Lance Mannion

Civility, circa 1917

Posted Monday night, November 25, 2019.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator and Pugilist, known to his fans as Pinky. Via Wikipedia by way of the Boston Review.

Lodge was a United States Senator. A Republican United States Senator. Bannawart was peace activist. I’d bet he threw the first punch. Not because of the irony or the stock character nature of it---the pacifist with a violent temper. Because of what I know of Lodge. He was something of a stock character too: the war-lover who normally left the fighting to others. The hero of the moment, though, was, of course, the telegram delivery boy:

Earlier that Day, a small group of peace activists from Massachusett had called upon their senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, to ask him to reconsider his support for war. Lodge said he had been considering for three years and wasn’t going to consider anymore. The conversation, in a corridor, grew heated, and one of the visitors, Alexander Bannawart, observed that cowards were the ones supporting war. Lodge replied that if Bannawart were calling him a coward, “He was damned liar.” Then one man or the other struck the first blow. In the ensuing melee they both took punches. Bannawart, a form minor league ballplayer and executive, was bloodied and subdued by a passing Western Union messenger boy, and arrested. Lodge, who was 66, felt he had acquitted himself capitally. “At my age there is a certain aspect of folly about the whole thing in wrote in a letter to [his good friend Theodore Roosevelt], “and yet I am glad that I hit him. The Senators all appeared to be perfectly delighted.”

---from “March 1917” by Will Englund.

New York City as Leon Trotsky found it

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, November 11, 2019. Posted Sunday night, November 24.

Filthy, jostling, and always on the make: The view down East 47th Street from Times Square, New York City in 1920, not long after Leon Trotsky lived there. That’s the Palace Theatre in the center of the photo and, its sign peeking out from the photo’s far left, is the Columbia Amusement Company Building, home of the Columbia Theatre, a famous burlesque house. Via Wikipedia.

New York City values, circa 1917:

The city was a jumbled mass of contradictions...It boasted the world’s tallest skyscraper---the four-year-old, 57 story Woolworth Building---and the rank tenements of the Lower East Side. Row upon row of chocolate-hued brownstones lined Manhattan’s cross streets. It was a natural place of business for both J.P. Morgan, the financier, and Max Eastman, the radical editor of The Masses. Southern blacks were settling in uptown Harlem even as the flow of Catholics from Italy and Jews from Russia had been closed off by the war. In Yorkville, on the Upper East Side, German-Americans read German-language newspapers and ate sauerbraten and strudel in German restaurants. Irish-Americans vied for political power’ Sicilian mobsters had started to amass a different kind of power. The Catskill Aqueduct, a huge public works project that would carry clean fresh water to the city from upstate, was months away from opening. Real estate developers were casting their eyes on the uncrowded upper burroughs.

New York was filthy, jostling, physically unencumbered by seemingly any controlling vision, and always on the make…

In the winter, skaters flocked to Central Park; in the summer, Coney Island drew its millions of visitors. New Yorkers had a choice of three baseball teams to root for, one in Brooklyn and two in Manhattan. Only the Giants were any good. People elsewhere in the country looked askance at New York’s social reforms, its immigrants, its high life, its power, its New York values. Across the nation Wall Street was loathed…

---from “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution” by Will Englund (6)

One must take extra care not to disturb the mountains and ruins lest you provoke the ire of the djinn

Mined from the notebooks, October 17, 2019. Posted Wednesday night, November 21, 2019.

Mount Kazbek range Caucasus Mountains, the traditional location of the land of Paristan in Persian mythology, home of the Pari—”fairy-like creatures from Persian mythology viewed as semi-angelic or as goodly djinn.” Copyrighted photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg, used by permission via Wikipedia.

For my first wish I'd like everyone who thinks Twitter is just outrage and vituperation to read this thread by Ali A Olomi, an assistant professor of history at Penn State specializing in the history of the Middle East and Islam and an expert on, among other aspects of Middle Eastern myth and folklore, the djinn making Twitter a happier place by sharing his expertise in threads like this one:

The djinn are said to be an invisible race living alongside humankind. While some inhabit our cities & even our homes, stories also tell of legendary lands & remote locations where they reside.

A thread on the realms and kingdoms of djinn in Middle Eastern and Islamic folklore

Mountains and caves are said to be regular haunts for the djinn. In particularly the legendary Mount Qaf.

Believed to be a mountain at the edge of the world, it is the home of many djinn kingdoms and mythic creatures

The mighty Roc lives on Mount Qaf while the Simurgh has its nest on its crags.

