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July 5, 2008

Some Reflections on the Fifth

I love my country and I'm glad she exists--for all the ways we've fucked up lately, I still think the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all that business was pretty amazing and very important, solidly positive developments in the story of humanity. Which is one reason I'm happy to celebrate her birthday. I just get really annoyed at some of the ways OTHER PEOPLE celebrate that birthday.

I'm talking firecrackers. I HATE firecrackers. Fireworks--you know, the big light shows costing lots of money and staged by professionals--are great, though I've seen enough in my life that they don't really fill me with excitement, and they certainly don't arouse the wonder and awe I feel for my favorite light show, the Milky Way.

But firecrackers, the little containers of explosives whose purpose is to make noise and leave a nasty smell, I just can't stand, and I can't stand people who go out in the street and set them off at all hours of the night. I am glad that I spent most of my life in states where the damn things are illegal, and look forward to leaving the one I currently live in, where they are legal. Which, if you ask me, is one more reason Pennsylvania is just back-ass-wards, along with its bizarro liquor laws and the fact that it elected Rick Santorum as its senator.

Posted by Holly at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)

June 5, 2008

I Completely Agree with Gorbachev Right Now

One of the weirdest tourist attractions I've ever seen in my life is Lenin's body, and one of the scariest military rituals I've ever witnessed is the changing of the guard at his tomb. It was totally creepy to see these grim young men carrying rifles goose-stepping towards me--it was probably the first thing that gave me any inkling of what it would be like to live under military occupation.

Anyway, after the guard changed, we all got to file through the tomb and see the body. I got in trouble because my coat wasn't closed--the zipper was broken and I couldn't close it--and that upset one of the guards (actually more of a docent kind of dude; as I remember, the ones with the guns were outside the entrance); apparently you have to keep your coat closed so you are less likely to reach inside it and pull out a weapon. I showed the guard/docent that my zipper wouldn't work--which sucked, because it was February in Moscow, and I would have liked to be able to zip up my coat--and I guess he decided a 20-year-old American tourist wasn't that much of a security risk, because he let me trundle past the body with everyone else.

And I remember that I thought it looked waxy and green, and thought the innumerable statues and paintings and so forth EVERYWHERE YOU WENT were enough to let you know what the guy looked like--I certainly can identify him now. I didn't see why you needed to see his actual dead body, which, at the point I saw it, had been dead for sixty years.

I'm going to state the obvious: people deal with death in different ways. The Apaches used get rid of every last thing a person owned (including livestock), and bury the body out in the middle of nowhere (there are plenty of middles of plenty of nowheres out in the desert), or throw it off a cliff or something, so that the ghost would be less likely to return, drawn by a connection to the things s/he used in life. When the person who named you died, you had to get a new name. The dead person was erased from present life.

I'll continue to tell everyone what they already know and state that in general, we participants of Western culture prefer to remember our dead, but we still have to do something with the dead bodies of those we love, because (let me remind you, in case you somehow forgot) they decompose, and they stink, and they get all maggoty and moldy and gross. Completely respectable and legitimate ways of disposing of bodies include cremating them or embalming and then burying them (I think embalming is mandatory for burial, which I find too bad, because I think embalming is gross, and don't see why you need it if you're encased in an air-tight vault), or throwing them off the side of a boat if they die at sea. (I wanted to make sure that burial at sea still happens--turns out if you served in the navy, it will allow you that time honored method of being laid to rest, and there's also a company called Nature's Passage that will arrange for the rest of us to be returned to the earth that way, should we so desire.) As far as burying goes, you can stick someone in an unmarked grave, give them a fancy headstone, put them in a tomb, or build them a shrine.

But keeping their bodies on display? It's expensive, unhygienic, and weird. Lenin looks BIZARRE, and the bizarreness of his appearance has led some people to claim that he was buried long ago and a wax copy substituted. The state, of course, denies this. People started arguing in 1991, after the fall of communism, that he should be buried. But enough people objected that he stayed where he was.

Now, according to a story in the Independent, Mikhail Gorbachev has said, "My view is [that] we should not be occupied right now with grave-digging. But we will necessarily come to a time when the mausoleum will have lost its meaning and we will bury [Lenin], give him up to the earth as his family had wanted. I think the time will come."

The story also reports that

Mr Gorbachev also called for the creation of a memorial museum to remember the millions of people killed or sent to prison under Josef Stalin, whose embalmed body lay beside Lenin's for eight years until 1961. Historians estimate that up to 27 million people in the Soviet Union suffered from Stalin's repression but he is revered by many Russians for defeating Nazi Germany and building the USSR into a superpower.

Personally, I think Mr. Gorbachev is onto something, on both counts.

Posted by Holly at 9:37 AM | Comments (5)

February 11, 2008

Finally, I Finish "The War"

My habit of watching stuff on TV months after everyone else has seen it continues.... I just finished watching Ken Burns’ documentary on World War II, aptly titled The War.

I am quite glad I waited to watch this, as I had time to gather opinions from others who watched it as it was televised, particularly from my friends who, like me, are very interested in military history. They said pretty much the same thing: “It was good, but not great. I thought I would LOVE it, and I didn’t. I only liked it."

So I sat down to watch it with lowered expectations, and because I expected less, I was pleased and surprised when I ended up liking it A LOT--maybe I didn't LOVE it, but it was close.

