Common working people has got to take the seat
in Washington, in Washington.
And I’m gonna tell you workers
‘fore you cash in your checks
they say America first but they mean America next
in Washington, in Washington.
— Woody Guthrie, “Lindbergh”
Is it annoying if we keep wrestling with the same issues, or does it just mean they’re eternal?
Tags: history, Music, Politics, woody guthrie
Last night we went on an very nice night-time (started at 9:30pm) guided walking tour of Cordoba. Our two hours of walking through the old part of the city included two bits where an actor appeared in the dress of local figures: first the 20th century painter Julio Romero de Torres, then and the 12th century Jewish philosopher Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides. "de Torres" appeared in Plaza del Potro, which was many centuries where horses were traded ("potro" = "colt"), and which apparently features in Don Quixote. This history and the name are commemorated by a statue of a colt above a fountain in the plaza, which cast this cool shadow on the wall of the building that houses the Museo de Julio Romero de Torres.
Tomorrow we take the train back up to Madrid, and then fly back to the UK, where we have a week with WeatherGirl’s mum before heading back to the U.S.! We’re happy, tired, excited, and sad all rolled up into one.
Ciao!
Tags: Art, Cordoba, history, my photography, Sabbatical, Spain, travel
If you’re never been over to BibliOdyssey I highly recommend a visit. The sub-title for the blog is “Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart” which, well, sums it all up rather nicely. Lots of neat old illustrations, often (but not always) on scientific themes. The themes are interesting, the background info excellent, and the images are frequently just too cool.
The image above is from some of the earliest high quality mapping of Mars in the late 1800’s by Giovanni Schiaparelli, and is part of a really neat set of early modern maps of the red planet. Peacay (BibliOdyssey’s curator) has once again pulled together some great images that are really wonderful to look at in and of themselves, as well as being really cool historic and scientific documents.
Schiaparelli’s (in)famous ‘canali’ turned out to be a kind of optical illusion caused by interactions between light, dust clouds that form in the martian atmosphere, the orbital location and background interference from the planet’s surface itself. If a sketch is made of something that wasn’t really there but you believed it to be there at the time, can you call the result abstract art I wonder? I guess so.
I concur.
Tags: Art, astronomy, Books, history, maps, Mars, Science, space
We just got back from a really fine week at Methwold Old Vicarage, a wonderful Landmark Trust property. The house dates to 1490-1510, and is quite beautiful inside and out. For an American like me, the idea of sleeping in a house constructed in the time of Columbus’s voyage is just too amazing.
The brick front is a veritable sampler of ornate brickwork from the period and remains a real show piece. There are gorgeous carved beams inside, and cool remnants of late 16th century wall paintings in the main bedroom upstairs that are museum quality. And we slept in that bedroom.
Wow.
We’re totally hooked, and definitely planning another Landmark Trust stay before we return to the States this summer!
I have an utter ton of photos. I’ll be posting some to my “main” Flickr account as I have time process them, and I’m also dumping a bunch of unedited shots to my events account. The shot above is a panorama constructed from six different photos of the house. The brick front faces almost due north, so it’s difficult to get any good light on it. This is in the late evening when the sun had almost swung far enough around.
Tags: history, Landmark Trust, Methwold Old Vicarage, my photography, Norfolk, Sabbatical, travel
A mentioned earlier, our friend Jane stayed in Peake’s House, a wonderful old Landmark Trust property here in Colchester. This photo is Jane, Sub-Evil Boy and WeatherGirl as they walk towards Peake’s House (the half-timbered building on the left) in the evening.
We were so inspired by that great house, and the wonderful collection of properties being preserved (and made available) by the Landmark Trust that we promptly booked a stay in one during Sub-Evil Boy’s term break. So soon we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage, which should be really fun. Between that and some looming deadlines, though, not much on-line time for a week or so. Just thought I’d warn you.
Back soon, though!
