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Petroleuses and Communards

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Nope, Not the French Revolution—Eighty Years Later

Nope, Not the French Revolution—Eighty Years Later

Most Americans know little about French history, particularly in the years after the French Revolution and Napoleon. I mean, aren’t they “surrender monkeys”?

Not quite. In 1870-1871, Germany invaded France and crushed the French forces at Sedan, as described by Émile Zola in his novel Le Débacle (The Débacle). The Emperor Napoleon III hurriedly decamped; and the Third Republic under Adolphe Thiers, headquartered at Versailles, took over and continued the war. The problem was the city of Paris. The lightly armed National Guard wanted no truck with either Thiers or the Prussians, whereupon the forces of both laid siege to Paris.

This is when the Paris Commune was formed, which ran the besieged city from March to May of 1871. There were stories (probably mythical) of Parisiennes called petroleuses (illustrated above) armed with bottles of inflammable fluids roving the streets, setting fire to buildings. Admittedly, Napoleon III’s Tuileries Palace was torched; but most of the fires were attributable to French and Prussian cannon fire. Still, women found hurrying home with bottles of cooking oil were frequently executed on the spot.

Altogether, the casualties of the siege were about ten times larger than the entire Reign of Terror under Robespierre: The invading forces usually did not take prisoners and instead went in for an early version of ethnic cleansing, targeting mainly the working poor.

It was during this siege that the Parisians first developed a taste for horsemeat, which they were forced into eating along with dogs, cats, and various vermin when food supplies became scarce.

When I was in Paris, I visited the Communards’ Wall at Père Lachaise cemetery, where several hundred men, women, and children were captured, lined up against the wall, shot by firing squads, and buried in a mass grave.

Not too many years later, Vladimir Lenin carefully studied the lessons of the Paris Commune and adopted them in the Bolshevik Revolution, which was much less bloody than the events of Paris in May 1871.

Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

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It Seems That Most Politics Is Driven by Hate

It Seems That Most Politics Is Driven by Hate

The phrase is from the late Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, referring to the news media. I think, however, in today’s poisonous climate, it refers to most populist politics. According to an article in the current edition of The New Scientist entitled “We Are What We Vote,” we find the following paragraph:

Research in the past few years using information on brain structure and function from MRI scans, psychological responses, eye-trackers and behavioural genetics, shows that individual political orientations are deeply connected to biological forces that are usually beyond personal control…. Despite initial incredulity—people like to believe political opinions are rational responses to salient events—the evidence that political preferences are linked to systems that often involve subconscious is growing. An admittedly simplistic but useful summary of this research is that human emotions are grounded in biology, and politics is grounded in emotions.

If you are left-leaning, a look at Raw Story or Salon.Com will send your blood boiling based on what such fear totems as Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh are saying. If, on the other hand, your news source of preference is The Drudge Report or RedState.Com, you will find articles bemoaning attacks on liberty, gun ownership, and fundamentalist religion. The intention is generally to make you feel outrage and hatred.

For each article by a reasonable commentator, there are typically half a dozen or more pieces excoriating “the enemy.” If it is hard to get away from knee-jerk reactions, it is partly because, amid all the clickbaiting, there are all too many examples in the mainstream media.

There is even an entire news network dedicated to fear and outrage. Do I have to name it, or can you guess?

Emeric Toth and the City

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Emeric Toth Is My Alter Egp

First Impressions of a Megalopolis

This posting is reprinted from Yahoo! 360 from February 2009, when I wrote some quasi-fictional pieces starring my alter ego, one Emeric Toth.

What was there to love about this city? Ten million plus people living their lives on a series of shelves between the mountains and the sea. Most of the time, the sun beat down relentlessly on the people, the buildings, and the gigantic road network that radiated like octopus appendages out from the center. When he first arrived there over forty years ago, Emeric Toth heard Los Angeles described as seventy-five towns in search of a city. He remembered the confusion on the ride to his first apartment from Union Station. He started downtown, went some five miles and—bam!—there was another downtown by Hollywood. A few miles further and—bam!—another downtown by a new place called Century City.

He had heard about the strangeness of the place and its inhabitants, who lived in metastasizing suburbs that stretched out for miles in every direction but one: The sea was an effective barrier.

The new state governor was an actor named Ronald Reagan, whom Toth had seen co-starring with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo (1939). The whole hippie thing was just beginning, which he traced with some amusement in the weekly newspaper called the Los Angeles Free Press, or Freep for short. The Vietnam war was just beginning to arouse massive resentment: In just two short years, Johnson would refuse to run for a second term because he felt tainted by the war. That’s when presidents cared what people thought.

So many things have changed, most notably Emeric Toth himself. The city was still recognizably the same, grimier in some instances, and new and shiny in others. He sat at a local café slowly savoring a small pot of Darjeeling tea as he watched the young people chattering away at adjacent tables. In another forty years, those kids would still be there, drinking whatever the beverage of choice would be, but he himself would not be. But some part of himself would be still be attenuated and distributed across the hundreds of square miles of buildings and freeways and occasional green spaces and towering peaks (if they’ll be able to see them then) and above all that dark green and black ocean whose waves break endlessly on the shore of Santa Monica Bay.

