correct, fidelio; the siege of vixburg happened after the battle of drambuie.
it was during that same siege that gerald ford, noted impresario, staged the first high-stepping revue of palmerston's folies at ford's theater. oil billionaire and reclusive airplane designer j. paul getty arrived for the opening in a fabulous designer gown he had purchased a bergdorf goodman's, leading ford to quip that the world would little note nor long remember what happened on stage that night, but they sure got an eyeful of getty's bergdorf dress!
well, if there's a *market* for radically misleading histories of the civil war, i imagine we have talent to cook one up right here! and profit!
"...as the civil war dragged into its seventh year, mexican forces under general santa ana were defeated at the battle of rorke's drift by the indomitable long-bows of the stout english yeomanry. northern hopes for a swift victory were dashed when a massive explosion destroyed the state of maine, sending it to the bottom of a harbor in cuba. senator william jennings bryan argued that north and south should divorce for ever, with his rallying cry of "remember the alimony!"
but cardinal richelieu had other plans."
okay--when do we sign a contract with the book clubs? what's our take?
yeah, the failures in this book pretty clearly go beyond incidental geo-trivia, to central issues of analysis.
that monitor/merrimack debacle is just astounding--how could you write a paragraph like that?
nope.
i still think that robust historical analysis can survive the occasional error of fact.
but this is just catastrophic failure--i don't know what larger point could reliably emerge from this pervasive matrix of wrong.
maybe i'm just sensitive because of that time in high school history class when i said that alaska was acquired in the louisiana purchase.
i mean, come on! it could have been, right?
and think of the similarities--large land purchase from a cash-strapped european empire. both states with an 'l' in their names. also, seafood.
yeah, that's unacceptable.
at the same time, i feel bad for keegan, whose 'face of battle' was first-rate and influential.
and i also wonder how critical to his arguments the errors in fact actually were. to put this differently: would "face of battle" really be worth much less if keegan had committed similar botches about the belgian landscape and french rivers?
that's an open question: i really wonder. historians are supposed to develop arguments from facts, and if you screw up too many facts then your argument is built on bupkis. but the best historical arguments are founded on a very broad basis of fact, and resilient to the failure of a few here and there.
certainly if keegan had gotten all of his states and rivers in the right places, we would not be lauding him for his brilliance in doing so. getting geography right, even 100% right, is not sufficient for doing valuable history.
is getting geography 100% right *necessary* for valuable history? i doubt it.
in any case, i am much more troubled by his failures of analysis than by his failures of fact. putting rivers in the right place is trivial; not knowing whether they are obstacles or highways is not. the name of the british p.m. may be ancillary to this book; the identity of the soldiers being honored at gettysburg is not.
@35 yup, i heard it. and heeded it.
for the good book saith, "take heed what ye hear: with what meter ye mete, it shall be metered unto you."
of course, walter schott: how did i forget him?
he and donald fagen wrote all steely dans' stuff, right? bass player?
slightly more seriously,
1) "und es war der zug" is actually a pretty powerful line, following the longer, wordier speech before it. reminds me of "and the war came", from the second inaugural (though parva componere magnis, of course).
2) there's something interesting going on here with a german author's reaction to a scottish event immediately triggering reminiscences of macbeth. i think also about the way that prince albert became a massive enthusiast for all things scottish (or ersatz, mythologized scottish), in the course of the hanoverian reappropriation of holyroodhouse.
and the impact of schlegel and tieck's german translation of shakespeare not many decades earlier. there was some kind of scottish fad among the german intelligentsia, as well as shakespeare mania. many elements had to conspire to bring about this poem.
still, i for one think that there should be many more poems rhyming "buttresses" with "confesses".
especially when "buttresses" is used in its middle-english sense of "female household attendants employed to butter things."
it's a brilliant find, and very exciting.
but i think the 'bigger than sutton hoo' line is guff, unless they have a lot more going on at the find-site than they have revealed. (and fair enough if so--i read that they are keeping the find-site under wraps so they can investigate further).
sutton hoo is an entire cemetery with ship-burial of a chieftain. it has context. hell, it practically has a narrative arc (measured in cubits).
if this new hoard just reflects a hole hastily dug in the middle of nowhere, with no further remains, no context, and no connections, then as wonderful as it is, it will still not shed the flood of light that sutton hoo did.
not to knock the artefacts themselves, which really are breath-taking in their intricacy.
