Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Sharing "The Gulf" by Jack E. Davis
Ordered only three days ago, a book that must be shared by all who have ties to our Gulf. which, as Mr. Davis says, he needed to put it all together and give us the book that we have needed. Others have given their due to such as Yosemite, to Alaska, tothe Andes, et al., to bring them to life, but in my three decades down here they have done nothing better than The Weather Channel, and for all the people I have come to know not just types. I have made myself ashamed, reading almost incessantly and failing to write to everyone!
I'm "publishing" this as is, not that it is per se a blog post.
Friday, July 13, 2018
The gift of Genetics: sanity in the midst of Current News
My emphasis on my outdated genetics brought me a wonderful birthday gift, the Kindle edition of Richard Dawkins recent book. It came from a friend young enough to have been one of my last students (actually, his mother was one of my last graduate students), but he must have been shocked by my ignorance, only a little exaggerated (better that than gobbledygook). Dawkins saved my sanity, and he writes so well. So now I've downloaded Darwin himself; it has been his original Origin of Species that I'd left unread. No matter how old, it has all the honesty and thoughtfulness (and he too wrote so well) that I need. I'll just Publish this note for now. And again thank Cian for giving me the credit to profit so richly in old age from reading Dawkins.
Sunday, February 18, 2018
GLAUX
Athena's Little Owl
After weeks I return to this topic, lest it grow stale.
First, the word that small dictionaries define simply as "owl" proves to be quite different from what I imagined its history might be, and I can't go more deeply into its history right now than just to make that much clear. I hadn't known more about owls than about the etymology of their name. I'll come back to "glaux" later if I can.
(1) Even in Greek, even in Attic Greek, it is not the standard word for 'owl'. The basic word for that kind of a bird is onomatopoeic and like its call that hearers have heard as something like kookoo or the Latin ulula (whether or not strictly considered it derives from the verb ululare). Only about the time that the Iliad reaches its final form, especially in Attic Greek, it seems, does it seem to stand alone for Athena's little owl: in vase-painting and in a classical type of statue, known in copies, she holds it and, by the way, as I learned it is that little owl (koukouvaya in spoken modern Greek) that fits in a human hand and that all over Europe is the common type and size, not the big barn owl that rural Americans are familiar with. Albrecht Dürer's exquisite watercolor dated 1506 as well as the justly famous Late Protocorinthian perfume bottle in the Louvre, ca. 635-625 BC, are just the right size, not more that three inches long. The French diminutive, chouette, is usually preferred in the critical literature. In earlier ancient Greek authors glaukos means the pale, gray-bluegreen, of the sea surface or for eyes, especially in Homer, where Athena is specifically called glaukopis (just as Hera is cow-eyed). The adjectival forms, as glaukos -e -on, occur earlier commonly than the noun. The big dictionary Greek dictionary, Liddell, Scott, and Jones, spells all this out carefully. The fullest account in a single-volume work that I have is, Partridge, Origins, 1958, s.vv. words like glass, ff. and, in the "elements" section at the back, glauco-, since of course, one of the Hellenistic doctors will have coined glaucoma (Pliny has it in Latin, but doubtless got it from his sources; (made-up scientific terms are not actually part of the 'natural' history of the word as such). The OUP family of dictionaries, of course, are also useful and the ever-loving Webster's Collegiate. One just had to learn not to think that one got the answer just by looking in one place.
(2) It was from one of my favorite reference books, H. J. Rose's Handbook of Greek Mythology (still in print, but the original HB editions have larger print and wider margins), with which I had started, a habit since I first 'took' Mythology more than half a century ago, that I first found Rose's noting Homer addressing her as glaukopis, which 20th century translators render as 'bright-faced', though the older ones (think Alexander Pope or Lang, Leaf, and Myers) translate as green (or gray)-eyed. I think you can imagine both at once. Now, as an alternate name for Athena, glaukopis seems to me perfect, but in giving new names to residences, in those towns that still prefer naming addresses, it is customary not to choose names that some neighbors find difficult or awkward. Of course, the Latin name Minerva, gets used on houses first, though she was Etruscan and not the same goddess; if a poet called her fair-faced it was taken from Greek literature (a jolly sentimental mixup in German, which Mary Midgley incorporated in her memoir, is German Romantic dressed in antique garb, more or less, so her title The Owl of Minerva is simply charming, and is solid evidence for the continued prevalence of Latin in English education. I found that I'd bought it when it came out but hadn't got around to reading it). You begin to see how one can get distracted in this sort of "research".
(3) Perhaps the best single volume on Athens Oxbow Monograph 67 (1997), a very rare treasure, 40 independent specialist articles from a conference on Athens, all of them interesting and worth having, which I just had to have for its Proto-Attic and above all for its article on the KX Painter on Samos. Seeing that I am interested in the history of the kylix cup and in the namepiece of the Samos Painter which was found there. .. But the volume has rewarded my interest in a number of other areas, too. Of course, it is in the nature of Attic Potters and Painters, who traded so widely and influenced other potteries, who matter so much for their development of glaze-paint, who illustrate Greek literature richly and incessantly, so that I think we could not half understand either the literature or the daily life without the vase-painting, that scholars like John Boardman and Erika Simon (to name only the two to whom it is dedicated) could so generously dedicate their lives to it without, even so, come near to exhausting it. One article, from a hand devoted to an utterly careless late black-figure group of vases, the Painter of the Half-Palmettes, left us a slew of rapidly produced vases many with, as he shows, a sanctuary of Athena and her local cult. François Lissarrgue, op. cit., pp. 125, ff, fig. 25, London B 359, showing her chouette on a little column behind the goddess's large profile bust to l. That bust, also, dates it: not earlier than the kore statue from the Acropolis signed by a sculptor named Antenor: the end of Late Archaic. The rest of the vases are consistent with this one (in fact, most of them could come from stock produced to be sold at a single festival (though one wouldn't want to put that in print). Now, who would look at this kind of painted ware if some picture-gallery dealer had it for sale? No one. It is evidence; it is history of popular religion. And, by the way, it's the kind if vase-painting that never (at least I can't imagine it) gets faked.
Anyhow, I had to finish this.
After weeks I return to this topic, lest it grow stale.
First, the word that small dictionaries define simply as "owl" proves to be quite different from what I imagined its history might be, and I can't go more deeply into its history right now than just to make that much clear. I hadn't known more about owls than about the etymology of their name. I'll come back to "glaux" later if I can.
(1) Even in Greek, even in Attic Greek, it is not the standard word for 'owl'. The basic word for that kind of a bird is onomatopoeic and like its call that hearers have heard as something like kookoo or the Latin ulula (whether or not strictly considered it derives from the verb ululare). Only about the time that the Iliad reaches its final form, especially in Attic Greek, it seems, does it seem to stand alone for Athena's little owl: in vase-painting and in a classical type of statue, known in copies, she holds it and, by the way, as I learned it is that little owl (koukouvaya in spoken modern Greek) that fits in a human hand and that all over Europe is the common type and size, not the big barn owl that rural Americans are familiar with. Albrecht Dürer's exquisite watercolor dated 1506 as well as the justly famous Late Protocorinthian perfume bottle in the Louvre, ca. 635-625 BC, are just the right size, not more that three inches long. The French diminutive, chouette, is usually preferred in the critical literature. In earlier ancient Greek authors glaukos means the pale, gray-bluegreen, of the sea surface or for eyes, especially in Homer, where Athena is specifically called glaukopis (just as Hera is cow-eyed). The adjectival forms, as glaukos -e -on, occur earlier commonly than the noun. The big dictionary Greek dictionary, Liddell, Scott, and Jones, spells all this out carefully. The fullest account in a single-volume work that I have is, Partridge, Origins, 1958, s.vv. words like glass, ff. and, in the "elements" section at the back, glauco-, since of course, one of the Hellenistic doctors will have coined glaucoma (Pliny has it in Latin, but doubtless got it from his sources; (made-up scientific terms are not actually part of the 'natural' history of the word as such). The OUP family of dictionaries, of course, are also useful and the ever-loving Webster's Collegiate. One just had to learn not to think that one got the answer just by looking in one place.
(2) It was from one of my favorite reference books, H. J. Rose's Handbook of Greek Mythology (still in print, but the original HB editions have larger print and wider margins), with which I had started, a habit since I first 'took' Mythology more than half a century ago, that I first found Rose's noting Homer addressing her as glaukopis, which 20th century translators render as 'bright-faced', though the older ones (think Alexander Pope or Lang, Leaf, and Myers) translate as green (or gray)-eyed. I think you can imagine both at once. Now, as an alternate name for Athena, glaukopis seems to me perfect, but in giving new names to residences, in those towns that still prefer naming addresses, it is customary not to choose names that some neighbors find difficult or awkward. Of course, the Latin name Minerva, gets used on houses first, though she was Etruscan and not the same goddess; if a poet called her fair-faced it was taken from Greek literature (a jolly sentimental mixup in German, which Mary Midgley incorporated in her memoir, is German Romantic dressed in antique garb, more or less, so her title The Owl of Minerva is simply charming, and is solid evidence for the continued prevalence of Latin in English education. I found that I'd bought it when it came out but hadn't got around to reading it). You begin to see how one can get distracted in this sort of "research".
