The Land of Steady Habits

Some may wonder about the title of my blog, “The Land of Steady Habits.” It’s a phrase that everyone from Connecticut knows. It originated sometime in the early 1800’s to refer to Connecticut’s steady political views and stable economy. Nowadays, when people quote it it’s with their tongue in cheek, with a chuckle.

Connecticut isn’t what it used to be. The Gold Coast (Fairfield County) is still pretty prosperous, and is still one of the wealthiest counties in the country.

I come from the middle-class part of Connecticut. My hometown, Meriden, has definitely seen better days. In the early 70’s International Silver was broken up and sold, and the city lost its largest private employer. When I read posts on the Facebook page “You know you’re from Meriden if.....” many of the posts are nostalgic in nature. Who remembers Dave Clayton’s Army and Navy on West Main Street. Who went to Les’s soft serve ice cream. Who had a family member who worked at International. You can tell someone whose family has been in Meriden for a long time because if they see a piece of silverplate in a thrift store or antiques mall they turn the piece over to see who made it. Was it International or Reed and Barton?

Connecticut has taken a beating economically. General Electric left. Aetna has partly left. There seems to be a revolving door on the Massachusetts and New York borders, and mostly they’re leaving. For some, Connecticut is the state wedged between New York and Massachusetts that you blow through on I-84 and if you're unlucky you hit rush hour traffic in Hartford. It's like the northernmost county of New Jersey except the fall foliage is better. Connecticut? Is that really part of New England?

When Anita and I moved here almost four years ago I knew what I was coming back to. Really bad driving, economic stratification, and relatively mild winters. She had not lived in New England before we were in New Hampshire. The winters there, except for the minus 0 temperatures, are more like what I remember growing up here. She says the winters here sometimes resemble the winters in Delaware where she grew up. If it snows it's gone in a day or two. There are wineries here now. Wineries? Nobody had wineries when I was a kid. It was too cold in the winter.

I really struggled with looking for a church in Connecticut. I wasn't sure I wanted to move back to my home state. Having visited my parents and brother many times I knew full well what state my hometown was in. It’s my home state. My family has been here for nearly four centuries. My ancestors are buried here. Our blood is in the soil.

Prior to the Civil War people often referred to their home state as their "country." There wasn't yet as clear an identity as "American" as opposed to being from Connecticut, Virginia, or New York. In this sense, Connecticut is my country.

Yet, our state government seems inept no matter what party is running it. I have hopes for our current governor but we'll see. Meanwhile, the residents of Hartford suffer with expensive yet inadequate rental housing, and a city government that is more interested in building a stadium than meeting the needs of the immigrants who now call Hartford and Connecticut, this ancient place, their home.

Our illusions of grandeur can be summed up in the map that I have as a banner on my blog. It shows Connecticut’s pretensions to grandeur. Our colonial charter did not specify a western border. So, a cartographer named Abel Buell made a map in 1784 that showed the state with its rightful claim to a strip of territory straight across to the Mississippi River. What’s in-between? Notice that the northern border of Pennsylvania is in line with the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts. That part of Pennsylvania was settled by Connecticut people after the Revolutionary War, people who were looking for more land. Ayuh. This magical belt of land would now encompass parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Those areas were also settled by Connecticut people.

Despite our grand nostalgia, our collective memory of times past, and our present economic doldrums, Connecticut is still a great place and I am happy to be here. No, I don’t like the way people drive, but there are treasures here. Yale University. The Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. UConn. Many others, too numerous to name. All treasures handed down from previous generations of people who worked their butts off to make the state what it was. Now it's up to us to decide what Connecticut will be in the near future. There are people who see our state as an economic outpost, a place to stake a claim and make a living. God bless them. I'll patronize them in a New York minute.

I sit here in my ca. 1794 house full of books, an outpost of learning in a sea of inanity. Don’t diss Connecticut or you’ll get my thumb in your eye. It’s my state. An ancestor of mine founded it in the 1630's. My people are buried here. Our blood is in the soil. My children have moved to different parts of the country, to Massachusetts, Virginia, and California, but their ancestors came from here. They know that.

