Success to the Tryphena

Back in 2012 to 2014, archaeologists from what was then John Milner Associates excavated the site of the future Museum of the American Revolution in downtown Philadephia. The main thing they found was 12 "shaft features" – privies and wells – filled in between 1750 and 1820. They have now released their report (under their new name, the Commonwealth Heritage Group), along with a press release that has landed them back in the news. Above, a sample of the 82,000 artifacts they recovered.

They found a staggering array of 18th-century ceramics.

I remember Rebecca Yamin, the project director, saying at some conference that she thought she was too jaded to ever be blown away again by stuff she found, but this site blew her away.

Especially noteworthy were two items that must have come from a tavern. First this window. Enough of this was reconstructed to show that someone once scratched a quotation on it. It seems to be "We admire riches and are in love with idleness," a quotation from Addison's play Cato, which was a favorite of British Whigs and American patriots; Washington had it performed for his men at Valley Forge. It is also the source of another famous quotation from the Revolution, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

Even better is this punch bowl, painted with "Success to the Tryphena." The Tryphena was a ship that sailed regularly between Philadelphia and Liverpool. But this punch bowl was almost certainly created for a political meeting to celebrate a particular sailing in 1765, when the Tryphena carried Pennsylvania's petition against the Stamp Act to Britain. How amazing that such a thing should be found in a privy, 250 years later. And not only that, but that it should have been found on the site of a museum devoted to the American Revolution, which will put it on display.

Lillies

My stepmother's garden, yesterday.

Petersburg

Just back from a trip to Richmond and the Petersburg Battlefield.

This trip had been planned for two weeks ago, but it had to be put off after a storm ripped through my father's street, blew down some of their 100-year-old oak trees and damaged most of the rest. Top picture shows the house next door; they also lost their car. The neighbors on the other side lost all three of their cars. These trees have stood through a century of thunderstorms, including one I remember that ripped the roof off a Kmart garden center a mile away and sent 8x8-foot sections of corrugated fiberglass roof hurtling down the streets. So this must have been some kind of storm.

I was worried that the Petersburg Battlefield might be really crowded on the Saturday of a three-day weekend that was also a perfect day, but really it was nearly deserted.

I loved it that this section of reconstructed earthworks is slowly dissolving into mud, just like the originals would have. There was also a young interpreter here in Union uniform who let Ben hold her rifle – I wanted him to get a sense of how heavy they were – and fired it off so they could hear the noise and see the smoke.

At the famous Crater. Mary and Clara explore the entrance to the 500-foot-long tunnel, and Ben contemplates the remains of the crater itself.

Ben tries to divine the meaning of a mysterious sign near the Crater tunnel.

When we walked out of the introductory movie Ben said, "Hey dad how historically accurate was that?" Mary said, "That should be our House Words."

St. Dominic and the Demon

By a Flemish painter known as "the Master of James IV of Scotland," c. 1510-1520. St. Dominic is trying to study, but the devil has sent a demon to distract him. Perhaps he should have sent a more serious adversary? This one looks like the golden retriever of pet dragons. Meanwhile, Dominic's faithful dog is attempting to help by holding up a torch, an allusion to a dream Dominic's mother had, that a dog would come forth from her womb with a torch in its mouth. From the Getty.

Santiago Rusiñol i Prats

Santiago Rusiñol i Prats (1862-1931) was a Catalan poet, playwright, painter, garden designer, architect, and more. (Autumn Road, 1888)

Rusiñol was born in Barcelona in 1861, to a family of textile magnates. He rebelled against his parents' plans for him, as one did, and insisted from his early teenage years that he would be an artist. (Blue Patio, Montserat, 1892)

He studied first in Barcelona but then in 1889 he moved to Paris and lived in Montmartre where his neighbors included Ramon Casas and Ignacio Zuloaga. He also developed a long and troubled relationship with morphine, which appears in several of his paintings. (Morphine)

Street in Rouen.

Rusiñol experimented with different styles. For a while he was considered a Symbolist, but in the 1890s he began calling himself a "modernist." (Blue Courtyard)

In 1893 he returned to Spain founded a studio and museum in the coastal town of Sitges, where he spent much of the rest of his life. There he organized festivals of modernist art and theater and became known as a leader of Catalan modernism. When he was in Barcelona he hung around the café Els Quatre Gats, later to be famous as Pablo Picasso's favorite haunt. Like the rest of that circle he spent time on Mallorca. (Pines)

Evening in the Park.

