I like names. I collect them: names, origins, meanings. They’re an easy thing to collect. They don’t cost anything and they don’t really take up any space. I like to look at them and pretend that they mean something; and maybe they don’t, but the pretending is nice. I keep most of them on the walls of my bedroom at home—home where I used to live. I keep the ones that echo. Good names with significance. Not the crap everyone seems to be using these days. I like foreign names, too; the unusual ones that you rarely see. If I ever had a baby, I’d pick one of those, but babies aren’t really something I see in my future, even the far off one.
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize — only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.
[I]n the view of the Founding Fathers of this country, a widespread distribution of property ownership was essential to the preservation of individual liberty and a republican form of government. In their day, of course, they assumed that the seemingly limitless land of the new nation afforded the opportunity for every man to own a freehold farm. Some, however, looked ahead to the important role of property ownership in preserving the American experiment in a distant day and age, when America would lose its predominately agricultural character. As James Madison said in 1787: In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without land, but without any sort of property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in their hands, or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case there will be equal danger on another side. Today, of course, America has come a long way from its origins as a nation of Jeffersonian yeomen. As we became urbanized and industrialized, we tended to lose sight of the importance of widespread property ownership. No longer can we return, as a people, to an 18th century way of life. Yet we should remember that private property is an indispensable part of the foundation of a free country. As time and technology advance, we need to reshape the Founding Fathers’ idea of the importance of widespread property ownership to fit new circumstances. This is particularly true in a Nation in which millions of families now have no ownership stake in anything greater than a television set or secondhand automobile. [ Congressional Record , June 8, 1971, p. S8483.]
Let us leave the question of origins to those who busy themselves with insoluble problems, and have nothing better to do.
Göbekli Tepe held another sensational secret. For many years, geneticists have been tracing the origins of domesticated wheat. Recent discoveries indicate that at least one domesticated variant, einkorn wheat, originated in the Karaçadag Hills – less than twenty miles from Göbekli Tepe.6 This can hardly be a coincidence. It’s likely that the cultural centre of Göbekli Tepe was somehow connected to the initial domestication of wheat by humankind and of humankind by wheat. In order to feed the people who built and used the monumental structures, particularly large quantities of food were required. It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase their normal food supply, but rather to support the building and running of a temple. In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Göbekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.
From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.
Ever wondered about the origins of the term "bugs" as applied to computer technology? U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation. The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in computer technology during World War II. At the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school adminis- trators that the first computer "bug" was a real bug--a moth. At Harvard one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the "granddaddy" of modern computers, the Mark I. "Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer," she said. "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." Hopper said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, "I referred them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in question." [actually, the term "bug" had even earlier usage in regard to problems with radio hardware. Ed.]
An Animal that knows who it is, one that has a sense of his own identity, is a discontented creature, doomed to create new problems for himself for the duration of his stay on this planet. Since neither the mouse nor the chimp knows what is, he is spared all the vexing problems that follow this discovery. But as soon as the human animal who asked himself this question emerged, he plunged himself and his descendants into an eternity of doubt and brooding, speculation and truth-seeking that has goaded him through the centuries as relentlessly as hunger or sexual longing. The chimp that does not know that he exists is not driven to discover his origins and is spared the tragic necessity of contemplating his own end. And even if the animal experimenters succeed in teaching a chimp to count one hundred bananas or to play chess, the chimp will develop no science and he will exhibit no appreciation of beauty, for the greatest part of man's wisdom may be traced back to the eternal questions of beginnings and endings, the quest to give meaning to his existence, to life itself. -- Selma Fraiberg, _The Magic Years_, pg. 193
It's grad exam time... MEDICINE You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of Scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. (You have 15 minutes.) HISTORY Describe the history of the papacy from its origins to the present day, concentrating especially, but not exclusively, on its social, political, economic, religious and philisophical impact upon Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. Be brief, concise, and specific. BIOLOGY Create life. Estimate the differences in subsequent human culture if this form of life had been created 500 million years ago or earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system.
In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the mind of man itself.
