Today's Place to Daydream about: Blois, France

Blois is an ancient town on the Loire River in central France. 

Most people who visit are on tours of the famous chateaux of the Loire Valley, an amazing collection of Renaissance palaces. The building of these got started when Henry V of England conquered northern France in the early 1400s, forcing the French court south to the Loire. Even after they retook Paris French kings continued to spend a lot of time in Blois, Tours, and nearby country retreats. It was not until the time of Louis XIV that French royalty mostly abandoned this region. 

The old town of Blois, as you will see, is very much a monument to this time: the place may be much older, but almost all the old buildings you can see were built between 1450 and 1700. It therefore has very much the look of the early modern period.

There is one major remnant of medieval Blois: the Tour-Beauvoir. This was the keep of a 12th-century castle that was later incorporated into the walls of the growing town and then used as a prison in to the 19th century.

Blois has an impressive cathedral, but except for its foundations little of it is medieval; construction of the current facade and bell tower began in 1544. You can see how the lingering Gothic of the late middle ages got mixed up with Renaissance neoclassicism.

The structure suffered heavily in the 16th-century Wars of Religion, when Calvinists broke most of the windows. So most of the details you can see date to the 17th century and later.

But it is for palaces, not cathedrals, that the Loire Valley is known, and this is equally true in Blois. The royal palace here grew over the years, as you can see, a series of monarchs each adding his own touch. 

Here you can enter the world of The Three Musketeers, of kings like Francis I and Henry IV, of queens like Marie de Medici. 

The king's bedchamber, as established under Francis I, with Henry IV's bed.

And the queen's.

The palace has famous gardens, including a rose garden.

But what really drew me to Blois was these images of the streets in the old town. Many of the houses here date to the 1500s and 1600s. The gray stone buildings and gray stone pavements speak to me of a the past, especially when photographed under the gray skies so common along Europe's Atlantic fringe.

I imagine merchants and their wives in black cloth and starched white ruffs, gentlemen and ladies in blue and red. I hear horses' hooves, rattling wagons, the voices of market sellers, criers, stevedores, and beggars.

I wish I were there, hearing the footsteps of the Ancien Regime echoing off the stones around me.

Did Michael Avenatti Deserve This?

Michael Avenatti, the sleazeball lawyer who represented Stormy Daniels when she sued Donald Trump, then stole $300,000 from his client, ended up in prison for attempted extortion. He is now suing the government, saying that he was treated harshly in prison because of his public criticism of Donald Trump. Ok, you're thinking, this is Michael Avenatti, surely this is another one of his sleazeball stunts. But wait.

This is from the summary in the Times: 

Mr. Avenatti said in his claim that he had initially been held in solitary confinement in the Santa Ana Jail in Orange County and had then been taken to Manhattan and detained at the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center, much of that time in its most secure wing, 10 South.

Traditionally, 10 South was used to hold detainees charged with terrorism and other notorious crimes. Its most notable recent occupant was Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo.

“To take a man who has lived for decades without any criminal convictions, no history of violence,” Mr. Avenatti said in a phone interview with one of his lawyers on the line, “and within 72 hours put him under these conditions where he is housed in the most restrictive, diabolical unit in the entire United States for pretrial detainees, is unheard-of.”

While in detention, Avenatti

spent about 94 days in solitary confinement or under locked-down status. “For the vast majority of that time period, I was in 10 South,” he said in the interview.

Last July, when he was sentenced to two and a half years in the Nike case, Judge Paul G. Gardephe of Federal District Court observed that Mr. Avenatti had been held “in horrific conditions at the M.C.C. for more than three months, in solitary confinement for much of the time and in lockdown for nearly all of it.”

Mr. Avenatti said in the papers that while he was at the M.C.C., he had been prohibited from speaking with relatives or friends, he had been provided no access to fresh air or recreation, temperatures at night had been frigid, and he had been permitted to see the sky only once.

Some of the lockdown was due to Covid, but this really is extremely weird for a white collar crook. And in the category of adding insult to injury,

When he asked for reading material, he said in his claim, he was initially refused and was then provided one book: “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”

I bet the guards are still laughing about that one.

