Xmas

My mother, God rest her soul, had as many faults and foibles as I do. On the back of a #10 envelope (her, and now my, favorite place to make a note or write a list) she scribbled that she had "a lifelong interest in education." This so that I would remember to put the information in her obituary.

And she made sure that I had an excellent liberal arts education, for which I am grateful every moment of my life. She enrolled me in Catlin Gabel School, a private grade and high school, when I was eleven; she continued to pay my tuition at Reed College even after I got married at the age of twenty; and she paid for me to get a master's degree at Portland State University when I was twenty-eight.

The summer I was fifteen, she had me take a class with her at Reed, Calligraphy, taught by Lloyd J. Reynolds (1902-1978). If you have ever had a great teacher, you know that his or her light stays with you for the rest of your life.

The way Lloyd approached his subject, calligraphy was more than the "study of beautiful writing." It was also the study of people representing their ideas in symbols and letters. So he began teaching us by going through the alphabet. Aleph, our letter A and a, came to us through the Phoenician alphabet from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox's head, the bar on the A representing the ox's horns. And so on.

By the time he got to the letter X and x, he explained that the word Xmas was not a tacky modern abbreviation, like the word nite for night, but that it represented X, the Greek letter Chi, a short form of Christ. Xmas was first used as early as 1100. Even today, though, the word is considered informal, and not appropriate in the best writing.

Bocage

I had a wonderful word in mind for my June 6 post: bocage. This year we marked the 70th anniversary of D-Day on that day, when the Allied armies mounted the greatest invasion in our history to take back the European continent from the Nazis.

According to the Wikipedia entry, bocage is a Norman French and English word typically meaning fields broken up by woodland thickets, which act as both windbreak and boundary. In American English, the word bocage came to mean hedgerow. The soldiers who stormed the beaches and pushed into Normandy encountered heavy resistance both from the enemy and from the very dense bocage.

The day I started working on this post was Hallowe'en, a good day to post about words like Samhain, hallow, or soul cake.

But I could not make myself write about a word or phrase with a Hallowe'en theme. If this is what you are looking for, please let me refer you to the Writer's Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, where you will find an appropriate Hallowe'en entry, as well as other interesting notes about the date, October 31.

I do not know if Garrison Keillor is a dreamer or not, although I imagine that as a writer he must have some characteristics of the dreamer. But the man also has a staff to help write seasonally appropriate entries, even out of season. (Note to self: what would it take for me to do this? More than I have, or not?)

Of course, having a staff also makes the possibility for mistakes even greater. In the Hallowe'en post, he (or, as I imagine, one of his staff) says, "Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, which forgave the punishment for sins." In fact, the indulgence--that is, the payment you had to make for forgiveness--is the punishment, and, in return for the payment, you got forgiveness. So this should read: ". . . selling indulgences, by which you could have your sins forgiven."

Archaeology Best Sellers, In Three Parts

Okay, all right! (Yes, okay should be spelled out, not abbreviated o.k. and all right is two words.)

Once again, you know more about me than I wish you did. Although, along those lines, I have to say that the best writing is, at its heart, honest.

I cannot depend on myself to complete the tasks I've set for myself (to say nothing of the tasks other people might like to set for me). I wrote a post on Connelly's Parthenon Enigma and planned to write two more posts on current archaeology books, Brier's Secret of the Great Pyramid and Cline's 1177 B. C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

And, just so we're square, the thesis of Brier's book is a theory developed by French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, in turn based on his father's insight (his father is also an architect) that the Great Pyramid at Giza was built by means first of an exterior ramp and then an interior ramp.

The thesis of Cline's book is that the migration or invasion of the Sea Peoples, so-called, who probably came from Western Europe, may have brought about the catastrophic collapse of the Late Bronze Age. I read carefully, but did not come away with more information than that.

Why is it, I often wonder, that I am not good at assigning myself posts. And the best, and most flattering, answer is that these posts "come" to me. I have an idea for a post and, at first, the idea is a gift. Then it becomes a possibility--"Oh," I think, "that might work"--and let my thoughts play with the idea. And finally it becomes a demand: "I'm not going to be able to put this idea to rest, or get any rest myself, for that matter, until I write the damn thing."

So now you know.

Archaeology Best Sellers, In Three Parts. Part 1: Connolly

Every once in a while, I read a popularized archaeology book that catches my eye. Lately, for example, I've made my way through The Parthenon Enigma, by Joan Breton Connolly (New York: Knopf, 2014); The Secret of the Great Pyramid, by Bob Brier (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); and 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H. Cline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

And I mean "made my way." Except for the dramatic, thriller-style titles, these books, although well-reasoned, are not well-written. They are scholarly works, complete with heavy words and plodding arguments, dressed up as best sellers.

Maybe these works can get away with looking like--yes, even acting like--best sellers, because their main ideas are so great.

In the Parthenon Enigma, Connolly argues that the Parthenon frieze "tells" the founding myth of Athens, in which Athens's first king, Erechtheus, sacrifices his daughter to save the city. We had lost track, not of the myth itself but of its importance, until we recently recovered a play by Euripides that tells the tale.

