User talk:Seaside rendezvous

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Automat (painting)
I agree with the anonymous user on the Automat talk page: this is extremely well written and a pleasure to read. --Alan W (talk) 23:17, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Hello again, Seaside rendezvous. Glad to see that you resurrected the earlier version of this article. That might not have been considered justifiable by strict Wikipedia standards, except that you acknowledged that citations of sources are needed, and you are adding them. So I think your actions are entirely justified, and this article deserves to be kept, and expanded if you can do so. Now that I have read through it to do some minor copyediting, I'm thinking that it could use a concluding paragraph or two in which critics' general assessments of the painting are given, along with perhaps something about where it is considered to fit in with Hopper's work as a whole. Just a suggestion. Regards, Alan W (talk) 02:18, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Alan W. Your suggestion about adding a summary of the critics' general assessment is good. Thanks as well for the kind words about the revert. I hate the idea of reverting other people's edits, but the edit in this case seemed so arbitrary: everything in the article which hadn't been properly footnoted had been deleted.

I guess I prefer a gentler, more cautious approach. Just a few days before the big deletion, I had finally located a source which allowed me to provide a citation for a comparison that had been in the article for ages, between 'Automat' with the Degas painting, 'Absinthe'. I had spent a couple of years feeling unhappy with the comparison, which seemed arbitrary to me (the paintings just don't look the same at all to me). But I resisted deleting the sentence, and eventually, found a source. I then added a footnote. To me, that kind of patient search is preferable to deleting assertions that are insufficiently footnoted. Seaside rendezvous (talk) 02:20, 4 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Agreed 100%. Allowing for the usual benefit of the doubt and "good faith", it still seems to me that too many edits on Wikipedia can be, shall we say, overzealous. Your comment that some "citation needed" tags should have been added instead, giving you (or someone else who is interested) a chance to find the appropriate sources, was entirely reasonable. I was tempted to comment on this myself, and even do the kind of revert that you did; but I hesitated because then I might have been expected to find the sources, which I am not prepared to do, and I didn't know if your interest in this article was still as great as it had been (and of course other circumstances in life often prevent as much work here as we might want to do). Glad to see that you are up to the task, and keep up the good work! I'm happy to read through it all and do a little editorial cleaning up (with which I feel right at home; in fact it brings me back to the days when I did that kind of thing for a living, sometimes editing books about art, now that I think of it). Regards, Alan W (talk) 02:44, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Office at Night
Glad you're still writing about Hopper's paintings. Haven't read all of your recent contributions yet, but enjoying what I've read so far. I do want to comment on one small point, as a lifelong New York City resident. The "L" train was not denominated as such until 1967. I wonder what Kathryn Shattuck, the author of that New York Times article, really meant. If she meant what was then just the East 14 Street–Canarsie line, then to call it the "L" train is an anachronism. She may simply have meant what in New York we usually write as the "el", short for elevated train. In that case, it is a mistake to link to the line that is now the "L" train. Do we know that that was the specific line Hopper rode? At the time of the painting, there were far more likely candidates, as the current "L" line is not likely to pass any office buildings. Even in 1940, I don't think it was elevated in Manhattan, but several other now-defunct lines were. Keep up the good work! Regards, Alan W (talk) 00:21, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi Alan W. Thanks for the kind words. I'll have to revert my May 10th edit, where I changed the link from the page on elevated railways to the page on the "L" line. Unfortunately, I've never seen Hopper's original letter, in which he apparently refers to the L train, rather than to the "el". It's possible that this was just his own shorthand, or that there's been a transcription error at some point, and that he actually did write "el."

I don't think we have any idea what train Hopper actually rode in late January 1940. I notice, in looking over the records of interviews he gave and in particular of the journal that he and Jo jointly kept, that it's Jo, more than Edward, who likes to build the narratives about the people in his paintings. Hopper, who was notoriously silent with his wife, may have indulged her in these stories without actually seeing them as being relevant to what he was trying to achieve in his paintings. It certainly seems possible that the specific train trip he took caused him to peek in on a scene like the one we see. But I think that what is likelier is that he pulled together elements from a variety of memories and inspirations, and then started painting. To state one obvious discrepancy between what he saw on this particular train ride and what he paints in Office at Night, the window would not have been open in January. Seaside rendezvous (talk) 01:00, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * An interesting point. I suppose we shouldn't take it all too literally. For what it's worth, though, in Chicago, the elevated trains are referred to generically as the "L", unlike in New York, where they are the "el". I do suspect that it's the generic elevated rapid-transit line, rather than the specific "L" train, that Edward or Jo Hopper would have been thinking of. Regards, Alan W (talk) 01:18, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

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