But, really, what is this about? Was Avenatti just an obnoxious jerk? Were the guards really down on him for going after Trump? Or maybe does he have some kind of organized crime connection that hasn't been made public yet, and the bosses used their prison connections to remind him of how much power they have to ruin the rest of his life if he talks about it?

I find the whole business very odd.

The Mästermyr Chest

The place known as Mästermyr, on the Swedish island of Gotland, used to be a lake. The lake was drained in the early twentieth century. In 1936 a farmer named Hugo Kraft was plowing up a new section of the resulting mucky fields when his plow struck something solid. It turned out to be this chest. The chest is 90 cm (35 in) long, 26 cm (10 in) wide and 24 cm (9.4 in) high. The chain that wrapped it was locked with a padlock.

For reasons I don't understand, it has proved difficult to date the chest; maybe something about the bog water messed up the radiocarbon profile? Anyway the best the Swedish Historical Museum can do is to say that this is "Viking period," 800-1100 AD.

The chest turned out to be full of tools. If the dating is right, this is the oldest major assemblage of European tools. There are more than 200 objects, including tools for both woodworking and metalworking as well as odds and ends like nails and lock parts.

One guess is that this belonged to a master shipwright, since they had to work with both wood and iron. Wikipedia has the complete list of the objects in the chest, which includes 3 padlocks, 7 hammers, forging tongs, axes, adzes, gouges, chisels, augers, wood files, metal files, and two draw knives. The Swedish Historical Museum has photographs of all of them.

One comment some experts have made is that this stuff looks an awful lot like a Roman tool chest would. The locks, in particular, are pretty much identical to Roman specimens. I don't find this surprising; everyday tools evolved very slowly until modern steel-making made super high-quality metal readily available, and still both a modern blacksmith's hammer and a modern carpenter's claw hammer look pretty much identical to Roman specimens.

One of the more unusual objects is the fire grid, for cooking over an outdoor fire.

So what is this stuff doing in an old lake? Opinions differ as to whether the chest was lost in a boat-wreck, or if it was intentionally hidden. If it was lost, it implies that the owner was itinerant, perhaps traveling from one noble house to another to build or repair ships and boats. However it got there, it is a remarkable look back at the craftsmen of the European past.

Links 14 January 2022

Georgia O'Keeffe, Dark Iris no.II, 1927

Investigating the child mummies of Palermo.

Kevin Drum wants to start thinking about what "living with Covid" would mean.

Also from Drum, a little news item about a smallpox outbreak in Massachusetts in 1932, complete with vaccine mandates and opposition to them.

At a place called Blackgrounds, British archaeologists unearth an Iron Age town that became a thriving trading settlement in the Roman period, part of the extraordinary archaeological effort tied to the HS2 train line project.

The bizarre story of the trebuchet that Cortez's men built at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

The coal piles in the historic mining town of Madrid, New Mexico are an environmental hazard, and the town is regularly flooded with coal-laden runoff. But the ruined landscape is key to the town's historic charm, which leads to it being a frequent movie set, so nobody can agree on what to do about the hazard. (Washington Post)

Metal animal sculptures by Korean artist Kang Dong Hyun.

The spiral lock was a complicated sort of fold that made it nearly impossible to open a letter without damage, which could therefore show that letters had not been read in transit. Europeans made much use of them between the 1500s and early 1800s. Much correspondence between monarchs was sent in this way. (New York Times)

Using big data and machine learning we can now make accurate scientific predictions without having any idea what the underlying theory might be. This makes many scientists uncomfortable; they want to know why. But does that make sense? And does machine learning show that our theories don't explain the world nearly as well as we would like to think?

New book asks the question, does Slaughterhouse Five prove Kurt Vonnegut had PTSD? But what kind of questions is that, anyway? (Washington Post)

Spanish badger digs up hoard of Roman coins that had been buried in a cave.

The woman whose hobby is buying letters, photographs, and other memorabilia at flea markets, then trying to find family members and return them. (Washington Post)

Study of English horse bones finds that medieval war horses were not very big by modern standards, 14 hands and shorter.

The Webb space telescope, sailing through space, has completed its complex unfolding operation, which made astronomers very nervous; there were hundreds of possible "failure points." The telescope still has a week to go to reach its final orbit, and then NASA says to expect 5 months of fine-tuning before we get the first real images.

