mix

(02:32):
of Walt Whitman and Zeus and it so much and
it's so accurate. I agree. I also mentioned at the
top of the show that I would talk about having
this revelation that oh I know this story and where
I know it from? Tell me, and it is from

(02:52):
one of what is, perhaps, depending on your point of view,
my most pretentious interests, which is the work of Philip Glass. Okay,
give me those half step arpeggios for ten minutes at
a time, all day, every day. I love Philip Glass.
Einstein on the Beach blew my mind when I first
heard it when I was in high school, and I

(03:14):
have been a devotee ever since. Okay, so, of course,
Philip Glass wrote an opera about Edward Moybridge called Wow
that I had forgotten I had seen clips of. It.
Was initially started that project by a man named Rob
Malasch of the Netherlands. I don't know if I'm saying
his name correctly, but he wrote the I don't know

(03:36):
that he wrote the libretto, but he wrote the story
of it, and then Philip Glass made an opera around it.
That is the one staging I have seen footage of
is a very plain, very minimalist staging, and it almost
tickles me knowing how some of these things were playing out. Yeah,
but listen, I will never, never apologize for loving Philip Glass.

(04:00):
So I could not in any way describe myself as
like a Philip Glass devote, just because there's a lot
of stuff to experience in the world and finite time.
But Philip Glass wrote the score to the movie Kundun, Yeah,
which is if you have are not familiar with this movie,

(04:20):
it is a biopic of tenzing Yatso the fourteenth style
I Lama by Martin Scorsese. Yeah, which my understanding is
that that movie was almost kind of buried when it
came out because of all of the social and political

(04:41):
issues involving the United States and China and Tibet and
the diplomatic relationships among all of them. But it I like,
I don't I can't really comment on like the the
the cultural appropriateness of all of these particular people making
this film together. But if you are talking about somebody

(05:04):
needing to write a movie score for a religious figure
in a religious context that involves a lot of chanting
and repetitive, repetitive actions and thoughts and like ritual things
with a lot of ritual significance. It makes a lot

(05:26):
of sense for Philip Glass to be the person writing
the score for it. Oh, it's so great again, Like
it's not for everybody. I've had people in the car
with me who are like, can we flip to anything else? Please?
I beg But for me, it's very it's cool, and
it's zen and I love it and it's painful, and
often the vocal punctuation of it is really sharp and staccato,

(05:49):
which I love. I mean, I'm not an expert on
opera by any means. I feel like a big dumb
dumb whenever I'm actually talking to people who know a
lot about it. But I justtionally connected his work so deeply,
so instantly, and I love all of it and is
so good. Anyway, that's my brief foray into my Philip Glass.

(06:12):
The thing that I find interesting about all of this,
and it's been written about a lot by a lot
of people, is that there are a lot of folks
who basically some I will say, they sum this up,
but they examine Edward Weybridge's life as an example of
a head injury that changed history because he was I mean,

(06:38):
we talked about it in the episode that he was
characterized as having changed significantly in personality after that happened,
and how you know, he became very driven in a
way that was different than his behavior before, when he
was pretty happy to have a lovely little bookshot and

(07:00):
suddenly he was like, I must take all of the risks.
I must go out and do crazy things. I must wander,
I must never settle. And it has been really interesting.
There are a lot of papers. I did not get
into it because I feel like you get into a
whole other part in terms of psychology and medicine and
psychiatry and also the diagnosing of a person who is deceased. Right,

(07:24):
But there are a lot of you know, very well
established and respected experts in you know, things like head
injuries that are like, yes, his behavior shifts are very
much inconcurrent with someone who has had had trauma. Yeah. Yeah.
And it's just a fascinating thing to me because we
don't know if he ever would have gotten those photographs

(07:45):
and invented the zoopraxoscope if he had not had that
incident happen. Right, he may have just been a nice
guy who had a bookshop in San Francisco, and we
never learned his name as like an important historical figure. Well,
and especially because it sounds like from him his description
of his like what he experienced after that injury, Like
it sounds like he was having kind of a double

(08:06):
vision phenomenon for a while. It got better, Yeah, but
it may have changed how he perceived things that he views. Yeah, right,
that may have been part of what gave him the
idea on how to do some of this. Yeah. This

(08:29):
also reminds me a little bit of Phineas Gauge, who
he is often invoked in a lot of the papers
about Edward Moybridge's injury. So if you are not familiar
with Phineas Gauge, I'm saying this from memory. Phineas Gage
was working like a railroad worker and his job involved
setting an explosive and something went wrong and the tamping

(08:53):
iron blew out of the hole and through part of
his face and head. Yeah, we did an episode on this.
It was a Saturday Classic on May twenty third of
twenty twenty, and a lot of it is about, like
number one, the fact that he survived that injury wild
in an era where there were not like modern antibiotics,

(09:18):
and also the fact that his personality seemed to have
some changes afterward. Although it's if I'm remembering correctly from
that episode, some of the writing about it makes it
sound more extreme than it probably actually was. But that
becoming part of you know, the more knowledge about like

(09:40):
how the brain works, and how the brain works after
an injury and that kind of thing. Yeah, it's super fascinating.
Most researchers of who have kind of examined his case
think that he had an injury to the orbitofrontal cortex,
which you know controls things like the regulation of emotion.

