With San Diego Comic-Con approaching, it’s time to revisit our 2024 question, What Is San Diego?
Perhaps the suffocating banality of official San Diego’s pious “America’s Finest City” mantra has led even those who know better to think that nothing is possible here other than the affectless pleasure that comes from drifting back and forth between the beach and the shops. Or maybe we are too preoccupied by daydreams of tech bros taking over the now-defunct Horton Plaza mall downtown, buying up luxury condos and ushering out the unpleasant hordes of the dispossessed, to think beyond our own marketing. Nonetheless, underneath San Diego’s superficial postcard sunshine, writers have found both grit and genuine transcendence.
Perhaps the city is best captured by the incongruous juxtaposition of the evanescent beauty of the gleaming coast with the muted gray façade of America’s multi-billion dollar killing machine. San Diego is also the sex oozing from the teeming Pacific Beach boardwalk in mid-summer and the lonely deaths of migrants in the unforgiving winter desert. It is a city of lurid scandal and right-wing vigilantism as well as a home for increasingly creative, diverse and progressive communities. San Diego is neither beyond alienation, nor devoid of ecstasy.
San Diego is the Anglo Mission fantasy that evolved from the days of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the place where Henry James wrote, “the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.” San Diego is where Henry Miller was converted to free love and radicalism by famous anarchist Emma Goldman on the way to a Tijuana brothel, and the place where right-wing vigilantes tortured and murdered Wobblies for speaking on soapboxes at the corner of 5th and E. America’s eighth largest city has produced a minor noir tradition and a sizable canon of gay sailor pulp novels.
In 1942, the narrator of Jim Thompson’s seminal noir account of San Diego, Now and On Earth observed that:
San Diego, prior to the establishment of the aircraft factories, was not inappropriately dubbed the “City of the Living Dead.” There were no industries, there was no construction; the town’s one asset was its climate. If you were young and wanted excitement and had a living to make, why, the town wouldn’t want you and you wouldn’t want it. If you were old and had a small income or pension, you couldn’t have found a more attractive place to live (or die) in.
I was looking for more answers to what’s the deal with San Diego – not the tourist portal, but the city that’s home to 1.4 million. What’s the San Diego that I, a tourist, never see? Luckily there’s a book just for me:
The historian Kevin Starr was asked by Neil Morgan, a Union-Tribune columnist, why San Diego got so little space in Starr’s celebrated Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915. Starr replied serenely, “From a historian’s point of view, nothing much happened in San Diego before the Second World War.”
Very funny thing for a historian to say. The pre-WW2 San Diego topic Starr does talk about in the book is the 1917 Panama- California Exhibition, the buildings and pavilions designed by Bertram Goodhue.
Many of these remain or were rebuilt in San Diego’s Balboa Park. (Goodhue also designed the LA Central Public Library and the Nebraska State Capital).
And what happened at the Second World War that made San Diego pop, historywise? Well, San Diego was converted into a giant military base and aircraft factory, and the city boomed in population.
Under tremendous pressure from Washington, San Diego had reluctantly yielded more than a quarter of its incorporated land area and 70 percent of the undeveloped county to defense plants, training camps, airfields, and bombing ranges. “The city’s landscape had been scraped, leveled and built to meet the demands of the army, the navy and the aircraft industry. Two thousand acres of new land had been added to airports and parade grounds by moving the waterfront a mile out…
But, whatever the price, there was simply not enough housing to meet the soaring levels of demand. In 1941 the population increased by a staggering 50 percent, a decade’s projected growth in a single year.
The result—as investigating congressional committees confirmed in 1941 and again in 1943—was the nation’s worst defense housing crisis.
“Aviation Okies,” as they were called, were often forced to sleep in their autos, abandoned rail cars, all-night movie theaters, or share beds in shifts. Mission Valley, whose Nisei truck farmers were now interned in Arizona, was a vast trailer camp for Consair workers and navy wives…
the county was experiencing a severe drought. In any event, the bewildered city administration of Mayor Benbough, who dropped dead of stress in 1942, was totally overwhelmed by the housing and infrastructural crises. With the city’s business leadership almost paralyzed, Fleet took matters into his own hands To gain Washington’s immediate attention, he telegraphed Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox that a deadly epidemic was imminent because of the sewage in the harbor. Then he spoke directly to FDR, warning the president that further expansion of B-24 production was being jeopardized by the city’s inability to overcome the various bottlenecks. “The situation is now impossible without federal aid,” Fleet said. The White House punctually ordered the navy and other agencies to undertake a crash program of housing and public works.
San Diego became the first of the so-called congested districts, crucial to war production, whose urban development was temporarily taken in hand by the federal government.
San Diego intersects with my own family history here: my grandmother took a train from New Jersey to Camp Pendleton, where she married my grandfather who was waiting to ship out.
This train connection from the east is a key to San Diego’s history. It was slow to arrive. San Diego has great geography for an ocean harbor and bad geography for an eastbound rail connection.