Turkish archaeologists say they have identified the bones of a man and dog who were killed together by the tsunami caused by the eruption of Thera, around 1600 BC.

When Scott Alexander/Siskind first became a famous blogger, he complained a lot about how hard it is for nerdy guys to get dates, etc. Last week he got married, at the age of 37.

Jerry Coyne ponders an online list of 800 genders and ways of defining gender.

US college enrolments declining: Fall 2021 enrolment was down 465,000 from Fall 2020, or about 3%. Enrolment is down 6.6% since the Fall of 2019, the last pandemic-free semester, including an 11% decline in degree-seeking students at four-year colleges. (Washington Post)

David Hume's political conservatism was born from a deep suspicion of democratic multitudes. He was particularly worried that lies would prove more popular than the truth: “Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude.” I agree, but I don't think aristocratic elites have a better record on that score.

Virginia's new Republican Lieutenant Governor, Winsome Sears, is the first black woman to hold statewide office. An immigrant from Jamaica, she is mostly a moderate but has lately been a loud foe of wokeness and wants to "move on" from slavery.

Back in 1996, scientists examining a piece of Mars that fell to earth as a meteorite said that it contained evidence of Martian life. New study disagrees.

Nesting Icefish

Scientists on a German icebreaker called the RV Polarstern were towing an underwater camera across the floor of the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. They were investigating this area because comparatively warm water – 3.6 Celsius, or 38.5 Fahrenheit – was welling up there. They found that someone else was interested in this warm water: about 60 million nesting icefish. 

This species of icefish (Neopagetopsis ionah) lay about a 1,700 eggs in each of these seafloor nests, which the adults then tend. The fish had previously been known to nest in colonies, but the biggest colony seen before had about 40 nests. This one extended across 240 square kilometers of sea floor (93 square miles). It seems that the rising "warm" water is full of zooplankton, on which newly hatched icefish feed, so the adults were all trying to bring forth their babies into this rich environment.

Incidentally the crocodile icefish (including Neopagetopsis ionah) are the only vertebrates that completely lack hemoglobin. They just let oxygen dissolve in their blood plasma and somehow get by with that.

South American Gargoyles

Basílica del Voto Nacional – Basilica of the National Vow – is a neogothic church in Quito, Ecuador, construction begun in 1884 and still not finished. I just discovered today that its gargoyles are mostly native South American animals.

Nok Sculpture from Nigeria

According to various online sources, including the Met and Louvre, the modern story of Nok sculpture began in 1943. In that year, tin miners working near the village of Nok in central Nigeria dug up a terracotta head. As we will see in a minute, this cannot possibly have been the first time modern people stumbled across one of these, but anyway that was the find that launched scholarly investigation of these intriguing sculptures.

It can't have been the first because hundreds of fairly intact specimens are now known, along with tens of thousands of fragments. They turn up all over the region, especially in three major archaeological sites at Nok, Taruga, and Samun Dukiya. They do not seem to be from tombs; the best guess is that most were set up on the surface in various prominent places. Some must have been intentionally buried to have survived so well, but most were not and so ended up smashed.

The Nok culture seems to have been established before 1500 BC by immigrants who came into the region from the north, on the borders of the Sahara. That is where their main crop, millet, grows naturally. They were making iron by 1000 BC; there is no agreement as to whether this was a local discovery or diffusion from Egypt and Nubia. The oldest sculptures seem to date to around 900 BC, and they were made down to around 500 AD.

Just cruising around the internet over the past half an hour I have begun to doubt that end date, because objects in very similar styles are listed by museums with dates as late as 900 AD, and I found one wooden sculpture very much like these from the 19th century.

The most famous examples are human heads, so you often see these described as "Nok heads." But most of the heads are broken and used to have bodies, and there is lots of other stuff. The biggest human forms are nearly life sized, while the smallest heads are the size of cherries.

They are made of clay, built by coiling up a long clay rope just like many pots were made. The fine features were then carved into the partially dried form before firing.

Fascinating objects that tell us a lot about the people who made them, for example that they rode horses.

More are being found all the time, by both official and unofficial archaeologists, so the body of Nok work keeps growing, and we keep learning more about these ancient people.