Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
At least if your musical tastes are as lowbrow as mine (it's a brain chemistry thing, I swear!), the "suggested next video" that appear in the personal playlist feature was an exercise in self-abnegation. I would play the Silencer' version of "Wild Mountain Thyme," which does speak to me, and after a few choices out of my frequently-viewed list, there's Ella Roberts' "Loch Lomond." The self disgust came from thinking, "OMG, the AI thinks I like this shite!" The despair it provoked about the way the world was going came from the fact that the AI couldn't learn, no matter how many times I stopped and refreshed at the first note of Ella Roberts' overblown Gaelic kitsch, it just could not learn. Nowadays it gives me this, which is still not the version of "Northwest Passage" I ever search for, but is at least in the first place not bad, and in the second, one that leans into the moment. (Future readers: You may not believe that Donald Trump managed to shine up Canadian nationalism, but trust me. It happened.)
Maryland has an NHS designation for "Historic Inns on the National Road." This is the Tomlinson Inn at Grantsville. Built around 1818. James K. Polk slept here! By Generic1139 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=21602442
All that being said, "Loch Lomond" is so popular for good reasons. "You'll take the high road/I'll take the low road" is a lyric meditation on mortality. The whole thing is genuinely affecting. It's sad that it has to be yoked to young love, Culloden, the Rising of '45, the Highland Clearances, but now in the fashion of the Internet I will turn it on its head and talk about high roads, low roads, the '45, and the National Road that the Federalists built from Cumberland, Maryland, over the Cumberland Narrows to Redstone Creek and on to Vandalia, Illinois via Wheeling, West Virginia, in way of having an argument about whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to fund "internal improvements," as opposed to lying down on the (privately built, toll-gated) freeway to die.
Thank you again for your hospitality, which I am sorry I am so late, but things in London have been hectic. You may have noticed from the calendar that we flew out of Montreal the day of the Comet grounding, and London was an absolute zoo when we got there. On the other hand the Azores are BEAUTIFUL, which is just as well because renting a car and touring made up for spending a week there. Or almost did, because why did there have to be an entire class of children aboard that plane? Why?
All this bad enough before the Britannia accident. And, yes, this should have been in the mail long before the first week of February, but what can I say? I've been touring James around because we've only the one car and I've had business in the counties, too trying to get the business of assorted people who were trying to move sterling into dollars ahead of the Crash of '54 and don't hold with old-fashioned surface shipping any more.
Speaking of The Organisation Man, I'd do "Little Boxes," but I've already done it, and I kind of agree with Tom Lehrer that it's the most sanctimonious song ever.
R_C_., The Oriental Club, London,
England
Dear Father:
I hope you're enjoying the Coronation. Not only am I jealous as can be, but just thinking about it has my mind turning to the madness of moving with two babies, even if it's almost two months away. In the mean time, you're missing a beautiful month in Vancouver.
I kid. Rain. Okay, it's not so bad. Somehow I've volunteered to stroll Maggie to sleep so that I can enjoy the gardens in the rain, which I am about to do as soon as I finish this. Not many young mothers do that sort of thing in this neighbourhood! Which reminds me that I am dying to ask Grace what she thinks of the birth rate numbers out of the US Census. It turns out that the wartime "baby boom" never ended. I wonder if that explains all the Park Forest-style conformity and social group think that Fortune is so upset about. Too many babies!
As February winds its way to the end, a long overdue installment in these letters. If I have any excuse at all, it is that the end (at long last) of my school days, and other momentous events, are galloping ever closer, and an intimation has been given in certain quarters that next year will be in London!
As if that were not enough, much of the month has been spent around here in high emotion as the news, mainly of Holland but also of the east of England, comes in. Amidst all the fund raising and the tears, I get the feeling that something more might be going on. Iknow that it is slightly incredible to think that a flood might accomplish what WWII did not, but there seems to be a swell of sentiment in favour of letting a few refugees into the country! (Along with an unkind suggestion in other quarters that the Dutch are among the rare few white enough to qualify.)