“Physically, as Davis notes (and the canny Kipling realized), San Diego—with its hem of forbidding eastern mountains—is a “cul-de-sac.” Its “intractable geography” frustrated generations of promoters who longed for the direct railroad connection to the east that might have made it a great entrepôt. Rather than becoming the hub of a railroad empire, however, San Diego was doomed to be a sideshow for remote capitalist deities like E. H. Harriman, master of “The Octopus” and Kipling’s model for Cheyne. Rapacious even by the standards of his fellow robber barons, Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, was the first to envision and almost to accomplish a global transportation network.
According to Davis, the development of North County in San Diego was “retarded” for a generation as a remote consequence of Harriman’s duel with the overmastered Henry Huntington.
By contrast:
Thanks to the San Andreas Fault, which shifts entire mountain ranges, the Los Angeles basin has two great natural gateways to the east—the San Gorgonio and Cajon passes—that were used by Indian raiders in the 183os and 184os before they became the routes of the Southern Pacific (1879) and Santa Fe (1885) railroads. The natural deficiencies of San Pedro Bay were compensated by these generous portals to the east.
In 1878, San Diego was predicted to become a rival of San Francisco’s trading ports. To prevent that, the manager of Central Pacific Railroad Charles Crocker, decided not to build an extension to San Diego, fearing that it would take too much trade from San Francisco.
LA and San Francisco got railway connections that San Diego didn’t.
The Civil War years brought literally biblical disaster to California south of the Tehachapis. The worst drought of the nineteenth century scorched the grasslands of Los Angeles and San Diego counties into ochre deserts and destroyed the livestock wealth of the region’s mixed Anglo-Californio pioneers. In San Francisco, by contrast, the fabulous fortunes of the city’s Nevada silver colony, the Comstock, as well as the profits from the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, had created a boom of Medician splendor. After the end of the Civil War, the excess capital of the North soon flowed south to take ownership of the ruined anchos. There was an almost complete turnover of elites as silver barons (like Baldwin and Irvine) and Central Pacific Railroad speculators (like Lankershim and Van Nuys) acquired an empire of former Spanish land grants at rock-bottom prices.
In this environment, Alonzo Horton saw promise.
Alznzo came from the east:
when he was 21, he began transporting grain by boat from the Lake Ontario port of Oswego, New York, to Canada… But having developed a cough, and with his family and friends fearing tuberculosis, he was advised to move to the West. At that time, the Western frontier was Wisconsin, and in 1836 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
He bought land warrants from veterans of the Mexican-American War, and set out to establish a town in the wilderness:
In 1848 Horton filed his first Warrant in Green Bay, the County seat for Brown County which the area was a part of at that time, for 160 acres of land which is now “Downtown Hortonville”. The price per acre at that time was only $.70. But before he could file he had to take an oath that he had seen and inspected the land and that no other settler resided on the land. To do so meant travelling by foot to inspect the land which was almost all dense woods with no trails. Then he had to go back to Green Bay by foot to file and return again. No easy task as the trip was around 40 miles and the area has many streams and rivers that he needed to cross along the way. After this he became a success at trading land, establishing businesses and cattle.
Hortonville, Wisconsin is still there, it looks pleasant. Alonzo moved on to California. He sold ice in gold field towns, and opened a furniture store in San Francisco. Then he heard about San Diego:
After a lecture about the ports of California, he later recalled his excitement, “I could not sleep at night for thinking about San Diego, and at 2 in the morning, I got up and looked on a map to see where San Diego was, and then went back to bed satisfied. In the morning, I said to my wife, I am going to sell my goods and go to San Diego and build a city.”
He was successful for awhile. He mapped out Horton’s Addition to the Old Town that was once the center of San Diego:
But the dream of the Texas Pacific Railroad reaching San Diego dissolved:
The bursting of the railroad bubble ruined Horton, who for a glorious few months had been selling his twenty-six-cents-an-acre lots for as much as $6,000 each. He was now forced to auction off his wharf and mortgage his hotel (the creditors finally foreclosed on it in 188l).
Simultaneously, New Town’s swollen population of speculators and land investors, who were waiting for the Texas and Pacific to make them instant millionaires, melted away to the far corners. San Diego altogether lost nearly 70 percent of its residents and for the remainder of the 187os was forced to earn a modest living from beekeeping, whaling, and vineyards, with an occasional mining boomlet in the mountains. Once again, in Hubert Bancroft’s acid phrase, the forlorn town “crawled along… like a starved dwarf, wandering among trees laden with fruit beyond his reach.”
