Wow! I have been very fortunate that other descendants of the Balenger/Belanger lines through Jean Baptiste Balenger (Balenger) (b. 1787 Yamaska, Quebec, Canada; d. May 12, 1838 in Bay Settlement (Town of Scott), Brown County, Wisconsin, USA) have done thorough research. Today I added a full line of ancestors through Jean Baptiste back to 1586 Normandie, France (paternal line) and via a maternal line all the way back to 1530 Bourgogne, France.
This is all very very mind-boggling. I am still having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that there is a paper trail of my ancestors nearly 500 years long. In my first post, I had traced my particular Balenger/Belanger line through Jean Baptiste and Angelique Forcier, and then traced the Forcier line all the way back to France:
Guillaume Forcier b. 1623; d. 1690 St. Aubin France m. Sebastienne Gaultier b. 1625, d. 1674 France -- parents of Pierre Forcier b. 1648 in St. Aubin, Nantes, Bregagne (?), France; d. 5/18/1690 in Indian attack St. Francois Du Lac, Quebec, Canada. He was the first Forcier in this line to tracel to the New World.
Nicolas Girard b. 1610; d. 1671 m. Francoise Huon b. 1620 d. 1725 (she was 105 years old???) -- parents of Marguerite Marie Girard b. 1643 Boulogne Ser Mer, Picardie, France; d. 8/7/1695 Quebec, Quebec, Canada. Marguerite Marie Girard married Pierre Forcier after both families had emigrated to Quebec, Canada.
Here is the information on Jean Baptiste Balenger (Belanger):
Jean Baptiste Balenger (Balenger) (my great-great-great grandfather)
b. 1787 Yamaska, Quebec, Canada;
d. May 12, 1838 in Bay Settlement (Town of Scott), Brown County, Wisconsin, USA
Son of
Chrysostome P. Belanger b. 2/20/1751 Lislet Sur Mer, Lislet, Quebec, Canada; d. 3/3/1798 Yamaska, Quebec, Canada m. Marie Louise Dit G Godin b. 12/30/1754 Quebec, Canada; d. 3/19 or 3/20/1794 Quebec, Canada
Son of
Pierre Belanger b. 2/4/1727 Canada; d. 10/3/1792 France m. Marie Francoise Bernier b. 7/16/1730 Canada; d. 10/10/1804 Canada. This line did not continue any further in this particular geneaology.
Now there is a problem, because on a separate genealogy by another descendant of Jean Baptiste Belanger, Chrysostome P. Belanger is the son of Pierre Balenger b. 5/3/1719 Lislet, Quebec, Canada; d. 5/4/1774 Y, Picardie, France m. Anne Clair Fournier b. 1/1/1722 Michigan USA; d. 8/7/1763 Yamaska, Quebec, Canada! This geneaology line continues as follows:
Son of
Francois Balenger b. 12/12/1686 Quebec, Canada; d. 11/12/1727 Quebec, Canada m. Genevieve Cloutier b. 2/4/1689 Quebec, Canada; d. 5/23/1759 Quebec, Canada.
Son of
Louis Belanger b. 12/18/1654 Canada; d. 10/1/1724 Canada m. Marguerite Lefrancois b. 2/2/1665 Canada; d. 10/29/1735 Canada.
Son of
Francois Belanger b. 10/1612 France; d. 10/25/1685 Canada m. Marie Barbe Guyon b. 3/18/1624 St. Jean, Mortagne, Perche, France; d. 11/27/1700 Cap St. Ignace, Quebec, Canada. This is the first Belanger in my particular family line to arrive in the New World from France.
Son of
Francois Belanger b. 1585 Normandie, France; d. 1640 Normandie France m. Francoise Horlays b. 1590 Normandie, France; d. 1612 Normandie, France. This is the end of this line of research.
However, there is research further back in the line of Marie Barbe Guyon, the wife of the first Belanger in my particular family line to arrive in the New World from France (Francois Belanger b. 10/1612 France; d. 10/25/1685 Canada):
Daughter of
Jean John Guyon b. 9/18/1592 France; d. 5/30/1663 Canada; no mother listed.
Son of
Jacques Guyon b. 1/6/1578 France; d. 9/29/1623 France; no mother listed.
Son of
Mathurin Guyon b. 1530 Bourgogne, France; d. 1/6/1578 France. (He died the day his son was born? Wow - wonder what the story is behind that). Married Mathurine Robin b. 1592 Perche, France; d. 4/16/1662 Canada.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Dead Babies Wash Up on Chinese Beach
Dead babies wash up on Chinese beach
Two mortuary workers were detained and two senior hospital staff were sacked in eastern China after the bodies of at least 21 infants and foetuses were found in a river.
Published: 9:25PM BST 30 Mar 2010
At least eight bodies had tags indicating they were from the hospital of Jining Medical University in Shandong province, Xinhua news agency reported.
Authorities were quoted by Beijing News saying the corpses could have been those of aborted foetuses or babies who had died of illness. They were found on the outskirts of the city of Jining.
Xinhua quoted a spokesman for the city government as telling reporters that two mortuary workers had been sacked in connection with the incident and were in police custody.
Naming the two workers as Zhu Zhenyu and Wang Zhijun, Xinhua quoted the spokesman as saying that the two had been paid to dispose of the bodies.
“Investigations by police and health authorities show that Zhu and Wang had reached verbal agreements privately with relatives of the dead babies to dispose the bodies and charged fees,” the spokesman, Gong Zhenhua, said.
“They subsequently transported the bodies secretly to the Guangfu River, but they had failed to bury the bodies completely,” he was quoted as saying.
The river was not a source of drinking water for the city and municipal tests found it had not been contaminated, Xinhua reported. [Yeah, right. One has to now wonder how many other bodies and body parts were dumped into the river. I don't believe for an instant that any of these bodies were "buried" and somehow became "uncovered." And that is just an outright lie about the river not being a source of drinking water. Right now China is experiencing a SEVERE drought of several years' duration and ALL rivers are being used as sources of drinking water, right while unprocessed chemical pollutants and unprocessed human waste continue to be dumped into them at record rates.]
Two senior officials, Li Luning and He Xin, director and deputy director of the hospital’s logistics department, were removed from their posts, and a vice president of the hospital, Niu Haifeng, was suspended, Gong said.
The incident exposed “a serious loophole in the hospital’s management and indicates a lack of ethics and legal awareness of some hospital staff,” Gong said. “It exerts a very negative impact on society and teaches us a profound lesson.”
He said the city government had ordered health authorities to immediately launch a general overhaul of body treatment at all local hospitals.
One of the bodies had been bundled into a plastic bag marked “hospital waste”, Beijing News said.
Abortion is common in China, where at least 13 million births are terminated every year, due in part to the nation’s so-called “one-child policy,” which limits most urban couples to just one offspring.
The family-planning rules are widely blamed for fuelling abortions of female foetuses in China, where boys are traditionally favoured.
Reports of poor treatment of patients – both living and dead – in China’s underfunded hospitals are also not uncommon.
Last June, a hospital in central China’s Hubei province was found to have dumped the bodies of two adults and six aborted foetuses at a construction site after failing to locate relatives of the dead, state media reported. [Question: How could an aborted foetus not have a relative? Is the mother not a relative?]
A bag containing severed human limbs was also discovered in the case, in the city of Xiangfan.
Two mortuary workers were detained and two senior hospital staff were sacked in eastern China after the bodies of at least 21 infants and foetuses were found in a river.
Published: 9:25PM BST 30 Mar 2010
At least eight bodies had tags indicating they were from the hospital of Jining Medical University in Shandong province, Xinhua news agency reported.
Authorities were quoted by Beijing News saying the corpses could have been those of aborted foetuses or babies who had died of illness. They were found on the outskirts of the city of Jining.
Xinhua quoted a spokesman for the city government as telling reporters that two mortuary workers had been sacked in connection with the incident and were in police custody.
Naming the two workers as Zhu Zhenyu and Wang Zhijun, Xinhua quoted the spokesman as saying that the two had been paid to dispose of the bodies.
“Investigations by police and health authorities show that Zhu and Wang had reached verbal agreements privately with relatives of the dead babies to dispose the bodies and charged fees,” the spokesman, Gong Zhenhua, said.
“They subsequently transported the bodies secretly to the Guangfu River, but they had failed to bury the bodies completely,” he was quoted as saying.
The river was not a source of drinking water for the city and municipal tests found it had not been contaminated, Xinhua reported. [Yeah, right. One has to now wonder how many other bodies and body parts were dumped into the river. I don't believe for an instant that any of these bodies were "buried" and somehow became "uncovered." And that is just an outright lie about the river not being a source of drinking water. Right now China is experiencing a SEVERE drought of several years' duration and ALL rivers are being used as sources of drinking water, right while unprocessed chemical pollutants and unprocessed human waste continue to be dumped into them at record rates.]
Two senior officials, Li Luning and He Xin, director and deputy director of the hospital’s logistics department, were removed from their posts, and a vice president of the hospital, Niu Haifeng, was suspended, Gong said.
The incident exposed “a serious loophole in the hospital’s management and indicates a lack of ethics and legal awareness of some hospital staff,” Gong said. “It exerts a very negative impact on society and teaches us a profound lesson.”
He said the city government had ordered health authorities to immediately launch a general overhaul of body treatment at all local hospitals.
One of the bodies had been bundled into a plastic bag marked “hospital waste”, Beijing News said.
Abortion is common in China, where at least 13 million births are terminated every year, due in part to the nation’s so-called “one-child policy,” which limits most urban couples to just one offspring.
The family-planning rules are widely blamed for fuelling abortions of female foetuses in China, where boys are traditionally favoured.
Reports of poor treatment of patients – both living and dead – in China’s underfunded hospitals are also not uncommon.
Last June, a hospital in central China’s Hubei province was found to have dumped the bodies of two adults and six aborted foetuses at a construction site after failing to locate relatives of the dead, state media reported. [Question: How could an aborted foetus not have a relative? Is the mother not a relative?]
A bag containing severed human limbs was also discovered in the case, in the city of Xiangfan.
**************************************************************
This is just one incident that has been "discovered" and reported (shocking, actually, that it was allowed to make the news) - multiply this about 10,000 times and you will begin to get a picture of what is really happening in China these days - day in and day out.
Men Owe Women for 'Creating Beer'
From the Telegraph.co.uk
Men owe women for 'creating beer' claims academic
One of man’s great pleasures might be a pint of beer at the local – but an academic has claimed it would never have existed without the entrepreneurial skills of women.
By Nick Britten
Published: 1:47PM BST 30 Mar 2010
Jane Peyton, 48, and author and historian, said women created beer and for thousands of years it was only they who were allowed to operate breweries and drink beer.
The drink is now almost exclusively marketed to men - with television characters such as Homer Simpson the epitome of the beer-loving male.
Yet Miss Peyton said that up until 200 years ago, beer was considered a food and fell into the remit of women’s work. It was only then that men began drinking it and it became what is considered a very male drink.
Miss Peyton has conducted extensive research into the origins of beer for a new book, and discovered to her surprise that a woman's touch was found on beer throughout the ages.
Nearly 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Sumeria, so important were their skills that they were the only ones allowed to brew the drink or run any taverns.
And in almost all ancient societies beer was also then considered to be a gift from a goddess, never a male God.
Between the eighth and tenth centuries AD the Vikings spread terror by rampaging through Europe, fuelled by women-made ale.
Women were the exclusive brewers in Norse society and all equipment by law remained their property.
And Ancient Finland also credits the creation of beer to the fairer sex, with three women, a bear's saliva and wild honey the apparent first ingredients.
In England ale was traditionally made in the home by women. They were known as brewsters or ale-wives and the sale of the drink provided a valuable income for many households.
It quickly became an essential staple of the diet and even royalty indulged in the tasty beverage.
Queen Elizabeth I, like most people of the era, consumed it for breakfast and at other times of the day.
But by the start of the late 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, new methods of making beer meant women's contribution slowly started to decline and be forgotten, until now.
Miss Peyton said: “I know men will be absolutely stunned to find this out, but they've got women to thank for beer.”
Men owe women for 'creating beer' claims academic
One of man’s great pleasures might be a pint of beer at the local – but an academic has claimed it would never have existed without the entrepreneurial skills of women.
By Nick Britten
Published: 1:47PM BST 30 Mar 2010
Jane Peyton, 48, and author and historian, said women created beer and for thousands of years it was only they who were allowed to operate breweries and drink beer.
The drink is now almost exclusively marketed to men - with television characters such as Homer Simpson the epitome of the beer-loving male.
Yet Miss Peyton said that up until 200 years ago, beer was considered a food and fell into the remit of women’s work. It was only then that men began drinking it and it became what is considered a very male drink.
Miss Peyton has conducted extensive research into the origins of beer for a new book, and discovered to her surprise that a woman's touch was found on beer throughout the ages.
Nearly 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Sumeria, so important were their skills that they were the only ones allowed to brew the drink or run any taverns.
And in almost all ancient societies beer was also then considered to be a gift from a goddess, never a male God.
Between the eighth and tenth centuries AD the Vikings spread terror by rampaging through Europe, fuelled by women-made ale.
Women were the exclusive brewers in Norse society and all equipment by law remained their property.
And Ancient Finland also credits the creation of beer to the fairer sex, with three women, a bear's saliva and wild honey the apparent first ingredients.
In England ale was traditionally made in the home by women. They were known as brewsters or ale-wives and the sale of the drink provided a valuable income for many households.
It quickly became an essential staple of the diet and even royalty indulged in the tasty beverage.
Queen Elizabeth I, like most people of the era, consumed it for breakfast and at other times of the day.
But by the start of the late 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, new methods of making beer meant women's contribution slowly started to decline and be forgotten, until now.
Miss Peyton said: “I know men will be absolutely stunned to find this out, but they've got women to thank for beer.”
Mysterious Lead Coffin Uncovered in Italy
Mar. 29, 2010
An archaeological mystery in a half-ton lead coffin
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—In the ruins of a city that was once Rome's neighbor, archaeologists last summer found a 1,000-pound lead coffin.
Who or what is inside is still a mystery, said Nicola Terrenato, the University of Michigan professor of classical studies who leads the project—the largest American dig in Italy in the past 50 years.
The sarcophagus will soon be transported to the American Academy in Rome, where engineers will use heating techniques and tiny cameras in an effort to gain insights about the contents without breaking the coffin itself.
"We're very excited about this find," Terrenato said. "Romans as a rule were not buried in coffins to begin with and when they did use coffins, they were mostly wooden. There are only a handful of other examples from Italy of lead coffins from this age—the second, third or fourth century A.D. We know of virtually no others in this region."
This one is especially unusual because of its size.
"It's a sheet of lead folded onto itself an inch thick," he said. "A thousand pounds of metal is an enormous amount of wealth in this era. To waste so much of it in a burial is pretty unusual."