(10:02):
And you know, you can get this injury without it
being easily visible because it's right near the bony ridges
that are oh yeah, you know that make up your
eye socket. Like it's right behind those those ridges that
form the eye socket. And so you can actually cut

(10:23):
into your orbitofrontal cortex without knowing it and have these
changes in your behavior even though you are recovering seemingly
outwardly that aren't necessarily as as easily discernible to even
medical professionals. They're like, great, his vision's getting better, Like

(10:43):
he can function on his own, he can travel, he
can make decisions, but really he is a different person
than he was right before all of this, as kind
of evidenced by the fact that he was like, well,
I gotta go kill that guy. But then I'm like,
I don't know, is that brain injury because everybody else
was like, yeah, you had to go kill that guy. Yeah,
I mean it just it seems like that's that's where

(11:06):
it gets kind of wild to me. And like, I know,
in earlier eras, and especially in this context, like earlier
eras in places that were in the western part of
North America, Yeah, there was like more of a culture
of that kind of violence being used to solve problems

(11:28):
and that being seen as just sort of how it worked. Yeah,
And I don't know if that's related to that at all.
That's absolutely speculation on my part. But the fact that
the jury also ultimately came to agree that yes, he
was justified in killing someone who had had an affair
with his wife, Yeah, after being instructed the opposite by

(11:52):
the judge. Yeah, that's the part that really gets me,
is that the judge is like, do not do not
think about that part because that's not part of it.
We know that happened, but still somebody's dead, Like, that's
not Yeah, this is not an eye for an eye
kind of situation, you guys, And they're like, yeah, it is.
It also feels like not exactly the same thing as

(12:14):
jury nullification, because usually when we're talking about jury nullification,
the idea is that the law in question is unjust,
and at least from what you have said, that doesn't
seem like where they were coming from. It wasn't that
oh a lot. Making it illegal to murder people is
not unjust. Yeah. No, they literally are like I would

(12:36):
do the same thing, so I can't condemn him, right
what Okay, Yeah, it would make me very scared to
go to northern California in the eighteen seventies. Yeah, well,
there are also cultures in the world still today where
like honor killings are kind of yes, one hundred percent percent.
I don't know, it's it took me totally by surprise. Yeah,

(13:00):
it's because it's wild. It's interesting because Flora and Harry
are talked about it in a number of different ways,
Like I read a death announcement for Flora that's kind
of like she Kona had a checkered past, you guys,
Like it's it's a little defamatory in a very gentle
sort of way. The way they write about it. They're like, well,

(13:23):
she was married at seventeen, and she was actually living
away from her husband for a while before she divorced him,
and like, there's a definitely some characterization of her as
having taken advantage of Edward in some way and getting
him to help her out of her first marriage and
then marrying her. I mean, listen, he was at the

(13:45):
time already a famous photographer, so he probably would have
had a number of women who would be interested in
him as a potential high earning mate. But I don't know, Listen.
Friends during the trial were like, no, he was really
super in love with her, So I don't which is possible.

(14:06):
He could have been super in love with her and
she could have been taking advantage of him. That is possible.
But also this was at a time when women got
characterized as sneaky weasels with very little provocation. So I
don't know. And Harry Larkin's life story is bananas like bananas, bananas.
When you read about his life before you got to

(14:27):
San Francisco, it's like he had all these wild adventures
and feats and people are like, I don't actually think
most of this is true. A lot of historians are like,
I think he made some of this up, So we
don't We don't really know what actual hijinks he got into.
But it didn't end well for him obviously. And then
there's the midwife, Susan Smith. What a story. Anyway, The

(14:49):
statue of Edward Moybridge at the Presidio is beautiful if
you go see it. That's the guy who murdered somebody
in cold blood and was acquitted, and was acquitted for
and went on to have a very very successful rest
of his life, which is a little mind blowy. But
also I mean, I just I feel like I'm gonna
get hate meal for saying this. But usually when that

