Author: gerryadmin

February 22

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by gerryadmin

The Great White Way has seen its spectacular successes over the years. We are still humming the tunes from Broadway musicals such as Showboat, Camelot, The Music Man, Annie, and Phantom of the Opera. (On request, I believe I could produce creditable renditions of most of the songs from Finian’s Rainbow.) Comedies such as The Producers or Barefoot in the Park and dramas such as Death of a Salesman, Come From Away and Amadeus are the stuff of legends.

Legendary too are the great flops – shows that were badly-cast, ill-conceived, overly-ambitious, or just too expensive to stage. Rockabye Hamlet, for example; a 1976 attempt to put the Prince of Denmark to music with lines such as this piece of advice from Polonius to Laertes: “Good son, you return to France/Keep your divinity inside your pants.” It lasted 7 performances, which is two more than Carrie: the Musical managed to stage in 1988. Apparently there was less of an audience for pig’s blood showers than the producers anticipated.

Fancy a dramatic investigation of the Shroud of Turin? Into the Light was turned off after six performances in 1986. The Broadway version of the Odyssey, entitled (wait for it) Home Sweet Homer, starring Yul Brynner closed after a single show – the producers had wanted to avoid putting it on altogether but Brynner’s contract stipulated that at least one performance was required. Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark might have continued had not the production cost $75 million before opening and requiring $1,000,000 a week to keep the lights on.

But when Broadway mavens gather around the campfire and tell chilling stories about truly desperately bad shows, talk always turns to The Moose Murders, a “mystery farce” which opened (and closed) on this day in 1983. Trapped by a storm in a wilderness lodge, the characters play a murder mystery game. Killings, flaccid slapstick, failed gags, incest, and a kick in the groin to a man in a moose costume made for a deathly silence from the audience and a closing after the first night. Movie and radio legend Eve Arden was to star but withdrew when it became obvious she could no longer memorize lines. (She did send a gracious note to the cast.)

Critics were not kind. It has been called “the golden standard of awfulness against which all theatre is judged.” The New York Times writer Frank Rich said it was “the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage”. In fact, in a magazine’s list of Great Disasters of the Twentieth Century the play ranked Number Five (just behind New Coke). The play’s author Arthur Bicknell did manage to make a bit of money from it by penning  Moose Murdered, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Broadway Bomb.

February 21

Home / Uncategorized / February 21
by gerryadmin

More precarity of life. Remember in reading this passage from Graham Robb’s masterful The Discovery of France that there are people alive today who knew people who were alive when these events occurred.

The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. Mountain regions closed down in the late autumn. Entire Pyrenean villages of wood, like Barèges on the western side of the Col du Tourmalet, were abandoned to the snow and reclaimed from the avalanches in late spring. Other populations in the Alps and the Pyrenees simply entombed themselves until March or April, with a hay-loft above, a stable to one side and the mountain slope behind. According to a geographer writing in 1909, “the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, dishevelled and anemic”. But hibernation was not peculiar to high altitudes. More temperate regions, too, retreated into a fortress of sleep. Idleness and torpor cast an eerie pall over the well-cultivated parts of the Berry, where seasonal variations are slight and the temperature rarely falls below freezing. George Sand’s normally phlegmatic husband felt “something like fear” when he saw tidy land that seemed to be farmed by ghosts. The fields of Flanders were deserted for much of the year. An official report on the Nièvre In 1844 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian day-labourer once the harvest was In and the vine stocks had been burned:

After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.

Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies. In Normandy, according to the diary of Jules Renard, “the peasant at home moves little more than the sloth” (1889); “in winter, they pass their lives asleep, corked up like snails” (1908). People trudged and dawdled, even in summer. They ate more slowly than modern people. Life expectancy at birth now seems depressingly low: in 1865, it was a few months over forty years in only twenty départments; in Paris and Finistère, it was under thirty; the national average was thirtyseven years two months. Life expectancy at five was fifty-one. Despite this, complaints about the brevity of life are far less common than complaints about its inordinate length. Slowness was not an attempt to savour the moment. A ploughman who took hours to reach a field beyond the town was not necessarily admiring the effect of morning mist on the furrows and the steaming cattle against the rising sun, he was trying to make a small amount of strength last for the working day, like a cartload of manure spread over a large field.