There were a few moments where I got to feel smart, because I knew what was coming: I am interested in the Battle of the Bulge--the name just arouses curiosity, and it began on my birthday--so I knew what was going on when the narrator mentioned that German troops started moving into the Ardennes in December 1944. (Though I admit I never made it through all of Band of Brothers--just found it too tedious and didn’t care for some of the actors.) I thought I knew the significance of the USS Indianapolis, since I had read all about its sinking, and the horrible blunders that led to about 900 men, originally hopeful of rescue, bobbing along for days in shark-infested water without food, potable water or lifeboats. (The reason the grisly old shark hunter in Jaws hated the animals so much was that he was a survivor of the Indianapolis, which is often called "the worst naval disaster in US history," though more men died on the USS Arizona--I guess it's that whole fighting off sharks thing, which could have been avoided had anyone paid attention to the fact that the Indianapolis didn't show up at dock when it was supposed to, that makes it worse.) I did not know, however, that when it was torpedoed and sunk, it was returning from delivering the first atomic bomb to Tinian.

One thing I really liked about the series was its use of Eugene Sledge, whose memoir With the Old Breed is one of my favorite books and has been called by a number of military historians “One of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war” (Paul Fussell) and “one of the most important accounts of war that I have ever read” (John Keegan). I teach it often and students find it profoundly moving and almost life-changing--you read it and you realize how much you don’t know, how much you’ll never know, how much separates combat veterans from those of us who either merely read about such things or simply don’t want to know. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Here’s one of the passages we often refer to in classes, about the fighting on Okinawa:

The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn’t a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire, flooded craters with the silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment--utter desolation.

The stench of death was overpowering. The only way I could bear the monstrous horror of it all was to look upward from the earthly reality surrounding us, watch the leaden gray clouds go skudding over, and repeat over and over to myself that the situation was unreal--just a nightmare--and that I would soon awake and find myself somewhere else. But the ever-present smell of death saturated my nostrils. It was there with every breath I took.

I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Umurbrogal Pocket on Peliliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.

.... We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity.

I was also struck to see Paul Fussell lose his composure and tear up. Fussell is an old acquaintance of mine; at least, that’s how I think of him. I first encountered him in an undergraduate creative writing class on poetic forms, via his first book, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (which is still in print 40 years after its original publication). But it was his book about World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, that made me a fan of his analyses of the literature and actual events of modern warfare. In print, Fussell comes across as unsentimental and cynical--or, in his terms, “a pissed-off infantryman.” He is notorious for a very provocative essay called “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” I put that essay in a special place when I discuss his work, preferring to focus on the other ways in which he has “given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensibly proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness” (Fussell, “My War”). If you watch many documentaries about war, you see him all the time, and the voice of that pissed-off infantry man is so strong, and he’s so stoic in most of his appearances, that it was shocking to me to see him begin to cry.

One other thing I liked about the series was that it serves as a good antidote to an attitude I have encountered a time or two in my classes: the sense that the real war was fought in Europe, that the only war that mattered was the one against the Nazis. A student in my class actually said once, when we read Sledge, “It’s good to learn about the war in the Pacific, because you just don’t hear much about it. It’s pretty obvious that it really wasn’t that important.”

“I’d have to disagree with that,” I said. “After all, World War Two started and ended for us in the Pacific.”

“World War Two started in Europe; everyone knows that,” he said.

“We didn’t enter the war until Pearl Harbor, remember?” I said. “The Japanese attacked us, and then we declared war on both Japan and Germany. Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, but we didn’t enter the war until December 1941.”

“Well, at the time, people weren’t as concerned about the war with the Japanese,” he insisted.

“Yes, they were,” I said. “My dad was nine when the war started, and he was obsessed with Guadalcanal. My mother was four when the war started, and she had nightmares about the Japs coming to get her. Plus we rounded up all people of Japanese descent and put them in internment camps, remember? We didn’t do anything to people of German or Italian descent, even though those countries were our enemies too. And don’t forget who we dropped the atom bombs on.” But he just wouldn’t budge. To him, the war in the Pacific didn’t have the veneer of nobility conferred after the fighting by the liberation of the inmate of the Nazi death camps--the full horror of which American politicians, military planners and the press downplayed, even after the Russians, who found them first, issued reports on them--so it wouldn’t matter as much to history, and couldn’t have mattered as much while it was going on.

Anyway. I found the series worth my time. I was moved and informed by it, and I hope that if you haven’t seen it, you’ll take the time to watch it.

Posted by Holly at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2008

Dirty Christians, Over-Scrubbed Americans, Soap, Advertising and You

I feel dirty right now, and nauseated, having tried to read one of William Kristol’s editorials in the NY Times. Loathing and revulsion don’t cover the reactions I have to that man. I have despised him since he first came to my attention, back around 2002 when I started paying attention to the fact that there were evil people with power who really, really wanted us to go to war. I would say that I can’t believe the Times hired the guy, were it not for the fact that the Times credulously accepted the kinds of arguments Kristol and his ilk offered for why we should go to war.

Something else that made me feel dirty and nauseated was this article about the evil that is Facebook. I resisted Facebook for a very long time, but finally joined a few months ago, after people convinced me it was one of the more benign social networking sites out there. Wrong! It’s owned by some really dreadful people who are glad to give the CIA access to all your information. I looked into deleting my account, but it turns you can’t do that--you can only “deactivate it.”

But this is not a post about Kristol or the Times--or Facebook or spying. It’s a post about dirt and dirtiness and cleanliness, and Kristol et al is useful in that they show the way dirtiness and cleanliness are states of mind, the way things we think about can make us feel, genuinely (not just as a figure of speech), that we need to take a shower.