Baleful Bookes and Other Stuff

Recently I started reading Edmund Spencer’s “The Faerie Queen,” an epic poem of biblical proportions published in 1596. I bought a 1912 imprint of a volume of the poetical works of Spenser, entitled “The Oxford Spencer.” How that conjurs up images of professors wearing their mortarboards while lecturing in lecture halls with oak paneling and paintings of Tudor monarchs high on the walls.

This is one of those works that high school students sometimes have to read, and college students in Freshman English. You read exactly what you are assigned and after that the book becomes a bookend or a doorstop. However, there are riches to be found. Explore this blog entry: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/48.1.5/

What I am enjoying about it is that it hasn’t been adapted by modern media. What I mean is there is no film version. You couldn’t do a film of it anyway. It’s far too long. And, it's allegorical. To try to film it would be to destroy the allegorical nature of it. It's confined to print, and that's a good thing. The nice thing about this edition is that the original spelling is retained. Some may remember an earlier post in which I wrote about the joys of reading 16th century English. This is another good example. Since this has not been adapted to modern media (other than being able to find the whole thing online) there are no media pictures to influence my reading of the story. I recently read a book on the Battle of Gettysburg. Throughout my reading I could see and hear bits from the movie done about 25 years ago. Same with Lord of the Rings. It would be impossible to read it now without seeing Ian McKellan as Gandalf and Elijah Wood as Frodo.

That’s not all bad. The Lord of the Rings films are superb, but as films they are limited in scope in the way that a book is not. That’s the thing with Spenser. There was no film at that time. All he had was print. I’m sure that somewhere along the line someone published abridged editions with fancy illustrations, but if so, none of those images have the staying power of a well-done movie.

So, I have this 107 year old volume, in very good condition, and that’s it. And I am loving it.

When those accursed messengers of hell,
That feigning dreame, and that faire-forged Spright°
Came to their wicked maister, and gan tell
Their bootelesse paines, and ill succeeding night:
Who all in rage to see his skilfull might
Deluded so, gan threaten hellish paine
And sad Proserpines wrath, them to affright.
But when he saw his threatning was but vaine,
He cast about, and searcht his baleful bookes againe. (I.2.2)

The imagery is wonderful and would be spoiled by illustrations or other media that tried to capture Spenser’s masterful use of language in a picture. It seems that to a good extent we have lost the ability to develop mental pictures from literature based solely on words. Maybe not, and I would be happy to be proved wrong. Older language such as this was written with that in mind--that the reader would naturally develop pictures in their head of what the scenes looked like. After all, people had been reading such poetry for centuries, and none of it was written with the hope that a major studio would buy the film rights. Having said that, despite its adaptation to film I'm quite sure that Tolkien did not have film in mind when he wrote the trilogy.

It should be obvious that I love English from this period. Jonson, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, all of it. It feeds me in a way that other language does not.

Back to my baleful bookes.

...one louing howre
For many yeares of sorrow can dispence:
A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sowre....

Gutenberg's Information Revolution

Recently I bought a facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible at a used book store. The price was reasonable and the facsimile was nicely done. It’s in two volumes, same as the original, and somewhat reduced in size so as to keep the cost down by putting it in the range of standard binding machines. Prompted by the serendipitous purchase I’m reading a book on Gutenberg and his development of movable type. It’s important to note that he didn’t invent it. It was invented in China a couple of centuries before but never went anywhere because of the nature of the Chinese language, which has thousands of characters. Gutenberg succeeded because he had an alphabet instead.

The pieces of the puzzle already existed in Gutenberg’s time, such as the idea of a punch to make the impression of a letter, the idea of printing in general (woodblock printing was already common) and so forth. Gutenberg was able to take these elements and put them together, developing the idea of making identical copies of a text. The Bible wasn’t the first thing he printed. He published a Latin grammar text that hasn’t survived, and an indulgence, a document that people paid for to get time off from purgatory. Church fundraising hasn’t been the same since Martin Luther made the indulgence unfashionable.

