Today is Thanksgiving Day. Although the Thanksgiving festivities celebrated by the Pilgrims and a tribe of Wampanoag Indians happened in 1621, it wasn’t until 1789 that the newly sworn-in President George Washington declared, in his first presidential proclamation, a day of national “thanksgiving and prayer” for that November.
The holiday fell out of custom, though, and by the mid 1800s only a handful of states officially celebrated Thanksgiving, on a date of their choice. It was the editor of a women’s magazine, Sarah Josepha Hale, a widow and the author of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” who campaigned for a return of the holiday. For 36 years, she wrote articles about the Plymouth colonists in her magazine, trying to revive interest in the subject, and editorials suggesting a national holiday. Hale wrote to four presidents about her idea — Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan — before her fifth letter got notice. In 1863, exactly 74 years after Washington had made his proclamation, President Lincoln issued his own, asking that citizens “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” He requested prayers especially for those widowed and orphaned by the ongoing Civil War, as well as gratitude for “fruitful fields,” enlarging borders of settlements, abundant mines, and a burgeoning population.
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who suggested, “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
In the book On Gratitude, published in 2010, a number of writers take up Emerson’s charge, listing some of the specific things that helped them in their writing career — things for which they are grateful. In the book, Kurt Vonnegut said: “I’ve said it before: I write in the voice of a child. That makes me readable in high school. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don’t use semicolons. It’s hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony. I don’t like people saying one thing and meaning the other. Simplicity and sincerity, two things I am grateful for.”
John Updike said: “I’m not a movie star or a rock star. I maybe get two or three letters a week out of the blue, for some reason, and as I’m an old guy now, most of the letters are kindly. They do keep you going. This is an unsponsored job. I don’t get paid without readers. So I appreciate that enduring fan base. It does keep me going. And for someone to take the time to say they like me. That’s a blessing.”
Joyce Carol Oates said: “I was only about eight years old when I first read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and when we’re very, very young almost anything that comes into our lives that’s special or unique or profound can have the effect of changing us … I virtually memorized most of Alice … That blend of the surreal and the nightmare of the quotidian have always stayed with me. My sense of reality has been conditioned by that book, certainly, and I am grateful for it.”
Jonathan Safran Foer said: “I’m grateful for anything that reminds me of what’s possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It’s so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.”
Black Friday or Cyber Friday. Buy Local. Buy Small Business. Give Services and Consumable Products. Give Thoughtfully. Remember Others. Donate Food, Time, Money, anything you can spare.
There’s nothing worse than smiling politely and tucking that unwanted gift away in a cold, dark corner of your closet until your descendants dig it out decades later.
Our 2011 holiday gift guide is dedicated to making those gift misses so 2010: Every one of these gifts — over 100 in 10 categories — is carefully curated for thoughtfulness, usefulness, durability, and longevity.
Whether you’re looking to give the unexpected beauty (a heart necklace repurposing Barbie’s breasts, sleek bracelets made out of Vietnam war scrap metal), the space-saving (a clever convertible chair that is also a stool and a table), the adorable (sushi cat toys, a lemur adoption), or the lush, leafy green (an indoor planter that is a nod to the living wall), all of these gifts come with another more subtle one: A healthy respect for the earth.
In fact, some of these gifts take up no space at all: We’ve singled out a few hard-working charities, as well as product service systems (think bike share passes and DVD rentals) that will leave that closet entirely alone. – Produced by Mairi Beautyman
@GovGregoire How do you expect kids to take school seriously when the state sees education as expendable?
Add/change your local/state law maker.
Cutting teacher salaries and benefits, increasing class sizes, shortening the school year, eliminating busing, and cutting the funding for some preschool and kindergarten students? What are kids supposed to think about the importance of education?
So, WHY are the Governor and legislators considering the following in order to balance the state budget?
1) Reduce the school year by 5 days.
2) Increase class sizes by average of two students per class in grades 4 through 12
3) Cut teacher salaries.
4) Reduce teacher health care benefits.
5) Slash funding for 1,000 preschool students.
6) Reduce assistance to property-poor school districts by $150 million.
7) Suspend salary step increases for teachers.
8) End sick leave cash-out for employees not retiring.
9) Eliminate funding for student bus transportation.
10) Eliminate the National Board bonus.
11) Cut funding for all-day kindergarten in high-poverty schools.
HERE ARE THE FACTS
1) Washington is 49th in the nation in class size.
2) We rank 47th in the nation in per-pupil spending.