This isn’t a new idea. It’s covered quite well in Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas, a book about ritual filth and purity that I had to read in grad school and liked well enough that I read it again later, just for fun. I’m looking forward to rereading it this summer, both just for the fun of it and as research for an essay I want to write about that concept of contamination ever so important to childhood, namely, cooties.

As research for the same project, I recently read The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg, which also made me feel I needed to take a bath--and then made me acknowledge something I already knew: I have more exacting bathing habits than most people, though I’m not afraid of germs: I just like being clean. Here’s another connection to Facebook: my profile there announces that “I love the simple, transient pleasure of cleanliness, as in crisp, freshly laundered sheets; hair washed so recently it's still damp; the minty freshness of just-brushed teeth. I especially love going to sleep in a clean bed with just-washed hair and well-maintained teeth.”

I like being clean so much, in fact, that I feel slight psychological and physical discomfort if I violate my own idiosyncratic ideas of what is clean and what is not. Emphasis on slight discomfort: my attitudes aren’t extreme enough to constitute a phobia or a compulsion, but they do require an adjustment whenever I visit people, as I also feel uncomfortable answering the question “Why do you need to take a bath before bed if you’re going to take a shower in the morning?” and guilty about using up my host’s hot water.

I recommend this book, though it has a considerable ick factor: it’s just not that cool to read about people who never once, NEVER ONCE, washed their hair, who, in fact, had a grand total of two baths during their entire time on earth: one at birth and one as preparation for burial. But all in all, the history of bathing in the West from the time of the Romans (who loved being clean almost as much as North Americans do) is a fascinating topic, and Ashenburg does a good job with it.

A rough overview: the Romans loved bathing and cleanliness, but early Christians hated it. That’s right, Christianity is the only major religion that has no real interest in physical cleanliness. This is not an entirely bad thing on one level; Jesus was willing to hang out with people others shunned, and argued that there was nothing intrinsically “unclean” about menstruating women or people with various illnesses; he also maintained that it was silly to worry so much about purifying your exterior if your interior was somehow defiled. But his followers took this argument to an illogical extreme, claiming that to be filthy was a sign of holiness. It wasn’t until Victorian England that people were taught in Sunday school that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

Then, long about 1000 a.d., people in Europe started to discover that it felt good to A) take a bath and B) hang out with your friends who were also taking baths (because few private homes had bathrooms, most baths were taken in public facilities) and C) be clean after the bath. Bathing and cleanliness were on the rise until the bubonic plague hit; ideas of disease at the time held that bathing made you more susceptible to the plague, because it opened your pores, and so bath houses across Europe were shut down, which was a bad thing plague-wise, since it meant people didn’t get rid of the fleas actually causing the plague, but a good thing forest-wise: having enough fuel to heat all that water was a major cause of deforestation back in the day.

The Renaissance was filthy, just filthy, but it wasn’t that people didn’t care about cleanliness: it’s that they believed bathing could kill them. Instead, if you wanted to be clean, you changed your shirt (which was the basic undergarment most people wore) a lot, because a clean linen shirt was thought to act as a wick that drew impurities out of the body. However, plenty of people put on their shirt or shift and left it on until it fell off in tatters--or until it had to be taken off for medical reasons, which could involve pulling away chunks of flesh as the garment came off. The court of Louis XIV seems to have been particularly dirty, since Louis didn’t like to bathe and had really bad breath. (In fact, for centuries, it was considered bourgeois to worry about bathing: only the middle class needed to care if they stunk, and until the mid-20th century, a lack of indoor plumbing was a sign of wealth in the grand homes of the British landed gentry: why install pipes to carry hot water to a little room if you were rich enough to hire men to carry a fancy-ass bathtub into your bedroom, set it by the fire, fill it with warm water boiled downstairs in the scullery, then haul the whole thing away after you’d had your bath?)

Baths began to make a come-back in the 18th century, for reasons of health, not cleanliness: medicinal waters were thought to cure disease. But once again, when people started taking baths, they discovered that doing so felt good. Along the way to the present day love of bathing was a debate about cold vs. hot water for bathing (Charles Dickens LOVED a cold shower every morning) and concerns about the use of soap.

Soap. We are so reliant on it now that it’s hard to believe people once advocated doing without it, and that a real battle was waged to convince people of soap’s necessity. It’s something of a truism that the goal of advertising is to make you feel insecure, and it turns out that was true from the get-go: modern advertising was created as a way to sell soap, and the way to do that was to convince people they would stink without it, and would therefore lose out on love, friendship and success. The same technique was used for mouthwash: No one would tell you have halitosis; they’d just avoid you, and you’d never know why. You know that saying, “Often a bridesmaid, never a bride”? It comes from an early ad for Listerine.

North Americans bathe more than anyone else, and care more about our teeth than anyone else; neither of which is necessarily a good thing: it is possible to overbrush your teeth, causing gums to recede or creating holes in tooth enamel, and this whole business of bleaching them white as snow them is bad for them. As for bathing too much, or using too many products; well, it may or may not hurt us, but it’s bad for the environment, something I acknowledge to my pain because I LOVE very hot, frequent baths. But I am determined to cut back--take short showers instead of long baths, for instance, and bathe only once a day instead of twice, as I really prefer to do.

