Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz
Posted: July 18, 2026 Filed under: food Leave a comment
I am concerned with a single substance called sucrose, a kind of sugar extracted primarily from the sugar cane, and with what became of it. The story can be summed up in a few sentences.
In 1000 A.D., few Europeans knew of the existence of sucrose, or cane sugar. But soon afterward they learned about it; by 1650, in England the nobility and the wealthy had become inveterate sugar eaters, and sugar figured in their medicine, literary imagery, and displays of rank. By no later than 1800, sugar had become a necessity-albeit a costly and rare one-in the diet of every English person; by 1900, it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.
How and why did this happen? What turned an exotic, foreign, and costly substance into the daily fare of even the poorest and humblest people? How could it have become so important so swiftly?
What did sugar mean to the rulers of the United Kingdom; what did it come to mean to the ordinary folk who became its mass consumers? The answers may seem self-evident; sugar is sweet, and human beings like sweetness. But when unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire-or are given-contextual meanings by those who use them. How that happens is by no means obvious. That human beings like the taste of sweetness does not explain why some eat immense quantities of sweet foods and others hardly any.
Once European people got their hands on cane sugar, they couldn’t get enough. The entire Caribbean was turned into one enormous sugar plantation.
Medieval cooking sounds repulsive to us:
“Sugar and other spices were combined in dishes that tasted neither exclusively nor preponderantly sweet. Often, food was reduced by pounding and mashing, and so heavily spiced that its distinctive taste was concealed: “Nearly every dish, whatever its name, was soft and mushy, with its principal ingredients disguised by the addition of wine or spices or vegetables. Practically everything had to be mashed or cut into small pieces and mixed with something else, preferably of so strong a flavour as to disguise the taste of most of the other ingredients.” Perhaps this was because of the absence of forks at the table; but that hardly explains the seasoning. In his discussion of medieval English cuisine, the British historian William Mead lists few recipes without sugar, and, like Hazlitt, he seems offended by the presence of sugar. “Everyone is aware,” he tells us, “that nothing is more sickening than an oyster sprinkled with sugar.
Yet we have more than one old receipt recommending such a combination.”34 The recipe he cites, however (“Oyster in gravy Bastard”), combines the oyster liquor, ale, bread, ginger, saffron, and powdered pepper and salt, along with sugar; since the proportions are unspecified, there is no certainty that the oysters actually tasted sweet. Admittedly, they must have tasted little like oysters as we know them. But admirers of Oysters Rockefeller and kindred wonders not be quite so shocked as Mead”
Ubwali and umunami:
If we look at the whole sweep of human cultural evolution and concentrate on that last “minute” of geological time when the domestication of plants and animals occurs, we can see that almost all human beings who have ever lived were members of societies in which some one particular vegetable food was “good.” Because plant domestication and purposeful cultivation greatly increased the stability of the food supply and, in consequence, the human pop vegetable food.s Most great (and many minor) sedentary civilizations have been built on the cultivation of a particular complex carbohydrate, such as maize or potatoes or rice or millet or wheat. In these starchbased societies, usually but not always horticultural or agricultural, people are nourished by their bodily conversion of the complex carbohydrates, either grains or tubers, into body sugars. Other plant foods, oils, flesh, fish, fowl, fruits, nuts, and seasonings-many of the ingredients of which are nutritively essential-will also be consumed, but the users themselves usually view them as secondary, even if necessary, additions to the major starch. This fitting together of core complex carbohydrate and flavor-fringe supplement is a fundamental feature of the human diet-not of all human diets, but certainly of enough of them in our history to serve as the basis for important generalizations.
In her monographs on the Southern Bantu people called the Bemba, Audrey Richards has described luminously how a preferred starch can be the nutritive anchor of an entire culture:
For us it requires a real effort of imagination to visualize a state of society in which food matters so much and from so many points of view, but this effort is necessary if we are to understand the emotional background of Bemba ideas as to diet.
To the Bemba each meal, to be satisfactory, must be composed of two constituents: a thick porridge (ubwali) made of millet and the relish (umunani) of vegetables, meat or fish, which is eaten with it…. Ubwali is commonly translated by “porridge” but this is misleading. The hot water and meal are mixed in proportion of 3 to 2 to make ubwali and this produces a solid mass of the consistency of plasticine and quite unlike what we know as porridge. Ubwali is eaten in hunks torn off in the hand, rolled into balls, dipped in relish, and bolted whole.
Millet has already been described as the main constituent of Bemba diet, but it is difficult for the European, accustomed as he is to a large variety of foodstuffs, to realize fully what a “staple crop” can mean to a primitive people. To the Bemba, millet porridge is not only necessary, but is the only constituent of his diet which actually ranks as food.
Sugar entered the UK diet alongside a different non-native ingredient, tea:
Until the eighteenth century, sugar was really the monopoly of a privileged minority, and its uses were still primarily as a medicine, as a spice, or as a decorative (display) substance. “An entirely new taste for sweetness manifested itself,” Davis declares, “as soon as the means to satisfy became available… by 1750 the poorest English farm labourer’s wife took sugar in her tea.
Why tea was so important:
Cheapness was important, but it does not by itself explain the growing tendency toward tea consumption. The cleric David Davies, an important observer of rural life at the end of the eighteenth century, discerned the combined circumstances leading to a deepening preference for tea and sugar over other items of diet at the time. Davies insisted that the rural poor would produce and drink milk if they could afford to keep a cow, but that this was beyond the means of most, and his detailed budgetary records support his view. Then, because malt was a taxed item, it was too costly to enable the poor to make small beer:
Under these hard circumstances, the dearness of malt, and the difficulty of procuring milk, the only thing remaining of them to moisten their bread with, was tea. This was their last resource.
Tea (with bread) furnishes one meal for a whole family every day, at no greater expense than about one shilling a week, at an average. If any body will point out an article that is cheaper and better, I will venture to answer for the poor in general, that they will be thankful for the discovery. Davies was sensitive to the arguments against tea:
Though the use of tea is more common than could be wished, it is not yet general among the labouring poor: and if we have regard to numbers, their share of the consumption is comparatively small; especially if we reckon the value in money.
Still, you exclaim tea is a luxury. If you mean fine hyson tea, sweetened with refined sugar, and softened with cream, I readily admit it to be so. But this is not the tea of the poor. Spring-water, just coloured with a few leaves of the lowest-priced tea, and sweetened with the brownest sugar, is the luxury for which you reproach them. To this they have recourse of necessity; and were they now to be deprived of this, they would immediately be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not the cause, but the consequence of the distresses of the poor.
The diet of the English poor:
“Bread and, to a lesser extent, potatoes were the main foods, but the disproportionately high expenditure on meat provided little for the money. Small amounts of “tea, dripping [fat], butter, jam, sugar, and greens,’ remarked Mrs. Reeves, “may be regarded rather in the light of condiments than of food.” Such additions were essential, says Oddy, “to make the semblance of a meal in diets with high starch content. ” But while the laboring husband got the meat, the wife and children got the sucrose: “We see that many a labourer, who has a wife and three or four children, is healthy and a good worker, although he earns only a pound a week. What we do not see is that in order to give him enough food, mother and children habitually go short, for the mother knows that all depends upon the wages of her husband.“”
Sugar has other powers besides sweetness. It helps “go-away”:
products are judged by their quality of “go-away.” Proper proportions of sugar and fat result in good “good go-away”-which means that the mouthful of food can be swallowed without leaving the inside of the mouth coated with fat particles. The help of sugar in achieving good go-away is vital. It is now permissible to add up to 10 percent sugar to manufactured peanut butters in the U.S. No other food, they say, has such poor go-away as peanut butter; sugar improves its go-away marvelously. Soft-drink manufacturers, substituting saccharin for sugar, struggle with a comparable problem.
Gums of various sorts are introduced to make the soft drink taste heavier in the mouth, the way sugar would make it heavy, since the mouth-food technologists tell us-prefers liquids that are heavier than water. The term “mouth feel” is used to describe the felt “body” of liquids (like soft drinks), to which sugar supplies agreeable weight or balance. It can be seen that this terminology is not really concerned with taste: texture, perhaps, or “feel”
Intriguing comments coming in
Posted: July 15, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentOn Simon Bolivar Buckner (and Jr) – apparently one reader has spoken with “Bill” Buckner, whose father was a WWII general and whose grandfather was a Confederate general, and he’s still kicking.