In Search of the Deskable

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My Adventures with E-Books

My Adventures with E-Books

About a third of the books I read are on one of my two Kindles—especially if I am traveling where a bag full of books would limit my range. Most of the time, the experience is pleasant, especially when the e-book I purchase is from a reputable publisher such as Penguin. Sometimes, however, you get an otherwise worthy book that is marred by the bane of e-publishing: namely, Optical Character Recognition, or OCR.

I have just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s superb autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. In between passages of great beauty, I would find sentences such as: “…but the real Deskable would have evaded one, the real Deske would have been left saying, ‘What is this to me?’”

Deskable? Deske?

The publisher of this e-book decided to forego human proofreading in favor of OCR software. Unfortunately, the software used rendered Desire as Deske and Desirable as Deskable.

At one point, I recognized the word “horkon” as the computer’s reading of “horizon.” The first person singular pronoun was frequently rendered by the decimal digit 1.

Fortunately, the work was good enough for me to persist to the end; but, many a time, usually when dealing with cheapster editions, I have given up in disgust.

The Stale Language of Protest

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This Is What It’s Usually About

This Is What It’s Usually About

Every so often, I feel that a particular mode of behavior has run its course. I think it’s time for a paradigm shift (perhaps that expression has run its course as well) in the art of protest. Turn on any news program, and you are sure to see a group of people carrying placards and usually moving around in a circle chanting very stale slogans. Typically, a newsman will hold a microphone and camera up to one of the most inarticulate of the protesters and ask them why he or she is picketing. After a few hems and haws, the protester will say that so and so is unfair or unjust or dangerous or just irksome as all get-out.

Now it is possible that all ten people who think like the protester are with him marching around and chanting. It is indeed probable that the viewpoint being expressed is not only in the minority, but a statistically insignificant sliver of the total population. In our era of “fair and balanced” news reporting, we are eager to seek out these minority viewpoints and make as much hay with them as possible. Think of these boring protests as a boon to news organizations, particularly on a slow news day.

I am always for more ingenuity. If one’s point of view is to be effectively conveyed, I say do something that people will remember. Let me cite a classic example. An Argentinian condom manufacturer who was also a big soccer fan published the following graphic before a match with Brazil:

PICBA1

I will not try to explain exactly what is happening here because—well, if you don’t know, you probably haven’t reached the age of puberty yet. Needless to say, the B stands for Brazil and the A for Argentina. This did not sit well with the Brazilian soccer fans. When their team pasted the Argentinians, they rubbed it in by publishing an even funnier graphic:

PICBA2

I will always remember this as perhaps the most inventive act of protest I have ever seen.

The next time you feel like taking to the streets with your message, try something different. Think of the streets as a form of theater. And start from there.

(This is a re-posting of one of my 2009 entries from Blog.Com.)

A Bird with a Broken Wing

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I’m Healing, but Slowly

I’m Healing, but Slowly

Today marks the third week since I fell in the street opposite my house and broke my left shoulder. The fracture is healing nicely, but ever so slowly.

The worst of it is at night when I am in bed. The joint throbs in pain all night, with my arm frequently falling asleep. Last night, I slept all of three hours; and I was unable to nap this afternoon. During the day, I get along all right and do not have to wear my sling. (I wear it on the bus, however, to warn other passengers to steer clear of my shoulder.)

On Thursday, the orthopedic surgeon seemed pleased with my recovery. He hinted that there would be a breakthrough in the next few days. I’m still waiting for it. In the meantime, I’m taking Advil for the pain, which seems no worse than the Hydrocodone I had been taking, and is probably a good deal safer.

This fracture has been far worse than the one I had in 2006 on my right shoulder: That one entailed a slightly cracked humerus. This one is fractured along several planes.

Eventually, this, too, shall pass. In the meantime I wish all of you a Happy Easter!

Laki and Tambora

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Volcanic Eruption at Holuhraun in Iceland

Volcanic Eruption at Holuhraun in Iceland

After all these billions of years, it never fails to amaze me that, beneath the crust of the earth, there are superhot gases that could, at a moment’s notice, change all our lives. Since our country was founded, there have been two volcanic mega-events that caused widespread death, destruction, and—surprisingly—temporary global cooling.

In answer to a question from an American reader, ESA, one of the staff writers of The Iceland Review wrote the following about Laki:

The Laki eruption (aka Skaftáreldar) took place over an eight-month period between June 8, 1783, and February 7, 1784. The eruption occurred in the Lakagígar craters in fissures on either side of Laki mountain between Mýrdalsjökull and Vatnajökull in the southern highlands and the adjoining Grímsvötn volcano in Vatnajökull….

The eruption began as a fissure with 130 craters opened with phreatomagmatic explosions. This event is rated as 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). The scale is open-ended with the largest volcanoes in history given magnitude 8. For comparison, the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption is rated as magnitude 3 on VEI.

