Burnin’

Darby gave me a stunning coffee table book on Frank Lloyd Wright for Christmas. It’s from German publisher, Taschen , and features trilingual text–English, French, and German–from Brooks Pfieffer along with amazing photographs and reproductions of Wright’s original sketches and architectural drawings.

Chicago Bloggers is a marvelous Web site. The site charts bloggers based on each blogger’s specific location in the public transportation grid of greater Chicagoland. Bloggers list their blog not by content type, but by CTA stop or Metra stop. Thus, one can hear what the neighbors are blogging on about. Or one might make an inquiry into the “blog tones” of a certain neighborhood, and see how they differ from one another.

I’m fascinated by Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a radical artist who dared to be great at all times. But like any genius, he was also but a man, sometimes susceptible to the lower impulses. After attaining much success in his architecture practice, marrying well, and raising six children, Wright grew restless. He looked to a client’s wife and neighbor in Oak Park, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah held a Masters degree from Ann Arbor and was an outspoken suffragist, feminist, and free-love advocate. She also translated foreign texts on these subjects. Mamah was also said to be quite beautiful. For certain, she deeply enchanted Wright, as he dropped everything–family, reputation, and career–to flee to Europe with her.

Upon returning to the states, Wright built Taliesin on his maternal ancestor’s land in south central Wisconsin. In part, as a defense against Chicago and the conventional values held universally therein. Taliesen also was a natural refuge, a place in the sun where Wright and Mamah could live life their way, masters of their rural, but progressive kingdom. All was well until one day in 1914 when Wright was away in Chicago working on Midway Gardens, a household servant went mad and burned the place down, waiting at the one available door with an axe, where he murdered each escaping person, including Mamah and her two children, plus four others.

As Truman Capote knows, this kind of stuff really happens. Here again we see, no inventor of fiction can easily compete with sad reality.