As for the facsimile, it is well done. It is by Taschen, the German publisher which has mastered the art of fine facsimiles. I have also bought their facsimile of the first edition of Martin Luther’s complete German bible and it is also magnificent.

Anyone who has been awake for the last couple of decades knows that we are in the midst of tremendous societal change. We don’t know where it is going, yet. Computer technology has totally revolutionized society. The Internet has transformed the dissemination of information.

Gutenberg started the previous information revolution. By developing movable type he made the quick transmission of information possible. One good example is Martin Luther. Although the printing press was not the only factor in Luther’s meteoric rise to prominence it was a major factor. Luther unwittingly tapped into anti-Rome sentiment in the Holy Roman Empire, fueled by a rising German nationalism.

Luther’s writing spread quickly once they reached the press. Historians do not agree that Luther actually posted the 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, although if he did post them in public, that’s where it would have been. Church doors functioned as the dormitory bulletin board in medieval Europe. Nevertheless the text of the 95 theses made its way into print shops around Germany pretty quickly. The original document doesn’t exist, most likely because someone snagged it off the church door to take to the nearest printer.

Within a few years Luther’s pamphlets fueled the rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church. It didn’t start at once, and he certainly did not have that in mind when he wrote it. However, the fact that he sent the 95 theses to the Archbishop of Mainz does indicate that he intended to make a splash. A splash is what he made.

Getting back to Gutenberg, I find it ironic that I was able to purchase an affordable facsimile of this magnificent book. It is copied from a perfect vellum copy. Out of the 180 volumes Gutenberg produced, about 40 were printed on vellum/parchment, the rest were printed on paper. The vellum copies were quite expensive, and probably made their way to royal libraries and wealthy monasteries and cathedrals. The paper copies made their way around as well, and were more affordable.

I have seen three perfectly complete Gutenberg bibles--at the Widner Library at Harvard University, the Library of Congress, and at Yale University. There aren't very many around, and only about 20 are complete. The rest are one volume or another, or an incomplete volume. About a century ago a book dealer divided up a very incomplete copy and sold individual pages. You can still get a page for somewhere around $75,000-150,000. Not bad, I guess, considering the historical value and rarity. I think I'll settle for my facsimile, though.

The ironic thing about a facsimile is that with computer technology in its present state a copy can be made of any image and nobody has to set type. The object is scanned, and printed off. The photograph can be of anything, text or otherwise. And, if the images are posted on the internet anyone can look at them without holding the physical book in their hands, which in the case of this particular book  is very unlikely to happen. This is the sort of book that sits behind glass and is handled by qualified people wearing gloves.

We still profit from Gutenberg's technology. Books are now printed with computer technology, although there are small presses that will publish books printed with handset type. But we use the great grandchild of movable type daily. It's the computer keyboard. Hit a key, and the letter or symbol on the key appears on the screen. Print it out and it's on paper. One to one correspondence. Key, screen, paper.

The funny thing about Gutenberg's bible is that he made it look like a manuscript bible. That's a pretty basic human thing. If you want to sell something really new, make it look like something familiar.

The standardization of a technology can come on quickly. Take the standard letter size of paper, 8.5 " x 11". Nobody knows the origin of this paper size, but it became the standard size for paper used in typewriters in the early 1900's. I discovered this when I was in seminary, where I worked in the archives. In cataloging theses from students around 1900, I found that in the later 1890's, one or two would be typed and the rest handwritten. Then one year, most of them were typed, and the following year they were all typed. The size of the paper varied, however. With the quick spread of the typewriter the standard size of paper settled into today's standard size. So, we program our computers to produce documents that are the standard size because that's what was used with typewriters. And, we have fonts that look like something printed rather than something generated by a computer, also to look like a thing from the past.

I am sure that Gutenberg would approve of the digital revolution. He's largely responsible for it.

