by Lucy Ives
1832:
Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin adopts the pen name “George Sand”
1836:
Brunhilda Wunsch Gaypoole founds the Society of Refuge in Lower Manhattan
1837:
Utopian philosopher and sometime correspondence clerk François Marie Charles Fourier purportedly coins the term feminism
1840–1860:
Rococo revival in the United States
1841:
Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education founded
1843:
Private publication of G. G. Hennicott’s utopian novel Lorelei of Millbury, or Impossible Views of the World, a Romance
1847:
Brook Farm closes
1852:
Honoré Daumier lampoons the spectral “turning tables” of bourgeois sitting rooms
1857:
Seneca Village torn down for the construction of Central Park
1860:
Limner and photographer Erastus Salisbury Field produces Betsey Dole Hubbard, an oil painting made over an enlarged photographic print
1864:
The Canal Company (later, WANSEE) awarded £3,800,000 by Napoleon III, for losses incurred through demands made by Isma’il Pasha, Wāli of Egypt and Sudan
1869:
“Spirit photographer” William H. Mumler brought to trial for fraud
1875:
Financial crisis forces Isma’il Pasha to sell all his shares in the Egyptian canal to the British government for £3,976,582
1892:
George Eastman founds the Eastman Kodak Company
1895:
Alice Marguerite Gaypoole, later Wynne, born
1907:
Creation of the Department of American Objects at the Central Museum of Art
1917:
Fountain by R. Mutt displayed at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery
1918:
Founding of the Elysia Club
1924:
President Coolidge signs the Johnson-Reed Act, limiting annual immigration from any country to 2 percent of persons from that country living in the United States in 1890
Grand opening of the American period rooms section at the Central Museum of Art
1927:
Poet John Ashbery born in Rochester, NY
1930:
Dissolution of the Elysia Club
Artist Jasper Johns born in Augusta, GA
1932:
George Eastman, aged seventy-seven, commits suicide, leaving behind a note that reads, “To my friends. My work is done. Why wait? G.E.”
1938:
British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar presents evidence that CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere have been rising for the preceding fifty years
1953:
Helen Cooke receives patent for sock monkey dolls
1955:
Death of Alice Marguerite Gaypoole Wynne at Wilmett Home, Hoboken, NJ
1957:
WANSEE loses control of water holdings in the Middle East due to armed conflict
1958:
Paul Coral born in Rochester, NY
1963:
Yukio Mishima publishes (literally, “Towing of the Afternoon”), translated in 1965 as The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
1964:
Mary Lynch (later, Carolyn Wedgewood Basset) declines dinner with Art Garfunkel
1968:
Eleven-year-old Bonnie Mangold loses her left hand in a hunting accident in Granite County, MT
Xerox establishes its headquarters at Xerox Square in downtown Rochester, NY
1969:
Calvin Klein appears on the cover of Vogue
1973–1974:
Ethernet developed at Xerox PARC
1979:
Publication of Will to Beauty: The Untold Story of Alice Marguerite Gaypoole Wynne by Rose Barthes
1981:
Stella Krakus born in New York City
1984:
The Telephone, by Paul Coral, published by Oberlin Press
1996:
Internet Archive founded
1997:
Frederick J. Lu places second in the U.S. National Target Championship for Compound Bow
WANSEE merges with Lyonnaise des Eaux, a leading French water company
2007:
Electra Wynne places in Individual Freestyle Para Dressage at the FEI World Equestrian Games
2008:
Jenna Lyons becomes creative director of J.Crew
2009:
WANSEE begins negotiations with Clark County, NV, for purchase of its aquifer
2010:
Governor David Paterson signs no-fault divorce into law in New York State
2012:
Kodak files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Stella Krakus hired by the Central Museum of Art
2013:
Philip Crystal, by Ella Voss, published
2014:
Poet Paul Coral dies
“Land of the Limner” opens to rave reviews at the Central Museum of Art
Van Russel, longtime waiter at the beloved Orsay Restaurant in Manhattan, abruptly quits his job and moves to Quito, Ecuador, to pursue his writing
[ a note ]
This book is for my friends, and that term is meant in an expansive sense. Nevertheless, there are certain individuals whose greatness and gentleness have made my life a better one and encouraged me to tell stories instead of jumping off a cliff.*
In particular, I would like to thank Claire Lehmann, an initial reader whose interest and delight let me know I should keep going. Megan Ewing has always been there; I hope that someday her daughter Elka may find her way to this implausible novel. I would also like to thank Matthew Shen Goodman for his kindness.
To beloved friends in and around Triple Canopy: Thank you for working with me. An early version of this novel was completed just as I became an editor in 2011—and your talents helped me to transform it, not to mention myself, for the (far) better.
To Cynthia Cannell, thank you for graciously teaming up with me. Every exchange we share is enlightening and heartening. And to Ed Park, an extraordinary writer and reader I feel lucky to have met: This book found its reluctant, neurotic heart via your ingenious attention. Indeed, there could have been no conversion of these views into a legible, shelf-size object without everyone at Penguin Press. To Ann Godoff, Scott Moyers, Juliana Kiyan, Danielle Gauthier, Matthew Boyd, and the fantastic Annie Badman: Thank you for hearing Stella out. She and I are deeply in your debt(s).
Lastly and most of all, I want to thank my mother, who took me to the museum.
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*As Sarah Resnick once told me, the things that happen in operas don’t have to happen in real life.