Most people in North America have become aware of the on-going protest in Turkey, fewer know about the one in Brazil. These two events have some things in common but are being handled in different ways and their respective outcomes may prove important in determining how this kind of protest is handled in the future.

Ankara, June 5 [Reuters]

In Brazil, the government announced a sudden 6% increase in bus fares. People gathered to protest and police moved in to break up the protest with overwhelming force. Tear gas and rubber bullets were freely used, violent force all out of proportion to the threat presented by the crowd, composed of ordinary tax-paying folks who just wanted a say in what was going on.

Sao Paulo, June 14 [via V for Vinegar ]

Turkey has responded, so far, by increasing the level of force employed against the protestors. Observers wonder why President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is so adamant about cutting down these trees. Perhaps the answer is that this level of force has long been part of Turkish law and order, only now it is nice people being clubbed.

This woman being tear-gassed in Ankara’s Gezi Park upset nice people around the world. [Reuters via Huffington Post]

It is clear that the state, in both instances, has the resources and the will to employ a very high level of violence, if necessary. The difference is that Brazil has determined that, this time, it isn’t necessary.  And there is a difference in the leadership: Turkey’s Erdogan has indicated that he will never back down, no matter how silly he looks. When President Roussef was booed at the Confederations Cup soccer match, she was visibly shaken – this was not how she saw her presidency proceeding. Perhaps her background as an anti-government protestor back in Brazil’s bad old days, pre-Lula, has something to do with her response. Or perhaps she is just worried about a possible boycott of the World Cup to be hosted by Brazil next year. Erdogan once served time in prison for anti-government speech but is now associated with military elements of the Turkish establishment. He is a guy used to being obeyed. Or maybe he’s just having a bad moment and will change his mind tomorrow.

Roussef being booed at the Confederations Cup. [YouTube, link in body of post]

Now what happens next? If Brazil protests continue, and they may, will that validate Erdogan’s hard-line stand? If Turkey slides into chaos, after years of peace and prosperity, will that cause other leaders to think twice about subscribing to such violence? There have been an awful lot of citizen protests the last few years — the Occupy events, the California university confrontations, Quebec’s printemps érable, Idle No More, and the establishment favorite: the Arab Spring. There seems a lot of pressure building up and, unless governments figure out how to get a handle on the problem, they might wind up with something serious on their hands.

For a thousand years, the Micronesian island of Pohnpei was ruled by a clan of aristocrats called the Saudeleur. They constructed artificial islands on top of existing coral reefs at Nan Madol and raised buildings and temples on these new platforms. There they ruled, about a thousand or so people out of a total Pohnpei population of 25000. Then, about 500 years ago, the Saudeleur were overthrown by a foreign interloper who established a new system, a sort of confederation of five different clans. Nan Madol was left to erosion and the encroaching jungle.

Outside a retaining wall at Nan Madol [S.W.Batzer, flickr.com]

Map of the Nan Madol complex. [Wikimedia Commons]

Basalt column walls, Nan Mador. [S.W.Batzer, flickr.com]

Mortuary site where royal corpses were laid out. [Christopher Pala, Smithsonian Magazine ]

Archaeological diagram showing how one island was constructed: basalt columns outlined in red, structures erected on the island in blue, finds of pottery in light green. [W.S.Ayres, U. of Oregon

Ruins of Nan Madol, Google Earth

Nan Madol gets a few hundred tourists a year. They walk along the basalt retaining walls and look down into the canals that still have water at the colorful tropical fish. The islands are mostly overgrown with mangrove trees and the site as a whole is being claimed by jungle on one side and eroded by the sea on the other.

More:
An overall look at Nan Madol with links.
Info from William Ayres, U. of Oregon archeologist.
Nan Madol page from the International Archeological Research Institute, Inc.
Smithsonian article on a visit to Nan Madol.
Metropolitan Museum of Art page.
Archaeology Magazine, “Land of Flying Stones”

In July 1837, Captain C.H. Hart sailed to the tiny island of Sapwuafik in Micronesia. His aim was to get a store of sea turtle shell that he believed was there. The men of Sapwuafihk knew he was up to no good and armed themselves but Captain Hart and his troop killed all of them but one who escaped only to die a few months later. Hart’s followers — British, Australian, American, and natives of other islands — then occupied the island, taking the women and children as their own. A hundred and eighty-five years later, the people of Sapwuafik have tried to digest their historical past and their origin in an act of mass murder and rape. They see themselves as separate from other nearby island peoples and they believe themselves to be more civilized and more Christian than these others. This is how that came to be.

The atoll that includes Sapwuahfik which is on the far left. [GoogleEarth]

Micronesia in the 1830s was a wild and wooly place. Although Europeans had been visiting the area for 200 years, there was, as yet, little attempt to bring the islands under any kind of order — that began to happen because of Europeans wanting to keep other Europeans out of their own particular honeypots.

The island of Sapwuahfik. [GoogleEarth]

In early 1836, Captain Hart brought his Australian registered ship, the Lambton to Pohnpei, then sailed on to Sapwuafik — which, for some reason or other, Hart called Ngatik. One of Hart’s men reported that he had seen a vast store of tortoise shell — very much a trade item of value, since it could be made into combs or mirror backs or other such fancy boudoir paraphernalia. Hart determined to take the shell but the party of men he sent to do the deed was turned back by the armed natives of Sapwuafik. So Hart sailed back northeast about a hundred and forty kilometers to Pohnpei.

Meanwhile, A British whaleship, the Falcon, which had been stuck on Pohnpei by contrary winds, sailed away and ran onto a reef. The Pohnpei tried to raid the ship and there was some fighting. The Falcon‘s captain, mate, and four of the crew were killed. Five days later, Captain Hart arrived on the scene. He assembled a force that included a number of natives and attacked the chief who he thought was responsible for the killings. That chief was brought on board the Lambton and hanged. By this time there were two other British ships — both operating out of Hawaii — in Pohnpei. They participated in the punitive expedition and — for a price — sailed some of the Falcon survivors to Guam.

Hart took some of the force that he had assembled in Pohnpei — including islanders and members of other ships’ crews — and returned to Sapwuafik to get the tortoise shell.

Once again, the Sapwuafik islanders armed themselves and prepared to meet the invaders. Hart spent the night on another island in the atoll that includes Sapwuafik and, the next morning, attacked in force. He had perhaps fifty European seamen and two hundred or so Pohnpei islanders who rode in canoes towed by the Falcon. These were men who had already participated in the Pohnpei hostilities.

Hart’s army overwhelmed the defenders of Sapwuafik who retreated before him. The next day, Hart managed to run down and kill all those who had escaped the initial attack. Some new widows then killed their children and hanged themselves to escape the invaders. Fifty or more men were dead, maybe forty more islanders died as a result of the fighting. This out of a total population of two or three hundred people.

Antique boxes made of tortoiseshell. This was the item that Hart came to steal.

The stock of turtle shell was nowhere near as valuable as Hart had been told, nevertheless he decided to keep a force on the island and run it as his own personal property. He left in charge an Irishman named Paddy Gorman who had been part of the Falcon fight. Gorman was eventually joined by his three native wives and a number of Pohnpei natives who wanted to be part of the settlement. For a few years Hart’s project continued, then a British official stepped ashore and announced that there was going to be a new administration. He located three boys who were descended from Sapwuafik’s ruling families and made them the new rulers of the island. British Navy vessels might call in at any time to see how things were going. So, in less than four years, Sapwuafik progressed from a small native polity to a pirate possession to colonial guardianship. (Note: the Brits did not make Sapwuahfik a colony as such — the Spanish were the rulers of these waters for a time — the English agent restored local order and dampened the ambitions of people like Hart who wanted to own a colony or a country of their own.)

19th Century Micronesia:

The small islands of Micronesia were far enough apart so that invasion from another island was not an everyday occurrence — yet it did happen. In the 16th Century, Pohnpei was invaded by a force from the island of Kosrae. These invaders overthrew the Saudeleurs, who had ruled Pohnpei for a thousand years — after conquering the place themselves.

Micronesian culture was everywhere distinct in terms of local peculiarities but was everywhere homogenous in certain features. The islands were ruled by the headmen of powerful clans. The clans were matrilineal (though it is not clear to me that this improved the lot of women one iota). A place might have its own deities but no one god was thought to rule over all and societies might honor, if not worship, the reigning deity from other communities. Most places practiced various kinds of magic or sorcery and these practices might be borrowed or passed down from memories of a time before the current rulers had taken over. In other words, the usual tolerance practiced by pagan groups toward other pagan forms of worship was general. The clans, the chiefdoms, religious practices, plus what Europeans call “custom and usage” — i.e., common law — all mixed together in a very complex jumble of form and possibility that is impossible to render as a flow chart or diagram of power and authority.

There is one more aspect of Micronesian culture to consider: a person might become a member of the tribe through birth and ancestry, or by adoption. This is not uncommon among non-Europeans before the 20th Century. Europeans, on the other hand, during this same period were developing a sense of race based on “blood”, which was their term for genetics before that concept had been developed scientifically.

At any rate, when the British agent restored native Sapwuahfik rule, he may have violated certain principles of Micronesian organization — though it is hard to see what else he could have done since the basic structure of Sapwuahfik society had been destroyed.

Sapwuahfik to the present:

After 1839 there is not much to be heard from Sapwuahfik until 1889 when a Pohnpie Christian, John Francis, took on the work of missionary to Sapwuahfik. Christian missionaries were active in the area from the early 19th Century and Sapwuahfik had indicated its willingness to hear the Word, but there were other, larger places to convert first. In most places the missionaries had to break down local society before they could convert and civilize the natives. Conversion and civilization were both part of the missionary vocabulary and one might be confused for the other by people trying to hear the message. Civilization — proper clothes and decorum — often preceded conversion; the word “enlightenment” referred to this civilizing process.

Sapwuahfik was new ground. Whatever had occurred in the half-century between the British restoration of local order and the advent of missionaries, the society itself was not repaired from the horrific Hart invasion. The islanders quickly latched on to the new religion and worked their system around it.

The Spanish were thrown out of Micronesia and most of the Pacific in 1898; the Germans ran the place until 1914 when it was turned over to World War I ally, Japan. In 1943-44, the United States drove out the Japanese. In 1986, Micronesia became independent. None of these events affected Sapwuahfik particularly.

Older people in Sapwuahfik have their opinions of the Japanese, as Lin Poyer has mentioned, but their island was never occupied as Pohnpei was. The Americans considered Pohnpei/Ponape not worth an invasion, but bombed it for a year or so. Japanese tanks are still to be found there. Meanwhile, the Americans dropped food and other good things on Sapwuahfik and the people there, like many others in the Pacific, consider the U.S. a special friend.

Today, Sapwuahfik considers itself to be more democratic than other islands, specifically Pohnpei. The island is moving toward general elections and local democracy, the inhabitants say — which may be a good thing, depending on how you feel about the loss of rule by clan headmen and possibly, the diminishment of matrilineal society.

But the critical cultural import for Sapwuahfik is Christianity. The Sapwuahfik people consider themselves more civilized and enlightened (closer to American values) and more Christian than other island communities around them. From this they have put together a vision of what a Sapwuahfik citizen is:

First, a person of Sapwuahfik is not necessarilly one who was born there. Certainly, that person’s belonging cannot be determined by genetics or race or even ethnicity in the way that these terms are understood in other places. The founding people of Sapwuahfik are native — women and children that survived the massacre, and from other islands such as Pohnpei but also the Gilbert and Mortlock Islands; and they are European or American (including black Americans) or Australian. In other words, ethno-genetic hash. So adoptees or invaders or the children of others may be Sapwuahfik. I say “may be” because any individual may suddenly find himself classed as “other” if there is some reason for society to name him/her so. This is back to the community using custom to defeat law. I like that guy = he is one of us.

Then there is Christianity. Sapwuahfik, now Christian, has decided that, before Hart, the island existed in a pagan state of sin. Hart was a bad guy, sure, but he served as God’s tool to remove paganism from these people and now they are better for it. “That’s the reason foreigners came and killed, for God permitted them to cause such [behavior] to be punished.” Lin Poyer, primary scholar for this place, has said that the people of Sapwuahfik are both God’s accursed and God’s chosen. But the accursed period, when Hart’s crew was on its murderous rampage, is over; now they are God’s chosen, the most enlightened of islanders who will show other Micronesians the way. One islander said that once he hated whites for the 1837 massacre but now he thinks of the Japanese on Pohnpei and the bombing there, which did not touch Sapwuahfik, and he thinks, “Maybe it comes out even.”

According to the story Sapwuahfik now tells itself, the last chief of Sapwuahfik, Sirinpahn, was a man who loosed all the sexual constraints of society. He proposed intercourse between members of different, or the same, clans and is spoken of as a man who promulgated general sexual license. That is the “behavior to be punished” that is referred to above. After their cleansing massacre, the people of Sapwuahfik believe themselves to be “more Christian” than other islanders: they are a chosen people. According to them, once Sapwuahfik was home to the most potent sorcerors anywhere, but now everyone has rejected magic. Anyway, if sorcery is used to kill a Christian, that person is guaranteed a place in Paradise.

Group from Sapwuahfik performing at Founders Day celebration for the College of Micronesia. [YouTube

So that is where we are: Sapwuahfik has decided that the murderous rampage that began its modern history was an Act of God; it does not differentiate between the descendants of that time as to race; but being Sapwuahfik may mean following the unwritten rules of community and custom; meanwhile, this chosen people is more enlightened and better able to move forward than others in their region, they think. No one should look on this as some silliness promulgated by savage people. Many of your ancestors — I don’t care who they were or where you come from — were born into a regime founded on murder. And you, now, think that you are a very enlightened person, and I say, yes. Yes, you are. But do you know how it was that you became enlightened?

Notes:

Sapwuahfik is now part of the Pohnpei polity in Micronesia. You may find more info on the place if you call it Ngatik, like Hart did. The Wikipedia entry, for instance, is under Ngatik Massacre.

Lin Poyer is the main source for this post. If you have Jstor access you can read her article “History, Identity, and Christian Evangelism: The Sapwuahfik Massacre”. If not, there is her book The Ngatik Massacre which is out of print but can be found at your friendly used book store.

Poyer has given a great deal of attention to the process that people use to digest an event like the Ngatik/Sapwuahfik Massacre and how the identity of Sapwuahfik people is constructed. See: “Being Sapwuahfik: Cultural and Ethnic Identity in A Micronesian Society”.

Poyer was my main source but I also got a few tidbits from Foreign Ships in Micronesia

A decent map showing the islands in question.

Like other places in the Pacific, Seventh Day Adventists have been very successful in the area. There are pages on the Net from SDA missionaries that give some pictures of this place. Here’s one. Here’s another.

Recently, a Brazilian reporter wondered where the Guy Fawkes masks worn by protestors came from. He learned that, locally, masks were being manufactured by Condal, a company that specializes in Carnaval masks. Right now, Condal sells sometimes 800 Guy Fawkes masks in a day, which is nothing compared to their output of 200,000 Carnaval masks a day during the season. (These numbers are from the article .) Condal, and the reporter, were somewhat bemused by the fact that individuals would come into the factory to buy several hundred masks at a time while stores and distributors might buy 60 or so per order. They understand that the mask is a phenomenon of the moment and Condal’s sales of the object may dissipate along with Brazil’s protest movement — or expand with it, as the case may be.