There’s a statue of him in Horton Plaza:
Into this vacuum came John D. Spreckels, son of the sugar king:
Why did I come to San Diego? Why did any of you come? We came because we thought we saw an unusual opportunity here. We believed that everything pointed to this as the logical site for a great city and seaport. In short, we had faith in San Diego’s future. We gave of our time and our strength and our means…to help develop our city, and naturally, our own fortunes. … What is the matter with San Diego? Why is it not the metropolis and seaport that its geographical and other unique advantages entitle it to be? Why does San Diego always just miss the train, somehow?
Spreckels controlled the street cars which he used to sell real estate:
Mike Davis describes him:
John D., who served an apprenticeship managing his father’s Hawaiian empire, inherited this love of conquest as well as a business philosophy based more on the dictums of von Clausewitz than those of Adam Smith. – Indeed, in hindsight, his enemies would later recognize that John D. had conquered San Diego like a Prussian general, systematically overrunning one stronghold after another. His first step, not long after docking the Lurline, was to construct a modern coal wharf at the foot of Broadway. Controlling the city’s supply of imported energy, he was in a superior position to leisurely cherry-pick the best properties.
By 1900, according to one of his principal adversaries, Colonel Ed Fletcher, “Spreckels owned nearly everything of value in San Diego,” and paid fully 1o percent of the county’s property tax assessment. It was a degree of absentee control John D. did not move his residence to San Diego until after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) unequaled anywhere in California, and editors and publicists had begun to routinely refer to San Diego as a “one-man town” or ” principality.”‘
But even the Promethean energies of Spreckels in consolidating and rationalizing the city’s key infrastructures were of little avail against the depression that gripped San Diego for nearly a generation after 1888. (Even in 1910, its population would still be smaller than it was in 1887). In 1893 John D. had to provide coal on credit to the bankrupt Santa Fe Corporation to prevent it from discontinuing rail service to what Los Angeles papers gleefully referred to as the “ghost town to the south.” Indeed, the 18gos ruthlessly clarified the differential growth potentials of the two southland cities. Although Los Angeles was also knocked flat in 1888, it was back on its feet and growing vigorously by the mid-189os, largely due to its exploitation of hitherto unsuspected mineral wealth.
Why did LA prosper while San Diego struggled?
The most important discovery was that the Los Angeles basin and its inland valleys literally floated on millions of acre-feet of underground water, which, thanks to newfangled electric pumps powered by dams in the foothills, could be used to irrigate thousands of orchards and farms. Los Angeles, as a consequence, quickly became the richest agricultural county in the nation. Its other bonanza was oil, first discovered on the flanks of downtown in the 18gos, then in fantastically rich fields near Long Beach after World War I. Los Angeles, which had always relied on expensive coal imported from Australia and British Columbia, became the Saudi Arabia of the 1920s, with prodigious reserves of cheap fuel for its cars, suburbs, and new branch plants.
San Diego, by contrast, had no oil and precious little ground-water. Nor did it have a large constituency of wealthy citrus growers aggressively pushing for the comprehensive development of the water and power resources of its local mountains. Indeed, by the time that imperial Los Angeles made its famed grab for the water of the Owens Valley, thirsty little San Diego was still embroiled in petty water wars between the Spreckels’s Oray interests and the competing holders of water rights on the San Diego River. Unlike Los Angeles, which could afford to build vast infrastructures in anticipation of future growth, San Diego habitually failed to keep up with current demand.
(Indeed, as we shall see, this historical shortfall in water provision, as well as in sewage treatment, would assume crisis proportions in the 1940s.) Whereas turn-of-the-century Los Angeles seemed to enjoy a virtuous circle of cheaper resources, more abundant capital, and high growth, San Diego stagnated without the capital to develop the necessary resources, or the resources to attract the necessary capital.
San Diego had to build a wooden flume to bring in water from 35 miles away:
A positive buried in that misfortune?:
Unlike Los Angeles, which had recklessly alienated its public lands, San Diego still possessed forty thousand acres of developable “pueblo land,” fourteen hundred acres of which had been providentially set aside for a great municipal park. With proper planning and good advertising, San Diego might yet become a bigger version of Pasadena, the celebrated town in the Los Angeles foothills that was a winter home for dozens of Midwestern millionaires.
In this boom and bust era was the rise of the Stingeree:
Just when the name Stingaree was first used to describe San Diego’s tenderloin district is unknown. From early newspaper accounts, it is learned there were some buildings on lower Fifth known as Stingaree Row or Stingaree Block. By 1881, however, they had fallen in disrepair and were causing considerable comment. In November of that year the Union reported that Stingaree Row was receiving an application of paint, soap and water; but in 1882 a citizen wrote to the editor complaining that the Stingaree Block was an eyesore to the community and a nuisance of flagrant character. Finally, in 1884, the old Stingaree Block was moved to a lot “near the court house.” It is possible that the name of this disreputable old building was later used to describe the entire area. In any event, the flats along San Diego’s waterfront were infested with Stingarees, a venomous fish with a whiplike tail capable of inflicting severe injury. Obviously those who patronized the Stingaree were likely to “get stung.”
