Postblogging Technology, January 1953, 1: Cold, Cold Heart

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I hope this finds you well, as I am not. I could say that it is because of my condition, but it is not. I could say that I am sick at the news (or rumours, anyway) out of the Soviet Union. But  while I am, that is not the cause. I could blame Aviation Week for missing delivery dates and reversing the order of my usual readings. (Don't ask why, it made sense to me when I did it.) I could stamp my girlish feet at the library for unaccountably continuing its Christmas break through an extra weekend without so much as a sign on the door, which seems like an outrageous thing that could never happen in 1953, and certainly not in the bright, shining future of years from now. 

But that is not it, either. The truth is that I was up late playing canasta and so finishing this letter has led to me putting off dinner, and I am famished! I am, accordingly, off to remedy the situation and maybe some jambalaya? And now I am depressed again, at the tragic death of a musician you've probably never even heard of.  

Your Loving Daughter, 

Ronnie

Gathering the Bones, XXVII: The Chainbearers

 

The Chainbearer (1845) is somehow the tenth from the last of James Fenimore Cooper's (1789--1851) books. Admittedly, people died younger and more suddenly in those days and there's nothing unlikely about an author still being in full spate at 62, but, geez, man, maybe relax and enjoy life a bit? Some of the books might have been a bit slapdash, but Chainbearer, and the "Littlepage Manuscripts" cycle of which it is a part, was a vocal intervention in the ongoing Anti-Rent War, which was a big thing at the time, even if it has slipped our  minds today.

Speaking of slipshod and hap-hazard, UBC Library has given up on late fines and started issuing journal volumes without comment, so I have been holding my journals at home, with the exception of Aviation Week, which I have continued to use online out of inertia. (And because it is a pain in the ass to recall from the automated retrieval system.) I finished my 1952 volumes last month, and my Aviation Week subscription lapsed this month, and, what with one thing or another --it's not all my fault, I swear!-- I have been having a bit more of an adventure than planned in updating my research collection. So that's where I am with that.

I'm not going to spend much more time with Cooper this week, my point being nicely made by omission in the Wikipedia article, which introduces the novel thus:

Critical to the trilogy is the sense of expansion through the measuring and acquisition of land by civilization. The title The Chainbearer represents "the man who carries the chains in measuring the land, the man who helps civilization to grow from the wilderness, but who at the same time continues the chain of evil, increases the potentiality for corruption."^[1] Chainbearers, also known as "chain men", were important figures in early America because the accuracy of surveys depended on their work, and they were often required to be sworn in before performing their duties. The central position of the "Chainbearer" allows Cooper to deal with the cultural lack of understanding that Native Americans had of European concepts of land ownership. This in turn allows Cooper to critique ownership in general.^[2]

  It's, like, how can you write this without noticing either Lovejoy, for the European sense of "the chain" of dependency that connects all being, and the Great Covenant Chain between the Haudenosaunee and their European partners? I'd be fine with just gesturing at Lovejoy, because that's what I do, and that makes it right, but the Covenant Chain is a bit more relevant. I guess you excuse that by suggesting that the James Fenimore Cooper of 1845 was somehow completely ignorant of the central concept of Eighteenth Century American diplomacy. And, to be fair, he doesn't mention it, being on endlessly about how chains ensure covenants from the point of view of a real estate salesman. I would be happy with a parenthetical about how interstate diplomacy isn't what the book is about, and on we go. I'm as tired as the next person at the unsourced assertion that the United States was directly inspired by the Haudenosaunee, or any other Indian league. It's easy to go too far in one direction. My problem is that we are still where we arrived at some two hundred years ago: We have wiped the First Nations out of the history of colonial America and are arguing over which white owns the land. 

A Technological and Muckraking Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1952: Sverdlov Envy

 

Sverdlov-class cruiser Admiral Ushakov in 1981

In some measure of apology to old-time Newsweek, the class namesake of the old Red Navy Sverdlov-class cruisers was commissioned on 15 May 1952, followed by Ordzhonikidize in June, Dzerzhinsky in August, and Zhdanov, Admiral Lazarev, and Aleksandr Nevsky in December.  Considering how overweight these 14,000t, 12x6" gun, 3,9" belt ships were by 1952, with so many old gun ships gone to the scrappers, this is quite the naval buildup, and would have been all the more impressive had the Stalingrad-class battlecruisers and proposed aircraft carriers not been scrapped after the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953. This doesn't completely exonerate Newsweek for detecting a battleship long since scrapped on the slips, although there might be some confusion with the Stalingrads, still two  years from completion; much less the fantastic idea that the new classes were armed with "rockets."