And on Lakes of France – cool job!
Chambéry
Posted: July 14, 2026 Filed under: France, Savoy 2 Comments
A passion: traveling and seeing the places on the map come to life.
Reading the history of Savoy, Chambéry came up again and again. A 30-40 minute train ride from Annecy, we decided to have a morning’s look.
Chambéry sits in a nice, elevated spot on a mountain pass, near Lac du Bourget. It’s a good location. Says Claude:
Together, these features turned Chambéry into the natural “hinge” between Italy, France, and Switzerland — a role formalized when the Counts (later Dukes) of Savoy made it their capital in the 13th century, since holding this valley meant holding the keys to Alpine trade and military movement in the region.
The most distinct attraction in Chambéry is the Elephant Fountain, commissioned by Benoit Boige:
Benoit Boigne, the son of a Chambéry glove maker, left in 1769 aged seventeen, to join the Irish regiment in Louis XV’s army. He then tried his luck in the Russian navy, was captured by the Turks, escaped, was shipwrecked in Egypt, and finally joined the Madras regiment of the East India Company. In India, his career took off; after just six years he became the commander-in-chief of the 30,000-strong army of the Maharajah of Sindh. Boigne accumulated a fortune and thirty-five years after leaving Chambéry, he returned and spent his wealth, and the last twenty-eight years of his life, reshaping the capital of Savoy.
(so says John Dormandy in A History of Savoy: Gatekeeper of the Alps)
Sometimes this elephant statue is called “les quartre sans cul,” the four without asses, which sounds kind of like Les Quatre Cents Coups, Truffaut’s movie, and thus is the kind of wordplay French people enjoy.
There is something distinct about Chambéry, the Savoy quality, the Alpine influence.
It was very hot the day we visited. This may have accounted for the empty streets. Real Rick Steves vibes as the medieval town revealed itself to us.
We lunched at Le Sporting, right next to the church. The birds and the quiet French chatter of the elderly lunchers was a very soothing acoustic accompaniment to the prawns cooked in calvados.
Chambéry was the capital of Savoy for two centuries. It maybe peaked by the year 1563, when Duke Emmanuel Philibert moved his capital to Turin, in what’s now Italy. Chambéry still kept a Senate (one of three for Savoy, it seems like this was more like an appeals court) and the Chamber of Accounts, so there was government business. At times the traveler can imagine himself as a 16th century visitor arriving on some annoying business and looking for lodging.
Over half of the 800 aristocratic families in Savoy lived in or near the old capital, Chambéry, almost none in the Alpine valleys. About two-thirds had acquired their titles more than 150 years earlier.
Walking the streets of Chambéry you can still be transported to that era. You can picture the events of an earlier time:
Discontented with a ruling of the ducal council in Chambéry, [Jacques de Montmajeur] and his men stormed into a council meeting, cut off the head of its president, and laid it on the council table.
The de Maistre brothers were Chambéry dignitaries, writers, political figures. Joseph was a monarchist political philosopher who thought the French Revolution was a terrible idea. His brother Xavier ended up fighting with the Russian army. As a younger man, Xavier was sentenced to house arrest for participating in duel. He wrote a whimsical memoir of his captivity called A Journey Around My Room. I took a look at it, there are some interesting philosophical musings. It’s not exactly funny to the modern reader but you can feel how it might’ve been delightful, even hilarious to readers at the time.
(Wikipedia photographer S23725 took that one. I concede my photography is amateur. So what?)
If life were infinity long maybe I would’ve checked out the exhibit of Albanian religious icons at the Musée de Beaux-Arts.
I was trying to photograph this Virgin Mary carved into the building when a Savoyard woman wandered into my shot, creating a much more compelling and memorable photo.
Yes.
from the section on Savoy in Norman Davies Vanished Kingdoms:
Chambéry in the 1850s was a small provincial town still harbouring memories of its past glory. It was increasingly overshadowed both by the nearby spa of Aix-les-Bains, with its boisterous casino, and, across the frontier, by the French city of Grenoble, which was more than twice its size.
Bayle St John liked it: Chambéry is the capital of the province of Savoy; and, it has… a far more complete and metropolitan character than might have been expected. There is no trace of the village about it… evidently a place accustomed to be the seat of government [and] somewhat annoyed to be so no longer… Everything seems to be arranged for making the city a comfortable winter-quarter… During the summer everyone who can afford it disperses… up the lower slopes of the mountains which are dotted with villas…
However, the streets and… the Place Saint Léger, where the band played each evening, were sufficiently well-thronged… The aristocracy of the place being away, the middle classes tried to lord it… I wished to change some English sovereigns. The money-changer had gone to Paris. This is confirmation of a truth… that the English… all go to Switzerland, or only make a dash into northern Savoy to visit Mont Blanc… The fountain of De Boigne, with its four half-elephants stuck together is one of the ugliest things I have ever seen… M. de Boigne… earned a colossal fortune in India… He built the long street through the centre of town, adorned like the Rue de Rivoli [in Paris], with porticos… Then there is the old castle–so many times rebuilt that only a scrap is really old… Underneath the terrace of the castle… not far from the place where Mme. de Warens once [held]… her extraordinary interviews with Jean Jacques [Rousseau], extends a botanical garden.
In 1860, after the events of the Franco-Austrian war, this part of Savoy including Chambéry was ceded to France:
Louis Houssot painted the scene.
Any stocked bar will have a product of Chambéry in it:
As far as I can tell you can’t tour the factory or do a vermouth tasting or anything. (Who would want to?)
A French 2nd class train can get pretty sweaty. A French 1st class train is nice.
Aix-les-Bains
Posted: July 11, 2026 Filed under: France, Savoy Leave a comment
Great advertising.
The town is not exactly like it pretends be at the train station.
But it’s not bad.
We love when a country looks like itself, or our idea of itself. Aix-les-Bains looks like the idea of France.
Aix-les-Bains is blessed with thermal springs which have been an attraction since Roman times. People would come and soak, and at night you would gamble. Sacha Guitry’s novel Le Roman d’un tricheur / Story of a Cheat, culminates at a casino in Aix-les-Bains in 1924.
Guitry’s French wikipedia page is a fine read that can lead one anywhere.
There are a number of impressive old hotels, from the Belle Epoque era, though most of them today have been converted to apartments.
French history is so wild: a series of strong kings wage war against everybody, a revolution and a reign of terror, then Napoleon, then disfunction, then the history-repeated-as-farce of Napoleon III, a disastrous war, the Commune and subsequent executions, and then a period called “the beautiful era” where the art and architecture is killer. All this could’ve been experienced in one lifetime. Then two world wars, disaster overseas. Here we are today with a France that has to be one of the world’s most pleasant places to live, even if Houellebecq presents it as nightmare. That there’s even a serious novelist working and getting readers and discussion suggest France has still got it.
The concept of a spa town runs through French culture. Apparently French Social Security will pay for three weeks of thermal water treatment. There are many of these towns, my favorite has to be Bains-les-Bains.
There’s a Smurfs book where they build themselves a spa town:
On the day we visited Aix-le-Bains, by train from Annecy, there was a dance going on at the park:
Great sculpture of a lion with his balls exposed.
Are they kissing?
You can park your car next to the ancient Roman arch.
Although the arch bears inscriptions in honour of the Campanus family (the monumental glorification of elites and their families was an innovation of this era[2]), the function of the monument remains uncertain.
Congratulations Campanus, now you have a Honda parked next to you.
Aix-les-Bains is not the most famous Aix. There’s Aix-en-Provence. It’s not even the most famous spa town Aix: Aix-la-Chapelle, aka Aaachen, German, has quite a beautiful bath situation. Why are there so many Aixs? Apparently it comes from the Latin aqua. Aix-les-Bains=”Water The Baths.” French place names can seem strange to the Anglo but then again I grew up in Needham, Massachusetts and now live in Los Angeles, California.
Aix-les-Bains merits no section in the Lonely Planet: France guide I had on Kindle.
Lacking a guide I had Claude generate one.
The schedule it devised was very optimistic. It failed to budget or warn for instance for French train delays.
The lakeshore, to me the main draw of Aix-les-Bains, is somewhat below the town, about a 2.3 km walk.
Always moved by the French war memorials. Something like 15-20% of the military age young men of France died in World War I. For what? It’s hard to comprehend.