Pool in a Church Garden at Son Moragues, 1903. I personally can't see much "modern" about these paintings, but I suppose it's the attitude that counts.

Late in life he got involved in designing gardens, and many of the paintings I have found online are gardens he painted at this time partly as studies for his design work. These are all renderings of the gardens at Aranjuez.

The Weirdest Book: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If you're in the mood for something weird, consider Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). I picked this up because I had read a feature in which British writers were asked to list their favorite translated novels, and the only post-World War II book to appear on more than one list was this one.

At the beginning you, the reader, have just bought Italo Calvino's new book, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. You settle down to read – you are male, incidentally, although there is a failed attempt to create a parallel female you later on – only to discover the the book is misbound, and instead of a whole novel you just have the first 16 pages repeated several times. Irate, you storm back to the bookstore to demand a clean copy. But there are no clean copies. Not only that, but the story you have been reading is not by Italo Calvino, but by some Polish author. You decide to purchase a copy of this book by the Polish author, but you get a completely different book that also breaks off after a few pages. But you, clever person that you are, notice that the names of people and places in this book are not really Polish. Looking up the places in an atlas, you discover that they are actually Cimmerian.

So you pay a visit to a famous professor of Cimmerian literature, at which point things really start to get weird. After an interlude in a feminist studies seminar where, of course, nobody actually cares about the book you are obsessed with recovering, you enter a surreal world of secret police, rebel groups known only by acronyms, book forgers, and political intrigue that reminded me of Thomas Pynchon at his most bizarre. In between strange encounters with secret agents you keep reading the first chapters of novels, none of which turns out to be what you were looking for, and these novels keep getting ever weirder, too.

One scene: you run into a best-selling hack novelist who is suffering from writer's block in his Piedmont villa. But every day a lovely woman comes outside to read by a house across the valley, and watching her through his telescope he becomes fascinated with her complete absorption in her books. He begins to write again by imagining what she is reading from her positions and the tilt of her head, trying to recreate the story she seems to be feeling. And of course he ends up recreating, word for word, the book she is reading and getting in trouble for plagiarism.

It is, in short, the sort of post-modern nonsense I have always hated, all about readers and writing and signs and what all. But for all that it is at times playfully creative, and I never thought Calvino was either mocking me or taking himself too seriously, so I finished it and sometimes enjoyed it rather a lot.

Elephant and Dragon

Liber de natura bestiarum, England, 1236-1300
British Library, Harley 3244, fol. 39v

Sperm Whale Culture

Interesting article about recent research in the social lives of sperm whales, which are studied mainly through their vocalizations:

Scientists working throughout the world have identified 80 unique "codas," the sperm whale equivalent of words, which they produce by emitting sounds called clicks. Each sperm whale clan has its own dialect, a unique repertoire of codas shared only with the other families who make up their clan. In the Pacific, there are five known dialect clans, and many of them co-exist in the same general regions without ever interacting. Atlantic whales have their own dialects too, and in the Caribbean there are two known clans.

Sperm whale society is very complicated, and every whale belongs to multiple social groups. Individuals spend most of their time in small family units, and multiple families converge to form larger groups. All the groups who share a dialect form a clan, and members of a clan may be so widely dispersed that they never meet one another even though they speak the same language. Families are made up of adult females and calves, while adult males tend to roam widely between clans and sometimes even swim from one ocean basin to the other. But even these general social structures vary a lot between oceans.

Fascinating, although calling different arrangements of of 80 simple sounds "languages" is a bit grandiose. I wonder how much all of this was impacted by the near extermination of sperm whales fifty years ago? Some human societies that have been through drastic population declines have also suffered huge losses of culture.

Open Borders vs. Closed

David Brooks wonders if the old left-right divide in America, focused on the size of government, is about to be replaced by a new divide between globalizers and America-firsters, and whether Donald Trump might be the prophet of this shift:

Trump’s only hope is to change the debate from size of government to open/closed. His only hope is to cast his opponents as the right-left establishment that supports open borders, free trade, cosmopolitan culture and global intervention. He would stand as a right-left populist who supports closed borders, trade barriers, local and nationalistic culture and an America First foreign policy.