In this era came Wyatt Earp:
Among the gamblers who came to town during the Boom was Wyatt Earp, former lawman and refugee from the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Earp, while in San Diego, ran three gambling halls, one on Fourth across from the Plaza, and the others near Sixth and E, all in the “respectable” part of town. As a sideline, he acted as a referee for boxing matches. He was listed in the 1888 City Directory as a “Capitalist.”
The Stingaree, described in 1887 by a reporter from the San Diego Union:
Strolling down Fifth in the evening, the ear is rasped by notes from asthmatic pianos, discordant fiddles and drunken voices boisterously singing ribald songs. Noses are offended by garlic, swill and fried meat coming from some chophouse. The eye is pained to see men lying drunk on every corner . . . . it is fully as bad as the Barbary Coast in San Francisco.
No “decent” woman would be seen in that part of town, even in the daytime. The identifiable ladies of the night seldom went beyond the “deadline,” Market Street, except in carriages hired by the Madam to transport her girls, all gussied up and looking very proper, around town to pass out their calling cards, much to the disgust of housewives who peered curiously through lace curtains at their fallen sisters.
On the west side of Fifth. between Island and J, in the middle of the block, was Pete Cassidy’s place, a two story brick building. Behind Cassidy’s, and running through to Fourth behind the Turf, was another compound of cribs, or stables. In the parlance of the Redlight District. stables or bullpens described rows of cribs facing on a courtyard, rather than having entrance from a street. In this compound were at least fifty rooms. Each girl paid $14 a week, plus a percentage of the take, for the privilege of doing business, and often a fee to the procurer who usually was the bouncer or “protector” of the compound.
Over the door of each crib was the name of the occupant, such as Rosie or Dolly. Often a good luck charm, such as a horseshoe tied with a faded ribbon, hung over the door. Inside the rooms on the walls could be seen plaster of Paris angels and cherubs, and often a copy of the Lord’s Prayer. ..
Some of the better brick structures on Fifth housed the “all purpose” girls, those who were employed uptown during the day in dress shops. restaurants and offices, and then “moonlighted” on Saturday night.
The regular inmates of the Stingaree seldom left the district, and so messengers were used to deliver clothing and other necessities from the stores which were out of bounds for the girls. Messenger boys also were kept busy supplying food and liquor to the girls in the compounds. One of the residents, known as Dutch Annie, was an alcoholic, and every morning without fail a messenger was summoned to bring her a bottle.
In the Stingaree in 1912 the most exciting event in pre-World War 2 San Diego took place, the Free Speech fight. IWW workers, Wobblies, and other outsider political speakers would give soap box speeches and agitate:
The square block at the corner of Fifth and E Streets was home to more than just debauchery, as it also was the central location for a variety of “soapbox orators” including the Salvation Army, Socialists, Holy Rollers, and the Single Taxers.
Davis/Mayhew/Miller find an interview that gives some context for this movement:
Empowering bums was not popular with the vested interested in the city. The San Diego Common Council passed a ban on soapbox speaking. An ongoing fight over the right to speech broke out. It came to climax in May 1912 when the socialists Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman came to town to speak. It didn’t go great:
Reitman was abducted by vigilantes from his hotel room and tortured. He later recalled,
They tore my clothes off. They knocked me down, and when I lay naked on the ground, they kicked and beat me until I was almost insensible. With a lighted cigar they burned the letters I.W.W. on my buttocks; then they poured a can of tar over my head and, in the absence of feathers, rubbed sage-brush on my body. One of them attempted to push a cane into my rectum. Another twisted my testicles. They forced me to kiss the flag and sing The Star-Spangled Banner. When they tired of the fun, they gave me my underwear for fear we should meet any women. They also gave me back my vest, in order that I might carry my money, railroad ticket, and watch. The rest of my clothes they kept. I was ordered to make a speech, and then they commanded me to run the gauntlet. The Vigilantes lined up, and as I ran past them, each one gave me a blow or a kick. Then they let me go.
In the aftermath, the Stingaree was cleaned up. Prostitutes were rounded up and put on trains, many buildings were razed. The neighborhood kinda languished, with some porno shops for sailors and stuff, until the 1970s, when it was reinvented as The Gaslamp District. This is kind of ersatz historic district, though there are some legit old buildings.
In the WW1 period, the Navy put a significant footprint on San Diego:
After the creation of a full-fledged Pacific battle fleet in 1919, San Diego soon won destroyers (based at Thirty-Second Street in National City) and a submarine base (at Ballast Point), transferred from San Pedro. If the biggest plums, the new battleships and heavy cruisers, went to Pearl Harbor, San Francisco, and Bremerton, it was a blessing in disguise. San Diego’s compensation was an unusual concentration of the navy’s infant, cutting-edge technologies: long-distance radio transmission, carrier aviation, and, later, undersea and amphibious warfare. This was San Diego’s future high-tech economy in embryo.