The djinn monarchs Malik Gatshan and Shahpal bin Shahrukh both host their court on Mount Qaf and the mythic mountain is said to be home to countless tribes of djinn

Some have associated Mount Qaf with the Caucasus Mountains but other descriptions place it as a range that encircles the edges of the earth, fashioned of glistening emerald

So bright is the emerald that its glint tints the sky

The idea of a distant mountain range also appear in Islamic eschatology as the barrier that holds back the apocalyptic horde of Yajuj and Majuj

Mount Qaf is occasionally associated with Paristan, home of the Pari—fairy-like creatures from Persian mythology viewed as semi-angelic or as goodly djinn.

Other times Paristan is a separate land. There is also a South Asian/ Himalayan village named after this land of fairies

The djinn are also said to live on islands, particularly those found in the Indian Ocean and China sea

One such island is WaqWaq, rich and abundant in gold. It is said only djinn and women reside on the island which is ruled by a queen. On it grows a mighty tree

And upon this tree grows babies who mature and they fall as full grown adults with a cry sounding like “wak wak.”

This is how the islands’ inhabitants reproduce 

In other tellings the tree births men and women alike

Another island is the home of the djinn king, Sakhr upon which is a great apple tree and the giant, Sharahiya, guardian of the tree.

On a different island and it’s cave one can find the Queen of Serpents, whose body is that of a snake but face of a beautiful woman

On the Island of Zaneh, winged djinn of multiple colors make their home. Some of them human-looking with wings and others more bestial 

Colors aren’t just used to depict djinn visually but also used to describe their kingdoms

The red djinn reside in a palace of copper ruled over by their martial king, Al Ahmar

The blue djinn live in a vast city made of carnelian, brass, and gold, ruled over by Barqan

The green kingdom of djinn live in a palace made of emerald and decorated with bronze and copper. They are ruled over by Zawba

The kingdom of the black djinn is said to reside among the clouds as they have mighty wings that let them fly. Their palace is made of obsidian & gold

The colored kingdoms of the djinn are also associated with the djinn kings of the days of the week

The djinn also make their home in ruins and desolate places. The Quran references Iram with its Pillars, a lost city of legend. In folklore it gains a reputation as the place where djinn make their home now 

They also make their home in historic ruins visited by pilgrims

Anand Vivek Taneja writes, in India the ruined Tughlaq fortress, Feroz Shah Kolta is believed to be the home of saint-like djinn who are petitioned by locals to intercede in various matters

While the Berber village of Aroumd is home to a shrine of the djinn, Chamharouch

Flags decorate his shrine while supplicants make sacrifices to him in the hopes that he will work miracles.

Among the Berber near Meknes, wells are the abode of the djinn mistress, Mimouna

In Mecca, there is the Masjid al Jinn, a mosque built on the spot where the djinn reputedly gathered to hear Prophet Muhammad recite the Quran and converted to Islam

Additionally we find natural formations as home of the djinn

The Bab el Mandeb, a strait in the Red Sea known as the Gate of Tears is said to have been been hewn by an ancient king and now is the home of tumultuous marids and ifrits

In Iran the great sand dunes of Rig e Jenn is home to countless djinn who lead travelers astray

Similarly the red dunes of Egypt are home to Ifrit who appear as sudden sandstorms and twisters of dust

There’s a claim that so ferocious were the ifrits of Egypt that Napoleon warned his colonial forces to be wary of the desert and its guardians

Finally whole countries are said to be haunted by djinn. Oman, Yemen, & Afghanistan are all home to vast scores of djinn

In Yemen, trickster djinn govern the water flow of Wadi Daw’an, while other djinn forged the gates of Aden under King Solomon’s orders for the Queen of Sheba

In the Red Sea, Kudummul is a small volcanic island formed from the petrified body of three giant djinn

In Afghanistan the mountains and caves are believed to be the home of many djinn and beasts. Some of the mountains are said to be the petrified bodies of mighty dragons

Other legends say the original inhabitants of Afghanistan’s mountains were djinn and pari, long before humans lived there.

One must take extra care not to disturb the mountains and ruins of Afghanistan lest you provoke the ire of the djinn

Bayonets and Blood

Posted Friday night, November 8, 2019.

Finished listening to “Hell and Good Company” this afternoon. Even when you know going in how it ends, even when you remind yourself Spain's been a democracy a decade longer than it was a dictatorship,even when you know that forty-four years later---This just in!---Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, it’s still gut-wrenching…

Past the Ebro, Franco’s forces pushed into Catalonia, Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939, Valencia on 30 March. On 1 April 1939 the Spanish Civil War ended in Republican defeat. In May the Nationalist armies paraded Franco’s victory on Madrid’s Gran Via while Spanish, Italian, and Condor Legion aircraft in formation spelled out the Caudillo’s name. Reprisals followed, firing squads manning machine guns, long years in prison, slave labor put to draining swamps and building monuments. “Our regime,” Franco announced grandly, “is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.”