A similar practice seems to have existed in late czarist Russia, according to an article in the British Medical Journal:

A practice closely akin to hibernation is said to be general among Russian peasants in the Pskov Government, where food is scanty to a degree almost equivalent to chronic famine. Not having provisions enough to carry them through the whole year, they adopt the economical expedient of spending one half of it in sleep. This custom has existed among them from time immemorial. At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks. The country remains comparatively lively till the following winter, when again all signs of life disappear and all is silent, except we presume for the snores of the sleepers. This winter sleep is called lotska.

February 20

Home / Uncategorized / February 20
by gerryadmin

Precarity encore. In every village, town, and city, men and women – uncounted millions of them – woke up not knowing how they would survive the day. Their places in the economy were extremely tenuous, depending on their ingenuity and pluck, the charity of the Church or their neighbours, the weather, the time of year, and the mood of the authorities.

Some were day labourers with a little skill they would try to find employment for: carpenters; painters; rat catchers with trained ferrets and mole catchers; “cinderellas”, who collected and sold ashes used for laundering clothes; men called tétaïres, who performed the function of a breast-pump by sucking mothers’ breasts to start the flow of milk; folk who bred maggots for anglers by collecting dead cats and dogs in the attic; women who worked as human alarm clocks; ‘guardian angels’ who were paid by restaurants to guide their drunken clients home; cat exterminators who sell the pelts as sable and the flesh as rabbit meat; renters of leeches for those who cannot afford to buy them. There were the “mud-larks” of London who braved the stinking muck of the tidal Thames for discarded wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships. There were “pure-finders” who gathered dog faeces to sell to tanners.

Then there were beggars. Beggar women sold their silence to respectable people by making lewd and compromising remarks about them in the street. They borrowed children who were diseased or deformed. They manufactured realistic sores from egg yolk and dried blood, working the yolk into a scratch to produce the full crusty effect. A judge at Rennes in 1787 reported “a bogus old man” with a fake hump and a club foot, another man who succeeded in blacking out one eye to give a terrible, dramatic impression of blindness, and yet another who could mimic all the symptoms of epilepsy⁠. “Abraham men” pretended to be mentally ill and allowed out of the asylum to beg for their keep. “Idle beggar” was a contradiction in terms.

Prostitution, full- or part-time, was the resort of poor women and girls. Employment in brothels depended on government atitudes. The British outlawed bordellos, though it was estimated that 1 house in every 60 in London served that function and that the capital was home to 80,000 prostitutes. The Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, were passed to slow the spread of venereal disease especially by contact between prostitutes and members of the military in garrison and port towns. Women suspected of plying that trade could be detained in “lock hositals” to determine their contagion. Some English regiments reported that half their men had had to be treated for sexually transmitted disease. The French and other European countries sought to contain the public health dangers of the trade by licensing brothels and subjecting their workers to regular medical examinations.

February 19

Home / Uncategorized / February 19
by gerryadmin

Back to precarity. In 17th-century London it was the responsibility of each parish to keep records of births and deaths. The birth part was easy as each child was required to be presented for baptism and its name entered. Here is how the procedure for establishing cause of death worked:

When anyone dies, then either by tolling, or by ringing of a Bell, or by bespeaking of a Grave of the Sexton, the same is known to the Searchers, corresponding with the said Sexton. The Searchers hereupon…examine by what Disease, or Casualty the corps died. Hereupon they make their Report to the Parish-Clerk, and he, every Tuesday night, carries in an Accompt of all the Burials, and Christnings, hapning that Week, to the Clerk of the Hall. On Wednesday the general Accompt is made up, and Printed, and on Thursdays published and dispersed.

Here is a sample for the years 1605-06. Note that deaths outnumbered births and that deaths caused by the plague were enormous and recorded separately.

John Graunt, a well-off London haberdasher collected such data for a period of two decades and in 1662 published the world’s first attempt at a demographic survey, Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, 1662, by John Graunt, a London haberdasher. Graunt made it his concern to examine two decades worth of parish records and “bills of mortality”. Graunt was skeptical of the Searchers’ accuracy in many cases and used statistical inference to calculate life expectancy and more reliable assessments of the causes of death.

In the 21st century we still die from apoplexy (stroke) and strangury (urinary tract disease) but few of us perish from being “cut of the stone” (operation for removal of gallstones or kidney stones)  or leprosy. Note the dreadfully high death rate of “overlaid and starved” — children being smothered while sleeping in bed with adults or dying from lack of nutrition. Graunt blamed this on “the carelessness, ignorance, and infirmity of the Milch-women” (wet-nurses). 