Tags: Colchester, history, holidays, Landmark Trust, Methwold Old Vicarage, travel![[6649]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2178/2388587045_857c0703a8.jpg)
We just finished two consecutive day trips to London (Friday and yesterday) and I’m thoroughly tired, and full of undigested photos. This fellow, one of the few I have processed, is from the Egyptian mummification exhibit at the British Museum (Rooms 62 and 63).
On Friday we started down in Greenwich. It was our first time through the Docklands on the DLR — it would be nice to walk those canals and take photos — and our first time to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian. I wish we’d had more time there - it was a beautiful day and there was a ton of cool stuff one could see. Time was tight, though, so we zoomed off to the British Museum before rush hour hit, and spent the rest of the evening there.
While WeatherGirl wandered the museum, however, Sub-Evil and I snuck off and bought tickets for Avenue Q at the Noël Coward Theatre for the following night. He’s been keen to see that ever sense we got here, and it was nice to finally make that happen, but it did mean two consecutive days into London, which is frankly pretty tiring.
Yesterday Sub-Evil and I started at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology on the UCL campus. Sub-Evil is very into Egyptian history, writing, artifacts, etc., so he really wanted to see this. It’s a very cool collection, but pretty desperately in need of a new home, with the collection crammed into old victorian cabinets and spilling down an emergency exit staircase! Next was the British Library, which was just tremendous! The King’s Library alone was worth the (free) price of admission, and the display of the treasures (Magna Carta, illuminated manuscripts, handwritten scores, drafts, diaries, and letters by amazing folks) was really wonderful.
After all that we grabbed some dinner and then headed off to Avenue Q! We both had listened to the soundtrack about a zillion times, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. The production was tons of fun, however, and watching the puppet masters sing, dance, act, and run the puppets at the same time reminded me of the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels :-).
Now we pack and organize, for tomorrow we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage for our first stay in a Landmark Trust property!
Tags: Art, British Library, British Museum, fun, history, London, museum, Music, my photography, theatre
In “Is language extinction a good thing?” Thomas Hawks reviews some recent writing on language extinction, focusing on differing attitudes to the question of how “bad” it really is when a language goes extinct.
Languages are clearly fluid, dynamic things, and statistically we’re going to lose some along the way. In this age of massive globalization and urbanization, however, we’re losing lots, and quickly. (This and the work of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages was a feature topic in cool podcast from last fall.)
Hawks quotes several folks who argue that language loss is a key part of the “assimilation” process that converted my starving Swiss ancestors into successful dairy farmers in Wisconsin, and thence to high-level investment analysts, and therefore we shouldn’t moan about it so much. While I’ll certainly acknowledge that there is an inevitability to certain amounts of language loss, I’m definitely not as comfortable with it as some of the people Hawks quotes for two key reasons: (a) So much of it was (and is) done against people’s will, and (b) as with biological extinction, there is potentially valuable information and history that is lost.
On the first point, I think that the “why” of the thing is crucial, and doesn’t come up anywhere in Hawks’ piece. (In fairness, Hawks is really just quoting a bunch of people here, so he’s arguably the messenger.) If the kids just aren’t interested in learning grandma’s weird old language, then at some level that’s their choice and we can’t force them to change their minds. My Swiss-German-speaking grandfather married a woman of primarily British descent, (American) English was their shared language, and neither my mother or aunt heard or learned any significant Swiss-German at home. My grandparents had the luxury of choice, and those are the choices they made.
All too often, however, minority groups have been forced to set aside their cultural traditions, language included. Native Americans, for example, were frequently punished severely (including beatings) if they used their native languages while in the boarding schools (which they were often forced to attend). Similarly Cajuns were often whipped for speaking their French in schools in Louisiana. Sadly, I’m sure we could pull together an embarrassingly long list of such cases worldwide, and it seems to be that we should mourn and decry every such loss in the strongest possible terms. To the degree that any given language extinction was aided by such behavior, we dare not be flippant about it’s disappearance, for it speaks ill of us all.