Our walk took us mostly through a residential area. Short on time we decided to Uber.
In reading about Aix-les-Bains I was surprised to learn that the median household income is something like 26,375 Euros a year. By American standards that is pathetic. In Los Angeles (city) the median household income is $79,700 a year. In LA County its even higher. Aix-les-Bains is comparable to Rosedale, Mississippi on this metric.
However, in France the government covers health care, childcare, university. The public spaces seem well-maintained by American standards. The numbers for Aix-l-B are a little skewed because there are quite a few retirees (39.6% of households).
I had Claude create a comparison for the US, France, and Australia:
A takeaway, certainly, is that in money terms, the United States is stupendously rich.
On the other hand I enjoyed the style of life I saw on display in Aix-les-Bains. The accumulated layers of a built environment with 2,000 years of refinement can’t be bought.
Lac du Bourget is famous for a poem about it, by Alphonse de Lamartine. The lake itself is a poem.
A lovely esplanade.
The Adelphia Hotel looked to me like it could be “low budget Wes Anderson.”
Beautiful but sort of severe.
(source)
Lakes of France
Posted: July 5, 2026 Filed under: France 2 Comments
Let’s have a list of the largest lakes in France, please!
| Rank | Lake | Area | Type | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lac Léman (French portion) | 234 km² of 582 km² total | Natural, glacial | Shared with Switzerland |
| 2 | Étang de Berre | 155 km² | Natural, saltwater lagoon | Largest entirely in France |
| 3 | Étang de Thau | 75 km² | Natural, saltwater lagoon | |
| 4 | Étang de Vaccarès | 63.3 km² | Natural, saltwater | Camargue |
| 5 | Lac d’Hourtin-Carcans | 58.3 km² | Natural, freshwater | Largest natural freshwater lake fully in France |
| 6 | Lac de Cazaux-Sanguinet | 55.6 km² | Natural, freshwater | Gironde/Landes |
| 7 | Étang de Leucate (+ Le Paurel, Sagne d’Opoul) | 54.8 km² | Natural, saltwater | |
| 8 | Lac de Grand-Lieu | 54.2 km² (varies 35–63 km²) | Natural, freshwater | Largest natural lake in France in winter (variable level) |
| 9 | Marais de Brière | 47.2 km² | Natural wetland/marsh | |
| 10 | Lac du Bourget | 44 km² | Natural, glacial freshwater | Deepest glacial lake (145 m) |
| — | Lac de Serre-Ponçon | 28 km² | Artificial reservoir | Largest artificial lake in France |
| 11 | Étang de Bages-Sigean (+ La Sèche, L’Aute, Peyriac-de-Mer) | 37 km² | Natural, saltwater | |
| 12 | Lac d’Annecy | 26.4 km² | Natural, glacial freshwater | |
| — | Lac de Vouglans | ~16 km² | Artificial reservoir | 3rd largest artificial lake (Jura) |
| 13 | Lac de Lacanau | 16.4 km² | Natural, freshwater | |
| 14 | Étang de Vendres | 15.4 km² | Natural, saltwater | |
| 15 | Étang de l’Impérial | 13.9 km² | Natural, saltwater | |
| 16 | Étang de Biguglia | 13.7 km² | Natural, saltwater lagoon | Corsica |
| 17 | Étang de l’Ayrolle | 13.3 km² | Natural, saltwater | |
| 18 | Étang de Biscarrosse-Parentis | 32.1 km² | Natural, freshwater | (note: actually ranks higher than some above — see correction below) |
| 19 | Étang de l’Or (Mauguio) | 31.4 km² | Natural, saltwater lagoon | |
| 20 | Lac d’Aiguebelette | 5.4 km² | Natural, glacial freshwater |
Source for this full continuation: French Wikipedia “Liste des plus grands lacs et étangs de France” — https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_plus_grands_lacs_et_%C3%A9tangs_de_France (their figures are drawn from IGN topographic surveys and regional hydrographic agencies, cited per-entry in the article’s footnotes).
(Claude generated that for me, using French Wikipedia’s table, cross-checked against GIPREB/Sandre-style figures, plus regional/prefecture sources).
Let’s eliminate any saltwater lagoons, and étangs. That leaves us with:
| Rank | Lake | Area | Type | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lac Léman (French portion) | 234 km² (582 km² total) | Natural, glacial freshwater | Shared with Switzerland; excluded from “fully French” rankings |
| 2 | Lac d’Hourtin-Carcans | 58.3 km² | Natural, freshwater | Largest natural freshwater lake entirely in France |
| 3 | Lac de Cazaux-Sanguinet | 55.6 km² | Natural, freshwater | Gironde/Landes |
| 4 | Lac de Grand-Lieu | 54.2 km² (ranges 35–63 km²) | Natural, freshwater | Highly variable level; largest in winter |
| 5 | Lac du Bourget | 44 km² | Natural, glacial freshwater | Deepest glacial lake in France (145 m) |
| 6 | Lac de Serre-Ponçon | 28 km² | Artificial reservoir | Largest artificial lake in France |
| 7 | Lac d’Annecy | 26.4 km² | Natural, glacial freshwater | |
| 8 | Lac de Sainte-Croix | ~22 km² | Artificial reservoir | Verdon |
| 9 | Lac de Vouglans | ~16 km² | Artificial reservoir | Jura |
| 10 | Lac de Lacanau | 16.4 km² | Natural, freshwater |
Lac Léman, aka Lake Geneva, is mostly in Switzerland.
Lac d’Hourtin-Carcans is pressed up against the Atlantic coast in a dunes situation:
(source) I’ve got to imagine that water is somewhat brackish. Lac de Cazeux a similar setup:
(source). More like a Florida-style lagoon or something than a real lake. That brings us to Lac de Grand-Lieu:
(source). Lake The Big Lake, appropriately named. The size of this lake size fluctuates, it’s very shallow, it’s in a protected area, and access is very limited. There are no towns along the shore. Says English Wikipedia:
Navigation on the lake is prohibited; only seven professional fishermen have been granted specific authorisation to do so. Because of its shallow topography, and its wild vegetation, the lake is difficult to access.
Would love to profile the seven professional fishermen. French Wikipedia suggests there’s a little more fishing allowed, but notes:
In 2024, the national reserve’s warden reported that the lake’s water quality had been deteriorating rapidly for the past five years due to runoff from agricultural land, which introduced excessive amounts of nitrates and phosphates. This nutrient saturation caused a proliferation of microalgae and cyanobacteria . Consequently, water oxygenation decreased, underwater plants disappeared, algae proliferated, and cyanobacteria produced a toxin harmful to local wildlife. Furthermore, three invasive species posed problems for the lake’s ecosystem: Louisiana crayfish, coypu , and water primrose , an invasive aquatic plant that colonized the waters and smothered native plants.
Bummer.
That brings us to Lac du Bourget:
Here it is seen from Brasserie de l’Aquarium in Aix-les-bains.
Lac du Bourget is majestic and deep, but it has a kind of eerie quality. We can see why on a topographical map:
Steep mountains along the west side and much of the east side make it inaccessible, there’s no shore. Lac du Bourget has the isolated Hautecombe Abbey:
(source), entombment place of various members of the House of Savoy.
On the eastern side, there’s pleasingly symmetrical esplanade:
All told, a satisfying lake, not world class.
Next is Lake Annecy, which we’ve covered before:
Which really has everything you could want in a lake. Preservation efforts have kept it blue, there are several interesting towns, a couple castles.
The only note on it might be Cézanne’s, that it’s almost too perfect, it’s too much a lake like you expect a lake to be, a platonic dream of a lake.
Lake Annecy kinda has a French Lake Tahoe vibe, with the rich blueness and mountain setting. But in size, it is a pebble compared to Tahoe. Lake Annecy has an area of about 10 miles, whereas Lake Tahoe is 191 square miles.
In size, Lake Annecy wouldn’t even rank in the top 100 American lakes, maybe not even the top 200 or 300. It’s a nothing on a US lake scale.
The USA is very blessed in its lakes. France is relatively lake poor – even measly Ireland has nine lakes bigger than Annecy. The UK has a whole Lake District. Switzerland, just a hair to the east, is sick with lakes. Bourget would barely crack Switzerland’s top ten.