(3) Perhaps the best single volume on Athens Oxbow Monograph 67 (1997), a very rare treasure, 40 independent specialist articles from a conference on Athens, all of them interesting and worth having, which I just had to have for its Proto-Attic and above all for its article on the KX Painter on Samos. Seeing that I am interested in the history of the kylix cup and in the namepiece of the Samos Painter which was found there. .. But the volume has rewarded my interest in a number of other areas, too. Of course, it is in the nature of Attic Potters and Painters, who traded so widely and influenced other potteries, who matter so much for their development of glaze-paint, who illustrate Greek literature richly and incessantly, so that I think we could not half understand either the literature or the daily life without the vase-painting, that scholars like John Boardman and Erika Simon (to name only the two to whom it is dedicated) could so generously dedicate their lives to it without, even so, come near to exhausting it. One article, from a hand devoted to an utterly careless late black-figure group of vases, the Painter of the Half-Palmettes, left us a slew of rapidly produced vases many with, as he shows, a sanctuary of Athena and her local cult. François Lissarrgue, op. cit., pp. 125, ff, fig. 25, London B 359, showing her chouette on a little column behind the goddess's large profile bust to l. That bust, also, dates it: not earlier than the kore statue from the Acropolis signed by a sculptor named Antenor: the end of Late Archaic. The rest of the vases are consistent with this one (in fact, most of them could come from stock produced to be sold at a single festival (though one wouldn't want to put that in print). Now, who would look at this kind of painted ware if some picture-gallery dealer had it for sale? No one. It is evidence; it is history of popular religion. And, by the way, it's the kind if vase-painting that never (at least I can't imagine it) gets faked.
Anyhow, I had to finish this.
Friday, October 13, 2017
Pre-DNA Double-helix Genetics
Dominant and Recessive: Mendel's Peas
I don't know how many reading this had textbooks in which genetics were Mendelian. I was an assistant professor before the brightly colored, full-paged Life magazine publication of the double helix appeared and was read by everyone. When I was in school, Genetics was those three generations represented schematically in terms of genetic dominance. We all realized that of four children of the same parents, the two brunettes also carried genes for red hair (and that was why ladies who wanted to be red-haired had only to bleach their hair with hydrogen peroxide), and the two kids who had been tow-haired as youngsters did not grow up red-haired (as my next sister and I did), but brown-haired. Indeed, my father was true blond and my mother brunette. But all four of us children had brown eyes. I suppose that was why I found genetics interesting. Both of my paternal grandparents had pale eyes, and and my father's were true pale gray, but so were my maternal grandfather's. Nana's were a beautiful dark chocolate brown, and her lashes and brows were as black as her hair (and, of course, it turned white and black, real salt and pepper, as she aged).
Anyhow, if you want to know about Mendel, whom I regard as an intellectual hero, just go to the Wikipedia. And yet, with all the Ancestry advertisements and Louis Gates on television, I haven't gone beyond popular genealogy. And it would be genetics that would tempt me.
What I began thinking about was that Mendel, so far as he could go without technology, remains worth considering. He was very careful, after all. And it's not as if genetic dominance were hogwash. I daresay the minor uncertainties that so worried early 20c scientists here and there in a Mendelian third generation could be explained, e.g., by epigenetic research—not that I'd know how to do it.
I don't know how many reading this had textbooks in which genetics were Mendelian. I was an assistant professor before the brightly colored, full-paged Life magazine publication of the double helix appeared and was read by everyone. When I was in school, Genetics was those three generations represented schematically in terms of genetic dominance. We all realized that of four children of the same parents, the two brunettes also carried genes for red hair (and that was why ladies who wanted to be red-haired had only to bleach their hair with hydrogen peroxide), and the two kids who had been tow-haired as youngsters did not grow up red-haired (as my next sister and I did), but brown-haired. Indeed, my father was true blond and my mother brunette. But all four of us children had brown eyes. I suppose that was why I found genetics interesting. Both of my paternal grandparents had pale eyes, and and my father's were true pale gray, but so were my maternal grandfather's. Nana's were a beautiful dark chocolate brown, and her lashes and brows were as black as her hair (and, of course, it turned white and black, real salt and pepper, as she aged).
Anyhow, if you want to know about Mendel, whom I regard as an intellectual hero, just go to the Wikipedia. And yet, with all the Ancestry advertisements and Louis Gates on television, I haven't gone beyond popular genealogy. And it would be genetics that would tempt me.
What I began thinking about was that Mendel, so far as he could go without technology, remains worth considering. He was very careful, after all. And it's not as if genetic dominance were hogwash. I daresay the minor uncertainties that so worried early 20c scientists here and there in a Mendelian third generation could be explained, e.g., by epigenetic research—not that I'd know how to do it.
Note: When I faced all the pages of Egyptian painting provided in the Images by Google, though I did not find another cat between Dynasty 18 and the Late Periods, I did find one from the famous tomb of Khnumhotep of Dynaasty 12 (Middle Kingdom) at Beni Hasan, more than half a millennium even earlier than Nebamun's. It is the same kind of cat and also, of course, is part of Khnumhotep's hunting scene. Of course, Middle Kingdom painters didn't use modeling as a few New Kingdom ones did. But I went through all the tiresome choices of Egyptian painting for Middle School children and did not find additional cats.
Back to living cats. Cats do have eyelashes (to be distinguished from the furry rims in the place of brows), but they are hard to photograph. One day a close-up of my ginger tabby, Percy, did record his lashes, and they are ginger-colored, too. I conclude with photos taken the same day which seem to match the pattern of markings on Nebamun's cat.
 |
| Showing "red" lashes |
When eyes are fully open, the lashes don't show
The sections of pattern are alike, down to the tail
The stomach markings have yet to be photographed...
I forgot to mention a couple of important details:
(l) The Egyptian ones I found are, so to speak, black-and-blond tabbies, and they are the ones that have identical markings, in exactly the same configurations and symmetrical. Even as dark tabbies have black stripes they also have dark eyelashes, and so has Percy, my cat. Yes, cats do have very slight lashes on their upper eyelids (not to be confused with the short hair brows, so to speak), and only the hybrid males with white bibs, bellies, and paws have the lashes that are pale. I have never seen a blond tabby from Egypt.
(2) The new young "Morris", the blond one (like the original Morris, whether he was part white I no longer remember) on some of the bags of Nine-Lives kibble, with his "signature" written across him, is like Percy, identically marked, line for line, and with the same adorable face, with a little chin like that which now serves as the trademark of the New York Public Library. Young "Morris" (the blond one: the same brand of cat food also used black-and-tan kittens).
(3) I cannot guess how many painted Egyptian cats there are. Stupidly, I once supposed that all the bronze cats, which are feminine, of course, too, are the dark color of ancient bronze. Well, I suppose they may have been. I mean that I have been forced to admit that though the goddess Bastet ought to have been a brown goddess's color, she wasn't always so imagined. I mean, the Louvre has a tiny bronze of a bronze mother cat happily nursing a litter of kittens, and perhaps she isn't even Bastet. So far, I rely on the Cat Fanciers' page that says that it is only toms that are free of white patches.
It is astonishing how interesting things are once you quit just assuming. Well, Darwin's curiosity was legendary.
Friday, September 15, 2017
My Cat from the Tomb of Nebamun
This fragment from a New Kingdom Hunting scene in the British Museum today comes from the Theban tomb of the tomb of a nobleman named Nebamun. To attest to a good life, the basic trilogy of subjects, going back to the beginning of Egyptian funerary painting in the Old Kingdom, include the Banquet, the Hunt (and/or his means of living, such as agriculture or shipping), the Portraits (with or without Deities). In the magisterial Tomb of Nebamun, a perfect cat, as good as life, accompanies the hunter. For I have been adopted by a perfect Egyptian cat; the Algonquin Hotel's new Hamlet is similar and beautiful but not quite so Egyptian.
 |
| It is easy to overlook the cat, and even the butterfly, so I did it justice by making a special trip to the museum. For the cat is important, being nearly a millennium earlier than all those elegant Saitic cats. And the domestic cat is surely originally Egyptian—we just take for granted that small cats can be pets. And not funerary, either. My new cat, who adopted me, about six months ago (I know not from whom he had been abandoned, but he was already neatly neutered), shares all the features and character of Nebamun's. |
The question is, how do cats, usually without our deliberate breeding, produce truly ancestral types through time and space? All the pedigrees, with fancy names, beginning with "Siamese" such as Abyssinian (which may not have stripes) or Bengal (with strong spots) or Bombay (solid black, pedigree granted in 1950s) or Burmese (puma-brown and lovely), have been created by cat-fanciers.