Guy Fawkes masks at the Condal factory, Rio. [photo: Gabriel de Paiva]

The series originally ran in Warrior Magazine, but when Warrior ceased publication in 1985, Moore and Lloyd signed a deal with DC Comics to run the series. That run led to a 2005 movie production, one of several that angered Moore and caused him to sever his connnections with the film industry. But the movie did popularize the mask and a US outfit called Rubie’s bought the license to produce V For Vendetta merchandise. Rubie’s sells perhaps 100,000 a year of the masks — $8.77 at your local Wal-Mart.

Anti-Scientology protest, London, 2008. [WikiMedia Commons]

Masks for sale in Taksim Square, Istanbul [Reuters]

As far I’m concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they’re just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we’re fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn’t a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.

The real Guy Fawkes was part of a group that tried to blow up Parliament in 1605. The intent was to foment a rebellion that would oust King James I and bring a Catholic sovereign to the throne. The plot was a fiasco: the gunpowder was wet and didn’t explode, Guy Fawkes was caught and, under torture, named the other members of the conspiracy. All were executed.

Panels from V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, Warrior Magazine #4, 1982

In the Alan Moore version, the man known as V actually succeeds in blowing up Parliament but he is not fighting for a Catholic monarchy nor any other kind of king. He wears Cavalier dress in opposition to the Roundhead puritan garb of the fascists who run England. Moore is mixing eras a bit, looking forward from James I to Cromwell’s puritan dictatorship of the 1650s. Oliver Cromwell, the English ayatollah, murderer of Irish Catholics and Scots Presbyterians, was who Moore wanted people to associate with English fascism.

There have been a number of articles pointing out that people buying Guy Fawkes masks are paying into a movie industry that is one of Anonymous’ enemies, but these articles miss the point. It is unlikely that Condal has actually paid Warner Brothers to license the mask. Probably there are as many knockoffs seen in protests as there are licensed objects. And, of course, you can print your own mask. Sooner or later, someone is going to distribute a template for 3-D printers and then Rubie’s will be redundant.

Protestors in Jakarta wearing printed masks. [Reuters]

Polish legislators protesting the passage of anti-piracy legislation, 2012. [via Bleeding Cool]

In 1935, Walt Disney was trying to work out a way to do better animated features. On a visit to Europe, he was enthralled by the work of the great children’s book illustrators of the day. He tried to hire Arthur Rackham — probably the best of those alive at the time — but Rackham had been diagnosed with the cancer that was to kill him in a few years and was unwilling to spend his last energies working for Disney.
Still, there many other excellent European illustrators that were available to Disney and some of them were already in the United States. Swiss-born Albert Hurter was hired to take charge of a new Disney department for concept development. Among the artists who worked under his direction were the Hungarian Ferdinand Horvath and, for a little while, the Dane Kay Nielsen. But few of these proved as important to the development of Disney’s animated films as Swedish-born Gustaf Tenggren.

Young Tenggren with added Disney ears.

Tenggren’s father was also an artist who left the family in Sweden while he travelled to the United States to work. Young Gustaf was encouraged by his grandfather, also a painter. He showed early talent and in 1917, at the age of twenty, he illustrated the Swedish children’s annual Bland tomtar och troll.

Tenggren cover for Bland tomtar och troll 1919 [via Nordic Thoughts]

Illustration for Sven the Wise and Svea the Kind 1932. Note the Rackham tree.

Bauer and Rackham were both obvious influences on Tenggren’s work. Rackham and Bauer each developed the coupling of ink-line with soft water-color washes around the same time. Tenggren picked up Bauer’s manner of portraying people and Rackham’s grasping trees. But he was more than an imitator, Tenggren had his own concepts and methods that he was still working out as a young free-lancer in the United States.

Title-page for Daulnoy’s Fairy Tales, 1923. [via Animation Resources]

Box art for Blue Moon stockings, circa 1928.

Albert Hurter’s concept artists worked up ideas that would serve as key illustrations for the animators. One of his first assignments was the Silly Symphony short “The Old Mill”. This short, like some other Silly Symphony cartoons were used by Disney to test out some of his new concepts and ideas. In this instance, the multiplane camera got a workout and Disnney’s European artists all had a hand in the artwork. Released in 1937, “The Old Mill” won an oscar and is often included in lists of greatest animated movies.

Tenggren study for “The Old Mill”

But all this was leadup to the movie that Disney knew would revolutionize the industry: Snow White.
Tenggren worked up character drawings of the dwarves, studies for their cottage, and other areas of the film. He used Rackham’s trees in the sequence where Snow White is in the forest.

Concept drawing for Snow White, 1937

The years spent developing and complating Snow White had exhausted everyone at the studio. Disney gave his employees a two-day holiday at Lake Norconian that he imagined would be a teetotal hotdog roast with campfire songs. Instead, according to Marc Eliot, the gang of young artists quickly turned the event into a drunken orgy. Disney was very angry, but the artists made a pact that if he fired one, they would all quit.

Pen rendering of the dwarves in their house, 1937

By all accounts Tenggren was quite a drinker and a womanizer, too. His first wife, who had emigrated with him from Sweden, left him when Tenggren took up with the woman who became his second wife. She is said to have been more accepting of his sexual peccadilloes.

Bambi study — too complex for animation. [via John Sporn]

Tenggren painting at Yosemite,1939.

For that project, Tenggren took long trips to Yosemite to draw and paint the trees — perhaps he was trying to exorcise the Rackham from his forest concepts. On one or more of these trips, Tenggren was accompanied by the teen-age niece of fellow Disney artist, Milt Stahl, who was none too pleased with the matter. Nor was Disney pleased with Tenggren’s complex forest scenes which did not lend themselves to animation. So Tenggren left Disney in 1939 under a cloud.

Pinocchio’s town. Some say that Tenggren based his buildings on an actual German town.

Tenggren worked on virtually every scene in Pinocchio, but when that movie was released, his name was left off the credits.

Heidi from 1923 and Heidi from 1944, both by Tenggren.

Tenggren now developed a new style that was adapted to the Little Golden Books series. He illustrated The Poky Little Puppy, The Scrawny Tawny Lion, The Saggy Baggy Elephant, and so on, ad nauseum. But, in all fairness to Tenggren, some people love those books and The Poky Little Puppy is the best-selling illustrated children’s book of all time, with more than fifteen million copies sold. According to the Disney Wiki, Tenggren shows”an increasing use of phallic shapes” in his work of this period. You be the judge.

That poky puppy. Phallic imagery?

Toward the end of his life, Gustaf Tenggren became moody and depressed. He was deeply disturbed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and his last paintings reflect a kind of environmental pessimism. (I cannot locate any of these of good quality.) A life-long smoker, he died of lung cancer in 1970.

Tenggren Saturday Evening Post cover from 1956.

Notes:
A great deal has been written about the Disney studio artists. In particular:
John Canemaker,Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney’s Inspirational SketchArtists
On Snow White see the official Disney release Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: An Art in Its Making
Lars Emanuelsson is working on a biography of Tenggren and has this website about him.
Animation Resources has several pages of scans of Tenggren work: see here and here.
The Illustrators page on Tenggren.
Filmic Light on Tenggren and Snow White

A lot of Tenggren advertising work may be seen at the American Art Archives.
Michael Sporn on “The Old Mill”

Yesterday, a Swedish judge dismissed murder charges against Thomas Quick aka Sture Bergwall. This is the eighth murder conviction that has been overturned against Quick/Bergwall, who has been incarcerated since 1994 when he confessed to a number of crimes. Now he is petitioning for release from the psychiatric facility where he has been held.

But even if Quick did not commit all or any of these murders, he is a pedophile, bank robber, and once stabbed a man and left him for dead.

Thomas Quick aka Sture Bergwall [YVONNE SELL/SVD/SCANPIX]

When Quick was fourteen, he discovered that he was gay. He was ashamed and afraid to tell his parents. His first victim was killed at this time, he claims. Quick killed him in a shed, leaving his face bloody and his clothes ripped. But witnesses say that Quick was at Communion with his sister when the crime took place four hundred kilometers away. Photographs bear out the witness statements. Next, Quick said he killed another boy in a distant town in 1967. Quick’s sister said that he was nowhere near the town where the murder occurred, also distant from their home. By the time Quick confessed, the statute of limitations had run out on the crimes and, anyway, he was a juvenile at the time of the alleged killings. The first victim’s name was Thomas and was combined with Ms. Bergwall’s maiden name of Quick to create the pseudonym by which he wanted to be known. It was in his teens that Quick began using drugs, mainly amphetamines.

Quick/Bergwall, 1993. [T-online]

Released from care, Quick was twenty-three when he picked up another man at a gay bar in Uppsala. There was an argument in the man’s apartment and Quick wound up stabbing him. Quick says that he had been sniffing trichloroethelyne which sometimes produces hallucinations. He hallucinated that the man was a monster and so, he had to defend himself. The victim, alive today, disputes this version. He says that they were talking and drinking, maybe fooling around a little when Quick suddenly attacked him. He remembers Quick calmly cleaning his fingerprints off the knife, then walking out to leave his victim — stabbed twelve times in the liver, guts, and lungs — to bleed to death. When he was arrested, Quick claimed innocence for a while, then switched stories and said that he had become enraged when a third man left the apartment. The victim says that there was no third man. Quick was sent back to Säter where he remained until 1977.

Once released, Quick went back using amphetamines. He was involved in some petty crimes — a fake hold-up, an arson attempt — then, in 1990, he and an eighteen-year-old companion, wearing Santa Claus masks, broke into the home of a bank manager. The pair was armed. Quick raged about the house, stabbing the walls, claiming that he had AIDS and would infect the bank manager’s wife and ten-year-old son unless the man cooperated. The manager and Quick’s companion then went to the bank to get money, leaving Quick with the terrified woman and child. Later that afternoon, Quick was apprehended and once again sent to Säter.

Quick/Bergwall at Säter.[guardian.co.uk]

Psychology professor Sven Christianson now took an interest in Quick and began lengthy interviews with him. Christianson had police connections and told them he had located a man who could clear many unsolved murders. The police were delighted. They took Quick to the areas where murders were supposed to have occurred and Quick re-enacted them. Christianson helped in this process. One officer, Jan Olsson, was involved in two later reconstructions and was dismayed by the procedures. Crime scenes were already set up before Quick got there, rather than having him tell the investigators where things happened. It seemed to Olsson that Quick was being coached, too. No one listened to Olsson and he quit the investigation. By the way, before these re-enactments, Quick was allowed doses of Xanax.

In 1993, police informed the parents of Johan Asplund, who had gone missing at the age of eleven in 1980, that a mental patient had confessed to killing their son. The parents, who had divorced when Johan was three, did not believe it. They thought they knew who had abducted their son and told the police: a man who Johan’s mother had broken up with was their suspect. The police were convinced otherwise. The Asplund parents became convinced that the police were feeding evidence to Quick and were careful what they told them. For instance, they didn’t mention a birthmark on Johan’s backside until pressured by the police. A few days later, the birthmark appeared in Quick’s testimony.

Quick piled on the confessions. The same psychologist interviewed him,the same police officers investigated, the same police sniffer dog was sent out to search for remains. No remains were found, although the sniffer dog did give positive responses at several locations. Then a single piece of charred bone that had been cut by an edged tool was identified by one forensic expert at a place where Quick said that he had burned a chopped-up body. Although he is homosexual, Quick claimed that he had raped one of two women he claimed to have murdered and semen was found in her body. Eventually the police began charging Quick with murders, eight altogether. Prosecutions proceeded and Quick was found guilty eight times between 1994 and 2001.

Quick with police at an allleged crime site, 1997. [viaNettavision]

Sten-Ove Bergwall and Pelle Svenson, lawyer who acted for the Asplund parents. Picture taken 2009 [Wikicommons]

Everyone knew that some of the thirty killings had never happened because the victims turned up alive. But Psychologists, police, judges, and Quick’s own lawyer were unwilling to give up on the eight prosecutions, two of them without bodies. Still, many people had questions. One author identified Quick as a serial hoaxer. The Asplunds sued the man who they believed had taken their son and won, although the decision was later overturned. The semen in the dead woman was found not to be Quick’s but he was convicted anyway. The charred bone turned out to be a piece of wood. The Chancellor of Justice reviewed the trials in 2006 and decided that the convictions would stand.

Then, in 2008, film-maker Hannes Råstam, looked at the police re-enactments and noticed that Quick seemed to be dazed or stoned. He began interviewing Quick and, after three months, Quick admitted that he had never killed anyone. Råstam made a television documentary that, on top of efforts made by many other people, caused re-examination of the murders. Quick’s new lawyer pressed to have the convictions overturned and, one by one, they have been.

Claes Borgström being questioned by reporters about his defense of Quick. [Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix]

So, probably, the man who now calls himself by his birth name, Sture Bergwall, will soon walk the streets. For a while he will be famous and important but, as this matter winds down, as eventually it will, fewer people will care about him. And my question is, what will Thomas Quick do then to re-assert his importance?

Notes:

Much of the above, including info about Sten-Ove Bergwall, is from this article by Chris Heath.

Some points were gotten from an article for The Observer by Elizabeth Day.

Sture Berwall/Thomas Quick has a blog; it’s in Swedish but translation devices abound. . Here is a 2012 post on his lawyer Claes Borgström.

Hannes Råstam’s book, Thomas Quick: The Making of a Serial Killer, was published posthumously last year.

At Carlton House in London, on April 9, 1787, A duel took place between two interesting characters of the era. The duel… Well, look for yourself:

Painting by Robineau, who was present, apparently, at the match. [Royal Collection, copyright owned by Queen Elizabeth II]

Portrait by Maher Brown of Saint-George derived from the official fencing academy portrait. This version, 1788. [Wikimedia Commons]

1787 portrait by Robineau who painted duel. [Wikimedia Commons 9French)]

Portrait of d’Eon circa 1775.

Soon after helping negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1763, d’Eon sensed a turning against him by the French court, possibly because he incurred the displeasure of Madame de Pompadour, possibly because he  was running up huge debts and begging the foreign ministry for cash. When he was ordered back to France at the end of 1763, d’Eon refused, claiming that the new French ambassador, Guerchy, had tried to poison him. Guerchy sued for libel. Although Guerchy was arraigned for murder, he was not convicted. D’Eon, on the other hand, was found guilty of libel. Now he launched a counter-attack against his enemies. For some time d’Eon had quietly amassed a collection of secret documents about such projects as the possible invasion of England. In 1764 he published some of these documents in a book that became an international scandal and upset both the French and the English governments. But d’Eon did not publish the most important papers, such as the plans to invade England; these he kept back as a threat not to cross him further. In 1766, the French court capitulated and d’Eon was granted an allowance and returned to his work as a spy.
It became well-known that d’Eon and Lia were the same person and some individuals insulted whichever persona was presented before them. D’Eon challenged several of these men to duels and won them all. The sporting classes of London began now to speculate on d’Eon’s true sex and, in the 1770s, great betting pools were set up where one could gamble on the spy’s gender. Thousands of pounds were offered to anyone who could prove that d’Eon was either male or female. D’Eon claimed to be upset about all this activity but didn’t help matters by publishing another book, Les Loisirs du Chevalier d’Eon, in 1774. In this book d’Eon was rather ambiguous about his sex, thus fueling the gambling frenzy. He also wrote letters — stacks of them — to everyone in sight protesting that he was a man and offering to cross swords with those who said otherwise, but his denials of being female always left room for doubt. Some of the gambling concerns — insurance companies as they were called — became anxious and one sued for a settlement of a wager. The case came before the King’s Bench in 1776 where the presiding judge ruled that d’Eon was female. D’Eon himself did not testify since he had returned to France to repair his fortunes there.