This one's getting a "Zombie Day" tag and rightfully so after my first week as a departmental assistant manager. On the bright side, I'm on vacation this week, so look for more and better, coming soon.
Blaise Pascal died young, only 39 years old when he went God called his wager on 19 August, 1662, a year into the personal reign of Louis XIV, eleven months after the arrest of Nicholas Fouquet, Marquis de Belle Ile and Viceroy of the Americas. Not entirely uncommonly for an old-fashioned mathematical prodigy, he was largely past active scientific work when, on 23 January, 1656, the first of the, anonymously authored Lettres provinicialesdropped. Presenting themselves as letters from a sophisticated, Paris-based Jesuit to a provincial colleague, it "humorously" attacked the purported Jesuit methods as casuistry. The sneer quotes shouldn't be taken as an attack on Pascal's comedic stylings, but rather on the impact of the First Letter on the Society of Jesus. More positively, the letter presents Jansenist soteriology, which, for those who care about such things, sounds suspiciously, or, alternatively, auspiciously Protestant. (I'm not going to get any clearer about these matters because I find Seventeenth Century theological debates and their subsequent recapitulations to be so soaked in bad faith, superficial readings that I'd just as rather not.)
There might be a lesson here to the aspiring transportation disruptor about the mixed consequences of indulging in theological and political controversy, because at the time of his death, Pascal was turning his literary profits into investment capital as the operator of one of the earliest omnibus services, a business that was regulated out of existence within twelve years of his death. He is far from the last "disruptor" we're going to hear about this week.
The lesson, if I have to spell it out, is that offending people is a bad idea when you're in business. One guy who would have been offended by the First Letter, had he lived to see it, was Isaac Jogues. The Jesuit father with the suspiciously Protestant-sounding name did not, because he had been martyred on 18 October 1646, supposedly at the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, at the current location of Auriesville, New York. It is likely that this was not the precise site of the martyrdom, and "Ossernenon" is problematic, too, but it is not in doubt that Jogues was tortured to death only 40 miles from Albany.
In any case, the holy saint and martyr could look down from Heaven to see the omnibus fleet pulled from the road for reasons of class anxiety.
(The Canaries have a great deal of volcanic tuft that makes it relatively easy to dig out a cave sanctuary or necropolis, something that old time Canarians loved to do.)
The Omicron Variant isn't just a rejected Michael Crichton manuscript. It's also eaten my weekend! But I did want to post something today, and given the rate of typos in just the paragraph I've already written, it sure better be low effort. Fortunately, there's an interesting question that has been weighing on me. It's even tangentially related to an epidemic of swabbed rapid tests! Have we caught up with the ancestral genetics of the island Atlantic now that everyone is asking 23andMe to do their genealogy homework for them? We haven't.
As predicted, the Communist advances in Annam and Korea turned on a dime just as soon as flying weather improved, which just goes to show that this is the Air Age. I will explain in person next week when I arrive via Canadian Pacific from Hong Kong, if Hong Kong is still there when I leave and we avoid any inconvenient mountains on the way. (It's ocean, it shouldn't be hard, but you never know.)
In a spirit of pure academic inquiry, I am going to note here that I rode up Anarchist Summit Thursday morning with my bike badly out of whack for various reasons. It was in much the same condition on Monday when I summitted the Alison Pass on the Hope-Princeton less the last hill before Sunshine Valley. All of this is important research, and in no way humble bragging.
In the same spirit of data collection, a shout out to the Alpine Motel of Keremeos for having good internet and pretty much good everything considering that it is a family-run small motel, your only option in the other Windy City. Ramada Inns are also nice, although you'd expect that. At the price, any complaints I have about the Boundary Creek in Greenwood have to be set aside considering the effort the new owners are putting into it. It must be something to show up to do a painting contract and end up owning a motel, instead. On the other hand, one thumb down to the Adriatic in Osoyoos, which could have viable Internet at the price, but which is in a late stage of dissolution due to the decrepitude of the owners, and two down for the Manning Park Lodge, which hasn't a shadow of an excuse.