Texas is a France-sized place:
with really only one natural freshwater lake, spooky old Caddo:
(source) but with great ingenuity the people there have created places to swim out of springs and reservoirs:
(source)
Discussion question: how do lakes or lack of lakes affect the national character?
Canicule
Posted: July 3, 2026 Filed under: France, Savoy, Uncategorized Leave a comment
France was hot. Blessedly we were near the lake, and everyone was taking advantage.
The topic in everyone’s conversation was the heatwave. Even though it sounded unprecedented, there seemed to be a French word for it:
Canicule.
It even made Le Canard:
Where does this word “canicule” come from?
I’m not qualified to read French etymology. Is my robot friend Claude?:
Etymology
It comes from Latin canicula, literally “little female dog” — a diminutive of canis (“dog”). This was the Roman name for Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (the “Great Dog”), a usage already found in the Roman writer Varro, translating the ancient Greek kýôn (“dog”) used to designate the same star, Sirius, the dog of Orion. WikipediaWhy a star became a heat term
At the 45th parallel north — i.e., in Europe — during the period from July 24 to August 24, this very bright star rises at the same time as the sun, which led the ancients to believe there was a link between the star’s appearance and the great summer heat. Pliny the Elder even wrote that when Sirius/Canicula rises, it “kindles the sun’s heat,” boiling the seas, fermenting wine in cellars, and stirring stagnant waters. WikipediaThe link goes back even further than Rome: in ancient Egypt, the goddess Sopdet, personifying Sirius, was depicted accompanied by a dog, and the star’s heliacal rising marked the Egyptian new year and the start of the Nile flood around July 19 — the hottest time of year. Wikipedia
Semantic shift
Originally “canicule” just named that astronomical period (the “dog days”). Over time the word’s meaning shifted from the astronomical event to the weather phenomenon people associated with it — French dictionaries like Larousse still list the original astronomical sense (“the period when Sirius rises with the sun, coinciding roughly with the start of summer in antiquity”) alongside the now-dominant modern sense, a spell of abnormally high day-and-night temperatures lasting from several days to weeks.Modern technical meaning
Today canicule has an official meteorological definition in France: a heat wave is officially declared when temperatures stay above roughly 35°C by day and 20°C by night for several consecutive days, with thresholds varying by region. The word also picked up public-health weight after the catastrophic 2003 heat wave, which killed close to 15,000 people in France — since then “canicule” has been tied to heat-alert plans and prevention campaigns, which is likely why you noticed it used so frequently. Apple PodcastsSo: a star named “little dog” → a hot summer period → a meteorological and public-health term, all in one word that’s stayed essentially unchanged since antiquity.
from Doreen St. Felix in The New Yorker, “Scenes from La Canicule in Paris“:
“La Canicule,” the term that the French have used to describe an elongated spell of oppressive, often dangerous temperatures, doesn’t really translate to “heat wave”—the phrase for that would be “vague de chaleur.” The spirit of La Canicule is more like dog days. Typically, the dog days arrive in late July or August, when the country winds down for its prolonged weeks of vacation. And those days tend to hover some twenty degrees Fahrenheit lower than what it is experiencing now. La Canicule is an old term, a cheeky one, just newly representative of the climate crisis.
There’s a way to look at the Canicule as a sign of climate catastrophe. But first reaction was like if there’s a word for it maybe it’s just a part of life, like the mistral.
(by mistral I’m talking about the wind, not the French AI company).
One day there was a windy storm, lightning in the distance. It seemed like there might be an American-style thunderstorm to break the heat. But it never quite came. There was though a nice rainbow:
Beach Boys
Posted: July 2, 2026 Filed under: music Leave a comment
“His progressions are always going up, then pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).
From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like “Till Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get Around’. Yet there is a logic here. Rock’n’roll was born from the uneasy tension between Saturday night and Sunday morning, church pew and dance floor, showing out and making things right with God. After those beginnings, pop and rock would go on to supply plenty of carnal jolt, but far fewer intimations of the sacred.
from Ian Penman’s review of Peter Doggett’s book about The Beach Boys in LRB.
Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor*
Posted: June 28, 2026 Filed under: Fate, hely's history, Uncategorized 1 CommentAlbrecht Dürer drew the emperor Maximilian in Augsburg in the year 1518:
On the drawing’s margin, he noted: “Is the emperor Maximilian that I Albrecht Dürer portrayed in Augsburg, up in the high palace, in his small room, Monday 28 June 1518”.
We continue our study of the Holy Roman Empire, and come to a prominent figure, who looms through the centuries. What was Maximilian like to encounter? Who saw him firsthand and wrote it down? Who spoke with him and left a record of it?
I spent a day’s worth of Fable tokens having the latest LLM model find and translate firsthand accounts of him:
Maximilian either wrote or commissioned some semi-autobiographical works about how terrific he was.
Durer’s painting of Innsbruck.
Maximilian was King of the Romans, the equivalent of Holy Roman Emperor, though he was never crowned by the Pope. He was a Habsburg, the son of Frederick III, the first Habsburg to become emperor. After him the family would produce almost all the holders of that office until the Empire was disbanded.
During Maximilian’s reign there were some wins for the family, but they lost Switzerland forever.
We’re concerned here though with Maximilian’s death:
In 1501, Maximilian fell from his horse and badly injured his leg, causing him pain for the rest of his life. Some historians have suggested that Maximilian was “morbidly” depressed: from 1514, he travelled everywhere with his coffin. In 1518, feeling his death near after seeing an eclipse, he returned to his beloved Innsbruck, but the city’s innskeepers and purveyors did not grant the emperor’s entourage further credit. The resulting fit led to a stroke that left him bedridden on 15 December 1518. However, he continued to read documents and received foreign envoys right until the end. Maximilian died in Wels, Upper Austria, at three o’clock in the morning on 12 January 1519. Different historians have listed different diseases as the main cause of death, including cancer (likely stomach cancer or intestinal cancer), pneumonia, syphilis, gall stones, stroke (he did have a combination of dangerous medical problems) etc.
Maximilian was succeeded as Emperor by his grandson Charles V, his son Philip the Handsome having died in 1506. For penitential reasons, Maximilian gave very specific instructions for the treatment of his body after death. He wanted his hair to be cut off and his teeth knocked out, and the body was to be whipped and covered with lime and ash, wrapped in linen, and “publicly displayed to show the perishableness of all earthly glory”. Gregor Reisch, the emperor’s friend and confessor who closed his eyes, did not obey the instruction though. He placed a rosary in Maximilian’s hand and other sacred objects near the corpse. He was buried in the Castle Chapel at Wiener Neustadt on borrowed money. The casket was opened during renovation under Maria Theresa. After that, the body was reinterred in a Baroque sarcophagus, that later was found unscathed amidst the wreckage of the chapel (due to the Second World War) on 6 August 1946. The emperor was ceremoniously buried again in 1950.
His death portrait.
Keir Starmer
Posted: June 23, 2026 Filed under: UK Leave a comment
Had a strong feeling Keir Starmer would be a flop when, in his interview with the Financial Times back in 2023, he seemed incapable of ordering his own lunch, or to even have any preference on his lunch.
Do you think Winston Churchill or Disraeli passively accepted a vegetarian fry-up?!
You, happy Austria, marry!
Posted: June 21, 2026 Filed under: Savoy Leave a comment
Traveling to the former Habsburg lands. What was the deal with these guys?
Origins:
As far back as we can trace, the Habsburg family was illustrious. In the 10th century, its progenitors carved out a medley of discontinuous lordships and manors in the region of the Upper Rhine, ranging across Alsace, the Black Forest, and what is now northern Switzerland. Around 1030, the earliest Habsburg of whom we have a definite record, Radbot (c.985-1045), founded the Benedictine abbey at Muri in the Swiss Aargau. Muri served over several centuries as the family’s place of burial. About the same time, Radbot built a stone fort called Habsburg some 30 kilometres away from Muri.
The name probably means Castle by the Ford, but is usually given the grander rendering of Castle of the Hawk. It was by the title of Habsburg that Radbot’s descendants were generally known.
The family had various forged documents that connected them to Julius Caesar and beyond:
By virtue of this and other similar deceptions (including a charter purportedly written by the Roman emperor, Nero), the Habsburgs ‘discovered’ that they were entitled to the rank of archduke. It was by this spoof title that all senior members of the dynasty subsequently styled themselves, in honour of which they wore a cloak trimmed with ermine and a coronet.