Was the deceased a soldier? A gladiator? A bishop? All are possibilities, some more remote than others, Terrenato said. Researchers will do their best to examine the bones and any "grave goods" or Christian symbols inside the container in an effort to make a determination.
"It's hard to predict what's inside, because it's the only example of its kind in the area," Terrenato said. "I'm trying to keep my hopes within reason."
Human remains encased in lead coffins tend to be well preserved, if difficult to get to. Researchers want to avoid breaking into the coffin. The amount of force necessary to break through the lead would likely damage the contents. Instead, they will first use thermography and endoscopy. Thermography involves heating the coffin by a few degrees and monitoring the thermal response. Bones and any artifacts buried with them would have different thermal responses, Terrenato said. Endoscopy involves inserting a small camera into the coffin. But how well that works depends on how much dirt has found its way into the container over the centuries.
If these approaches fail, the researchers could turn to an MRI scan—an expensive option that would involve hauling the half-ton casket to a hospital.
The dig that unearthed this find started in summer 2009 and continues through 2013. Each year, around 75 researchers from around the nation and world, including a dozen U-M undergraduate students, spend two months on the project at the ancient city of Gabii (pronounced "gabby").
The site of Gabii, situated on undeveloped land 11 miles east of Rome in modern-day Lazio, was a major city that pre-dates Rome but seems to have waned as the Roman Empire grew.
Studying Gabii gives researchers a glimpse into pre-Roman life and offers clues to how early Italian cities formed. It also allows them broader access to more substantial archaeological layers or strata. In Rome, layers of civilization were built on top of each other, and archaeologists are not able or allowed to disturb them.
"In Rome, so often, there's something in the way, so we have to get lucky," Terrenato said. "In Gabii, they should all be lucky spots because there's nothing in the way."
Indeed, Terrenato and others were surprised to find something as significant as this coffin so soon.
"The finding of the lead coffin was exhilarating," said Allison Zarbo, a senior art history major who graduates this spring.
Zarbo didn't mind that after the researchers dug up the coffin once, they had to pile the dirt back on to hide it from looters overnight.
"The fact that we had to fill the hole was not so much of a burden as a relief!" Zarbo said. "For academia to lose priceless artifacts that have been found fully in context would be very damaging to our potential knowledge."
Students spent most of their time pick-axing, shoveling, and manning the wheelbarrows, said Bailey Benson, a junior who is double majoring in classical archaeology and art history.
"By the end of the day, not even a 20-minute shower can remove all the dirt and grime you get covered in," Benson said. "It's hard but satisfying work. How many people can say they uncovered an ancient burial?"
This research is funded in part by the National Geographic Society. The managing director of the project is Jeffrey Becker, assistant professor of classics at McMaster University. The field director leading the coffin studies is independent researcher Anna Gallone. The Italian State Archaeological Service (Soprintendenza di Roma) is authorizing and facilitating the project.
Aha! More information from the National Geographic:
Lead "Burrito" Sarcophagus Found Near Rome Ancient coffin may hold a gladiator or a Christian dignitary, experts say.
Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic News
Published March 29, 2010
A 1,700-year-old sarcophagus found in an abandoned city near Rome could contain the body of a gladiator or a Christian dignitary, say archaeologists who are preparing to examine the coffin in the lab.
Found in a cement-capped pit in the ancient metropolis of Gabii, the coffin is unusual because it's made of lead—only a few hundred such Roman burials are known.
Even odder, the 800 pounds (362 kilograms) of lead fold over the corpse like a burrito, said Roman archaeologist Jeffrey Becker. Most lead sarcophagi look like "old-fashioned cracker boxes," molded into a rectangular shape with a lid, he said.
The coffin, which has been in storage since last year, is about to be moved to the American Academy in Rome for further testing.
But uncovering details about the person inside the lead coffin will be tricky. For starters, the undisturbed tomb contained no grave goods, offering few clues about the owner. (See more temple and tomb pictures.)
What's more, x-ray and CT scans—the preferred methods of coffin analysis—cannot penetrate the thick lead, leaving researchers pondering other, potentially dangerous ways to examine the remains inside.
"It's exciting as well as frustrating, because there are no known matches in the record," said Becker, managing director of the University of Michigan's Gabii Project.
Unlocking the lead coffin's secrets could ultimately offer new insights into a powerful civilization that has lain forgotten for centuries, he said.
Roman Ally's Mysterious Decline
The newfound sarcophagus was the "most surprising" discovery made in 2009 during the largest ever archaeological dig in Gabii. Becker and colleague Nicola Terrenato received funding for the ongoing project from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
Just 11 miles (18 kilometers) from Rome, Gabii was founded in the tenth century B.C., and it flourished for centuries alongside its growing neighbor, with which it shared a unique treaty of political friendship.
Walking through Gabii may have been a bit like a stroll through Rome, where the dense populace made the city crowded, noisy, and smoky in the daytime, and overall "unpleasant" to live in, Becker said.
However, by the second or third centuries A.D., Gabii had contracted dramatically, and by the ninth century it was no more.
The cause of the city's demise is unclear, but the "most obvious guess is that Rome's expanding power and territorial ambitions eventually eclipsed" Gabii, Becker said.
Lead Sarcophagus Holds "Somebody of Substance"
Mysteries about Gabii society make the newfound lead coffin especially intriguing.
Lead was a high-value metal at the time, so a full sarcophagus made out of the stuff "is a sure marker of somebody of some kind of substance," Becker said.
Past lead burials found throughout Europe have housed soldiers, elite members of the Christian church, and even female gladiators.
In fact, many lead coffins contain high-ranking women or adolescents instead of men, said Jenny Hall, a senior curator of Roman archaeology at the Museum of London, who was not involved in the new study.
However, the newfound sarcophagus' tentative age may make the gladiator scenario unlikely, said Bruce Hitchner, a visiting professor in classical archaeology at All Souls College at the U.K.'s University of Oxford.
The coffin dates back to the fourth or fifth centuries A.D., while the gladiator heyday was centuries earlier, said Hitchner, who was not part of the excavation team. (Related: "Ancient Gladiator Mosaic Found in Roman Villa.")
Coffin Had Unusual Downtown Location
What intrigues team leader Becker the most is the sarcophagus's placement—"smack dab" in the middle of a city block. A taboo against burying the dead inside city limits was deeply ingrained in the Roman religious mindset of the time, he said.
"I don't think it's, We're feeling lazy today, we're going to bury Uncle Joe in the tomato garden," Becker said. There may have been some major event that made people bury the body downtown—a possibility he intends to investigate during the next dig.
"As we seek to understand the life of the city, it's important for us to consider its end," Becker pointed out.
"To see someone who is at first glance a person of high social standing associated with later layers of the city ... opens a potentially new conversation about this urban twilight in central Italy."
Foot Bone Hints at "Extraordinary Preservation"
First, however, Becker's team hopes to find out more about the person inside the lead sarcophagus. The researchers' only hint so far is a small foot bone protruding through a hole in one end of the coffin.
Some lead burials have allowed for "extraordinary preservation" of human tissue and hair, Becker said, though the opening in the sarcophagus may mean that air has sped up decomposition of the body.
Still, early examinations reveal that the foot bone is "exceedingly" intact, Becker said: "Worst case, there's an exceptionally well-preserved human skeleton inside the wrapping."
Bones alone can tell scientists a lot about the person and his or her culture, said Bruno Frohlich, a forensic anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
"We put some kind of face to the bones—we make them alive in a way."
For instance, if the bones show evidence of diseases contracted long before death, that could mean the person survived an illness, and that Gabii society had the resources and knowledge to care for the sick, Frohlich said.
Lead Coffin too Dangerous to Open?
But Becker and his colleagues may not even get bones to work with, because the coffin may be too dangerous to open for both the living and the dead.
If the researchers decide to cut into the lead, cancer-causing lead dust could harm scientists, while exposure to bacteria could easily damage the corpse.
At the academy, a team will perform preliminary experiments on the sarcophagus, including an endoscopic exam that would feed a small fiber optic camera into the hole at the foot end.
If the experiments show that lead dust from cutting can be easily contained, the next step would be to find a "clean room"—similar to those NASA uses for experiments—in which to open the coffin, Becker said. (Related: "NASA 'Clean Rooms' Brimming With Bacteria.")
No matter who turns out to be inside the lead coffin, Becker is hopeful that the person wrapped in metal will turn out to be a window into history.
"To anybody with a passing interest in the human past, it's an exciting opportunity right there—to be able to say more about someone who lived and died at least 1,700 years ago."
Long Lost Pyramid Found?
Pyramid of Mystery Pharaoh Possibly Located
The long-lost tomb of the 4,300-year-old Egyptian pharaoh Userkare may have been located.
By Rossella Lorenzi | Mon Mar 29, 2010 05:42 AM ET
The missing pyramid of an obscure pharaoh that ruled Egypt some 4,300 years ago could lie at the intersection of a series of invisible lines in South Saqqara, according to new astronomical and topographical research.
Connecting the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the 6th Dynasty between 2,322 B.C. and 2,151 B.C., these lines would have governed the sacred space of the Saqqara area, in accordance with a number of criteria such as dynastic lineage, religion and astronomical alignment.
"We are talking of meridian and diagonal alignments, with pyramids raised at their intersections. The only missing piece in this sort of grid is the pyramid of Userkare," Giulio Magli, professor of archaeoastronomy at Milan's Polytechnic University, told Discovery News. His research will appear in the next issue of the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry.
Known only from the king lists, Userkare was the second pharaoh of the 6th Dynasty and ruled briefly between Teti and Teti's son Pepi I. He took power after Teti was murdered, perhaps in a conspiracy he himself had maneuvered.
Little is known about this shadowy pharaoh.
"When Pepi I took control a few years later, Userkare disappeared from history. Finding his tomb might help understand those obscure years. The walls in his burial might also contain intact copies of the Pyramid Texts," Magli said, referring to the oldest known religious texts in the world that were carved on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids at Saqqara during the 5th and 6th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom.
The long-lost tomb of the 4,300-year-old Egyptian pharaoh Userkare may have been located.
By Rossella Lorenzi | Mon Mar 29, 2010 05:42 AM ET
The missing pyramid of an obscure pharaoh that ruled Egypt some 4,300 years ago could lie at the intersection of a series of invisible lines in South Saqqara, according to new astronomical and topographical research.
Connecting the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the 6th Dynasty between 2,322 B.C. and 2,151 B.C., these lines would have governed the sacred space of the Saqqara area, in accordance with a number of criteria such as dynastic lineage, religion and astronomical alignment.
"We are talking of meridian and diagonal alignments, with pyramids raised at their intersections. The only missing piece in this sort of grid is the pyramid of Userkare," Giulio Magli, professor of archaeoastronomy at Milan's Polytechnic University, told Discovery News. His research will appear in the next issue of the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry.
Known only from the king lists, Userkare was the second pharaoh of the 6th Dynasty and ruled briefly between Teti and Teti's son Pepi I. He took power after Teti was murdered, perhaps in a conspiracy he himself had maneuvered.
Little is known about this shadowy pharaoh.
"When Pepi I took control a few years later, Userkare disappeared from history. Finding his tomb might help understand those obscure years. The walls in his burial might also contain intact copies of the Pyramid Texts," Magli said, referring to the oldest known religious texts in the world that were carved on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids at Saqqara during the 5th and 6th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Tracing the Family - All the Way Back to 1600s France! EEK!
Edited on March 30, 2010 to correct some details and add a few more:
I have not been posting as much as usual lately, triggered by a sad family event, the loss of a beloved aunt, Lorraine Prondzinski, one of my mother's sisters. Of seven Jablonski sisters, only two are now living, my mother, Caroline Newton, and Aunt Christine Gonawicka. I've been busy busy busy doing other things -
Some comments were made at the funeral that reminded me of something that I had begun way back in 1976, during the celebration of USA's 200th birthday - and some misunderstanding that I had undertaken to do a family tree. Not! I had done a little writing about the family line - old stories that I remember Dad telling us, but nothing more.
I was raised with tales of the Newton family ancestry. I don't remember if I've written about this here before, but this is the family history from Grandpa Newton's side, in a nutshell: We were from France, we came over here sometime in the early 1700s and worked our way up the Mississippi River and eventually settled in northern Wisconsin where we became lumberjacks. We may have some Cajun blood from our time in Louisiana. I am not certain, but vague recollection is that we may have been kicked out of France - or left in a big hurry. Were we criminals - or religious refuges? I don't know.
Around the beginning of March I signed up at ancestry.com for a short free trial. I found some information there, but ran into a lot of dead-ends. I searched for my father's parents, and my mother's parents. I did not locate any information at all about my mother's parents - not even her birth certificate. Frustration. I was not able to locate anything at all about my grandmother Newton (Ida Belanger) other than a 1930 census record which confirmed information I already knew: she was married to my grandfather, she had (at that time) four children: my father, my Aunt Laurel, my Aunt Faythe, my Aunt Valerie. I found a lot of Newton records, but I had no way of connecting them to my grandfather Frank C. Newton, because I could not find an online record of his birth and so had no names of his ancestors.
I CAN tell you that there are a LOT of Newtons settled in west Texas and many of them have the name Frank or Francis, but I have no idea if they are relatives.
Today - a day off from work, while I was digging around for my tax records I came across a copy of my father's World World II service records. Lo and behold, I found more information there than I had found through numerous fruitless searches online at archives.com.
My dad's service records contained two vital items: (1) a birth certificate and (2) his baptismal certificate. I thus learned from my father's baptismal record that his father, Frank C. Newton, was born in Marinette, Wisconsin on January 2, 1894. Before, I did not have a place of birth and I had not been able to confirm that his middle initial was "C" as I had found on another record. Both of my father's records also confirmed that his mother was, indeed, Ida Belanger, who was born in Michigan - also a snippet of information (place of birth) I did not have before.
Following the path of the celebrities on the current program on NBC "Who Do You Think You Are?", I signed up for a 14 day free trial at ancestry.com. Not having had any previous success tracing my father's family, I decided to try searching for my paternal grandmother, Ida Belanger.
Unbelievably, I hit a gold mine immediately. Several other people have researched the Belanger (a/k/a Balenger) family line. I found Ida right away. The most extensive work appears to have been done by a descendant of Ida Belanger's younger brother, John Belanger, who died in 1950 (before I was born).
I hit paydirt. Oh my, did I ever!