So Alex turns us up an Independentarticle on ongoing excavations at the islet of Dhaskalio in the Cyclades, which turns out to be a semi-retirement project for the indomitable Colin Renfrew. The Independent makes the point, not brought out in at least the extract of the World Archaeologyarticle, that a monumental building phase at Dhaskalio, a so-called Greek pyramid, in fact rising tiers of marble buildings on a pyramid-shaped islet, occurred within a century of the Pyramids, Stonehenge, "first Mesopotamian kingdoms," and the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation. I have reservations about the Mesopotamian angle and can't even begin with the IVC, but they do seem to buttress a case that checks out for Stonehenge, the Pyramids and Dhaskalio.
Since Renfrew has a monopoly on explanation/interpretation of the site, I'll start with Dhaskalio, whttps://www.world-archaeology.com/features/dhaskalio/here he adduces a two-stage history. In the first, about 2700BC, people began travelling to Dhaskalio's parent islet of Keros and depositing broken statuary and other durable artefacts at what was probably then an isthmus between Keros and Dhaskalio. Renfrew's account rests heavily on the presumed lack of everyday reason to travel to these barren islets, at which I bristle slightly. I assume that archaeozoology has ruled out a nesting area or a seal rookery, but would like that confirmed somewhere. Beginning slightly later, copper ore was brought to a windblasted beach on Dhaskalio for smelting, and about 2500 the political landscape of tiered marble buildings had emerged, while deposit activity at the isthmus tailed off and came to an end.
There are obvious parallels to the Stonehenge 3, II stage besides the Independent calling our attention to it. (If you'r wondering, I am absolutely begging off any attempt to delve into the Giza site. That's way too much work for the ninety minutes I have to kill before it is time to start getting ready for the road again.) Deposit activity doesn't come to an end, nor does building begin in 3, II; but the scale of the latter is immensely increased.
Synchronicity across vast distances speaks to something more than coincidence, and, of course, the Stone Age/Bronze Age has been an important transition between eras for as long as we've had eras. I know that it is fashionable to denounce it as an artefact, but it is such an enduring explanatory mechanism that I am inclined to promote it to the status of Something That Actually Happened. Maybe that's just the prejudice of the historian of technology, but I think I have more than insulated myself from accusations of androcentric focus by singling out the role of jewelry, detergents, textiles,. You know. Girl stuff.
So let's specific some kind of techno-cultural transformation that's sweeping the planet. (Wool textiles, I say.) Where do we go from here? Well, to the eve-of-Brexit anxiety that is sweeping the new field of genetic archaeology, with a "population replacement" model of social and cultural change taking hold of efforts to explain the British scene.
The dominant picture of Europe's genetic history (Y-group) is that everyone looks more-or-less like their neighbours, and the Scandinavians look a bit inbred.
More detail only refines that. However, if you look at the scanty remains of ancient Britons (and, to be fair, we have a lot of them. It's not like basing the "Ancient North Eurasian" ancestry that can be traced from Ireland to South America, and, so far as I know, Chad as well, on a single boy who died near Lake Baikal 24,000 years ago.) it turns out that some kind of population replacement, to include genocide perpetuated by trans-Channel foreigners, occurred in Britain at both the beginning of the Neolithic and of the Bronze Age.
For the purposes of this post, that means that incoming "Beaker" people arrived, exterminated (not really; the share of Neolithic ancestry rises over time, indicating that a population survived and intermixed gradually, but don't tell Nigel! [pdf]), took over Stonehenge, and promptly dressed the place up a bit --in a way that seems pretty respectful of existing henge and cursus traditions. From tumuli to roundabouts, the Brits seem to love their circles. If that's not weird enough, the cattle barbecued at the adjacent work/party site of Durrington Wells includes a significant number of animals --pigs as well as cattle-- from the Scottish Highlands.
Skepticism about long distance trade and transhumant pastoralism aside, this is pretty striking evidence of the power of cult to unite the island of Britain, and of the ability of incomers to assimilate into and improve upon existing cultural practices.
Ain't no politics round here any more than there's tourism promotion. Try the steak next time you're in the Thyme And Plate in Grand Forks, B.C.