In fact, after reading this book, I resolved that early in the summer, after the academic year ended and I’d no longer have to interact with people daily but before it got so hot I’d sweat a lot, I’d go a week without bathing at all, just to see if I could and what it felt like, though of course I still planned to brush my teeth and wash my hands after using the toilet or scooping out the cat box. I thought this was a very daring experiment until a friend sent me a link to this article by a woman who went six weeks without washing at all--including her hands or her teeth--with some very interesting results. She felt dirty, her kids refused to cuddle with her and she didn’t want to see people, but the quality of her skin improved and her irritable bowel syndrome cleared up, both of which she attributed to the fact that she was no longer putting all these gross chemical compounds on her skin to maintain or improve it. The one real physical ailment she suffered as a result of the experiment was a cavity from not brushing or flossing.

Anyway. This is, as I already mentioned, a quick overview of Ashenburg’s book. I hope I have piqued your interest, because it really is a good treatment of a fascinating and important topic.

Posted by Holly at 12:48 PM | Comments (8)

August 6, 2007

What I'm Reading Meme

I started this blog entry more than two weeks ago--in fact, in a conversation about this book, I told someone I'd finished the entry and would be posting it the next day--and that was two weeks ago. At the time, I really did plan to post this the next day--but then I looked at what I'd written and decided this book deserves a more interesting and thorough write-up. Here it finally is.

Anyway, here's a meme I've seen going around, along with its rules:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 123.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
* Do not dig around for the 'cool' or 'intellectual' book on your shelf. Do not go to the other room to find an old textbook. Just pick up whatever is lying at hand.

I grabbed the book I was currently reading: Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil. It is a thoroughly fabulous book and I plan to blog all about it eventually, but for now I'll focus on the chapter in which page 123 occurs: Chapter 5, "War and Wellingtons: Military Footwear in the Age of Empire" by Alison Matthews David.

I have to fudge a little: page 123 is actually an illustration of some French "support the troops!" propaganda poster from World War I, so I'm providing four sentences from page 124:

Another telling design feature is the heel of the boot, which has a small, inverted metal horse-shoe shaped reinforcement hammered into the leather itself. Unlike officers, soldiers were beasts of burden who carried packs weighing up to sixty pounds. Like the horses that served in wartime, they were literally "shod" to protect their feet from lameness. The thin, smooth sole with a few small, invisible nails were the hallmark of a man who sat on a horse, rode in a carriage, or wore his boots on newly paved urban streets.

And there you have it: the origin of the term "well-heeled" as a descriptor of superior wealth and up-bringing: it literally refers to the well-crafted, solid, carefully maintained heels on an officer's boots. Because not only were the heels attached to expensive boots, they were also equestrian in style and function (even for officers in the navy), which announced their wearer as a man who owned (or aspired to own, with some chance of success) horses, as well as stables to keep them in and land own which to build the stables.

The beautifully photographed and presented illustrations (this is both a coffee-table art book and a collection of scholarly essays) demonstrate just how cloddish, clumsy and unattractive were the boots of working-class and enlisted men. In other words, the contemporary belief that men should have big feet, because "big feet equal big other things" did not hold true for earlier times. Rather, men

who had them were proud to show off their "neat" small feet and suffered accordingly from corns, hammer toes, bunions, ingrown toenails and other painful conditions. Toes were crammed into the tips of boots that alternated between exaggeratedly square and round-toed models.... Medical men compared fashionable male footwear with the barbarous practices of tight-laced corsets for women and Chinese footbinding.... While the British "Tommy" [of World War One] was said to have a "special affection for his boots" because they were his "best friends" in wartime, his boots still marked him as a working-class man. They had thick, metal-studded soles and laced up to the ankles. Most importantly, they had an unfashionably broad toe. A small, narrow "smart" foot held cachet. By the early 20th century, infantry soldiers complained not that their boots were shoddy, but that they were too large and wide.

Chapter 5 was one of my favorite chapters--after all, I have this thing for war literature and maritime history, so it was already on a topic that would interest me, but there were other reasons I really liked it: it was smart and informative and like the video about cannons I describe at the end of this post, taught me stuff I hadn't known I didn't know.

In particular, it taught me about military marching. Maybe because of the trauma of being in marching band in high school (someday I might be able to address the pain I still experience when I think about how horrible that was), I always thought that all that regimented, precise marching soldiers had to do was just a form of torture, a way to fill hours and make men so bored and unhappy and tired and frustrated they'll be ready to kill just about anything, given the opportunity.

But no! I mean, that's ONE reason soldiers march, but it turns out there's another:

Martial movement was highly specialized and ritualized. Generals and superior officers had to know the exact pace of their men for tactical reasons. By knowing how many miles or kilometers a troop could cover in an hour or a day, they could calculate how much time it would take to deploy battalions or bring in reinforcements.

In order to achieve this end, recruits were drilled until they could move with mechanical precision. Soldiers never "walked" in formation: they marched. Both pace and cadence were crucial.

I also learned that it was only in the 20th century that western military powers regularly supplied soldiers with socks, and that the miseries of the Crimean war were exacerbated by the lack of decent footwear--both socks and boots--among British and French troops. Tell me if this general scenario, if not the details, sounds at all familiar:

Unscrupulous military contractors had supplied shoddy goods to the French and British armies. The shoemaker James Devlin railed against these abuses of power and equated the plight of the underpaid shoemaker with that of the soldier: both were forced to suffer physical and economic misery on account of military footwear. Writing after the deadly winter of 1855, Devlin singled out firms such as Messrs Almond of St. Martin's Lane in London, experts in leather equipment, who had been awarded a contract for footwear they had no experience in making, or corrupt army inspectors, who overlooked manufacturing defects in order to send some boots to the Crimea rather than none.