The Singing Man on the Cello

Recently I decided to do something wacky. I thought I’d like to try playing a fractional cello. There are different sizes, and they are made for children of varying ages, although a smaller adult could certainly use one of the larger fractional cellos. Anyone who has a child learning to play a string instrument with the Suzuki method will be familiar with these small instruments. Generally the sizes are 1/10, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 7/8, and 4/4 (full size). The fractional sizes can be deceptive to the uninformed. A 1/2 cello is not one half the size of a full sized cello. A full sized cello is around 48”. For each quarter size it drops about 2-3 inches. So, a 1/4 cello is about 38” long, significantly smaller than a 4/4 cello. I have one of those too, a Chinese 5 string cello that I like very much, and of course my grandfather's cello, which is in storage right now because it needs some serious work. I trolled Craig’s list looking for either a 1/8 or 1/4 cello, as well as eBay and Facebook Marketplace. After a few days I found a nice 1/4 cello for a very reasonable price. I brought it home, and really liked the sound. Turns out it is made by Eastman, which makes good student instruments. Then I had a thought--there were lots of 5 string cellos, called a “violoncello piccolo,” and there's an up and coming thing called a “violencello da spalla,” which is about the size of a 1/10 to 1/8 cello and is played in the position of a viola or violin, except it rests against your chest and shoulder, held in place by a shoulder strap. Here's a link to a Wikipedia article on the violoncello piccolo that also has a picture of a violoncello da spalla. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violoncello_piccolo Such instruments were often found in the Baroque period, and one builder started making them a few years ago. They have a more nasal sound, more like a viola, which is fine for me because I love the sound of a viola. The sound doesn't have the full ring that a full size cello has. It's a more intimate sound, especially when played with a Baroque bow, which has less hair than a modern bow.

Originally I thought I would add a high E string to my small cello but eventually decided against it, thinking I could end up destabilizing the whole thing by doing too much to the neck. So, I decided instead I’d make it into a 4 string baroque cello. There were some smaller cellos used to make a more intimate sound.

I took off the ebony fingerboard, which unfortunately came off in pieces, and made a new Baroque fingerboard from a heavily figured curly maple. The difference between a modern cello (a “Rhomberg” fingerboard) and a Baroque one is that the Rhomberg fingerboard slopes downward more on the high side, whereas a Baroque fingerboard has a uniform arch. The same is true for the bridge, the profile of which has to mimic the end of the fingerboard so that the strings will be suspended properly over the fingerboard.

I also made a new tailpiece to match the new fingerboard. Then, for both pieces I woodburned a geometric design common for the baroque period.

Next, I decided to replace the standard scroll with a carved grotesque head, a very common feature on Renaissance and Baroque string instruments. I decided  to carve a small copy of a wood carving that my father brought home from France after World War II. It is a carving of a man wearing a hat and a mustache, and his mouth is wide open as if he is singing.



The last little detail was a rosette. I had to have a rosette, another common feature on viols and other string instruments during the Renaissance and Baroque eras. I bought a 1.5" maple rosette from a vendor on Amazon, and it is very nice. It's laser cut so the detail is exquisite. I will buy another one from them if the occasion arises. This involved using a 1.5 " hole saw to cut the hole. I measured carefully and it came out well.

While I was at it, I thought since the other details were in maple, I would turn new tuning pegs from maple. They came out well. I replaced the end pin with a maple button that I turned, since Baroque cellos do not have an end pin. The end pin comes out of the bottom of the instrument and is essential for modern playing because it holds the cello in a stable position. For Baroque playing the cello is held between the knees and calves.

Carving the head was the better part of a day, and using a power cutter made the process shorter. I then put a bit of scroll detail on the pegbox with the head, stained the carving, and finished it. It’s all strung and sounds really nice

I then altered the bridge so it would have a curved arch like the end of the fingerboard.


The cello is now restrung and sounds great! I have been experimenting with bows. After some time I have found that a full size cello bow is too much. It seems the best way to get a nice intimate Baroque sound is to use, (drumroll) a Baroque bow. I happen to have one.