Since it took me more than a week to find my British Museum detail, I started by looking for defined types. It's not like dogs, which are working animals, and all the pages of cats on line seem to be, if not cute kittens whose traits are not yet well defined, apart from long-haired (which basically seem to be "Persians") either sturdy and round-faced (British) or narrow-faced with very long tails, long toes with clearly defined joints, muscular-haunched and very short-haired.
That is, they all can (and do) mate with one another, so they are all domestic cats, tout court.
It seems to me that they are all descendants of either forest-floor or barn cats or tree dwellers. American short-hairs seem to me to be as perfectly hybridized as can be. My old cat, RIP aet 18, more or less, like most of the cats in our neighborhood, was a typical American short-hair: he had lots of white on his face and underside and the white was fluff: my friends who are allergic to cat fur got runny-eyes if they sat where he had been, and cats that had no white but whose undercoat was fluff ("bunny fur"), were regular American tom tabbies, and allergenic, too. My new cat, a wonderful creature, may of course have been purchased from a breeder, but the Algonquin Hotel's new cat is a true NYC alley cat; he even came with a torn ear. He may not be, however, a true climber. My climber, though with all the personality traits of breeds given "Asian" names, is named Percy.
The little book (such as you are tempted to buy as stocking stuffers at the book shop's check-out) called "The Little Black Cat Book", which a dear friend sent me years ago, is my source for the "Bombay" breed, pedigreed only in the 1950s. I remembered how such black breeds are known to occur. Once, some time in my adolescence, my mother took me with her to a household of fanciers of Siamese, whether some of her second cousins or customers who had done a Stanley Home Products party. In either case, they controlled very carefully the breeding of their cats: I was fascinated by how they lived (compare the TV program about breeders and exhibitors of pet ferrets); my own cats had been chosen at the SPCA. Anyway, they had a gloriously beautiful accidental cat: a large neuter male solid black with emerald eyes. He was the offspring of two seal-point Siamese, and he was very fond of humans. He was the loveliest cat I ever saw, and they told me I could adopt him. But I had no place of my own, and I knew I couldn't take care of him. But, nota bene, I never forgot that cat. That "Bombay" cat, I am sure, was the result of such an accidental hybrid. Yet, I am no expert on breeding, of course.
Anyway, whether ginger or tiger or black (or perhaps including Russian Blues), cats with body configuration like Nebamun's 18th dynasty cat, with long bones, and paws meant for climbing, and no white bunny fur undercoat but pure short-hair coats, like my Percy, very nice and sleek, also have panther/puma personalities and the ancestral propensity to climb and small high voices and affection for their humans, BUT they are not lap cats, gentle and clean though they are. In fact, Percy is the most assiduous washer of all the cats I've had. He is also very alert and intelligent, responsive to verbal commands without much teaching. And, of course, he loves cat toys. He's not fussy about food, however, eating any kibble of decent quality, and I've never seen him stalking the blue jays or cuckoos, and he's plain afraid of opossums. So I'll Publish this now, adding a photo later.
photos taken this July. His eyes are the color of Dijon mustard.
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
More rewards from Arthur Waley
Finally I treated myself to a masterpiece that everyone had told me to read. I suppose that I am not the only person who for unfathomable reasons resists what it seems that everyone estimable recommends: for example, I put off watching "The Seventh Seal" for decades.
But finally I downloaded the eBook edition of "Monkey".
If there is no one, at just this moment in history, who has not read "Monkey", or who supposes that Waley's translation of Genji is surpassed by the later one (though both are excellent) or that "Monkey" is any less relevant than it ever was, or less joyous, let me risk putting off anyone who suffers from the same resistance to recommendations as I have had, that though it is never too late to read it (the extra Introduction by the Chinese scholar-ambassador, Hu Shih, also is very fine, in the edition available online dated at the end of Arthur Waley's preface to 1942) makes this the edition of choice, I think.
I won't even hint at "Monkey"'s perennially pleasures, but if you need any help, read the front matter first. If you find the daily news just fine, well...
But finally I downloaded the eBook edition of "Monkey".
If there is no one, at just this moment in history, who has not read "Monkey", or who supposes that Waley's translation of Genji is surpassed by the later one (though both are excellent) or that "Monkey" is any less relevant than it ever was, or less joyous, let me risk putting off anyone who suffers from the same resistance to recommendations as I have had, that though it is never too late to read it (the extra Introduction by the Chinese scholar-ambassador, Hu Shih, also is very fine, in the edition available online dated at the end of Arthur Waley's preface to 1942) makes this the edition of choice, I think.
I won't even hint at "Monkey"'s perennially pleasures, but if you need any help, read the front matter first. If you find the daily news just fine, well...
Friday, June 23, 2017
Golden Peaches
It has been years since I last read it straight through, and by now I have picked up perspective that I lacked when Schafer's The Golden Peaches of Samarkand was first published and, to my pleasure, is still in print, both literally in hard copy and as an e-book. I never took Schafer's course, but most of my friends did, and his colleagues admired it, too. I owned the first edition of 1962, one of the UC Press's finest productions, and after I returned to teaching in the 1980s I replaced it (evidently given away to an appreciative friend when I entered a religious order) with the current paperback. Now that the Kindle edition is so much easier on my eyes, I have acquired it and am grateful that the footnote access works perfectly. No scholarly book has ever managed its documentation, of almost unequaled adequacy, and mostly the author's own, better than this one; to a reader who habitually reads footnotes it is wonderful to be able to use them just as well as in the original.
There was a period of several months in my last undergraduate year when, privately, I struggled with the realization that I couldn't do graduate work in both Greek and Chinese art and history in the parallel fashion I'd been enjoying; either one demanded some real mastery of the language. Since I had always worked my way through, my head start in Greek and Latin was decisive; I had not even begun Chinese, and there was always a generous but limited provision of scholarships, fellowships, teaching assistantships (from the budgets of different apartments), and hour-basis jobs in the University Library loan department (where, also, I had learned punch-card based computer programming). In sum, the University had already treated me as royally as even Oxford or Cambridge was wont to do for such as me. But my interest in China persisted, and China was foreign only in the same way as Greece was, though I never did study the language.
One evening Antiques Roadshow featured a lion both powerful and exquisite and wonderfully preserved. As the expert said, it is certainly Tang, and it triggered a search all over my house for my copy of Schafer's book and then to seek it in Amazon, where, behold, there it is. What with all the place-names in both the older transliterations rather than pinyin and finding adequate maps (assuming that, like me, you are unhappy without them) it is not easy reading, but I can only say that, even reading it for the first time, one is possessed by it (rather like Arthur Waley's translation of The Tale of Genji in this respect) once you have read not more than a hundred pages. The Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910) double-page map of China is best, but it is more daunting than the most readily available (and possibly based on it) double-page map in any edition of Sherman Lee's A History of Far Eastern Art. You see, I am actually urging you all to read Edward Schafer's Golden Peaches of Samarkand. It still bears its 5-star rating in Amazon.
So, this is, you see, my first repayment of my debt alluded to in the last Post, a true pleasure of real value in recompense for time taken to try to chase that money trail, since now I see that all the media are finally onto it. The latter quest isn't something that one values having learned more than half a century later.
Of course, each of us may find his own Golden Peaches.
There was a period of several months in my last undergraduate year when, privately, I struggled with the realization that I couldn't do graduate work in both Greek and Chinese art and history in the parallel fashion I'd been enjoying; either one demanded some real mastery of the language. Since I had always worked my way through, my head start in Greek and Latin was decisive; I had not even begun Chinese, and there was always a generous but limited provision of scholarships, fellowships, teaching assistantships (from the budgets of different apartments), and hour-basis jobs in the University Library loan department (where, also, I had learned punch-card based computer programming). In sum, the University had already treated me as royally as even Oxford or Cambridge was wont to do for such as me. But my interest in China persisted, and China was foreign only in the same way as Greece was, though I never did study the language.