English satiric engraving of d’Eon, 1770s.

After Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, the French began pressing d’Eon to return the documents he had stashed away. D’Eon responded with threats to publish them all and demanded that the king pay him an enormous sum of money. In 1775 Louis sent an agent, Pierre Beaumarchais, author of The Barber of Seville, first performed that year, to negotiate d’Eon’s return of the papers. Louis could not risk the publication of the papers. On the other hand, he had to punish d’Eon in some fashion. Beaumarchais believed, or said he believed, that d’Eon was indeed a woman and begged His Majesty to think of the poor, frail woman, so besieged by fate and cruel enemies: “When it is considered that this creature, so persecuted, is of a sex to which all is forgiven, the heart is moved with sweet compassion.”
In other words, you can forgive d’Eon because she is a woman. Your enemies cannot say that you lack the will to punish them if you are merely forgiving some female foibles. A novel solution to this dilemma was worked out: d’Eon would return the papers, the French government would pay off his debts and restore his pension, but on condition that d’Eon pass as a woman for the rest of his life.  Should he ever put on man’s clothing, d’Eon would be imprisoned and possibly executed. The Comte de Vergennes, Louis’ minister, wrote to Beaumarchais:

I require, absolutely, I say, in the name of the King, that the phantom Chevalier d’Eon shall entirely disappear, and that the public mind shall forever be set at rest by a distinct, precise, and unambiguous declaration, publicly made, of the true sex of Charles-Geneviève-Louis-August-André-Timotheé d’Eon de Beaumont before she returns to France — her resumption of female attire settling for ever the public mind with regard to her…

Certainly, if he ever dared reveal French secrets to the English, “consequences will be terrible to d’Eon” wrote Vergennes. So, at the age of forty-nine, d’Eon took on a permanent role as a woman, which now, according to the English courts and the French king, she was. In 1779, d’Eon published an autobiography but the book was ghost-written and rather untrustworthy. Still, it has served as the basis for much of the myth surrounding d’Eon.
The Chevalier Saint-George was at the top of his game when, in 1776, he tried for the position of head of the Royal Opera, now a perogative of Louis XVI. According to Gabriel Banat, three of the female performers wrote to the king that they could never take orders from Saint-George because: “their honor and their delicate conscience could never allow them to submit to the orders of a mulatto.” Perhaps Saint-George became a bit embittered toward the upper classes at this point. He continued composing and directing. By 1778 he had written symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and musical comedies. In 1779, he became a court favorite of Marie Antoinette, a situation that was, perhaps, displeasing to some. In that year he suffered his first assassination attempt. A group of eight or nine men attacked Saint-George in the street, one of them had a gun to his throat when help arrived. The gunman claimed that he was only defending himself against Saint-George’s sword. There were rumors that the entire affair had come about because Saint-George had cuckolded the pistoleer. Later, another man paid child support to that man’s wife.

1847  engraving for a book about dueling that featured an heroic Saint-George.

If the attacks on Saint-George and LeClair sound like something out of Les Liasons Dangereuses, it might be worth mentioning that Choderlos de Laclos was a friend of Saint-George and, in his novel, was describing a milieu he well-knew. The attempt to kill Saint-George may have arisen because of his reputation as a great lover. His biographer, Gabriel Banat, suggsts that Saint-George’s fame as a bedtime swordsman was the same kind of racist attribution that is well-known: blacks are bigger, better, and once you go there you don’t go back. At any rate, after this, Saint-George seems to have made an effort to play down his reputation as a lover — a sort of reticence not at all common in this era — though his friends made it quite clear that they thought Saint-George a great lady-killer.

d’Eon portrait made by the English painter, Thomas Stewart, but copying a French portrait by Mosnier made 17??. [Wikimedia Commons]

Engraving made from the Robineau painting by Victor Marie Picot in 1789. Picot has caricatured the audience. [Princeton University Library]

…James Boswell… talked with d’Eon at a party one evening in 1786. “I was shocked to think of her a kind of monster by metamorphosis. She appeared to me a man in woman’s clothes.” Horace Walpole “found her loud, noisy, and vulgar… The night was hot, she had no muff or gloves, and her hands and arms seem not to have participated of the change of sexes, but are fitter to carrying a chair than a fan.”
What is amazing about the reactions of Boswell and Walpole is that they did not follow their instincts and declare that d’Eon was actually a man dressed as a woman. Rather, despite what they perceived, they identified d’Eon as an Amazon, a thoroughly masculinized woman. They assumed female in what they could not see; they perceived male in what they could see. To them, d’Eon was anatomically female, but socially a man: this is what came across so appalingly to these conservative Englishmen.

If d’Eon’s difference was such that he could hide it with a change of clothes, Saint-George’s was inescapable and written on his skin. His biographers claim that he could not marry because no white Frenchwoman would risk the ignomin y of a mixed marriage, but the fact is many of them did. Is it possible that he was gay? Or did he, like d’Eon, choose a celibate path? At any rate, he and d’Eon were odd men out. D’Eon traded on his difference, Saint-George endured his. Slavery was illegal in Paris and its environs, so Saint-George had been free since his arrival there. Now he determined to do something of value to all colored peoples: he joined with the abolitionist movement in England.
In France, Saint-George formed the Society of Friends of Blacks. In England, where he often travelled in order to perform, he became friendly with the major abolitionists of the day. One night, in 1790, accompanied by co-abolitionist the Duc d’Orleans, Saint-George was walking through Greenwich Park to a house where he was to give a performance. A man wielding a gun attcked the pair. When Saint-George proved equal to the task of defending himself, four more gunmen emerged from the bushes. The great fencer used his walking stick and his violin to defend himself and his companion, driving off his assailants. It is thought that these were toughs hired by pro-slavery interests to attack the abolitionists.
Now the French Revolution had begun. Saint-George quickly declared himself a Republican and offered himself for military service. He was brought into the National Guard with the rank of captain. An organization promoting Black/White friendship had been formed by Julien Raimond, a planter and slave-owner of part-African ancestry. Raimond’s group wanted to promote the friendship between free blacks and whites so that, together, they might make slavery work better — which is to say, with lower possibilty of slave revolts. This was completely opposite to Saint-George’s abolitionist Society of Friends of Blacks. But now Saint-George joined Raimond in petitioning the National Assembly to raise a black regiment. In 1792, the Assembly had passed its Edict of Fraternity, which promised to aid any republican uprising that asked for assistance. The edict also allowed for “free legions” of non-nationals who would fight for the French Republic. The Assembly still held much of the racist attitude of the Ancien Regime, which had passed Black Codes that were more and more restrictive as the 18th Century progressed. A free legion of blacks could be excused, somehow, under the Edict of Fraternity, although the Assembly was still dithering over the abolition of slavery. So was formed the French Legion of Americans of the South, also known as the Black Legion, but more generally as the Légion de Saint-George.
Saint-George immediately set out to enlist a fellow student of Leböessière, Alexandre Dumas. Dumas was born a slave to a noble who had a sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue. The nobleman, through a stroke of fortune, came into great wealth from the family holdings and took his son with him back to France. Dumas was given a first rate education and lived the life of a wealthy playboy until his father began cutting back on his allowance. Then, he enlisted in the army. Although, in theory, he could have been commissioned as an officer, he joined up as a private. His father, now the Marquis de la Pailleterie, was horrified that his son might drag the family honor through the lower ranks, insisted that he use a name other than de la Pailleterie. So, the young man enlisted as Alexandre Dumas. Two weeks later, his father died but Dumas never attempted to become a marquis — a fact that probably served him well during the Revolution. He proved an excellent soldier and worked his way up through the ranks. Along with most of the French Army he declared as a republican and joined the National Guard after the storming of the Bastille. Dumas was at the forefront as the Revolutionary National Guard fought the armies of Europe. Already lauded as a military hero. Dumas was the man to lead Saint-George’s legion. In 1793 he was named Lieutenant-Colonel, under Colonel Saint-George, with two hundred cavalry and eight hundred infantry under his command.

Dumas in action against Austrian troops. Color engraving probably from 1800s. Note other members of the Saint-George Legion in the background.

The unit was stationed at Lille where it soon engaged in combat with Austrian forces, defeating them. Officially, the legion was part of the Army of the Centre of General Dumouriez. Dumouriez had politicked against the execution of Louis XVI, had quarreled with the Assembly over supplies for his troops, and otherwise made himself unpopular. When the Assembly sent a delegation to Dumouriez to examine his conduct, he arrested them and then tried to persuade his troops to march on Paris. Saint-George and his legion refused and revealed the attempted coup to the Assembly. Dumouriez fled to Belgium and Saint-George was, briefly, hailed as a hero.
There were complaints about the way Saint-George handled his command, including some from Dumas, who claimed that Saint-George was responsible for the chronic supply shortages. Saint-George was already under suspicion for his ties to the nobility. He dropped the “Chevalier” title and began signing his name as “George” but no one forgot that this man once played music with the despised Marie Antoinette. Ironically, the exposure of Dumouriez’ treachery had helped to create the political fury that soon became the Terror. Saint-George was arrested and incarcerated. He remained in prison for eighteen months, until the fall of Robespierre brought in a new political order and he was pardoned in late 1794, the same year that the French Assembly abolished slavery. Julien Raimond, ironically, was the person sent to Haiti to help that nation adapt to freedom.
Saint-George was not allowed to rejoin the army, so began trying to repair his musical career. But this was a difficult matter without arts-funding by the nobility and Saint-George struggled to make a go of it. In 1799, he suffered a bladder infection that soon proved fatal.
After the Carlton House duel, d’Eon fought a number of other exhibition matches — at least six staged by the Prince of Wales, now Prince-Regent. The French Revolution ended d’Eon’s pension and she spent some months in debtors’ prison. In 1792 d’Eon wrote the French Assembly, offering to raise a company of women, a légion of Amazons, to fight for the Revolution. This offer was declined. D’Eon had a small fencing school that gave various show matches around Britain. In 1796, at one of these duels, d’Eon’s opponent broke the tip of his sword and the fractured blade pierced d’Eon under the armpit. D’Eon was two years recovering from the wound and announced that there would be no more fencing exhibitions. For the last fifteen years of her life, d’Eon lived in the house of a Mary Cole where, in 1810 she died at the age of 81. A crew of doctors now demanded to examine d’Eon’s body. They pronounced d’Eon anatomically male in all respects. Mary Cole was shocked, shocked do you hear, and many women who had met d’Eon under circumstances not suitable for mixed company, were scandalized.
Dumas continued to rise as an officer and was a general when the Assembly called him to return to Paris in 1794, probably to stand trial for treason. Dumas delayed his departure until after the fall of Robespierre, when the matter was forgotten. Dumas served under Napoleon in Italy and was a member of the ill-fated Egyptian expedition. Returning from Egypt in early 1799, Dumas’ ship foundered and he wound up a prisoner in Taranto, part of the Kingdom of Naples. While in prison he suffered terrible privations, losing the sight of one eye and becoming partly paralyzed. In 1801, Napoleon, now in power, took the Kingdom of Naples and Dumas returned home. There he died of stomach cancer in 1806. His prison diaries helped inspire his son, Alexandre Dumas, in the writing of The Count of Monte Cristo.

The actor LaFont costumed as Saint-George in an 1840 production. [Wikimedia Commons]

Some Sources:

Chevalier Saint-George:
Gabriel Banat,The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow
The recently-published The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss is a life of Alexandre Dumas which contains info about Saint-George and his Legion.
AfriClassical.com has a biography as well as a partial discography and a few audio samples. More performances may be found via Google and YouTube. The violin concertos are possibly the most-played pieces.
The CBC documentary,The Black Mozart/Le Mozart Noir is available on DVD and there is an accompanying set of CDs with a great many pieces by Saint-George.
Another on-line biography page.

Chevalier(e) d’Eon:
A biography, The Strange Career of the Chevalier D’Eon de Beaumont by Buchan Telfer, published 1885, is available on-line and is pretty good on d’Eon’s spying and the Beaumarchais mission.
This page is very sober and claims that d’Eon did very little cross-dressing and especially, emphatically Not, during the mission to Russia.
This page takes from a number of sources and sees d’Eon as a cross-dresser, especially on the Russian mission. There are a lot of pictures of d’Eon.
Gary Kates, Monsieur D’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade examines some trans-gender issues but its conclusion — that d’Eon was moved by religious notions to become a woman — seems fanciful to me.

In 1553, a wood-cutter named Heinrich Schmidt was standing amongst a crowd in the Bavarian town of Hof, listening to the Margrave detail a plot to assassinate him. The Margrave had arrested three men and accused them of the crime. Now it was time to execute them. There was no official executioner handy, so the Margrave invoked a local custom: he pointed at Heinrich and ordered him to do the deed. The wood-cutter was reluctant but was told that if he refused to carry out the order, then he would be executed instead as well as the men standing on either side of him. So Heinrich Schmidt picked up a sword and cut the heads off the three men.

Having killed these men, Schmidt became a social outcast, like a gravedigger or a slaughterhouse worker, the kind of workers that are called burakumin in Japan and shunned to this day. So Schmidt turned to the only job opening available for a man like himself — he became an official executioner. Two years later, his son, Frantz, was born and, when he was old enough, became his father’s apprentice.

“Leonardt Russ of Ceyern, a thief. Executed with the rope at the city of Steinach. Was my first execution.” So begins the diary of Frantz Schmidt which details his life’s work as an executioner and torturer, first under his father, then in Nuremburg. Over the course of forty-five years, Frantz Schmidt executed 361 people and tortured hundreds more. These acts were all noted in his diary. He was proficient in using the noose, the wheel, fire, and drowning besides the sword, which was considered the most merciful of execution methods.

The only known picture of Schmidt. “Execution of Hans Fröschel, 1591″. This drawing was made in the margins of a court record book. Note Schmidt’s collar and curved moustache. [WikiMedia Commons]

Five years after hanging his first man, Schmidt took up work in Nuremburg. He first served as assistant to Nuremburg’s chief executioner, then succeeded him. He also married his master’s daughter — both husband and wife being tainted by association with one of the nastier trades, they would have had difficulty finding a spouse elsewhere. But the post of chief executioner was well-paid and the Schmidt family lived in an upscale part of the city.

A public execution was staged as a morality play. In the first act, the prisoner — whose guilt had already been determined — was allowed a last meal, including alcohol, then was dressed in a white blouse. The executioner then entered and asked the prisoner’s forgiveness before sharing a traditional drink with him. During this time the executioner would be assessing the prisoner’s state of mind and health, judging when he was ready to proceed.

Dungeon under Nuremburg’s Old City Hall. Here is where prisoners were held before their execution. Now it’s a tourist destination.

Now the prisoner was brought before a “blood court” consisting of a robed judge holding a rod and a sword, and twelve jurors. The judge would read out the death sentence, including the method of execution, then poll the jurors for their assent. “What is legal and just pleases me,” each would reply. Next the judge asked if the prisoner wished to speak. This was an opportunity for the prisoner to forgive those who had condemned him to death and possibly express his thanks, especially if the sentence was for a merciful beheading. Some prisoners might curse the court, others were too dumb with fear or stupefied by drink to make a coherent speech. When the prisoner was finished speaking, the judge would order the executioner to carry out the sentence and snap in two the white rod he was holding.