Three years after Graunt’s first edition, in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, London bills of mortality showed 97,306 burials, of which 68,598 were deaths from plague.

February 18

Home / Today in History / February 18
by gerryadmin

1900 The Battle of Paardeberg Drift begins

This engagement, fought during the Second Anglo-Boer War, was the first time that men in Canadian uniform, fighting in a Canadian unit, made war overseas. Troops from The Royal Canadian Regiment of Infantry under William Otter (who had taken part in putting down the Northwest Rebellion in western Canada in 1885) helped pin down some 4,000 Boers. Advancing by night towards the enemy lines, quietly digging trenches on high ground 65 yards from the Boer lines, they forced the enemy kommando to surrender.

It was the first significant British victory of the war, despite the blundering of British officers such as General Kitchener who insisted on frontal attacks on entrenched Boer positions — always a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of men on both sides, including 31 Canadians, died at Paardeberg.

February 17

Home / Today in History / February 17
by gerryadmin

Precarity is today’s topic. We are, all of us, mortal – pre-programmed to strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then be heard no more, at least upon this earthly stage. We are all destined to die, but medical advances of the last 150 years have led us to trust that we will spend our last days as elderly creatures awaiting a painless slide into whatever we hold to be beyond the veil. Early death is deemed a tragedy, an unexpected and unfair curtailing of what was supposed to be a long and healthy life.

Our ancestors held no such delusions. Death was ever-present and life was expected to be rough and painful and short. Prophets, poets, and philosophers for centuries mused upon mortality as the chiefest of subjects. The best meditation on the theme came from the pen of Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century English clergyman, in the opening paragraph of his 1651 classic The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. Taylor conjures up a series of metaphors as he struggles to find the best image to describe just how temporary and contingent human life is. We will meet some of the perils of early-modern life that he mentions in further posts.

A Man is a Bubble (said the Greek Proverb); which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, All the world is a Storm, and Men rise up in their several generations like Bubbles descending, from God and the dew of Heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from Nature and Providence: and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of Water, having had no other businesse in the world but to be born that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man: He is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning Mushromes, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulnesse; some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of Vanity be expired, and then peradventure the Sun shines hot upon their heads and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a childe, of a careless Nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a Doves neck or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are phantastickal; and so he dances out the gayety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humor: and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances, and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing were equally the issues of an Almighty power. And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit mans condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf, the smallest, the weakest piece of a short liv’d unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow: Another, the dream of the shadow of smoak. But St James spake by a more excellent Spirit, saying, Our life is but a vapour, viz., drawn from the earth by a celestial influence: made of smoak, or the lighter parts of water, tossed with every winde, moved by the motion of a superior body, without vertue in it self, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the Sun its Foster-Father. But it is lighter yet. It is but appearing; a phantastick vapor, an apparition, nothing real: it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia’s chair, or Pelops shoulder, or the circles of Heaven: appearances, for which you cannot have a word that can signify a veryer nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive; a vapour, and phantastickal, or a mere appearance, and this but for a little while neither; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departeth, or like a tale that is told, or as a dream when one awaketh: A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The summe of all is this: That thou art a man, then whom there is not in the world any greater instance of heights and declensions, of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of laughter and tears, of groans and death.

February 16

Home / Today in History / February 16
by gerryadmin

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So said L.P. Hartley in a 1953 novel The Go-Between (made into a 1971 film with the divine Julie Christie.) Though human nature has remained unchanged since Adam and Eve were evicted from their garden tenancy, human customs change wildly over time. Our ancestors have done things very differently. In the next few postings I’m going to show mindsets that are alien to those of today.

 Take, for instance, this image. It’s an ostrakon, a potsherd (or, occasionally as in this case, a piece of limestone) which was used in the ancient world as a surface to write on. Athenians used shards of broken pottery as ballots when voting on whether to exile (thus ostracize) over-ambitious politicians. This example was used in Egypt, c. 1250 BC, as a way to record absences from a work site.

As you might expect, illness is the most frequent reason for not showing up to work but other reasons reveal a world far from our contemporary lives. How many modern Human Resources offices have received the following excuses?

