Among the works of Carlos Salzedo is

Four Preludes to the Afternoon of a Telephone, for harp duo (1921)

• Audubon 530
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(Wiki)

from THE LONDON GAZETTE, 16 MARCH, 1926., p 1918

Whitehall, March 15, 1926.

The KING has been pleased to give and grant unto Dashwood Poyntz Ricketts, Esq., Engineer-in-Chief Peking-Mukden Railway, His Majesty's Royal licence and authority to wear the Insignia of the Fourth Class of the Order of the Excellent Crop, which Decoration has been conferred upon him by the President of the Republic of China in recognition of valuable services rendered by him.

 

Francis Bacon said in 1623,

audacter calumniare, aliquid semper haeret,
  (which is to say,)

      Slander boldly, something always sticks.

(De Augmentis Scientarum)

Of course by that point a fair amount had stuck to him.... 

the Religion Corner

The Catholic Church (with all due respect to anyone's heritage, and recognizing that I am something of an amateur Catholic myself) seems just about ready to implode over Herr Doktor-Licentiate Erzbischof-Pape Ratzinger and his over-generous notions of discretion -- which would be a grand, grand spectacle, better than most earthquakes.  I mean, wouldn't a normal person suspect that a celibate all-male organization might possibly attract persons of unusual sexual preference?  But, no, I'm shocked -- shocked, I say -- that there are pedophile priests -- but, let us forgive them, and their superiors and enablers and accomplices -- after all, don't you know, Jimmy, that Jesus loved to wrestle with the Apostles?

For equal-time and fairness and so on:  poking around for a substantive yea-or-nay on the vital question Did Louis Armstrong speak fluent yiddish? I came across some references to a big gang of Jewish pimps in Argentina in the first part of the last century -- Zwi Migdal, it was called, with some 400 guys and branch offices all over the Western world.  The picturesque part is this:  naturally enough they were utterly shunned by the rest of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires (after all, we're not African-Americans) -- there were even signs in the Yiddish movie theatres, "No Pimps Allowed" -- and refused burial in Jewish cemeteries, so they formed their own burial society, what we call a chesed or a chevra (depending on the dialect) -- a benevolent society.  They bought land for a cemetery and so on; I believe it still exists.

Meanwhile the Jewish whores organized too, under the cover of another chesed, but in fact they were more of a labor union.  The woman who led the whore-chesed (you can't call it a chevra, because that literally means "brotherhood"), name of Rebekah Fridmann, died only in 1985 and left behind a big pile of oral-history tapes.  So, another obscure corner enlightened....

BTW, even though Mr Armstrong was very close to a Litvaksh family in New Orleans named Karnofsky from the time he was seven  (and stayed in touch with them all his life), it seems unlikely that he was fluent -- he could probably understand, and he knew a few pieces of kitchen-yiddish, as we call it, but there's no evidence of fluent speech and some evidence to the contrary. 

The more interesting question (unanswerable, of course, like all the more interesting questions) is how much influence did Eastern-European Jewish music, klezmer, have on his, um, melodic and harmonic sensibilities?  Near the end of his life (so the story goes), sick as a dog in a New York hospital, he recognized a yiddish lullaby sung to him by his doctor (does YOUR doctor sing you lullabies?!) and proceeded to sing right along -- it all provoked him to write a memoir about the Karnofskys -- well, I think it's about time to Wash Those Dishes.

My Sharia

Hey, speaking of which, I mean the South & West, what about that Akin guy with his medieval notions of ordeal by rape -- the truly innocent won't get pregnant!  Y'know, water rejects the witch and she floats but the innocent drowns, hot irons will not burn the hand of the truth-teller, trial by combat is the Judgment of God:  this guy could be the leading edge of a juridical revolution which would have us absolutely begging for Sharia -- shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh, my Sharia -- or even for Scalia.

"saltational"?

No, not in OED, though anyone could cook up a citation and send it in...apparently the word is "saltatory." 

One then finds, in the usual way, "saltatress."  Hoping to encounter a loose woman, one who leaps from bed to bed, instead one is handed an obsolete and rare "female dancer," with only one cite, from 1784.  I wonder how they draw the line between "obs., rare" and "nonce-word"?  just one of the many vexing issues that bear critically on the future of civilisation as we know it....

The Roman frontier...

The Roman frontier in Europe, as it does more obviously in Africa and the East, by and large corresponds with the limit of intensive agriculture.  Economically the rational frontier in Britain was about halfway up and Hadrian's wall was a fair military translation of this, but there was always a feeling that, after all, the place was an island, and if you could get to the end you wouldn't need a frontier at all.  Accordingly, the annexation of Scotland was attempted at intervals but always failed because the legions could not supply themselves in such sparsely populated country.

Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, 1st ed. (1967)  p.82, note 1


A clearer and more succinct statement of what Braudel called "the limits of the possible" is hard to imagine.As prose this paragraph is not quite perfect, though close -- still, I would have been very content indeed to have written it.  The entire book is a joy.  (I have not seen the second edition.)

Feuilletoniste -- pronounced "blog-GER"

If it is so obvious, why does [a certain charming blogger still on the good side of thirty] need to hear it from you? Put yourself in her shoes.

I do, and this is what I get.  I'm a bright, energetic, ambitious newser and citizen deeply concerned about the incredible mess the world is in.  I come of age in a culture which has developed over the last half-century the ability to mercantilize dissent -- "Think different!" -- to absorb and neutralize (and monetize!) critical, bohemian, rebellious, thought and speech.  On the one hand I want to fix things, to be a force for good and so on -- and I see all this corruption around me and I want to expose it.  On the other hand, I REALLY need to pay the rent.

My expectations have been (because I really have not fully penetrated the "groovy Hollywood" scam) that I could do both, but the more I learn about how the infobiz works, and the more utter slimeballs I encounter, it begins to become clear to me that I either have to sell out, get out, or go get a shit job somewhere and resign myself to being peripheral and ineffective.  This is a horrible prospect -- I mean, it is a HORRIBLE prospect, and I can't yet quite bring myself to face it.  That's what her shoes feel like to me.

As it happens, and I know you're not interested, this is the prospect that has faced absolutely every young-and-idealistic Grub-Streeter and f (oh boy...) feuilletoniste since Bohemia was born in the 1840's.  "Feuilletoniste" -- I think not TOO badly misspelled -- a writer of occasional pieces, fairly long -- our nearest equivalents:  pamphleteer, freelance, publicist.

This guy could write like ringin' a bell:

the coffee importer's reckless, hot-eyed daughter

Bach, the organ virtuoso

A posthumous report on Bach's 1739 dedication of the Trost organ at the Altenburg palace church reads:

For an organist, to yield to the singing congregation is better than to have it his way. Only a few are able to direct the congregation as the old Bach could do, who, on the great organ in Altenburg, played the Credo hymn "Wir glauben all an einen Gott" in D minor, but for the second stanza lifted the congregation to E-flat minor, and for the third one even up to E minor. That, however, only a Bach and an organ in Altenburg could make happen. This, all of us are not, and have not.  

apud Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, p.144 ff