 How will I use this? For fun. Maybe I'll get a chance to play with someone else in a Baroque piece.

Old Fart Mode

Ok. It’s old fart mode. I’ve been thinking about advances in technology and thought someone might be interested in my ramblings.

I’m in my early 60’s, born in the later 50’s.  I grew up in the suburban edge of a city in Connecticut. We had a comfortable upbringing, and an interesting home where intellectual challenges were not only tolerated, but encouraged. The foundation I received from my parents is still the bedrock foundation of who I am.

We talked a lot about their childhoods. My mother grew up in a family of five in Illinois. My grandfather was a college professor and didn’t make much. He kept a large garden and their family lived off of canned vegetables for the winter. They had fall canning parties. They didn’t have a huge amount of money but from everything my mother told me, there was a lot of love in their family.

My father grew up as the son of a pastor in Massachusetts. His parents were divorced when he was a teenager, so his circumstances changed. Before the divorce they were pretty well off, better than many.

So, we heard about technology. My parents both remembered cars that had to be cranked to start. My mother said her father, who was born in 1876, never learned to drive.

Telephones were a big deal. They both remembered phones that had the separate receiver and transmitter, and also had to be cranked.

Growing up, the cutting edge technology was television. We had a TV that had tubes, and I remember the repairman coming and replacing tubes. I’ll bet that vintage TV would be worth something now, but it’s long gone.  Telephones were modern by current standards, but not digital, and you didn’t own your phone. There was only one type of ring.

The availability of entertainment was totally different than today. I remember that the Wizard of Oz was always on TV each August around my birthday, and it was a family event. When movies had been in the theaters for awhile, the next step was the network premiere. There were three major networks--ABC, CBS, and NBC.  Everyone watched the news at 6, and there was not a continuous news cycle. We got our news in the morning from newspapers.

When my kids were small the VHS revolution happened, and you could rent videos. Now we weren’t dependent on the networks to air a movie. You didn’t wait for the network premiere, you waited for the film to come out on VHS. Remember to rewind.

I got my first computer when I was working on my second masters degree in the mid 80’s.  It was a Commodore 64.  I wrote my masters thesis on it. Hard to believe. I remember printing out my thesis with an interface to a Brother typewriter. I stayed up all night.

My first Mac was a Mac Classic II. I’ve had Macs ever since and haven’t looked back.

I remember my brother getting a pocket calculator in the early 70’s for his upper level math classes. It was the size of a brick and did the four basic functions.

Phones? I have an IPhone 8+ that can accomplish more than all of the devices described above. It is far more powerful than the computers that ran the moon missions. Blows my mind? You bet.



We are just getting a handle on the social implications of continual access to electronic devices. I'm sure doctoral dissertations are already being written on the implications of social media, and the transformation that it has wrought in our society. The world has been transformed, and not always for the better. Sure, we have closer contact with people and have access to a wealth of information but we are addicted. Internet addiction is a serious problem and is only beginning to be understood.


I don't remember being addicted to anything as a kid other than reading books. That is still true. Social media now? Sure, I keep in touch with friends, vent when current events get crazy, but curling up in a chair or sitting in the backyard with a glass of wine and a volume of Shakespeare beats anything available online.

Origins of Racism: Colonialism

I’m on a roll. I read Walter Raleigh’s book "The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana" (1596) and have started "The Decades of the Newe World or West Indies” (1555) which was the most influential book in English in shaping English views of the New World during the 1500's. By today’s standards parts of it are racist, with descriptions of the native peoples as passive, lazy and uncivilized. It’s not hard to see where later attitudes came from. Nevertheless it is interesting to read as it reflects the expansive feeling that Britain had toward the Americas at that time. The book is almost entirely in black letter, the printed version of the manuscript hand used in books before printing but it actually isn’t that bad to read.