The family line is very large and begs for other lines to be explored, but tracing back as straight as I can make it, here goes:
My paternal grandmother (the mother of my father, Francis John Newton):
Ida Belanger b. June 4, 1893; d. January 5, 1962
(possibly born in Michigan, although some records indicate Wisconsin;
she died in Hancock, Michigan while visiting family)
m. Frank C. Newton (b. 1/2/1894 in Amberg, WI; d. 6/8/1964 in Racine, WI) sometime before August 17, 1922, when my father (their oldest child) was born, but I don't have an exact date
Parents of Ida Belanger:
My great-grandfather: Edward Balenger, Jr. (also spelled Belanger) b. 1852 to 1855; d - unknown
(born in Scott, Brown County, Wisconsin, USA; died - unknown )
My great-grandmother: Mathilda A. Forsythe b. April 19, 1861; d. June 7, 1943
(born in Wisconsin; died in Racine, Wisconsin)
Parents of Edward Balenger (Belanger), Jr:
My great-great-grandfather: Edward Be'langer b. April 16, 1822 (or possibly in April, 1821 according to another line of research); d. October 26, 1906
(born in St. Michel, Yamaska, Quebec, Canada; died in Gladstone, Delta, Michigan, USA. Note, another line of research done by another person indicates that Edward Be'langer died in Bay Settlement (Town of Scott), Brown County, WI. I do know know why there is a discrepancy.)
My great-great-grandmother: Aurelia Marie Francoise Brunette b. October 10, 1831; d. August 30, 1907
(born in Notre Du Rosarie, St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, Canada; died in Gladstone, Michigan, USA)
Married on May 30, 1846 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA. A note about Aurelia Marie's name - another line of research done by another person indicates that her name was Marie-Aurelia Brunette. This marriage was very fruitful. According to one line of research I have discovered, Edward Be'langer and Aurelia Marie Brunette had the following children: Mary b. abt. 1848 in Wisconsin; Joseph b. abt. 1850 in Wisconsin; Edward (my ancestor) b. abt. 1852 in Wisconsin; John b. abt. 1854 in Wisconsin; Louis b. abt. 1859 in Wisconsin; Isaac b. abt. 1862 in Wisconsin; Lucy Theresa b. abt. 1864 in Wisconsin; Alfred b. abt. 1866 in Wisconsin; Margaret b. abt. 1868 in Wisconsin; Michael b. abt. 1868 in Wisconsin (twin of Margaret?); Peter b. abt. 1870 in Wisconsin.
Lots of Belangers - and I'm probably related to most of them!
Parents of Edward Be'langer:
My great-great-great-grandfather: Jean Baptiste Belanger b. 1787; d. May 12, 1838
(born Yamaska, Quebec, Canada; died in Bay Settlement, Brown County, Wisconsin, USA)
My great-great-great-grandmother Angelique Forcier b. 7/10/1793; d. 1834
(born Yamaska, Quebec,Canada)
Note: I thought that Angelique and Jean Baptiste had only the one child, Edward, who is my particular Belanger and Forcier ancestor. However, I have found a reference to another son of Angelique and Jean Baptiste: Joseph. This information also says that Jean Baptiste was in Minnesota for awhile. I do not have any further information on this Joseph Belanger.
After Angelique's death in 1834, Jean Baptiste married again - Susanne Bibeau on June 16, 1835 in St. Francis du lac, Quebec, Canada. Unfortunately, she died on May 12, 1838 in Bay Settlement, Brown County, WI. Jean Baptiste then married again (marriage #3), Theotiste Rivard-dit-Laglanderie, on February 28, 1841. She died on September 3, 1857. But wait - according to one record I have, Jean Baptiste died May 12, 1838 - not his second wife. So - who actually died on May 12, 1838? Was it Jean Baptiste and therefore he could not have married wife #3, or was it Susanne Bibeau?
Susanne Bibeau and Jean Baptiste Belanger had two children: Peter Belanger, b. abt. 1836, and Moyses Belanger, b. abt. 1837. So, Edward had two half-brothers - and possibly he had one full-blood brother, Joseph (see note above).
No children are listed from the marriage of Theotiste Rivard-dit-Laglanderie and Jean Baptiste Belanger.
Parents of Angelique Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-grandfather Pierre Francois Forcier b. August 13, 1758; d. 1835
(born in St. Michel)
My great-great-great-great-grandmother: unknown - not listed. I found her, though, in another family line researched by another person: Jeanne St. Germain. They were married in St. Michel in 1785 but I have no further information at this time.
Parents of Pierre Francois Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Francois Forcier b. April 19, 1724; d. March 17, 1781
???
Parents of Francois Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jacques Forcier b. 1682; d. 1750
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Jeanne Harel b. 1687; d. 1769
Parents of Jacques Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Pierre Forcier b. 1648; d. May 18, 1690
(born St. Aubin, Nantes, Bregagne, France; died in St. Francois Du Lac, Quebec, Canada)
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Marguerite Marie Girard b. 1643 d. August 7, 1695
(born Boulogne Sur Mer, Picardie, France; died in Quebec, Quebec, Canada)
Parents of Pierre Forcier:
Guillaume Forcier b. 1623; d. 1690 St. Aubin, France
Sebastienne Gaultier b. 1625; d. 1674 France
and
Parents of Marguerite Girard (my 7x great-grandmother):
Nicolas Girard b. 1610; d. 1671
Francoise Huon b. 1620; d. 1725 (if these dates are correct, she died at 105 years of age).
So - this particular branch of the Belanger a/k/a Balenger line, via Angelique Forcier, who married into the Belanger/Balenger line, can be traced all the way back to Guillaume Forcier b. 1623 and Nicolas Girard b. 1610, in France.
I will see if I can find existing lines tracing the ancestors of Jean Baptiste Belanger.
So much more to learn...
I have not been posting as much as usual lately, triggered by a sad family event, the loss of a beloved aunt, Lorraine Prondzinski, one of my mother's sisters. Of seven Jablonski sisters, only two are now living, my mother, Caroline Newton, and Aunt Christine Gonawicka. I've been busy busy busy doing other things -
Some comments were made at the funeral that reminded me of something that I had begun way back in 1976, during the celebration of USA's 200th birthday - and some misunderstanding that I had undertaken to do a family tree. Not! I had done a little writing about the family line - old stories that I remember Dad telling us, but nothing more.
I was raised with tales of the Newton family ancestry. I don't remember if I've written about this here before, but this is the family history from Grandpa Newton's side, in a nutshell: We were from France, we came over here sometime in the early 1700s and worked our way up the Mississippi River and eventually settled in northern Wisconsin where we became lumberjacks. We may have some Cajun blood from our time in Louisiana. I am not certain, but vague recollection is that we may have been kicked out of France - or left in a big hurry. Were we criminals - or religious refuges? I don't know.
Around the beginning of March I signed up at ancestry.com for a short free trial. I found some information there, but ran into a lot of dead-ends. I searched for my father's parents, and my mother's parents. I did not locate any information at all about my mother's parents - not even her birth certificate. Frustration. I was not able to locate anything at all about my grandmother Newton (Ida Belanger) other than a 1930 census record which confirmed information I already knew: she was married to my grandfather, she had (at that time) four children: my father, my Aunt Laurel, my Aunt Faythe, my Aunt Valerie. I found a lot of Newton records, but I had no way of connecting them to my grandfather Frank C. Newton, because I could not find an online record of his birth and so had no names of his ancestors.
I CAN tell you that there are a LOT of Newtons settled in west Texas and many of them have the name Frank or Francis, but I have no idea if they are relatives.
Today - a day off from work, while I was digging around for my tax records I came across a copy of my father's World World II service records. Lo and behold, I found more information there than I had found through numerous fruitless searches online at archives.com.
My dad's service records contained two vital items: (1) a birth certificate and (2) his baptismal certificate. I thus learned from my father's baptismal record that his father, Frank C. Newton, was born in Marinette, Wisconsin on January 2, 1894. Before, I did not have a place of birth and I had not been able to confirm that his middle initial was "C" as I had found on another record. Both of my father's records also confirmed that his mother was, indeed, Ida Belanger, who was born in Michigan - also a snippet of information (place of birth) I did not have before.
Following the path of the celebrities on the current program on NBC "Who Do You Think You Are?", I signed up for a 14 day free trial at ancestry.com. Not having had any previous success tracing my father's family, I decided to try searching for my paternal grandmother, Ida Belanger.
Unbelievably, I hit a gold mine immediately. Several other people have researched the Belanger (a/k/a Balenger) family line. I found Ida right away. The most extensive work appears to have been done by a descendant of Ida Belanger's younger brother, John Belanger, who died in 1950 (before I was born).
I hit paydirt. Oh my, did I ever!
The family line is very large and begs for other lines to be explored, but tracing back as straight as I can make it, here goes:
My paternal grandmother (the mother of my father, Francis John Newton):
Ida Belanger b. June 4, 1893; d. January 5, 1962
(possibly born in Michigan, although some records indicate Wisconsin;
she died in Hancock, Michigan while visiting family)
m. Frank C. Newton (b. 1/2/1894 in Amberg, WI; d. 6/8/1964 in Racine, WI) sometime before August 17, 1922, when my father (their oldest child) was born, but I don't have an exact date
Parents of Ida Belanger:
My great-grandfather: Edward Balenger, Jr. (also spelled Belanger) b. 1852 to 1855; d - unknown
(born in Scott, Brown County, Wisconsin, USA; died - unknown )
My great-grandmother: Mathilda A. Forsythe b. April 19, 1861; d. June 7, 1943
(born in Wisconsin; died in Racine, Wisconsin)
Parents of Edward Balenger (Belanger), Jr:
My great-great-grandfather: Edward Be'langer b. April 16, 1822 (or possibly in April, 1821 according to another line of research); d. October 26, 1906
(born in St. Michel, Yamaska, Quebec, Canada; died in Gladstone, Delta, Michigan, USA. Note, another line of research done by another person indicates that Edward Be'langer died in Bay Settlement (Town of Scott), Brown County, WI. I do know know why there is a discrepancy.)
My great-great-grandmother: Aurelia Marie Francoise Brunette b. October 10, 1831; d. August 30, 1907
(born in Notre Du Rosarie, St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, Canada; died in Gladstone, Michigan, USA)
Married on May 30, 1846 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA. A note about Aurelia Marie's name - another line of research done by another person indicates that her name was Marie-Aurelia Brunette. This marriage was very fruitful. According to one line of research I have discovered, Edward Be'langer and Aurelia Marie Brunette had the following children: Mary b. abt. 1848 in Wisconsin; Joseph b. abt. 1850 in Wisconsin; Edward (my ancestor) b. abt. 1852 in Wisconsin; John b. abt. 1854 in Wisconsin; Louis b. abt. 1859 in Wisconsin; Isaac b. abt. 1862 in Wisconsin; Lucy Theresa b. abt. 1864 in Wisconsin; Alfred b. abt. 1866 in Wisconsin; Margaret b. abt. 1868 in Wisconsin; Michael b. abt. 1868 in Wisconsin (twin of Margaret?); Peter b. abt. 1870 in Wisconsin.
Lots of Belangers - and I'm probably related to most of them!
Parents of Edward Be'langer:
My great-great-great-grandfather: Jean Baptiste Belanger b. 1787; d. May 12, 1838
(born Yamaska, Quebec, Canada; died in Bay Settlement, Brown County, Wisconsin, USA)
My great-great-great-grandmother Angelique Forcier b. 7/10/1793; d. 1834
(born Yamaska, Quebec,Canada)
Note: I thought that Angelique and Jean Baptiste had only the one child, Edward, who is my particular Belanger and Forcier ancestor. However, I have found a reference to another son of Angelique and Jean Baptiste: Joseph. This information also says that Jean Baptiste was in Minnesota for awhile. I do not have any further information on this Joseph Belanger.
After Angelique's death in 1834, Jean Baptiste married again - Susanne Bibeau on June 16, 1835 in St. Francis du lac, Quebec, Canada. Unfortunately, she died on May 12, 1838 in Bay Settlement, Brown County, WI. Jean Baptiste then married again (marriage #3), Theotiste Rivard-dit-Laglanderie, on February 28, 1841. She died on September 3, 1857. But wait - according to one record I have, Jean Baptiste died May 12, 1838 - not his second wife. So - who actually died on May 12, 1838? Was it Jean Baptiste and therefore he could not have married wife #3, or was it Susanne Bibeau?
Susanne Bibeau and Jean Baptiste Belanger had two children: Peter Belanger, b. abt. 1836, and Moyses Belanger, b. abt. 1837. So, Edward had two half-brothers - and possibly he had one full-blood brother, Joseph (see note above).
No children are listed from the marriage of Theotiste Rivard-dit-Laglanderie and Jean Baptiste Belanger.
Parents of Angelique Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-grandfather Pierre Francois Forcier b. August 13, 1758; d. 1835
(born in St. Michel)
My great-great-great-great-grandmother: unknown - not listed. I found her, though, in another family line researched by another person: Jeanne St. Germain. They were married in St. Michel in 1785 but I have no further information at this time.
Parents of Pierre Francois Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Francois Forcier b. April 19, 1724; d. March 17, 1781
???
Parents of Francois Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jacques Forcier b. 1682; d. 1750
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Jeanne Harel b. 1687; d. 1769
Parents of Jacques Forcier:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Pierre Forcier b. 1648; d. May 18, 1690
(born St. Aubin, Nantes, Bregagne, France; died in St. Francois Du Lac, Quebec, Canada)
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Marguerite Marie Girard b. 1643 d. August 7, 1695
(born Boulogne Sur Mer, Picardie, France; died in Quebec, Quebec, Canada)
Parents of Pierre Forcier:
Guillaume Forcier b. 1623; d. 1690 St. Aubin, France
Sebastienne Gaultier b. 1625; d. 1674 France
and
Parents of Marguerite Girard (my 7x great-grandmother):
Nicolas Girard b. 1610; d. 1671
Francoise Huon b. 1620; d. 1725 (if these dates are correct, she died at 105 years of age).
So - this particular branch of the Belanger a/k/a Balenger line, via Angelique Forcier, who married into the Belanger/Balenger line, can be traced all the way back to Guillaume Forcier b. 1623 and Nicolas Girard b. 1610, in France.
I will see if I can find existing lines tracing the ancestors of Jean Baptiste Belanger.
So much more to learn...
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Jane Austen - New Biography "Jane's Fame"
From National Public Radio (NPR):
Biography Offers New Glimpses Of Jane Austen
March 25, 2010
It has been almost 200 years since Jane Austen's death but her books remain some of the most widely read in English literature. Claire Harman, author of the book Jane's Fame, about Austen's life, discusses her popularity.
Transcript:
Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:
Jane Austen has given us some our favorite love stories, movies and TV programs, and daydreams of characters like the rich and handsome Mr. Darcy. And quotations: It is a truth universally acknowledge that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.
How did this spinster, born in 1775, who live most of her life in an English village, come to inhabit imaginations in the 21st century?
Claire Harman answers that question in her new book, "Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World."
For one thing, Claire Harman says, Jane Austen wrote in a completely new style.
Ms. CLAIRE HARMAN (Author): She really took out of the 18th century all the flimflam and the verbosity that had held it back, really, and reshaped the novel. I mean she modernized the novel single-handedly and before she was published.
WERTHEIMER: Modernized it how?
Ms. HARMAN: By making it shorter, more streamlined, funnier. She's such an intellectual and she's writing love stories, so you get a wonderful combination of very clear thinking, very astute analysis of society and of human nature. And her jokes are terribly funny.