The story behind the forgeries rests on politics and ambition. In the 1lth and 12th centuries, Radbot and the first Habsburgs had sought to carve out a principality in the region of Switzerland and the Upper Rhine. They were, however, unable to consolidate their disparate properties into a unified block, for the region was intersected by too many rival lordships, cities, and confederacies.
One thing the early Habsburgs did have was money, for they controlled the Alpine toll stations which stood between the upland pastures and the cities of the valleys. In the hope that his family’s wealth might be deployed to bring order to the Holy Roman Empire, the German princes elected Rudolf of Habsburg as king in 1273. He did not disappoint them, deploying his armies against the robber-knights whose Rhineland castles impeded merchants and commerce.
One key to their success: using their daughters:
The Habsburgs were striking in the way that they used daughters not only as political pawns but also as political players, administering parts of the dynasty’s possessions.
Not that it was great to be a Habsburg daughter, you probably had to marry some prince you didn’t like, maybe more than one.
Meanwhile, Charles’s younger brother, Ferdinand, for whom Maximilian had engineered marriage into the Polish Jagiello line, acquired in 1526 the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, following the death in battle of his Jagiello brother-in-law, Louis. In the space of just half a century, therefore, the two Habsburg brothers, Charles and Ferdinand, had through Maximilian’s marriage schemes taken over half of Europe, and they had done so more or less peacefully. Only in Hungary was there any concerted resistance. As an adage put it at the time, ‘Let others fight, you Happy Austria marry.’
It’s hard to understand the period from the end of the Roman Empire until at least the 20th century if you can’t comprehend that Christianity did really matter to people. There were sinners and cynical operators but there were people at both the top and the bottom who really believed and acted on their belief.
Dynastic ambition was only one factor that guided the Habsburg rulers. Indeed, on occasions the policies they pursued were potentially damaging and even ruinous to the dynasty’s interests and survival. These other guiding principles and determinants of policy included the conviction that as Holy Roman Emperors the Habsburg rulers had an obligation to defend the Catholic Church and to promote its spiritual interests, which included the promotion of peace.
How this worked (or didn’t):
They also embraced the belief that government was a trust and that rulership implied duties to subjects. Although rarely doubting the divine providence that vindicated their power and ordained the secular hierarchy on which they stood at the apex, the Habsburg emperors took their obligations to their subjects seriously. Right through to the 20th century, their mornings were typically occupied by audiences at which up to a hundred petitioners queued to ask the sovereign for his help or advice, or (which was more usual) to thank him in person for some kindness shown.
There were two problems with the cultivation of good government.
The first was the problem of distance, which meant that Habsburg rulers might demonstrate their personal rule and fatherly concern only to a few. Country folk from Lower Austria might thus travel to Vienna to have a private word with the emperor about their daughters’ marriages, but this was scarcely possible for most Habsburg subjects. The old adage of Spanish colonial rule, ‘If death came from Madrid, we would be immortal, was a fitting verdict on the problems of communication that beset Habsburg rule more generally.
How did we get here?:
In 1437, the Emperor Sigismund, son of Charles IV of Luxemburg, died without heir. Meanwhile, the various cadet lines of the Habsburgs either expired or faltered, leaving children as heirs. In 1438, the electors chose as king Albert of Habsburg, the late Emperor Sigismund’s son-in-law. Upon Albert’s death the next year, they appointed as successor his second cousin, Frederick of Styria, who was now the senior member of the dynasty.
Frederick was chosen by the electors because there was no one else available for the role of king. Nevertheless, he looked the part, for he was tall and muscular, with long blond hair-characteristics that he had inherited from his Polish mother, Cymburga, a woman of prodigious beauty and physical strength, who could reputedly drive nails into oak tables with her bare fist. Frederick ruled as king of Germany from 1440 and, following his coronation in Rome, as emperor from 1452 until his death in 1493.
That nails in oak claim sounds like a seven almonds story: a joke or quip that is taken too literally and enters the historical record.
Historians have not looked kindly upon Frederick III, too readily following the later description of him as the ‘arch-sleepyhead or averring by reference to the Austrian poet Rilke that his main achievement was to have reigned in adversity for so long: Who speaks of victory, when to endure is all?’ An even harsher verdict blames Frederick for Germany’s later misfortunes. Instead of busying himself with the Holy Roman Empire and trying to bring order to its politics, Frederick withdrew to provincial Wiener Neustadt and occupied himself with Habsburg family affairs.
Where all this led:
[The Habsburg dynasty] held to a mythologized history that taught it to expect greatness. It was tenacious in acquiring lands, kingdoms, and titles, either by war or by marriage. Its members were, moreover, bound together both biologically and by the distribution of power and honours. The branches of the dynasty thus regularly intermarried, to such an extent that Charles II of Spain (1665-1700) had only two-thirds the normal number of great-and great-great-grandparents.
Inbreeding between cousins and uncles caused the prognathism for which the Habsburgs were famous and was most pronounced in Charles II (Figure 2).
Magenta
Posted: June 20, 2026 Filed under: Savoy Leave a comment
So many topics we’re working through here could be filed as “footnotes to footnotes.”
In John Dormandy’s A History of Savoy: Gatekeeper of the Alps he drops this one:
In 1858, Emperor Louis Napoleon III and Count Benzo Cavour, prime minister of King Victor Emmanuel, met secretly in the small spa town of Plombières in the Vosges mountains to hatch a plot. The two men, equally devious, agreed to provoke an attack by Austria on the Kingdom of Sardinia that included Savoy; the French would then promptly come to the aid of poor Sardinia, and together they would expel the Austrians from northern Italy. Following that happy outcome, Sardinia would acquire all of northern Italy and in recompense for his help, Napoleon III would be allowed to annexe Savoy to France. That was exactly what happened, except that by the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, Europe, particularly Victorian England, was beginning to baulk at countries being traded as commodities, especially if the recipient of the gift was France under a second Napoleon. Cavour and Napoleon, ever resourceful, organised a ‘free’ plebiscite in Savoy in which 99 per cent of the population voted for annexation to France.
Savoy has had our attention. Savoy is a region of alpine lakes, mountains, valleys and passes in what’s now France, Italy, maybe a touch of western Switzerland. Savoy was a duchy, a principality, a state, a province, the seat of an empire, a poor source of refugees and emigrees, a retreat for aristocrats, a land of dairies, of resorts, of monestaries. Savoy was an idea, and it was a catchy idea. It spread in funny ways, through marriages and princesses and neighborhoods and towns, a hotel, and then many hotels, a cake, and a dance hall and a song and a beer and a fictional baseball bat.
Fortune brought us twice to Savoy to one of her most favored spots, Lake Annecy. We’ll be there again.
If you’re at the animation festival, come see us. We have two panels, one for Common Side Effects on Thursday at 2:30pm at Salle Pierre Lamy, one for Adult Swim on Friday at 1:30pm at MIFA Tent at the Imperial Hotel.
Back to Magenta:
Undeterred by their lack of any military experience, there was no way Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel were going to be talked out of leading their armies in person. Parliament in Turin dissolved itself and gave the King, and therefore Cavour, full executive powers. Once war was declared the anti-Cavour faction in Savoy became as patriotic as everybody else, cheering the French troops as they crossed Savoy, on the way to Italy.
The forty-year-old King concentrated the Sardinian army of 50,000 men between Alessandria and Casale. Napoleon had been gathering his army near Lyons and French troops started crossing Savoy within forty-eight hours of the Austrian army entering Piedmont territory. The French Army used the railway as far as St-Jean-de-Maurienne, but the Mont Cenis Pass had to be crossed on foot. Within days, French soldiers were streaming down the Alps into Piedmont at the rate of 10,000 a day. On 14 May, the fifty-year-old Napoleon joined his army of 107,000 men and 324 cannons in Alessandria.