The second act of this drama was a procession to the place of execution, which might be a mile or two away. The judge led the way, followed by the prisoner, a couple of soldiers, a chaplain or two, and the executioner and his assistants. Sometimes, if the prisoner was violent or was sentenced to be tortured on the way, he would be carried in a cart. Tortures might include having pieces of flesh torn out with red-hot tongs. The number of these “nips” were spelled out in the sentence. Sometimes the prisoner would have a few more drinks along the way.

The procession route would be lined by crowds of people, who might themselves be drunk and unruly and sometimes threw things at the prisoner. If he could, Schmidt would hurry the prisoner along to avoid problems. The prisoner might pray along with the chaplains and bless the crowd or he might curse his audience or break down in tears.

Execution by wheel. The man’s limbs are being broken with heavy wheels. This is opposed to execution on a wheel, where the limbs were broken by a rod or weight after the victim was strapped to a wheel.

The final act was the execution itself. The condemned prisoner would mount a scaffold or a platform. There, it was expected that a final prayer would issue from his lips as the noose was placed around his neck or as he sunk to his knees and awaited the executioner’s sword. The executioner would perform the deed then turn to the judge:

“Lord Judge, have I executed well?”

“You have executed as judgment and law have required.”

“For that I thank God and my master who has taught me such art.”

Then the executioner and his assistants would clean up and dispose of the remains.

The idea of the public execution was to make a statement. On the one hand it was supposed to be reassuring—a reminder that people get caught and punished. On the other hand it was a statement about state authority, because the state’s authority was not unquestioned. One of the things government officials were concerned about was private punishment—like lynch mobs and private justice. So it was meant to establish their authority.

No executioner wanted to make a mistake that would sully the grand pageant of death. Though messy executions were frequent at this time, Frantz Schmidt seldom took more than one stroke of the sword to remove a head. Out of 187 decapitations, only four needed more than a single blow. Schmidt was unforgiving to himself for these four, writing in his diary that he had botched the job and did not try to excuse himself. He was proud to practice his trade well. His headsman skill was at least partly due to the fact that he did not drink — at this time executioners were often as drunk as their prisoners when they wielded their sword.

German executioner’s sword. The inscription: “I have to punish crime as the law and judge tell me”. [Weapons Universe]

Women were not executed as often as men but repeated offenses might well wind up with a capital sentence. So, Marie Kurschnerin, a prostitute, was pilloried in the stocks and driven out of town. Further offenses brought the punishment of having her ears cropped. Finally, in 1584, Schmidt’s wrote in his diary:

…the thief and whore Marie Kurschnerin, together with thievish youths and fellows, had climbed and broken into citizens’ houses and stole a mighty quantity of things. It was an unheard of thing for a woman to be hanged in this city and it had never happened before. Such a dreadful crowd ran out to see this, that several people were crushed to death.

An entry from Schmidt’s diary for 1617:

November 13th. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine. Because he and his brother, with the help of others, practiced coining and counterfeiting money and clipping coins fraudulently. He also had a working knowledge of magic… This miller, who worked in the town mills here three years ago, fell into the town moat on Whitsunday. It would have been better for him if he had been drowned, but it turned out according to the proverb that “What belongs to the gallows cannot drown in water.” This was the last person whom I, Master Frantz, executed.

Frantz Schmidt served the city of Nuremburg for forty years. He successfully petitioned the emperor to allow his children to have the executioner stigma removed from their names so that they could pursue other trades. After his retirement in 1617, Schmidt served as a healer for the last seventeen years of his life. Ironically, during that period most of his children and grand-children, that he had saved from practicing his deadly craft, died. When Frantz Schmidt himself followed them in 1634, Nuremburg honored him with a grand funeral. Social outcast though he was, Schmidt was also well-respected.

Notes:

The main source for all the above is Joel Harrington’s The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, a really interesting book. An except may be found here and an earlier article about Schmidt by Harrington is here.

Some odd points were picked up from an interview with Harrington and a few items from this article on medieval executions of women which includes an interesting account of the execution by Schmidt of Elizabeth Aurhaltin, aka Scabby Beth.

Schmidt’s original diary long ago disappeared but at least four copies of it were made. Harrington used the earliest copy known as the basis for his book. A 1928 English translation from another copy is a prime candidate for the Internet Archive or Gutenberg.org. Somebody out there hear me.

Also, in this context, I can’t help recommending Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun tetralogy featuring Severian, apprentice to the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, which is to say, the Torturers’ Guild.

My Story: Around 1970 I started putting up pictures on the wall over the desk where I worked. This picture of a little girl swimming was the first. I put it on the wall because it made me smile every time I looked at it.

A little while later I added this picture of a kid who probably doesn’t know that he looks like a pharoah but who is having a good time anyway.

Then I added this one, of two kids in a drainage ditch or maybe a jungle river. A friend saw this picture and was horrified, “Who cut up those children and threw them in a ditch?” It was then that I understood that something was very wrong with her.

So what is it about these pictures? Well, there are kids having a good time — not being told to sit still or behave or not get their clothes dirty — they are totally without care and feeling good. Cold water, hot day, what’s not to like? Jung has something to say about these images as archetypes but I skimmed past that last time I came across it. I don’t want to over-analyze these pictures and lose their immediate virtue: They make me smile. Every time.
The Facts: I confess that I have lost the name of the photographer who took the first photo. (Yes, I’ve tried both TinEye and Google Image search — perhaps it’s not on line.) I recall that it’s a photo of his daughter taken late 60s or very early 70s at their vacation place in Maine or Massachusetts, but my recaller is not always reliable. Perhaps someone will write in and identify this photographer. Meanwhile this is a scan of an original artifact, punched full of holes made by staples and pushpins as it was moved from location to location.
The second photo was taken by George Krause in Philadelphia, 1966. Krause titled this picture “Fountainhead”.
The third photo is by Bruno Barbey and was taken in the Brazillian Amazon in 1966.

About a week ago, a South Korean newspaper reported that Kim Jong-un had executed his ex-mistress and a number of other members of her musical troupe for the crime of making pornographic films, and possibly for possessing Bibles. There were some lip-smacking details: death was by machine gun and family members had been forced to witness the event before being herded off into the prison gulag of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea.
But did this actually happen? The South Korean newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo, is considered Korea’s top journalistic publication, but need I mention the top US paper and, say, Weapons of Mass Destruction? And Chosun Ilbo is very much part of Korea’s power elite and has been accused of slanting reports in aid of that elite. Perhaps South Korean politicos felt the need to mock the North for some reason or other; Chosun Ilbo is able to help. All reporting has to be read critically.

Kim Jong-un and Hyon Song-wal at an Unhasu Orchestra performance August 8. On August 17, Hyon was reported arrested.

So what do we know? The woman in question, Hyon Song-wol, reportedly became involved with Kim Jong-un ten years ago, but Dad (Kim Jong-il) didn’t approve and broke up the relationship. Rumor has it that Hyon and Kim Jong-un carried on, though, even after her marriage to an army officer.

Ri Sol-ju and Kim Jong-un earlier this year.

The Kim dynasty has been very secretive about family matters. It was something of a departure for Kim Jong-un to be seen and photographed with his wife, Ri Sol-ju, over the last year or so.

Mun Kyong-jin performing in Paris, 2012.

Hyon was a member of the Wangjaesan Light Music Band musical troupe that often performed with the Unhasu Orchestra, a serious group that played in Paris last year. Mun Kyong-jin, a highly regarded violinist, and two other concertmasters of the Unhasu Orchestra are among those said to have been executed. Also reported slain were members of the all-female Moranbong Band. Hyon also performed with the popular group, Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble. Her best known number was “A Girl in the Saddle of a Steed” (also translated as “Excellent Horse-like Lady”) where she performed as a worker in a textile factory, dancing amongst the bobbins in a widely-seen video. Glorification of the worker and militarist patriotic numbers are staples of North Korean music.

Wangjaeshan Light Music Band. Hyon is in purple dress.

Ri Sol-ju is a former member of the Unhasu troupe, though Kim has tried to erase her show biz past. There is speculation about her involvement in the executions. So far as I can tell, it is all speculation. About ten days before the reported executions, Kim and Ri Sol-ju attended a performance of the Unhasu Orchestra and Wangjaesan Light Music Band.
The pornographic video sold in China is said to be the one on this page. Hyon and two other women dance to “Aloha Oe”, sung in English, while wearing red borsalino hats and vests. They throw off the vests toward the end of the number, somewhat like a stripper might do, except that there is no nudity.

Pornographic “Aloha Oe”? link to video in post.

Now watching that video has to convince you that North Korea is weird. No doubt about it. Kim Jong-il once kidnapped a movie director and an actress from South Korea and kept them captive to make movies for him. And there are reports that Kim Jong-un had a senior military officer executed for drinking during the mourning period for Kim Jong-il. According to reports, Kim commanded that the man be obliterated so the executioners zeroed in a mortar on the spot where he stood and blew him up. Yep, weird.

from Guy Delisle, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea
If power has no need for truth, perhaps neither does entertainment posing as journalism.

The problem is that no one really knows what is going on in North Korea. The first real evidence of the prison camps came from an escapee. Still, that was a widely-disseminated rumor that turned out to be true. And perhaps this story of executed musicians is true as well, or perhaps it’s just that First World people have a taste for News of the Weird. A spokesperson at North Korea’s official YouTube channel has denied the reports and, a little while back, claimed that Hyon and the Unhasu Orchestra were going to perform September 9, Foundation Day of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. But, so far, no video of Hyon taken since August 17 has been shown on YouTube.

In 1830, at Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, a baby boy is born to a slave woman in the Driscoll household, Roxy; at the same time, a boy is being born to Roxy’s white mistress, who dies in childbirth. Roxy is ordered to nurse and raise both children. One week later, David Wilson arrives in Dawson’s Landing, meaning to practice law there. He enters into conversation with some locals:

…[when a] dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud:
“I wish I owned half of that dog.”
“Why?” somebody asked.
“Because I would kill my half.”
The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One said:
“‘Pears to be a fool.”
“‘Pears?” said another. “Is, I reckon you better say.”
“Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot,” said a third. “What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half? Do you reckon he thought it would live?”

After some discussion, the locals decide that Wilson is a “pudd’nhead”. Wilson is unable to shake this first impression and no one hires him as a lawyer. He takes down his shingle and offers his services as surveyor’s assistant and bookkeeper, specializing in untangling confused accounts. So begins Mark Twain’s 1894 novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson.

Mark Twain photo used in the first editions of Pudd’nhead Wilson [Twain Library, U. of Va.]

[More photos and info here] Blacks pretending to be white is a constant theme in America. Of the children fathered on slave Sally Hemmings by her owner Thomas Jefferson, some descendants went north and lived as whites, some stayed in the south and were black. “Passing for white” was a theme in the 1959 movie Imitation of Life. It was not until 1967 that interracial marriages were legal in some states and life for blacks and whites was so unequal that, given a chance, many people who were legally (under state law at the time) black would pass for white.
There is considerable discussion in the United States right now as to whether such a thing as “race” exists. Twain is making the point that circumstance, not race, decides a person’s place in the world. A white person who is a slave becomes black. Race is created by racism. The fact that Obama is half white is meaningless, his black half defines his race. Roxy is black because she had a black great-grandmother; she and her child are the product of generations of slaves raped by white masters. Twain might appreciate the irony that has both Roxy and and her child played by very dark-skinned actors in the various dramatic and film adaptations of his book. But then, these black people could hardly be played by whites, could they?
So Roxy switches the children: her son becomes Tom Driscoll and her master’s son, Chambers, short for Valet de Chambres, “the fine sound of it had pleased [Roxy's] ear” — even as she named her child, she was thinking of elevating him in the world.

David “Pudd’nhead” Wilson has a hobby: he collects fingerprints. By the 18th Century some European researchers understood that every individual had a unique set of fingerprints, something that the Chinese had known (but not applied) for a thousand years. The first real use of fingerprints for identification was made in India by English civil servant William Janes Herschel, a decade or two after Pudd’nhead Wilson ends. Wilson takes fingerprints on glass slides, labels them with the name and date, and stores them away. He already has two sets of the infants in Roxy’s care when she brings them around for another printing. She does not see the prints as identifying the boys (nor does anyone else see them as identifying marks); she wants to know if Wilson can detect that she has switched the babies. For Roxy, unlike the local townspeople, sees that Wilson is a very bright man. But he does not notice the exchange (all babies look alike) and Roxy is satisfied that her scheme will succeed. Wilson never compares the slides, just stores them away with the many others he has collected.
The idea of babies switched at birth is an old one, found in many folk tales around the world. The idea that a person might be of royal birth but was switched out for a commoner was current in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries in popular literature. Usually a scar or other identifying mark, perhaps known only to a parent or an old nurse, reveals the true heir to the throne. Occasionally it is a piece of jewellery that was left with the child. Twain reverses that concept by having Roxy take the necklace that belongs to the Driscoll baby and put it on her own boy. Twain mocked the “switched-at-birth” convention in some of his other writings, but here uses it to explore notions subversive of the original idea. Noble birth does not make better people, only more privileged ones. In other words, Twain is a proponent of Nurture over Nature and this shows up in his treatment of the two boys as they grow up.
Tom (Roxy’s own child) becomes the spoiled son of privilege, and Chambers, the true heir, learns humility as a slave. Tom is a nasty sort who enjoys giving pain. Chambers is often the recipient of Tom’s blows but, as he grows older and stronger, is used by Tom to beat up the other boys. The boys’ characters solidify as they become men.
Meanwhile, Tom’s father dies and he is fostered by his uncle, Judge Driscoll. Tom’s father has a disordered estate that is taken over by debt collectors, but his childless brother is wealthy and names Tom as his heir. Roxy is set free by her owner on his deathbed and goes off to work as a chambermaid on the riverboats. Tom spends two years at Yale where he was “not an object of distinction” and returns home.
Now Dawson’s Landing experiences a rarity: something exciting happens! Identical Italian twins take up residence there. The town is quite excited over having such exotic new residents and the twins are well-received.
Roxy also returns to Dawson’s Landing. She has begun to suffer from rheumatism and quit her job on the riverboats, meaning to live off the savings that she has slowly accumulated. Alas, her savings have disppeared along when the New Orleans bank where they were held went bust and Roxy is penniless. Her co-workers on the riverboat take up a collection for her — not the last time in the book that people will take up a collection for Roxy, since she is well-liked — and Roxy makes her home in an abandoned building. She calls on Tom and asks him for money:

“My lan’, how you is growed, honey! ‘Clah to goodness, I wouldn’t a-knowed you, Marse Tom! ‘Deed I wouldn’t! Look at me good; does you ‘member old Roxy? Does you know yo’ old nigger mammy, honey? Well now, I kin lay down en die in peace, ‘ca’se I’se seed—”
“Cut it short, Goddamn it, cut it short! What is it you want?”
“You heah dat? Jes the same old Marse Tom, al’ays so gay and funnin’ wid de ole mammy. I’uz jes as shore—”
“Cut it short, I tell you, and get along! What do you want?”