As to the second point, I am continually amazed and frustrated by certain people’s willfully obstinant refusal to recognize the very real value of diversity. This isn’t just some liberal whining about “Can’t we all just get along?”; I’m not arguing that the world is somehow “just a better place” when we have diversity. Diversity is vital in generating innovation and adapting to change (issues of at least a little importance in the world we have made for ourselves). Diversity manifestly enriches our lives (consider, for example, the wonderful diversities in world cuisine and world music, and how much more cooler our days are because of them).
And every language that goes extinct is a great chunk of experience, calved off the glacier of human history to melt away forever. Languages embed both knowledge and world view, and the loss of a language is the potential loss of much of that knowledge. The fact that a group in South America has over 70 words for “wasp” shouldn’t be seen as an oddity, it should be seen as a demonstration of the enormous importance of that insect to those people, and a collective encoding of a great deal of information about wasps. If that language goes extinct, that knowledge of those wasps goes with it.
This doesn’t mean that we should “freeze” languages, or force people to preserve their languages whether they want to or not. But we should be sad when one vanishes, and we should support people who wish to maintain their language in the face of all the pressures to the contrary.
Tags: change, culture, diversity, extinction, globalization, history, language, Music, podcast
I realize that I’m fashionably late for Darwin Day (12 Feb), but I offer cool-scary dinosaur skeletons and flesh-eating beetles in apology!
We were in London Friday to see the Kildegaards who (a) are friends of ours from Morris, (b) are living in Denmark this year on sabbatical, and (c) were in London for a week. We had a wonderful day, which included time in both the Natural History Museum (NHM - where the photo above was taken) and the V&A.
As part of our time in the NHM, we toured the wonderful Darwin Centre. (See the nifty connection? See? See? :->) This included amazing cool things such as a giant squid in a tank, loads of great big animals (mostly fish) preserved in equally big custom-made glass jars (including a Coelacanth and a whole jar of platypi), and flesh-eating beetles! They have a whole room of incubators of flesh-eating beetles that they use to clean specimens without damaging the skeletal structure. And to top off this festival of biological delights, they have a real-time beetle-cam where you can watch the little critters roaming around over the carcass of the moment (in a grainy, low-res format, to be sure), busily contributing to the scientific process. I suspect, in fact, that they will, in their oblivious fashion, will probably contribute more to science than someone like Huckabee.
I want to thank our tour guide (whose name I, sadly but predictably, have forgotten), as she did a great job. She was full of useful information, and handled our numerous questions gracefully and informatively.
Tags: beetles, Darwin, dinosaur, Friends, history, London, museum, Natural History Museum, Sabbatical, Science
Courtesty of Status-Q, I’ve just run across this amazing and wonderful little project: WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier.
Bill Lamin is posting the letters his grandfather (Harry Lamin) wrote home from the front of WWI as a blog. Each letter is posted 90 years after (to the day) Harry wrote it, so following the blog is somewhat like being his family, waiting for news, hoping it’s good.
What a brilliantly simple idea, absolutely full of potential and possibility. Our family is fortunate enough to have a number of excellent diaries, letter collections, and such, and I’ve often thought of “doing something” with them. My thoughts had always been fairly traditional; this opens all sorts of doors.
Wow.
Tags: blog, blogging, Family, history, Writing
In doing my homework on things to see while I was in Dublin early in December, I was particularly struck by the description in one book of “Famine”, a sculpture group by Rowan Gillespie. The sculptures represent victims of the enormously tragic famine of the mid-1800’s, where a full quarter of the Irish population died or left the country in hopes of better elsewhere.
I walked out to the sculptures on the first of my two nights in Dublin (which was a long haul). It was indeed a incredibly powerful piece of art, perhaps more so in the dark. It was a bit weird, though, to have the holiday lights as the back drop for this harrowing set of figures.
It’s not clear in the shot above, but the man is carrying what I presume to be a small girl across his shoulders, and is bowed beneath her weight. Quite terrifying, really.
Sadly, as the assassination of Benzir Bhutto makes clear, we’re still learning how to live together on this small rock, and often not doing a great job of it.
Tags: Art, Dublin, history, my photography, Politics, sculpture
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