3) We’re dead LAST in average teacher compensation among West Coast states.
4) Nearly 3,700 educators’ jobs have already been slashed by the legislature.
5) Enrollment in our state has surged by almost 7,000 students.
6) The legislature suspended all funding for I-728, which provided class size reduction money to districts.
7) Gone also is I-732, which guaranteed an annual cost-of-living adjustment for school employees.
8) Salaries for teachers were cut an equivalent of 6.4 days over the past several years.
9) Health benefits have been frozen for teachers, despite increases in medical premiums.
10) The legislature “hijacked” federal funding for education jobs, keeping the money intended to go directly to local school districts.
11) The legislature cut almost $2.5 billion from public schools during the last three legislative sessions.
As a part of a Day of Action across the state, November 28th teachers, district workers and pro-public education supporters will be wearing red to signify our collective belief that our legislators should NOT CUT public education and instead find other solutions to our tax revenue shortfall.
If we can get enough signatures quickly, on November 28th as part of the Day of Action, this petition will be delivered to our legislators as they start the special session to deal with the projected $2 billion shortfall.
Today is the birthday of American heiress, horticulturalist, art collector, and philanthropist Doris Duke. She was the only child of tobacco and electric energy tycoon James Buchanan Duke and his second wife, Nanaline Holt Inman, widow of Dr. William Patterson Inman. At his death in 1925, the elder Duke’s will bequeathed the majority of his estate to his wife and daughter,[3] along with $17,000,000, in two separate clauses of the will, to The Duke Endowment he had created in 1924.
Duke acquired a number of homes. Her principal residence and official domicile was Duke Farms, her father’s 2,700 acre estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. Here she created Duke Gardens, 60,000-square-foot public indoor botanical display that were among the largest in America.
Duke’s other residences were private during her lifetime: she spent summer weekends working on her Newport Restoration Foundation projects while staying at Rough Point, the 49-room English manor-style mansion that she inherited in Newport, Rhode Island. Winters were spent at an estate she built in the 1930s and named “Shangri La” in Honolulu, Hawaii; and at “Falcon’s Lair” in Beverly Hills, California, once the home of Rudolph Valentino. She also maintained two apartments in Manhattan: a 9-room penthouse with a 1,000-square-foot veranda at 475 Park Avenue that is currently owned by journalist Cindy Adams; and another apartment near Times Square that she used exclusively as an office for the management of her financial affairs. She purchased her own Boeing 737 jet and redecorated the interior to travel between homes and on her trips to collect art and plants. The plane included a bedroom decorated to resemble a bedroom in a real house.
Three of Duke’s residences are currently managed by subsidiaries of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and allow limited public access. Duke Farms in New Jersey is managed by the Duke Farms Foundation; a video tour of former Duke Gardens is available. Rough Point was deeded to the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1999 and opened to the public in 2000. Tours are limited to 12 people. Shangri-La is operated by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art; small personal tours and an online virtual tour are available.
Duke’s first major philanthropic act was to establish the Duke Gardens Foundation to endow the public display gardens she started to create at Duke Farms in 1958. Her Foundation intended that Duke Gardens “reveal the interests and philanthropic aspirations of the Duke family, as well as an appreciation for other cultures and a yearning for global understanding.”. Duke Gardens were the center of a controversy over the decision by the trustees of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to close them on May 25, 2008.
In 1968, Duke created the Newport Restoration Foundation with the goal of preserving more than eighty colonial buildings in the town. Historic properties include Rough Point, Samuel Whitehorne House, Prescott Farm, the Buloid-Perry House, the King’s Arms Tavern, the Baptist Meetinghouse, and the Cotton House. Seventy-one buildings are rented to tenants. Only five function as museums. She also funded the construction of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India, visited by the Beatles in 1968.
Duke’s extensive travels led to an interest in a variety of cultures, and during her lifetime she amassed a considerable collection of Islamic and Southeast Asian art. After her death, numerous pieces were donated to The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore.
Duke did much additional philanthropic work and was a major benefactor of medical research and child welfare programs. Her foundation, Dependent Aid, created when she was twelve months old, became the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
A regular guy named John Pike has become the new face of evil among people following the Occupy protests around the country. The UC Davis police officer’s matter-of-fact pepper spraying of seated, obviously peaceful students has provoked justifiable outrage. James Fallows summed up the situation with his usual precise moral compass. “This is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population,” he wrote. “That’s what I think here.”Many are calling for Pike’s firing, or worse. He certainly doesn’t present a sympathetic figure. What kind of person could do this?