Fustel de Coulanges was the most conscientious of men, the most systematic and uncompromising of historians. Appointed to a lectureship at the École Normale Supérieure in February 1870, to a professorship at the Paris faculty of letters in 1875, and to the chair of medieval history created for him at the Sorbonne in 1878, he applied himself to the study of the political institutions of ancient France. The invasion of France by the German armies during the war of 1870-71 attracted his attention to the Germanic invasions under the Roman Empire. Pursuing the theory of J.B. Dubos, but singularly transforming it, he maintained that those invasions were not marked by the violent and destructive character usually attributed to them; that the penetration of the German barbarians into Gaul was a slow process; that the Germans submitted to the imperial administration; that the political institutions of the Merovingians had their origins in the Roman laws at least as much as, if not more than, in German usages; and, consequently, that there was no conquest of Gaul by the Germans. This thesis he sustained brilliantly in his _Histoire des institutions politiques de l'ancienne France_, the first volume of which appeared in 1874. It was the author's original intention to complete this work in four volumes, but as the first volume was keenly attacked in Germany as well as in France, Fustel was forced in self-defence to recast the book entirely. With admirable conscientiousness he re-examined all the texts and wrote a number of dissertations, of which, though several (e.g. those on the Germanic mark and on the _allodium_ and _beneficium_) were models of learning and sagacity, all were dominated by his general idea and characterized by a total disregard for the results of such historical disciplines as diplomatic. From this crucible issued an entirely new work, less well arranged than the original, but richer in facts and critical comments. The first volume was expanded into three volumes, _La Gaule romaine_ (1891), _L'Invasion germanique et la fin de l'empire_ (1891) and _La Monarchie franque_ (1888), followed by three other volumes, _L'Alleu et le domaine rural pendant l'époque mérovingienne_ (1889), _Les Origines du système féodal: le bénéfice et le patronat ..._ (1890) and _Les Transformations de la royauté pendant l'époque carolingienne_ (1892). Thus, in six volumes, he had carried the work no farther than the Carolingian period. The result of this enormous labour, albeit worthy of a great historian, clearly showed that the author lacked all sense of historical proportion. He was a diligent seeker after the truth, and was perfectly sincere when he informed a critic of the exact number of "truths" he had discovered, and when he remarked to one of his pupils a few days before his death, "Rest assured that what I have written in my book is the truth." Such superb self-confidence can accomplish much, and it undoubtedly helped to form Fustel's talent and to give to his style that admirable concision which subjugates even when it fails to convince; but a student instinctively distrusts an historian who settles the most controverted problems with such impassioned assurance. The dissertations not embodied in his great work were collected by himself and (after his death) by his pupil, Camille Jullian, and published as volumes of miscellanies: _Recherches sur quelques problèmes d'histoire_ (1885), dealing with the Roman colonate, the land system in Normandy, the Germanic mark, and the judiciary organization in the kingdom of the Franks; _Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problèmes d'histoire_ (1891); and _Questions historiques_ (1893), which contains his paper on Chios and his thesis on Polybius. Entry: FUSTEL
The processes then of fine art, like those of all arts properly so called, are premeditated, and the property of every fine art is to give to the person exercising it a special kind of active pleasure, and a special kind of passive or receptive pleasure to the person witnessing the results of such exercise. This latter statement seems to imply that there exist in human societies a separate class producing works of fine art and another class enjoying them. Such an implication, in regard to advanced societies, is near enough the truth to be theoretically admitted (like the analogous assumption in political economy that there exist separate classes of producers and consumers). In developed communities the gifts and calling of the artist constitute in fact a separate profession of the creators or purveyors of fine art, while the rest of the community are its enjoyers or recipients. In the most primitive societies, apparently, this cannot have been so, and we can go back to an original or rudimentary stage of almost every fine art at which the separation between a class of producers or performers and a class of recipients hardly exists. Such an original or rudimentary stage of the dramatic art is presented by children, who will occupy themselves for ever with mimicry and make-believe for their own satisfaction, with small regard or none to the presence or absence of witnesses. The original or rudimentary type of the profession of imitative sculptors or painters is the cave-dweller of prehistoric ages, who, when he rested from his day's hunting, first took up the bone handle of his weapon, and with a flint either carved it into the shape, or on its surface scratched the outlines, of the animals of the chase. The original or rudimentary type of the architect, considered not as a mere builder but as an artist, is the savage who, when his tribe had taken to live in tents or huts instead of caves, first arranged the skins and timbers of his tent or hut in one way because it pleased his eye, rather than in some other way which was as good for shelter. The original type of the artificer or adorner of implements, considered in the same light, was the other savage who first took it into his head to fashion his club or spear in one way rather than another for the pleasure of the eye only and not for any practical reason, and to ornament it with tufts or markings. In none of these cases, it would seem, can the primitive artist have had much reason for pleasing