The Laki eruption produced an estimated 14 km3 (3.4 cubic miles) of lava, and the total volume of tephra emitted was 0.91 km3 (0.2 cubic miles). Lava fountains were estimated to have reached heights of 800 to 1,400 meters (2,600 to 4,600 feet).

The gases emitted, including an estimated 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2), caused the death of over 50 percent of Iceland’s livestock, leading to a famine killing approximately 25 percent of the country’s inhabitants.

The Laki eruption and its aftermath caused a drop in global temperatures, as SO2 was spewed into the Northern Hemisphere. This caused crop failures in Europe and may have caused droughts in Asia. The eruption has been estimated to have killed over six million people worldwide, making it the deadliest in historical times.

Not too long after, in 1816, there was another mega volcanic event. Bill McGuire, in The New Scientist (28 March 2015), wrote:

Two hundred years ago, a simmering tropical volcano tore itself apart in spectacular fashion. Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted in a colossal blast that led to the deaths of more than 70,000 people in the region. So large was the explosion that its reach extended far beyond South-East Asia, loading the stratosphere with 200 million tonnes of sulphate particles that dimmed the sun and brought about a dramatic cooling with widespread ramifications half a world away.

The extended climate disruption saw 1816 dubbed “the year without a summer.” There was a wholesale failure of harvests in eastern North America and across Europe, contributing to what economic host John Post has called “the last great subsistence crisis in the western world.” Famine, bread riots, insurrection and disease stalked many nations, while governments sought to cope with the consequences of a distant geophysical phenomenon they didn’t understand.

It can happen again at any time somewhere along the Ring of Fire that encircles the earth. Pray that it doesn’t happen in our lifetime.

Gone Forever: The Cafe Richmond

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One of the World’s Great Literary Cafés

One of the World’s Great Literary Cafés

Just before Martine and I flew to Buenos Aires in 2011, one of the world’s greatest literary cafés was turned overnight into a Nike sportswear shop. Where once Jorge Luis Borges sat and wrote his stories, and where Graham Greene hung out (and commemorated) while he was writing The Honorary Consul, and where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ate near his “charming little apartment” on Calle Florida, you can now buy shoes and other clothing items that are also available in a thousand other nearby outlets.

If I make it to Argentina later this year, I plan to photograph the damage, while urging you to boycott Nike. As far as I’m concerned, they can go and swoosh themselves into oblivion.

There is a charming article in the Argentina Independent about Calle Florida, where the Richmond was located at #468 (near the intersection with Lavalle). You can read more about the Cafe Richmond in The Guardian and The Independent.

Fortunately, Buenos Aires is a city with many great cafés; but, sometimes, when a great one closes, the ripples are felt around the world.

Gabriela Kogan has written a great little book which Martine and I used called The Authentic Bars, Cafés, and Restaurants of Buenos Aires which is available from The Little Bookroom.

James Bond and Me

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James and I Go Way Back

James and I Go Way Back

I was a student at Dartmouth College when I first saw Sean Connery in Dr. No (1962). The film hit me right between the eyes, as if it had been fired at me from 007’s Beretta. Here was a guy with the ultimate cool: He was a bon vivant, handsome to women, and pitted against enemies who were the ultimate in evil. In Live and Let Die (1954), the second novel in the series after Casino Royale, Bond came up against the massive Mr. Big, a gargantuan Negro with not only pretensions to Voodoo (as Baron Samedi himself), but an operative of SMERSH, short for Смерть шпионам, “Death to Spies,” a Soviet counter-intelligence agency named by Joseph Stalin during World War Two.

The second part is dangled before us, but we don’t see any real Soviet spy business; and its role in the novel is negligible and could have omitted entirely. As with most of the Bond novels, it’s pretty easy to see what’s going to happen: The plot twists are well telegraphed. When 007 is preparing an underwater incursion on Mr. Big’s Jamaican hideaway and we are told that it would take 48 hours for the shark and barracuda repellent to arrive from the States, well we all know what is about to happen: Underwater feeding frenzy!

I must have read most of the Bond thrillers during my college years. It was candy for the mind and great adolescent wish-fulfillment. I guess that, into each life, some froth must fall.

The End of a Book

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It Barely Lasted the 3 Days It Took to Read the Book

It Barely Lasted the Three Days It Took to Read the Book

It is always sad whenever I have to throw out a book, especially when I enjoyed reading it like this one. Over the years, I have red about two dozen or more Georges Simenon novels, and loved most of them. This old Signet paperback had glued signatures using cheap pulp paper. Even as I read it, it started shedding little triangles of paper from the cover and the interior. So now I’ll just throw it out before it ends up as a random pile of kipple on my bookshelf.

Whence comes this love of books? I think I got it from my mother. I have vivid memories of lying in my crib while she read stories to me. When she didn’t have enough time to stop in at the library, she made up her own story, usually about a fairy princess in a dark European forest. From the earliest age, I was hooked.

Now my apartment contains literally thousands of books. I love reading them. I even love handling them. Alas, Georges Simenon’s The Bells of Bicêtre has come to the end of the line. No more will someone want to pick it up and gently turn the pages. Requiescat in pace!