WERTHEIMER: She was not writing about kidnappings and sword fights and...
(Soundbite of laughter)
WERTHEIMER: ...all the sort of romantic and gothic-ee(ph) stuff that was current when she was young.
Ms. HARMAN: No, she didnt put in scenes of high drama, anything unrealistic. She kept to simple storylines, three or four families in a country village, credible characters. I mean they step out of those books as if we know them from everyday life today. I mean they are so well observed in such enduring types.
WERTHEIMER: Jane Austen was reasonably successful even in her lifetime, and then she had a kind of a trough - a period where no one read her. And it began to look as though her books would just die with her.
The biography that was written by her nephew, that helped just sort of propel her into a wider readership.
Ms. HARMAN: Oh, yes, very much so. I mean that was really lighting the blue touch paper for Austen's fame, because it dealt almost exclusively with Jane Austen's supposedly meek and genteel personality and hardly anything about the books. Suddenly readers who were vaguely aware of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma" and "Sense and Sensibility" were made even more aware of them by this personality of the lovely aunt.
And James Edwards' memoir of his aunt made her into a sort of sentimental object. You know, and people loved her as a person and as a character, as well as the books and sometimes instead of the books.
WERTHEIMER: Do you think she really was like that, that sort of meek and mild and the dear aunt and the loving sister and so forth?
Ms. HARMAN: Well, she's certainly a loving sister and she was certainly a beloved aunt. But she wasnt necessarily a nice person at all. I mean there's really nothing in the letters to suggest anything other than a very sharp-witted and at times rather acid-tongued woman.
And, you know, the mind behind the novels could only be a very discerning, very critical mind. I mean she's - the famed irony of Austen's novels is really a way of saying that she was quite cynical and very worldly.
WERTHEIMER: You told me something that I had never heard before in this book, that Jane Austen had big fans in the trenches in the First World War - a sense of Austen and other literature of her period as a moment of escape.
Ms. HARMAN: Thats right. The 18th century novelists and writers were very popular in the trenches in the Great War. And yes, Austen was used in the fever chart that the War Office drew up to treat shell-shocked soldiers. She was put top of that chart, in terms of how therapeutic her works could be in a dire situation where a man was grievously wounded and needed to be read to. Austen's novels were thought to be the most comforting.
WERTHEIMER: I think there are a lot of people in the 21st century who feel that way about Jane Austen. Certainly I do. I have three of her books on my electronic reader for, you know, when things go horrible on me, I can sit down and read for a little while and calm down.
Ms. HARMAN: You know, when Im on an airplane, for instance, I always turn - if there's a Jane Austen adaptation, I will watch it for the Nth time because I always feel as if Im in mortal danger on an airplane and I want the reassurance of Austen or, you know, a similar writer and the comfort of that known thought.
And yet the wonderful thing about Austen is however many times you read those books, they're always surprising. I mean you know what the outcome of the plot is going to be, but she still manages through her shared skill to keep you in a state of suspense.
So you know, when you get near to the end of "Emma" you think, gosh, will Mr. Knightley actually propose?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. HARMAN: And it's absurd. Of course you know he's going to propose. What else is there to happen? It's Austen's amazing ability to be fresh every time you read her.
WERTHEIMER: In your account of Jane's fame, every time that her popularity seems to sag a bit, something saves her - well-timed biographies in the 19th century. And then maybe her biggest rescuer of all, the movies in the 20th century.
Ms. HARMAN: Certainly. Well, since the 1995 BBC film that really surprised everybody with its intense interest, great success, and nobody realized how that could be followed up by even more films, even more adaptations and riffs on them. You know, you had all those films like "Clueless" and "Bride and Prejudice." And you now have strange spin-offs like the zombies books last year, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."
Who would have thought that a book that contained 85 percent of Austen's text would sell so much more than a hundred percent of Austen's text? I mean it's really amazing.
WERTHEIMER: If Jane Austen were alive today, one thing she would be is stinking rich...
(Soundbite of laughter)
WERTHEIMER: ...from all of the rights to the movies and the books and whatnot.
Ms. HARMAN: Yeah.
WERTHEIMER: But do you think she would have had the faintest notion that all this could have happened?
Ms. HARMAN: Not in the slightest. Because Jane Austen's fame is disproportionate - I mean she's a genius but still her fame is disproportionate to anybody's genius. It has grown and it has moved away from the text. It occupies people's minds in ways that dont relate to the books but relate to fantasies and dreams around the books.
And she would have been quite appalled, I think, at even more fame than she had in her lifetime, which was little enough. She didnt want to be gawked at by neighbors who'd discovered she was an author. She wanted to maintain her integrity and her freedom to look at the world and be able to honestly say what she thought about it.
WERTHEIMER: Claire Harman's book is called "Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World."
Thank you very much.
Ms. HARMAN: Thank you.
Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
Biography Offers New Glimpses Of Jane Austen
March 25, 2010
It has been almost 200 years since Jane Austen's death but her books remain some of the most widely read in English literature. Claire Harman, author of the book Jane's Fame, about Austen's life, discusses her popularity.
Transcript:
Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:
Jane Austen has given us some our favorite love stories, movies and TV programs, and daydreams of characters like the rich and handsome Mr. Darcy. And quotations: It is a truth universally acknowledge that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.
How did this spinster, born in 1775, who live most of her life in an English village, come to inhabit imaginations in the 21st century?
Claire Harman answers that question in her new book, "Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World."
For one thing, Claire Harman says, Jane Austen wrote in a completely new style.
Ms. CLAIRE HARMAN (Author): She really took out of the 18th century all the flimflam and the verbosity that had held it back, really, and reshaped the novel. I mean she modernized the novel single-handedly and before she was published.
WERTHEIMER: Modernized it how?
Ms. HARMAN: By making it shorter, more streamlined, funnier. She's such an intellectual and she's writing love stories, so you get a wonderful combination of very clear thinking, very astute analysis of society and of human nature. And her jokes are terribly funny.
WERTHEIMER: She was not writing about kidnappings and sword fights and...
(Soundbite of laughter)
WERTHEIMER: ...all the sort of romantic and gothic-ee(ph) stuff that was current when she was young.
Ms. HARMAN: No, she didnt put in scenes of high drama, anything unrealistic. She kept to simple storylines, three or four families in a country village, credible characters. I mean they step out of those books as if we know them from everyday life today. I mean they are so well observed in such enduring types.
WERTHEIMER: Jane Austen was reasonably successful even in her lifetime, and then she had a kind of a trough - a period where no one read her. And it began to look as though her books would just die with her.
The biography that was written by her nephew, that helped just sort of propel her into a wider readership.
Ms. HARMAN: Oh, yes, very much so. I mean that was really lighting the blue touch paper for Austen's fame, because it dealt almost exclusively with Jane Austen's supposedly meek and genteel personality and hardly anything about the books. Suddenly readers who were vaguely aware of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma" and "Sense and Sensibility" were made even more aware of them by this personality of the lovely aunt.
And James Edwards' memoir of his aunt made her into a sort of sentimental object. You know, and people loved her as a person and as a character, as well as the books and sometimes instead of the books.
WERTHEIMER: Do you think she really was like that, that sort of meek and mild and the dear aunt and the loving sister and so forth?
Ms. HARMAN: Well, she's certainly a loving sister and she was certainly a beloved aunt. But she wasnt necessarily a nice person at all. I mean there's really nothing in the letters to suggest anything other than a very sharp-witted and at times rather acid-tongued woman.
And, you know, the mind behind the novels could only be a very discerning, very critical mind. I mean she's - the famed irony of Austen's novels is really a way of saying that she was quite cynical and very worldly.
WERTHEIMER: You told me something that I had never heard before in this book, that Jane Austen had big fans in the trenches in the First World War - a sense of Austen and other literature of her period as a moment of escape.
Ms. HARMAN: Thats right. The 18th century novelists and writers were very popular in the trenches in the Great War. And yes, Austen was used in the fever chart that the War Office drew up to treat shell-shocked soldiers. She was put top of that chart, in terms of how therapeutic her works could be in a dire situation where a man was grievously wounded and needed to be read to. Austen's novels were thought to be the most comforting.
WERTHEIMER: I think there are a lot of people in the 21st century who feel that way about Jane Austen. Certainly I do. I have three of her books on my electronic reader for, you know, when things go horrible on me, I can sit down and read for a little while and calm down.
Ms. HARMAN: You know, when Im on an airplane, for instance, I always turn - if there's a Jane Austen adaptation, I will watch it for the Nth time because I always feel as if Im in mortal danger on an airplane and I want the reassurance of Austen or, you know, a similar writer and the comfort of that known thought.
And yet the wonderful thing about Austen is however many times you read those books, they're always surprising. I mean you know what the outcome of the plot is going to be, but she still manages through her shared skill to keep you in a state of suspense.
So you know, when you get near to the end of "Emma" you think, gosh, will Mr. Knightley actually propose?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. HARMAN: And it's absurd. Of course you know he's going to propose. What else is there to happen? It's Austen's amazing ability to be fresh every time you read her.
WERTHEIMER: In your account of Jane's fame, every time that her popularity seems to sag a bit, something saves her - well-timed biographies in the 19th century. And then maybe her biggest rescuer of all, the movies in the 20th century.
Ms. HARMAN: Certainly. Well, since the 1995 BBC film that really surprised everybody with its intense interest, great success, and nobody realized how that could be followed up by even more films, even more adaptations and riffs on them. You know, you had all those films like "Clueless" and "Bride and Prejudice." And you now have strange spin-offs like the zombies books last year, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."
Who would have thought that a book that contained 85 percent of Austen's text would sell so much more than a hundred percent of Austen's text? I mean it's really amazing.
WERTHEIMER: If Jane Austen were alive today, one thing she would be is stinking rich...
(Soundbite of laughter)
WERTHEIMER: ...from all of the rights to the movies and the books and whatnot.
Ms. HARMAN: Yeah.
WERTHEIMER: But do you think she would have had the faintest notion that all this could have happened?
Ms. HARMAN: Not in the slightest. Because Jane Austen's fame is disproportionate - I mean she's a genius but still her fame is disproportionate to anybody's genius. It has grown and it has moved away from the text. It occupies people's minds in ways that dont relate to the books but relate to fantasies and dreams around the books.
And she would have been quite appalled, I think, at even more fame than she had in her lifetime, which was little enough. She didnt want to be gawked at by neighbors who'd discovered she was an author. She wanted to maintain her integrity and her freedom to look at the world and be able to honestly say what she thought about it.
WERTHEIMER: Claire Harman's book is called "Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World."
Thank you very much.
Ms. HARMAN: Thank you.
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Scientists Now Say Biblical Plagues Actually Happened
From The Telegraph.co.uk
Biblical plagues really happened say scientists
The Biblical plagues that devastated Ancient Egypt in the Old Testament were the result of global warming and a volcanic eruption, scientists have claimed.
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Published: 11:00AM GMT 27 Mar 2010
Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based.
But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away.
They have compiled compelling evidence that offers new explanations for the Biblical plagues, which will be outlined in a new series to be broadcast on the National Geographical Channel on Easter Sunday.
Archaeologists now widely believe the plagues occurred at an ancient city of Pi-Rameses on the Nile Delta, which was the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279BC and 1213BC.
The city appears to have been abandoned around 3,000 years ago and scientists claim the plagues could offer an explanation.
Climatologists studying the ancient climate at the time have discovered a dramatic shift in the climate in the area occurred towards the end of Rameses the Second's reign.
By studying stalagmites in Egyptian caves they have been able to rebuild a record of the weather patterns using traces of radioactive elements contained within the rock.
They found that Rameses reign coincided with a warm, wet climate, but then the climate switched to a dry period.
Professor Augusto Magini, a paleoclimatologist at Heidelberg University's institute for environmental physics, said: "Pharaoh Rameses II reigned during a very favourable climatic period.
"There was plenty of rain and his country flourished. However, this wet period only lasted a few decades. After Rameses' reign, the climate curve goes sharply downwards.
"There is a dry period which would certainly have had serious consequences."
The scientists believe this switch in the climate was the trigger for the first of the plagues.
The rising temperatures could have caused the river Nile to dry up, turning the fast flowing river that was Egypt's lifeline into a slow moving and muddy watercourse.
These conditions would have been perfect for the arrival of the first plague, which in the Bible is described as the Nile turning to blood. Dr Stephan Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, believes this description could have been the result of a toxic fresh water algae. He said the bacterium, known as Burgundy Blood algae or Oscillatoria rubescens, is known to have existed 3,000 years ago and still causes similar effects today.
He said: "It multiplies massively in slow-moving warm waters with high levels of nutrition. And as it dies, it stains the water red."
The scientists also claim the arrival of this algae set in motion the events that led to the second, third and forth plagues – frogs, lice and flies. Frogs development from tadpoles into fully formed adults is governed by hormones that can speed up their development in times of stress. The arrival of the toxic algae would have triggered such a transformation and forced the frogs to leave the water where they lived. But as the frogs died, it would have meant that mosquitoes, flies and other insects would have flourished without the predators to keep their numbers under control.
This, according to the scientists, could have led in turn to the fifth and sixth plagues – diseased livestock and boils
Professor Werner Kloas, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute, said: "We know insects often carry diseases like malaria, so the next step in the chain reaction is the outbreak of epidemics, causing the human population to fall ill."
Another major natural disaster more than 400 miles away is now also thought to be responsible for triggering the seventh, eighth and ninth plagues that bring hail, locusts and darkness to Egypt. One of the biggest volcanic eruptions in human history occurred when Thera, a volcano that was part of the Mediterranean islands of Santorini, just north of Crete, exploded around 3,500 year ago, spewing billions of tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere.
Nadine von Blohm, from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Germany, has been conducting experiments on how hailstorms form and believes that the volcanic ash could have clashed with thunderstorms above Egypt to produce dramatic hail storms.
Dr Siro Trevisanato, a Canadian biologist who has written a book about the plagues, said the locusts could also be explained by the volcanic fall out from the ash.
He said: "The ash fall out caused weather anomalies, which translates into higher precipitations, higher humidity. And that's exactly what fosters the presence of the locusts."
The volcanic ash could also have blocked out the sunlight causing the stories of a plague of darkness. Scientists have found pumice, stone made from cooled volcanic lava, during excavations of Egyptian ruins despite there not being any volcanoes in Egypt. Analysis of the rock shows that it came from the Santorini volcano, providing physical evidence that the ash fallout from the eruption at Santorini reached Egyptian shores.
The cause of the final plague, the death of the first borns of Egypt, has been suggested as being caused by a fungus that may have poisoned the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first pickings and so been first to fall victim.
But Dr Robert Miller, associate professor of the Old Testament, from the Catholic University of America, said: "I'm reluctant to come up with natural causes for all of the plagues. The problem with the naturalistic explanations, is that they lose the whole point.