Roxy loses her temper and reveals to Tom that: “You’s a nigger!—bawn a nigger and a slave!—en you’s a nigger en a slave dis minute; en if I opens my mouf ole Marse Driscoll’ll sell you down de river befo’ you is two days older den what you is now!” Unless he helps her, she will reveal all. She is quite aware of the kind of person that Tom is and tells him that if anything happens to her — like someone sticking a knife in her — that she has left a written account with a person who will make certain that Tom is exposed. Actually, there is no such letter but Roxy understands her boy well enough that she knows the threat is all that’s required to keep him in line.
Tom believes Roxy but he has no money to give her. He is a gambler — Judge Driscoll has already bailed him out once but has threatened to disinheirit Tom should he go into debt again. Tom has begun burglarizing houses in the town and selling the stuff he steals in pawnshops up the river. He manages to pay off his debts this way and swears never to gamble again. He shares half of his allowance from Judge Driscoll with Roxy and the two manage to get on for a while.
But Tom cannot stay away from gambling. He wins big, then loses it all and more besides. He engages in some more theft and Roxy helps him set up a scheme to borrow on his expected inheritance from Judge Driscoll. But when Tom goes to St.Louis to sell his plunder, he himself is robbed, and now has nothing. Once again, Roxy comes up with a scheme: Tom is to sell her as a slave to a farm upstate and use the proceeds to clear his debts. When he comes into the Driscoll fortune, he will buy her back.
Although Roxy is a freedwoman, she knows that slavedealers are not particular. Tom can put together some phony documents and she can be sold in an area where she is unknown. So it happens. Roxy is on a steamer, heading toward her new owner, when she realizes that the boat is going with the current. Tom has sold his mother down the river!
There are other crises: a duel between the Judge and one of the twins — the judge is fighting on Tom’s behalf and disowns him for not duelling until Tom weasels out an explanation; the continuing thefts — now reported as being done by a woman who the reader knows is Tom in drag; political hoopla — Wilson runs for Mayor and the twins run for Council: Wilson wins, the twins lose after being slandered by Tom, and they lose all their friends in town, except Wilson. But all this is just prelude to the big event: Roxy’s return.
Roxy is mistreated on the deep South plantation by a cruel overseer. When a child gives Roxy some food, the overseer hitts the little girl until Roxy takes his stick away and beats him with it. Then she makes her way to the river where she finds a boat where she had once worked. The crew help her out, she steams up the river, people take up a collection for her, and now Roxy confronts her son — in blackface! Yes, to disguise herself, Roxy darkens her skin and wears men’s clothes. I think that, of all the characters in this book, Roxy comes out the best. She is not perfect by any means, she is imperious and bossy and likes her whisky, but she is also brave, resourceful, and intelligent.
So Roxy confronts Tom. She gives him an ultimatum: buy her back or she will go to Judge Driscoll. Roxy thinks that Tom will beg the money from his guardian, but Tom decides to steal it. Tom has with him a very valuable knife with jewelled scabbard that he stole from the twins, but the knife cannot be sold to a pawnbroker, everyone knows what it looks like and the seller would immediately be identified as a thief. The judge surprises Tom — or perhaps Tom never meant to hide from him — and Tom stabs him with the twins’ knife which he leaves behind.
So the Judge is dead, the twins are accused of his murder, and Tom stands to inheirit a fortune, The only obstacle to this scheme is Pudd’nhead Wilson who now takes up his neglected law practice to defend the Italians. Wilson has noticed a fingerprint on the knife…
The big trial scene: Wilson has compared the print on the knife with those in his collection and made some astounding discoveries. First, he explains fingerprints to the court and demonstrates that he can tell one person’s prints from another’s. Then he tells the story of two babies, switched at the age of ten months, as the fingerprint records show, and how the prints of one of those babies, now grown, is on the bloody knife. That man is a murder and a slave posing as a white man. That person is… But Tom has already collapsed in a faint and there is no need to continue.
Some readers have criticized this book for its lack of coherence; they think it should have been written longer and read more smoothly and they have a point. Some of the characters — Chambers, for example — are little more than caricatures and there are certain inconsistencies in the narrative, but over all, I think Pudd’nhead Wilson stands up very well.
Twain was in need of money when he wrote the book — his publishing company had just failed – and dashed it off in a month or so of feverish writing. He says that, originally, the work was to feature more of the twins but that he found that he was trying to pour too much plot into too small a book. The book is sometimes titled The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins. So some of the twins’ story was removed to be printed as an addendum. Various critics have remarked on the twinning bits of the narrative – besides the Italians, there is Tom and Chambers, for instance, and other characters have counterparts. Perhaps this is a remnant of Twain’s original plan.

Mark Twain contemplates twins. Some think that, originally, Twain had meant the Italian twins to be conjoined.

Twain had a bitter streak that shows up in many of his writings. Human beings always fall short of the greatness  of which Humanity is capable. This bitterness shows throughout the novel. All events, all opinions are delivered with Twain’s characteristic dry humor but there is a bite here not found in some of his other books. Several chapters end with a bit of harsh satire that the reader may or may not find funny. For instance, at the end of Chapter Two, when Driscoll demands that the thieving slaves confess or all will be sold down the river and the guilty parties say, “I done it!—have mercy, marster—Lord have mercy on us po’ niggers!” The master replies:

“I will sell you here though you don’t deserve it. You ought to be sold down the river.”
The culprits flung themselves prone, in an ecstasy of gratitude, and kissed his feet, declaring that they would never forget his goodness and never cease to pray for him as long as they lived. They were sincere, for like a god he had stretched forth his mighty hand and closed the gates of hell against them. He knew, himself, that he had done a noble and gracious thing, and was privately well pleased with his magnanimity; and that night he set the incident down in his diary, so that his son might read it in after years, and be thereby moved to deeds of gentleness and humanity himself.

Each chapter begins with a quotation from Puddn’head Wilson’s Calendar, a collection of thoughts by the man himself:

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want
the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it
was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the
serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent. —Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s Calendar

Less amusing perhaps, is this one:

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is,
knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first
great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the
world. —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

But the bitterest comments of all close the book. The townspeople admit they were wrong to call Wilson a “pudd’nhead”. Yes, they say, he has turned us all into pudd’nheads. Now he is elevated but Wilson remains estranged from his fellows. His friends, the twins, return to Italy, having had enough of America. Roxy finds solace, as much as she can, in her church. Chambers supports her. Poor Chambers is now a wealthy free man, a white man, but his speech and manners are those of a slave. He can find no place in society, but Twain has little more to say about him. Twain winds up with these words about Tom:

The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. But now a complication came up. The Percy Driscoll estate was in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty percent of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate. But the creditors came forward now, and complained that inasmuch as through an error for which THEY were in no way to blame the false heir was not inventoried at the time with the rest of the property, great wrong and loss had thereby been inflicted upon them. They rightly claimed that “Tom” was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; that they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place, they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll; therefore it was not that he had really committed the murder, the guilt lay with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was reason in this. Everybody granted that if “Tom” were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter.

As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river.

Notes:

There are several editions of Pudd’nhead Wilson on line. I used the one at Gutenberg.org.

Stephen Railton’s Mark Twain in His Times, is a valuable resource on Twain that includes a complete digitization of the first edition, a link to Those Extraordinary Twins, a number of illustrations, and some critical articles.

In May of 1915, a brief news story appeared in the London Times reporting that some Dublin Fusiliers had seen a Canadian soldier crucified with bayonets before being “riddled with bullets”. The story was reprinted in Canada and was brought up in the UK Parliament. Before long, various versions of the story were circulating: the soldier was one of a number of wounded left by retreating troops in a barn, the Germans bayoneted all except a sergeant who was tied to the large cross from a village church before being killed; the sergeant was pinned to a church wall with four bayonets before a fifth went through his throat; it was eight bayonets; it was many bayonets; he was dead when pinned to the wall/fence/tree/barn door; he was alive, and so on. The soldier’s name was given as Thomas Elliott of Brantford, Ontario. Elliott himself wrote to his pastor to say that he had not been crucified. Canada set Albert Kemp, Minister for Overseas Military Forces, to investigate and he found three soldiers, one of them a Victoria Cross winner, ready to testify. But: One claimed to have seen three soldiers, all crucified to a church wall; one was not in Europe at the time of the alleged crucifixion; and one claimed to have seen the crucifixion in a place that the Germans did not occupy. Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps said that he could find no evidence of the event.

Ad for Bonds, Calgary Herald, November 2,1918

But Allied propagandists jumped on the story, printing posters and including the incident in a propaganda movie, The Prussian Cur. There is speculation that General John Charteris, chief of “Black Propaganda” and author of the German Corpse Factory myth and possibly the Angel of Mons story, may have been involved in promoting the story of the Crucified Canadian.

Still from The Prussian Cur, propaganda movie made 1918. The film is now lost.

The Canadian soldier was said to have been crucified April 22-24 in the Ypres salient, perhaps at, or near, St. Julien. This was the extreme allied flank and the Germans meant to break through the defense and, perhaps, turn the Allied flank. But a direct assault seemed impossible of success until the German High Command came up with a new tactic: gas. On the 22nd, the Germans let loose a cloud of chlorine gas toward the Allied lines. Many troops ran from this new horror, but some 4000 Canadians stood their ground and kept the assault from victory. Some say that the Canadians may have killed Germans, including prisoners, after that as payback for the gas attack. Some say that the Crucified Soldier was German revenge for Canadian war crimes. Few speak of the crime of chemical warfare, possibly because the Allies were developing that very same weapon, using it for the first time in September, 1915. Crucifixion was an atrocity with more resonance for people — not many have been gassed but everyone has seen a crucifix.

“Canada’s Golgotha” by Francis Derwent Wood on display at the Canadian War Museum. [via MelbourneBlogger]

In 1918, Francis Derwent Wood cast a bronze image, less than a meter high, titled Canada’s Golgotha that depicted the incident. The bronze was to be exhibited in January, 1919, but Germany protested, demanding to see evidence that the event had occurred. There was none and the sculpture was withdrawn. Germany also requested that they have a representative on the Canadian commission under Albert Kemp investigating the claim. Shortly afterward, Canadian authorities pronounced that the story was “not proven”.

But while all this was going on, a nurse in France heard a wounded man tell her of a Canadian soldier whose body he had seen bayoneted to a barn door. He identified the man as Sergeant Harry Band. Band’s family, then living in Kelowna, B.C., had received letters from members of his outfit that also claimed that he had been crucified by German troops. Iain Overton investigated the incident and became convinced that Harry Band had indeed been crucified by German troops. [see a documentary here].

Sergeant Harry Band

Band was born in Scotland and had seen service in the British Army before moving to Canada. In September, 1914, he signed up with the 48th Highlanders, an Ontario unit composed largely of Scots immigrants and people of Scots ancestry. A thousand strong, the unit was reduced to 300 men after the fighting at Ypres. Band listed his father in Kelowna as next of kin and directed that his pay be sent to a Miss Isabella Ritchie in Dundee, of whom nothing is known. Band was well-thought of by the men who served with him.
Many who studied this story mention that Belgium, around Ypres, is full of crucifixion imagery. There are statues by the roadside everywhere, not just churches. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory: “The image of crucifixion was always accessible at the front because of the numerous real physical calvaries visible at French and Belgian crossroads, many of them named Crucifix Corner.” Fussell and others think that exhausted men fed their imagination with the everpresent imagery. But British soldiers hardly needed hallucination to see one of their own crucified, it was a rather common event.

Field Punishment No. 1. British War Office contemporary illustration. Note the pencilled instruction at left: “make the post look entirely unlike the cross”.

Crucifixion was the name given by British troops to Field Punishment No. 1. Men who were accused of petty crimes — losing a piece of equipment, for instance — would be bound to a post or caisson for hours at a time over a period of days, sometimes under conditions which resulted in fatalities. The War Office instructed that the post was to “look entirely unlike the cross” but the troops could see a resemblance. The Canadian War Museum helpfully notes that military punishment had little to do with justice but was intended to instill discipline. This concept of “pour encourage les autres” was carried to the extreme during the War as British officers ordered more than 300 troops to be executed for various infractions without any meaningful investigation. Canada honored its twenty-three executed soldiers in 2001, England gave a posthumous pardon to these executed soldiers in 2006.
One vet, at the age of 105, recalled the War and said he doesn’t know if posthumous pardons for those executed was a good idea, but he did remember feeling sorry for one man who was crucified:

One day I was ordered to stand guard over a chap who had been tied to a wheel, without food or water, as a punishment for something. I can’t remember what he’d done. But I felt sorry for him so I put my fag up to his lips so he could have a smoke. It was a very risky thing to do because if anyone had seen me they’d have tied me to the wheel as well!

“Ecce Homo” by George Grosz, 1924. Grosz was charged with blasphemy for making this drawing.

After the War, German artist George Grosz produced a drawing which summed up the experience of all those men who had served in the Great War: “Ecce Homo”, subtitled “Shut Up and Do Your Duty”. Other artists echoed this theme. William Faulkner’s A Fable has a Christ-like doughboy as central character who winds up interred as The Unknown Soldier. Paul Gross’ film Passchendaele references the Crucified Canadian several times and has its hero undergo his own Calvary.

Paul Gross in Passchendaele, 2008.

Many men died at Ypres. Some are buried in marked graves but other corpses simply disappeared in the mud. Those whose bodies were not recovered are memorialized at Menin, their names inscribed on the walls of the Gate. Occasionally a farmer will turn up bones in his field and, once in a while, these can be identified. When that happens, the remains are interred in a proper cemetery and a name is removed from the wall. More than 54000 names remain on that wall; one of them is Band, H.

Inside the Menin Gate Memorial near Ypres. The names of more than 54000 men whose bodies were never identified are carved on the wall. Tens of thousands whose remains are identified are buried in the surrounding cemeteries. Five battles were fought at the Ypres salient with over a million casualties.

Notes:
The evidence that Harry Band was crucified is presented in this documentary.
Story from The Ottawa Citizen with Iain Overton’s remarks.

Various blogs and web pages exist on this subject. These may be useful:
Wikipedia
Spartacus (John Simkin)
Above Top Secret (links are dead)

Paul Gross’ Passchendaele

It is one thing to see something fifty years old and think “I was alive when that happened!” and something else to see something a half century in the past and say, “I remember that!” One is history, the other, memory. The New York Review of Books recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary by reprinting its first issue, which you can read here or buy a paper copy here. I was a (very) young man when this issue was printed — I didn’t read it then; I don’t know if it was distributed outside of New York City at the time, but I did start reading the Review not long after when the Vietnam War became an issue. This magazine was one of the first to oppose that war and nothing that I have ever read since has caused me to think that was a misinformed position. Still, that doesn’t mean that the NYRB was, or is, right about everything. But here, what I mean to do is look at this first issue as an historical artifact and examine what it has to say. Many of these books and writers were known to me at the time and some are still being read.
There was a newspaper strike in New York in 1963 and a business-minded publisher, Jason Epstein, realized that publishers would buy ads in a magazine devoted to books. Epstein was connected in New York’s literary world and soon teamed up with Elizabeth Hardwick, a writer unfairly known mostly for being Robert Lowell’s wife. Epstein’s wife, Barbara, became an editor and Hardwick recommended Robert Silvers of Harper’s as co-editor. Whitney Ellsworth became publisher. This group worked together for years running the magazine. Robert Silvers is the last of the team still alive. He still edits the New York Review.

25th anniversary of the NYRB. Left to right, standing: Robert Silver, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Darryl Pinckney,Jonathan Miller, James Fenton, Rea Hederman, Alma Guillermoprieto; seated: Elizabeth Hardwick, Jason Epstein

Various lights of the New York literary scene signed on to contribute — Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, Dwight MacDonald, Phillip Rahv, and so on. Most of these people knew each other, many had been associated with the Partisan Review. Now they reviewed each other’s books gratis to kick off the new magazine. The result was what the New Yorker called “the greatest first issue of any magazine ever”.