Thinking about the outrage of friends and colleagues, a James Baldwin passage that I’ve read many times came back into my mind. Here’s what he had to say in the New York Timesabout Jim Clark, an Alabama sheriff and staunch civil rights opponent whose state troopers viciously attacked peaceful protesters.
[Clark] cannot be dismissed as a total monster; I am sure he loves his wife and children and likes to get drunk. One has to assume that he is a man like me… Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.
Baldwin recognized that Clark was merely the endpoint of a system that shaped the sheriff just as it shaped the people the sheriff attacked.Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.
That these changes in the police force have occurred is not in dispute. They’ve been sufficiently open that academics can write long papers detailing the changes in police responses to protests from the middle of the 20th century to today. They are described in one July 2011 paper by sociologist Patrick Gillham called, “Securitizing America.” During the 1960s, police used what was called “escalated force” to stop protesters.
“Police sought to maintain law and order often trampling on protesters’ First Amendment rights, and frequently resorted to mass and unprovoked arrests and the overwhelming and indiscriminate use of force,” Gillham writes and TV footage from the time attests. This was the water cannon stage of police response to protest.
But by the 1970s, that version of crowd control had given rise to all sorts of problems and various departments went in “search for an alternative approach.” What they landed on was a paradigm called “negotiated management.” Police forces, by and large, cooperated with protesters who were willing to give major concessions on when and where they’d march or demonstrate. “Police used as little force as necessary to protect people and property and used arrests only symbolically at the request of activists or as a last resort and only against those breaking the law,” Gillham writes.
That relatively cozy relationship between police and protesters was an uneasy compromise that was often tested by small groups of “transgressive” protesters who refused to cooperate with authorities. They often used decentralized leadership structures that were difficult to infiltrate, co-opt, or even talk with. Still, they seemed like small potatoes.
Then came the massive and much-disputed 1999 WTO protests. Negotiated management was seen to have totally failed and it cost the police chief his job and helped knock the mayor from office. “It can be reasonably argued that these protests, and the experiences of the Seattle Police Department in trying to manage them, have had a more profound effect on modern policing than any other single event prior to 9/11,” former Chicago police officer and Western Illinois professor Todd Lough argued.
No one wanted to be Seattle and police departments around the country began to change. “In Chicago for example, paramilitary gear such as that worn by the Seattle Police was quickly acquired and distributed to officers,” Lough continued, “and the use of force policy was amended to allow for the pepper spraying of passive resistors under certain circumstances.” (That emphasis is mine.)
9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.
This is what it looked like on the ground in Miami in 2003. Occupy protests have shown that variations on this unprecedented show of force have now become commonplace.
Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale, who has specialized in tracking police tactical changes, found that the the “broken windows” theory of policing, which was introduced to a national audience by this very magazine, has also had a major impact on protest policing. As we wrote in 1982, broken windows policing did not attempt to directly fight violent crime but rather the “sense that the street is disorderly, a source of distasteful, worrisome encounters.”
As Vitale would put it, the theory “created a kind of moral imperative for the police to restore middle class values to the city’s public spaces.” When applied to protesters, the strategy has meant that any break with the NYPD’s behavioral preferences could be grounds for swift arrest and/or physical violence. Vitale described how the theory has been applied to Occupy Wall Street:
Consider what has precipitated the vast majority of the disorderly conduct arrests in this movement: using a megaphone, writing on the sidewalk with chalk, marching in the street (and Brooklyn Bridge), standing in line at a bank to close an account (a financial boycott, in essence) and occupying a park after its closing. These are all peaceful forms of political expression. To the police, however, they are all disorderly conduct.
Add up all these changes in the training paradigms and outlooks of police departments and you have an entirely different kind of policing than we knew during the Reagan and Clinton years. Scholars identified this new approach’s salient features in 2007, adopting the name “strategic incapacitation”:
But now regular people are identifying this new approach’s salient features as well. The large-scale deployment of video recording technologies combined with high-speed media diffusion channels have allowed everyone to see what only a tiny number did back in 2003 in Miami. They are seeing kids getting pepper sprayed and hundreds of protesters getting arrested. They’re watching police throw flash grenades into groups of American citizens. These images are coming to them through the same Twitter accounts and Facebook updates that show them photos of their friends’ new babies and the score of the USC game.