In my ongoing project to understand how we got to the point where we are now, this book is a landmark. It is important to understand the attitudes and assumptions that Europeans made in their approach to this hemisphere even if reading texts such as these can make me wince. Europeans saw their encounter with the Americas as a discovery because they didn't have a clue it was there. Columbus died convinced that he had actually encountered the outer islands of the eastern coast of Asia. It didn't matter that there were people in the way.

Obviously the Norse were here centuries before but by the time the Spanish were

exploring this region that had pretty much become forgotten.

For Europeans their encounter with the Americas was totally out of the blue, but their wonder soon turned into the desire to dominate people and extract resources for their own gain. In fact, Columbus' voyages were not high-minded expeditions to increase the knowledge about the world. They were expeditions to find the back door to Asia to get spices at wholesale prices.
 
However, the bonus, as the colonial powers saw it, was that they brought Christianity to the savages. So, even though they were enslaved, and worked to death, and killed by European diseases, they needed to be grateful for this. Hm.

Their blindness to the rights of the native peoples of the Americas to their own land and cultures caused a huge injustice which still reverberates in our hemisphere, and the origins of this injustice lie here.  I realize that reading older books like these may seem esoteric to some, but it isn't. Walter Raleigh came to South America at a time when the continent had been colonized by the Spanish and Portugese for a century. He describes the Guayana Region, now part of Venezuela, and makes lavish promises about how abundant gold is in the region. The colonial powers of Spain and Portugal were in South and Central America for one reason--money. They extracted immense amounts of silver, for one. The colonial system they set up lasted for centuries, and the effects still exist today. This region is the way it is because European empires made it that way. They committed cultural genocide, and literal genocide. You can draw a straight line between Raleigh's description of this region and Trump's immigration policy which discriminates against people fleeing from oppression in Central America.

So, what can be done? It's not possible to return to the past. I'm not planning to go to England because that's where my ancestors came from, any more than African Americans should be expected to go "back" to Africa because that's where their ancestors came from before they were forcibly removed. If they were to choose so, as W. E. B. Dubois did (he moved to Ghana where he died in 1963) that's fine, but to expect them to do so is just plain ignorant.

Having said that, don't think I haven't ruled out moving to England to escape the insanity here.

A start is to find a way to be hospitable to those coming from Central America not because they are looking for a free ride, but because they are fleeing politically unstable countries, some seemingly on the verge of anarchy. These countries have been through a lot, first as colonies, then suffering under the oppression of brutal dictatorships, and now being overrun by drug cartels and gangs of thugs. This is a mess our ancestors created, and innocent people are suffering for it. It's our creation, not theirs.

 

I Will Resist

What am I going to do? I am going to continue to study. I will continue to read about history. I will not fall into total despair. I will retreat into my study, full of books, and drink deeply from the wisdom of the ages. Shakespeare, Livy, Augustine, Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, they all populate my study and I greet them when I come in.

My family has always had a karma for books. Lots of books. History, classic fiction, history, history, history, philosophy, history, that sort of thing. It isn't just a luxury. It's a necessity. Want to counteract all the nonsense about history that is spouted these days? Read history. It will blow your mind.

If those who are reading this do not read much, read. Read for your lives. Read for the future of your country.
Don't just read fiction. Read history.

I am not happy with the political climate as it is, and it seems to get worse, but I will continue to study to counteract all the false views and information flooding the media. My mind is my best weapon against falsehood. I will share my findings as I am able to put them into cogent form.

I will resist.

I will not accept status quo.

I will resist.

I will not be gaslighted into thinking that we can return to a mythological 1950's where all boys wore striped t-shirts and shorts and delivered newspapers and all girls stayed at home and played with dolls.

I will resist.

My resistance will consist of reading, reading, reading, until I can speak with authority about history.

I will resist.

I will refuse to accept an interpretation of our history that whitewashes slavery, genocide, and the marginalization of women. My ancestors were a part of that, and I regret it, but they are still my ancestors. I have to deal with that.

I will resist.

My mind is my strongest tool and I intend to use it. Watch out.

I will resist.