One evening Antiques Roadshow featured a lion both powerful and exquisite and wonderfully preserved. As the expert said, it is certainly Tang, and it triggered a search all over my house for my copy of Schafer's book and then to seek it in Amazon, where, behold, there it is. What with all the place-names in both the older transliterations rather than pinyin and finding adequate maps (assuming that, like me, you are unhappy without them) it is not easy reading, but I can only say that, even reading it for the first time, one is possessed by it (rather like Arthur Waley's translation of The Tale of Genji in this respect) once you have read not more than a hundred pages. The Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910) double-page map of China is best, but it is more daunting than the most readily available (and possibly based on it) double-page map in any edition of Sherman Lee's A History of Far Eastern Art. You see, I am actually urging you all to read Edward Schafer's Golden Peaches of Samarkand. It still bears its 5-star rating in Amazon.
So, this is, you see, my first repayment of my debt alluded to in the last Post, a true pleasure of real value in recompense for time taken to try to chase that money trail, since now I see that all the media are finally onto it. The latter quest isn't something that one values having learned more than half a century later.
Of course, each of us may find his own Golden Peaches.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Epilogue, esp. to Post of March 18, 2017
Enough of politics and banking!
Not that learning about all that, better late than never, but I cannot even keep up with what I've realized, and there is no way that I could learn (and judge what I've read) enough to offer advice to you all, most of whom know more than I do. It is not that I am surprised by Money being more shocking than reading a few spy novels years ago taught me, and of course I am too old to be shocked to read that all nations, apparently, are engaged in covert actions (and of course I don't have to believe everything that I read, but surely we all can respect all thoughtful opinions), but the current specialists don't realize even as much as I do about knavery as well as sanctity through the ages; some even write that it all began with the CIA!
But with everything falling apart, why add my bit?
Let's just have the grace to realize that our readers can work it out alone (and, for that matter, what one learns from others must be struggled through each by himself).
I just mustn't pontificate on what I have yet to digest.
Only, in the primary sense of the word, I am, of course, a liberal. And I owe a debt to give most to the arts that have given me the most.
Not that learning about all that, better late than never, but I cannot even keep up with what I've realized, and there is no way that I could learn (and judge what I've read) enough to offer advice to you all, most of whom know more than I do. It is not that I am surprised by Money being more shocking than reading a few spy novels years ago taught me, and of course I am too old to be shocked to read that all nations, apparently, are engaged in covert actions (and of course I don't have to believe everything that I read, but surely we all can respect all thoughtful opinions), but the current specialists don't realize even as much as I do about knavery as well as sanctity through the ages; some even write that it all began with the CIA!
But with everything falling apart, why add my bit?
Let's just have the grace to realize that our readers can work it out alone (and, for that matter, what one learns from others must be struggled through each by himself).
I just mustn't pontificate on what I have yet to digest.
Only, in the primary sense of the word, I am, of course, a liberal. And I owe a debt to give most to the arts that have given me the most.
Monday, May 1, 2017
Alt-Syrien, revised
The purpose of this Post is to show why, unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, for example, we have a rough, vague idea of what we mean by Syria, due mainly to its being a geographical designation rather than, really, an ethnic one. That is, after World War I, the name was given to the Levant (apart from Lebanon, approximately) south of Turkey (that is south of Alalakh), west (more or less) of the upper Euphrates, and north of Damascus. Its lovely city, Aleppo, was not far south of Turkey and was notable for its cosmopolitan culture. Its population, in the days of Lawrence of Arabia (but the movie was filmed, as I recall, in Jordan), was, as the adjective itself implies, cosmopolitan. Compare, perhaps, Bangkok. But it was not nationalized until after the end of the Ottoman Empire, after World War I, after the Treaty of Versailles, and its modern borders date only from that time. That is why I mentioned Lawrence of Arabia. It had long before become urban and largely educated. Even old Palmyra, though far inland and my no means so Greco-Roman as Baalbek, was as much Roman Imperial as Levantine. Remember that 'Levant' is just French for Anatolia (Latin for Orient), whence from the Mediterranean point of view, the sun rises, but the name Syria comes from the NW Semitic name used for its Bronze Age immigrants. By the time I am concerned with here, the 10th to 8th centuries BC, the descendants of those NW Semites, Aramaeans (speaking Aramaic) were among the prevalent peoples in Syria, but the traders we call Phoenician and, in the north, Luvians, who had inherited more than a tinge of sub-Hittite culture, to judge from their art, and doubtless other people, constituted a largely urban population. If I were a scholar of ancient Semitic languages I might be able to say more, but, so far as it goes, I think that's sound. Beware of 'sources' that are merely old cut-and-paste; they are prone to saying simply that Syria is the land of the Phoenicians; the American OED provided for online dictionaries is one such. Today some specialists are not even sure what dialect those sea traders in luxury goods actually spoke.
Anyway, most Syrians are the descendants of the inventors of the alphabet and the first adopters of minted coins as a means of exchange. There really are very few truly primitive peoples today, and the Levantines rendered homeless by these wars are among the most cultivated of all.
****
Every day you hear news reporters alluding to 'Syrians' in terns that leave most of us feeling that families of illiterate or unwashed or anti-western people threaten our civilization. Folks feel that they all belong to angry Muslims. True that there are some who are fearsome, but there are many, many more who are dentists or skilled technicians or grocers and bakers, etc. And of course the children and their mothers and grandmothers are just that, as they can tell us themselves having been taught English and/or French in school. The world is often a dangerous place. Everyone should be watchful, but ignorance is most dangerous. The world is several times more populous today than it was when in the 1940s homeless families had to seek homes where they could.Anyway, most Syrians are the descendants of the inventors of the alphabet and the first adopters of minted coins as a means of exchange. There really are very few truly primitive peoples today, and the Levantines rendered homeless by these wars are among the most cultivated of all.
****
About 15 years ago when I was using the University Prints (then they went out of print and were no longer copyright) instead of one of the overpriced textbooks for my undergraduate courses. Two years ago I took the syllabus I had made and combined it with fully annotated University Prints. I used the Blogpost format to put them on line and urged anyone at all to use them. To that end I edited the verbiage very carefully and told everyone to translate them into any language they preferred, free of charge. For that reason they are very carefully edited and I cannot by now do the job as well again. But the 'page' entitled "After the End of the Bronze Age", which I posted April 22, 2014, in TeeGee:TraditionalArtHistory, is saved to be as economical as possible, so it can run on cheap or old laptops (actually, on one of the new iPads, I think, full length), but I am having trouble linking it here. I'll get it up in this convenient place, with several extra images of my own, if I can.
Here is the original introduction to Alt-Syrien:
It is Alt-Syrien that remained precious, even after Henri Frankfort's Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, 1954, one of the very first volumes of the Pelican History of Art; it contained only one slim chapter on Aramaeans and Phoenicians in Syria. Frankfort had been old when he wrote it, and his devoted successors had to keep his chapters. So it wasn't surprising that the late, lamented University Prints stuck to Frankfort. Besides, the profitable textbooks, which had to be used by teachers who still were bewildered (even those who had access to German books of Bossert's generation, or could read German) by what wasn't either just Mesopotamian or Egyptian, there being no illustrations of early Jewish art unless you believed the Providence Lithograph Company, often just skimmed over the material that they were in a hurry to get through the course. There is still, I must say, unresolved difference of opinion as to the sense in which ancient texts use the epithet Phoenician: whether it is only geographical, or cultural, or linguistic and ethnic; cultural it certainly is, but when very old books speak of the alphabet as Phoenician, questions arise. Such questions do not excuse journalists' tendency, even in Wikipedia (which is by no means so faulty as folks like to say), to generalizing in terms of who "the Syrians" are, or were. And, when I found the college textbooks unendurable (after several years they did improve), I was one of numerous professors teaching ancient art in survey courses who put together their own courses using University Prints.
When I had been retired for several years, aware of the horrendous prices of the new textbooks and concerned for students worldwide who might not have affordable access to any orderly corpus to study, I felt that I had to offer my mid-20c (so "traditional" simply because it comprises what the University Prints offered at the Survey level, held together by my outline as free of ideology as I could make it) and offer it free of charge.
https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3192706135770676794#allposts/src=sidebar
You will notice that the posts are in reverse chronological order. The University Prints have their own captions (and some of them are very old and corrected in the accompanying texts). The images from my own teaching collection are hand-held color photos.
You can open to the Introduction page and, from the list at right, go to the page that will help you put Syria in its place in history.
http://teegeeforwhomever.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-centuries-of-reorganization.html
And here are the additional images:
Here is the original introduction to Alt-Syrien:
You can't imagine how few archaeological picture books there were in the early 1950s. I mean the kind that have adequate and correct captions, never mind that they looked like newspaper photos. When in 1952 I took the Survey course in ancient art, the two most useful were Helmut Bossert's Alt-Kreta and Alt-Syrien. Popular accounts, themselves new, like Gods, Graves, and Scholars, were scantily illustrated and, for that matter, very generalized.