(15:11):
happens today, it is a cop that kills someone and
then is acquitted. You're not wrong, yeah, But in this case,
s Edward Moybridge a famous photographer. I don't know, I
don't know. I don't know if his fame factored in
to the jury's decision. We talked about Beatrice Kenner and

(15:40):
Mildred Smith and their various inventions this week, which meant
we talked a lot about menstrul protection. Yeah, and and Holly,
you and I came of age to start menstruating during
the transition from sanitary belts to it he pads. Yes,

(16:01):
that there also were other options happening at the same time.
But the thing that caused us to have to kind
of stop in the minute, in a minute in the
middle of recording to clarify something was like the the
belt to adhesive transition. Yeah, because I think you got
health class discussion at school with a video that still

(16:22):
had belts in it. Well, and we also got a
little sample pack that had one. Oh really, Now, granted
this could reflect on my school system for all I know,
those had been sitting there in a closet for like
ten years, I don't know, but I remember them giving
us a little sample pack and being like, no, not this,

(16:42):
because we did know that there were better options available. Yeah,
and there some of those better options were in that
sample pack. Like it was a wide range Okay, So
I don't know if it was like a it was
kind of like a Hey, here are options available to you,
and this you don't have to buy a box of
everything to find out what you're most comfortable with. Yeah. Yeah,

(17:06):
So I remember like being at the drug store, and
at that time this would have been like in the
early to mid eighties that the like pads would specifically
be labeled as beltless. Yeah. And I think where I
was really introduced to the idea of like a sanitary

(17:28):
belt was reading Judy Blooms Are you there, God, it's
me Margaret when I was a kid, And so that
was first published in nineteen seventy. Yeah, at which point
adhesive pads did exist, but like they were not widespread
yet really in nineteen seventy. I would have read it

(17:48):
around maybe nineteen eighty two or eighty three, probably maybe
a little bit later than that. That book has been
updated today to reference like adhesive paths, But when I
read it, like, there was still this discussion of belts,

(18:09):
and I remember an adult having to explain to me that,
like number one, that was how they worked before number two,
that the adult in question, who probably was my mom,
found the belted ones to be terrible. I have so
many thoughts, Yeah, yeah, like do I disclose what a

(18:30):
terrible child I was, because so when we had our
little aside during a recording where we were like, I
was like, no, the belts still existed and you were like,
did you read about it? And are you there? Got
it to be Margaret. As a kid, I had a
very strong and not kind opinion of that book. Oh

(18:50):
really okay, yes, and I don't listen. This was kid Holly,
who was a tiny shrew, a very judgmental but I
thought that that book was for babies who wouldn't look
stuff up in the encyclopedia. Okay. I was like, I
don't need somebody to tell me a story about this.
It's just as it's just science and I'll learn my

(19:13):
own way. Like I didn't want anybody to tell me
about it. I didn't want any sugarcoated version of any
of it. I didn't. I literally was just like, just
give me a scientific pamphlet. Yeah, yeah, that's funny, Like
I because I had two older sisters also right, and
I remember looking at the insert packaging in their products

(19:38):
that they had in their bathroom and being like, oh,
I understand this. And then I was like, why do
people need a baby book to explain it? Like I
was so catty and horrible about it, So funny, what
an awful, mean child. It's a tiny mean girl. I
feel like we all do things when we were children, right,
But also like those books are great for a lot

(20:00):
of people at like introducing concepts of very adult things
that need to be handled in life right to kids
in a way that is accessible and kind and like.
But I was just not an accessible kind kid. I
was a mean little shrip. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that
when I was old enough for this book to be
relevant to me, there were probably still adults who were

(20:23):
using belted pads because that was what they had always used,
and that was what they you know, they were still
around in stores. That was definitely never something I personally used,
and so it felt a little odd to have this book.
It made the book feel really old fashioned, yeah, even
though it wasn't written that long before I was born.

(20:48):
And as we said, like nowadays, the ones that people
buy currently or read as ebooks or whatever like that's
been updated to reflect how pads work today. On on
another note, this episode was simultaneously a joy and deeply
frustrating to research. Well, there's so much mystery information that's

(21:13):
been related correctly. Yes, so I think it's totally within
the realm of possibility that Beatrice and Mildred both worked
at the General accounting office. Most of what I actually
read that was like interviews with Beatrice. She said something
like I got a government job, and so part of

(21:35):
me is, like, was the government job at the General
Accounting Office? Or did somebody at some point conflate Mildred
and Beatrice, which has definitely happened with other details, And like,
just and I did not try to go hunt down
federal employment records from the forties and fifties, Like that's