For reasons that are unclear, General Gyulai stopped the unopposed advance of the Austrian army behind the Ticino river and did not resume his advance till 20 May, more than three weeks after crossing the frontier … Ninety-year-old Field Marshal Radetzky was brought out of retirement, but he was too late to undo Gyulai’s blunder. The first major battle took place on 4 June at Magenta, 20 km west of Milan. Some 50,000 French soldiers faced an equal number of Austrians. It was Napoleon’s first experience of commanding an army in battle and for several hours, the outcome was in balance, until finally the French prevailed. About 7,000 Austrian and 4,000 French soldiers died at Magenta.* The twenty-nine-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph, even less experienced than Napoleon or Victor Emmanuel, now took over personal command of the Austrian armies. Victor Emmanuel placed Garibaldi in charge of the volunteer corps of untrained civilians, but without any specific orders, which Garibaldi would probably have ignored in any event. By 20 June, Garibaldi had reached Lake Garda, well behind the Austrian lines, further enhancing his reputation with his men and the Italian public.
Four days after the battle at Magenta, Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel made a triumphal entry into Milan. The Emperor and the King were cheered at the service of thanksgiving in the cathedral, at the gala performance in La Scala, and at a series of banquets. Napoleon assured everyone that he had no personal agenda and that his only motive for being there was to help his ‘brother’ Victor Emmanuel fulfil the legitimate aspirations of the Italian people and liberate Italy…
Napoleon III and Cavour got exactly what they wanted. At first.
Then events got out of their control, Italy became independent, Napoleon III was a prisoner, then died in exile in England. Cavour died of malaria while Prime Minster of Italy, an office that would eventually go to Mussolini. Even these guys who briefly seem as if they bend history end up toppled by unforeseen consequences.
Savoy, meanwhile, took off! It’s great for skiing in the winter and relaxing in the summer. It’s probably the richest it has ever been.
Previous coverage:
Savoy Special (and knowing and not knowing in the age of AI)
Everyday Life in the Holy Roman Empire
Swiss History series: Part One, Bernese Chronicles, William Tell etc., League of God’s House, Why Switzerland?, Calvin’s Geneva, Geneva Conventions
Robert Thurman
Posted: June 19, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentHe enrolled in boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. He was expelled in 1958 — weeks from graduation, having already been accepted at Harvard — after leaving without permission to join Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army in Cuba. He was stopped in Florida and worked for a brief time in Mexico.
In 1959, he married Christophe de Menil, an oil heiress. In 1961, while changing a flat tire, the tire iron slipped and destroyed his left eye, a freak accident that left him questioning his own mortality.
He dropped out of Harvard to travel across Asia. His wife, uninterested in his wanderings, left him. He arrived in Turkey close to broke.
…
He returned home when his father died in 1962, but continued his pursuit of Buddhist knowledge with Geshe Wangyal, a Buddhist lama in New Jersey. Adept at languages, he learned Tibetan in a matter of months and eventually spoke it without an accent.
He decided to become a monk and persuaded his teacher to accompany him to Dharamshala, India, the home in exile of the Dalai Lama.Dr. Thurman and the Dalai Lama became fast friends: He studied under the Tibetan spiritual leader and, in turn, gave him lessons in Freudian psychology, nuclear physics and other Western ideas.
“He would say, ‘Forget about the teaching, you can go and talk to some old lama,’” Dr. Thurman told The San Francisco Examiner in 1997. “‘But now what I want to know is how does the bicameral American constitutional system work? What is a gene, how does it work?’”
Incredible obituary of Robert Thurman. A remarkable comment from one of his kids:
From Christophe DeMenil’s obituary:
In the spring of 1959, she married Robert Thurman, who was eight years her junior and who would enter Harvard that fall. He dropped out two years later with wanderlust and headed toward India by way of Turkey and Iran in search of enlightenment through Buddha. He left behind his infant daughter, Taya, as well as his wife, who, he was quoted as saying, was “nervous, scared of the whole thing.”
Ms. de Menil maintained for years that it was not India where he had been headed but the mountains of Mexico, where he proposed to camp and explore mind-altering drugs, neither of which she felt was appropriate for an infant. The marriage ended in divorce, and Mr. Thurman, who became a distinguished scholar of Buddhism and a monk, later married a German-Swiss model who had divorced Timothy Leary, the proponent of LSD. One of their children, born in 1970 in Mexico, is the actress Uma Thurman.
How did the de Menils get so rich?
Each child was endowed with a formidable financial legacy, thanks to their grandfather Conrad Schlumberger, a physicist, and the great-uncle, Marcel. Together the two men pioneered well-logging, which, using the electrical resistance of the earth, determines with considerable accuracy the location of oil deposits.
I know the name from the art collection in Houston, founded by Christophe’s mother.
Not a great nursery rhyme
Posted: June 18, 2026 Filed under: advice, Savoy, the California Condition Leave a comment
from this kinda strange book:
Hildegarde Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s granddaughter, swans around California musing on the Spanish and Mediterranean majesty. I know, it sounds interesting, but it’s not. The best part of E. H. Suydam’s illustration.
Ulysses, by Hugh Kenner
Posted: June 16, 2026 Filed under: Ireland Leave a comment
Ulysses, the Book of Bloom, was commenced in Trieste about 1914, written there and in Zurich and Paris during the next seven years, published in Paris, 2 February 1922 on the author’s fortieth birthday, and promplty created what the gutter press loves, a scandal. SCANDAL OF ULYSSES read hoardings for the Sporting Times (‘The Pink ‘Un’) in which one could read that the contents of the book were “enough to make a Hottentot sick.” Hottentots in those days were British subjects.
That’s from Hugh Kenner, Ulysses.
A day in June is very long indeed at 53′ North latitude. In Dublin in 1904, Standard Time and Summer Time still years in the future, local time had the sun rise at 16 June at 3:33 AM and not set until 8:27.
A few years ago, my friends saw Gatz, a production by the theater group Elevator Repair Service that is about eight hours long and brings to life The Great Gatsby:
James Gatz — that was really, or at least legally, his name.One morning in the shabby office of a mysterious small business, an employee finds a copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter on his desk. He starts to read it out loud and doesn’t stop. At first his coworkers hardly notice. But after a series of strange coincidences, it’s no longer clear whether he’s reading the book or the book is transforming him.
8 hours long and with a cast of 13, Gatz is by far ERS’s most ambitious endeavor yet — not a retelling of the Gatsby story but an enactment of the novel itself. Fitzgerald’s American masterpiece is delivered word for word, startlingly brought to life by a low-rent office staff in the midst of their inscrutable business operations.
an eight hour theater production sounded tough.
but my friends were mesmerized.
The reviews matched:
the most remarkable achievement in theater not only of this year but also of this decade.
—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
So when Elevator Repair Service came to town with Ulysses, I had to check it out:
Blessedly, just a couple hours long.
Riotous fun at times although it might be totally incomprehensible if you didn’t know the book?
It got Ulysses back on my mind.
Ulysses by James Joyce starts with the living situation of Stephen, a sort of gloomy softboi. Then we pick up with Leopold Bloom, feeding his cat, eating breakfast, and then walking around Dublin trying to think about anything except the fact that this afternoon his wife Molly is gonna have sex with Myles Boylan.
(He gazes ahead, reading on the wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a phallic design.) Odd! Molly drawing on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown. What’s that like? (Gaudy dollwomen loll in the lighted doorways, in window embrasures, smoking birdseye cigarettes. The odour of the sicksweet weed floats towards him in slow round ovalling wreaths.)
BLOOM: (As before.) Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish device. (Lewdly.) The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.
ZOE: Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.
BLOOM: (In workman’s corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Ralegh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all. That is to say he brought the poison a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits.
Hugh Kenner identifies some issues:
Joyce obeyed a principle Hemingway later enunciated, that a writer’s omissions will show only when he omits things because he doesn’t know them, and he worked out elaborate schemata so as to be able to suppress them. Except for the funeral cortège, with which we ride swaying and rattling clear across the city with frequent indications of time and place (“Are we late?’ asks Martin Cunningham; Paddy Dignam has an appointment with the grave), Joyce only once (10.113) takes us aboard the wheeled conveyances his characters use so freely. An abrupt cessation of action here, an abrupt resumption there – such is his staccato notation: the cut, not the dissolve. The effect, for a reader trained on the Portrait’s suave transitions (where cuts signify the passage of days, or years) is one of calculated disorientation: Where are we now? How did we get here?
Joyce the critic:
Some things were clear to Joyce extremely early. At 22 he wrote to his brother ‘Damned stupid, after reading “The Wild Goose’ in George Moore’s Untilled Field. ‘A lady who has been living for three years on the line between Bray and Dublin is told by her husband that there is a meeting in Dublin at which he must be present. She looks up the table to see the hours of the trains. This on [the Dublin, Wicklow & Wexford Railway] where the trains go regularly; this after three years. Isn’t it rather stupid of Moore.”