"And the whole point was that you didn't come out of Egypt by natural causes, you came out by the hand of God."
Biblical plagues really happened say scientists
The Biblical plagues that devastated Ancient Egypt in the Old Testament were the result of global warming and a volcanic eruption, scientists have claimed.
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Published: 11:00AM GMT 27 Mar 2010
Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based.
But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away.
They have compiled compelling evidence that offers new explanations for the Biblical plagues, which will be outlined in a new series to be broadcast on the National Geographical Channel on Easter Sunday.
Archaeologists now widely believe the plagues occurred at an ancient city of Pi-Rameses on the Nile Delta, which was the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279BC and 1213BC.
The city appears to have been abandoned around 3,000 years ago and scientists claim the plagues could offer an explanation.
Climatologists studying the ancient climate at the time have discovered a dramatic shift in the climate in the area occurred towards the end of Rameses the Second's reign.
By studying stalagmites in Egyptian caves they have been able to rebuild a record of the weather patterns using traces of radioactive elements contained within the rock.
They found that Rameses reign coincided with a warm, wet climate, but then the climate switched to a dry period.
Professor Augusto Magini, a paleoclimatologist at Heidelberg University's institute for environmental physics, said: "Pharaoh Rameses II reigned during a very favourable climatic period.
"There was plenty of rain and his country flourished. However, this wet period only lasted a few decades. After Rameses' reign, the climate curve goes sharply downwards.
"There is a dry period which would certainly have had serious consequences."
The scientists believe this switch in the climate was the trigger for the first of the plagues.
The rising temperatures could have caused the river Nile to dry up, turning the fast flowing river that was Egypt's lifeline into a slow moving and muddy watercourse.
These conditions would have been perfect for the arrival of the first plague, which in the Bible is described as the Nile turning to blood. Dr Stephan Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, believes this description could have been the result of a toxic fresh water algae. He said the bacterium, known as Burgundy Blood algae or Oscillatoria rubescens, is known to have existed 3,000 years ago and still causes similar effects today.
He said: "It multiplies massively in slow-moving warm waters with high levels of nutrition. And as it dies, it stains the water red."
The scientists also claim the arrival of this algae set in motion the events that led to the second, third and forth plagues – frogs, lice and flies. Frogs development from tadpoles into fully formed adults is governed by hormones that can speed up their development in times of stress. The arrival of the toxic algae would have triggered such a transformation and forced the frogs to leave the water where they lived. But as the frogs died, it would have meant that mosquitoes, flies and other insects would have flourished without the predators to keep their numbers under control.
This, according to the scientists, could have led in turn to the fifth and sixth plagues – diseased livestock and boils
Professor Werner Kloas, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute, said: "We know insects often carry diseases like malaria, so the next step in the chain reaction is the outbreak of epidemics, causing the human population to fall ill."
Another major natural disaster more than 400 miles away is now also thought to be responsible for triggering the seventh, eighth and ninth plagues that bring hail, locusts and darkness to Egypt. One of the biggest volcanic eruptions in human history occurred when Thera, a volcano that was part of the Mediterranean islands of Santorini, just north of Crete, exploded around 3,500 year ago, spewing billions of tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere.
Nadine von Blohm, from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Germany, has been conducting experiments on how hailstorms form and believes that the volcanic ash could have clashed with thunderstorms above Egypt to produce dramatic hail storms.
Dr Siro Trevisanato, a Canadian biologist who has written a book about the plagues, said the locusts could also be explained by the volcanic fall out from the ash.
He said: "The ash fall out caused weather anomalies, which translates into higher precipitations, higher humidity. And that's exactly what fosters the presence of the locusts."
The volcanic ash could also have blocked out the sunlight causing the stories of a plague of darkness. Scientists have found pumice, stone made from cooled volcanic lava, during excavations of Egyptian ruins despite there not being any volcanoes in Egypt. Analysis of the rock shows that it came from the Santorini volcano, providing physical evidence that the ash fallout from the eruption at Santorini reached Egyptian shores.
The cause of the final plague, the death of the first borns of Egypt, has been suggested as being caused by a fungus that may have poisoned the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first pickings and so been first to fall victim.
But Dr Robert Miller, associate professor of the Old Testament, from the Catholic University of America, said: "I'm reluctant to come up with natural causes for all of the plagues. The problem with the naturalistic explanations, is that they lose the whole point.
"And the whole point was that you didn't come out of Egypt by natural causes, you came out by the hand of God."
Remembering a Great Tragedy: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
The victims, workers in a clothing factory, were mostly women and girls, mostly immigrants at the time, the turn from the 19th century into the 20th century.
NYC
Choosing Not to Forget What Is Painful to Recall
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: March 25, 2010
On a street off Washington Square, a bell tolled 146 times on Thursday, once for each woman and man who died in the great fire there so very long ago. Dozens of schoolchildren read the names of the victims, one by one, then laid carnations upon a makeshift memorial. A fire truck raised its ladder in tribute but only so far — a reminder of a rescue effort that fell tragically short.
Everything was as it was supposed to be, 99 years to the day since a fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory took the lives of 146 garment workers — most of them women, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrants, most of them heartbreakingly young.
The flames that engulfed the factory, on the top three floors of a building at Washington Place and Greene Street, was the most cataclysmic disaster to befall a New York workplace until Islamist fanatics turned airplanes into missiles in 2001. But even the attacks of Sept. 11 have not diminished Triangle’s central place in the consciousness of an oft-wounded city.
Like all rituals, Thursday’s remembrance of March 25, 1911, moved to a practiced rhythm. An anniversary ceremony has been held at that corner for years. Repetition, however, in no way stole from poignancy.
There were accounts of how the low-paid seamstresses who made ladies’ blouses — shirtwaists — were trapped in the blaze. How locked doors prevented many from fleeing to safety. How the firefighters’ tallest ladder reached only to the sixth floor, well below workers trying to stave off death two, three and four floors higher. How in desperation — does this sound familiar? — many jumped to their deaths.
There were speeches from labor leaders about how the disaster led to tougher safety regulations but also about how much remains undone. Locking in workers? Wal-Mart was found to have been doing that just a few years ago. Last month, in an echo of Triangle, 21 workers in Bangladesh died in a fire at a garment factory with locked exits.
And there was the mournful tolling of a firehouse bell, each ring accompanying a name, each name capturing a soul: Lizzie Adler, Rosina Cirrito, Yetta Goldstein, Gaetana Midolo, Simie Wisotsky and, every now and then, Unidentified Woman and Unidentified Man.
New York generally prefers the future tense. It is not always good at remembering.
Sept. 11 aside, anniversaries of disasters come and go with barely a nod. Until 9/11, none was deadlier than the 1904 burning of the General Slocum, a poorly equipped excursion steamboat that caught fire in Hell Gate’s waters. More than 1,000 people died, most of them women and children. Yet the anniversary, June 15, usually passes unnoticed.
Not so with the Triangle fire. If anything, the observances have been expanding and are likely to grow still more in 2011, the centennial year. Events on Thursday included programs at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and Christ the King Regional High School in Middle Village, Queens.
The Queens event was led by Vincent Maltese, whose older brother, Serphin, is a former state senator. For them, the Triangle fire is personal. Their grandmother and her two daughters died. The girls were 18 and 14. “My grandfather never really talked about it, except once a year,” said Vincent Maltese, 76. “He’d get moody toward the end of March.”
Perhaps the fire endures in civic memory because it has clear constituencies. It is part of the Italian-American narrative and, arguably even more so, of Jewish-American history. But there is more to it, said David Von Drehle, the author of “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.”
Triangle “speaks to large trends — the immigrant story, the progressive political story, the labor movement story and the women’s rights story,” Mr. Von Drehle said. “It’s illustrative of all those currents, which continue to be living issues in a way that steamboat safety is not.”
For similar reasons, Ruth Sergel, a filmmaker, organizes her own memorial. On the anniversary, she leads volunteers in a project called Chalk. They visit the places where each of the 146 victims lived, mostly in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. At those locations, on the pavement, they chalk in the names and ages of those who died.
“It’s the idea of making communal memory visible,” Ms. Sergel said, describing it as “a different kind of power.”
“It’s not permanent,” she said. “It washes away. But you know what? It’s going to come back next year.”
NYC
Choosing Not to Forget What Is Painful to Recall
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: March 25, 2010
On a street off Washington Square, a bell tolled 146 times on Thursday, once for each woman and man who died in the great fire there so very long ago. Dozens of schoolchildren read the names of the victims, one by one, then laid carnations upon a makeshift memorial. A fire truck raised its ladder in tribute but only so far — a reminder of a rescue effort that fell tragically short.
Everything was as it was supposed to be, 99 years to the day since a fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory took the lives of 146 garment workers — most of them women, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrants, most of them heartbreakingly young.
The flames that engulfed the factory, on the top three floors of a building at Washington Place and Greene Street, was the most cataclysmic disaster to befall a New York workplace until Islamist fanatics turned airplanes into missiles in 2001. But even the attacks of Sept. 11 have not diminished Triangle’s central place in the consciousness of an oft-wounded city.
Like all rituals, Thursday’s remembrance of March 25, 1911, moved to a practiced rhythm. An anniversary ceremony has been held at that corner for years. Repetition, however, in no way stole from poignancy.
There were accounts of how the low-paid seamstresses who made ladies’ blouses — shirtwaists — were trapped in the blaze. How locked doors prevented many from fleeing to safety. How the firefighters’ tallest ladder reached only to the sixth floor, well below workers trying to stave off death two, three and four floors higher. How in desperation — does this sound familiar? — many jumped to their deaths.
There were speeches from labor leaders about how the disaster led to tougher safety regulations but also about how much remains undone. Locking in workers? Wal-Mart was found to have been doing that just a few years ago. Last month, in an echo of Triangle, 21 workers in Bangladesh died in a fire at a garment factory with locked exits.
And there was the mournful tolling of a firehouse bell, each ring accompanying a name, each name capturing a soul: Lizzie Adler, Rosina Cirrito, Yetta Goldstein, Gaetana Midolo, Simie Wisotsky and, every now and then, Unidentified Woman and Unidentified Man.
New York generally prefers the future tense. It is not always good at remembering.
Sept. 11 aside, anniversaries of disasters come and go with barely a nod. Until 9/11, none was deadlier than the 1904 burning of the General Slocum, a poorly equipped excursion steamboat that caught fire in Hell Gate’s waters. More than 1,000 people died, most of them women and children. Yet the anniversary, June 15, usually passes unnoticed.
Not so with the Triangle fire. If anything, the observances have been expanding and are likely to grow still more in 2011, the centennial year. Events on Thursday included programs at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and Christ the King Regional High School in Middle Village, Queens.
The Queens event was led by Vincent Maltese, whose older brother, Serphin, is a former state senator. For them, the Triangle fire is personal. Their grandmother and her two daughters died. The girls were 18 and 14. “My grandfather never really talked about it, except once a year,” said Vincent Maltese, 76. “He’d get moody toward the end of March.”
Perhaps the fire endures in civic memory because it has clear constituencies. It is part of the Italian-American narrative and, arguably even more so, of Jewish-American history. But there is more to it, said David Von Drehle, the author of “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.”
Triangle “speaks to large trends — the immigrant story, the progressive political story, the labor movement story and the women’s rights story,” Mr. Von Drehle said. “It’s illustrative of all those currents, which continue to be living issues in a way that steamboat safety is not.”
For similar reasons, Ruth Sergel, a filmmaker, organizes her own memorial. On the anniversary, she leads volunteers in a project called Chalk. They visit the places where each of the 146 victims lived, mostly in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. At those locations, on the pavement, they chalk in the names and ages of those who died.
“It’s the idea of making communal memory visible,” Ms. Sergel said, describing it as “a different kind of power.”
“It’s not permanent,” she said. “It washes away. But you know what? It’s going to come back next year.”
Short-Sighted Policies: Ancient Tushan (Turkey) To Be Flooded Out by Dam
UA PROFESSOR DIGS ANCIENT HISTORY
Old secrets of lost city threatened
Archaeologist based in Akron working to finish work before site is inundated
By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Monday, Mar 22, 2010
This is Tim Matney's 14th year at an archaeological dig in Southeast Turkey. (Image: Conservators Yvonne Helmholz (left) and Charlotte Rerolle prepare a consolidant cuneiform tablet for lifting during an excavation at Ziyaret Tepe, Turkey on August 5, 2009. The tablet has been covered in wax to consolidate the fragments. (Photo courtesy Timothy Matney, Assoc. Prof. of Archaeology)
He keeps a close eye on the calendar. Time is not on his side.
He and fellow archaeologists are hurrying to find and preserve what they can of the ancient Assyrian city of Tushan before a hydroelectric dam floods the area.
''This is a pragmatic, conservationist rescue dig,'' said Matney, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Akron. In the Turkish bureaucracy, he said, that means he has a ''slightly less cumbersome system to work with.''
Matney heads a team of archaeologists from Germany, Turkey and the United Kingdom who will return to the site in early April for 10 more weeks of work in 110-plus-degree heat.
While Matney, 46, has done archaeological work in Great Britain, Syria, Iraq, India, the United States and Israel, he gravitated to Turkey as a fresh doctoral graduate in 1994 because it enabled him to explore his first love: ancient urban centers, especially those that, once abandoned, had never been built on again.
From 1994 to 1999, he co-directed a dig at Titris Hoyuk, a thriving settlement from 2600 to 2100 B.C. on a tributary of the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia.
Then a colleague mentioned an untapped archaeological site about 110 miles away at Ziyaret Tepe, formerly Tushan, an outpost on the northern bor
der of the Assyrian empire from 900 to 600 B.C. The government was opening the area to excavations in the last years before a dam on the Tigris River flooded the area in 2003.
For three seasons, Matney worked on both projects. In 2000, he concentrated his field work at Ziyaret Tepe for what he thought would be three more years.
As project director, he oversees perhaps 25 archaeologists and other professionals and 30 to 100 local workers on each dig. This season's staff will include two of Matney's former students, Jim Sutter and Chelsea Jalbrzikowski. Their work is so painstaking that they have uncovered just 1 percent of the 80-acre settlement.
Digging for facts
As nothing above ground remains — the area has been agricultural fields for centuries — they base their work on topographical maps and subsurface geophysical surveys.
The team has uncovered a large mud brick building with the remnants of what Matney calls ''high status goods,'' such as ivory fragments and furniture fittings. The team calls this building the Bronze Palace, although its exact use is unknown.
Last summer, the team discovered clay tablets with cuneiform — or wedge-shaped — script in the palace. One tablet was a list of women's names. Because those were not Assyrian names, they might have been women from the local population subjugated by the conquering Assyrians or workers imported to the site.
The team has found several thousand artifacts — pottery, animal bones, tablets, bronze and iron vessels and more. Some artifacts are being cleaned, preserved and assembled into whole pieces for display in a museum 40 miles away in Diyarbakir.
