Dakota Winter

Ever restlessly moving West, the young Wisconsin native  winds up in as-yet-untamed  Dakota:

Level as a floor,  these acres were,

and dotted with the  bones  of bison.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 244

Sufficiently disheartening.  Yet how much moreso, as the season grew bitter, and those bleached bones  proved the only bulwark against death by freezing:

Winter!  No man knows what winter means 

until he has lived through one  in a pine-board shanty

on a Dakota plain 

with only buffalo-bones  for fuel.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 248

Dakota Summer

Apprehension on the prairie,

amid frightening light:

An ominous change had crept over the plain.

The winds were hot and dry,

and the grass, baked on the stem,

 had become as inflammable as hay.

The birds

were  silent .

The sky, absolutely cloudless,

began to scare us with its light.

The sun rose through the dusty air,

sinister  with flare  of horizontal heat.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 247

Personal Penguins

Upon suffering some tummy-trouble:

“It must have been that caviar,” he was thinking.  “That beastly caviar.”  He violently hated caviar.  Every sturgeon in the Black Sea  was his personal enemy.

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  67

There is something reverent and respectful about have a personal relationship with each individual sturgeon, albeit one of enmity.   In the case of penguins, such a distributed relationship exists -- but in this case, one of amity.

And it was in that spirit that Doctor Justice set forth upon his visionary project of individually naming each and every penguin.  The project was a success, and is now famed throughout the civilized universe.   You can read about it here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/04/doctor-justice-names-penguins.html

The Inner Life of Turtles (and the sagacity of owls)

“By nature  a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird.  But you must admit that its way of living doesn’t exactly encourage intelligence.”

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  102

That it does not; but, contemplation.

For a meditation upon the contemplative nature of our shelly friends, try this:

   https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/04/thirty-two-turtles.html

And, for those of us who just can’t get enough of these fellows, these:

 https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/turtles

 

~

The owl has met a variety of folkloristic fortunes around the world, being seen  here as a sage, there as a fool.  Being partial ourselves to the former image, we were delighted to stumble upon this passage

The prince was overjoyed to find the owl so deeply versed in topography, and now informed him, in confidence, of his tender passion  and his intended elopement, urging him to be his companion and counselor.

“Go to!”said the owl, with a look of displeasure.  “Am I a bird to engage in a love-affair? -- I, whose time is devoted to meditation and the moon?”

-- Washington Irving, “The Legend of Prince Ahmed Al Kamel”, in The Alhambra (1832)

But all turns out well, as the fowl allows himself to be persuaded.  After the adventure, the prince appoints the owl his privy-counselor -- “It is needless to say that never was a realm more sagely administered.”

First there is a Mountain

The sight of a dog  running across the road  just in front of the car  aroused her from her reverie.

How suddenly, how startlingly it had dashed into the narrow universe of the headlamps!  It existed for a fraction of a second, desperately running, and was gone again  into the darkness on the other side of the luminous world.

Another dog  was suddenly in its place,  pursuing …

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  79

First there is a mountain;  then  there is no mountain;  then there is.

Salute the Solstice(s)

As we do each year at this time, we post a poem celebrating the summer solstice.  However, as (a bit back) a veteran of a memorable family vacation in Australia, I now realize that, for our friends the quokkas (and the penguins!) for them, it’s the winter solstice. 

And thus, to treat the hemispheres evenhandedly, we here post a hat-tip to both solstices.

======

Summer Solstice

The sun at apogee, an empire all of light.

The sweet corn basks and ripens in its rays.

All memory of winter  has melted from our minds.

Yet even now the worm lies in the bud, one day to blast it.

The long limbs of daylight   that had stretched and stretched

now imperceptibly  begin to shrink:

even as the cosmos  attains its outmost limit,

and sighs back  to collapse.

Alas, the Elves of Ice  lurk still in northern forests,

plotting their return.

======

Winter Solstice

Today (for y’all Down Under, whether marsupial or antarctic) is the official Beginning of Winter.   We celebrate after the traditional fashion of our ancestors,dancing at midnight,

     clad only in moonlight;

many a child was conceived on this day.  (And they grow up with magic in their eyes.)

Covertly, we rejoice  for a subterranean reason:  that while, nominally, this marks the onset of winter winds and bitter chill,  astronomically it ushers in rather  that annual apocatastasis, whereby the days begin once again to lengthen, creeping towards the equinoctial equilibrium of spring, and onwards towards their eventual estival-solstitial apotheosis.

Rootabaga Redivivus

--  Jeepers, creepers -- whereja get those peepers?

-- Got ‘em off the Peeper Tree;

   Tater-Face Blindman  giv’m t’me.