In an age of anxiety, that closed posture might have a shot at winning. On trade, for example, 60 percent of Republicans, 49 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of independents believe that trade agreements are mostly harmful. . . .

The old size-of-government question was growing increasingly archaic and obsolete. In country after country the main battle lines of debate are evolving toward the open/closed framework.

If you don’t like our current political polarization, wait 10 years. One way or another it will go away. When the frame of debate shifts to open/closed, sometime soon, the old coalitions will smash apart and new ones will form. Politics will be unrecognizable. . . .

The prophets of closedness will argue that the problem is trade. The prophets of openness will argue that we need the dynamism that free trade brings. We just need to be more aggressive in equipping people to thrive in that dynamic landscape. If facts still matter in this debate — and I’m not sure they do — the proponents of openness are massively right.

As I was just writing the other day, I see this same divide becoming more and more prominent. But I doubt there is really enough support in America to build a political coalition around anti-globalization. Cultural issues like race, gay rights, and abortion will make it very hard for Bernie Sanders supporters to support anyone who can rally Trump's supporters, and vice versa. I do think that open or closed borders is one of the most important issues we face, but it just doesn't align well enough with the emotional postures that define liberals and conservatives to serve as the defining creed for political parties.

Book of Hours, Florence 1470-1480

Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève / Comites Latentes 54, a magnificent illuminated manuscript I stumbled across this week.

I love the detail in the borders.

You can access this and a bunch of other wonderful manuscripts through this search portal.

Before tracking it to its source I guessed that it dated to the sixteenth century. I showed it to my elder daughter, fresh out of college with a shiny new degree, and she said, "late fifteenth, maybe early sixteenth." You let these kids out of your sight and soon they come back knowing more than you do.

Even the ordinary pages in this book of hours are decorated with these marvelous doodles; a doodler myself, I am awed by the virtuosity displayed here.

I found lots of other manuscripts in the course of this exercise, so there will be more in days to come.

A Safe Space for White Rage

Jared Yates Sexton attended a Donald Trump rally and came away thinking it was a safe space for a certain sort of conservative cultural anger:

Inside the auditorium, men gleefully referred to Hillary Clinton with misogynistic slurs; those same smears were printed on T-shirts sold by vendors outside. The men and women sporting them were constantly being pulled into photographs with their fellow Trump supporters, all of them slinging their arms around one another and flashing smiles and thumbs up.

Seemingly emboldened by the atmosphere of serial transgression, a man a few feet away from me answered a warm-up speaker’s call for solidarity with the victims of the massacre in Orlando, Fla., by shouting, “The gays had it coming!”

Turmp's speech made no impression on Sexton and very little on the other attendees; this didn't seem to be about Trump so much as the scenes in the crowd.

When Mr. Trump left the stage and the doors opened, I found myself in a glut of supporters streaming into the parking lot. As vendors hawked T-shirts by yelling, “Hillary sucks!” the people — more than a few of whom appeared inebriated — were discussing such worthy topics as the untrustworthiness of most Latinos, the inhumanity of immigrants and the racial epithets they’d used when Mr. Trump had referred to Mr. Obama as “one hell of a lousy president.”

They were pumped up by the speech, but it was more than that. Their voices were clear and unabashed. There was a noticeable comfort, as if they had been encouraged by not just Mr. Trump’s rhetoric but also their shared proximity to so many people of a similar mind.

And then it dawned on me: For them the arena, and then the parking lot, had become their own safe spaces, where these people, who had long been reined in by changing societal expectations and especially the heavy burden of political correctness, felt they were finally free of the ridiculous expectations of overly sensitive liberals. . . .

Commentators have tried to cast Mr. Trump as a master manipulator, using his supporters to carry him to the White House but having no real interest in improving their lives. That may be his intention. But the reality is the other way around: His supporters are using him. Indeed, as I got in my car to drive home, I realized that since leaving the coliseum, of all the things I had heard people say, there was one phrase I hadn’t heard his supporters utter even once: Donald Trump’s name.

If that's right, it explains why Trump's obvious flaws never faze his core supporters; for them it isn't about him anyway, but about a license to really let go about things that bother them but can't be discussed in polite company.