Triptych Cryptic

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

A Long, Strange Trip Indeed
Mr. Yamaguchi (survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki) has passed away.

Labels: 2010, history

17:35 cdogzilla

Monday, November 23, 2009

Non-Random Book, Non-Random Passage #1
Have I mentioned how much I love having my books all shelved and at hand? Yes. The random was fun (for me) but I'm itching to flip through some faves. Of course, it's Kim Stanley Robinson to start. The Gold Coast maintains a special place in my heart, even though The Years of Rice and Salt is currently my favorite of his novels. I've got a Hardback 1st and a paperback TGC -- liked it so much I bought it twice. Plus, I received a J'ai Lu edition en Français as a gift.

There's a bit that's always stuck with me, something I'd done, and I'm sure most folks have at one point or another where you count back generations to try to fit history in your head, make the scale of it intelligible. In the novel, the gang of friends need to get out of Dodge while some trouble blows over, so they jet off to Europe, hit some of the big tourist destinations, then decide to see the Pyramids in Egypt (and are underwhelmed), then Jim, our protagonist, suggests checking out Greece and getting off the beaten path to do some camping. They find some ruins and with the help of a few lines off the back of a map launch themselves into history:

"Well, the back of the map has a few sentences about it, and that's all I know, really. It began as a Minoan town, around 2500 B.C. Then it was occupied by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines. Under the Greeks it was an independent city-state and coined its own money. It was abandoned around either 900 A.D. or 1500 A.D., because of earthquakes."

"Only six hundred years' difference," Sandy says, "My Lord, the time scales!"

"Immense," Jim says. "We can't imagine them. Especially not Californians."

Sandy takes this as a challenge. "Can too!"

"Cannot!"

"Can too!"

About five reps of that, and Sandy says, "Okay, try this. We'll go backwards from now, generation by generation. Thirty-three years per generation. You tell us what they were doing, I'll keep count."

"Okay, let's try it."

"Last generation?"

"Part of Greece."

Sandy makes a mark in the dirt between flagstones. "Before that?"

"Same."

Five generations go by like that. Jim has his eyes squeezed shut, he's concentrating, trying to recall Cretan history from the guidebooks, his history texts back home. "Okay, this guy saw Crete deeded over from Turkey to Greece. Before him, under the Turks."

"And his parents?"

"Under the Turks." They repeat these two sentences over and over, slowly, as if completing some ritual, so that Jim can keep track of the years. Sixteen times! "That's one big Thanksgiving," Humphrey mutters.

"What's that?"

"Lot's of Turkey."

Then Jim says, "Okay, now the Venetians."

So the response changes. "And their parent?" "Venetian." Ten times. At which point Jim adds, "We've just no reached the end of Itanos, by the way. The end of this city."

They laugh at that. And move to the Byzantines. Seven times Jim answers with that. Then: "The Arabs. Saracen Arabs, from Spain. Bloody times." Four generations under the Arabs. Then it's back to the Byzantines, to the time when the church before them was functioning, holding services, having its doorsill scraped by the door's locking post, again and again. Fifteen times Jim answers "Byzantine," eyes screwed shut.

"And their parents?"

"In Itanos. Independent city-state, Greek in nature."

"Call it Itanos. And their parents?"

"Itanos."

Twenty-six times they repeat the litany, Sandy keeping the pace slow and measured. At this point none of them can really believe it.

"Dorian Greeks." After a few more: "Mycenean Greeks. Time of the Trojan War."

"So this generation could have gone to Troy?"

"Yes." And on it goes, for eight generations. Sandy's shifting to get some fresh dirt to scratch. Then: "Earthquakes brought down the Minoan palaces for the last time. This generation felt them."

"Minoans! And their parents?"

"Minoan." And here they fall into a slow singsong, they know they've caught the rhythm of something deep, something fundamental. Forty times Sandy asks "And their parents?", and Jim answers "Minoan," until their voices creak with the repetition.

And finally Jim opens his eyes, looks around as if seeing it all for the first time. "This generation, it was a group of friends, and they came here in boats. There was nothing here. They were probably fishermen, and stopped here on fishing trips. This hill was probably fifty feet inland, behind a wide beach. Their homes down near the palace at Zakros were getting crowded, they probably lived with their parents, and they were always up here fishing anyway, so they decided to take the wives and kids and move up here together. A group of friends, they all knew each other, they were having a good time all on their own, with their kids, and this whole valley for the taking. They built lean-tos at first, then started cutting the soft stone." Jim runs his hand over th eporous Minoan block he is leaning against. Looks at Sandy curiously. "Well?"

Sandy nods, says softly, "So we can imagine it."

"I guess so."

Sandy counts his marks. "One hundred thirty-seven generations."

They sit. The moon rises. Low broken clouds scud in from the west, fly under the moon, dash its light here and there. Broken walls, tumbled blocks. A history as long as that, and now the land, empty again.

At this point, some headlights break the characters' reverie and they are back in the present day. Whew, long passage to transcribe. I love it. Humphrey's Thanksgiving quip falls flat, unacknowledged once explained. The generations in the recounting wash up on empty land like a wave, then recede. The sand they are scratching in, the rocks that were scraped and cut, they abide. The repetition and ritualism, expanding their imagination of history. Jim's eyes are screwed shut until he reaches the first settlers. When he opens his eyes, I feel like I'm seeing the landscape the way he is.

And so we should, imagine backwards, then look at where we are. Where are we going next? How are we living in times that are like the times of our ancestors? How are things different? Then, of course, we need to think about what comes next, right? How to live now so when future generations count back, they don't say "bloody times."

Labels: Books, history

16:02 cdogzilla

Friday, October 23, 2009

Hooker Day Parade Canceled - Cityline | Hartford News: If you're not a Nutmegger, it's probably not what you think. More about Thomas Hooker at wikipedia...