And then there was this, which I'd also never thought about, but which is completely obvious now that I consider it:

Much of the male (and also sometimes female) wardrobe has been inspired by military styles. Cravats, lapels, pocket flaps, khaki pants, camouflage gear, even the simple T-shirt, worn as an undershirt by American troops in the Second World War, have all crossed over from military to civilian dress.

I will have more to say about this book--it's truly, truly remarkable, but I could never write about the whole thing at one go, so I'm happy to provide this introduction here. And I hope someone else will rush out and buy a copy as well. I originally got it from the library, but about half way through I decided I had to own my own copy. Even now that I've finished reading it, I keep picking it up to flip through and look at the photographs, and the layout of the pages--it's a beautiful, beautiful book.

Posted by Holly at 2:01 PM | Comments (2)

July 16, 2007

Mr. Bowditch Carried On without Me

One thing I didn't see in Salem, Massachusetts (I started an entry about going to Salem but haven't finished it because it's depressing) because I didn't know it was there but would have visited had I known about it is the Nathaniel Bowditch House.

Who, you are probably asking, is Nathaniel Bowditch?

Nathaniel Bowditch was a very important self-taught navigator who found some important way of determining one's location while at sea. His work The American Practical Navigator, published in 1802, is still in print (seriously--you can get it from Amazon) and is carried on all commissioned US Naval vessels.

That's not a very complete explanation, but the two sites I link to--both Wikipedia and some Salem history thing--give a more thorough, learned explanation than I could provide even if I cribbed from them extensively.

But I was able to give you a bare-bones answer in part because as I child I read, and earlier this summer I reread, the absolutely marvelous Newbery medal-winning Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham. I reread it in part because back when Anonymous Blog Friend visited me, ABF and I visited the Flagship Niagara, which was very cool* but made both of us wonder why we have this fascination with maritime history. (Aside, of course, from the fact that Ioan Gruffudd, who plays Horatio Hornblower, is so HOT!--which actually still doesn't answer the question, because not everyone wants to watch even a hottie like Ioan portray an early 19th-century British sea captian.) And then I noticed Latham's book in the gift shop, and said, "Reading this in fourth grade or so probably has something to do with my interest in tall ships. Have you read it? It's really good."

Rereading it this summer, I still thought it was pretty good. If you want a quick intro to 18th-century navigation, try this! It's a fun little historical novel and unless you already know a lot about naval history, you'll be smarter when you finish it than you were when you started.

Bowditch grew up in Salem; I'd forgotten that connection until I saw the headstone of his first wife, Elizabeth, in the old graveyard. She died when she was only 18. I searched the Bowditch plot of Nathaniel's grave, but it wasn't there; turns out he's buried in Cambridge, which I visited the next day, but I didn't go looking for cemeteries while I was there--just Indian food and universities, all of which I found.

*One thing I just LOVE, in that "this horrifies, revolts and fascinates me" kind of way, is a video about the damage cannon fire does to a ship. When they were building the replica of the original brig, they also built an extra ship side, then took it out to the middle of nowhere, and fired cannons at it. I find the video so compelling because it makes me realize what I hadn't known before: I hadn't known about shrapnel. I mean, I knew there was this thing called shrapnel, but I didn't realize that when a cannon ball hit some great big old boat, it would cause the timber the ship was constructed from to splinter into sharp, jagged chunks of wood often bigger than baseball bats, which were hurled about with great force, and could do a lot of damage to human bodies in their path. Even an itty bitty piece of shrapnel--say, six inches long--could really freaking HURT if it went right through your lower abdomen or shoulder or face at 60 miles an hour.

Posted by Holly at 9:34 AM | Comments (5)

June 2, 2007

As Opposed to a Pleasant One

The first Medici pope was Giovanni de' Medici, who, as I mentioned last time, is reported to have written to his brother, "God has given us the Papacy--let us enjoy it," when in 1513 he learned he'd be able to change his name from Giovanni to Leo X. (Leo X just doesn't sound as good as Malcolm X, does it.)

But Leo had to help God a little along the way in getting Him to give him the papacy. The pope before Leo was Julius II, a particularly bellicose and belligerent man who shocked absolutely everyone by riding out before the armies of the Vatican and who, in the words of Tuchman,

is ranked among the great popes because of his temporal accomplishments, not least his fertile partnership with Michelangelo--for art, next to war, is the great immortalizer of reputations.... He achieved important results in both these endeavors, which, being visible, have received ample notice as the visibles of history usually do, while the significant aspect of his reign, its failure of concern for the religious crisis, has been overlooked as the invisibles of history usually are.

After Julius II's very martial papacy, many were glad to have a lazy hedonist on the papal throne, particularly one who might die early and so give all the other cardinals a chance to be pope before too long. According, once again, to Tuchman, Leo's

health was a major concern because, although only 37 when elected, he suffered from an unpleasant anal ulcer which gave hm trouble in processions, although it aided his election because he allowed his doctors to spread word that he would not live long--always a persuasive factor to fellow cardinals.

Now, the fact that letting everyone think you'll die soon could aid your chances of being elected pope is interesting, but what really caught my attention in that passage is the phrase "unpleasant anal ulcer." Maybe it's just my lack of experience with anal ulcers, but I have trouble imagining a pleasant anal ulcer. The "unpleasant" there seems superfluous, about like mentioning a "tall giant" or a "short dwarf."