This comes to you by the hand of Willie Yeoh, because he does a fine "Wa Yeoh," complete with a real Fu Manchu goatee and a kris that he really has used to dispatch a Japanese soldier and perhaps a rubber planter a time or two. More importantly, if he fails to intimidate, he has quite the trick for smuggling a .25 automatic into meetings like yours. If the other side does cause a breakdown in negotiations, Willie has ended them before.
Uncle George will give you an oral briefing on our discoveries in respect to third parties that you might use one way or another. Suffice it to say that, as far as the ex-President goes, we found a ledger detailing the Hoover payments in Pegler's lawyer's office, but not whatever material Pegler was holding over him. We have a lively suspicion about where it might be, but none of us has the stomach to torture an eighty-year-old, or the granddaughter, who is probably holding them. She has three children under four! I sincerely hope that you will be able to bluff Hoover into thinking that we are in some kind of "mutual destruction" situation. Uncle George's information, which obviously must be kept discrete, will perhaps create the impression that all of the blackmail archives are in our hands, and not a single self-destructive letter by a perverted old drunk.
Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie
PS: I am feeling really uncomfortable about Mr. Flynn paying a blackmailer, as opposed to being in jail. Is there perhaps something that can be done?
You know the story: The world is without form, water fills the void; Pregnant girl falls from the sky; Turtle saves her by bearing her on her back; Muskrat dives to the bottom and brings up mud to build an island on top of Turtle's back; Girl gives birth to the ancestor[s] of the human race. I think this is the story behind James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, but the important point is that the picture is of Rita Moreno playing Hetty Hutter, and carrying Killdeer, the American Excalibur.
The moral of the story is that Rita Moreno was a very attractive woman in her time; and also that I need to talk about rafts underneath the world. Really! This isn't my obsession with James Fenimore Cooper! It's an important bit of the history of technology that I have inadvertently exposed to the light in the last month of postblogging, and I'm actually quite excited about it because it might shed some light on something that I've been wondering about on my commute, ever since I began doing the part in Vancouver on a bike in 2014.
Most publicity shots from Duel in the Sun feature Jane Russell's boobs against a backdrop of hay. Jennifer Jones isthis blog's Queen of May for 2018. (Thanks to all the gals who came out: Also, if it comes up, the blog's choice is distinct from the author's.)
And this image of a British wildflower meadow is cheerfully scraped from a "How to" article in the Daily Telegraph explaining how to go about creating your own wildflower meadow on a few hectares of your land for which you can't think of any other use. But setting my clumsy attempt to start class warfare aside (we're all in this together, you know!), let's just stop and meditate on spring and flowers and fertility and the mysterious way in which they're connected, deep in the human psyche.
Done? Enough meditation! What about scythes?
Er, yeah. No, I mean like this,
as it turns out that haymowing re-enactors are seriously a thing these days. The idea of dueling with scythes isn't completely preposterous, given that the fifty-centimeter-plus long scythe is the second largest Iron Age toolblade after the sword, and your typical scythe saw fan order of magnitude more use during its lifetime than your typical sword. That quietly and unobtrusively puts it in position to claim the title of apex technology for hand blacksmithing, which makes it all the more remarkable that its history is so obscure. I do have some results to report, or I would be talking about my recent correspondence with Dietrich Eckhardt, but I want to be brief, since, in pursuing the subject, I was sidetracked into buying Manning's "major new history of economic life in the Mediterranean in the Iron Age," and Marc van de Mierop's Philosophy before Greece, and may eventually have something to report.
The argument here is that the fall of the Roman Empire (and by that I mean the crisis of the Third Century) is linked too, but not caused by, the breakdown of long-distance transhumant pastoral agriculture. It's not a new argument, in general, but the particular sequence of events I am pushing is perhaps somewhat novel. More importantly, the evidence to support the argument is accumulating. Which is why this post --apart from my needing a break from more ambitious projects.
Night crew rotation! (Semi-autobiographical comment on the persistent labour shortage-that's-somehow-not-a-shortage.)