While it’s easiest to note the incidents of police violence, the protesters’ cameras also record what’s *not* in the images. Authorities have long claimed that they were merely battling the “black bloc” of violent anarchists. But when you look at all these videos, the bogeyman isn’t there.
Instead, it’s a dozen scared kids and a police officer named John Pike spraying them in the face from three feet away. And while it’s his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn’t become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it.
And while the kids may cough up blood and writhe in pain, what happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.
On this date in 1820, a sperm whale attacked a whaling ship off the coast of South America. The Essex hailed from Nantucket, Massachusetts, and was captained by George Pollard Jr. Pollard was only 29, the youngest man to ever command a whaling ship; the Essex, by contrast, was pretty old, and she was also small for a whaleship. She was considered lucky, though, because crews made money on most of her voyages.
This particular voyage, which was to last two and a half years, didn’t start very auspiciously. Soon after leaving port en route to the whaling grounds off the west coast of South America, the ship was hit with a squall, lost her topgallant sail, and nearly sank. It took longer than usual to reach the whaling grounds, and the crew began to get edgy and superstitious. Then, when they finally arrived near the Galapagos Islands, they found the grounds nearly fished out. They struck out for a new whaling ground, but it was thousands of miles off the coast, much farther from land than whalers usually felt comfortable hunting. But the risk appeared to pay off when a pod of sperm whales was sighted on the morning of the 20th. The crew harpooned a couple of the whales, but then found themselves face to face with an enormous whale, which appeared to be acting strangely. The whale rammed the ship repeatedly; first mate Owen Chase later recounted, “I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods (550 yards) directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed (around 24 knots or 44 kph), and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.” After crushing the bow, the whale swam off, never to be seen again.
The crew set off in some of the small whaleboats, but they didn’t have enough food or water. The captain wanted to sail west, to the Marquesas, but Owen and the crew believed the South Pacific was inhabited by cannibals, so they set off east, for South America, and this decision proved disastrous. By the time they arrived at the Pitcairn Islands, some of them had already died of thirst, and the survivors soon depleted the meager fish and bird population of the uninhabited island they landed on. The crew set out again in hope of rescue, but again, food ran out, and they resorted to cannibalism themselves, first eating the crew members who died, and then drawing lots to determine which living member they would sacrifice. By the time they were rescued by another whaling ship, they were completely out of their heads, and were terrified of their rescuers.
Owen Chase, who survived, wrote an account of the event, called The Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821). Twenty years later, Chase’s son William met another seaman, Herman Melville, who had heard about the sinking of the Essex and asked him about it. William Chase gave Melville a copy of his father’s book. Melville read it while at sea, not far from the site of the original shipwreck, and it inspired his Moby-Dick.
Get the Moby-Dick ebook (Kindle, HTML, etc.) from the Gutenberg Project FREE here.
Get the Moby-Dick audio book (zip file, iTunes RSS feed, etc.) from Librivox FREE here.
Watch the first part of the 1956 Film adaptation, directed by John Huston and staring Gregory Peck below:
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through
The first cold bit of weather always brings me back to this hat. Those of you that have known me for any length of time can skip over my fashion fanboy ten year obsession rant that is the Dior Mohawk hat, circa 2000.
That is, unless you can knit or are a personal friend of the Dior archivist.
It’s the birthday of artist Georgia O’Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887). She had her first exhibition in 1916, at photographer Alfred Stieglitz‘s 291 Gallery, without her knowledge. She had sent some of her charcoal drawings to a friend, who in turn showed them to Stieglitz, who hung them in his gallery. Within two years, he had convinced her to move to New York from Texas, where she’d been living and teaching. He encouraged her to devote herself to painting, promising to support her for a year if she did so, and he promoted her work enthusiastically, mounting one-woman shows at least once a year. By 1918, they were in love, and in 1924, they were married. She painted lush flowers, dramatic cityscapes, and bleached bones; he photographed her, more than 500 times over the years, his intimate portraits of her graceful, angular face telling a pictorial love story. “He photographed me until I was crazy,” she later said.
Stieglitz and O’Keeffe wrote each other letters, a great many letters, sometimes three or four a day: 25,000 pages passed between them from 1915 to 1946. “I’m getting to like you so tremendously that it sometimes scares me,” O’Keeffe wrote in 1916. ” … Having told you so much of me — more than anyone else I know — could anything else follow but that I should want you …” He wrote to her in 1917, “How I wanted to photograph you — the hands — the mouth — & eyes — & the enveloped in black body — the touch of white — & the throat — but I didn’t want to break into your time …” The first volume of their correspondence, titled My Faraway One and covering the years from 1915 to 1933, was published earlier this year.