But in 1517 the story of Leo's ass gets every weirder, and here it is:

The Petrucci conspiracy was an obscure and vicious affair that has baffled everyone from that day to this. Leo professed to discover through betrayal by a servant a conspiracy of several cardinals to assassinate him. Led by the young Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci of Siena, who nursed a personal grievance, the plot depended on poison to be injected by a suborned doctor in the course of lancing a boil on the Pope's buttock. Arrests were made, informers tortured, suspect cardinals grilled. Lured to Rome on a safe-conduct, Petrucci and others of the accused were imprisoned, the violation being condoned by Leo on the ground that no poisoner could be considered a safe risk. Hearings produced awful revelations; confessions were induced; whispered reports of the proceedings bewildered and terrified Rome. Forced to plead guilty, Cardinal Petrucci was executed by strangling with an appropriately red silk noose at the hand of a Moor because protocol did not permit a Christian to put to death a Prince of the Church. Faced with this example, the other accused cardinals accepted pardons at a cost of enormous fines, up to 150,000 ducats from the richest, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, yet another of the nipoti of Sixtus IV, in this case a grand-nephew.

So far-fetched was the plot that the inference could not be avoided that the Pope, perhaps seizing upon some informer's tattle, had promoted the whole affair for the sake of the fines. Recent investigations in Vatican archives suggest that the plot may in fact have been real, but what counts is the impression made at the time. Coming on top of public indignation at Leo's war on Urbino, the Petrucci conspiracy further discredited the Papacy, besides alarming and antagonizing the cardinals. Whether to nullify their hostility or to fend off bankruptcy, or both, Leo in an act of astonishing boldness created 31 new cardinals in a single day, collecting from the recruits over 300,000 [which is simony, or selling a religious office for profit, a very great sin]. The wholesale creation is said to have been conceived by [Leo's cousin] Cardinal Guilio de' Medici as a paving stone on his own path to the Papacy.

Leo died in 1521; he was succeeded by Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, a Dutch-born reformer who actually wanted to be a proper pope and a true religious leader, and therefore got no cooperation from the cardinals. His death in September 1523 was unmourned, and made way for Guilio de' Medici to become Pope Clement VII. Clement's major claim to fame is that he so mismanaged what was already fucked up, failing to respond at all to what was obviously a crisis, that the sack of Rome occurred during his reign.

And all of that is really interesting and good to know, but I still find myself horrified and fascinated by the idea that people would try to assassinate a pope by injecting poison into a boil on his ass.

Posted by Holly at 11:45 AM | Comments (2)

June 1, 2007

Put a Bad Guy in a Tiara and a Dress, and See What Trouble Ensues

Last weekend I watched a thoroughly inadequate documentary on The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. A major problem was the acting, which was simultaneously too restrained and excessive, in that the actors never spoke, so they had to resort to over-emoting to convey any sort of inner state. I like cheese as a general proposition but that was just too much.

But an even bigger problem was that the whole thing was carefully sanitized to avoid offending Catholics. The discussion of Savonarola, the Dominican ascetic who persuaded people to renounce materialism and riches by casting their paintings, statues, books, jewels and fine clothes onto raging "bonfires of the vanities," makes it sound like his gripe was all about the fact that Lorenzo de' Medici paid Sandro Bottecelli to paint naked depictions of pagan goddesses instead of clothed depictions of Christian saints. In other words, there was absolutely no mention of the fact that at the time Savonarola began railing against the established church, the dude wearing the papal tiara was Alexander VI, a.k.a. Rodrigo Borgia, a licentious, scheming son of a bitch who became pope by buying the papacy outright at age 62 after fathering at least seven acknowledged illegitimate children. (I say at least seven because he acknowledged seven of them very clearly; then there was an eighth, who was legitimized first as Rodrigo's grandson and then as his son, by two successive papal bulls; one of the elders son, Cesare, whose paternity was never in doubt, was supported and protected by his father in his very successful career as a murderer and general extremely nasty bad guy.) You'd think that given that the documentary was about a family of Italian merchants who eventually became some of the most important art patrons in the history of the world before becoming very bad ecclesiastical leaders, there would be room to point out the failings of a family of Spanish scofflaws.

But no, because more important than an accurate account of much of anything is the requirement not to say anything negative about a church, which is one more reason organized religion sucks and people who follow it are so often unable and unwilling to have a clear grasp of the truth. Thus, the Borgias are not even mentioned. Nor was there any reference to mistresses kept by Medici popes (there were two popes, and god only knows how many mistresses). The famous (and perhaps apocryphal) comment by Giovanni de' Medici (a.k.a. Pope Leo X) to his brother Giuliano upon Giovanni's accession, "God has given us the Papacy--let us enjoy it," was treated as a remark that was irreverent and indecorous rather than greedy and rapacious, although Leo managed to empty the papal coffers in record time.

So I turned to The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman, a book about why governments insist on pursuing policies and actions that are contrary to their interests, even after the policies are shown to be flawed and the actions mistakes. Tuchman attributes part of the problem to "wooden-headedness," which is

the source of self-deception [and] a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived or fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian's statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns [though perhaps not of all presidents]: "No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence."

I read this book in the spring of 2003 as we were gearing up for the war in Iraq. The section on Vietnam was enough to persuade anyone with a brain that what we were preparing to do was the height of folly, but we went ahead and did it anyway--just as Tuchman might have predicted.

