I had heard about the efforts of a bunch of libertarians to move to Grafton, NH, and run it on libertarian principles. I never heard how it worked out, though.
Not too well, as it turns out.
If nothing else, they’ve given a great addition to storytelling. Every story sounds better with, “And then the bears came.” As a schtick, I’ve already used it once, and I think it works.
I’m going to use the opening of “The Night We Met,” by Lord Huron. This is mostly to see if I can play with the typeface for the Quote attribute.
I am not the only traveler…
Who has not repaid his debt.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Yes, it looks meme-like. It was made by me, at a meme generation site (I forget which one). The quote comes from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, back in the old days on the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.fandom on USENET. It’s a good chunk of why I have the US flag emoji up on the header on top.
As Patrick pointed out at the time, the US flag, as a symbol, is not feared by many traditionalists around the world because it represents rah-rah chauvinism, or our powerful military. No, it’s feared as a symbol because it represents the kind of ideas he lists.
Looks like it’s been a little over two years since I did anything on this poor, forlorn site.
I made a stupid, callously catastrophic mistake while updating the version of WordPress. I had no backup. I hoped to try to do a partial restore — from 2016 or so — but it wasn’t a top priority. It would mean rooting around with an FTP client. It would take time.
Then, the bears came I had a stoke on Saturday, 2022-01-08. A year ago, tomorrow.
Oops.
It’s time to declare restoration bankruptcy. Face that I have limits with only one-and-a-half working hands. Dust myself off, and get back to blogging/journaling. Especially since I want to get away from social media, but still have thoughts.
So… Onward!
Welcome to a WordPress blog. This is the first post. Perhaps there will be more.
As leaves
Leads to
Left,
Bereaves
Becomes
Bereft.
Venice is a space station.
Hear me out. I’m not saying this just to accept the Mary McCarthy Challenge (“Nothing can be said here (including this statement) that has not been said before.”).
The picture above is of the Campo San Barnaba. You can just see a boat in green, with some carts in front of it.
Those carts are for trash. Venetians put out their trash every day in bags, and carts like those are pushed by hand to come along and pick them up. The mechanical arm that’s also just visible on the boat picks up the cart, the bottom falls out, and the trash goes into the hold of the boat.
Why?
Because everything in Venice comes in by boat, and everything has to go out by boat.
Yes, there’s the Piazzale Roma, where the buses come in, and its garage. But even then, to get to anyplace in the city itself, it has to be transferred to a boat.
The fire department (Vigili del Fuoco). Police. Ambulances. Groceries. Packages. Produce. Mass transit. All of these we saw as boats, at one point or another on our visit.
The boats orbit the city, like a hazy swarm of fireflies.
And if the boats are the shuttle pods of the city, the railway coming into Ferrovia Santa Lucia is the space elevator. Tying the city to the mainland by means of the causeway.
Others have commented on how Venice is without cars. That carlessness also plays into the space station nature of the town — one is forever going up and down stairs, down narrow passageways, seeing the boats just in the corner of one’s eye, or one rides on the vaporetti through the tunnels of the Grand Canal, the Giudecca Canal, or the northern edge by the Fondamenta Nove.
Another aspect that’s like a space station is how Venice is fully urbanized, edge to edge of the archipelago. Others have commented on this, but it makes the calli and canali seem all of a piece, all going to the skin where Venice meets the laguna.
Venice is of the Earth, but not on the Earth. Tethered, but floating. That it floats on water instead of in space is immaterial.
Venexia is a space station.
A while back, I read this piece in the New Yorker by Tom Vanderbilt, “What Makes a Work of Art Seem Dated?”
This paragraph stood out for me:
“Sometimes, of course, things are genuinely ahead of their time. In “The Architecture of Happiness,” Alain de Botton reprints a 1927 advertisement for Mercedes-Benz that depicts a woman, wearing gloves and a cloche (that iconic headwear of the twenties), one foot astride the running board. The woman and the car are posed in front of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Double House, built for the Weissenhof housing project in Stuttgart. The photo reads like a children’s game: Which of these things is not like the others? The car and the woman are Jazz Age relics; the house looks like it could be have been built in Malibu last week. The irony is that the advertisement wants to depict all three as the quintessence of “modern,” but only the house, so stylistically out in front, kept on being “modern.”
Here’s the picture in question:
The fashion looks dated because fashion moved on.
The car looks dated because industrial design moved on.
The architecture doesn’t look dated because architecture hasn’t moved on.
It isn’t that this building is “genuinely ahead of (its) time.” It is absolutely, rigidly, painfully of its time. It’s that in the 86 years since, architecture hasn’t moved one millimeter. So when you design a building that looks like Corbu’s, remember you’re making one just as full of pastiche as designing clothes or a car in the retro style of the ad.
I was mulling over the way architecture has hit creative vapor lock, but rhetorically insists that recently designed buildings are somehow more current than classically designed buildings, which are dismissed as “mere pastiche.” I’ve talked about this before, in response to seeing the TV program Architecture School.
