Extra Credits
Published on 14 Jul 2018The flu arrived in France. It found a pleasant home in the crowded wartime trenches, much to the dismay of the Allies who tried to keep the flu a secret. When it made its way to Madrid, not subject to wartime censorship, it picked up the nickname “Spanish flu.”
July 15, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Trench Fever – Extra History – #2
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Alcibiades, the Athenian Byron
Not for poetry, but for the Byronian swathe he cut through a large portion of Classical Greece:
“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of Samuel Johnson’s conversation in Boswell’s biography and know at once that he was magnificent, lovable and desperately unhappy. But as to what it was like to have Lord Byron turn the full force of his attention onto you – well, we have no conceivable way of knowing. We just have to trust his contemporaries that it felt like ‘the opening of the gate of heaven’.
This causes problems for a biographer of Alcibiades. On the face of it, the man was utterly insufferable. Born in around 450 BC into one of the oldest and richest families of ancient Athens, Alcibiades was the only Old Etonian (as it were) to play a leading role in the late-fifth-century radical democracy. The account of his childhood in Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades suggests a bad case of antisocial personality disorder: biting during wrestling, mutilating dogs, punching his future father-in-law in the face for a dare. His later political career makes Boris Johnson seem like a man of firm and unbending principle. Exiled from Athens in 415 BC over some particularly odious Bullingdon Club antics, Alcibiades promptly sold his services to Sparta (where he seduced the king’s wife) before double-crossing both sides and wheedling his way into the court of a Persian satrap.
But Alcibiades, like Byron, clearly had that indefinable something. One catches a glimpse of it in the unforgettable last scene of Plato’s Symposium, when he crashes into the room, blind drunk, flirting with everything on legs, shouting about his love for Socrates. Thucydides captures it in his report of Alcibiades’s speech whipping up the Athenian assembly to vote for the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415 BC – an extraordinary stew of egotistic bragging (about how successful his racehorses are), mendacious demagoguery and brilliantly acute strategic thinking. The unwashed Athenian masses, not usually prone to atavistic toff-grovelling, absolutely adored him: when Alcibiades finally returned to Athens in 407 BC after eight years of exile, sailing coolly into Piraeus on a ship with purple sails, they welcomed him back with paroxysms of joy.
Behind the Peloponnese-sized ego, Alcibiades was a general of spectacular genius – when he could be bothered. In 410 BC, shortly after his controversial reinstatement as admiral of the Athenian navy (on the back of a bogus promise of Persian support), he wiped out the entire Spartan fleet at the Battle of Cyzicus; two years later, through sheer chutzpah, he captured the city of Selymbria near Byzantium with only fifty soldiers, and without striking a blow. When things went wrong – as in 406 BC, after a disastrous campaigning season in the eastern Aegean – he showed an infuriating ability to wriggle out of trouble. His final years (406–404 BC) were spent once again in exile from Athens, holed up in a private castle on the Gallipoli peninsula. The circumstances of his death are still shrouded in mystery. One story tells that he died in the remote mountains of central Turkey at the hands of the brothers of a Phrygian noblewoman whom he had decided to seduce. This is, I fear, all too believable.
This is the introduction to a review by Peter Thonemann of a new biography of Alcibiades by David Stuttard in the Literary Review for July, 2018. H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.
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More Info About Alsace-Lorraine in WW1 I OUT OF THE ETHER
The Great War
Published on 14 Jul 2018Markus and Indy give you some background on our recent special episode.
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“Reading the fourth Dune book is like doing your 5,472nd Sudoku”
Unlike most of my generation of science fiction fans, I wasn’t a fan of the original Dune by Frank Herbert. I read it, it was okay, but it didn’t grab my imagination as it seemed to do for so many others. I think I started reading the second book in the series, but never finished it. I just checked, and I no longer have any Frank Herbert books in my library, which does indicate to me that I lost patience long before the end of the series. That said, I do see the attraction for attempting to translate the story to the big screen. Colby Cosh (who was a fan of the book) reports on the latest adaptation headed toward a multiplex near you, probably:
The cinema-rumour websites are hissing with whispers about the upcoming adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune from Canadian director Denis Villeneuve.
Folks who still swear by science-fiction movies live in a state of constant unease about tent-pole projects like this. After an adaptation of cherished object X by messianic genius Y is announced, there are still a hundred things that can go awry with the script or the finances or the cast, and one of those hundred things, or some interaction amongst them, usually does. But the buzz is that everything is, so far, in order for Villeneuve to begin shooting early next year.
Dune (published in 1965) is somewhat esoteric and bizarre, and as source material for video it has had a difficult history, one that is itself now the subject of legend. One of the most celebrated documentaries of 2013 was Jodorowsky’s Dune, the chronicle of a failed Seventies attempt to shoot the book with an art-cinema giant at the helm.
The book itself is almost defiantly unfilmable. Dune flings technicalities and background references at the reader to an almost sadistic degree without ever lifting one finger to engage in conscious literary exposition. This was, indeed, part of the reason it revolutionized science fiction. The book is driven by gimmicks, like any good SF story, but the reader is expected to not only solve narrative puzzles (what the heck is a “Mentat”?) but to bring some knowledge of history and science to the game.
This is why nerds adore Dune, and it is why the pleasure of the sequels is subject, notoriously so, to fast-diminishing returns. Reading the fourth Dune book is like doing your 5,472nd Sudoku.
Despite having been written as if Herbert specifically intended to make adaptation impossible, Dune has reached the screen twice: as a 1984 feature directed by David Lynch (who is what Alejandro Jodorowsky would be if Alejandro Jodorowsky were a grown-up Eagle Scout from Montana) and as a 2000 TV miniseries for the Sci-Fi Channel. All of this is to say that Dune carries a lot of baggage, and the stakes for Villeneuve, whose Blade Runner sequel is thought to have lost a lot of money, seem positively alarming. A directorial career is a tightrope: everyone is one blunder away from plummeting into an abyss, even though particular blunders may be survivable.
Not being a movie fan or TV watcher, I haven’t seen either of the previous adaptations — although the stills from Lynch’s 1984 movie are quite striking — and it’s unlikely I’ll bother with the next one.
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Soviet Gear – Why it Didn’t Die | Feature Fittings
Feature History
Published on 23 Jun 2018———————————————————————————————————–
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I do the research, writing, narration, art, and animation. Yes, it is very lonelyIntro Song
Ross Bugden – ChosenMusic by Epidemic Sound: http://epidemicsound.com
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QotD: “Temporary” government programs
Obamacare will not collapse imminently — or maybe not even ever. But that is not because it is “working” as a public policy. Countries around the world have carried the husk of their far more socialized health-care systems for generations. Rent control, the minimum wage, and countless other economically ridiculous policies endure because they satisfy the political needs of politicians, bureaucrats, and a whole phylum of remora-like rent-seekers. That’s why Milton Friedman said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” He should know, given how it was basically his idea to implement tax-withholding from paychecks as a wartime measure.
You might say that these programs also help real people too. And that is true. But wealth distribution efforts always help someone. And those someones become vested interests who demand perpetuation of the status quo. If the federal government implemented a program to give every left-handed person in the country $20,000 a year free and clear (no doubt to compensate for the fact that such people are witches), you can be sure the Left Handed Association of America would work assiduously to protect their entitlement.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Consequences of Overpromising on Obamacare”, National Review, 2016-10-08.
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