Staff of the Partisan Review , 1938. Philip Rahv at top center, Dwight MacDonald at right, FW. DuPee at left.

The lead essay is a critique of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, written by F.W.DuPee, who had been instrumental, as editor of the Partisan Review,  in getting Baldwin to return from France to report on racial matters. It is jarring now to read the word “Negro” when applied to African-Americans, or black people of any nationality. It is even more jarring when the writer refers to “the Negro problem”. Those troublesome darkies! What a problem they pose! I am reminded of 19th Century references to the “problem of the Feminine”. Both terms assume that the person writing is the norm, that Negroes or women are somehow apart from the standard, normal sort of human being.
Baldwin’s book consists of two essays that appeared in magazines toward the end of 1962, “A Letter to My Nephew”, (retitled in the book version as “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation”, DuPee calls this title “ominous”) and a much longer one, “Letter from a Region of My Mind” (retitled for the book, “Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind”). Baldwin describes the problems of the Negro (his term) in America and warns that there is a great deal of anger being suppressed that will, eventually, find some voice. He writes of a meeting with Elijah Muhammed and the Chicago Muslim organization. Black Power, urban riots, and the Black Panthers are yet to come, but Baldwin is prophesying their birth. That is the part of the book that brings a response from DuPee. But Baldwin’s overall message is that blacks should not allow their humanity to be corrupted by the “American problem” while whites try to discover their own souls. DuPee rejects entirely the essay “Letter to My Nephew”, but it has a message for him, one of the “innocent and well meaning people” who have perpetrated a great wrong that they will not acknowledge because they believe that their hearts are Good. Baldwin to his nephew:

There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

Life is tragic, says Baldwin. Inevitably, it ends in death. The most significant word in the two essays is “love”. Love requires courage because it means directly confronting the tragic nature of humanity:

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

DuPee never once uses the word “love” in his review. His analysis of Baldwin’s book winds up basically supporting the notion that American blacks need to be non-violent, not because — as Baldwin pointed out — that was more comfortable for American whites, but because anything else would be harmful to the gains he thought that blacks were making. He is also clear on the fact that any kind of black uprising would be crushed. Baldwin is aware of this, too, and suggests that making whites fearful will only cause them to be more violent than they already are. And the angry outbursts of the ’60s and ’70s did wind up being fatal to many black people. Even so, it does not seem to be true that racial progress was slowed by these violent events — it may be that they served a purpose by demonstrating that, however nice the words used by “innocent” whites, they masked a deep-rooted inability to achieve the kind of spiritual state that Baldwin proposes. Baldwin to his nephew:

Many of [the innocents] indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.

White American racial attitudes show up in other essays. A book review by John Thompson includes these words:
“…all of us need desperately to extend our knowledge of the life of American Negroes.” Then he scurries on to add, “Naturally, I do not exclude Negroes when I say ‘us’.”
Well, no, John, that isn’t what you meant, naturally, to say, because that is incredibly insulting, whereas, without that hurried bit of expiation, your comment is merely condescending and stupid. Of course, being English, you may beg a little bit of excuse.

Frank Tannenbaum,Carleton S. Coon,James Baldwin

One might ask “just how different are the races themselves”? And that brings up The Origin of Races by Carleton S. Coon which seeks to prove that they are very different and some more advanced than others. Coon said that there are five races and that they each evolved independently into Homo sapiens. Congoid/Negro races evolved some 200,000 years later than Caucasians. Well, that explains so much, doesn’t it! Reviewer of this book is John Maddocks, who is not further identified. Mr. Maddocks, though, is very astute and he recognizes a pile of crap when he steps in it. He mentions that other anthroplogists and geneticists have serious doubts that the five-fold evolution of H.sapiens is at all likely, and he notes other shortcomings of Coon’s work. He is a little taken aback that a scholar of such eminence would promote a thesis that will so benefit racists. Maddocks writes:

No great imagination is needed to see how this conclusion has delighted the theoreticians of apartheid. Professor Wesley C. George of the University of Alabama leans heavily on Coon in a document called The Biology of Race, prepared for the governor of his state. So too does Mr. Carleton Putnam, who specializes in open letters to the President which are then reprinted in Southern newspapers and even as advertisements in The New York Times, with titles such as Race and Reason and Evolution and Race: New Evidence … In these and other ways the campaign to suggest that race prejudice can be given a scientific foundation goes with a more vigorous swing than it has for many years.

And Maddocks sees that providing a rationale for white supremacy is what the book is meant to do:
“…it would be over-generous to think that Coon’s present book could be innocently tactless. The uses that would be made of it were, after all, entirely predictable.” Yes. But it would be a good many years before it was revealed, via the publication of Coon’s letters, that he had been actively seeking to help white racists, especially the aforementioned Carleton Putnam, though Coon was careful to keep his own name out of the segregationist literature except as it referenced his books.
Another article that touches on these matters is a review by William Styron of Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen. Originally published in 1947, a recent reprint is reviewed here. Styron was, at the time, researching his novel about the Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia and was familiar with Tannenbaum’s book. According to Tannenbaum, race relations in the US were an outgrowth of the specific kind of slavery there. Other places, with different kinds of slave institutions have less racial discord, said Tannenbaum. So far as that goes, most readers might agree with Tannenbaum. The problem is that some, like Styron, take Tannenbaum’s arguments too far and make far-fetched claims for racial harmony in, say, Brazil which are not borne out by the facts. Still, there are differences between the US and other Western Hemisphere nations in black/white relations and those differences, and why they occurred, are of great interest. Tannenbaum’s book is still a starting point for this discussion, though Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black has shifted the argument.
The main problem with the NYRB‘s handling of race relations is that it is directed toward a very small audience — the White Citizen Councils of Alabama were unlikely to ever read Maddocks’ takedown of Dr. Coon. The NYRB is not a publication that would have been of value at the time for either black or white Americans trying to deal with the great set of problems that confronted them because these problems were not of much immediate concern to the small cultural elite representing there, with the exception of such as DuPee, who helped bring Baldwin back from France to report on the situation. But even these few were apt to lapse into confrontational mode, informed by fear, when having to face the fact that blacks could be harboring great anger. They were, as Baldwin said, innocents who would have to be brought slowly, and with love, to knowledge.

Jules Feiffer, William Burroughs

The elitism of the NYRB shows up in various ways. Mary McCarthy reviews William Burroughs’ The(sic) Naked Lunch. The review is favorable but includes this puzzling statement: “This must be the first space novel, the first serious piece of science fiction — the others are entertainment.”
Now it is hard to see how Burroughs’ work is any more science fiction than Gulliver’s Travels, a book McCarthy compares it to, or, say, works by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley that everyone recognizes as serious. The point is, McCarthy is using the term “science fiction” as a derogatory identifier. If it’s good, then it isn’t science fiction, except maybe this one book by Burroughs that can’t easilly be pigeon-holed. But McCarthy’s attitude was widely held. At the same time that this essay was published, J.G.Ballard was writing stories that he claimed were not science fiction, even though they were being published in science fiction magazines. The notion that a genre tag, like “science fiction”, would diminish a work was adopted even by people working in said genres.

Jules Feiffer illustrates how highcult becomes masscult or something.

This attitude is especially evident here when a writer uses the term “comic strip” in an essay. It is always derogatory. It is pretty funny to read a review, by John Hollander, Yale English professor, of a collection of comic strips by Jules Feiffer (who also has a strip in this issue of the NYRB) that includes this statement:

There are often non-books on the best-seller lists, and lately they have been appearing for children as well.
It is a deplorable tradition. And yet, it has been almost redeemed by the few cases in which a really unique imagination has found form there. The splendid Gothic Victorianism of Edward Gorey is one of these, I think, and the collections of what are by no means really cartoon-strips by Jules Feiffer are surely another.

“By no means really cartoon-strips”? What the hell? If it’s good, you see, then it can’t be a comic strip. But then Feiffer himself was shortly to publish an article in Playboy, expanded into a book in 1965, that concludes that comics are only “junk”, and kid’s junk at that!
It is startling to hear an artist put down his own work that way, and I do think that Feiffer and Ballard grew somewhat less defensive as they achieved both popular success and critical appreciation. Still, at this time, they adopted the manners of the class that they wished not to alienate, the one where they felt they belonged.
This cultural defensiveness seems to be a common attitude of the NYRB elite and one of them, Dwight MacDonald, tried to turn it into an artistic credo. MacDonald’s book, Against the American Grain, reviewed in this issue, includes an essay called “Masscult and Midcult”, that has achieved classic status. [Read it here]
MacDonald says that you have High Culture, which is for the elite, and Folk Art, which is for the masses. The problem is that Midcult stuff which pretends to be Art but is really mass produced simplifications of High Culture aimed at bourgeois tastes. MacDonald tries to make this distinction clear but only muddies the waters as he displays his own ignorance of, for instance, jazz. But he is most revealing when he tries to say that art aimed at the non-elites is Okay, so long as it doesn’t get uppity:

Folk Art was the people’s own institution, their private little kitchen-garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters. But Masscult breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of domination.

That is a pretty amazing analysis of medieval times coming from a communist — or, rather, former communist, MacDonald having passed from Stalin through Trotsky to calling himself an anarchist. Less to do with classical anarchism, like Saint-Simon or Fourier, than an excuse for sloppy thinking, I believe. Anyway, his reviewer, Barbara Solomon:

Somewhere in “Masscult and Midcult” Macdonald finds himself in Ortega y Gasset’s bed—the masses are destructive of civilization, the elite, the preservers of tradition. It is a perfectly valid conclusion, and yet once Macdonald arrives at it he shies away from the implications. A world for the elite? It is not easy for a long-time left-winger who is also American to say: “I am Charles de Gaulle.”

Here, I must say, I have never read a favorable review of “Masscult and Midcult” anywhere, although it still has life — possibly due to the insecurity of people who write for a living, possibly due to the term “midcult” having been selected into the English language.
The important part of the essay for the purpose here is this bit:

The past cultures I admire — Periclean Greece, the city-states of the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England, are examples — have mostly been produced by communities, and remarkably small ones at that. Also remarkably heterogenous ones, riven by faction, stormy with passionate antagonisms.

Dwight wants to be Athenian. Not a slave, of course, but the kind of guy who hangs out with Socrates and Plato and admires beautiful Alcibiades. Okay, but this great phase of Athenian culture lasted only 80 years at best, the second half of that being Periclean and then, around the time Socrates drank hemlock, descended into not-greatness. So, if the period following the Persian Wars but before the post-Periclean collapse is what MacDonald wanted in a contemporary version, perhaps in post WWII America, before the Nixonian collapse, he thought he might find it.
(I have to insert here MacDonald’s comment about Mary (NoSFForMe) McCarthy — “Why does she have to be so goddamned snooty..?” Oh yeah! Takes one to know one, Dwight.)
Race relations and cultural definition are the major topics of this issue of the NYRB, but other matters are discussed: the Cold War, for example. This was a time when Khruschev was attempting to take the USSR from Stalinism into a place more kind to its citizens. There is a review by Philip Rahv of Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, now allowed publication after Khruschev’s public revelation of the gulag. Rahv thinks it’s a pretty good book although, he sniffs, it’s too small to be a “great work of art”. (Philip: how big is the “Mona Lisa”? How large a canvas did Van Gogh require for his sunflowers? How many pages does a writer have to fill to have a great work, as opposed to a small one? Aren’t you conflating two different meanings of the word “great”?) But this is interesting:

Thank God, the world is still unpredictable after all. No one, not even the most astute Kremlinologist among us, could possibly have foreseen that the party-hierarchs would be prevailed upon to permit the publication of a work so devastating in its implications.

There is also a review of several works on the Soviet economy, which Khruschev was also trying to reform, bringing in experiments with computer models and profit-making. The review does not mention these but is more interested in the question of how much the USSR is spending on its military — this is, after all, only a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Khruschev’s experiments failed and when a great drought devastated the 1963 grain harvest, the USSR was in dire economic straits. Brezhnev and Kosygin replaced him in 1964. The economy went back on a military footing without much regard for consumers. Cultural expression was suppressed and Solzhenitsyn exiled. But in the 1980s a group of Soviet officials took Khruschev’s attempted reforms to heart and, well, the world is still unpredictable after all.
There are a couple of essays on American politics. Dennis Wrong reviews James MacGregor Burns’ The Deadlock of Democracy. Burns has a list of ailments in the American political system and a list of remedies for them. Some of the ailments are familiar: a minority in Congress can stifle legislation, districts are often gerrymandered, there are barriers to voting, and so on. Burns proposes some Constitutional amending to cure these ills. Wrong is not so certain that this will help. What is certain is that no such reforms happened then and are unlikely to take place any time soon.

Arthur Schlesinger and Kennedy [Life Magazine], Dwight MacDonald [Corbis]

Morley Callaghan, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer

There is lots of other material here — forty-four contributors, including great poets, critics, novelists, essayists, but there’s no point going on about that. One last review deserves mention — I suspect it will be the one essay most reprinted from this issue of the NYRB: Norman Mailer’s review of Morley Callaghan’s memoir, That Summer In Paris. Mailer waves aside most of the book as uninteresting — memoirs are an “inferior art” — but it contains “a superb short story”. The story, which has been widely discussed, concerns a boxing match between Callaghan and Ernest Hemingway, refereed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that took place that summer in Paris. Hemingway had a penchant for calling smaller men into the ring and showing off by pounding them — later on, he did this with Cuban fishermen — but he made an error by taking on Callaghan, who had done some real boxing. So, Callaghan knocks Hemingway down when Fitzgerald, the time-keeper, over-extends the round. Hemingway over-reacts and snarls at Fitzgerald, who later asks Callaghan to apologize, and so on. A real literary match here, folks. But Mailer gets to the meat of the situation:

It is possible Hemingway lived every day of his life in the style of the suicide. What a great dread is that. It is the dread which sits in the silences of his short declarative sentences. At any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonizing demands of his courage. For the life of his talent must have depended on living in a psychic terrain where one must either be brave beyond one’s limit, or sicken closer into a bad illness, or, indeed, by the ultimate logic of the suicide, must advance the hour in which one would make another reconnaissance into one’s death.
… It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him. What is more likely the truth of his long odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all of his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods. It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself. There are two kinds of brave men. Those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will. It is the merit of Callaghan’s long anecdote that the second condition is suggested to be Hemingway’s own.

And that, possibly, is the critical insight that will last longest from this first issue of the great New York Review of Books.
Dwight MacDonald wanted to be part of a small cultural community and the New York Review of Books was put together by a coterie who all knew one another and had worked together and sometimes were passionately riven, just as MacDonald fantasized. Many had published or participated in the Partisan Review. The Partisan Review had several editors among the reviewers here, MacDonald and DuPee among them, and The Partisan Review Anthology, a collection of essays culled from twenty-five years of publication, is reviewed in this issue.
The PR was godparent to the NYRB. But fairly quickly, the New York Review grew to include all kinds of writers from all over the world, many of whom have never met one another. The world is too large for the tiny fiefdoms of MacDonald’s fantasy. A recent article by Timothy Garton Ash [paywall] says that contributors to the NYRB belong to a “republic of letters” and states that the NYRB stands in for a European review of books, of which there are none so good. (Readers of the London Review of Books may need to be reminded that, during the London Times lockout in 1979, the NYRB founded the London Review. First issues were inserts in the NYRB.) And the NYRB has outgrown silliness like typing genre literature, television, and comics as not being worthy of notice. The Fiftieth Anniversary issue includes a review of George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice books and the television series Game of Thrones. Margaret Atwood has reviewed Elmore Leonard (favorably) in its pages and comics artists like Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman are taken seriously. (Though the NYRB wound up with a useless clunker of a review when they assigned Harold Bloom to review Robert Crumb’s Genesis.) Right now the magazine has the highest circulation it has ever had — about 150,000 — even as other periodicals are dying. It still produces essays worth reading, whether you agree with them or not, and hopefully will continue doing so for another fifty years or more.