  • Embalming his brother                        
  • Fetching stone for the scribe
  • Brewing beer                                  
  • Wife was menstruating
  • Libating his god                            
  • Daughter was menstruating
  • Building his house                                
  • Wrapping the corpse of his mother
  • Burying the god                                    
  • Strengthening the door
  • Making remedies for the scribe’s wife
  • Libating for his son                            
  • The scorpion bit him
  • Fetching stone for Qenherkhepshef

February 15

Home / Something Wise / February 15
by gerryadmin

We haven’t had any dazzling flashes of insight for a while. Here we go.

Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences. – John Wesley, sermon 39 “Catholic Spirit”

Sorrow never comes too late. – Thomas Grey, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

Love is like a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the snow weasels come.  – Matt Groening, Love is Hell

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none. – Charles Dickens, Our Parish

One must be always drunk. Everything lies in that; it is the only question worth considering. In order not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce, but with what? With wine, poetry, or art?– As you will ; but intoxicate yourself. – Charles Baudelaire, Little Poems in Prose

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. – Feodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

Night is the darkest of weathers, necessity is the hardest of fates, sorrow is the sorest burden, sleep is most like death. – Anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, c. 900

February 14

Home / Today in History / February 14
by gerryadmin

St Valentine’s Day

A grumpy nineteenth-century critic of the English Valentine’s Day said that it was “now almost everywhere a much degenerated festival, the only observance of any note consisting merely of the sending of jocular anonymous letters to parties whom one wishes to quiz, and this confined very much to the humbler classes.”

An eighteenth-century English Valentine custom was described thusly:

On the eve of St. Valentine’s Day the young folks in England and Scotland, by a very ancient custom, celebrate a little festival. An equal number of maids and bachelors get together: each writes their true or some feigned name upon separate billets, which they roll up, and draw by way of lots, the maids taking the men’s billets, and the men the maids’: so that each of the young men lights upon a girl that he calls his valentine, and each of the girls upon a young man whom she calls hers. By this means each has two valentines: but the man sticks faster to the valentine that has fallen to him than to the valentine to whom he is fallen. Fortune having thus divided the company into so many couples, the valentines give balls and treats to their mistresses, wear their billets several days upon their bosoms or sleeves, and this little sport often ends in love.

In the 1750s an English magazine article described this girlish fortune-telling practice:

Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and the night before, I got five bay-leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle: and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk, and filled it with salt: and when I went to bed, ate it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers’ names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water; and the first that rose up was to be our valentine. Would you think it?—Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay a-bed and shut my eyes all the morning, till he came to our house: for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world. 

Since Chaucer’s day it has been imagined that February 14 was linked to the love life of birds. John Donne made this connection in a poem celebrating the wedding of England’s Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine (aka “the Winter King”) which took place on Valentine’s Day 1615.

Hail, Bishop Valentine! whose day this is:
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners:
Thou marryest every year
The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove:
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher:
Thou mak’st the blackbird speed as soon
As cloth the goldfinch or the halcyon–
This day more cheerfully than ever shine,
This day which might inflame thyself, old Valentine!

February 13

Home / Today in History / February 13
by gerryadmin

1503 The Challenge of Barletta

Early in the 16th century much of Italy was a battlefield as armies of independent city states, France, Spain, and the papacy vied for control of the peninsula. On this date in 1503 French and Italian knights battled, not over politics, but national honour.

In southern Italy a number of French knights were taken prisoner in a skirmish and brought as captives to the town of Barletta. In chivalric fashion, they were invited to a banquet where one of them, a mouthy individual named Charles de la Motte, made disparaging remarks about the courage of Italian men of war. Feelings were hurt, an argument ensued and the upshot of it was a challenge: 13 Italian knights would joust with an equal number of Frenchmen. Winners would be awarded the horses and weapons of the vanquished as well as 100 ducats. De la Motte would lead the French and Ettore Fieramosca, a famous leader of condottieri would be at the head of the Italian knights.

In a series of encounters that went on all day and into the evening, the Italians emerged triumphant, winning all 13 battles. The French were forced to apologize for their intemperate speech. News of the challenge spread throughout Italy and became the stuff of legends. A monument was set up in Barletta to commemorate the event, but 300 years later when Napoleonic armies invaded the area, French troops tore the statue down. It was put back up when the Corsican Tyrant was defeated and to this day Barletta is nicknamed Città della Disfida, “City of the Challenge”. An annual festival celebrates the encounter and costumed figures recreate the day of battles.

On the poster above you can see the coats of arms of the 13 Italian knights and the arms of the City of Barletta.