—-from “Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made” by Richard Rhodes.

Before the age of electronically propagated hysteria

Posted Saturday night, October 19, 2019.

An Android statue with Oreos outside the Googleplex, Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. Photo credit: MariaX/Shutterstock via World Atlas.

Last night I reached the chapter in “Quichotte”, Salman Rushdie’s contemporary reboot of Cervantes' “Don Quixote”, where Quichotte, the Quixote character, introduces his “son” Sancho to his estranged sister, a successful entrepreneur, feminist writer, activist, and philanthropist. Sancho’s “aunt” tells him how she and his “father”---I’m using quotation marks because Sancho is a figment of Quichotte’s imagination come to life and his familial relationship to anyone in the physical world, including his “father” are questionable, at least to himself---fell out. It happened when they were young and she was just establishing herself. She wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that made her all kinds of influential enemies among the public intelligentsia who set out to destroy her reputation and her budding career. Quichotte, a writer and intellectual himself, didn’t come to her defense and even suggested she was to blame for bringing the trouble on herself. What saved her, her business, and her name, she tells Sancho, was when it happened:

“What saved me was the date. Let’s just say, B.G., which is to say, Before Google...The world before the age of electronically propagated hysteria, in which words have become bombs that blow up their users, and to make any public utterage is to set off such explosions. Our age, A.G., in which the mob rules, and the smartphone rules the mob. Back then the most advanced technology was the fax machine. Old technology saved my business and my life. It was too slow to kill. The howls of outrage spread, but they spread slowly. My character was assassinated, but it was a slow assassination, which allowed time for a defense to be assembled, for resistance to be organized…

---from “Quichotte: A Novel” by Salman Rushdie.

Huh. I wonder if Rushdie has read Siva Vaidhyanathan's "The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry".

[Clicking on the book titles will take you to Amazon’s website. I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission from purchases made via this blog.]

"Normal doesn't feel normal to me," says Sancho

Posted Friday night, October 11, 2019.

In “Quichotte”, Salman Rushdie’s retelling of “Don Quixote”, set in the United States in the 21st Century, the title character isn’t driven mad by too much reading of the wrong sort of books, like his 17th Century counterpart. He’s driven mad by too much television. His Sancho is a figment of his imagination come to physical life, a fifteen year old boy who is partly a dream of the son he never had, partly an idealized version of himself as a teenager, and  mostly a typical television sitcom character. Sancho, who takes over as narrator a quarter of the way through the book, shortly after he materializes in the passenger seat of Quichotte's car, is aware of himself as a fictional construct and doesn’t much care for being one. He wants to be a real live boy. (Sancho is also aware of himself as a literary allusion, and refers to himself at one point as having been “Pinochicco-ed” into existence.) He and Quichotte are traveling across the country, on a quest to find Quichotte's Dulcinea, a talk show host he fell in love with while watching her on TV. He and Sancho stop at motels for the night, where they don't have much to do but watch television. Sancho tries to learn what it’s like to be a real live American boy from TV. It’s not a satisfying learning experience, and asking his “father” for help doesn’t help….

I’m new here. I’m trying to understand how the world works, his world, the only one available to me. The world according to Quichotte. I’m trying to get a sense of the normal, but it keeps dissolving around me. On TV, because (having no option) I’m watching a lot of myself now, everybody seems to know what normal is, and at the same time nobody agrees. I’m using the remote to find out.

“Is this what’s normal?” I ask him. “A couch in the living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair to the side, and a father in the armchair and a mom in the kitchen and teenage children rushing in and out wanting sandwiches and quarreling but every thirty mintues minus commercials there’s a group hug?”

“Yes,” he says. “Life is like this for normal people.”

“Or,” I say, “is normal a couch in the living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair on the side and loud woman’s big comeback killed by a tweet referencing Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes?”

“That’s a less normal normal,” he says.

Zap. Sports channel. Normal is nine innings, four balls, three strikes, somebody wins, somebody loses, there’s no such thing as a tie. Zap---

---Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there’s another normal if your skin is the wrong color and another normal if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing. I’m really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap. Zap. Zap...a fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny out to get guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies..We’re Bevis and Butt-head on ‘roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch...Zap...Zap…

“Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him.

“It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies.

This is what I get instead of fatherly wisdom. (Rushdie 131-133)

---from “Quichotte” by Salman Rusdie.