Anyway, there's a section in Tuchman's book about all the ways the Renaissance popes really, really screwed up. And the point of this post was not really to talk about the crappy documentary--that was just to introduce my real subject. But I have barely gotten around to that, and this post is already really long, so I'll finish up with my real topic tomorrow.

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

December 5, 2006

Stonehenge as Hospital

I own a book called Love Is in the Earth. It's an encyclopedia of various gems and stones, both precious and semi-precious, but it won't tell you how to judge their monetary or aesthetic value, how to cut or set them. Instead, it explains the mystical healing properties of the stones listed in it.

Now, that sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo to plenty of people, but I was profoundly and profusely ill at more than one point in my life, and collecting pretty stones and hoping their vibrations would do me some good seemed as sensible as visiting a man in a white coat, who would bombard parts of my body with invisible "rays" (as in X-) or "waves" (as in sonar) as some sort of diagnostic procedure, and then tell me stuff I already knew, such as "You're ill," before adding, "but I don't know how you got that way and I don't know how to make you better, so go home and hope it clears up and if anything changes, come back."

Understand: I still visited the guy in the white coat, but I figured I should cover all my bases. So I also bought pretty stones. I would hang them in front of my window, or put them under my pillow, or tote them in my pocket, though I was also fond of carrying them about my person in the form of earrings, pendants, rings and bracelets. People have asked me, when I've mentioned buying the stones, "Didn't that get kind of expensive?" I suppose it has, if you count the really fancy stones in really fancy settings that I wear as jewelry.... But the cost of all the loose stones I've ever bought in my entire life hasn't come close costing what I paid for prescription drugs during a single year of grad school. (This was back before we managed to get a grad student union at the University of Iowa.) Not only were the stones cheaper; they were also more psychologically empowering, and still look pretty in the container where I keep them.

Now, this idea that stones have mystical healing powers is not new; instead, it's extremely old. In fact, the giant dolerite and rhyolite stones used in the construction of Stonehenge were believed to have healing properties. Understand: these were special stones weighing several tons, dragged all the way from Wales, while other parts of Stonehenge were locally quarried sandstone. Why go to the trouble of getting great big stones from someplace so far away when there are nice big chunks of rocks to be had nearby, unless it's because there's something special about the foreign stones?

Which is why someone has argued that Stonehenge was a hospital--that, and the fact that surrounding Stonehenge are burial mounds, containing a remarkably high percentage of bodies with strange deformities. Yes, the stones of the site were aligned to astrologically significant points, but that was not the whole point. It wasn't an observatory. The point of matching things up with pivotal days of the calendar was that such matchings would augment the inherent healing power in the stones. The people who hung out at Stonehenge were either sick people hoping to be cured, or shamans hoping to cure them, not religious pilgrims or esoteric priests presiding over arcane rituals.

I admit this argument, advanced by Professors Geoff Wainwright and Timothy Darvill and summarized by Steven Jenkins in a commentary for the Guardian UK, makes sense to me. And had I been some prehistoric chronically ill person, I probably would have attempted a pilgrimage to Stonehenge the hospital. For that matter, I'd probably make a pilgrimage there if it were still a hospital. Or maybe I wouldn't--I believe that Sedona, Arizona, is an intensely powerful place, but it's so overrun with rich people that I prefer to stay away, and find my healing in the desert's solitary places.

Posted by Holly at 9:16 AM | Comments (3)

September 4, 2006

Lizzy Tudor in Film

Recently I watched two different two-part versions of the life of Elizabeth Tudor. The first was the 2005 HBO mini-series Elizabeth I, starring Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons (both of whom I always like to watch), and the second was the 2005 Masterpiece Theatre mini-series The Virgin Queen, starring Anne-Marie Duff, a young Irish actress who was also in The Magdalene Sisters. Helen Mirren was WAY better. (I have every certainty that she deserved the Emmy she won for this role.) She is regal to begin with and the character as written for her was much wittier, wiser, more powerful. In the Duff version, there were scenes where the queen was mocked and ridiculed, and it was easily done because there was something ridiculous about her character, and something ridiculous about a 30-something woman playing a 60-something crone (and Duff's portrayal WAS a crone).

When I first moved to the town I live in now, I went to check out the public library and what it had to offer. A librarian tried really hard to sell me on their facilities for genealogical research. "I had a bunch of great aunts who traced the family way back," I said. "There's not much more to be done unless someone wants to go look at tombstones and read parish records in rural Germany or France."

"Oh," the librarian said, smiling. "Don't underestimate what we have to offer, especially now that libraries are link. You'd be surprised."

"No, you'd be surprised," I said. "Those great aunts of mine were hard-core Mormons."

The librarian lost her smile and nodded. She knew, as anyone who does genealogical research knows, that the Mormons are the most diligent and thorough genealogists in the world.

I mention this because it's one reason I have always had an interest in the British monarchy: those great aunts established that among my ancestors are Wicked King John (who signed the Magna Carta) and William the Conqueror (a.k.a. William the Bastard, Norman invader of England). It's not like I claimed an affinity for royalty or liked to imagine I could have been a princess; rather, I was fascinated to think of my ancestors living in drafty stone castles, galloping through dappled forest in hot pursuit of wild bore, begetting scores of illegitimate children and watching a guy in a hat with bells on it strum the lute. Starting in junior high I read about them a lot; among my royal ancestors, my favorite is Eleanor of Aquitaine (played by Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter).