When I had been retired for several years, aware of the horrendous prices of the new textbooks and concerned for students worldwide who might not have affordable access to any orderly corpus to study, I felt that I had to offer my mid-20c (so "traditional" simply because it comprises what the University Prints offered at the Survey level, held together by my outline as free of ideology as I could make it) and offer it free of charge.
https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3192706135770676794#allposts/src=sidebar
You will notice that the posts are in reverse chronological order. The University Prints have their own captions (and some of them are very old and corrected in the accompanying texts). The images from my own teaching collection are hand-held color photos.
You can open to the Introduction page and, from the list at right, go to the page that will help you put Syria in its place in history.
http://teegeeforwhomever.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-centuries-of-reorganization.html
And here are the additional images:
 |
| Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al). Orthostat with a sub-Hittite warrior or god. |
 |
| Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al), time of King Barrakub, ca. 720s BCE. Detail of the Aramaean princess on her grave stele. Notice her rosette jewelry (typical) and her Phrygian-type (remarkable) dress pin. |
 |
| PHOENICIAN. London, BM. Ivory plaque from Assyrian palace at Nimrud. Romantic exoticism in the subject, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style. 8-7 c. BCE. H. 0.105m. The inlays are of lapis lazuli and carnelian; it is partly gilded and plated with gold. |
 |
| PHOENICIAN. New York, MMA. Romantic exoticism, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style: note the "Tutankhamen proportions" of the figure and the type of sandals. From the Assyrian palace at Nimrud. 9 or 8 c BCE. H. 5 5/16" |
 |
| SYRIAN. London, BM. Ivory head of a woman. 750-700 BCE. H. 0.044m. The eyes, with equally curved upper and lower rims and a drilled dot in the center, the round cheeks, the shape of the ears, and the rendering of the hair are all Syrian--nothing Egyptianizing about this. |
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
ALT-SYRIEN
The Difficult Definition of "Syrian": It was never a single ethnicity.
 |
| Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al). Orthostat with a sub-Hittite warrior or god. |
 |
| PHOENICIAN. New York, MMA. Romantic exoticism, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style: note the "Tutankhamen proportions" of the figure and the type of sandals. From the Assyrian palace at Nimrud. 9 or 8 c BCE. H. 5 5/16" |
 |
| PHOENICIAN. London, BM. Ivory plaque from Assyrian palace at Nimrud. Romantic exoticism in the subject, Phoenician adaptation of late Egyptian style. 8-7 c. BCE. H. 0.105m. The inlays are of lapis lazuli and carnelian; it is partly gilded and plated with gold. |
 |
| Berlin, StM. Zincirli (Sam'al), time of King Barrakub, ca. 720s BCE. Detail of the Aramaean princess on her grave stele. Notice her rosette jewelry (typical) and her Phrygian-type (remarkable) dress pin. |
 |
| SYRIAN. London, BM. Ivory head of a woman. 750-700 BCE. H. 0.044m. The eyes, with equally curved upper and lower rims and a drilled dot in the center, the round cheeks, the shape of the ears, and the rendering of the hair are all Syrian--nothing Egyptianizing about this. |
You can't imagine how few archaeological picture books there were in the early 1950s. I mean the kind that have adequate and correct captions, never mind that they looked like newspapaer photos. When in 1952 I took the Survey course in ancient art, the two most useful were Helmut Bossert's Alt-Kreta and Alt-Syrien. Popular accounts, themselves new, like Gods, Graves, and Scholars, were scantily illustrated and, for that matter, very generalized.
When I had been retired for several years, aware of the horrendous prices of the new textbooks and concerned for students worldwide who might not have affordable access to any orderly corpus to study, I felt that I had to offer my mid-20c (so "traditional" simply because it comprises what the University Prints offered at the Survey level, held together by my outline as free of ideology as I could make it) and offer it free of charge.
https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3192706135770676794#allposts/src=sidebar
You will notice that the posts are in reverse chronological order. The University Prints have their own captions (and some of them are very old and corrected in the accompanying texts). The images from my own teaching collection are hand-held color photos.
You can open to the Introduction page and, from the list at right, go to the page that will help you put Syria in its place in history.
http://teegeeforwhomever.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-centuries-of-reorganization.html
Saturday, April 8, 2017
An Unabashed Recommendation: Charles Peters
Wherever I picked it up (perhaps from PBS News), this recommendation of a brand-new, Random House book is my own. As usual, I downloaded it on trial (to see if it was well written!), then bought the eBook (Kindle), and, as my posts earlier this year will suggest, you will learn what I mean by "true liberal". The author is, of course, only a few years older than I am, a member of that Shirley Temple generation who has lived preserving all his marbles. His is the mindset that formed my own; he remembers what I remember (only better, because in the '70s I was in a religious order with very limited time, so that I really needed help to make continuous sense of some of that decade), and he saw it in the same light as it had been formed, basically in the 1950s in Berkeley, CA. He doesn't see FDR quite the way that textbook-formed baby-boomers do; it is part of his life and his career as a literate journalist. Jon Meacham, though, is right: until now I didn't know anything about Charles Peters.
https://www.amazon.com/We-Do-Our-Part-America-ebook/dp/B01JWDWPDK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491712454&sr=1-1&keywords=charles+peters.
In any case, it proves that my own memory and attitudes are not peculiar nor, indeed, aberrant. And it is so recent, and so thoughtful, that he even has thought through President Trump's campaign.
https://www.amazon.com/We-Do-Our-Part-America-ebook/dp/B01JWDWPDK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491712454&sr=1-1&keywords=charles+peters.
In any case, it proves that my own memory and attitudes are not peculiar nor, indeed, aberrant. And it is so recent, and so thoughtful, that he even has thought through President Trump's campaign.
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Cohen, The Life of Riley, and One's Turn in the Barrel
When I honestly recall what I knew and understood when I was a college student, I cannot despair of today's young, eagerly trying to make sense of Life. I was still reading Edna St. Vincent Millay, biographies of opera stars, and assorted novelists. I still did not know, really, how sex was done (the books that Parents Magazine had recommended to my mother...). I thought the newspapers were dumb (and they were, really) but the little map of Korea on the front page of the Berkeley Daily Gazette didn't indicate where it was. I had no TV, and when I went to my mother's there was no news on it. But would I have followed Public channels if I'd had them? And, of course, there was no Cable TV. The Voice of Firestone was still on AM radio (I had no FM) and of course nothing was in color. In compensation we had the NBC Symphony (Toscanini), the New York Philharmonic (Mitropolis, usually), and both the Metropolitan Opera and the San Francisco Opera, besides the Chicago Opera (? title?) with a speech by Col. McCormick.
That's enough to show how different things were. LP mono records were just beginning to come on the market, but most of our collection was in albums (and that is when and why we say "album"): a symphony was usually five discs, ten sides.
And so on.
But here I'm going to describe a ten-inch record of a vaudeville song. Later I bought, new or used, some vaudeville material, but the pop stuff my parents had was from their high school days and not at all indecent. I must still have "Cohen is Living the Life of Riley Now".
(1) I cannot locate the disc or the cassette taken from it, but I think it was a blue-label US Decca two-sided 10-inch disc, and I can actually recall what it sounded like, so I think it was early electric. It definitely was vaudeville, late vaudeville, and purchasable at the dime-store, not at the music library shop that sold RCA red-seal records; I got it from a bin in a secondhand store or possibly from a batch of records from someone's family attic. What is remarkable is that I cannot find it in the LOC jukebox site or anywhere in Amazon or in YouTube. Not that it is explicitly, verbally sexual. No. It is horribly Incorrect: Cohen is making out with Reilly's wife, named Molly, and they are teaching each other their food, their slang, and so forth (which serve to imply the unmentionable things they share). That's how it was. As in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn": you could take the whole family and pretend that the children didn't know what Cohen and Riley did. So I thought I'd check to see how much popular culture (most of the stage acts being Jewish or Irish in fact) dealt crudely with such crude affairs.
And I found nothing else! Not even in Eric Partridge. I only found a footnote in the 15th (centennial) Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, on p. 922, with, yes, a vaudeville show about the Life of Riley in the 1880s, followed by a slew of references to 'life of Riley' with as many variants (they are on line, svv) as for 'I used to work in Chicago' but not as rich, and, yes, the first ones British and all in the same spirit as old Punch jokes, with their Tenniel-style stereotype of an Irish man. That is, crude (and unprintable today) but not blatantly sexual: my phono record is at least two generations later and New York rather than London. Does anyone else know this NYC recording?