"This glinting hint from a dead man’s grin is almost unnecessary---for this is a painting about transience"

Monday evening, September 23, 2019.

Detail from “Vanitas Still Life” by Maria van Oosterwijck. 1688. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Via Wikipedia.

A typical still life of the time, painted [by Maria van Oosterwijck] in 1688, shows a gray-marble table with a slightly chipped edge. Assembled on it are household items that appear to have been picked up carelessly and left there: a bunch of flowers, a carafe of aqua vita (brandy), letters, an accounts ledger and some books, a celestial globe, an hourglass, a ginger jar being used as an inkwell, a purse---and a skull. This glinting hint from a dead man’s grin is almost unnecessary---for this is a painting about transience.

The finely executed flowers...will soon wilt, and even now the composition gives the impression that the flowers are sprouting from the bony hollow that once contained a brain. In the left corner, a head of wheat is being eyed by a mouse that will soon devour it, while the rattle, used by plague victims is a reminder of the fragility of happiness. The recorder receives its voice only from living, human breath, which will soon expire. The cob of corn...is already half eaten and the ginger jar...which once contained a rare delicacy offered to select guests, has come down in the world to less exalted service.

The...theme continues in the ledger, even if the astute observer already suspects that it contains not the bookkeeping of a wholesaler but rather a more existential tally, a register of sins…

The carafe of the left is filled with a red liquid not at all like clear, distilled alcohol. What then is this aqua vita, this elixir of life, that is kept inside? Is it liqueur or does the glass, fragile as the human body, contain a more precious liquid?...

The artist’s emblem is also part of the scene a Red Admiral butterfly, which has found life after death in the chrysalis...its quivering, powdery wings show their beautiful pattern but will soon be dust again. For a moment, the butterfly is sitting on the book that contains the accounts of people’s deeds and misdeeds. One moment later it will be gone.

---from “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present" by Philipp Blom.

"To him who feels the hailstones patter about his ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and tempest…"

Posted Monday night, September 16, 2019.

"Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap" by Pieter Breugel the Elder. 1565. Via Wikipedia.

When the vines of my village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes, that the indignation of God has gone out against all the human race...Who is it that, seeing the havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand; without considering, that many worse things have been seen, and that in the meantime, people are very merry in a thousand other parts of the earth for all this? For my part, considering the licence and impunity that always attend such commotions, I wonder they are so moderate, and that there is no more mischief done. To him who feels the hailstones patter about his ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and tempest…

---Michel de Montaigne, from “Of the Education of Children”.

Carl Sagan's objection to objections to astrology

Very early Monday morning, September 2, 2019.

Sagan again. This time on his way to making a deeper point. But I’m using it as an excuse to let you know that I know what the precession of the equinoxes is because I do my homework and looked it up. And as an excuse to post the painting up top because any excuse to post tasteful nudity. The painting is titled “Astrologer observing the Equinox and a scene of parting Adonis and Venus”. It was painted in 1684 or thereabouts by a lesser known Dutch contemporary of Vermeer, Domenicus van Wijnen. I looked him up too. The young man in the turban is the astrologer. The couple, um, dancing in the air in the background are Venus and Adonis. That they’re doing a parting, um, dance tells you the equinox in question is the autumn equinox. Zeus allowed Venus and Adonis to spend half the year together, ‘spring and summer. Adonis had to spend the other half of the year in hell. The demonically smiling nude rising out of the water is supposed to be Charon come to collect Adonis’ soul for his half a year in the underworld.  I don’t know why Charon didn’t take his boat. Anywho. Sagan...

Many valid criticisms of astrology can be formulated in a few sentences: for example, its acceptance of precession of the equinoxes in announcing an “Age of Aquarius” and its rejection of precession of the equinoxes in casting horoscopes; its neglect of atmospheric refraction; its list of supposedly significant celestial objects that is mainly limited to naked eye objects known to Ptolemy in the second century, and that ignores an enormous variety of new astronomical objects discovered since (Where is the astrology of near-Earth asteroids?); inconsistent requirements for detailed information on time as compared to latitude and longitude of birth; the failure of astrology to pass the identical-twin test; the major differences in horoscopes and such psychological tests as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory…

---from “The Demon-Haunted World”.

I also looked up the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. You’ll have to do your own homework and look it up for yourself, as well as the precession of the equinoxes (if you need to) and Domenicus van Wijnen. Just follow the links.