(doesn't northrop frye somewhere comment that "curiously inwrought" was an aesthetic accolade in this age? many of these jewel-like marvels show just what it means to praise something as "curiously inwrought".)
brown is probably right that turing's work on the enigma code is his most *famous* work.
but i should think that the work which is of the greatest significance in the long arc of history is his more general work on the theory of computability.
the enigma work was a really cool fix for a tough practical problem.
the work on algorithms, computability, and general turing machines was a glimpse into totally uncharted territory.
a beautiful mind brought low by bigotry. rest in peace.
worth re-reading this:
www.chrishayes.org/articles/the-good-war-on-terror/
it's no knock on the genuine heroes of wwii, to say that their genuine heroism was perverted into something ugly and grotesque by the bush administration.
good lord. what a thorough job he did. what a thoroughly evil soul he was.
#581--
what is it with slate? wall-to-wall wrong-headedness.
i think the root trouble is that the slate people came from print, and still want to be print. they fundamentally do not like the web. they didn't come up through darpa, usenet, etc.
instead, they spent their adolescences wanting to write for the new republic or new york times or new yorker--something old, anyhow.
and they still have the print attitude that they are the shapers of opinion, talking down to us mere consumers. sorry, guys--that ship sailed a long time ago.
anyhow--yeah, the article on the dead is egregious. and yet, somehow, par for the course at slate.
#99--
you flatter me. but my original intent was to read others' stories, not to write my own. i was trying to provoke the really talented writers around here into giving it a crack.
teresa stepped up to the plate, bless her heart, and knocked one out of the park, but otherwise i failed to inspire.
i have seen in the past what can happen when the right spark sets off a making-light thread. it's more incendiary then an atomized cloud of flour.
but mass talent is at no one's beck and call, certainly not mine. threads have moods, and fluctuating spirits. the occasion was not propitious, and that is no one's fault.
#50--
"peradventure"? really? i would have had an instant idiolect-crush on the first person i heard say that.
a misplaced one, of course, and soon repented of when i heard everyone else saying it, too.
but still--it sounds so courtly.
about the mechanism for peripheral conservatism--all of these suggestions seem plausible, but i don't know that anyone has a good handle on the phenomenon. it has to operate over very long times and very long distances, which makes some of the explanations via overt psychologizing ("and then the tasmanians said to themselves: "we may be a long way from new guinea, but we're still new guineans at heart!"") less plausible. johanna nichol's book "linguistic diversity in space and time" is the place to learn more.
she has shockingly little to say in it about sweet sausages and the use of fennel, however.
#46--
a classic case of what linguists call "peripheral conservatism".
not entirely clear why, but when linguistic groups travel geographically from a core, the furthest dispersed groups tend to preserve more archaic features of the language, where the speakers at the core continue to innovate.
perhaps the center of the pot keeps boiling, so to speak, where the edges cool and harden.
anyhow, if you want to know how indo-european was spoken in its homeland, you'll find better clues in ireland and in india than you will in armenia (using that as a plausible guess among controversial competitors).
italian may lose some of its food traditions. but only because they are innovating so fearlessly, and creating the next traditions. and because they won't put up with anyone looking over their shoulder and saying, 'that's not authentic.'
"so i visited my cousins? in peoria? and they were talking like people talked in the san fernando, like, twenty years ago! and i was just like, whatever! valspeak is so totally 1985!"
agreed. it lacks the full, rounded flavor you'd get from longer simmering. but i'm just short order, anyhow, not haute cuisine.
#12--
indeed: "burnt" is surely a false etymology.
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