Moreover, as the bay was gradually deepened, San Diego was able to grab some cruisers and, far more important, the first generation of aircraft carriers, led by the Langley in 1922 and the Saratoga in 1932.
(The sediment dredged for the carriers was used, in turn, to create Lindbergh Field in 1929) In part, this was San Diego’s just reward for its political support of Admiral William Moffett and other leading advocates of naval aviation.
This continued through WW2, as we’ve seen, and then after:
in the mid-1950s the holy grail sought by Wilson and other boosters was homeporting the navys new supercarriers. Without costly dredging of the harbor channel and the construction of new wharf facilities, however, San Diego could not accommodate the huge ships, the most deadly weapons platforms ever constructed. Long Beach, on the other hand, had ample port facilities and was eager to see San Diego demoted to a mere destroyer base. To make matters worse, the navy, which considered all of Kearny Mesa’s airspace as the exclusive preserve of its Miramar-based jets, was angry at a city plan to develop nearby Montgomery Field as a replacement for overcrowded and dangerously situated Lindbergh Field downtown. In the end it was left to the Union to panic voters with the apocalyptic headline, “Navy Says San Diego May Lose Carrier Fleet in Airport Dispute.” Duly intimi dated, the city council scrapped its airport scheme, and, with the help of Vice President Richard Nixon, Congress approved funding in 1958 for a new supercarrier wharf on North Island.’Two years later, San Diego repaid Nixon’s favor by providing him with the margin of votes to narrowly carry California in the 1960 presidential election.
The best book I’ve ever found about San Diego is Max Miller’s I Cover The Waterfront, from 1932, reviewed here. The waterfront in Miller’s time was on a different scale from the aircraft carrier and tourist shop waterfront of today. Says Wikipedia:
The San Diego tuna fleet reached a peak of 160 vessels, and in 1962 employed around forty thousand San Diegans
Incredible. It seems the tuna fleet declined due to foreign competition, Mexican restrictions, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Claude estimates the number of people working in commercial fishing in San Diego today to be in the low hundreds. Bumblebee is still headquartered in San Diego.
Don’t worry, there’s darkness below the surface there too.
Mike Davis is great on the various power brokers of postwar San Diego: pavement kings who controlled construction, developers and political dealmakers. Your tolerance for local corruption and spiderwebs of dealmaking may vary; any time new developments are happening there are alliances in politics, regulations boxing people out, the people with the connections to lift the delays and move the shovels. Consider Irvin Kahn:
In 1962, Kahn acquired the approximately 14,000 acre Rancho Peñasquitos with financing from Sixty Trust, the employee pension fund of airplane manufacturer Textron, Inc. (Rancho Peñasquitos was one of only a handful of large ranches still operating within the city limits.) Kahn planned to develop the land into a massive $1 billion housing development with a golf course, apartments, single-family tract homes, retirement housing, and shopping centers. Kahn’s broad vision set in motion a series of additional planning processes that created lengthy delays for the project, with the San Diego City Planning Commission voting to delay consideration of Kahn’s subdivision plan for several years until a master plan could be developed for the area. By 1965 the project was in danger of foreclosure and required additional financing. Kahn recruited Louis Lessor’s help in obtaining financing from the Teamsters Pension Fund through Lessor’s relationship with Morris Shenker, who was the gatekeeper for the Pension Fund’s investments. Shenker arrange a $10M mortgage from the Mercantile Trust Company National Association and an additional $3.5M in financing from the Teamsters Pension Fund. In exchange, the Teamsters Pension Fund received a first deed of trust on Rancho Peñasquitos, and a 20% share in the Rancho Peñasquitos development corporation.
Or, to put it more bluntly:
Davis is great on San Diego’s mayor turned California governor, Pete Wilson:
The structural reform, however, that most concerned Wilson was redressing the imbalance of power between the mayor and the city manager. San Diego’s weak mayor-strong council/city manager system did not fit with either Wilson’s personality or his ambitions.
The city charter devoted two full pages to the city manager’s powers but a mere paragraph to the mayor’s. Wilson frequently contrasted the enfeebled status of the mayor with the line authority exercised by county supervisors or, even more tellingly, the sweeping powers of Port Director Don Nay, who was the landlord of Lindbergh Field and all of San Diego’s tideland industries.
When a frontal assault—an unsuccessful 1973 charter reform ini-tiative— failed to provide Wilson with enhanced power, he resorted to stealth He succeeded in forcing the council to accept a new committee system whose proceedings were controlled by a rules committee of which the mayor was chair. No agenda item, as a result, could come before the council without Wilson’s approval. … Finally, he created a fundraising network that allowed him to dominate San Diego’s system (established in 193L) of citywide council runoffs. Council candidates were pared to two finalists by district primaries, but success in the runoff depended upon one’s resources to mount citywide television ad campaigns. Wilson controlled the crucial purse strings.