(2) Just as blue-collar families took the whole family to shows in eastern cities, unless a grandmother was available to babysit, so when I started in art school, on a scholarship in 1952, my coeval fellow students were far more knowing and certainly less inexperienced than I was, but though protective and eager to show me a San Francisco, that of the Beat Generation in galleries and coteries that are now famous, that my mother's employment as a club vocalist for soldiers and sailors, though hinted at at home (like my father's stories from the Hunter's Point shipyards) also were unaware of. Some of them did have signs saying "Off Limits to Servicemen". Only once (and, after all, I was still far under age for any bar), did they take me to one of these and they made the regular customers assume I was someone's little sister, but we all hung out at the same cheap eateries and bookstores, such as City Lights, wherever someone's pictures were hung. And back in our neighborhoods and in the studio classes they told me who slept with whom and who wouldn't speak to each other. And they told me, when I asked, what homosexuals did. I guarantee you, my family (I no longer lived with them, since there was an addiction problem there) did not know what they did. I must tell you that the class distinction between folks who who did things they couldn't or wouldn't name and those who could and would talk and write about what they did not do (and, as I said, if you were young and inexperienced, one's friends shielded you from doing or being used). This seems, today, an odd way of talking. Yet, until a decade ago when I retired from teaching, it still seemed to me that I could tell which students (freshmen) were still shielded and which probably were not. Not that it mattered.
The only reason for mentioning this is that one of my homosexual friends told me a lot of his favorite jokes, including one about an ocean-going ship of hard-up sailors, who might be introduced to the Barrel. I forget the mechanics involved, but the punchline was, when a new crew-member asked if he could have its use on a given weekend, he was informed, no, that was his night in the barrel. I couldn't imagine how this joke made sense unless both guys were katapygon, a word I'd just learned from a Greek vase inscription. I assumed, further, that this joke belonged to homosexual society. Funny, you say, what one remembers. Indeed. But when on MSNBC someone wrote a tweet, addressing Mr. Podesta, that next it would be HIS turn "in the barrel", guys younger than me knew that to be "in the barrel" (so not privy to jokes left over from WWII in the Pacific) meant that taking one's turn willy-nilly was nasty and unpleasant. Getting the point of genital humor is, after all, universal? Locker room humor... Our President's social past, admittedly, I decided, probably was not exceptional, though letting it be recorded certainly was imprudent. I mean, half a century later someone still cherished a recording.
(3) Since then, I have continued reading about the scandals in international banking / investing. Are any of the large institutions not scandalous? How does one get stupendously rich? The studies I have read, at UBS and Deutsche Bank, just to name two, are hair-raising. No wonder it seems impossible to know how much one did or did not pay to the IRS. No wonder, if one's President does not want to put up with publicity on Fifth Avenue or a former DC main post office, one may have a whole remodeled floor of an uninhabitable tower at Baku in Azerbaijan, managed by his daughter. Not that I know it firsthand. Only, Adam Davidson's long article, The New Yorker, March 13, pp. 48, ff. (and now he's a staff writer, too), is not only hard to put down and very hard to dismiss and awfully coherent. Now I had to give in and subscribe on line to The New Yorker. Having read it since the 50s and still missing the bloopers at the bottom of the back page, it was more than my old eyes could take to read it every week. And I was astonished that ALT+F, but spelled out in full and freely, was now, especially in Reviews, abundant. I feel much better having its company in this world. But you'll have to read it yourself; I won't be anybody's press secretary.
P.S. Originally I had been struck by the preponderance of Irish names in the Trump cabinet and staff, but I couldn't find any explanation for it and even began to think that it might be illusory. But that was why I had headed this Post with Life of Riley.
That's enough to show how different things were. LP mono records were just beginning to come on the market, but most of our collection was in albums (and that is when and why we say "album"): a symphony was usually five discs, ten sides.
And so on.
But here I'm going to describe a ten-inch record of a vaudeville song. Later I bought, new or used, some vaudeville material, but the pop stuff my parents had was from their high school days and not at all indecent. I must still have "Cohen is Living the Life of Riley Now".
(1) I cannot locate the disc or the cassette taken from it, but I think it was a blue-label US Decca two-sided 10-inch disc, and I can actually recall what it sounded like, so I think it was early electric. It definitely was vaudeville, late vaudeville, and purchasable at the dime-store, not at the music library shop that sold RCA red-seal records; I got it from a bin in a secondhand store or possibly from a batch of records from someone's family attic. What is remarkable is that I cannot find it in the LOC jukebox site or anywhere in Amazon or in YouTube. Not that it is explicitly, verbally sexual. No. It is horribly Incorrect: Cohen is making out with Reilly's wife, named Molly, and they are teaching each other their food, their slang, and so forth (which serve to imply the unmentionable things they share). That's how it was. As in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn": you could take the whole family and pretend that the children didn't know what Cohen and Riley did. So I thought I'd check to see how much popular culture (most of the stage acts being Jewish or Irish in fact) dealt crudely with such crude affairs.
And I found nothing else! Not even in Eric Partridge. I only found a footnote in the 15th (centennial) Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, on p. 922, with, yes, a vaudeville show about the Life of Riley in the 1880s, followed by a slew of references to 'life of Riley' with as many variants (they are on line, svv) as for 'I used to work in Chicago' but not as rich, and, yes, the first ones British and all in the same spirit as old Punch jokes, with their Tenniel-style stereotype of an Irish man. That is, crude (and unprintable today) but not blatantly sexual: my phono record is at least two generations later and New York rather than London. Does anyone else know this NYC recording?
(2) Just as blue-collar families took the whole family to shows in eastern cities, unless a grandmother was available to babysit, so when I started in art school, on a scholarship in 1952, my coeval fellow students were far more knowing and certainly less inexperienced than I was, but though protective and eager to show me a San Francisco, that of the Beat Generation in galleries and coteries that are now famous, that my mother's employment as a club vocalist for soldiers and sailors, though hinted at at home (like my father's stories from the Hunter's Point shipyards) also were unaware of. Some of them did have signs saying "Off Limits to Servicemen". Only once (and, after all, I was still far under age for any bar), did they take me to one of these and they made the regular customers assume I was someone's little sister, but we all hung out at the same cheap eateries and bookstores, such as City Lights, wherever someone's pictures were hung. And back in our neighborhoods and in the studio classes they told me who slept with whom and who wouldn't speak to each other. And they told me, when I asked, what homosexuals did. I guarantee you, my family (I no longer lived with them, since there was an addiction problem there) did not know what they did. I must tell you that the class distinction between folks who who did things they couldn't or wouldn't name and those who could and would talk and write about what they did not do (and, as I said, if you were young and inexperienced, one's friends shielded you from doing or being used). This seems, today, an odd way of talking. Yet, until a decade ago when I retired from teaching, it still seemed to me that I could tell which students (freshmen) were still shielded and which probably were not. Not that it mattered.
The only reason for mentioning this is that one of my homosexual friends told me a lot of his favorite jokes, including one about an ocean-going ship of hard-up sailors, who might be introduced to the Barrel. I forget the mechanics involved, but the punchline was, when a new crew-member asked if he could have its use on a given weekend, he was informed, no, that was his night in the barrel. I couldn't imagine how this joke made sense unless both guys were katapygon, a word I'd just learned from a Greek vase inscription. I assumed, further, that this joke belonged to homosexual society. Funny, you say, what one remembers. Indeed. But when on MSNBC someone wrote a tweet, addressing Mr. Podesta, that next it would be HIS turn "in the barrel", guys younger than me knew that to be "in the barrel" (so not privy to jokes left over from WWII in the Pacific) meant that taking one's turn willy-nilly was nasty and unpleasant. Getting the point of genital humor is, after all, universal? Locker room humor... Our President's social past, admittedly, I decided, probably was not exceptional, though letting it be recorded certainly was imprudent. I mean, half a century later someone still cherished a recording.
(3) Since then, I have continued reading about the scandals in international banking / investing. Are any of the large institutions not scandalous? How does one get stupendously rich? The studies I have read, at UBS and Deutsche Bank, just to name two, are hair-raising. No wonder it seems impossible to know how much one did or did not pay to the IRS. No wonder, if one's President does not want to put up with publicity on Fifth Avenue or a former DC main post office, one may have a whole remodeled floor of an uninhabitable tower at Baku in Azerbaijan, managed by his daughter. Not that I know it firsthand. Only, Adam Davidson's long article, The New Yorker, March 13, pp. 48, ff. (and now he's a staff writer, too), is not only hard to put down and very hard to dismiss and awfully coherent. Now I had to give in and subscribe on line to The New Yorker. Having read it since the 50s and still missing the bloopers at the bottom of the back page, it was more than my old eyes could take to read it every week. And I was astonished that ALT+F, but spelled out in full and freely, was now, especially in Reviews, abundant. I feel much better having its company in this world. But you'll have to read it yourself; I won't be anybody's press secretary.