One of the most fascinating discoveries reflects the collapse of Ziyaret Tepe when neighboring countries invaded the Assyrian capital of Ninevah.
As the supply chain in the sophisticated kingdom fell apart, so did the letter writer's ability to muster a unit of chariots. He complained he didn't have the coppersmiths, blacksmiths and others he needed to fulfill the request.
''Death will come out of it,'' he wrote ominously. ''No one [will escape]. I am done.''
Time running out
Matney's team has four work seasons to uncover more clues to life in Tushan and why it apparently was peacefully abandoned.
Delays in construction of the dam have postponed the final day of reckoning until 2013. It's even unclear now whether waters from the dam will completely submerge the site or if it will become, in essence, lakefront property. Regardless, the team's work will be done.
For a permanent work permit, Matney would have to guarantee 10 years of funding. Since it costs about $250,000 a year to fund the field work and related costs of the dig, that means Matney would have to cobble together $2.5 million.
That isn't out of the question, but the weak global economy makes fundraising more challenging. Plus the weak U.S. dollar and the rising costs of doing archaeological work in Turkey are driving expenses to new heights. In 2000, Matney paid local workers $5 a day; this work season, they will receive almost $30.
Matney hopes the team's work will show how everyday people lived in the frontiers of ancient Assyria — ''how they got their groceries, what they made and traded, what their relationships were like with the other Iron Age peoples they encountered.''
The goal: to make the ancient Assyrians more accessible to students and scholars alike, he said.
Old secrets of lost city threatened
Archaeologist based in Akron working to finish work before site is inundated
By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Monday, Mar 22, 2010
He keeps a close eye on the calendar. Time is not on his side.
He and fellow archaeologists are hurrying to find and preserve what they can of the ancient Assyrian city of Tushan before a hydroelectric dam floods the area.
''This is a pragmatic, conservationist rescue dig,'' said Matney, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Akron. In the Turkish bureaucracy, he said, that means he has a ''slightly less cumbersome system to work with.''
Matney heads a team of archaeologists from Germany, Turkey and the United Kingdom who will return to the site in early April for 10 more weeks of work in 110-plus-degree heat.
While Matney, 46, has done archaeological work in Great Britain, Syria, Iraq, India, the United States and Israel, he gravitated to Turkey as a fresh doctoral graduate in 1994 because it enabled him to explore his first love: ancient urban centers, especially those that, once abandoned, had never been built on again.
From 1994 to 1999, he co-directed a dig at Titris Hoyuk, a thriving settlement from 2600 to 2100 B.C. on a tributary of the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia.
Then a colleague mentioned an untapped archaeological site about 110 miles away at Ziyaret Tepe, formerly Tushan, an outpost on the northern bor
der of the Assyrian empire from 900 to 600 B.C. The government was opening the area to excavations in the last years before a dam on the Tigris River flooded the area in 2003.
For three seasons, Matney worked on both projects. In 2000, he concentrated his field work at Ziyaret Tepe for what he thought would be three more years.
As project director, he oversees perhaps 25 archaeologists and other professionals and 30 to 100 local workers on each dig. This season's staff will include two of Matney's former students, Jim Sutter and Chelsea Jalbrzikowski. Their work is so painstaking that they have uncovered just 1 percent of the 80-acre settlement.
Digging for facts
As nothing above ground remains — the area has been agricultural fields for centuries — they base their work on topographical maps and subsurface geophysical surveys.
The team has uncovered a large mud brick building with the remnants of what Matney calls ''high status goods,'' such as ivory fragments and furniture fittings. The team calls this building the Bronze Palace, although its exact use is unknown.
Last summer, the team discovered clay tablets with cuneiform — or wedge-shaped — script in the palace. One tablet was a list of women's names. Because those were not Assyrian names, they might have been women from the local population subjugated by the conquering Assyrians or workers imported to the site.
The team has found several thousand artifacts — pottery, animal bones, tablets, bronze and iron vessels and more. Some artifacts are being cleaned, preserved and assembled into whole pieces for display in a museum 40 miles away in Diyarbakir.
One of the most fascinating discoveries reflects the collapse of Ziyaret Tepe when neighboring countries invaded the Assyrian capital of Ninevah.
As the supply chain in the sophisticated kingdom fell apart, so did the letter writer's ability to muster a unit of chariots. He complained he didn't have the coppersmiths, blacksmiths and others he needed to fulfill the request.
''Death will come out of it,'' he wrote ominously. ''No one [will escape]. I am done.''
Time running out
Matney's team has four work seasons to uncover more clues to life in Tushan and why it apparently was peacefully abandoned.
Delays in construction of the dam have postponed the final day of reckoning until 2013. It's even unclear now whether waters from the dam will completely submerge the site or if it will become, in essence, lakefront property. Regardless, the team's work will be done.
For a permanent work permit, Matney would have to guarantee 10 years of funding. Since it costs about $250,000 a year to fund the field work and related costs of the dig, that means Matney would have to cobble together $2.5 million.
That isn't out of the question, but the weak global economy makes fundraising more challenging. Plus the weak U.S. dollar and the rising costs of doing archaeological work in Turkey are driving expenses to new heights. In 2000, Matney paid local workers $5 a day; this work season, they will receive almost $30.
Matney hopes the team's work will show how everyday people lived in the frontiers of ancient Assyria — ''how they got their groceries, what they made and traded, what their relationships were like with the other Iron Age peoples they encountered.''
The goal: to make the ancient Assyrians more accessible to students and scholars alike, he said.
Bones, Oh Those Bones
We are, I believe, literally at the threshhold of learning much more about our true past as humans than we ever dreamed was possible before, with the new tools we have for dating archaeological layers and analysing "human" remains. Whether they are human remains to be seen and, I sincerely hope, will be contested and discussed for the next hundred years or however long it takes until we realize that "man" has been "man" all along. But hey, that's just my take on the subject.
I found this article interesting because it introduces an element of mystery into the "human" settlement of the area we today call The Netherlands. Physical remains that may date back some 370,000 years. Say what?
Neanderthal may not be the oldest Dutchman
Published on : 26 March 2010 - 4:48pm | By Henk-Sjoerd Oosterhoff
People may well have been roaming the land we now call the Netherlands for far longer than was assumed until recently. There is evidence to suggest that the country was home to the forebears of the Neanderthals. Amateur archaeologist Pieter Stoel found materials used by the oldest inhabitants in the central town of Woerden. These artefacts were shown to be at least 370,000 years old, which takes us back to long before the time of the Neanderthals.
I found this article interesting because it introduces an element of mystery into the "human" settlement of the area we today call The Netherlands. Physical remains that may date back some 370,000 years. Say what?
Neanderthal may not be the oldest Dutchman
Published on : 26 March 2010 - 4:48pm | By Henk-Sjoerd Oosterhoff
People may well have been roaming the land we now call the Netherlands for far longer than was assumed until recently. There is evidence to suggest that the country was home to the forebears of the Neanderthals. Amateur archaeologist Pieter Stoel found materials used by the oldest inhabitants in the central town of Woerden. These artefacts were shown to be at least 370,000 years old, which takes us back to long before the time of the Neanderthals.
Teenage Mariner Hopes to Circumnavigate the World
This is one of the stories that Isis sent me a few days ago, but I did not have the time to publish it then. Today I see this update. Thanks for the story, Isis.
Good luck to this young lady!
Saturday, March 27, 2010 8:23am PDT
Teenage sailor Abby Sunderland approaching treacherous Cape Horn
By: Pete Thomas, GrindTV.com
Good luck to this young lady!
Saturday, March 27, 2010 8:23am PDT
Teenage sailor Abby Sunderland approaching treacherous Cape Horn
By: Pete Thomas, GrindTV.com
Swimming Dragon Exercise - Lose Weight in the Waist
Today I found this exercise which, I discovered, I have been doing a version of for the past six months or so, but I call it part of shaking my booty around the bedroom at night with shades drawn and no one watching :) I love the name of this exercise and find it most evocative of the more esoteric aspects of playing chess and/or Xiang Qi. Not to mention - it has the qi ("chi") of the universe flowing through it :)
By Dr. Maoshing Ni - Posted on Fri, Mar 19, 2010, 1:27 am PDT
America’s rapidly expanding waistline has become a huge concern in the past decade. Today, eight out of ten adults are overweight and some 40 million people are considered obese. It’s not hard to see why: We eat foods that contain tightly-packed calories in smaller packages and don’t engage in enough physical activity. Here are 3 unique and easy exercises that will get you in shape this spring!
You have to move to lose weight
The number one cause of being overweight is inactivity. The human body is designed for physical activity. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who spent most of their lives on the move; their metabolic functions matched their physical lifestyle. Nowadays, we live in opposition to our nature. The reason most diets fail is because our bodies are not designed to subsist on meager foods. We are designed to consume a good amount of energy -- and then to burn that energy. Physical activity is the key to a healthy metabolism.
Physical activity does not necessarily mean abrupt, fast-paced and forceful exercise. What if I told you that gentle, slower, and deliberate movements are just as beneficial for your health? Unique to China are the gentler kind of movement arts that promote energy, balance of function, and a calm mind. I call them mind-body exercises, and they include tai chi, qigong, and Dao In yoga. Many recent studies have confirmed that these mind-body exercises help balance blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol, equilibrium, and other organ functions. Mind-body exercise works through a system of energy communication within the body. By deliberately activating the flow of energy and removing blockages, communication is restored and organ functions return to their optimal level. You can learn these mind-body exercises with a teacher or from instructional DVDs.
Taken from a tradition that is thousands of years old, here are three qigong exercises that target your weight and get you in shape. The qigong exercises from this article are adapted from my book Secrets of Self-Healing, where you can find many more exercises to benefit a variety of health conditions.
Exercise 1: Swimming Dragon speeds up your metabolism
This simple qigong exercise can help speed up your metabolism and reduce your appetite. Not unlike a belly dance, Swimming Dragon is a wriggling rhythmic dance of the torso, which burns energy and promotes fat burning in the abdomen.
1. In a comfortable, quiet place stand with your feet together and ankles touching, or as close together as you can get them. Bring hands over your head, with palms together and fingers pointing up. Keep your palms together during this entire exercise.
2. Inhaling, push your waist out to the right side while keeping your head and upper torso straight. Simultaneously move your right elbow to the right, so that it rests at shoulder height.
3. Exhaling, push your waist out to the left side while keeping your head and upper torso straight. Simultaneously move your left elbow fully to the left at shoulder height.
4. Repeat this movement several times. Every time you move your waist to the right, bend your knees slightly more, lowering your entire body as you squat. Be sure to keep your upper torso and head straight.
5. With each right movement, move your hands lower, keeping your palms together and fingers pointing up. When your arms reach your chest, turn your fingers toward the ground and continue the movement.
6. When your arms reach your knees, you should be squatting.
7. Continue the movements, now rising with each right movement until you reach the standing position. When your arms reach your chest, switch the direction of your fingers so that they’re pointing up again.
Throughout this exercise, your hands should produce an S-shaped movement and your body should do a rhythmic belly dance. Remember to inhale on the rightward movement and exhale to the left. Only do this exercise on an empty stomach. Begin slowly and increase speed, warming up the whole body, but not to the point of perspiration.
Computer Labs for Kids: Update Dallas, March 20, 2010
I have received photos from Shira that give a flavor of what Computer Labs for Kids' latest project was like on March 20, 2010 in Dallas, Texas, at Buckner Children and Family Services. Having been a volunteer at a Computer Labs for Kids' project in Chicago, Illinois in November, 2009, I can pretty much now tell what went on each step of the way :)
If you have an opportunity to do so, I highly recommend signing up as a volunteer at one of Shira Evans' Computer Labs for Kids projects. The personal rewards you will experience in exchange for a few hours of your time on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon are more precious than gold.
First Photo: I know this scene! It's the main table where everyone comes to check in and get their name tags! Supplies for volunteers are also handed out here - very important because they contain the supplies needed for their student along with the exercise sheets that are worked through as the Workshop begins and continues through life-value lessons (non-denominational) that teach such basic things as respect for others, respect for others' belongings and how to care for your belongings. Here we see a volunteer (in black blouse) and Shira Evans (going through her check-list).
Second photo: One of the computers to be given to the kids. As you can see, these aren't "toys." They are actual working laptops that come fully loaded with Windows operating system and other software, including GM Susan Polgar's award-winning "Learn Chess in 30 Minutes."
At the conclusion of the Computer Labs for Kids worshop, each child receives his or her very own laptop computer to keep.
Third Photo: A photo of the class in session. You can see the kids and the volunteers working with the computers. Each kid has his or her own volunteer, who goes through a short on-line training session to better enable the volunteer to deal with questions and issues that his or her child may raise during the course. Typically even so-called "problem" children are well behaved during the session (there is a break half-way through), as the kids are all intensively engaged. First, "life lessons" videos are displayed on a large screen at the front of the room; then a question and answer session promotes interchange with the kids in the audience. After the on-screen lesson, the volunteer and the child go through the lesson again on the computer, where the child has an opportunity to ask questions and a work-book is also gone through, where the child works with his or her volunteer to answer life-lesson questions.
Fourth Photo: One-on-one. This is how Computer Labs for Kids workshops are taught in the United States - one volunteer instructor and one child. The kids don't have to "share" an instructor, they each have their own, ready to show them how to utilize the computer and the pre-loaded programs, and answer all the questions they have. The interaction between student and volunteer is intense and very personal.
If you have an opportunity to do so, I highly recommend signing up as a volunteer at one of Shira Evans' Computer Labs for Kids projects. The personal rewards you will experience in exchange for a few hours of your time on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon are more precious than gold.
At the conclusion of the Computer Labs for Kids worshop, each child receives his or her very own laptop computer to keep.
A Miracle?
This event was verified as a genuine miracle by the Roman Catholic Church.
Amsterdam's own miracle of 1345
Published on : 24 March 2010 - 1:57pm
On 13 March 1345 an honest-to-God miracle occurred in Amsterdam. On that day, a dying man sent for a priest to administer the last sacraments. However, the man was so sick that he regurgitated the Host (the wafer that represents the body of Christ) and then died.
The Host returns
His vomit, including the Host, was thrown into the fire. The next day, the maid was surprised to find that the Host had remained untouched by the fire, and took it to the priest of Amsterdam's Old Church. Much to everyone's surprise, the Host reappeared at the dead man's house the next day. The maid again took it to the priest, but the host returned to the man's house twice. This wondrous sequence of events became known as the Miracle of Amsterdam.
The miracle was officially recognised by the Roman Catholic Church and considered proof of the actual presence of Jesus Christ in the Host. An annual procession was held to commemorate the Miracle of Amsterdam until all public expressions of the Catholic faith were banned in the 16th century.
The annual pilgrim's walk through Amsterdam, the Silent Procession (Stille Omgang), was held this year for the 129th time since its reintroduction in 1881.