Moore, who didn’t live on the DW & WR, would have had to look up that train, but he should have reflected that his character wouldn’t have. The writer should be alert to what his characters would know
Ulysses can be a tough read, this aint exactly Jack Reacher:
But Ulysses is so designed that new readers, given, even, what cannot be postulated, ideal immunity to attention overload, cannot possibly grasp certain elements because of a warp in the order of presentation, and veteran readers will perceive after twenty years new lights going on as a consequence of a question they have only just thought to ask. Such a question would be: Why is Bloom made to advert to the potato just when he does, on a page where there seems no earthly reason for him to remember the potato or for us to be apprised of it? And when we think to ask something happens.
Kenner implores us this is worthy:
For nearly seven years Ulysses was more than a project: it was what James Joyce was doing with the one life at his disposal, and he should be credited with some reflection on the import of this.
Not to worry, plenty of brainpower has been deployed on this book:
Possible Joyce was frustrated with the reception:
Ezra Pound in old age liked to recall how Joyce had responded to reviews and explications: “If only someone would say the book was so damn’ funny.”
It’s not a laugh riot but there’s fun.
Ulysses came out in 1922, but it’s set in 1904. Eighteen years earlier. Imagine l reading a book today about a guy walking around.., San Francisco? Boston?… in 2008. (Would read).
In 1916, between the setting and the publication, many spots in central Dublin were damaged in the Easter Rising and aftermath:
A biography of Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann came out not long ago. From a New Statesman review piece by Lyndall Gordon:
I was struck by the phrase “stupid, monotonous work.”
Even admirers of Ulysses get exhausted:
it sometimes overruns the bounds of art into an arid ingenuity which would make a mystic correspondence do duty for an artistic reason
EO Wilson, source
I picked up Hugh Kenner’s Ulysses looking for an answer to a specific question, about the catechism section, 17, are those real? Like she had sex with all those people?
What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?
New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.
If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
What preceding series?
Assuming Mulvey to be the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell d’Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society’s Horse Show, Maggot O’Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon (Lord Mayor of Dublin), Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder, an unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon Dedalus, Andrew (Pisser) Burke, Joseph Cuffe, Wisdom Hely, Alderman John Hooper, Dr Francis Brady, Father Sebastian of Mount Argus, a bootblack at the General Post Office, Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and so on to no last term.
My question is, are those names all Molly Bloom’s actual lovers/roster? or is this Bloom’s imagining?
Kenner has an answer:
This is easily taken as a list of Molly’s lovers other than Bloom, twenty-five of them in all – confirming, as it seems to, impressions we’ve picked up earlier in the book… It was long so taken by critical consensus, and Molly long regarded as a hardened adulteress, a misconception which deprives Bloomsday of its special tang.
Its conceptions were nearly forty years being challenged, and Molly’s character as long a time being refocused… Thus Penrose was a ‘delicate looking student, a priestylooking chap was always squinting in when he passed (8.176; that was 1889 when Molly was nursing Milly, and Penrose nearly caught sight of her breasts; ‘that was his studenting’ is her tart recall (18.575), and we’re safe in concluding she taught him nothing further. Dr Brady (elsewhere described as old: 15.4359) attended her in her confinement (18.575); Fr Sebastian may have been the cleric who sat beside her at the Jews’ Temples Gardens (18.90) or else someone who once heard her confession; gynaecological examination and examination of conscience are intimacies of a sort, but not the sort that contribute to the tale of a hardened adulteress. And so on. No, this list is a list of past occasions for twinges of Bloomian jealousy, and there is no ground for supposing that the hospitality of Molly’s bed has been extended to anyone but her husband and Boylan. No rhetoric affords more pitfalls than that of ‘objectivity.*
Is Molly’s soliloquy itself actually just a Bloom imagination?
I asked Claude:
Coy as usual Claude.
Joyce was interested in technology, he helped open one of the first movie theaters in Dublin.
Whether Molly’s soliloquy is all Molly or part Bloom part Molly or all Bloom, really Blooming: that will be a good discussion question for our seminar.
Is the meaning of Ulysses that life is a distracted fog of comedy and allusion and confusion and worry and jealousy, punctuated with a few moments of pure post-nut clarity?
Stella Adler
Posted: June 10, 2026 Filed under: actors Leave a comment
These are collected classroom lectures by the famous acting teacher:
One night, when Olivier was playing Othello, he gave what must have been an electrifying performance. Even he was startled by it. And the audience would not stop applauding. Maggie Smith, who was playing Desdemona, was also stunned. When the curtain was rung down for the last time, instead of going to her own dressing room she went to his. She found him sitting there alone in the dark. “Larry,” she asked him. “How did you do it?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Interestingly, shortly after giving this momentous performance Olivier went into a horrible artistic funk. I suppose it’s what they would call a midlife crisis, but it was unusually severe. He was convinced he knew nothing about acting. He was afraid every time he went out on stage that a moment would come in the performance when he would have to step down to the footlights, beg the audience’s forgiveness and ask that the curtain be brought down because he would not be able to remember his lines or not be able to perform. That never happened, but for years the possibility that it might happen haunted him. Many years afterward he described this crisis in an interview, and I wondered if it had to do with that night when he did some of the best acting he ever did in his life and didn’t understand how.
An origin story:
Now I didn’t have a so-called normal childhood, because I lived with the greatest actor I’ve ever seen, who happened to be my father. Jacob P. Adler was recognized in America as one of the greatest actors of all time. When Stanislavski came to America he sought out my father because my father had played a role in Yiddish that Stanislavski was going to play in Russian and he wanted to know how my father had done certain things. My father didn’t give me a moment’s peace. If we were walking in the street, he’d point to someone and say, “Look at her. Look at the way she walks. Look at him. Watch the way he uses his hands. Imitate her voice.” I was always being told to do something. I wasn’t told just to walk. My father’s eyes never stopped. All of his kids had to imitate everything. He didn’t care whether we slept or not. At night we would be taken out of bed. Company would be there. “Get up and imitate your teacher,” he would order us. We were acting all the time. “Observe! Observe! Observe!” he’d tell us. I was sitting in a box in the theatre with him once, and he saw a girl in the next box who had a nervous habit. He studied her and he started imitating her. He never stopped for a minute. That’s the way you become an actor. You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.
John Steinbeck writing routine
Posted: June 7, 2026 Filed under: Steinbeck, the California Condition Leave a commentOh, yes, John said, his father was a disciplined worker. “He would get up at five in the morning, generally, and fiddle around with breakfast. Then he would sharpen pencils for a long time. he had a box of not such dull pencils here … ” John reached with his right hand into an imaginary box … “and an empty box here.” He reached with his left hand into a second, imaginary box. Laughed. “I’m talking about 400 pencils. He had one of the first electric pencil sharpeners ever made He’d take a pencil,” John mimed, “put it in the sharpener, and by the time he had them all sharpened, when this box was full, he had gotten over what all writers have: that morning inhibition: ‘Am I really going to put my mind on a piece of blank paper?’ By the time the 400 pencils were sharpened, he’d negotiated all that. And then he would write, from six or seven in the morning until noon. Then quit and go fishing or whittling or invent. I thought that was really enviable, that he only worked until noon. But he did it with a great deal of discipline. He didn’t give himself vacations. He didn’t gnash his teeth about stuff. He worked out a lot of his mechanical problems by writing letters to his close friends and editor.”
I was looking up “John Steinbeck San Diego” to see if he ever wrote anything about the place and found this 1989 interview with his son, who was living in La Jolla, in The San Diego Reader.
“He worked very hard at what he did. He was poor for a long time. His success of any remark was in in his late 30s. He worked hard and he worked a lot of things, did a lot of manual labor, was a night watchman, helped build Madison Square Garden, poured cement ffr it.”
What things remind him of his father? “Some odors — a certain Florida toilet water. I noticed very pleasantly the other day, I walked into my office and it smelled like my father’s office.
Some gags:
“He brought a lot o this into his real life. In one of the Sports Illustrated articles, he had written that one of the sports he liked — he was making them up — was fishing contests without baiting the hook. Actually, he did fish that way a lot, not baiting the hook. Actually, he did fish that way a lot, not baiting the hook, because, he said, ‘It won’t disturb them.’ Also, he fished that way sometimes in order to work out problems in his work.”