P.S. Originally I had been struck by the preponderance of Irish names in the Trump cabinet and staff, but I couldn't find any explanation for it and even began to think that it might be illusory. But that was why I had headed this Post with Life of Riley.
Monday, February 6, 2017
Liberality
Liberality
I didn't mean to follow up on my last Post, which I wrote deliberately very promptly, so as not to hear others' opinions.
But I just was badly frightened by BookTV which I've listened to almost every weekend since the 1990s, even when it covered authors far to the left or to the right of Brian Lamb or his successors.
For three hours Nick Adams said whatever he wanted in depth, though his depth was not quite such as I'd call it. Thing is, I watch Fox News channel only for major sports events (I had just turned off the Super Bowl). I only knew Bill O'Reilly, for example, from Henry Louis Gates' genealogy program. Had just, unhappily, made the on-line acquaintance of KellyAnne Conway, whom I didn't like. Anyway, now, directly following Nick Adams, I am consoled by Hugh Hewitt, who like Morning Joe is reasonable and even entertaining. Certainly reasonable (though I prefer Chris Mathews). And like Hewitt, I've been reading lots of stuff I ought to have read decades ago, but the Kindle now encourages instant purchases, and back in my graduate student years and early teaching years I had neither the money nor the time taken from publishing to gain job security (I didn't have time or shelf space. either).
Anyway, though I always voted D, I am no political fanatic. It's interesting however, now that I'm reading up on Eisenhower and the Bushes and the youth of Joseph Pulitzer has proven that American history may be wasted on kids, but Nick Adams seems to me a frightening basket case. That label shows how scary he felt to me. So bless Hugh Hewitt for consoling me.
But I have to get back to that word: liberal. Don't ask me to say what that new OED may say of it. What I say is what it HAS meant, and why it is worth considering that.
Liberality is the mentality of the freeborn, such as Romans born as freeborn children are, of famuli of patres familiarum. Of course, there were others in the household, who could work their way out of slavery: I've never been sure, in the absence of something quite like our Welfare, whether all of them were purchased persons, or in either case, they were at least indentured. They were servi, who were servili, just as the freeborn liberi were liberali. Nicely bigoted children, who might grow up to inherit or to marry their peers, could be called liberal as adults, just as servi, whom you might dislike even when they'd worked their way free, might be dismissed as servile, especially if they had bowed and scraped.
Now on BookTV Dennis Prager in his turn is heartening me even more than Hugh Hewitt did, though I'm sure, alas, that Nick Adams is awfully illiberal. But I do recommend Dennis Prager. And the ancient source of the word liberal clings happily to its etymology, even though usually it is mangled.
I didn't mean to follow up on my last Post, which I wrote deliberately very promptly, so as not to hear others' opinions.
But I just was badly frightened by BookTV which I've listened to almost every weekend since the 1990s, even when it covered authors far to the left or to the right of Brian Lamb or his successors.
For three hours Nick Adams said whatever he wanted in depth, though his depth was not quite such as I'd call it. Thing is, I watch Fox News channel only for major sports events (I had just turned off the Super Bowl). I only knew Bill O'Reilly, for example, from Henry Louis Gates' genealogy program. Had just, unhappily, made the on-line acquaintance of KellyAnne Conway, whom I didn't like. Anyway, now, directly following Nick Adams, I am consoled by Hugh Hewitt, who like Morning Joe is reasonable and even entertaining. Certainly reasonable (though I prefer Chris Mathews). And like Hewitt, I've been reading lots of stuff I ought to have read decades ago, but the Kindle now encourages instant purchases, and back in my graduate student years and early teaching years I had neither the money nor the time taken from publishing to gain job security (I didn't have time or shelf space. either).
Anyway, though I always voted D, I am no political fanatic. It's interesting however, now that I'm reading up on Eisenhower and the Bushes and the youth of Joseph Pulitzer has proven that American history may be wasted on kids, but Nick Adams seems to me a frightening basket case. That label shows how scary he felt to me. So bless Hugh Hewitt for consoling me.
But I have to get back to that word: liberal. Don't ask me to say what that new OED may say of it. What I say is what it HAS meant, and why it is worth considering that.
Liberality is the mentality of the freeborn, such as Romans born as freeborn children are, of famuli of patres familiarum. Of course, there were others in the household, who could work their way out of slavery: I've never been sure, in the absence of something quite like our Welfare, whether all of them were purchased persons, or in either case, they were at least indentured. They were servi, who were servili, just as the freeborn liberi were liberali. Nicely bigoted children, who might grow up to inherit or to marry their peers, could be called liberal as adults, just as servi, whom you might dislike even when they'd worked their way free, might be dismissed as servile, especially if they had bowed and scraped.
Now on BookTV Dennis Prager in his turn is heartening me even more than Hugh Hewitt did, though I'm sure, alas, that Nick Adams is awfully illiberal. But I do recommend Dennis Prager. And the ancient source of the word liberal clings happily to its etymology, even though usually it is mangled.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Democracy
The closing address.
I just listened to President Obama's address from Chicago.
l have to say, unabashedly, that I believe every word of it and its sum. It is why I voted for him before, and even more after all he's been through. My Pacific president, but not just that. Now I can't refrain from saying so. A great president. A great American. Not that other forms of constitutional government (such as monarchies) can't be great. I no longer am so unhappy as I was just a week ago.
I just listened to President Obama's address from Chicago.
l have to say, unabashedly, that I believe every word of it and its sum. It is why I voted for him before, and even more after all he's been through. My Pacific president, but not just that. Now I can't refrain from saying so. A great president. A great American. Not that other forms of constitutional government (such as monarchies) can't be great. I no longer am so unhappy as I was just a week ago.
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
A brief note on the prefix 'alt-'
The other day, failing to notice that the blog on which I'd left a comment (and now can't even find) about "alt-", is puzzling: unless it means nearly the same as "neo-" did several years ago in political discussions, it would be a truncated form, as "lumis-" and "paci-" frequently are and as such easily confused with the German "alt-", meaning old, and too similar to Latin "altus", referring to height but doubly unclear when truncated.
The author of the now-defunct blog post explained with several current, published examples that it means alternate or alternative. My comment suggested that between German and Latin look-alikes, familiar to older readers, this confusing one should be abandoned.
Then, one of those dawnings that happen when one is about to fall asleep: it's not "alt-" but ALT on the PC keyboard. And as such it may be useful, to rid us of those strings of asterisks or hyphens ; it would be unambiguous when undergraduates or political candidates or comedians used words that networks bleep and the print media replace with those century-old asterisks, thus: ALT+F, et al.
The author of the now-defunct blog post explained with several current, published examples that it means alternate or alternative. My comment suggested that between German and Latin look-alikes, familiar to older readers, this confusing one should be abandoned.
Then, one of those dawnings that happen when one is about to fall asleep: it's not "alt-" but ALT on the PC keyboard. And as such it may be useful, to rid us of those strings of asterisks or hyphens ; it would be unambiguous when undergraduates or political candidates or comedians used words that networks bleep and the print media replace with those century-old asterisks, thus: ALT+F, et al.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Paperbacks, eBooks, and Me
At the University of UC Corner
Originally UC Corner on Telegraph Avenue was an international newsstand; that was why it had clocks on the Durant Avenue side window with all the time zones; indeed, it did still have international papers and magazines through at least most of my student years. But it became the best stocked and best organized of the stores of paperbacks and then of LP records.
Of course, there had always been paperbacks, but they were all pulp, such as crime and other non-literary, and one called them Pocket Books, as A Pocket Book of Boners. The exception was Penguin, the categories color coded: turquoise blue for non-fiction, dark green for mysteries, brown for Greek classics, purple for Latin classics, orange (?) for Scandinavian, orange for, well, respectable fiction, and others—a wonderful system. Then, of a sudden alongside the rows of Penguin paperbacks on the shelves of UC Corner, there were Anchor Paperbacks from Doubleday, almost all of them of permanent value and, one noticed, most of them pre-War, out of print. Not just otherwise unavailable but great. At the back of one of the first that I got, Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, was a list of those available in 1957. My first paperback was a turquoise Penguin, Civilization by Clive Bell. I got it at the little bookstore of the College of Arts and Crafts (N.B., before I'd even heard of his famous sister in law). For several years his little essay was like a bible to me! But my systematic acquisition of quality paperbacks began when I moved to Berkeley and to the University of California. I searched out one after the other and read them eagerly. Some of them have been acquired now by the New York Review of Books, such as Lionel Trilling's, but more were such as Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages and before long, when Harper (Torchbooks) joined the movement, E. R. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. By then my mentor professor had also had me read Virginia Woolf's First and Second Reader. Needless to say, by the time that I graduated with a BA in Art, specializing in History of Art (for that was how it was administered then), I had worked my way through college, and mostly working in the Loan Department of the UC Library, with a good-looking transcript, yes, but also virtually with an extra major in all the subjects I hadn't been able to take for credit. I did have, by the time I finished the requirements for the PhD, almost a real complete major in Classics. Being able to read Latin and Greek, I see in retrospect, was probably the most useful thing I did, apart from art and architecture per se.