O’Keeffe’s other great love was the landscape around Taos, New Mexico. She took her first trip there in 1929, and returned every summer to paint. After Stieglitz’s death in 1946, she moved to New Mexico permanently. She gave up painting in oils when her eyesight failed in the mid-1970s, but continued to work in pencil and watercolor for several more years. In 1982, she began sculpting with clay, which she continued until two years before her death in 1986, at the age of 98.
Today is the birthday of the artist who said, “I would like to paint the way a bird sings”: Claude Monet, born in Paris in 1840. His father ran a grocery store, and he’d hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps. The boy had other ideas and vowed to become an artist, much to his father’s dismay. Monet began his studies at the age of 10 in Le Havre, working first in charcoal. He drew caricatures, which he would sell to the locals for 10 or 20 francs apiece. About five years later, he befriended artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him oil painting. Boudin also encouraged him to paint en plein air, or outside. “One day, Boudin said to me, ‘Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky,’” Monet later said. “I took his advice.”
In 1861, he joined the cavalry in Algeria, intending to serve for seven years. Two years later, he contracted typhoid, and his aunt arranged for him to be discharged; he returned to France to study art, rejecting the traditional École des Beaux-Arts in favor of the private Académie Suisse. It was there that Monet met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille; the four young artists became disillusioned with the meticulous detail that was fashionable in academic circles, and they began experimenting with a new style of landscape painting, producing rapid “sketches” using short, broken brushstrokes and trying to capture, above all, the fleeting quality of the light. Monet produced many paintings in the late 1860s, and although he hadn’t fully adopted the technique that he became known for, he did break from tradition by painting scenes from everyday, middle-class life. He received positive notice for his painting The Woman in the Green Dress in 1866; his model, Camille Doncieux, became his lover and, later, his wife.
His painting Impression, Sunrise, which he painted in 1872, was exhibited for the first time at an independent art show in 1874, and it was his first public showing of the sketch-like style he had been trying out. “I had sent a thing done in Le Havre, from my window, sun in the mist and a few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground,” he later wrote. “They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: ‘Put Impression.’” The painting and the show were poorly received by the critics, including Louis Leroy, who dubbed the style “Impressionism.” Leroy was being derogatory, and wrote, “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” but Monet and his contemporaries adopted the name anyway. For his part, Monet felt he had finally come home. “I didn’t become an Impressionist. As long as I can remember I have always been one.”
Camille died of tuberculosis in 1879, shortly after the birth of their second son. Monet painted a portrait of her on her deathbed, as a last tribute. He told his friend Georges Clemenceau: “Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.” He grieved her loss deeply, and for several months, but felt a renewed passion for his art, and moved with his children to the home of his patron, Ernest Hoshedé. The patronage fell apart when Hoshedé ran into financial difficulties, but Hoshedé’s wife, Alice, provided patronage of a different sort; they began an affair, she paid Monet’s debts with her dowry, and eventually moved with him to Giverny, where the artist bought a small farmhouse surrounded by an orchard. They eventually married after the death of her husband in 1892; the following year, Monet bought a strip of marshland across the road from his house, and found great pleasure in designing a water-garden. “I am only good at two things, and those are: gardening and painting,” he wrote. He spent nearly 30 years in his gardens, planting and painting irises and tulips, wisteria and bamboo.
Later in his career, he became interested in painting the same subject at different times of day, and produced several series: water lilies, haystacks, poplars, the cathedral in Rouen, and the Houses of Parliament in London. As he grew older, he developed cataracts, which left him nearly blind and had a profound effect on his perception of colors. His tones became muddy and muted, and his paintings had a reddish or yellowish cast. He had to rely on the labels of his paint tubes to tell him what color they contained, but he was determined to carry on. In 1921, he told a journalist, “I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.” In a letter to a friend in 1922, he complained: “To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I’ve ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and abandon the rest; and on top of that, my poor eyesight makes me see everything in a complete fog. It’s very beautiful all the same and it’s this which I’d love to have been able to convey. All in all, I am very unhappy.” He finally agreed to have surgery performed on his right eye in 1923, but he was disappointed with the results and refused to have the procedure repeated on his left eye. He was never again able to use both eyes together effectively, and was only able to read and write with the aid of special glasses. He died of lung cancer in 1926; his home and gardens in Giverny are now the property of the French Academy of Fine Arts, and host visitors from all over the world.