[If you can hearken to such a hypnotic jingle, and sense the theophany  within its wisps,  then you might enjoy our series of poems and essayettes  in the Rootabagian vein;  beginning here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/rootabaga-saga-incipit.html ]

Les parapluies du Texas

Just recently, the term “Umbrella Man” has popped up again, once more in a mysterious context, but with no reference to Neville Chamberlain.  E.g.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/05/30/who-is-umbrella-man-mystery-vandal-at-minneapolis-riot-spurs-conspiracies/

Examples of earlier American use, where Chamberlain was the allusion:

Lyndon Johnson running against Coke Stevenson for Senator, in 1948:

“Isolationist” was another word he [i.e., LBJ] drummed into his listeners -- until he started using a stronger word:  “appeaser”.   Stevenson, he said, “is an umbrella man. … He talks Chamberlain talk … He wants another Munich.”

-- Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent (1990), p. 254

[The above is the latest footnote  to the following light-hearted exercise:

   https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-umbrella-man.html  ]

Tales of mighty Zeno

A witness from Classical Antiquity:

Pericles, also, was a hearer of Zeno, the Eleatic, who treated of natural philosophy  in the same manner as Parmenides did, but had also perfected himself in an art of his own, for refuting and silencing  opponents in argument;  as Timon of Phlius describes it --

Also the two-edgted tongue  of mighty Zeno, who,

say what one would, could argue it untrue.

-- Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden’s translation)

(For the essay to which that is an addendum, see:

 https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/04/refutation-inflation-re-updated.html )

Martyrdom in Linguistics

Lately  it has been my lot, to sit among scribes and dragomans, who strain and groan to set in print, and then to clothe in English,  thoughts (and threats) originally expressed in an alien tongue.  Often we are ignored by our masters, occasionally admonished, but never exposed to opprobrium or bodily outrage -- unlike our predecessors in Classical times.  Let Plutarch tell it (as transmitted by Dryden):

When the king of Persia 

sent messengers into Greece,  with an interpreter, 

to demand earth and water, 

as an acknowledgement of subjection,

Themistocles, by the consent of the people,

seized upon the interpreter,

and put him to death,

for presuming to publish

the barbarian orders and decrees

in the Greek language.

-- Plutarch’s Lives, s.v. Themistocles

For further notes on the pain and prowess  of philologers, try this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/03/forensic-linguists-save-day.html

Glimpses of Sick Light

Chicago on fire,  seen from afar:

the thickening haze

through which the sun shone

with a hellish red glare

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

In the red darkness

glinted

innumerable rubies

-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ch. 3 

(In context, the implication is likewise hellish,
 since the locale is the laboratory manufacturing babies.)

Dust Bowl:

In the spring of 1934, only sun, and no rain … A powder of humus and colloids, the topsoil of the country  blowing away.  And still the sullen sun shone.

On and on  the clouds whirled, some into the astonished East, spreading their baleful orange and amber aura.

-- Arthur Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (1959), p. 69

Note: “baleful” is an apt adjective here, as it echos the word balefire.

Compare, during an eruption of Vesuvius:

A lurid, baleful light  hung in the heavens.

-- Washington Irving, “The Story of the Young Italian.

The sky, darkened by moving storm clouds

was one of those invented by Gustave Doré

to emphasize important Biblical calamities.

A colorless light   filled  the empty quay.

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

Touche pas à mon poulet !

We earlier (https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/03/late-arrivals.html) recounted the uncomfortable railway journeys of Sigmund Freud, and of Arthur Koestler.  Here is Proust on the same situation:

… M. de Stermaria  gardait l’air glacial, pressé, distant, rude, pointilleux  et malintentionné  qu’on a dans un buffet de chemin de fer, au milieu de voyageurs qu’on n’a jamais vus, qu’on ne reverra pas, et avec qui on ne conçoit d’autre rapports que de défendre contre eux  son poulet froid  et son coin dans le wagon.

-- Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919)

L’appetit vient en mangeant

On the fall of the Hapsburg dynasty:

Inevitably, any concession  came too late  and was too little;  and equally inevitably, every concession produced more violent discontent.

-- A.J.P. Taylor,  The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918 (1948), p. 7

A lunar tautology

Usually there is a summary “That’s that” finality to tautologies, whether used informatively or not;  stylistically, they are bare-bones.  But consider this:

Herod:  The moon has a strange look tonight. … She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. … Does she not reel like a drunken woman?  She is like a madwoman, is she not?

Herodias:  No;  the moon is like the moon, that is all.

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

Here the barrenness of the pale white, plain round  far-floating body, is reflected in the unyielding tautological formula.



[For the essay to which the above is an appendix, see this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/05/informative-tautologies-updated.html  ]

Last-Light Tableaux

like

black    lakes

  troubled by

fantastic moons

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

The sun had sunk now  to the line of woodland;

all the opposing slope was already in twilight,

but the lakes below us   were aflame.

-- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

The Aging Brain

Alles Neue  ekelt mich an.

-- Wm. v. Humboldt, an Goethe, 1818

Du pillage

Der zureichende Grund dafür, daß jemand Mamas abkühlenden Apfelkuchen vom Fensterbrett mopst, ist nicht die böse Gier per se, sondern die Erreichbarkeit des Fensterbretts.