Source – this San Diego Reader piece by Thomas Larson on Wilson, which mostly focuses on Pete as governor, and Prop 187, the anti-immigrant measure that won big at the ballot box, got tied up in the courts, and probably wiped out the Republican Party in California.
The first time I ever visited San Diego I arrived by plane, and I was struck that the airport seemed to be right in the middle of the city. Indeed, the Guinness Book of World Records declares San Diego to have the “most centrally located urban airport.” On subsequent visits I try to arrive by train, to the Santa Fe depot. The rail line runs right by the beach in north San Diego County. There are plans to move it inland, and into a tunnel, which would be less fun. Someday it will fall into the ocean.
That’s a reasonable roundup on the history of San Diego, at least for the weekend tourist. Max Miller’s waterfront and the former Stingaree will host 100,000 Comic-Con visitors this weekend. Let’s give the last word to Doug Porter:
San Diego is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States. It also has one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor in California, a growing unhoused population, and juxtaposes a carefree postcard reality with a massive military industrial complex and a heavily fortified international border. San Diego County goes from the desert to the sea, contains mountains, wild spaces, and the sprawling suburbs which threaten them. In many ways, it is a region on the cutting edge of the Pacific Rim.
Our Common Side Effects panel will be at San Diego Comic Con this Friday, July 24, 12 p.m. in the Indigo Ballroom.
Common Side Effects Season 2 in Production, Indigo Ballroom. Adult Swim’s award-winning series Common Side Effects goes behind the scenes as co-creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely give an in-depth look at season 2, currently in production. This panel explores how the new season is being built, from evolving storylines and character arcs to animation, tone, and the creative challenges of expanding the world after season 1. The conversation includes candid discussion, work-in-progress insights, and a rare glimpse into how Common Side Effects enters its next chapter.
After the bad harvests of 1845 and 1846, the resulting inflation and hunger crisis reached its peak in 1847. Spreckels emigrated to the United States in 1848 at the age of 19 to start a new life, with only one German thaler in his pocket, which upon arrival in the US, he exchanged for 75 cents. (Equivalent to about $30 in 2023 dollars.) Spreckels settled in Charleston, South Carolina, working as a grocery clerk, taking over the grocery store after a year and a half by buying it on credit from the retiring shop owner.
Claus’s brother Bernard had moved to San Francisco, and told Claus things were booming there. In 1855 Claus moved there. He opened a grocery store, and then a brewery. From Wikipedia:
Brewing proved a sometimes difficult line of work. Beermaking required constant monitoring for temperature, something that might be ignored when a shift change happened, requiring Spreckels to come in late at night and monitor the process himself. He later stated that he often slept no more than four hours per day for months on end.
A new idea:
Spreckels saloon was located in the same area as George Gordon’s San Francisco and Pacific Sugar Refinery and frequented by some of its workmen. Spreckels had overheard a conversation between these workmen discussing the wastefulness of the sugar refining process at their factory, which allowed large amounts of sugar liquor to overflow and run into the sewers. Spreckels sensed that if the refinery could still turn a profit while wasting so much of its product, then the profit potential in sugar must be enormous. An additional factor was the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, which cut off the North from Southern sugar supplies, causing demand to outstrip supply.
This went great, but it wasn’t easy:
In 1869, overwork and stress had led to severe burnout and a mental breakdown, characterized by memory loss and other physical and mental symptoms. His doctors advised him to withdraw from all business activity. Spreckels left management of the California Sugar Refinery in the hands of his partners and spent the next 18 months over 1869 and 1870 traveling with his family in Europe. This trip included a course of hydrotherapy at the spa town of Karlsbad, Bohemia. He returned to San Francisco in early 1871 with his health and vigor fully restored.
He had sugar plantations in Hawaii, and sugar beet operations in Santa Cruz County. In Maui he built the company town of Spreckelsville. But he found himself on the wrong side of Hawaiian politics after the overthrow of the Kingdom, and left.
Allegations by the Chronicle and other critics included the claim that he practiced slavery on his Hawaiian plantations, that he acted as a pimp for King Kalākaua, and that he had defrauded stockholders in his company
Back in California Spreckels developed more sugar beet operations, and established another Spreckelsville:
(source). Sometime I’d like to visit. from a 2012 Monterey Now article:
Claus Spreckels founded the town in 1899, when the sugar plant became the world’s biggest, binging on 13 million gallons of water from local wells and processing 3,000 tons of beets a day.
The company may have left in the ’80s, but its imprint never will. Sugar beets still pop up “randomly” in the yard, according to resident and local celebrity chef Todd Fisher.
“People who live there will forever associate with the sugar plant,” he says. “We’ve all got some form of memento.”
The impact appears permanent on the wider Salinas Valley as well. Claus Spreckels is credited for the Salad Bowl’s first raised row crops and for pioneering its underground irrigation.