Connolly debunks the idea that the frieze shows the procession of the Panathenaea, the great annual festival of the city, which is how we had been used to interpret the frieze.

As part of her argument, Connolly depicts all ninety-two marble metopes, or panels carved in bas-relief, from the Parthenon frieze. (In a typical Doric frieze such as this, metopes alternate with triglyphs, carved marble panels with three vertical lines, perhaps memorializing the beam ends of  ancient wooden structures.)

The British Museum holds most of the metopes as part of the Elgin Marbles. The new Parthenon Gallery of the Acropolis Museum and six other institutions hold the rest.

Connolly remarks that part of the problem in the misinterpretation of the frieze lies with the loss of Euripides's tragedy and part with the diaspora of the marbles themselves. Scholars could have looked at them as a single narrative, but, having to work with the same limitations as the rest of us human beings, they did not.

Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1868, held by Birmingham Museums And Art Gallery. 

Part 2: Brier.
Part 3: Cline.

Return to Casino Royale

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, James Bond returns to Royale-les-Eaux to visit the grave of Vesper Lynd, a yearly pilgrimage of his. On the road, he and the mysterious, and reckless, Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo race each other in their cars. Later they meet face to face in the casino, where Bond, even though he barely knows her, covers her gambling debt to save her from a dishonorable loss, un coup de deshonneur.

But Tracy is worse than reckless; she is suicidal. The next day, Bond interrupts her while she is trying to kill herself.

Bond finds himself talking alone to Tracy's father, Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Corsican Mafia and holder of the King's Medal for Resistance Fighters (so, even though a criminal, a good guy). Draco convinces Bond to make love to his daughter, to give her hope enough to stay alive, and admonishes him to keep their conversation herkos odonton, which, he says, is Greek for top secret.

Now according to Hank Prunckun, in Counterintelligence Theory and Practice, this Greek saying probably comes from a passage in the Odyssey in which Zeus asks Athena to be careful about letting information slip so easily through the barrier (herkos) of her teeth (odonton).

I am easily amused, and I have been having fun imagining the school boy, Ian Fleming, coming across this phrase and tucking it away in his mind. "Someday," he thinks, "I'll find a use for this wonderful phrase, herkos odonton; I just know I will."

Casino Royale

The time has come, I'll wager, for an annotated edition of Casino Royale (first published in London by Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1953).

Case in point:

Bond is at the roulette table. He has lost the money his government bankrolled him so that he could clean out the villain, Le Chiffre. He is despondent, with nowhere to turn. What can he do now?

His American spy friend, Felix Leiter, slips him a new stake, an envelope full of cash, and says, "Marshall Aid. Thirty-two million francs. With the compliments of the USA."

Note:

After the devastation of World War II, Europe struggled to rebuild. The Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, provided $13 billion in economic grants and loans to the United Kingdom, France, and other European nations, including enemy combatants, Austria, Italy, and West Germany, over a four-year period from 1948 to 1951. The idea was that the slow start of economic regrowth in postwar Europe could make countries vulnerable to Soviet Communism and a little stimulus could help prevent this.

So Felix is joking with Bond. Just as the United States provided economic stimulus to Europe, so Felix helps Bond with the money he needs to beat Le Chiffre.

What Is a Sabretache?

James Bond is in Royale-les-Eaux, a fictional fishing village on the coast of Britanny. Royale-les-Eaux was twice a fashionable health spa, once during the Second Empire and again at the turn of the nineteenth century. Now, in the early 1950s, it is a gambler's paradise, where the worldly can play baccarat and other games of chance at the Casino Royale.

Bond is meeting Mathis, his MI6 contact, over lunch at the Hermitage. Mathis will introduce him to Mlle. Vesper Lynd, the woman who will help him in the operation to bankrupt Le Chiffre.

At this first meeting, the beautiful Lynd wears a grey silk dress with a square neck, tight bodice, and slightly full skirt; her waist is encircled by a black, 3-inch-wide, hand-stitched belt. (The dress is by Dior, as it turns out.) Her shoes are a matching black and her hat, a large "cart-wheel" of gold straw, has a black ribbon. Around her neck, a gold flat-link chain lights up her sun-tanned skin; on her finger, a "broad" topaz ring picks up the gold of the necklace and the straw hat.

Her purse is a black, hand-stitched sabretache, a military pouch once carried by Magyar horsemen of the tenth century; we have examples of these pouches as grave goods. Then called a tarsoly, the pouch was suspended from the belt with the saber and so hung under the saber and to the rider's left side. It was often embellished with a coat of arms or monogram on the front flap.

Hussar cavalry soldiers adopted the tarsoly, in part because their uniforms were so tight that there was no room for pockets, but changed the name: German sabel for saber plus tasche for pocket became sabretache.

British cavalry in the Crimean War (1853-1856) still carried sabretaches. According to the Wikipedia entry, "'undress' versions in plain black patent leather were used on active duty."

So to complete the picture of Miss Lynd, this is how I see her sabretache: it is plain, but shiny, black patent leather like those British cavalrymen used in the Crimea.

A Hussar officer in full dress, army of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807. His sabretache is emblazoned with the White Eagle of Poland. Painting by Jan Chełmiński, 1913.