I'll try to concentrate in this blog on some of the value of all the reading that, in retrospect, I see that Berkeley gave me, specifically the south of campus (now utterly changed, since the 1960s and 1970s) alongTelegraph Avenue. Everything I stole time to read added up to another education in its own right, and it centered on the jam-packed but by no means junky establishment of UC Corner. By the 1980s that was no longer what it had been, and, if the internet serves me aright, today it no longer exists at all.
Today, indeed with a touch of presbyopeia and living hundreds of miles from Berkeley, anyway, it is Amazon that feeds my hunger for self-education; another revolution has replaced the paperback revolution as such. That is good, because the Telegraph Avenue with its UC Corner that I took for granted would exist wherever there was a university no longer exists for avid students hardly anywhere. Yet so long as the avid learners exist, well, if Erich Auerbach could write Mimesis in wartime Istanbul, young scholars will take advantage of what we have now.
P.S. The choice of a picture for the cover of the original paperback (and I have in this case treasured the original) is wonderful. It is a detail from the North Porch of Chartres and the sculptor has found the means of showing God envisaging the creature that in his love he is making in his own image.
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Latinity
Deplorable Atrocity
I like to listen to interviews on C-Span's Book TV, but sometimes I wonder whether the interviewer was aware of what he or she said and, even more, whether author, whose new book was in his hand, had had the services of a competent editor; it seems very often that he hadn't. In any case he was unconscious of the effect of his (or her) speech on the meaning of what he meant to say. For example, one author habitually ended most sentences with "etc.", over and over, as if periods or any other meaningful punctuation were unavailable. And he gesticulated a lot with his hands, though without any apparent special emphasis. If he writes as he speaks, reading his book will be a dreary, irritating experience.
I started fussing this way after Hillary Clinton was made to regret saying "deplorable". I understood her meaning that the positions held by her opponents made her unhappy. But commentators of both parties seemed unanimous in accusing her of calling him deplorable. First, her syntax made clear that she meant that the state of discussion in the campaigns had become deplorable, and, second, that it is conditions, opinions, and the like, that are fit to make one weep.
Of course, even half a century ago (even, in fact, a whole century ago), it was emphasized that languages change, so that a Latin original might have changed its meaning. Certainly! Just as our remote ancestors who walked out of Africa had skeletons fascinatingly different from ours, both from regular evolution and in response to different environments (and Dobzhansky was certainly right to go to the trouble of proving that we continue to evolve—it was less universally realized half a century ago than it is today), so, too, our speech. If not, all the ancestors of modern speakers of Romance languages would have transmitted their Latin to them unaltered. Indeed, philologists of the Enlightenment had already sorted out the descent of Indo-European tongues pretty well.
Thus, "deplorable", it seems, first came to us in its French form (though we have to rely on texts as evidence), but no matter: deplorare already meant in Latin "to weep bitterly", and Roget gives us many alternatives for use as context and style may demand, of which "lament", "bemoan", and "bewail" are only three. Now, don't let me get started on the misuse of Roget as a source of 'synonyms' to stuff into bad sentences as ornaments. It's too late now, and hardly anyone would care, but Hillary was exactly right that the level of the political exchanges last week was 'fit to make one weep'.
Atrocity is much harsher. On the News someone was trying to explain how, legally, ever since Nuremburg, acts of war, atrocities, terrorism, ... I forget the fourth one, ought not to be used interchangeably, just for emphasis. I do agree that they ought to be used thoughtfully, but he did not succeed in enlightening me.
Anyway, atrox is a more specialized and interesting word, even having a possible Greek cognate, and having the same stem as the ater of atrium, originally the sooty, ashy, fire pit in the center of the primitive round hut. Anyhow, in classical Latin atrox, atrocis (3rd decl. adj.) means 'cruel', 'fierce', and also 'savage' and 'brutal'. That last may suggest the bridge to the primitive fire pit? It is not so commonplace a word as deplorare.
For that reason, 'atrocious' seems to have entered modern English, like most of the 'worsened words' (those that have been demoted to cheap overstatement) to mean, colloquially, 'very bad', 'abominable', as it appears in the margin of a student paper or in an impatient book review of a lousy novel. You can look up 'abominable' for yourselves.
Thursday, September 1, 2016
Occasional Flowers
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| One of the occasional gifts of wind and/or rain |
In the course of thirty years, this almost spectacular lily (?) flower has come up overnight, bloomed (lasting several days), and disappeared . Once a friend identified it until (unless) it came again late in summer. But after my Picasa files lost their classification, of my own devising, among so many thousand images I cannot find the earlier one, in whose caption ("title") or File Info (not come over from Photoshop!) the data for this plant is lurking. What is worse, I cannot find it in Wikipedia.
Yet these are seen all over town in Baton Rouge, LA.
The current snapshots were taken on the last day of August. I opened the back door to feed the cat, and, like red lamps that had shot up overnight, there they were, and I hastened to document them and, this time, post them in the blog, rather than just asking all my friends what they are.
I am, as you must realize, no gardener, but I am grateful for whatever I get.
And I thank anyone who can identify this (otherwise than as "firecracer") for me.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Industrial Pennsylvania
STEEL: Pittsburgh and Bethlehem in Literature
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| Walker Evans, 1935, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from hill, across cemetery, to steel mills and furnace chimneys. Large negative.
Retired persons, especially if they are not just tempted but compelled to use eBooks for their zoomable fonts, have the time and open schedules to follow ideas and motifs and recall novels and pictures that made an impression fifty and sixty years ago. Sometimes it seems that motifs recur significantly. For example, the adolescent girl, bound to become a protagonist, goes into service or takes a wearisome job, at only fourteen or so. Even Isabel Allende uses this Type and I noticed it emphasized in the campaign film as the key idea in the youth of Hillary Clinton's mother. Surely, in real life, it was not always the most important fact in a whole adolescence. To me, as I'm sure to many others, the necessity to do whatever one could find at that age was commonplace and belonged to melodrama, as in the plays produced by David Belasco. A real Girl of the Golden West, however, had plenty of self respect. Early in this blog I wrote about San Pablo Poultry Company; I rather gloried in it.
Immediately I remembered Mary in Marcia Davenport's The Valley of Decision. This novel made a great impression on me, though I never saw the movie. I remembered the steel mill at night (though the photo that I chose, and it's only a little less than a decade earlier than the novel, and is of Bethlehem rather than Pittsburg), which is wonderfully described. Ever since wherever I was traveling in the vicinity of steel-working I thought of Davenport's verbal picture. I know that she did live in Pittsburg before writing about it. She may not have been our greatest novelist, but her firsthand knowledge and sound research are pervasive in this book as in her first success, Mozart, and in her operatic novel, Of Lena Geyer (her mother being the soprano Alma Gluck). But I need the electronic edition to re-read so long a novel, and having read The Valley of Decision while myself a teenager, and before I even was self-supporting, apart from the steel industry, the parts that remain vivid are the love interest! I am certain that Davenport did all her homework, but the Kindle, for the first time, cannot help me. I don't know why it is available only in hard copy, since it is, at least, as good as Gone With the Wind, and far more valuable for all its background. I'm sure it's worth reading, though I've moved on to George F. Kennan and Julian Barnes, which are really more rewarding! But have you noticed, e.g. in the 1930s, that there seem to be 'meaningful' recordings, usually Gramophone Society, and usually of Bach? And I do think that the Poor Little Match Girl stereotype in political footage has been overdone (not that I hold it against the candidates themselves). |
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Again, fixation on Light as the Photographic Medium
Three of a handful taken the morning of August 23, 2016
These are not pictures, such as would illustrate a catalogue, of cheap porch chairs, but of the light that the late morning sunlight happened to create, so that I can only apologize for the burnout at lower left of the second one. Photography has been for me, from my first permission to work, under the red safelight, over the development trays in my father's darkroom, the art whose medium is light itself, just as its early practitioners realized in calling it Photography. The objects themselves are not its interest, just as line drawings in an early mail-order catalogue are not at all the same thing as drawings and prints made in their own right are not the same thing.
If I were a better photographer, let alone a great one, the images would be more interesting—but I continue to take them anyway, the reason for continuing to own cameras.
The light was especially welcome, though, after a solid week of rain and the dreadful flooding (but not where I live: I had done my homework before buying a house; no house in Louisiana "lives on a hill" but, as everywhere, it is wise to live in the oldest neighborhoods).
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