But as outrageous (and cool)as this story is, this post was inspired by the decades-long undeath of Henry Knowler  and the Chief of the Air Staff's incautious comment that two Transport Command Vickers 1002 would all but replace the chartered airlines in Middle Eastern trooping, and, implicitly, far exceed the capacity of the proposed RAF Britannia freighter buy. The Type 1007 was not just cancelled, clearing the way to the subsequent cancellation of the VC7, but the path to its production was swept away by the prior cancellation of the Vickers Valiant 2, the "Pathfinder" type with an improved and stronger wing structure to prevent stress fatigue in low-level operations. This cancellation was explicitly justified by the  premise that Pathfinder operations were obsolete, which is dubious to start with, and the implicit one that there was no future requirement for  low-level  V-bombers. Given that the V-bombers were switched to low-altitude penetration operations only a decade after entering service, and that low-altitude strikes remain an effective and perhaps strategically decisive operational technique today, decades after the V-bombers, but not their B-52 contemporaries, have disappeared, it all seems like almost as much of a comedy of errors as the career of Saro Aircraft.

Postblogging Technology, 1952, II: If Daddy Had Only Seen

R_. C_.,
Arcadia,
Santa Clara,
California

Dear Father:

I hope this reaches you before Christmas Day. We've had a bit of excitement here in Chicago. First, Reggie's train was late. Then, the very next day, who should show up at his parent's brunch but the prodigal A., and with him, B. It made a bit of an odd couple. A. is celebrating the rise of the Dulles brothers, himself firmly planted in their hip (if not otherwise) pocket; B. explaining that the CIA deserved his talents less than that indefatigable crusader for truth, justice, and the American way, Roy Cohn. I believe he was editing a magazine in the fifteen minutes between  Mexico City and  Mr. Cohn. No doubt they didn't deserve him, either. He (and we  hear it here first) soon find himself promoted into the personal staff of Senator Joe, himself. 

So, yes, slugs and the lesser invertebrates have Christmas, too, at least in such time as they have to spare for the mother country before it is off (more hints dropped) to Teheran. And if you are worried, it is further intimated that the hydrogen bomb is about twice as powerful as expected. Surely no Communist can  resist! 

So, anyway, if you have a suggestion for a good bomb-shelter-digger in the Palo Alto area, I would be glad to take a reference. In the meantime, I enclose further model-train-and-earthmoving-equipment related information. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, December 1952, I: What A Laugh It Would Have Been

R_.C_.,
Arcadia,
Santa Clara,
California.

Dear Father:

I'm told that, some day, I will look back very fondly at long college vacations and having grandparents at my beck and call when the little darling(s) get to be too much. Well, these must be the golden days. We arrived in Chicago on Friday by train, with a beaming Grandpa and Grandma and a silent and stoic driver (and distant cousin on Mother's side) waiting with hugs and kisses for James. Well, not George. That would have been strange. (Prodigal daughter held her tongue and guiltily carried her handbag at least.) Grandma is . . . 

You know what? I am going to leave that sentence, and that thought, behind me. After all, I am calling her "Grandma" now precisely so that I don't slip back into that cold and slithering "Mother" of my teenage days. Chicago is exactly as cold and snowy and windy as I remember, but so what? We're off to get a Christmas tree in an hour and there is a crackling fire in my room and my robe is fleecy and thick. Probably because, like that Warm House scientist says, individual fires make homes colder on net, but I am sure that that is some kind of average across the hallway and the spare room across, and I'm not there, I'm here! All that's missing is Reggie, and he will be  here on Thursday. 

We'll be doing some entertaining later where I will possibly have to be polite to people I don't want to be polite to, but actually to be fair to my parents they've been very careful in their invitations over the weekend, so none of the fabled Ronnie freeze to go with the Lakeshore wind!

If there are at this late date any qualms about Christmas presents for James, I very briefly mentioned some of the wonderful new "industrial toys" out this Christmas. Doepke has a wonderful set, which I haven't succumbed to the temptation to collect because I didn't want to spend my entire allowance and deprive anyone else of the chance to do the same. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Gathering the Bones, XXV: Albany Regency

 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 proviniciales dropped. 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.

Gathering the Bones, XXIV: The Gardener's Problem and Smith's History of Virginia

 

It's been more than two years since I've done a "Gathering the Bones" post, and I can report some progress. I've finished reading Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte: Or, the Hutted Knoll. It's a really good book, Fenimore Cooper continues to be a fascinating person, and the novel is a lot like Wept of Wish-ton-Wish in that it uses distance from the Leatherstocking Cycle to comment on some of the same themes as Deerslayer while being a bit more willing to admit the crime. (The Wyandotte Patent is assigned to the infant product of a private marriage and baptism and so remains the property of a British general while avoiding confiscation during the Revolution by appearing to belong to a local Dutch New York Patriot family.) On the other hand, the question of mixed marriages is handled even more obliquely than in previous novels, much less being explicitly admitted, as in Wish. The heroine, Maud Meredith (Willoughby) is born to her mother in a British army frontier post in 1758, and so her mother is neither British nor a member of American society, in that she is neither home in the United Kingdom nor in Albany. On the other hand, she has  money. So Maud Yeardley comes out of some kind of irregular circumstances that I'm not going to probe any further here, although obviously she is much better born than Judith Hutter of Deerslayer, and what about all that deerslaying?