First of all, obviously long-distance transhumant agriculture is primordial. Take the "agriculture" out, and we humans have been doing it for a very long time, because it's just another way of saying that they're following the herds, which organise themselves for "transhumance" perfectly well without human intervention.
(This is where I link to the "Buffalo Trace" that became America's first interstate, and invited everyone to wonder at the depths and mysteries of the founding of the United States, at the first glimmers of the written record.)
Here's a picture of the sheep moving out of a paddock on a big Australian "station," as they call them, because Australians speak English funny.
The condition of the top cover in the foreground demonstrates why you would want to transhumant. Ah ha, you may say! Isn't transhumant herding between high, mountain pastures, and low ones. Aren't we all romantic about it. Didn't the Silencers have an inadvertent hit when they recorded a rock version of the classic Scottish folk air, Wild Mountain Thyme? Why, yes, they did, and yes, it sometimes is.
Lots of caption here, because credit where credit is due. This is Abdelratif Reda's fresh goat cheese, served with apricot jam on a bagel in the medina of Rabat, Morocco.. The photograph is by Eloise Schieferdecker (imputed c. 2015), and appears in an article by Zoë Hu, running in the online lifestyles magazine Zester Daily
Did Rome have a crisis? The basic outline of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is Decadent First Century-Golden Second Century-Third Century Crisis-Fourth Century Dominate-Fifth Century Fall-Sixth Century-
Cliche, but good point. Let's just stay the heck away from the Byzantine Empire or whatever it is.
The confusing thing here is that the crisis comes in the middle. There's an elaborate theory of politics in which governments pass through cycles of development. Domitian's government is a "Dominate," replacing an earlier "Principate." Yes, the restored empire is a different, and lesser thing, rather like the old Chinese Western and Eastern dynasties, but it is restored.
In this analysis, it is all about politics. A number of specific factors make the Empire politically infeasible: the government is badly structured; The location of the Roman capital is bad; it is overspending to buy army support; changing elites mean that new groups will have to seize control of the imperial office, whatever the short term cost of political stability. Etc. Not a single mention of cream cheese for breakfast!
Since I am on record as arguing that the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west is due to a breakdown in long-distance trade causing a shortage of money and local deflation in the far west, it might be time to go through the long, long list of emperors and usurpers and highlight the factors that, I think, make a purely political explanation inadequate.
Those are some happy elephants, because Tirupati deluxe bran is the best bran.
iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, /panem et circenses
--Juvenal, Satire X. (Note that like any Nineteenth Century parliamentarian on his feet to deliver a zinger on the Balkan Question, I've cut and pasted out of Wikipedia.)
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."
- Elmer T. Peterson. In this week of so much going astray down south, the fact that the nominee for American Secretary of Labour has riffed on the idea that democracies are destroyed by social welfare benefits ("bread and circusses") might easily take a back seat to more pressing concerns about his boss. But! I'll start with the attribution, which is a spanking new, modern thing for which we can thank Google, even if my store of gratitude to Google is being drawn down by the gradual disintegration of Google Books, although that's a rant for another day. Traditinally, we see this quote attributed to much more famous people than Elmer T. Peterson, and he himself began this tradition by attributing it to a a minor Nineteenth Century thinker with a funny name. He did so in a 1951 letter to the editor published in a minor Oklahoman paper, which raises the question of how it entered the public record so quickly. Peterson himself was a writer, but his literary record [pdf] is pretty second rate, and it would be surprising if many people took him very seriously. "Alexander Fraser Tyttle," on the other hand, is someone to reckon with! I suppose.
Perhaps Peterson noticed the general shortage of actual examples of welfare payments destroying democracies. After all, he may have had the Juvenal "bread and circusses" line in mind, and perhaps even has some recollection of being rather brusquely informed that Juvenal came a full century after the Republic. Perhaps, although this is asking a lot of the basically optimistic mind of the early 1950s, which feared only communist roentgens, someone even pointed out that rich tax evaders have a better record of destroying regimes than poor handout beneficiaries.