Amsterdam's own miracle of 1345
Published on : 24 March 2010 - 1:57pm
On 13 March 1345 an honest-to-God miracle occurred in Amsterdam. On that day, a dying man sent for a priest to administer the last sacraments. However, the man was so sick that he regurgitated the Host (the wafer that represents the body of Christ) and then died.
The Host returns
His vomit, including the Host, was thrown into the fire. The next day, the maid was surprised to find that the Host had remained untouched by the fire, and took it to the priest of Amsterdam's Old Church. Much to everyone's surprise, the Host reappeared at the dead man's house the next day. The maid again took it to the priest, but the host returned to the man's house twice. This wondrous sequence of events became known as the Miracle of Amsterdam.
The miracle was officially recognised by the Roman Catholic Church and considered proof of the actual presence of Jesus Christ in the Host. An annual procession was held to commemorate the Miracle of Amsterdam until all public expressions of the Catholic faith were banned in the 16th century.
The annual pilgrim's walk through Amsterdam, the Silent Procession (Stille Omgang), was held this year for the 129th time since its reintroduction in 1881.
******************************************************************************
What I want to know is where is this Host today? Is it preserved somewhere similar to those mysterious "archives" where was saw the Ark of the Covenant stashed inside an anonymous wooden crate at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark?" Did someone take it in Holy Communion hundreds of years later? Was it destroyed during the Protestant revolts in the 1600s? Is it still on display inside a glass case, miraculously preserved and pristine white (except for some dried puke?) Or did the Host finally get tired of magically rescuring itself from the fire and decide to walk away and hide in the forest - where it remains hidden to this day...
Do We Only Live Once?
To this very day we usually don't say that somebody has died, we say that person has "passed away." Of course the implication is that the person has left behind physical life and moved on to something else - vaguely visualized as "something better." The body may moulder inside an expensive casket (what a waste of money!) but the "soul" if you will - that essential spark and unique identity that is each of us - survives.
What happens to that unique identity once the physical body dies is the subject of endless debate. But the fact that the debate itself exists, is very telling, isn't it :)
For the record, I do believe that our unique selves survive and incarnate into human beings again.
I saw a link to this article through a friend's comment at Facebook. Here are the introductory paragraphs from the Huffington Post.
Robert Lanza, M.D.Scientist; author, "Biocentrism"
Posted: March 24, 2010 09:11 AM
Do You Only Live Once? Experiments Suggest Life Not One-Time Deal
We think we die and rot into the ground, and thus must squeeze everything in before it's too late. If life -- yours, mine -- is a just a one-time deal, then we're as likely to be screwed as pampered. But experiments suggest this view of the world may be wrong.
The results of quantum physics confirm that observations can't be predicted absolutely. Instead, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states that there are an infinite number of universes (the "multiverse"). Everything that can possibly happen occurs in some universe. The old mechanical -- "we're just a bunch of atoms" −- view of life loses its grip in these scenarios.
Biocentrism extends this idea, suggesting that life is a flowering and adventure that transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking. Although our individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the "me'' feeling is just energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest principles of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. When we die, we do so not in the random billiard ball matrix but in the inescapable life matrix. Life has a non-linear dimensionality −- it's like a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.
A series of landmark experiments show that measurements an observer makes can influence events that have already happened in the past. One experiment (Science 315, 966, 2007) confirmed that flipping a switch could retroactively change a result that had happened before the switch was flipped. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it'll be you who will experience the outcomes −- the universes −- that will result.
Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Methinks it is time for a new generation of Americans to read Buck's novels about life in China. For the people living in China's hinterlands (the "peasants" as they are still called today), life hasn't changed much in thousands of years, except the water is more polluted where water is still available (millions have been driven off their hereditary lands through massive damming projects, and millions more are withering away through a 10-year long drought that shows no signs of ending anytime soon, thanks to shifts in weather patterns due to global warming), and the earth is more poisoned than ever with industrial pollution.
As a country and as a western culture, we cannot begin to successfully understand and deal with the juggernaut that is today's China unless we know it - and through Buck's novels we can come to know it.
So, I am glad to see a biography of Buck being published. Perhaps it will spur interest in her novels in this country and her readers can learn a few things about what life in China is really like - things haven't changed for the "peasants" since Buck wrote about them in her novels, and the cultural mores and outlooks they embody are deeply embedded in the people who control China today, despite a cosmopolitan gloss that fools some of the people (i.e., our leaders) most of the time.
From literyreview.co.uk
Elaine Showalter
CHINA GIRL
Burying Bones: Pearl Buck's Life in China
By Hilary Spurling (Profile Books 288pp £15)
How does a woman overcome the suffocating messages of her culture to become an artist? In Burying the Bones, Hilary Spurling unearths the creative roots of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck (1892-1973). Spurling points out that, although Buck's most famous novel, The Good Earth, is still in print, the author is 'virtually forgotten. She has no place in feminist mythology, and her novels have been effectively eliminated from the American literary map.' Boldly conceived and magnificently written, Burying the Bones should repair Buck's literary fortunes and restore her to the pantheon of feminist heroines.
In her foreword, Spurling dates her fascination with Buck to her childhood reading. The first book she remembers was Pearl Buck's The Chinese Children Next Door, about a family of six little girls totally overshadowed and enslaved by the seventh child, a baby brother. When she reread it as an adult, Spurling recognised 'echoes of stories my mother told me about her own childhood when she, too, had been the last of six unwanted girls'. For Spurling, these were stories of a remote time and place, but for Buck, who played as a little girl 'in a Chinese town where wild dogs foraged for babies routinely exposed to die on waste land', it was a domestication of the terrors of finding the 'half-eaten' remains of bodies, 'nearly always girls suffocated or strangled at birth'. Spurling makes this story a symbol of the archaeological process of 'recovering the remnants' of Buck's early life, but it is also a fable about male supremacy and the silencing of women's voices. How Buck survived and transcended this destiny is the empowering theme of the book.
Pearl Sydenstricker grew up in China at the turn of the century as the daughter of Southern Presbyterian missionaries, cared for by a beloved amah. 'I spoke Chinese first and more easily,' she recalled. 'I did not consider myself a white person in those days.' Pearl's father, Absalom, was an ascetic, fierce Christian in search of martyrdom, who demanded an area 'as large as the state of Texas' north of Shanghai as his first post, in a futile effort to convert a people for whom he had little personal compassion or cultural sympathy. In three years 'he made not a single convert', and came home from his solo trips around the country covered with bruises and spittle. Absalom's blind devotion to his church robbed his wife Carrie of all material comfort and emotional support, and fuelled Pearl's sympathy for all women bound in their minds as well as their bodies. In The Exile (1936) Buck told her mother's story of sacrifice, poverty and suffering in a marriage of sexual and spiritual duty. Nevertheless, as Buck would acknowledge in a biography of her father called The Fighting Angel (1936), there was something heroic in Absalom's single-minded calling and something admirable in his lifelong effort to translate the New Testament into the Chinese vernacular.
In 1901, having survived the sieges of the Boxer Rebellion, the Sydenstrickers returned temporarily to their native West Virginia, and nine-year-old Pearl had her first American experiences. Later she was sent to be educated at the genteel Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she continued to read Dickens obsessively and briefly reinvented herself as a Southern belle. But Pearl was eager to return to China and went back in 1914 to keep house for her father, care for her ailing mother, and teach English to the new generation of Chinese students and intellectuals influenced by the Nationalist revolution of Sun Yat-sen.
During this exciting time she acknowledged her vocation as a writer, and was determined to follow the example of Chinese popular fiction, championed by the young iconoclasts of Chinese literary reform. Unlike the arcane classical Chinese literature of the past, this new writing, according to Buck, 'was an enormous release to educated men and women. To be able to say what one felt ... was to free an energy suppressed for centuries.' While for all Chinese writers, the change meant a shift from the classical to the 'despised' vernacular language, for women it meant the freedom to describe female experience, to tell the truth about their lives.
Pearl had just started to write stories and journalism about China when she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist stationed in Anhwei Province. Although it began as a love match, the marriage turned out to duplicate some of the worst elements of her parents' unhappy life together. Lossing (as he was called) was obsessed by his work, and their sexual incompatibility showed up in her writing 'about thwarted sexuality, marital rape, and the physical repulsion' women could feel for their husbands. Indeed, Spurling writes, 'Sex was Pearl Buck's territory as a novelist.' Tragically, their daughter Carol was born in 1920 with a genetic birth defect called phenylketonuria, which led to mental impairment. The Bucks adopted another daughter, Janice, hoping to stimulate Carol with sibling companionship, but the emotional and practical weight of caring for the children fell on Pearl, and Lossing refused to leave the political chaos of China for America, even in 1927 when the violent clash between Nationalists and Communists in Nanjing put their lives at risk.
I see now that I was in a queer submerged state. It was like living in a solitary cell, nothing and no one came in, and I seemed unable to communicate with anyone ... remembering it, I have the feelings of someone having spent part of his life in jail.
She would explore this sense of imaginative and emotional imprisonment in her fiction.
In 1929, she made the agonising decision to put Carol in a private institution in New Jersey and, upon her return to China, began to write The Good Earth. Published by the small New York firm John Day in 1931, the novel was an international sensation, 'the first attempt to penetrate the deep underlife of ordinary Chinese people that no one else had ever written about before'. Its depiction of a strange and harsh society and its portrait of the stoic mother, O-lan, connected with the fears of ordinary Americans in the Depression. The book's success dramatically changed Buck's life. She divorced Lossing Buck, married her publisher Richard Walsh, and moved back to the US. Together they adopted five more children and founded Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. In the last forty years of her life, Buck became a popular novelist who never lost her faith in the importance of fiction to reach a mass audience, and a staunch advocate for birth control, the care of mentally disabled children, and racial and sexual equality.
As a country and as a western culture, we cannot begin to successfully understand and deal with the juggernaut that is today's China unless we know it - and through Buck's novels we can come to know it.
So, I am glad to see a biography of Buck being published. Perhaps it will spur interest in her novels in this country and her readers can learn a few things about what life in China is really like - things haven't changed for the "peasants" since Buck wrote about them in her novels, and the cultural mores and outlooks they embody are deeply embedded in the people who control China today, despite a cosmopolitan gloss that fools some of the people (i.e., our leaders) most of the time.
From literyreview.co.uk
Elaine Showalter
CHINA GIRL
Burying Bones: Pearl Buck's Life in China
By Hilary Spurling (Profile Books 288pp £15)
How does a woman overcome the suffocating messages of her culture to become an artist? In Burying the Bones, Hilary Spurling unearths the creative roots of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck (1892-1973). Spurling points out that, although Buck's most famous novel, The Good Earth, is still in print, the author is 'virtually forgotten. She has no place in feminist mythology, and her novels have been effectively eliminated from the American literary map.' Boldly conceived and magnificently written, Burying the Bones should repair Buck's literary fortunes and restore her to the pantheon of feminist heroines.
In her foreword, Spurling dates her fascination with Buck to her childhood reading. The first book she remembers was Pearl Buck's The Chinese Children Next Door, about a family of six little girls totally overshadowed and enslaved by the seventh child, a baby brother. When she reread it as an adult, Spurling recognised 'echoes of stories my mother told me about her own childhood when she, too, had been the last of six unwanted girls'. For Spurling, these were stories of a remote time and place, but for Buck, who played as a little girl 'in a Chinese town where wild dogs foraged for babies routinely exposed to die on waste land', it was a domestication of the terrors of finding the 'half-eaten' remains of bodies, 'nearly always girls suffocated or strangled at birth'. Spurling makes this story a symbol of the archaeological process of 'recovering the remnants' of Buck's early life, but it is also a fable about male supremacy and the silencing of women's voices. How Buck survived and transcended this destiny is the empowering theme of the book.
Pearl Sydenstricker grew up in China at the turn of the century as the daughter of Southern Presbyterian missionaries, cared for by a beloved amah. 'I spoke Chinese first and more easily,' she recalled. 'I did not consider myself a white person in those days.' Pearl's father, Absalom, was an ascetic, fierce Christian in search of martyrdom, who demanded an area 'as large as the state of Texas' north of Shanghai as his first post, in a futile effort to convert a people for whom he had little personal compassion or cultural sympathy. In three years 'he made not a single convert', and came home from his solo trips around the country covered with bruises and spittle. Absalom's blind devotion to his church robbed his wife Carrie of all material comfort and emotional support, and fuelled Pearl's sympathy for all women bound in their minds as well as their bodies. In The Exile (1936) Buck told her mother's story of sacrifice, poverty and suffering in a marriage of sexual and spiritual duty. Nevertheless, as Buck would acknowledge in a biography of her father called The Fighting Angel (1936), there was something heroic in Absalom's single-minded calling and something admirable in his lifelong effort to translate the New Testament into the Chinese vernacular.
In 1901, having survived the sieges of the Boxer Rebellion, the Sydenstrickers returned temporarily to their native West Virginia, and nine-year-old Pearl had her first American experiences. Later she was sent to be educated at the genteel Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she continued to read Dickens obsessively and briefly reinvented herself as a Southern belle. But Pearl was eager to return to China and went back in 1914 to keep house for her father, care for her ailing mother, and teach English to the new generation of Chinese students and intellectuals influenced by the Nationalist revolution of Sun Yat-sen.
During this exciting time she acknowledged her vocation as a writer, and was determined to follow the example of Chinese popular fiction, championed by the young iconoclasts of Chinese literary reform. Unlike the arcane classical Chinese literature of the past, this new writing, according to Buck, 'was an enormous release to educated men and women. To be able to say what one felt ... was to free an energy suppressed for centuries.' While for all Chinese writers, the change meant a shift from the classical to the 'despised' vernacular language, for women it meant the freedom to describe female experience, to tell the truth about their lives.
Pearl had just started to write stories and journalism about China when she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist stationed in Anhwei Province. Although it began as a love match, the marriage turned out to duplicate some of the worst elements of her parents' unhappy life together. Lossing (as he was called) was obsessed by his work, and their sexual incompatibility showed up in her writing 'about thwarted sexuality, marital rape, and the physical repulsion' women could feel for their husbands. Indeed, Spurling writes, 'Sex was Pearl Buck's territory as a novelist.' Tragically, their daughter Carol was born in 1920 with a genetic birth defect called phenylketonuria, which led to mental impairment. The Bucks adopted another daughter, Janice, hoping to stimulate Carol with sibling companionship, but the emotional and practical weight of caring for the children fell on Pearl, and Lossing refused to leave the political chaos of China for America, even in 1927 when the violent clash between Nationalists and Communists in Nanjing put their lives at risk.
I see now that I was in a queer submerged state. It was like living in a solitary cell, nothing and no one came in, and I seemed unable to communicate with anyone ... remembering it, I have the feelings of someone having spent part of his life in jail.
She would explore this sense of imaginative and emotional imprisonment in her fiction.