In another of his Sports Illustrated articles, Steinbeck had discussed racing oak trees. John was visiting him and saw, next to his father’s writing desk, a baking dish filled with peat moss and on the peat moss were rows of acorns, turned upside down. “I didn’t let him know I’d read the Sports Illustrated article,” John said, “and I asked him, “What are you doing here?’ and he said, ‘I’m racing oak trees.'” John’s laughter interrupted his story, then he continues, repeating to us his father’s answer, “‘Well, it hasn’t caught on yet, but if it does, I have one of the first stables.’
“It was so strange. He had a very funny private little thing going on. You’d go into the attic where people had mousetraps. He’d have a plate of poisoned grain, and he’d have signs all over, ‘Mouse Beware. This is Poison. Do not Eat.’ He was a funny guy.”
How about this:
“The most gratifying thing he gave me, both before and after he died, was to know that the most refined highest wisdoms and human knowledge we find in the everyday, ordinary world, not in a library of Sanskrit, not at Oxford, but from the guy down the street. That guy knows as much. The common wisdom is the most profound. Ordinary mind is enlightened mind. Fortunately, my other training also reinforced that truth.
“Not that my father didn’t believe scholarship was useful, but that it had its place. If he needed to learn something about the language of the Middle Ages, he would go to the books or scholars who could teach him, but he did that only so he could learn what ordinary people said in the Middle Ages.”
Los Angeles
Posted: June 6, 2026 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Out the window. Are people’s airplane photos boring? C’mon, this is a pretty decent capture of the whole basin.
Chesapeake vs Shannon: The Battle of Boston Harbor
Posted: June 1, 2026 Filed under: Boston, New England Leave a comment
[The Chesapeake] had become known as an unlucky ship… crews were reluctant to serve on it.
Broke was the captain of the Shannon, which was waiting outside Boston harbor for the USS Chesapeake, one of the six frigates designed for the new US Navy by Joshua Humphreys.
Broke sent James Lawrence, captain of the Chesapeake, a written challenge:
As the Chesapeake appears now ready for sea, I request you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her, ship to ship, to try the fortune of our respective flags. The Shannon mounts twenty-four guns upon her broadside and one light boat-gun; 18 pounders upon her maindeck, and 32-pounder carronades upon her quarterdeck and forecastle; and is manned with a complement of 300 men and boys, beside thirty seamen, boys, and passengers, who were taken out of recaptured vessels lately. I entreat you, sir, not to imagine that I am urged by mere personal vanity to the wish of meeting the Chesapeake, or that I depend only upon your personal ambition for your acceding to this invitation. We have both noble motives. You will feel it as a compliment if I say that the result of our meeting may be the most grateful service I can render to my country; and I doubt not that you, equally confident of success, will feel convinced that it is only by repeated triumphs in even combats that your little navy can now hope to console your country for the loss of that trade it can no longer protect. Favour me with a speedy reply. We are short of provisions and water, and cannot stay long here.
(that’s as condensed by James and Chamier 1837, Wikipedia tells me. Boldface mine).
Lawrence never got the letter, but he got the idea and sailed out anyway for a ship to ship duel.
Bostonians and their neighbours anticipated great results from the celebrated Lawrence and his crew. Local authorities reserved a space at the docks in expectation of accommodating the captured British man-of-war. Also plans were set in motion for a gala victory banquet. As the American warship moved down the harbour, citizens raced to vantage points to witness the fight. Crowds gathered on available heights from Lynn to Malden and from Cohasset to Scituate. A diarist likened the Salem crowds to swarms of bees. The more daring took to boats to follow the Chesapeake. A Boston newspaper reported the bay being covered with civilian craft of all kinds.
The battle happened on June 1, 1813. A Tuesday. June 1 is an auspicious day in British naval history, “the glorious first of June.” The ships met around half past five pm:
Captain Lawrence realised that his ship’s speed would take it past Shannon and ordered a ‘pilot’s luff’. This was a small and brief turn to windward which would make the sails shiver and reduce the ship’s speed. Just after Chesapeake began this limited turn away from Shannon, she had her means of manoeuvring entirely disabled as a second round of accurate British fire caused more losses, most critically to the men and officers manning Chesapeake‘s quarterdeck. Here the helmsmen were killed by a 9-pounder gun that Broke had ordered installed on the quarterdeck for that very purpose, and the same gun shortly afterwards shot away the wheel itself.
Damn I would not sleep easy as the helmsman if word came down they had a 9-pound cannonball just for killing me.
A funny illustration but the actual event must’ve been horrifying. Garry Wills, summarizing Henry Adams in Henry Adams and the Making of America says:
The battle that followed was surreally intense and brief.
Lawrence was killed by a musket shot, and the British boarded Chesapeake.
Broke himself led a charge against a number of the Americans who had managed to rally on the forecastle. Three American sailors, probably from the rigging, descended and attacked him. Taken by surprise, he killed the first, but the second hit him with a musket which stunned him, whilst the third sliced open his skull with a sabre or cutlass, knocking him to the deck. Before the sailor could finish Broke off, the American was bayoneted by a British Marine named John Hill. Shannon‘s crew rallied to the defence of their captain and carried the forecastle, killing the remaining Americans. Broke sat, dizzied and weak, on a carronade slide, and his head was bound up by William Mindham, who used his own neckerchief.
The engagement had lasted just ten minutes according to Shannon‘s log, or eleven minutes by Lieutenant Wallis’ watch. Broke more modestly claimed fifteen minutes in his official despatch. Shannon had lost 23 men killed, and had 56 wounded. Chesapeake had about 48 killed, including four lieutenants, the master and many other of her officers, and 99 wounded.
The Chesapeake and the American survivors were taken to Halifax:
Many officers were paroled to Halifax, but some began a riot at a performance of a patriotic song about Chesapeake‘s defeat. Parole restrictions were tightened: beginning in 1814, paroled officers were required to attend a monthly muster on Melville Island, and those who violated their parole were confined to the prison.
Chesapeake, after active service in the Royal Navy, was eventually sold at Portsmouth, England, for £500 in 1819 and broken up. Some of the timbers of Chesapeake were used in the construction of the Chesapeake Mill in Wickham, Hampshire.
The American captain Lawrence was killed:
He is probably best known today for his last words, “Don’t give up the ship!”, uttered during the capture of the Chesapeake.
…
Captain Lawrence was buried in Halifax with full military honours; six British naval officers served as pallbearers
As for Broke:
Broke never again commanded a ship. The head wound from a cutlass blow, which had exposed the brain, had been very severe accompanied by great blood loss. Therapeutic bleeding, routinely employed at the time, was not performed by Shannon‘s surgeon Mr Alexander Jack, which was to Broke’s advantage. The report of the surgeon described the wound as “a deep cut on the parietal bone, extending from the top of the head … towards the left ear, [the bone] penetrated for at least three inches in length”.[65] Broke survived the wound into moderate old age (64 years), though he was debilitated. He suffered, to a greater or lesser extent, from headaches and other neurological problems for the rest of his life.
Yeah, his skull got split open and his brain was exposed, I would guess he had some headaches.
Sidequest: in his Naval History of the War of 1812 (quoted by Wills) Theodore Roosevelt says:
I had to look up Bayard. Confusing, because there was an American politician Nicholas Bayard who was active in the events of this era. But Roosevelt must mean Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard, “the knight without fear and reproach.” This must be one of those references like Crillon that came from a time when everyone knew more about the heroes of chivalry. Bayard fought at lots of 16th century battles, including the Battle of the Spurs (the art of which is epic).
About his personal life, Wikipedia says he never married but he’s believed to have fathered a child.
Various hypotheses have been made about the identity of the mother: numerous clues lead to Bianca di Monferrato, the Duchess of Savoy, who was widowed when very young. This is supported by Bayard’s presence at that time in Piedmont and his statement that the child was noble and the daughter of a lady of great house.
(I swear, once you start noticing you see Savoy everywhere. That’s the Duchess on the left, painted by the Master of the Chapel of Crea.)
The hypothesis is strongly supported by Paul Ballaguy, while Camille Monnet categorically rejects it.
Let’s get those two on the pod!
Helytimes 
.jpg){kind=link}