So...the point Sagan was on his way to making was this: astrology we'll always have with us and the reason for that is that science and skepticism don't do as good a job of addressing the fears and anxieties of people living in a troublesome and unpredictable world:

In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called “Objections to Astrology” and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign---not because I thought astrology had any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. It criticized astrology for having origins shrouded in superstition. But this is true as well for religion, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy, to mention only four. The issue is not what faltering and rudimentary knowledge astrology came from, but what is its present validity. Then there was speculation on the psychological motivations of those who believe in astrology. These motivations---for example, the feeling of powerlessness in a complex, troublesome and unpredictable world---might explain why astrology is not generally given the skeptical scrutiny it deserves, but is quite peripheral to whether it works…

What I would have signed is a statement describing and refuting the principal tenets of astrological belief. Such a statement would have been far more persuasive than what was actually circulated and published. But astrology, which has been with us for four thousand years or more, today seems more popular than ever. At least a quarter of all Americans, according to opinion polls, “believe” in astrology. A third think Sun-sign astrology is “scientific.” The fraction of schoolchildren believing in astrology rose from 40 percent to 49 percent between 1978 and 1984. There are perhaps ten times more astrologers than astronomers in the United States. In France there are more astrologers than Roman Catholic clergy. No stuffy dismissal by a gaggle of scientists makes contact with the social needs that astrology---no matter how invalid it is---addresses, and science does not. 

“The Demon-Haunted World” is a collection of essays published in 1995. But the essays were written over a period of years and this one I’m quoting---”The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder” appears to have been written in the late 1980s. I wouldn’t bet that astrology has become less popular in the thirty odd years since, although I can’t help cynically hoping that there are even more astrologers in France than there are priests now, and everywhere else, but only if that signifies a decline in the number of celibates in backward collars and not an increase in the number of astrologers. Astrologers have done less harm. But we do live in a complex, troublesome, and unpredictable world, we are mostly powerless to do anything about it, and people don’t like feeling powerless. Astrology is something people can turn to to help them figure out, as Sagan puts it an another part of the essay, how that world works and what their place in it might be. Oh well. It’s not the most pernicious belief system going at the moment.

"If you're only skeptical..."<---What came before. What follows--->Silence conveys assent.

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"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

"If you're only skeptical..."

Posted very early Monday morning, September 2, 2018.

Detail from “Philosopher in Meditation” by Rembrandt van Rijn. 1632. Louvre via Wikipedia.

If you’re only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything. You become a crotchety misanthrope convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) Since major discoveries at the borderlines of science are rare, experience will tend to confirm your grumpiness. But every now and then a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you’re too resolutely skeptical, you’re going to miss (or resent) the transforming discoveries in science, and either way you will be obstructing understanding and progress. Mere skepticism is not enough. 

---Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World”.

None of us come into this world fully equipped<---What came before. What's next---Carl Sagan's objection to objections to astrology.

None of us come into this world fully equipped

Posted very late Sunday night, September 1, 2019.

Trying to figure out how the world works and what their place in it might be: Detail from “Consulting the Oracle” by Henry Nelson O’Neil. Circa mid-19th Century. Courtesy of Glasgow Museums Media Resource Centre via Art UK.

Have I ever heard a skeptic wax superior and contemptuous? Certainly. I’ve sometimes heard, to my retrospective dismay, that unpleasant tone in my own voice. There are human imperfections on both sides of this issue. Even when it’s applied sensitively, scientific skepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless, and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of others. And, it must be said, some scientists and dedicated skeptics apply this tool as a blunt instrument, with little finesse. Sometimes in looks as if the skeptical conclusion came first, that contentions were dismissed before, not after, the evidence was examined. All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based---or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug---it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault…

...In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudo-science are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our place in it might be. Their motives are consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

---Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World”.

What follows--->If you're only skeptical...

 

Poor and lonely in the Texas Hill Country

Posted Wednesday night, August 21, 2019.

Somewhere on the LBJ Ranch. Lyndon Johnson National Historical Park. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

When I look through the notebooks in which I took my notes from the interviews with those men and women, I find over and over the word “poor” written. There was a level of poverty there that a city person could hardly imagine. Some of the families who lived outside the little towns that dotted the Hill Country---Dripping Springs, Blanco, Junction, Telegraph---still lived in the log dwellings called “dog-runs,” which were two separate rooms or cabins connected under a continuous roof, with an open corridor that had been left between them for ventilation. That was where the dogs slept. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up, there was very little cash in Johnson City. Very little. You could get a dime for a dozen eggs, but you had to sell them in Marble Falls, and Marble Falls was twenty-three miles away from Johnson City. One of Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood friends, Bed Crider, relates how he rode horseback the twenty-three miles between Johnson City and Marble falls keeping the horse at a walk and carrying those dozen eggs in a bos he held in front of him so they wouldn’t break, just for a dime. “Lonely” is a word that I found over and over again in my notes...Lyndon Johnson didn’t even grow up in Johnson City, small and isolated as it was; he grew up on the Johnson Ranch, which was fourteen miles beyond Johnson City, farther out into the hills. One corner of that ranch came down next to what they called the Austin-Fredericksburg Road, which was really not a road but only a graded, rutted path between these two places. Lyndon’s little brother, Sam Houston Johnson, would tell me how he and Lyndon used to sit on the fence at that corner for hours when they were little boys hoping that a rider or carriage would come by so they’d have a new person to talk to.