(21:57):
beyond what we are normally trying to do on our show.
So like, some of those things are possibly things that
are clarified somewhere, but like, just not in the information
that I had. I listened to an episode of the
Smithsonian side Door podcast that was about about them that

(22:18):
made reference to an article that had been published in
nineteen ninety three, and I went down just the longest
rabbit hole of trying to track down this article. And
I did all kinds of different googling and also looking
in all kinds of different databases and newspaper repositories and

(22:38):
all kinds of stuff, including searching quotes that they read
word for word in this episode. And finally I was like, Okay,
this probably is just something that the website that it
was on is defunct now and I'm not going to
be able to find it. And then I opened a
PhD dissertation that I had already downloaded, and that was

(23:02):
what it was a kind piece of fate. Yeah yeah,
But also like what a what a waste of time
that I spent, like trying to find this thing that
was turned out to be something I already had. So
this PhD dissertation was about black women inventors, specifically, I

(23:23):
think it might be the source of the misspelling of
the sand nampac company sand what I don't remember the
SOD instead of SAND I think might have come there
from there and also might have been from a transcript
of an oral interview, Like that seems like a possible

(23:43):
thing that might have happened. Is that, like the transcript
of an oral interview led to this misspelling that then
got repeated other places. But it also included a very
significant error, which is it said that Beatrice had gotten
married to heavyweight boxing champion Jack Jabbo Johnson. Jack Johnson,

(24:11):
a famous black heavyweight boxer, was dead when Beatrice Kenner
married James Jabo Kenner, a completely different person, And that's
such an error I'm like, Beatrice cannot have said this right,
that cannot be like what she said in this interview.

(24:33):
I'm really curious, like what exactly happened there, Like how
how did that wind up being in the text. But
then that made me second, guest, details right that we're
in here that were like in that same PhD dissertation,
And there was just a lot of stuff that I

(24:54):
would stumble over and go with, Okay, is this was
this actually right? And then I would go try to
track down, you know, other sources to confirm whether that
was right, ideally finding like a primary source that was
either something written on them during their lifetimes or something
they actually said to a different interviewer. And so it

(25:17):
was a whole long process of just continually stumbling over
things where I was like family traditions. I love the
idea of this board game. I feel like if you
repackage that today with all of the people who loved
doing genealogy, huh, it would be a huge hit. Yeah. Yeah.

(25:37):
I also know somebody who developed a board game while
recovering from a serious injury and very similar circumstances, And
so I just had sort of, you know, fond feelings
about people in my life while researching this, And yeah,
that was a whole process, a whole process of alternately
being like, man, what a great thing, and then like

(25:58):
is this correct? Can I confirm it's correct? Is it
even possible to confirm it's correct with the resources that
I have available, availability available to me at this time?
Can I say the word available? On the podcast, Beatrice's
first patent for the sanitary belt also included a term
that I don't know if I've ever encountered before, y

(26:21):
catamenial okay, a term for relating to menstruation that is
apparently not as common anymore. Yeah, I had never heard
it before this moment, and that is how it was
referenced throughout the patent, And that made me wonder, is
this sort of an evolution in the language that is

(26:41):
more commonly used, or was it just because there's so
much stigma around periods that a less potentially obvious term
was chosen for it. I don't know. I don't know
either way. Though. I love both of these sisters and
their stories. They're very charming. Yeah, I love how they

(27:03):
just solve problems with their brains. Yep, yep, Whatt's after
my own heart? Let's try to make it so you're
not having to hunt for the end of the toilet paper.
I don't know why that one tickled me, but it did.
It made me think about how often I'm just like,
it's the middle of the night and I'm spinning the

(27:24):
toilet paper roll around trying to get the end of
it to show up for me, and what I really
want to do is go back to bed. I think
I just slap it and wait for something to fly out. Yeah,
I do a slap spin. Is that not how everybody
does it? I kind of flip it with my hands.
Sometimes the end of the toilet paper sticks to the

(27:46):
rest of the roll and it takes a little bit.
I bet this depends on the brand and texture of
toilet paper that a person has. Anyway, I can't remember
where exactly I stumble onto. I think what I stumbled
onto was Beatrice, and over time the episode evolved would

(28:08):
be about both of them. And I don't remember where
I stumbled across something about Beatrice, but I'm glad I did. Hey,
whatever's coming up on your weekend. If there is a
minor annoyance in your life that you're able to just
find a solution for I hope you do. I hope
it's one of those things where a minimal amount of
money or time or expense can just resolve something. Then

(28:31):
you don't have to deal with it anymore. We will
be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and we will
have something brand new on Monday. Stuff You Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(28:53):
you listen to your favorite shows.