Elizabeth Tudor (who is neither my ancestor nor even my relative) is my favorite monarch and one of my favorite historical figures of all time, in large part because she was a fiery-tempered, strong-willed, intelligent spinster, and I have always claimed an affinity for those. I admit I could never understand how anyone could sympathize with that shallow milktoast Mary Queen of Scots, and my interest in Elizabeth made her mother, Anne Boleyn, sympathetic to me too. I was never a huge fan of Liz's father, Henry VIII--how could I be, given the way he treated his wives?--and I was always glad the Earl of Essex didn't succeed in fomenting a rebellion. I just wish the whole big story didn't involve so many people getting their heads chopped off.

I watch every version of Elizabeth's life I come across. I liked the Cate Blanchett movie Elizabeth because it had Cate Blanchett in it, and saw it a couple of times, but it took so many liberties with facts and accuracy that I couldn't really respect it. (Plus it has Geoffrey Rush in it, and he flat creeps me out.) It's been a while since I saw the 1971 BBC six-part mini-series starring Glenda Jackson, but as I remember, Jackson was awesome! I'm kind of sated as far as "The Life if Liz" goes, but maybe in a few months I'll watch it again and see how it compares to the Mirren version. (Especially since I just discovered that the actress who plays Mary of Scotland is named Vivian Pickles.)

So here are my recommendations: If you like elaborate costume dramas, all these versions of Elizabeth's life have their merits, but I'd start with Helen Mirren. Then Glenda, then Anne-Marie, then Cate, and if you really want to go all out, there's always the Bette Davis version, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. But I'd definitely save it for last.

Posted by Holly at 11:45 AM | Comments (7)

February 2, 2006

Balderdash and Piffle

Monday, my friend Matthew the Brit who lives in Brussels left a comment on my entry written In Praise of the C Word, suggesting that we Americans check out this British show Balderdash and Piffle, because it was cool and because Germaine Greer had done a really cool bit on the c word itself. I believed him, but I didn't have time to check it out right away.

Later that day, on campus, I went to consult the Oxford English Dictionary on the etymology of a particular word. (While I really love the multi-volume hard copy, it's much more convenient to use the on-line version--I am lucky to work at an institution that has a subscription to the OED on-line.) And instead of the standard home page, I got something telling me that until February 13, 2006, ANYONE can use the OED, because it's available in conjunction with Balderdash and Piffle.

If you've never looked something up in the OED, do. It's really cool--OK, it's really cool if you're a language geek, but what writer isn't? The entries tell you not only the current meaning, but every meaning a word has ever had, and it lists occurrences of the word throughout history. Part of the mission of the OED is to document a word's first written usage, and to that end, they enlist the help of anyone who reads, to provide them with citations and occurrences.

On the B&P site is a list of words the OED people want help with. The site states:

We're particuarly interested to hear from you on the origins of the following words as no one has yet managed beat the dictionary.

* Beeb [1967]
* boffin* [1941]
* bomber jacket [1973]
* codswallop* [previously thought to be 1963; antedated to 1959 thanks to Wordhunt]
* Crimble [1963]
* cyberspace [1982]
* cyborg [1960]
* ditsy* [1978]
* dosh* [1953]
* full monty [previously thought to be 1985; updated etymology and evidence from 1982 thanks to Wordhunt]
* gas mark [1963]
* gay (homosexual sense) [1935]
* handbags (at dawn) [1987]
* her indoors [1979]
* jaffa* (cricketing term)
* muller* [1993]
* mushy peas [1975]
* naff* [1966]
* nip and tuck [previously thought to be 1980; antedated to 1977 thanks to Wordhunt]
* nit nurse [previously thought to be 1985; antedated to 1942 thanks to Wordhunt]
* nutmeg* (football use) [1979]
* Old Bill (police) [1958]
* on the pull [1988]
* pass the parcel [previously thought to be 1967; antedated to 1954 thanks to Wordhunt]
* pear-shaped [1983]
* porky [1985]
* posh* [1915]
* ska [1964; updated etymology thanks to Wordhunt]
* snazzy* [previously thought to be 1932; antedated to 1931 thanks to Wordhunt]

OK, the list is pretty thoroughly British--I doubt many Americans know the origins of cricketing terms. But who wouldn't like credit for finding the earliest usage of "mullet"? (Though when I had one such haircut long about 1981 or so, we called it "a bi-level.")

The BBC site also provides links allowing you to (among other things) check out the family tree of the Indo-European language, hear what Anglo-Saxon sounded like, write a poem, play an etymology game, and listen to various regional dialects.

Have fun!

Posted by Holly at 9:55 AM | Comments (1)

September 2, 2005

Simon Schama and the Pod People

Check out this article in the Independent UK, about Simon Schama, an amazing historian at Columbia whose 15-hour series A History of Britain was one of the best things Netflix ever sent me. He has written a new book on the role of black slaves in the American revolution--particularly on the fact that many of them left their American masters and went to fight on the side of King George. The article is long and interesting, and I was fascinated by all of it, but I admit I clapped my hands and laughed aloud in delight when I read this paragraph:

Well, [Schama] did think that going to lecture to Mormon students in Utah would prove his Old European otherness, but he loved their company and their discussion. "And I came back and Ginny, my wife, said 'You're wearing that smile. They've got you' -- because her sister is a Mormon. 'You've been captured by the pod people'."

Posted by Holly at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)