This is what makes the Roman example so handy, in that rich people might evade taxes and even attend gladiatorial games, but they certainly do not stand in bread lines. Not that Peterson needed to explore things very deeply. Everyone knows that the ancient Romans gave out a corn dole to the urban poor of Rome. But!
Someone had to go and make Rimmer an admiral, didn't they?
Unlike apparently every other person on Earth, I've really got no problem with the Empire building one death star after another, and getting them blown up, one after another. It's a dysfunctional regime, guys. That's what dysfunctional regimes do. If you need an explanation, just borrow a cynical line about someone's interest/income, whatever. If the Dark Side is all about evil and genocide, then regimes dominated by the Dark Side are going to be impervious to the idea that genocide is bad policy. Dark Siders like doing genocide: Rationalisation to follow.
The Third Reich wasn't dominated by Sith lords because Sith lords don't exist. So what's going on? The leadership's dysfunction is easily explained. They were the usual lot of over-promoted narcissists. The two questions are: how did people like that achieve power; and; Why genocide? The answer is that the Nazis promised to do stuff for people that other parties wouldn't. Weimar struggled for years over (agricultural) land reform because big owners and small had divergent interests. The Nazis promised to give both big and small what they wanted --and a pony! This is a trick that narcissists can do, because they don't give a shit about anything but postive reinforcement right now now now now. Since the big farmers largely wanted their old Polish estates back, the outlines of policy were clear enough. The problem was not having stuff that belonged to foreigners, so the solution was taking stuff from foreigners. What would happen to the foreigners? They would, like all the other "useless mouths" and whatever other pejorative label we like today, just go away. (They're crude and nasty and backwards, so it's practically a good deed to shoot them in the back of the head. Am I being subtle enough here?)
There. No more subtle.
So, no Sith, but, nevertheless, a policy of genocide. I doubt that my summary of an argument about the roots of Nazi genocidal policy is going to sound anything more than glib and unconvincing tot he vast number of scholars who investigate these questions, so take my contribution for what it is worth. Where I can possibly push forward is by asking how evil as strategy worked out. Not very well, is the well-known answer, but there's some interesting details in the corners of the situation.
Of course not. No-one's ever read a history of the Thirty Years War past the death of Wallenstein, and even that was a struggle. That's the part where you skip the last, thick chunk of pages. It's amazing that anyone ever even managed to write those pages, and I am not going to absolutely guarantee that they're not blank. No-one knows the end of the Thirty Years War. Or the Hundred Years War, or the Italian Wars, for that matter. The last history of that last that I've tried to tackle starts out with exactly that observation, wondering who would still be with him in 1557. (Not I, as it turns out, although I really liked the bits I read. Only $46 for the Kindle edition!)
This is why, in British economic history, it is always and will forever be 1846. Famine in Ireland! Corn Law repeal! Peel splitting the Conservative Party! Chartism! Something something Second Reform Bill, and, in the midst of it all, the disgraceful capitulation to America over the Oregion Boundary.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
The siege of St. Omer is a pretty good example of this, actually. The linked Wiki article seems to have been written out of an old Spanish account, and has mind-numbing detail of the difficulties that late Thirty-Years-War armies had in mastering the complex systems of canalisation and reclamation with which local authorities had tamed the surrounding marshlands into irrigated farmland and convertible water meadows. We can see how agricultural investment is transforming the landscape and dragging military practice along with it. Then, all this was forgotten in pieties about "Cabinet War" and the more recent "OMG they make fortresses shaped like stars, help Po-Mo Man you're our only hope." Farms and fortresses; it would make a good study.
Farming! That's what I'm talking about!
Writing about Lord Woolton's war requires pictures of Land Army girls driving tractors, so here you are. You'll notice that this is a caterpillar tractor (small "c" caterpillar), of which we haven't heard much so far in this series, since they tend to be big and expensive for modern collectors and their websites. Also, per David Perren, British agriculture just wasn't that into caterpillar tractors, on account of the soft-bottomed land being under permanent grass.