-- Diemar Dath, though it almost might have been Freud


[Update:  A hat-tip to our blogging colleagues at http://m759.net/wordpress/ , who have offered a mouth-watering illustration of that epigram, featuring our ancestors, the Orchard Thieves.]

*Another* Day that will Live in Infamy

Historians have long wondered, how, as late as December 1941, with a world war raging, and a litany of Japanese grievances against the U.S., the officers and sailors at our principal Pacific naval base  were all sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, the ships berthed cheek-by-jowl, an impossibly alluring target.

A secondary puzzle was, did FDR have any advance intel that such an attack was likely, but ignored it?   (Let us set aside the conspiracy-theory that he knew but let it happen.) If so, he would take a seat beside Stalin, who likewise had been remarkably lackadaisical with respect to Nazi Germany, which had been waging blitzkrieg, but from whom he felt safe, owing to the piece of paper known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.  Stalin actually did have warning, from Japan-based master-spy Richard Sorge, and quite precise warning at that:    “Der Krieg wird am 22. Juni beginnen, ” a message sent on 15 June.   This was ignored.

Toleja so ...

A lesser-known possibility is that Washington did receive warning of an impending sneak-attack, and indeed from Sorge’s circle.   A Comintern memoirist who had repeated contact with Sorge  writes:

Kurz vor ihrem Hochgehen in Tokio   gab die Gruppe “Ramsay” [i.e., Sorge] noch eine hochbedeutsame Meldung  an zwei Adressaten durch:  Moskau und Washingtron.  Gewiß gelangte sie auf auf den Schreibtisch Stalins, vermutlich nicht auf den Schreibtisch Präsident Roosevelts:  die Meldung, daß die Japaner  ohne Kriegserklärung  auf den wichtigsten Flottenstützpunkt der USA im Pazifik, Pearl Harbor, für Anfang Dezember  unter strengster Geheimhaltung  vorbereiterten.
-- Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (1978), p. 144

She goes on to state that Sorge’s Yugoslav coworker Branko Vukelić tipped off an American friend as to the impending attack, to no avail.

In any event, the lesson of 7 December was not promptly learned, for on 8 December, in the Philippines, another branch of the service was likewise caught with its breeches down.   Let Professor Wiki tell it:

Even though tracked by radar and with three U.S. pursuit squadrons in the air, when Japanese bombers of the 11th Kōkūkantai attacked Clark Field at 12:40 pm, they achieved tactical surprise. Two squadrons of B-17s were dispersed on the ground. Most of the P-40s of the 20th PS were preparing to taxi and were struck by the first wave of 27 Japanese twin-engine Mitsubishi G3M "Nell" bombers; only four of the 20th PS P-40Bs managed to take off as the bombs were falling.

A second bomber attack (26 Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" bombers) followed closely, then escorting Zero fighters strafed the field for 30 minutes, destroying 12 of the 17 American heavy bombers present and seriously damaging three others. Two damaged B-17s were made flyable and taken to Mindanao, where one was destroyed in a ground collision.

A near-simultaneous attack on the auxiliary field at Iba to the northwest by 54 "Betty" bombers was also successful: all but four of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron's P-40s, short on fuel and caught in their landing pattern, were destroyed No formal investigation took place regarding this failure as occurred in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. The Far East Air Force lost fully half its planes in the 45-minute attack, and was all but destroyed over the next few days, including a number of the surviving B-17s lost to takeoff crashes of other planes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1941%E2%80%9342)

Thus, not only December seventh, but December eighth,  is draped in crape.

Murphy's epiphanies

Check these out:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/search/label/epiphany

Tautologies in action

A bare tautology like “Business is business”, as a free-standing statement, invite contentful interpretation via a “Gricean implicature” (specifically, the Maxim of Quantity).   The following is a syntactically more complex case, where the tautology is embedded in a subordinate clause:

Ever since self was self, nature been keepin’ folks off of red-hot stoves.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

The meaning is:  Common sense has been extant  from time immemorial.  Operationally, the (tongue-in-cheek) interpretation is:  Go back and back in time, sampling as you go. For each sample-point, verify whether  “self = self” holds at that time; and if so, then evaluate “Common Sense is in effect? Y/N”.   If the answer is Yes each time, then the corelation holds.

The sentence, for all its folksiness, has a kind of philosophy-class spin to it; the moreso as “self = self” calls up First-Order Logic with Identity.

[For the essay to which the above is an appendix, see this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/05/informative-tautologies-updated.html  ]

 

La pensée unique (American-style)

Je ne connais pas de pays où il regne moins d’indépendance et de véritable liberté de discussion  qu’en Amérique. … En Amérique, la majorité trace un cercle formidable autour de la pensée.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835), vol. I, p. 353

Portent

A slow tide of crisis

spread pressures and counterpressures

to odd places

at great remove.

-- Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years (vol. II, 1963--65), p. 241