anybody but himself. Again, the original or rudimentary type of lyric song and dancing arose when the first reveller clapped hands and stamped or shouted in time, in honour of his god, in commemoration of a victory, or in mere obedience to the blind stirring of a rhythmic impulse within him. To some very remote and solitary ancestral savage the presence or absence of witnesses at such a display may in like manner have been indifferent; but very early in the history of the race the primitive dancer and singer joined hands and voices with others of his tribe, while others again sat apart and looked on at the performance, and the rite thus became both choral and social. A primitive type of the instrumental musician is the shepherd who first notched a reed and drew sounds from it while his sheep were cropping. The father of all artists in dress and personal adornment was the first wild man who tattooed himself or bedecked himself with shells and plumes. In both of these latter instances, it may be taken as certain, the primitive artist had the motive of pleasing not himself only, but his mate, or the female whom he desired to be his mate, and in the last instance of all the further motive of impressing his fellow-tribesmen and striking awe or envy into his enemies. The tendency of recent speculation and research concerning the origins of art has been to ascribe the primitive artistic activities of man less and less to individual and solitary impulse, and more and more to social impulse and the desire of sharing and communicating pleasure. (The writer who has gone furthest in developing this view, and on grounds of the most careful study of evidence, has been Dr Yrjö Hirn of Helsingfors.) Whatever relative parts the individual and the social impulses may have in fact played at the outset, it is clear that what any one can enjoy or admire by himself, whether in the way of mimicry, of rhythmical movements or utterances, of imitative or ornamental carving and drawing, of the disposition and adornment of dwelling-places and utensils--the same things, it is clear, others are able also to enjoy or admire with him. And so, with the growth of societies, it came about that one class of persons separated themselves and became the ministers or producers of this kind of pleasures, while the rest became the persons ministered to, the participators in or recipients of the pleasures. Artists are those members of a society who are so constituted as to feel more acutely than the rest certain classes of pleasures which all can feel in their degree. By this fact of their constitution they are impelled to devote their active powers to the production of such pleasures, to the making or doing of some of those things which they enjoy so keenly when they are made and done by others. At the same time the artist does not, by assuming these ministering or creative functions, surrender his enjoying or receptive functions. He continues to participate in the pleasures of which he is himself the cause, and remains a conscious member of his own public. The architect, sculptor, painter, are able respectively to stand off from and appreciate the results of their own labours; the singer enjoys the sound of his own voice, and the musician of his own instrument; the poet, according to his temperament, furnishes the most enthusiastic or the most fastidious reader for his own stanzas. Neither, on the other hand, does the person who is a habitual recipient from others of the pleasures of fine art forfeit the privilege of producing them according to his capabilities, and of becoming, if he has the power, an _amateur_ or occasional artist. Entry: I
This peculiar association of earthquakes with pronounced topographical configuration and certain geological conditions evidently indicates that the origin of many of them is connected with rock folding. Inasmuch as certain large earthquakes have been accompanied by rock fracture, as for example in 1891, when in central Japan a fault some 50 m. in length was created, whilst the origins of others have been distinctly traced to the line of an existing fault or its continuation, we may conclude that the majority of earthquakes are spasmodic accelerations in the secular movements which are creating (and in some instances possibly obliterating) the more prominent features of the earth's surface. These secular movements, which include upheavals, subsidences, horizontal displacements--all of which are explained on the assumption of a crust seeking support on a nucleus gradually contracting by loss of heat, are collectively referred to as bradyseismical ([Greek: bradys], slow) movements. To these may be added movements directly attributable to the influence of gravity. Sub-oceanic districts in a state of seismic strain may be so far loaded by the accumulation of sediments that gentle bending may be accompanied by sudden yieldings. This possibly accounts for the frequency of earthquakes off the mouth of the Tonegawa on the eastern side of Japan. The distortions so frequently observed in fossils and pebbles, the varying thickness of contorted strata, and the "creep" in coal-mines, together with other phenomena, indicate that rocks may flow. Observations of this nature lead to the supposition that high plateau-like regions may be gradually subsiding under the influence of their own weight, and that the process of settlement may from time to time be spasmodic in its character. Whether the earthquakes which originate round the submerged basal frontiers of the continents bounding the Pacific are ever attributable to such activities, it is impossible to say. All that we know with certainty is that they are sometimes accompanied by such a vast displacement of material that the ocean has been set into a state of oscillation for periods of 24 hours, that in some instances there have been marked changes in depth, and that enormous sub-oceanic landslips have occurred. These phenomena are, however, equally well explained on the assumption of sudden faulting accompanied by violent shaking, which would dislodge steeply inclined beds of material beneath the ocean as it does upon the land. Entry: A