Time needs to be more careful with its copy. You might almost read this as implying that these two pinkos are having an affair. On the other hand, if you did read it that way, well, no slander is truly wrong when it fights the relentless advance of world communism.
R_.C_.,
Westmount,
Canada.
Dear Father:
I just want to say at the first how much I regret the tone I took in our telephone conversation on Thursday. I've had a chance to calm down. James sat me down and firmly explained the hardships you've taken on yourself in your flying trip to Montreal. I apologise.
I am not going to succumb to some kind of ill-placed faith in quacks and miracle cures. But as James says, good physiotherapy will be vital if Vickie is to grow up straight and healthy. I have a fine pediatrician, and both Uncle Henry and Dr. Rivers have approached me about taking on a physiotherapist. I shall say more about Uncle Henry's latest scheme, but I do have faith that Dr. Rivers will hire the best man he can. The difficulty is that physiotherapy is a woman's practice, so the best man will be a woman, and it is so very hard to find a career-minded woman. As well, physiotherapy is advancing by leaps and bounds. Even if Vickie finds first-class care in San Francisco now, how long before London or New York is ahead again? I dread the idea of entering social circles I cannot manage; therefore, as you say, we must put our therapist here into contact with the most advanced circles. If you are thinking that I am being awfully level-headed for a mother in my predicament, then it is also because I have good news. We have Vickie back with us. The new iron lung is installed in the nursery. I showed it to Bill and David when they were here with Alex to discuss incorporation. They are always keen on gadgets, and, of course, were instantly trying to improve it with some electrics here and there.
I am afraid I put my foot down quite firmly. I do hope they were not offended. Speaking of people who annoy me and whom I cannot be cross with, Uncle Henry continues to be inspired by Vickie's condition, as well as much else. That's to be read as an implication that he is getting awfully close to the woman who takes care of the business side of his medical insurance sideline, by the way. Her official title is "head administrative nurse," but the hand that punches the postage meter rules the world, as no-one but me has probably ever said. I'm sorry, I wander again, and into obnoxioius gossip, at that. So, Uncle Henry has decided to take this "managed care" corporation seriously, and, predictably, for him, "seriously" means a grandiose project. He has been showing me sketches and plans of a new hospital for the Bay Area, to be built in the salubrious surroundings (that means that it is high up) of Walnut Creek. This new hospital is to have all sorts of bells and whistles, and he is busy trying to persuade me to move into one of the private suites it will have, so that mothers of means can sleep right next to their darlings as they undergo the most modern and scientific treatments. I gently reminded him that we have an iron lung at home, and that he helped us find it at short notice, and that I really was grateful. Oh, no, he said. I mean pneumatic hammers, he said. He went on to explain a process which uses air hammers to smash the nerve endings in the limbs of polio victims, on the theory that this will cause them to sprout new fibres, and re-enervate the atrophied lumb. Fortunately, I vaguely recalled reading about it, so I didn't laugh --otherwise, it would have sounded exactly like one of those morbid "iron lung" jokes that are going around. No, I told him firmly, we will not be smashing Vickie's flesh with an air gun to see what happens next. I even tried to suggest that perhaps he shouldn't be draining away the profits of his new enterprise into a grand new hospital, but got exactly nowhere. I have a feeling we will be fighting over the Nagasaki trust fund again, especially since it looks like it may be trust for ten years or more a the current rate of progress. So why not look for something feasible in the shorter term? "Hawaii is so nice at this time of year," I said. "Why not look there for real estate possibilities?" Fat chance of that, though. It looks as though this will be another enthusiasm to ride out.
"GRACE."
*Still a long way off for Bill and David, I am sad to say. In happier news, Alex will finally ship a "tape machine" to Uncle George's friend's recording studio late next fall, which will finally make two-coast radio delay broadcast feasible, and take a little pressure off the man before he ends up pouring himself into a bottle and never coming out.