In 1929, she made the agonising decision to put Carol in a private institution in New Jersey and, upon her return to China, began to write The Good Earth. Published by the small New York firm John Day in 1931, the novel was an international sensation, 'the first attempt to penetrate the deep underlife of ordinary Chinese people that no one else had ever written about before'. Its depiction of a strange and harsh society and its portrait of the stoic mother, O-lan, connected with the fears of ordinary Americans in the Depression. The book's success dramatically changed Buck's life. She divorced Lossing Buck, married her publisher Richard Walsh, and moved back to the US. Together they adopted five more children and founded Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. In the last forty years of her life, Buck became a popular novelist who never lost her faith in the importance of fiction to reach a mass audience, and a staunch advocate for birth control, the care of mentally disabled children, and racial and sexual equality.
9 Queens Action! Third Annual Chess Fest
April 11, 2010 in Tucson, Arizona!
3rd Annual Chess Fest
Time: 2:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: Historic Hotel Congress
Street: 311 E. Congress St.
9 Queens and the Hotel Congress are proud to present the 3rd Annual Chess Fest. This nontraditional chess festival offers something for everyone including:
* A speed chess tournament
* Free chess lessons
* Blindfold chess exhibition
* Human chess match played on a life size board
* Live music
* Face painting
3rd Annual Chess Fest
Time: 2:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: Historic Hotel Congress
Street: 311 E. Congress St.
9 Queens and the Hotel Congress are proud to present the 3rd Annual Chess Fest. This nontraditional chess festival offers something for everyone including:
* A speed chess tournament
* Free chess lessons
* Blindfold chess exhibition
* Human chess match played on a life size board
* Live music
* Face painting
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Computer Labs for Kids: Dallas, Texas
An email from Shira Evans of Computer Labs for Kids. Once again, a successful project - this one in Dallas, Texas earlier this month. Shira is working on a small scale in concentrated bursts to introduce big changes into the lives of foster kids and orphans all around the world, and she has done it successfully now for over a year. But, as you know, the need is great.
Foster kids receive Laptops!
On March 20th twenty children received their very own educational laptop at Buckner Children and Family Services.
Twenty-five Computer Labs for Kids volunteers teamed up to deliver training to these children who came from foster homes and the poorest areas of Dallas, TX.
I would like to extend a very warm thank you to all of our volunteers and contributors. You made this event possible!!!
Success!
So far this year, we have awarded 40 laptops to children at foster care facilities. Last year, we awarded 31 laptops and 13 leapsters.
Future Projects
Mary Kimball has requested we hold a course at an Indian Reservation in Phoenix, AZ.
Rev. Alfred Solomon has requested we hold a course for the poor children in Scotland Neck, NC.
The requests go on... including India, Thailand, Brazil, Africa and Israel.
Visit our website to see photos and videos!
FREE MOVIE PASS!
The first 30 people to donate $10 or more will receive a Pacific Theatres pass good for 1 admission ticket. Limited to 1 per donor.
Donate Now!
We Need Help!
We are entirely dependent on your generosity. The only way we will be able to get started on our next project is with the help of your donations.
It costs us $600 per child and right now we have no way to continue. Our costs include the price of the laptop, software, and all course materials.
Thank you for being a part of our organization! Shira
Computer Labs for Kids, Inc.
278 E Colorado Blvd.
#1617
Pasadena, CA 91101
Foster kids receive Laptops!
On March 20th twenty children received their very own educational laptop at Buckner Children and Family Services.
Twenty-five Computer Labs for Kids volunteers teamed up to deliver training to these children who came from foster homes and the poorest areas of Dallas, TX.
I would like to extend a very warm thank you to all of our volunteers and contributors. You made this event possible!!!
Success!
So far this year, we have awarded 40 laptops to children at foster care facilities. Last year, we awarded 31 laptops and 13 leapsters.
Future Projects
Mary Kimball has requested we hold a course at an Indian Reservation in Phoenix, AZ.
Rev. Alfred Solomon has requested we hold a course for the poor children in Scotland Neck, NC.
The requests go on... including India, Thailand, Brazil, Africa and Israel.
Visit our website to see photos and videos!
FREE MOVIE PASS!
The first 30 people to donate $10 or more will receive a Pacific Theatres pass good for 1 admission ticket. Limited to 1 per donor.
Donate Now!
We Need Help!
We are entirely dependent on your generosity. The only way we will be able to get started on our next project is with the help of your donations.
It costs us $600 per child and right now we have no way to continue. Our costs include the price of the laptop, software, and all course materials.
Thank you for being a part of our organization! Shira
Computer Labs for Kids, Inc.
278 E Colorado Blvd.
#1617
Pasadena, CA 91101
2010 World Ladies' Free Skate
Well, we can rest assured that bullshit continues to reign in the world of figure skating. What I'm seeing here (see below) says that Kim Yu Na WON the free skate. NOT. I watched her performance, and I watched Asada's performance. I watched every performance for the last 3 groups (18 skaters). I'm no expert but I've watched figure skating for over 45 years and I've learned a few things about it in that time.
So reputation trumps actual performance for Kim. She didn't look too happy on the medals stand, I'm thinking she knows she got an absolute gift in that silver medal. If she's not thinking it, she SHOULD be. I've got nothing against Kim Yu Na, I think she is a magical skater. But not in this competition.
Kim sure as hell did not out-performace Mao Asada in the Free Skate nor do I think that she out-performed Mirai Nagasu. Asada has her shortcomings but she did a really fine performance in the Free Skate, I thought it was better than her performance at the Olympics. The American skaters were absolutely screwed. No way did Nagasu deserve 11th place ranking for her Free Skate - not after what I saw the other skaters did. It's all there, you will be able to watch it on video and judge for yourselves. I'm thinking the judges thought the Americans won an ice-dance medal and that's enough for this year, and since Nagasu is the "future of American figure skating" (and they are all hoping that Rachel Flatt leaves the sport and becomes a Nobel Prize Winner in science) they could screw them over with their scores. Which they did. Way to go, judges.
FPl. Name Nation Points SP FS
1 Mao ASADA JPN 197.58 2 2
2 Yu-Na KIM KOR 190.79 7 1 WAY OVERSCORED
3 Laura LEPISTO FIN 178.62 3 6 WAY OVERSCORED
4 Miki ANDO JPN 177.82 11 3 WAY UNDERSCORED
5 Cynthia PHANEUF CAN 177.54 8 4
6 Carolina KOSTNER ITA 177.31 4 5 OVERSCORED
7 Mirai NAGASU USA 175.48 1 11 WAY UNDERSCORED
8 Ksenia MAKAROVA RUS 169.64 5 8 OVERSCORED
9 Rachael FLATT USA 167.44 6 9 UNDERSCORED
10 Viktoria HELGESSON SWE 161.79 9 10
Here is the table for the Free Skate (top skaters):
Pl. Name Nation TSS = TES + PCS + SS TR PE CH IN Ded. - StN.
1 Yu-Na KIM KOR 130.49 66.45 65.04 8.35 7.75 7.95 8.15 8.45 1.00 #15
2 Mao ASADA JPN 129.50 67.02 62.48 8.25 7.40 7.95 7.55 7.90 0.00 #20
3 Miki ANDO JPN 122.04 63.64 58.40 7.35 6.85 7.60 7.30 7.40 0.00 #14
4 Cynthia PHANEUF CAN 118.04 61.48 56.56 7.20 6.65 7.35 7.15 7.00 0.00 #17
5 Carolina KOSTNER ITA 115.11 54.87 60.24 7.70 7.20 7.55 7.55 7.65 0.00 #19
6 Laura LEPISTO FIN 114.32 54.24 60.08 7.60 7.40 7.45 7.50 7.60 0.00 #22
7 Akiko SUZUKI JPN 111.68 58.96 52.72 6.80 6.10 6.85 6.55 6.65 0.00 #6
8 Ksenia MAKAROVA RUS 107.58 55.14 53.44 6.80 6.20 7.00 6.70 6.70 1.00 #24
9 Rachael FLATT USA 106.56 53.20 53.36 6.75 6.45 6.75 6.75 6.65 0.00 #21
10 Viktoria HELGESSON SWE 105.47 54.91 50.56 6.40 6.05 6.55 6.40 6.20 0.00 #16
11 Mirai NAGASU USA 105.08 49.04 57.04 7.40 6.75 7.20 7.25 7.05 1.00 #23
12 Jenna MCCORKELL GBR 98.78 51.82 46.96 6.10 5.40 6.20 5.80 5.85 0.00 #10
13 Sarah HECKEN GER 98.74 54.14 45.60 5.90 5.35 5.85 5.70 5.70 1.00 #7
14 Alena LEONOVA RUS 98.50 51.50 48.00 6.25 5.75 6.00 6.00 6.00 1.00 #8
15 Julia SEBESTYEN HUN 91.56 42.28 49.28 6.55 5.90 6.30 6.05 6.00 0.00 #18
16 Yan LIU CHN 91.33 47.65 43.68 5.70 5.45 5.30 5.60 5.25 0.00 #12
Liu Yan - that's the Chinese skater I mentioned in my earlier post today. I'm thinking keep your eye on her. She's got something special, despite the lousy costume. I think she's got that "IT" factor. Looking forward to seeing the competition heat up between her and Nagasu in the next few years. For the Russians, Leonova has more "it" than Makarova, but Makarova has a "prettier" presence on the ice. Leonova, ditch the "edgy" haircut, it doesn't do anything for you, trust me girlfriend.
Rachel Flatt should change her last name and lose 10 pounds. I know that sounds cruel - but I will bet you money that is what every single international judge who is looking at her thinks.
I love Miki Ando, but she peaked in 2007 and hasn't been back since. Today I saw more spark in her than in the last year - she was particularly flat at the Olympics. I think she should retire, I think she will be a fabulous coach because she knows what it feels like to "lose that loving feeling" for the sport. I think she should coach Nagasu after Frank Carol retires.
That's it until Nationals for me, in January 2011. Geez, I'm getting old, and I'm not liking it one bit.
So reputation trumps actual performance for Kim. She didn't look too happy on the medals stand, I'm thinking she knows she got an absolute gift in that silver medal. If she's not thinking it, she SHOULD be. I've got nothing against Kim Yu Na, I think she is a magical skater. But not in this competition.
Kim sure as hell did not out-performace Mao Asada in the Free Skate nor do I think that she out-performed Mirai Nagasu. Asada has her shortcomings but she did a really fine performance in the Free Skate, I thought it was better than her performance at the Olympics. The American skaters were absolutely screwed. No way did Nagasu deserve 11th place ranking for her Free Skate - not after what I saw the other skaters did. It's all there, you will be able to watch it on video and judge for yourselves. I'm thinking the judges thought the Americans won an ice-dance medal and that's enough for this year, and since Nagasu is the "future of American figure skating" (and they are all hoping that Rachel Flatt leaves the sport and becomes a Nobel Prize Winner in science) they could screw them over with their scores. Which they did. Way to go, judges.
FPl. Name Nation Points SP FS
1 Mao ASADA JPN 197.58 2 2
2 Yu-Na KIM KOR 190.79 7 1 WAY OVERSCORED
3 Laura LEPISTO FIN 178.62 3 6 WAY OVERSCORED
4 Miki ANDO JPN 177.82 11 3 WAY UNDERSCORED
5 Cynthia PHANEUF CAN 177.54 8 4
6 Carolina KOSTNER ITA 177.31 4 5 OVERSCORED
7 Mirai NAGASU USA 175.48 1 11 WAY UNDERSCORED
8 Ksenia MAKAROVA RUS 169.64 5 8 OVERSCORED
9 Rachael FLATT USA 167.44 6 9 UNDERSCORED
10 Viktoria HELGESSON SWE 161.79 9 10
Here is the table for the Free Skate (top skaters):
Pl. Name Nation TSS = TES + PCS + SS TR PE CH IN Ded. - StN.
1 Yu-Na KIM KOR 130.49 66.45 65.04 8.35 7.75 7.95 8.15 8.45 1.00 #15
2 Mao ASADA JPN 129.50 67.02 62.48 8.25 7.40 7.95 7.55 7.90 0.00 #20
3 Miki ANDO JPN 122.04 63.64 58.40 7.35 6.85 7.60 7.30 7.40 0.00 #14
4 Cynthia PHANEUF CAN 118.04 61.48 56.56 7.20 6.65 7.35 7.15 7.00 0.00 #17
5 Carolina KOSTNER ITA 115.11 54.87 60.24 7.70 7.20 7.55 7.55 7.65 0.00 #19
6 Laura LEPISTO FIN 114.32 54.24 60.08 7.60 7.40 7.45 7.50 7.60 0.00 #22
7 Akiko SUZUKI JPN 111.68 58.96 52.72 6.80 6.10 6.85 6.55 6.65 0.00 #6
8 Ksenia MAKAROVA RUS 107.58 55.14 53.44 6.80 6.20 7.00 6.70 6.70 1.00 #24
9 Rachael FLATT USA 106.56 53.20 53.36 6.75 6.45 6.75 6.75 6.65 0.00 #21
10 Viktoria HELGESSON SWE 105.47 54.91 50.56 6.40 6.05 6.55 6.40 6.20 0.00 #16
11 Mirai NAGASU USA 105.08 49.04 57.04 7.40 6.75 7.20 7.25 7.05 1.00 #23
12 Jenna MCCORKELL GBR 98.78 51.82 46.96 6.10 5.40 6.20 5.80 5.85 0.00 #10
13 Sarah HECKEN GER 98.74 54.14 45.60 5.90 5.35 5.85 5.70 5.70 1.00 #7
14 Alena LEONOVA RUS 98.50 51.50 48.00 6.25 5.75 6.00 6.00 6.00 1.00 #8
15 Julia SEBESTYEN HUN 91.56 42.28 49.28 6.55 5.90 6.30 6.05 6.00 0.00 #18
16 Yan LIU CHN 91.33 47.65 43.68 5.70 5.45 5.30 5.60 5.25 0.00 #12
Liu Yan - that's the Chinese skater I mentioned in my earlier post today. I'm thinking keep your eye on her. She's got something special, despite the lousy costume. I think she's got that "IT" factor. Looking forward to seeing the competition heat up between her and Nagasu in the next few years. For the Russians, Leonova has more "it" than Makarova, but Makarova has a "prettier" presence on the ice. Leonova, ditch the "edgy" haircut, it doesn't do anything for you, trust me girlfriend.
Rachel Flatt should change her last name and lose 10 pounds. I know that sounds cruel - but I will bet you money that is what every single international judge who is looking at her thinks.
I love Miki Ando, but she peaked in 2007 and hasn't been back since. Today I saw more spark in her than in the last year - she was particularly flat at the Olympics. I think she should retire, I think she will be a fabulous coach because she knows what it feels like to "lose that loving feeling" for the sport. I think she should coach Nagasu after Frank Carol retires.
That's it until Nationals for me, in January 2011. Geez, I'm getting old, and I'm not liking it one bit.
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