The great source for Franciscan history is Wadding's _Annales_; it has been many times continued, and now extends in 25 vols. fol. to the year 1622. The story is also told by Helyot, _Hist. des ordres religieux_ (1714), vol. vii. Abridgments, with references to recent literature, will be found in Max Heimbucher, _Orden und Kongregationen_ (1896), i. §§ 37-51; in Wetzer und Welte, _Kirchenlexicon_ (2nd ed.), articles "Armut (III.)," "Franciscaner orden" (this article contains the best account of the inner history and the polity of the order up to 1886); in Herzog, _Realencyklopädie_ (3rd ed.), articles "Franz von Assisi" (fullest references to literature up to 1899), "Fraticellen." Of modern critical studies on Franciscan origins, K. Müller's _Anfänge des Minoritenordens und der Bussbruderschaften_ (1885), and various articles by F. Ehrle in _Archiv für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters_ and _Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie_, deserve special mention. Eccleston's charming chronicle of "The Coming of the Friars Minor into England" has been translated into English by the Capuchin Fr. Cuthbert, who has prefixed an Introductory Essay giving by far the best account in English of "the Spirit and Genius of the Franciscan Friars" (_The Friars and how they came to England_, 1903). Fuller information on the English Franciscans will be found in A. G. Little's _Grey Friars in Oxford_ (Oxford Hist. Soc., 1892). (E. C. B.) Entry: FRANCISCANS
That the theory of evolution serves usefully to group and to interpret many facts in the history of art we shall not deny, though it would be easy to show that Herbert Spencer's instances and applications are not sufficient to sustain all the conclusions that he seems to draw from them. Thus, it is perfectly true that the Egyptian or Assyrian palace wall is an instance of rudimentary painting and rudimentary sculpture in subservience to architecture. But it is not less true that races who had no architecture at all, but lived in caverns of the earth, exhibit, as we have already had occasion to notice, excellent rudiments of the other two shaping arts in a different form, in the carved or incised handles of their weapons. And it is almost certain that, among the nations of oriental antiquity themselves, the art of decorating solid walls so as to please the eye with patterns and presentations of natural objects was borrowed from the precedent of an older art which works in easier materials, namely, the art of the weaver. It would be in the perished textile fabrics of the earliest dwellers in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile that we should find, if anywhere, the origins of the systems of surface design, whether conventional or imitative, which those races afterwards applied to the decoration of their solid constructions. Not, therefore, in any one exclusive type of primitive artistic activity, but in a score of such types equally, varying according to race, region and circumstances, shall we find so many germs or nuclei from which whole families of fine arts have in the course of the world's history differentiated and unfolded themselves. And more than once during that history, a cataclysm of political and social forces has not only checked the process of the evolution of the fine arts, but from an advanced stage of development has thrown them back again to a primitive stage. Recent research has shown how the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations in the Mediterranean basin, with their developed fine arts, must have perished and been effaced before the second growth of art from new rudiments took place in Greece. The great instance of the downfall of the Roman civilization need not be requoted. By Spencer's application of the theory of evolution, not less than by Hegel's theory of the historic periods, attention is called to the fact that Christian Europe, during several centuries of the middle age, presents to our study a civilization analogous to the civilization of the old oriental empires in this respect, that its ruling and characteristic manual art is architecture, to which sculpture and painting are, as in the oriental empires, once more subjugated and attached. It does not of course follow that such periods of fusion or mutual dependence among the arts are periods of bad art. On the contrary, each stage of the evolution of any art has its own characteristic excellence. The arts can be employed in combination, and yet be all severally excellent. When music, dancing, acting and singing were combined in the performance of the Greek chorus, the combination no doubt presented a relative perfection of each of the four elements analogous to the combined perfection, in the contemporary Doric temple, of pure architectural form, sculptured enrichment of spaces specially contrived for sculpture in the pediments and frieze, and coloured decoration over all. The extreme differentiation of any art from every other art, and of the several branches of one art among themselves, does not by any means tend to the perfection of that art. The process of evolution among the fine arts may go, and indeed in the course of history has gone, much too far for the health of the arts severally. Thus an artist of our own day is usually either a painter only or a sculptor only; but yet it is acknowledged that the painter who can model a statue, or the sculptor who can paint a picture, is likely to be the more efficient master of both arts; and in the best days of Florentine art the greatest men were generally painters, sculptors, architects and goldsmiths all at once. In like manner a landscape painter who paints landscape only is apt not to paint it so well as one who paints the figure too; and in recent times the craft of engraving had almost ceased to be an art from the habit of allotting one part of the work, as skies, to one hand, another part, as figures, to a second, and another part, as landscape, to a third. This kind of continually progressing subdivision of labour, which seems to be the necessary law of industrial processes, is fatal to any skill which demands, as skill in the fine arts, we have seen, demands, the free exercise and direction of a highly complex cluster both of faculties and sensibilities. Entry: III