“He put Salinas on the map agriculturally,” says Tanimura & Antle cofounder and CEO Rick Antle. “It was basically wheat crops for cattle feed before him.”
“The Spreckels Sugar Company built a vast network of wells, pumps, ditches and canals, all to bring water to the beet fields,” authors Gary Breschini, Mona Gudgel and Trudy Haversat write in Images of America: Spreckels. “This irrigation project transformed the dry ranches into fertile farmland. In subsequent years, the irrigation made the switch to row crops possible. In many ways, it was Claus Spreckels who turned the Salinas Valley green.”
He developed a railroad into the Central Valley that competed with the Southern Pacific.
By the early 1960s a series of mergers and acquisitions swallowed up Spreckels Sugar. Some remnants became part of Amstar and others were shut down.
Some of Spreckels children were Adolph, who shot San Francisco Chronicle publisher Michael DeYoung, failed to kill him, and was acquitted. Aldoph also bred the first California horse to win the Kentucky Derby. He married Alma de Bretteville:
Alma de Bretteville met her future husband thanks to a rumor that she modeled for the Dewey Monument by Robert Aitken, which can be found in Union Square. One version of the story holds that Aitken hired Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, who had modeled for Aitken previously, to model for the statue. However, a 1902 article detailing the monument’s construction states that Aitken’s model was Clara Petzold or Petzoldt, a popular artists’ model in San Francisco at that time. Regardless, this statue was selected from a number of entries and only barely made the cut, thanks to the crucial vote of the chair of the Citizens’ Committee, Adolph B. Spreckels. Although he was 24 years older than she was, he was smitten by Alma, and after a five-year courtship, they married on May 11, 1908.
Alma funded the Palace of the Legion of Honor, famed San Francisco landmark seen in the movie The Rock.
Adolph’s brother John D. was an important figure in San Diego. He built the “Impossible Railroad” that connected the city, through rough terrain, to the east, requiring miles of tunnels and bridges.
At various times he owned all of Coronado Island, the San Diego-Coronado Ferry System, the Union-Tribune Publishing Co., the San Diego Electric Railway, the San Diego & Arizona Railway, and Belmont Park in Mission Beach. He built several downtown buildings, including the Union Building in 1908, Spreckels Theatre in 1912, the Hotel San Diego, and the Golden West Hotel. He employed thousands of people and at one time he paid 10% of all the property taxes in San Diego County.
Adolph’s son, Adolph Jr, was the father of the surfer Bunker Spreckels:
When Kathleen’s marriage collapsed to Adolph Jr, she fell into the arms of one Clark Gable, who took Bunker on as his own, schooling him in the arts of hunting and Hollywood artifice (In one of Bunker’s final interviews, with writer CR Stecyk III, he said of Gable: “I’ll say one thing – he was the same way at home that he was on the screen. He didn’t change very much. He was from that no-crap school of acting and that’s the way he lived, too. He was never one to talk about himself… He taught me how to shoot. He taught me how to use different weapons – knives and bullwhips, that type of thing. He was good with a whip. He was good with a lasso, good in the cowboy arts. Good with horses. He was good with animals. He was into hunting and fishing.”) Gable was, by many accounts, a wonderful stepfather to Bunker, but when he died suddenly in 1960, he left in his wake a boy with a wild streak who had never lived by the de facto rules of society, and an heir to a ridiculously large inheritance. In the years after Gable died, Bunker is said to have used the actor’s Oscar trophy as a doorstop. What could possibly go wrong? Between the ages of 15 and 20, Bunker made ends meet by selling bags of weed here and there while living on Gable’s ranch. His girlfriend at the time was Miss Teen California and they would kill time cruising around in her trophy car. Despite embarking on a promising career as a stockbroker, Bunker returned to his family’s de facto homeland of Hawaii when was 18 (he wouldn’t inherit his fortune until 21) and threw himself into surfing culture (he’d originally envisioned himself flying missions into Vietnam). As a young boy, he had already been taken on by the island’s nobility. Because of his family’s support of the king, David Kalākaua, many of the old kahunas believed Bunker to be a reincarnated Hawaiian prince and taught him from an early age the ways of Pacific island life. Hunting, arching, fishing, and of course surfing, his true passion.
Let’s get into your background. Has your family always been a powerful family?
Yes.
Do you know much about your ancestors?
Quite a bit actually, about some of them, just maybe the key people in the family. I’ve read books on them. We come from a Viking line of Tetons. My great grandfather Claus Speckels- only then it was Von Spreckelsen, but in America we dropped it to Spreckels – sailed over from Germany in 1846.
He was in the grocery business?
He was in the grocery business in New York and he made his money and he came West. He went up to San Francisco and got into the beet sugar business as well as public utilities. I think he had his finger in parts of the banking business, too. He made a lot of money in those businesses. Then he came to Hawaii in the late 1800s.