To give an idea of the stasis I see, I’ve come up with what I call the Expo 67 Test:
If this building had been built or proposed as a national pavilion at Expo 67, would it have caused any aesthetic controversy at all?
(It’s the “or proposed” that’s the real key — as any student of 20th century architecture knows, there are an awful lot of unbuilt but influential projects out there.)
This article at TheAtlanticCities about yet another proposal by Zaha Hadid that fails the Expo 67 Test was the immediate spark. That ceiling, from inside the stadium, looks like nothing so much as the Olympic Stadium in Munich for the 1972 games, and that in turn was clearly based on the BRD (West German) Pavilion at Expo 67.
Jobshenge is another building that utterly fails the Expo 67 Test. It keeps being described as “futuristic,” and I suppose it is, but only with those ironic scare quotes — it would look completely at ease in a 1960s Kubrick SF movie.
The interesting thing is how the Expo 67 Test can be expanded to other arts as well:
* Would this painting look out of place in a gallery show at Expo 67?
* Would this piece of music have sounded out of place as “new music” in a concert at Expo 67?
Etc., etc., et bloody cetera.
Or so Stan Freberg says of George Washington when he Presents the United States, Vol. 1.
One problem, though. Washington’s teeth weren’t made of wood.
I don’t know if it was this review of WASHINGTON: A Life by Ron Chernow in the New York Times. Still, I recently heard, in connection with Chernow’s book, something similar to Times reviewer Janet Maslin’s off-hand comment: “[Washington had a] harshly pragmatic attitude toward slavery (he purchased slaves’ teeth, perhaps for use in dentures).”
Yeah… that caused a big gulp on my part. Perhaps I have too much empathy but… George Washington? Of all people? Using the teeth of his slaves for his dentures? Can you be more literal yet symbolic when it comes to an image of white privilege and rapaciousness?
I hunted down what I think may be the source for this. It used to be reprinted online by the PBS series Frontline. I believe it was an article by Mary V. Thompson, who was described as, “A research specialist at Mt. Vernon, [who] studies the domestic life, foodways, and religious practices of the residents of George Washington’s plantation, with a special interest in the slave community.” The article originally appeared in Virginia Cavalcade, Volume 48, Autumn 1999, No. 4, pp.178-190.
Here’s the core of it:
“Slaves of the eighteenth century sometimes turned to the perfectly acceptable means of making money by selling their teeth to dentists. Since at least the end of the Middle Ages, poor people had often sold their teeth for use in both dentures and in tooth-transplant operations for those wealthy enough to afford the procedures. Sometimes the teeth were perfectly healthy; others were diseased and needed to be pulled anyway. In 1780 a French dentist named Jean Pierre Le Moyer (also called Le Mayeaur, Le Mayeur, and Joseph Lemaire) came to America, possibly as a naval surgeon with the French forces commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau, and over the next decade treated patients in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Alexandria, and Richmond. He seems to have had an extensive practice in tooth transplants, but the results of the procedure were short-lived, usually less than one or two years. Transplantable teeth were hard to come by, and in 1783 Le Moyer even went so far as to advertise in the New York papers for “persons disposed to sell their front teeth, or any of them,” netting the donor two guineas (forty-two shillings) per tooth. In Richmond, he offered anyone but slaves a similar amount for their front teeth. Technical problems made it impossible to transplant molars, so the operation was probably useful primarily for cosmetic reasons. Le Moyer first treated George Washington’s teeth at his military headquarters in 1783.
The following year, in May of 1784, Washington paid several unnamed “Negroes,” presumably Mount Vernon slaves, 122 shillings for nine teeth, slightly less than one-third the going rate advertised in the papers, “on acct. of the French Dentis [sic} Doctr. Lemay [sic],” almost certainly Le Moyer. Over the next four years, the dentist was a frequent and apparently favorite guest on the plantation. Whether the Mount Vernon slaves sold their teeth to the dentist for any patient who needed them or specifically for George Washington is unknown, although Washington’s payment suggests that they were for his own use. Washington probably underwent the transplant procedure–”I confess I have been staggered in my belief in the efficacy of transplantion,” he told Richard Varick, his friend and wartime clerk, in 1784–and thus it may well be that some of the human teeth implanted to improve his appearance, or used to manufacture his dentures, came from his own slaves.”
Wow. Just… wow.
*^*^*
EDITED TO ADD: Mount Vernon has an exhibit that includes the only known surviving denture of Washington’s. “Carved from hippopotamus ivory, the denture contains real human teeth fixed in the ivory by means of brass screws.” They don’t note the provenance of the “real human teeth” in question.
ETA2: It wasn’t the Times. It was this piece in the New Yorker, by Jill Lepore. Lepore herself is a history professor at Harvard, which, combined with the New Yorker‘s fact checkers, makes this all too credible.
Lepore’s off-hand comment was striking:
“The mar to [Washington’s] beauty was his terrible teeth, which were replaced by unsuccessful transplant surgery and by dentures made from ivory and from teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.”
It was “pulled” that made my heart drop. Thompson’s account makes it seem much more voluntary — or as voluntary as a commercial transaction with a person who owns you as chattel can be.