Labels: history, local flavor

16:04 cdogzilla

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Why we don't use Galileo's last name. - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine: "Why Do We Call Galileo Galilei by His First Name?We don't go around saying 'Albert' discovered relativity."

Galileo figures prominently in Kim Stanley Robinson's next novel, so he's on my historical blogging radar.

Labels: Books, history

21:15 cdogzilla

Friday, July 10, 2009

Gropecunt Lane - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: I wouldn't have linked this except I thought it hilarious that Jeeves (Stephen Fry) himself tweeted it. If you only follow one celeb, he's the man.
Update: Google Maps Mania follows up with some more puerile place names.

Labels: history

21:00 cdogzilla

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Barclay Villa: We went to wedding at the beautiful Barclay Villa a few weeks ago. They quote a bit from Frederick Law Olmstead, who stayed there in the 1850s on their website, but they refer to the book they took the quote from as "Cotton Kingdom". When I tried to find a Google Books clip I was stumped at first, then found the text in "A Journey to the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853-1854".

If you check out the website, look for the Stop Audio link at the bottom right.

Labels: history, local flavor

22:24 cdogzilla

Friday, May 01, 2009

New Book Revisits Roosevelt’s Policy on European Jews - NYTimes.com: We may have been closer to a world like Chabon's in The Yiddish Policemen's Union than any of us realized.

Labels: Books, history

09:59 cdogzilla

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Regift, Please!:

"A decade ago, I and the other two co-authors of the 'Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot' devoted a chapter to refuting the historical and ideological fallacies contained in Galeano's tract, which we called the 'idiot's bible.' Everything that has happened in the Western Hemisphere since the book appeared in 1971 has belied Galeano's arguments and predictions. But I guess Chavez has given it the kiss of life and, since people are asking, here I go again."

I opened Galeano's Century of the Wind to a random page and read:

1980: Santa Marta
Marijuana
Out of each dollar of dreams that a U.S. marijuana smoker buys, barely one cent reaches the hands of the Colombian campesinos who grow it. The other ninety-nine cents go to the traffickers ...

... [T]he drug mafiosi live in ostentatious mansions. In front they like to display on granite pedestals the small planes the used in their first operation. They rock their children in gold cradles, give golden fingernails to their lovers ...

The mafiosi habitually fumigate their forces. Four years ago they machinegunned Lucho Barranquilla, the most popular of the traffickers, on a streetcorner in the city of Santa Marta. The murderers sent to the funeral a floral wreath in the form a heart and took up a collection to erect a statue of the departed on the main plaza.

It was pretty easy to find something relevant and topical in Galeano's 20+ year old writings. I'm not familiar at all with Open Veins, and maybe it is bad, but I'm inclined to give Galeano the benefit of the doubt here.

Labels: Books, crime, history, Obama

16:56 cdogzilla

Thursday, May 01, 2008

How Loathsome
The headline, "White House Admits Fault on 'Mission Accomplished' Banner," struck me as faulty right away. Admits fault? The Bush White House? It can't be.

It wasn't. Read the article.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

Don't you love how the White House pretends Bush is the victim here? Me too. Of course, the reason they weren't more specific and said mission accomplished for these sailors is that they didn't invent that excuse until months after the fact.

What a crummy article. The only fault I can see is that we all misinterpreted a perfectly clear banner and beat up a poor defenseless president. It also continues the myth that Bush flew the plane. I wonder what percentage of Americans believe that Bush was the pilot. I bet above 90.

If you'll forgive me for patting myself on the back, but that day five years ago I told anyone who would listen - not many - that Democrats were going to wind up using that image in political ads.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, history, Iraq, TV

11:26 bone daddy

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

How Did I Not Know About Moe Berg?
Tooling around Barnes & Noble before seeing "The Forbidden Kingdom" this past weekend, I read the first few pages of The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. Berg was a back-up catcher for the Red Sox in the late 30s, then a coach for a couple years, and (as you may have guessed) eventually a spy working for the OSS during WW2. One of his assignments was to attend a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, determine if the Germans were close to developing an A-Bomb, and shoot him if they were. Fascinating stuff. [Moe Berg Wikipedia page]

Labels: Books, history, sports

21:51 cdogzilla

Thursday, August 23, 2007

No Sense of Decency ... Bush scratches at the wounds of Vietnam in an attempt to smear his critics and prop up faltering support for his Iraq folly. I've long maintained that the pro-war right will get loonier and more violent as the debacle that is Iraq becomes less and less deniable. No reason Bush would be exempt from this I guess. There's two ways of looking at this - either a man with little ability to grasp the present is showing his trouble with the past as well, or Bush knows perfectly well that Iraq is and will continue to be a disaster for some time and he is setting up others to take the blame.

In a small sense, Vietnam War protesters have helped set up Bush's blame-those-who-were-right strategy by taking too much credit for ending Vietnam. We lost Vietnam because of the Vietnamese and, to a lesser degree, because we shouldn't have been there. Not because of the hippies.

Less than a year ago, Bush floated this analogy, prompting Robert Scheer to write ...

The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.

The United States dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than it unloaded on all of Europe in World War II, only hardening Vietnamese nationalist resolve. Hundreds of thousands of troops, massive defoliation of the countryside, "free fire zones," South Vietnamese allies, bombing the harbors ... none of it worked. Yet, never admitting that our blundering military presence fueled the native nationalist militancy we supposedly sought to eradicate, three US Presidents--two of them Democrats--lied themselves into believing victory was around some mythical corner.

Lastly, I'd like to ask, if Bush knows so much about winning in Vietnam, why didn't he go ahead and fight there?

Labels: 2008, Bush, Conservative Goons, history, Iraq

14:21 bone daddy