VULGAR LIVING
An underground New England youth movement in the late 19th century, led by Benedetto Ossoli (born on September 5th, 1848); Benedetto Ossoli was the fraternal twin of Angelo Ossoli and the son of Giovanni Ossoli and Margaret Fuller Ossoli; on July 19, 1850, Giovanni, Margaret, and Angelo Ossoli all perished at sea in a shipwreck near Fire Island, New York; Margaret Fuller Ossoli, more famously known as Margaret Fuller, was a critic, gender theorist, and the most highly-regarded feminist of her era; Margaret Fuller Ossoli was one of only two women who were original members of the Transcendental Club; Ralph Waldo Emerson persuaded Henry David Thoreau to travel to New York to search the shoreline for Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s body, but neither her nor her husband’s bodies were ever found; the baby Angelo Ossoli was found, drowned; the possession and exhibition of three names was popular among Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as Frederic Henry Hedge and Amos Bronson Alcott; Mary Moody Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aunt, was a Calvinist and a voracious reader, enjoying Milton, Byron, Plato, Locke, Jonathan Edwards, and the Bible; Mary Moody Emerson’s influence on her famous nephew was enormous, and he described her as, “a fruit of Calvinism and New England that marks the precise time when the power of the old creed yielded to the influence of modern science and humanity”; Emerson’s radical departure from traditional Christianity upset his aunt, and for a period she refused any communication with him; my great-aunt, a North Carolinian by birth, possesses little-to-no knowledge of transcendentalism, but a preternatural ability to accumulate worthless knick-knacks, mints from restaurants, pilfered silverware, and canned vegetables from bygone Presidential administrations; in 1993, I watched the NCAA basketball championship with my extended family at my grandparents’ retirement home in Stuart, Florida; this included my parents, sister, grandparents, aunt, uncle, cousin, great-uncle, and great-aunt; the University of North Carolina played the University of Michigan—with their famed “Fab Five,” of Jimmy King, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson, and Chris Webber—for the national title; when Chris Webber, who was a brilliant college basketball player, a first-team All-American, made the mistake of calling a time-out with 11 seconds remaining in the game, despite his team having no remaining time-outs, his team received a technical foul, clinching the victory for the University of North Carolina; after Chris Webber made the profound error of calling the time-out, my great-aunt exclaimed, “Those shine-heads sure can’t handle pressure!”; my entire family was aghast at my great-aunt’s outburst, which was racist as well as shockingly descriptive and creative; my great-aunt also insists on calling the sprinkles at ice cream shops “coloreds”; I share blood with my great-aunt; this fact sometimes causes me great consternation; Benedetto Ossoli did not drown in 1850 with his brother, father, and famous mother, Margaret Fuller Ossoli—because he was inexplicably left on the steps of an orphanage two weeks after his birth; this abandonment caused Benedetto—whose left cheek was dominated by a birthmark that would now be called a “port-wine stain”—great anguish during his childhood years; Benedetto Ossoli settled in Boston, and in 1865, while still a teenager, began the movement known as “Vulgar Living”; Vulgar Living included various slothful acts, including the consumption of massive quantities of alcohol and meat, as well as thievery, vandalism, spitting (but not into a spittoon), rudeness towards the elderly, and public onanism; theories abound, connecting the rise in Vulgar Living to a sense of disenfranchisement felt by young soldiers returning from the Civil War; Benedetto Ossoli never married, and spent his later years in New Bedford, Massachusetts, managing a boarding house popular with young fishermen; Ossoli also ran a brewpub adjoining his boardinghouse, and is viewed by some as the grandfather of the American microbrewery movement; Benedetto Ossoli’s brewpub, which is now the site of a gas station, was called “The Drowning Lady.”
Please keep up the wonderful posts. You (both?) have a fine way of writing.
By the way, the Wikipedia page on Margaret Fuller lacks any mention of a second son:
Fuller and Ossoli had a child together named Angelo … Fuller, Ossoli, and their child were completing a five-week return voyage to the United States aboard the ship Elizabeth when, on July 18, 1850 around 3:30 a.m., the ship slammed into a sandbar about one hundred yards away from Fire Island, New York. The family did not survive.