I have a point when I talk about how the early settlement of the Atlantic took place in a "bishop's sea." It is, in the first instance, that before there were states or even capitalists, there were bishops promoting the settlement of remote places and the Christianising of faraway pagans. The second point is that in the English-language historiography, we tend to handle bishops with far too much kindness. We choose not to see them, as German historiography sees them, as politicians and statesmen, often bloody-handed and always liars and cynics. If we allow full reign for dark and bloody acts of politics, and then suppose that the worst of these acts are swept under the rug for the Good of the Church, we create a darkness and a mystery in which smaller and more human histories can be hidden.
C. Wellwood Beall, of Boeing. In spite of his importance to Boeing, contemporary fame, large fortune, and extensive family, he does not have a Wikipedia article. It's almost like the family doesn't want to call attention to itself for some reason.
When I went into this question last time, it was with a blog post entitled "Christ Stops at Kingcome." In his 1945 memoir of his Fascist-era internal exile, teaching in two remote towns in the mountains of southern Italy, Carlo Levi promoted a powerful, although, as James Scott points out, actually fairly stereotyped idea. The idea that "Christ stopped at Eboli," the terminus of the railway on the plains far below, is that not Christianity, nor morality,even history itself, had penetrated any further than the last railway station. Substitute the names of assorted tribal communities of upland South Asia, and you get the old saw that Scott is criticising in his History of Not Being Governed, and, as fresh as the idea may have been to Levi, he could have picked it up in casual conversation in any Qing commandery of the south, or in the palaces of any of fifty or so of the "paddy states" which have now been swept into Assam, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand. Mostly Thailand, actually.
In my experience, oblivious to Scott, you can take this literally without your head exploding. An old Italian navy officer I knew in my MA programme, did. He would lustily explain that the fires of the high mountain villages visible as you sailed in and out of Taranto were lit by inexperessibly primitive people who never came down to the plain, and who presumably still spoke Samnite and worshipped Mars and Saturn, although in the last bits I am putting words in his mouth, and I am not all sure that the Samnite branches of Italic were ever spoken that far south. The point is, it didn't hurt Tullio Vidoni's historical acumen any. When he wasn't reminiscing about the old days, he had quite a sophisticated take about how the Viking voyages out of Greenland could only have been going "south," by their understanding of geography, and so needed to be understood as part of the genre of wonder stories about Africa and the tropics, and not about some New World which did not, yet, conceptually exist.
Or you can accuse Levi of being unserious, show that the people of the Basilicata were actually thoroughly involved in the life of the lowlands, as Horden and Purcell do. Fair enough, but my point in substituting the old Catholic mission station on Kingcome Inlet for Eboli.
It's summer! God speed the plough! Unfortunately, with the hand of every good man and woman turned out to bring in the mangelwurzels and vetch, there's no-one to staff the university library on Sundays. (The alternative explanation, that the university needs to save money, is self-refuting nonsense. The objection that there is an acute shortage of actual researchers using the library, although supported by notoriously unreliable visual evidence, is equally crazy. We're spending enough money on the research-education infrastructure that we must be getting results.)
The "I. K. Barber Learning Centre." It used to be the boring old Main Library used to stand, but we got rid of the stupid stacks in favour of a "state-of-the-art system [which] drastically reduced space, which allowed for the integration of classrooms, offices, informal learning environments, group rooms, reading rooms, and even a climate-controlled vault for rare books." Which is nice, I guess. Well, not nice in the sense that automated retriveal is anywhere near as good as open stacks or in the sense that a schoold with declining enrollment needs more classroom space. But nice in the sense that the university gets to build a Real Big Building. Otherwise, it would be stuck with only building all of the other Real Big Buildings that it is building. Oh! Oh! I have a theory about where the decline in consumer spending might be coming from!
St. George's School charges $20,000/year in tuition, and is a bucolic fifteen minute bike ride from Main Library. Does "bucolic" mean rain-drenched forests? Maybe not. Not many buildings in sight, is what I'm saying. In a city where a detached home on a city lot is going for seven figures. Oh, well. Whatcha gonna do? Develop the 2000 acres of Pacific Spirit Regional Park? Then where would Vancouverites go to get back to nature?
Shorter ironically couched rant; the library was closed on my last day off, and that's why this is a recap.
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