Notes:
reprint of the first issue of the New York Review of Books
50th anniversary issue
Washington Post article on the 50th anniversary

Some of the books mentioned above:
Dwight MacDonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Classic Comparative Study of Race Relations in the Americas
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
W.H.Auden, The Dyer’s Hand
David Jones, Anathemata, The
Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris
Arthur Schlesinger, The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage: American Liberalism in the 1960s

In 1946, the Argentine Navy, far from the most intelligent military outfit you’ve ever heard of, got a bright idea. They would bring in some Canadian beavers, set them loose in Tierra del Fuego, and then the local folk would profit off of selling their fur. Tierra del Fuego, at the very tip of South America, is an island inhabited then by only a few people, mostly natives who would love to rake in the fortunes possible in the fur trade. What could go wrong?

Release of Manitoba beavers into Tierra del Fuego, 1946. [LambAir.com]

Argentine beaver trying to figure out why the trees are gone. [WorldNomads.com]

Beaver fast-food joint in Ushuaia. Unfortunately, they don’t serve beaver. Nobody there finds it palatable. [JonsAdventure]

This used to be forest, now it’s bog and dead snags, thanks to beavers. [JonsAdventure]

The movie poster below is for a 1951 film version of Marcel Aymé’s story “The Man Who Walked Through Walls”, first published in 1943 while German forces occupied France. No doubt a great many people wished they had the ability to pass through walls then.

Poster for the 1951 film version of The Man Who Walked Through Walls. Poster by surrealist Felix Labisse.

Before the War, Marcel Aymé had written several novels set in rural France. These were disdained by the snobbish Parisian literary establishment as was Aymé’s style, which incorporated Anglicisms and the patois of the Franche-Comte, where he was born in 1902. Even his children’s stories, collected as Stories from the Perching Cat [Les Contes du chat perché], were savaged by these critics. It didn’t help that Aymé often satirized the bourgeoisie and their hypocrisy. He ignored the critics and kept on writing.
Aymé was apolitical. He had tried to escape conscription but, at the age of eighteen, was taken into the army where he served as part of the French occupation of Germany in 1920. Before 1935, Aymé was considered a leftist, but in that year he signed a petition opposing French action against Italy for the invasion of Ethiopia. The petition was essentially a pacifist plea but contained troubling words that called the Ethiopians a “pack of tribes” and suggested that Italy was bringing Western civilization to savages. More to the point, the petition noted that France had a large empire of its own and had no business criticizing other nations until it cleaned up its own house.

Marcel Ayme, 1940s.

The petition was signed by a number of right-wing intellectuals, including many connected with Action française, an extreme right publication that had begun life as an anti-Dreyfus journal. Other signatories included many French fascists including Robert Brasillach (of whom, more later). The petition was denounced by many on the left as a document of “fascist intellectualism”. It should be noted that, at this time, there were pacifists on both the left and the right (yes) and that anti-bourgeois sentiments were common to both. The left tended to be secular and republican with Marxism the core philosophy; the right was Catholic and royalist with a philosophical bent toward fascism.
France had a great many outright fascists who admired Mussolini’s model and there were many more who shared certain principles — nationalism, militarism, anti-semitism — with them. After the collapse of the French army in 1940, many of these became supporters of the Vichy puppet regime. Some openly proclaimed their satisfaction with the German conquest. “A divine surprise,” Charles Maurras called it.
German occupation of France was intended to be a soft affair, one that wouldn’t upset the citizens too much, and for a while, it was. Independent France still existed — on paper — in Vichy, which gave people an excuse to go along with the Germans, since it meant protecting France. The Germans put Francophiles in charge of occupied Paris – some were married to Frenchwomen — and they were quite sensitive to French feelings. French artists in particular had freedoms not known in other parts of occupied Europe.
Some French residents, such as Gertrude Stein, actively took up the cause of Marshall Pétain, “the savior of France” and head of the Vichy regime.  Stein translated a work of Petain’s into English. This book, which included long anti-semitic diatribes, was meant for publication in America. Stein wrote a foreword in which she compared Pétain to George Washington and Benjamin Franklin — in other words, the Nazi collaborator was the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers. Stein took up residence in Vichy territory. Her Paris apartment, full of priceless artwork, was sealed. When the Gestapo decided to open the seal, Picasso warned Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, who was unofficial Vichy Minister for Culture and Stein’s protector.  Faÿ ordered the Gestapo away. The Pétain book was never distributed in America.
Some others, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, intensified the expression of their thoughts. Céline, who was about as nasty an anti-semite as could be found anywhere, continued a series of anti-Jewish books that he had begun before the War. André Gide, by no means a fascist, defended the first, pre-war, volume as over-the-top black humor. And it may be possible to read Trifles for a Massacre [Bagatelles pour un massacre] that way. But, in 1941 when Céline was still openly calling for the elimination of all Jews, the joke was hard to find:

Beating up Jews (by Jew I mean anyone with a Jew for a grandparent, even one!) won’t help, I’m sure, that’s just going around in circles, it’s a joke, you’re only beating around the bush if you don’t grab them by the strings [tefillins], if you don’t strangle them with them. [via Tony Judt in the NYRB]

“Tefillen” are the straps used to attach phylactery prayer-boxes, as on this Israeli soldier. Cocteau is saying that they should be used to strangle Jews.

Céline was a friend to Aymé who had championed his work in the past. Both satirized the bourgeosie, both played with language, though Aymé was a humanist who tended to smile at human foibles while Céline seemed to desire the kind of dark destruction that appealed to fascist romantics. But Aymé was loyal to his friends.
Meanwhile, others determined to resist. Albert Camus saw a friend shot by the Germans and came to the conclusion that sometimes one had to make a choice, a decision about which side you were on. And he wrote in his journal about Vichy, “Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.”
Jean Texcier wrote his pamphlet “Advice to the Occupied” which gave instructions on dealing with the Germans: “Have no illusions. They are not tourists, they are conquerors…” Don’t deliberately insult these conquerors to their face, give them a light if they ask for it, but do not befriend them, don’t invite them into your home.
There were incidents — violent confrontations — in the countryside from the beginning of the occupation, but these were unorganized. By the end of 1940, a number of groups of resistants had formed across France, some were Communist, some ex-army, some criminals, some adventure-seekers, and some were ordinary folk, unwilling to put up with an occupation that was becoming, outside Paris, more and more bloody. In early 1941, these groups began to cooperate and function as a united Resistance.

Combat office in 1944. Camus at left, Andre Malraux in uniform at right.

The Resistance published its own journal, Combat, which was staffed by many of the leading lights of French literature, in particular Albert Camus, but also Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Raymond Aron, and others. At the same time, the right-wing Je suis partout [I am everywhere -- scary, right?], with Robert Brasillach as editor, displaced Action française as the main organ for Vichy collaborators. Aymé wrote four articles for this journal in 1942. None were political.
The resistants’ war became more and more bloody. German troops were killed in the streets of Paris, resulting in the kind of reprisals already familiar in the countryside. The occupation became more onerous to ordinary citizens: France had to pay the costs of the German occupation and currency values were rigged to favor the deutschmark. Most of France’s gross domestic product flowed back to the Third Reich. Young Frenchmen were drafted into the Labor Corps. And the arrest and transport of Jews began in July of 1942, with more than 70,000 French Jews murdered by the War’s end.

Arno Breker sculpting Cocteau.

As things became more serious, the casual disdain for political affairs displayed by certain artists dissolved into fear. Picasso became afraid and begged Jean Cocteau for help. Cocteau was a fascist sympathizer who contacted Arno Breker, “Hitler’s favorite sculptor”, on Picasso’s behalf. According to Breker, he kept Picasso from being shot. Meanwhile, the Resistance had become popular and Jean Marais, Cocteau’s lover, begged to be allowed to join. No one trusted him, though, either because of his connection to Cocteau or because he was a blabbermouth, and Marais never found a resistant willing to recruit him.

Jean Marais, Cocteau at rear, 1939.

In 1943, Marcel Aymé published a book of short pieces titled  The Man Who Walked Through Walls [Le Passer-muraille]. The stories are mostly fantastic and satiric. Aymé’s method is to take a single fantastic situation and then push it to a climax.
“The Man Who Walks Through Walls” is the story of a civil servant named Dutilleul who, at the age of 42, discovers that he can walk through walls. This power does not interest him, in fact it bothers him, so Dutilleul goes to a doctor who prescribes medication that will take away this unwanted talent. Dutilleul takes one tablet, then shuts the rest of the pills away. He continues using doors and ignoring walls until his boss is replaced by someone disagreeable. Eventually, Dutilleul is driven to use his power to drive this new boss to the point of madness. After he is driven from the scene, Dutilleul finds himself with a taste for more devilment. He becomes a thief and eventually reveals himself to the police, who, of course, cannot hold him in a cell. Dutilleul relishes his notoriety. He takes a lover, whose husband locks her in at night, and his life is going well until, one day, he has a headache and pops a pill he finds in the cupboard. It is one of those that the doctor prescribed for him. He goes to meet his lover and winds up stuck in the wall, unable to move.
But the most interesting story in the collection is “The Ration-Card”["La Carte"]. It is presented as a diary:

There’s an absurd rumor going around the neighborhood about new austerity
measures. In order to ward off shortages and insure a greater output from the
laboring element of the population, there will supposedly be executions of
non-productive consumers: the elderly, the retired, those of independent means,
the unemployed and other non-essential persons. Deep down, I feel that this
measure would be quite fair.

But the diarist discovers that:

…putting all the non-essential to death is out of the question. The plan will
simply cut back on their time alive. Maleffroi explained to me that they will be
entitled to so many days of existence per month according to their degree of
uselessness.

So people thought to be useless will have less time alive. The narrator is allowed only fifteen days a month of life. He is indignant, but is told that, after all, writers are useless. The narator goes to pick up his ration card:

I waited three hours in line at the 18th district city hall to get my time
ticket. We were there, lined up in double file, around two thousand unfortunate
souls dedicated to the appetite of the laboring masses. And this was just the
first little batch. About half of the number looked to be elderly. There were
pretty young women whose faces were languid with sadness and who seemed to sigh:
“I don’t want to die yet”. … In the waiting lines, I recognized, not without emotion, and, I must admit, with
secret satisfaction, comrades from Montmartre, writers and artists: Céline, Gen
Paul, Daragnès, Fauchois, Soupault, Tintin, d’Esparbès and others. Céline was in
a dark mood. He said that it was just one more maneuver of the Jews, but I think
that on this particular point, his bad mood led him astray. As a matter of fact,
in the terms of the decree, it allows Jews, without distinction for age, sex, or
activity, one-half day of existence per month. On the whole, the crowd was
irritated and tumultuous. The many officers assigned to security duty treated us
with great disdain, clearly considering us the scum of the earth. Again and
again, as we grew tired of this long wait, they appeased our impatience with
kicks in the ass.

By now the reader must recognize this story as an allegory of current events. The Nazis called those they condemned to death — cripples, the insane, the old, the feeble-minded — as “useless eaters”. As for the artists, well, we have met Céline, the painter Gen Paul was not a fascist, and Soupault was on the run from the Gestapo, arranging a Resistance radio network. So, one must ask, how did this manage to get published in occupied Paris in 1943? Presumably, because the Nazi censors nodded when presented with fantasy. There may be an answer in the French Gestapo files for 1943 but these are sealed for several decades yet.
Anyway, the ration cards and the life they represent begin to turn up on the black market. Some can buy extra days of existence. The narrator adds five days to June, existing to the 35th. Eventually, with the wealthy buying up all existence and extending their days for many months, the authorities concede that the plan has not aided the economy one bit and they discontinue the cards.

People rummaging through scraps at a market in occupied Paris. [photo by André Zucca, who took pictures for the Germans.]

I have always been horrified by the death penalty, and I have judged that as an individual the least I could do was not participate in it, even by abstention….This is a scruple that I suppose would make the friends of Brasillach laugh. And as for him, if his life is spared and if an amnesty frees him as it probably will in one or two years, I would like him to be told the following as concerns my letter: it is not for him that I join my signature with yours, it is not for the writer,  whom I consider to be worth nothing, nor for the individual, for whom I have the strongest contempt.

Mauriac took the petition, with Camus’ signature, personally to De Gaulle. But, in January, 1945, Brasillach was shot. His last words: “Vive la France.” He was the only writer to be executed during the Purification. A number of others were sentenced to death, although de Gaulle commuted Pétain’s sentence to life imprisonment. Aymé was widely attacked and accused of collaboration. The Ethiopian petition and the articles in Je suis partout were mentioned, but the real crime was  Aymé’s friendship with fascists like Brasillach and Céline. The charges were not pressed. Still, Aymé was labeled with the quasi-official term “blame without [overt] display” (“blâme sans affichage”), which I take to be something like “thought crime”.
In 1945 many claimed to have been resistants or anti-Vichy, whose resistance was, at best, minimal. Gertrude Stein, for instance, claimed to have aided the Resistance, though evidence for that is difficult to find. She was certainly, at minimum, a Pétainist. Some felt that the best way to proclaim their own resistance to the Germans was to attack anyone else who might be suspected of any kind of collaboration.
Aymé was disgusted with this kind of hypocrisy, which, at that time, might mean a matter of life and death. His politics were personal and extended to those around him. He despised grand organizations and causes. You not betray a friend or, for that matter, any human being for the sake of an ideal.
In 1948 he published Uranus, a novel describing the events in a newly liberated village. Young Communists murder  social democrats and Trotskyites in the street, and sometimes they kill other people for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. In one scene, townspeople who had been prisoners of war return. The Marseillaise is played and the mayor makes a speech while five Communists locate a man in the group that they call a Pétainist. They throw him on the ground and begin to beat him. Everyone stands aside and the mayor continues his welcoming speech as the man is beaten to death. At the novel’s center is an alcoholic tavern-keeper, Leopold, a sympathetic character who winds up being executed.

Gerard Depardieu as Leopold in the 1990 film version of Uranus.

Uranus is the third novel in a trilogy that depicts life in a French Village from the late 1930s to 1944. Neither of the first two, published in 1941 and 1942, has the harsh bitterness expressed in Uranus. (Although the first, Travelingue, contains sharp satire of leftists during the Popular Front.) Tony Judt calls Uranus hard-bitten and cynical, and puts it in company with the writing of others at the time who said much the same sort of thing.
Even a non-cynical person could not fail to find something corrupt in the offer of the Legion of Honor to Aymé in 1949. He turned it down, warning against “the extreme lightness with which [this honor] was thrown at the head of a bad Frenchman like me…”
In that same year, Aymé took up the cause of another writer, Maurice Bardèche, a scholar of 19th Century literature and Brasillach’s brother-in-law, who was accused of excusing war crimes. Bardèche was definitely a fascist sympathizer before the War and after it, but was not an active collaborator. He was sentenced to a year in prison, something that made him more defiant, and he became a Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist.
In 1950, Céline was convicted in absentia of “acts harming the national defense”, a much less damaging charge than treason. He was sentenced to a year in prison, which he served in Denmark, where he was living. In 1951, his lawyer negotiated an amnesty for Céline, and he returned to France. During this period, Aymé wrote pleas and letters and circulated petitions  to aid his friend.