Before going to Hawaii, I believe he was involved in running the government of San Francisco some-how. There was a little corruption with him and some other guy. That seemed to be the rule. There was always some sort of corruption going down around him. As I look in my book at my notes here / see the word “corruption.” Corruption. Opium bribes. Gifts to the king.
Who’s that in the picture?
Kalakaua. And then the Oceanic Steamship Company, which is now the Matson Line. The SS “Lurline” is named after a Spreckel. She’s named after Lurline Spreckels.
But your family has been influential in the development of modern Hawaii?
Not modern Hawaii, no.
Well, if it wasn’t for your family we probably wouldn’t know Hawaii more or less as it is today: territorial, statehood, and all that.
They were here when it was a monarchy. After the queen was jailed it became whatever it became, the annexation business. Our family by that time had pretty much pulled out of here.
After my great-grandfather Claus, there was another Spreckels that ran a bit of a game here, but nothing like Claus ran. Plus, there was no more monarchy because when Claus was here he was the king’s best friend.
What was their life like?
I hear it was pretty decadent. The legend is that Claus won the kingdom playing cards, which isn’t true. It was just that Kalakaua had a lot of missionaries on his back and a lot of people breathing down his neck because he liked to party and drink gin and what not, and have his women and his opium and whatever he liked. They call him the “merry monarch” because he liked to party.
He was overspending and he owed money to so many different people. Whenever something was going to happen he’d have to ask people if he could do it, and here is the king having to ask all these people if he could do something. When Claus came to Hawaii he walked right to the front door, had a drink with the king, and said, “How much money do you need to bail yourself out of this and pay everybody off?” The king told him and he paid everybody off. Kalakaua fired his whole cabinet at 2 in the morning one night and they put in the people that Claus and Kalakaua wanted in the cabinet.
Plus the king gave Claus Spreckelsville, land for his sugar plantations.
Claus brought his engineers over from Germany and they redesigned the sugar industry, the refining of the sugar and all that, they redesigned that. They dug the Spreckels ditch for irrigation purposes. They just revolutionized the whole sugar industry to the point that they kind of had a monopoly on the sugar business because they had the most advanced techniques and they could produce the most sugar in the fastest, most effective way. That was Claus’s genius. He knew who to call up and who to bring on and have this design or that design.
How did the missionaries react to them?
They felt that Claus came over here with his money and his power and offered his friendship to the king. Claus is responsible for the king traveling, too, getting him on a boat and going around the world. He really wanted to make Hawaii a power, the king did. They’d go in and they’d present themselves to European royalty and all that kind of stuff and tell them to come to Hawaii, “We’ll take care of you,” and all that kind of stuff. The missionaries came over here with their Bibles and their talk. I think they totally ruined Hawaiian culture with all that. The Hawaiians had their own gods. I feel that some of the missionaries who came were hypocritical. Some of them really hadn’t done their homework.
You mean with what the people were like?
Yeah, they just came over here and started waving Bibles and told everybody to put their clothes on. They taught them to read. They imposed something on the Hawaiian people. They imposed their way of life and their trip.
How did your great grandfather differ?
He was a heathen. He was a realist. He came over and he didn’t use Christianity to get what he wanted.
He used the things he had made with his hands, his power, and the things he had at his disposal.
Did your great grandfather speak Hawaiian?
Not fluently, no.
What kinds of activities was he into?
He drank. He could drink Kalakaua under the table. They could both drink. I just heard that. They could both drink all night and the next day, they would be up working.
Claus went around, he oversaw the fields. He’d check on his bosses and his workers and make sure things were getting done right.
Let’s change gears a bit. What do you feel you’ve gained from your father, Adolph?
I learned how to find out as much about people as fast as I possibly can. I learned that from my father. When you go out with my father you find everything out about the coffee-shop waitress and everything about her whole life in about two minutes. That was one of his better qualities.
How did he do it?
He’d just strike up a conversation with her. He’d probably tell her a joke. He was quite a lady’s man, quite charming if he wasn’t too intoxicated. He would just break the ice with a joke or something like that, or “How’s the family?” and before you knew it he’d get the whole story from her.
What’d you learn from your mother?
I probably couldn’t sum that up in one sentence. I probably learned how to listen to other people rather than shooting my mouth off and letting my feelings and my emotions be known. She would say, “Be as wise as a serpent, as sound as a dove.” That’s just one little trick | picked up from her.
What about your stepfather, Clark Gable?
I learned a lot about grooming. I heard from him what a fuck-tit the acting business is. I learned a lot about words, how to use words. He taught me how to use the dictionary.
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”
On 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.
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.
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 AJourney 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:
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.
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.”
(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:
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:
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. Wikipedia
Why 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. Wikipedia
The 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 Podcasts
So: 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.
“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:
“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.
Albrecht 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.
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?!
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).
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.
He 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?’”
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.
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, 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.
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
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?
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?
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.
Oh, 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.”
Helytimes 
_crop.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