---from “A Sense of Place” in “Working” by Robert Caro.

Math as liberation and resistance

Posted Friday night, August 16, 2019.

Soviet junior high school history classroom, circa the mid-1970s.

To a Soviet child, the afterschool math club was a miracle. For one thing, it was not school. Every morning Soviet children all over the country left their identical concrete block apartments a little after eight and walked to their identical concrete school buildings to sit in their identical classrooms with the walls painted yellow and with identical portraits of bearded dead men on the walls---Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the literature classrooms, Mendeleev in the chemistry classroom, and Lenin everywhere. Their teachers marked attendance in identical class journals and reached for identical textbooks that they used to impart a perfectly uniform education to their charges, of whom they demanded uniformity in return. My own first-grade teacher...actually made me pretend my reading skills were as poor as the other children’s, enforcing her own vision of conforming to grade level. The first time I spent an afternoon solving math problems...I sat for what seemed like an eternity, holding a pencil over a drawing of some shape. I do not remember the problem, but the solution required transposing the shape. I sat, unable to touch my pencil to paper, until a teaching assistant came by and asked me a very basic question, something like “What might you do?”

“I might transpose it, like this,” I answered.

“So do it,” he said.

Apparently, this was a place where I was expected to think for myself...I hunched over my piece of paper, sketched out the solution in a couple of minutes, and felt a wave of relief so total that I think I became a math junkie on the spot...The joy of feeling my brain rev up, rush toward a solution, and be affirmed for it felt like love, truth, hope, and justice all handed to me at once.

---Masha Gessen,  “Perfect Rigor”.

Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything

Posted Sunday night, August 11, 2019.

VASILY FEDOSENKO / REUTERS

That Russia produced some of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians is, plainly, a miracle. Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything. It promoted argument; it studied patterns in a country that controlled its citizens by forcing them to inhabit a shifting, unpredictable reality; it placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand, making the mathematical conversation that was indecipherable to an outsider; and worst of all, mathematics laid claim to singular and knowable truths when the regime had staked its legitimacy on its own singular truth. All of this is what made mathematics in the Soviet Union uniquely appealing to those whose minds demanded consistency and logic, unattainable in virtually any other area of study. It is also what made mathematics and mathematicians suspect. Explaining what makes mathematics as important and beautiful as mathematicians know it to be, the Russian algebraist Mihkal Tsfasman said, “Mathematics is uniquely suited to teaching one to distinguish between right and wrong, the proven from the unproven, the probable from the improbable. It also teaches us to distinguish that which is probable and probably true from the which, while apparently, probable, is an obvious lie…"

---from "Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century" by Masha Gesson.

What Sam Johnson refused to see that his son made a point of seeing all too well

Posted late Thursday night, July 25, 2019.

The Pendernales River as it flows along the southern edge of the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas. Photo by Cynthia Dorminey courtesy of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park and the National Park Service.

“The Years of Lyndon Johnson”, Robert Caro’s not-yet-finished multi-volume biography of LBJ, has been the nonfiction equivalent of Proust for me: something I feel I have to read but keep putting off for “someday” when I can carve out the uninterrupted time. Reading “A Sense of Place”, the essay in Caro’s book of essays on his life as a writer, “Working”, on how Caro researched how the land LBJ grew up on informed LBJ’s character and influenced his life and his politics,as if they’re separate things, is making me think “someday’ is fast approaching and I should start carving.  

Generations before, during the 1870s and 80s, the era of the “Cattle Kingdom,” there had been a great, sprawling Johnson Ranch along the Pendernales River from which huge herds had been driven up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, with the original Johnson Brothers returning with their saddle bags bulging with gold. But the family had ceased making money and had lost the ranch some decades before Lyindon was born in 1908 and now, when Lyndon was about ten years old, it came on the market, and Sam Johnson determined to buy it---to recreate the original “Johnson Ranch,” to make the whole Pendernales Valley “Johnson Country” again.

One reason the ranch had been lost, however, was that its soil had worn out, had washed away when cattle grazed on it, or, later, when attempts were made to grow cotton on it, and there was no longer much soil left on the limestone base. You couldn’t do anything with the land. It still looked beautiful and fertile---when you go to the ranch today, the grass covers those rolling hills; there are still big, majestic live oak trees with their shiny leaves, but beautiful as it was when Sam looked at it, there wasn’t going to be any way of making much money out of the land, and Sam didn’t realize that. Seeing how beautiful it was, he had this romantic dream of restoring the great Johnson Ranch, and so he believed he was going to make it pay, and, to outbid other people, he overpaid for the ranch. He paid so much that the ranch couldn’t possibly earn back what he paid for it, and very quickly, when Lyndon was fifteen, Sam went broke and lost the ranch. And a crucial element of Lyndon Johnson’s youth is a consequence of that loss: the insecurity that followed. The family...moved to a little house in Johnson City. Every month Lyndon had to live with the fear that the ban was going to take the house away. He lived in a house in which his father, broken by his financial failure, was constantly ill, and there was often no food, and neighbors brought covered plates. Worst of all, perhaps, his father became the laughing stock of the town, an object of ridicule (“Sam Johnson is a might smart man. But he’s got no sense”) in the speeches given at political barbeques as his son stood listening…

When I began The Path to Power, I had this romantic idea about Sam, that he was such a great legislator, fighting for the people and all. Then one day Lyndon’s cousin Ava, his favorite cousin, said to me---I could tell she didn’t like it when I talked about Sam in so admiring a way.---she said, “Let’s drive out to the Johnson Ranch and you get there and that grass-covered landscape looks beautiful, and fertile. And she said, “Now, get out of the car.” I got out of the car. Ava was an old woman but a very forceful woman. She said, “Now kneel down,” and I knelt down, and she said, “Now stick your fingers into the ground.” And I stuck my fingers into the soil and I couldn’t even get them into the ground the length of my finger. There was hardly any soil on top of that rock. There was enough to grow the beautiful grass but not enough to grow cotton or graze cattle. Ava said to me, “Do you understand now? Sam didn’t really see. He didn’t want to see. It looked so beautiful.” In other words, she was saying, he didn’t see the reality of it. The reality---the hard unblinking facts… 

---from “Working” by Robert Caro.

“The most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.”

Posted Thursday night, July 18, 2019.

A master legislator with a romantic streak: Lyndon Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson, at work in his office in the Texas State House of Representatives, circa 1905. LBJ Presidential Library via Wikipedia.

You can’t get very deep into Johnson’s life without realizing that the central fact of his life was his relationship with his father. His brother, Sam Houston, once said to me, “The most important thing to be like Daddy.”

His father, Sam Ealy Johnson, looked remarkably like Lyndon. Both were over six feet tall, both had very big ears, both had that big jutting jaw and piercing dark eyes. And both had the habit---Sam when he was in the Texas legislature, Lyndon when he was in the House and the Senate in Washington---of putting one arm around the shoulders of someone they were trying to persuade while grabbing the person’s lapel with the other han an holding him firmly and leaning into his face as they talked. They were both master legislators. Sam, the father, was a very idealistic legislator, a legislator with a romantic streak, a legislator who felt that the purpose of government was to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.”

Sam was described as “a man of great optimism,” and to some extent that optimism was justified in Austin: opular and skillful in the legislature, he got an  impressive number of laws passed. But also had to make a living, and he had to make it in the Hill Country. And his “optimism,” his romantic, idealistic streak, kept him from looing at hard facts. In the Hill Cournty, that really cost him---cost him among other things, the love, or at least the respect and admiration, of his elder son.

---from “Working” by Robert Caro.

Second in the series. Here's what came before---> Nancy Pelosi is Counting Votes.

"Fuego!"

Posted Monday evening, July 8, 2019.

The farmhouse at la Colonia de Víznar near the Andalusian village of Alfacar where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was held prisoner the night before he was executed by a fascist firing squad in August 1936. His body was buried by the side of the nearby road in an unmarked grave that hasn’t been found yet although the search has been on for decades. Photo via Barbarous Nights.

On the dark field adjacent to the road, the soldiers told the prisoners to stop. The five men weren’t professional executioners. They had taken a side and now accepted their duties, some more zealously than others. One of the soldiers who would later brag in public about having shot Lorca in his “big head,” was the frst cousin of a man whom the poet had unflatteringly fictionalized in a new play. One of the other men had paced nervously earlier in the night, exclaiming, “This isn’t for me! This isn’t for me!” Another, the leader of the firing squad and a former chauffeur for the first prime minister of the Republic, had lost his ten-month-old son the day before.

The five men lifted their guns and fired.

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

Romance de la Luna Luna

Posted Monday afternoon, July 8, 2019.

Detail from “Bathing Woman” by Joan Miro. 1925. Courtesy Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, via WikiArt.

Following up on the previous post, “There was, famously, no moon…”

Moon came to the forge
in her petticoat of nard
The boy looks and looks
the boy looks at the Moon
In the turbulent air
Moon lifts up her arms
showing — pure and sexy —
her beaten-tin breasts
Run Moon run Moon Moon

If the gypsies came
white rings and white necklaces
they would beat from your heart
Boy will you let me dance —
when the gypsies come
they’ll find you on the anvil
with your little eyes shut
Run Moon run Moon Moon
I hear the horses’ hoofs
Leave me boy! Don’t walk
on my lane of white starch

The horseman came beating
the drum of the plains
The boy at the forge
has his little eyes shut
Through the olive groves
in bronze and in dreams
here the gypsies come
their heads riding high
their eyelids hanging low

How the night heron sings
how it sings in the tree
Moon crosses the sky
with a boy by the hand

At the forge the gypsies
cry and then scream
The wind watches watches
the wind watches the Moon

--- “Ballad of the Moon Moon” by Federico García Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Arvio. Collected in “Poet in Spain”, poems by Lorca, translations by Arvio.

There was, famously, no moon

Monday morning, July 8, 2019.

“A small daub of beauty added onto a story that is at heart nothing more than proof of human brutality”: Andulsian countryside at night similar to the spot where the poet Federico García Lorca was executed by a fascist firing squad as Aaron Shulman describes it in “The Age of Disenchantments”. The countryside is similar. The sky is not. There was, famously, no moon the night Lorca died. Uncredited photo via GoSpain.

There are many books about Lorca, and nearly all of them mention the fact that the moon wasn’t visible on the night he was killed. I mention this, too, in my account of his death---twice, to be exact. The moon appeared frequently in Lorca’s poetry, perhaps most iconcally in “Romance de la Luna Luna” or “Ballad of the Moon, Moon” which includes the short line, so heartrending in retrospect, “Haye, luna, luna, luna”--- “Flee, moon, moon, moon.” The people who write about Lorca’s death highlight the moon’s absence because of the poetic irony and tragic aura: a man who constantly called out to the moon for inspiration wouldn’t have been able to seek its comfort during his last moments on earth as he looked up at the sky, knowing he was about to die.

 I understand why biographers underline Lorca’s abandonment by the moon. It is gorgeously terrible. Yet, objectively, it means absolutely nothing. The moon’s absences was incidental, random, trivia that only takes on the meaning we give it. It allows us to add a small daub of beauty, however painful, onto a story that is at heart nothing more than proof of human barbarity. We can’t control history, our evocations of Lora’s final minutes seem to say, but we can control the stories we tell about history. It’s true: converting experience into narrative gives an illusion of control, and sometimes even actual control. This is the ultimate tragedy of Lorca.---that he lost not just his life but his words, his role as teller of his story. His death was his end as narrator…

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

"A winged heart and a crystalline waterfall"

Posted Monday morning, July 8, 2019.

“His pain fueled poems of melancholy longing and stage tragedies of disastrously failed love…: Scene from James Madison University’s student production of “Blood Wedding” by Federico García Lorca, Spring 2009. Set design and photo copyright Richard Finkelstein.

Born in 1898 to a well-off family in a village near Grenada, Lorca had grown up to be a gifted musician, pathbreaking poet, theater-filling dramatist, and unparalled party guest. His personality was so contagious that when a young Salvador Dali first met Lorca in college, the painter would literally run away from him to battle in private his jealousy of the Grenadine’s charisma. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, Lorca was one of the most-beloved Spanish language writers alive. Alongisde his literary peers, the Generation of ‘27, he reinvigorated Spanish poetry, bringing artistic innovations from the rest of Europe into harmony with Spain’s folkloric traditions, especially that of his native Andalusia with its rich Gypsy influences. The Chilean poet Pabol Neruda wrote onf his friend Lorca: “I have never seen grace and genius, a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, come together in anyone else as they did in him.”

Behind that shimmiering waterfall, however, Lorca inhabited a fragile, shadowy inner world. As a gay man in a steadfastly homophobic society, he was never able to express his true self in all its complexity, perhaps te worst fate imaginable for someone as torrentially expressive as Lorca. His pain fueled poems of melancholy longing and stage tragedies of disastrously failed love…

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.