Céline, at left, with Aymé in 1955.

As Camus had foreseen, the harsh treatment of collaborators had diminished to the point where pardons became the norm. But who could have predicted, in 1945, that eight years later it would become a crime to label anyone a collaborator? By the end of 1951, more than 50,000 French citizens had been charged with various offenses under the Purification Acts. After that, the French government came to think that there was more harm than good to be found in continuing the program, so the official position was completely reversed. Anyway, France had more immediate problems: inability to form stable governments, a stuttering economy, relations with the U.S., the Cold War, and the collapse of the French empire, first in Indo-China, then in Algeria. Men and women who had been united in Resistance found themselves split on these new questions.
It is very wrong for anyone, who has never had to face something like occupation by invaders, to make easy judgements on the actions of those who underwent this experience. Still, it is necessary to examine such historical events for whatever lessons and moral instruction may be taken from them. One may believe, with Camus, that sometimes a person must take sides, with all the moral complications that may ensue from acts of resistance and rebellion. Artists are not immune to criticism because they are artists, they still have a duty to act. But Camus himself came under fire for his position, or lack of it, on Algeria. Algerian-born, he decried the use of indiscriminate violence to spur revolution. He said that, if a bus were bombed and his mother killed, then he would be on his mother’s side, not the bombers’. This runs close to Aymé’s personal politics.
Texceira’s instructions on how to deal with occupation forces boiled down to: don’t befriend them but don’t antagonize them for no reason except to make yourself look good. In fact, that (IMO) is the program followed by most of those in occupied France. This approach does not rule out resistance or armed rebellion, but it does try to apply some common sense to the situation faced by ordinary people.

The Ayme memorial by Jean Marais in Montmarte. [photo: Andre Derain via philibert.sportblog.fr]

Notes:

The only English translation of the collection, The Man Who Walked Through Walls, is this one.
Two of the stories (and one from another collection) with the original French versions, are available on-line here.
The 1951 film version of Passer-muraille is a slapstick comedy with little relation to Aymé’s story. You can watch the entire movie here.
Les contes du chat perché is not available in English. The stories concern two girls spending time at a farm. They speak to animals and have adventures. Some of the stories have been adapted into stage plays, animated movies, and comic books.
Uranus is unavailable in English. The 1990 film is good but also has no current DVD version with subtitles. A subtitled version sometimes plays on television, though. Watch for it.

An excellent account of artists in occupied Paris is Alan Riding’s And the Show Went on: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris

This article by Tony Judt surveys several books about France from the thirties to the fifties.
Gertrude Stein’s Vichy role is summarized here.
Céline’s anti-semitic work is reviewed here.

It’s twelve days or thereabouts until Christmas, so here’s a visual graph of all those birds and things in that song:

This chart comes from Niege Borges of Visual Lys. I found it via Nag On The Lake, one of the sites I visit daily.

Arthur’s Seat is an extinct volcano just outside Edinburgh. The Seat and other peaks are located in Holyrood Park, a place for tourists and hikers now, but in 1836, sheep grazed here and locals hunted rabbits. Five boys were out after rabbits in the summer of 1836 when they opened up a recess in the rocks and discovered a stack of small wooden coffins, each less than four inches long by an inch wide. The boys threw the small boxes at each other, trashing some of them, but the next day one of their teachers made his way up the mountain and recovered those coffins that he could find. He took them home and pried off the lids to discover tiny wooden bodies. Over the next one and three-quarters centuries, people have speculated on just what these coffins are all about and why they were left where they were.

Arthur’s Seat from Edinburgh. [Wikimedia Commons]

a mother carv[ed] them for stillborn or miscarried children: portraits of the sons she never got to raise, made from the toys they never got to play with.

Now, it is not unknown for a woman to have seventeen children, but to have them all die at birth or in childhood seems such cruel happenstance that my mind simply rejects it.

The eight coffins from Arthur’s Seat. [National Museum of Scotland]

Arthur’s Seat has certainly had more than its share of violent death: the slaughter of rebellious apprentices at Murder Acre in 1677, a murder-suicide at Hangman’s Crag in 1769, deaths accompanying various Scots attempts to rid themselves of English rule, a mutiny of local soldiers which had one direct death in 1778 and many indirect after the lads were shipped off to India. Corpses are found from time to time, some are possibly those of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men, some are far more recent.
Once the site of a monastery, the area was considered by locals to be a place of sanctuary and various outcast individuals lived there on the fringe of society. A furnished cave from the 18th Century has been uncovered and explained as a smuggler’s hideout or an outlaw refuge, but any number of possibilities come to mind, a priest-hole, for instance, or a safehouse for Jacobite spies.
The first decades of the 19th Century, as Scotland modernized, were troubling to many locals. Horse-drawn railways constructed to bring coal into Edinburgh proliferated in the 1830s, and others were constructed to the harbors at Granton and Leith. Edinburgh residents were pleased to use the railroads for excursion purposes but were skeptical about the benefits of improving transport to the harbor towns. Leith opened its first harbor in 1806 and its second in 1817 — though it lacked effective city governance for a decade and became notorious as a hangout for thieves and ruffians. Some locals believed that the harbor towns were draining life from the region as they became embarkation points for New World emigrants.
Edinburgh was surpassed by Glasgow as Scotland’s largest city in the 1820s and there was a sense of decline in the city. The “Scottish Enlightenment” had ended before 1800 with the death of such luminaries as David Hume and Adam Smith and such soon-to-be-famous Scots as Sir Walter Scott had yet to make their mark. There was some anxiety about the great changes that were taking place.

Rabbit on Athur’s Seat [via Crafty Green Poet]

Here’s what is known and unknown about them:
1– It is unknown exactly where the coffins were found. Various widely separathed places near Arthur’s Seat have been named. Whinny Hill, an eroded volcanic cone to the east, seems a likely candidate, though a place south-east of Arthur’s Seat is favored by some.
2– The coffins were in a niche (probably not man-made) in a hillside. Pieces of slate, perhaps three of them, were used to cover the opening. Reports that these were headstone-shaped are (I think) embellishments.
3–The coffins were arranged in two stacks of eight, and one coffin, possibly the beginning of a new stack, next to them. This description is apparently from one or more of the boys who discovered them but we have no first-hand reports, nor even the names, of these lads.

4– The coffins are in different stages of decay. Whether this means that they were placed in the niche at different times or simply suffered different amounts of moisture and weathering is unknown.
5–There was no real examination of the niche nor the slate covers. It is possible that no one but the boys actually saw either of these.
6–The eight coffins that have lasted through the years are carved from Scots pine. A knife, possibly with a hooked blade, was used to cut away a recess in a 95mm/3.74inch by 23mm/.9inch block of wood. In one case the knife blade has actually cut through the coffin bottom. Since a woodworker would have (presumably) used a chisel or gouge rather than a knife, it is conjectured that the maker(s) was/were a leatherworker or practiced some other trade requiring a very sharp knife. The 19th Century Edinburgh directories on-line show a number of boot and shoemakers and there is a large saddlery warehouse as well. (The directory for 1835 is not on-line but is available at museums and libraries in the area.)
7– The coffin lids are decorated with pieces of tin. Since tin was used to make shoe-buckles, this points toward a shoemaker.
8– Some of the coffins have rounded corners while others are square. It is conjectured that two carvers were at work.
9– Two of the coffins were originally painted or stained red.
10– One coffin is lined with paper made after 1780.

Figure outside coffin. Note darkening (paint) around feet. [National Museum of Scotland]

Notes:
The best article on-line is this one by Mike Dash, originally published at Fortean Times.
Article in the July 16, 1836 Scotsman (“The Logic-chair”) describing the discovery of the coffins is available on-line, but it costs..
The 1994 study by Simpson and Menefee is in the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, available for £4 plus postage.

Best known for Pogo, Walt Kelly was a star artist for Disney in the 1940s. He drew centaurs for Fantasia (silly people added bras to the female centaurs later) and comic books for the Dell publishing company who printed a number of Disney titles. He turned out work at an alarming rate and Dell actually gave him credit for some comics — a rare thing in those days. Among the titles that Kelly worked on were Santa Claus Funnies and some Christmas one-offs, but the book close to his heart was Animal Comics, where Pogo Possum got his start.
Early on Kelly put his characters in Christmas stories. Here’s a few pages from Animal Comics December issue, 1945. Note that Pogo looked alot different then he did later, and his personality is also different: he’s more cunning and sly. The little boy in the story is Bumbazine, gentle voice of reason when dealing with the animals in the swamp. Later, Bumbazine would be dropped from the comic and his personality shifted to Pogo. [Most images in this post can be made bigger by clicking on them.]

The story concept — putting on a Christmas party for the orphans — is one that Kelly used over and over. Although Albert is identified here as an orphan, a few years later Pogo calls Albert a fake when he claims to be orphaned — it seems his parents are travelling circus performers. Porky Pine becomes the swamp’s token orphan. Although Kelly often re-hashed material, he never bothered too much with continuity.
Kelly’s most famous Christmas trope was introduced in 1948 during a brief comic strip run in a short-lived paper. I mean, of course, the carol, “Deck Us All With Boston Charlie”. Here’s a much later version [from The Return of Pogo, originally published 1965]:

The lyrics changed over the years; possibly the key version is the one in Songs of the Pogo which you can read here  in its entirety.
“Boston Charlie” was a hit, of sorts. People argued about the lyrics and tried to find meaning in them. Kelly was bemused by this and often said that the song was what it was at any given moment and didn’t mean anything. Of course, no one paid any attention any more then Charlie Manson paid attention when people said Helter Skelter” was just a pop song.
Kelly did other carols, too:

Good King Sauerkraut, Look out!
On your feets uneven.
While the snoo lay round about…
“Snoo? What’s snoo?”
“Not Much. What’s snoo with you?”

And he tackled this gem [from Pogo Sunday Brunch, originally appeared 1955]:

Then there was Clement Moore’s poem [from Pogo Sunday Parade, originally published 1954]:

That Sunday page was originally in color and you will be able to see it in all its glory in the Fantagraphics complete Pogo comic strips series when it is printed — volume four, I think, but maybe five.[Pogo, Vol. 1: Complete Syndicated Comic Strips ]
But Kelly’s own favorite Christmas carol was probably the one that he used on his Christmas cards, year after year.

via medialink 17

Merry Christmas everyone, be merry and never give in to dismay.

[If you want more Pogo, check out Whirled of Kelly which reprints lots of stuff.]

Here’s a lookback at some of this year’s posts which seemed to deserve postscripts.

Is North Korea Weird or Is It Us?

That was the question I posed on September 5. There were reports that Kim Jong-un had executed former girlfriend Hyon Song-wol and a number of other musicians for pornography and bible-reading. I questioned whether the reports were true or if North Korea had become just another heading in the News of the Weird section, usually given over to Urban Legends. Well, Hyon Song-wol has not been heard from since last summer. Meanwhile, Kim has released videotapes of the trial of his uncle which resulted in a death sentence. In fact, Kim seems to have executed a number of people recently. So, I have to conclude, it is North Korea and not us. Kim seems to be ruling in the Stalinist mode: be totally paranoid and nurture absolute fear among your courtiers. Rest In Peace Hyon Song-wol.

Upcoming Episodes of Law and Order

This February post talked about three recent crime cases that I thought would make for good episodes of Law and Order — the fact that the show was cancelled three years ago notwithstanding. There were three cases mentioned: first, the murder of self-professed “gun nut” Keith Ratliff; second, the case of cannibal cop, Gilberto Valle, which was then being tried; third, the case of ex-cop Christopher Dorner who had gone on a mad killing spree in California– he was being hunted when the post was written.

The murder of Keith Ratliff has not been solved. Police executed a search warrant on associate Kyle Myer for illegal explosives but found nothing illegal. It is speculated that Myer is a suspect in the murder, although no evidence of official suspicion of the man has been produced.

Gilberto Valle was found guilty of kidnapping conspiracy, which carries a possible life sentence, and a less-serious charge of misusing a government computer. He was due to be sentenced in June but sentencing has been postponed while his lawyers try to get him a new trial.

Christopher Dorner was found dead of gunshot wounds after his cabin was besieged by police, who deny setting it on fire. The fatal gunshot may have been self-inflicted. During the manhunt, the police shot up several vehicles belonging to innocent people. The State of California paid out several million dollars in damages to a 71-year-old woman and her daughter who were both wounded.

Left to right: Myer, possible suspect; Valle,guilty but hoping for new trial; Dorner, shot to death in burning cabin; Bergwall, still institutionalized

Thomas Quick and Sture Bergwall: What Next?

Although Bergwall was cleared of his final murder charge months ago, he is still being held in a psychiatric facility. His blog complains about the food there and promises to give lyrical descriptions of freedom when he is released, although Swedish authorities would clearly rather not do that. Bergwall remains in limbo.

“The Kreutzer Sonata” and The Moonlight, part 1

Eventually I’ll get around to part 2. I came across a pile of writings about Cary’s work that I want to digest first.

After filming all those Tolkien movies, there were a bunch of sets left standing in New Zealand. These have been turned into tourist attractions. A lot of people will pay to tour a hobbit house.

Peter Jackson outside a NZ hobbit house. [ABC]

This one may be closed down by neighbors because the builders did not get permits and ignored local building codes. (Article and film here.):

This one from Montana which has a hobbit village all its own):

This structure by artist Zube at Whistler, B.C. pre-dates the Jackson films and was called “The Mushroom House”. It sold for $3.5 Million:

So, of course, there are more Mushroom Houses. You can tour this one (if you’re willing to put up with awful commentary by the realtors trying to sell the place), it is billed as an “Art Icon House”:

Now there is something to be said for living in an objet d’art and a whole lot to be said against it — does the roof leak? what kind of plumbing does it have? and, most important, how do I clean this sucker? It’s one thing to spill something awful on your living-room floor, it’s something else to consider that you have just ruined a masterpiece. But, hey! Isn’t this a swell looking place:

House built by Pennsylvania architects to house Tolkien memorabilia of a collector. That’s right, no one lives there! See above link for interior shots — they are cool!

But why do these dwellings have such appeal? Perhaps it’s all about curved lines, which are generally more interesting to look at than blocky forms. We live our lives, away from home, in cubicles, so why not rest our psyches, along with our bodies at home? Well, there are reasons — the shapes of furniture and objects that need to be stored and… But say, look at this:

Staircase at Gaudi’s Casa Battlo.

The curviest of architects was Antonio Gaudi who based his lines on natural forms. They are compelling:

Fireplace at Casa Battlo by Gaudi.[©Ignasi de Solá-Morales]

One of the two houses completed at Park Guell, originally meant to be a housing development in Barcelona. [via kkmusic]

Hobbiton in Montana. Possibly a hobbit motel. A little more grass and less gravel, a few more closeup trees,  and less of the wretched murals and tschotkes — you might have something.

But I don’t want to speak against other people’s feelings about these structures, especially when I find some of the New Zealand hobbit houses so inviting: