April 15


1945


I have very few memories of my uncle Kai from Norway, who was only an uncle-once-removed anyway, and that by marriage. My dad's middle brother had married Hettie Davis, and it was her sister Thelma, the artist Thelma Patricia, who left England around the time time that I was born to marry him, and parent Lynn and Leslie, with whom I spent many hours on their family visits to England throughout my childhood. Did Kai die young, or Thelma divorce him? I don't know. Only that he disappeared from my memories quite early on, while Thelma and the children were there until I too left home; disappeared, indeed, the way a man might disappear in a Nazi deportation, picked up and vanished without trace for years, and nothing to recall him by except that number tatooed on his arm, his concentration camp number. Kai's was the first I had ever seen, aged five or six I think, and for a long time I didn't even ask what it was there for, because some instinct told me that it wouldn't be a good idea to ask. He got it, I learned later, at Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated, today in 1945.





What follows below is in part adapted from the website:  http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/norwayjews.html: 


 The Nazis invaded Norway and Denmark on the 9th of April 1940, thwarting the combined heroism of Norwegian, British, Polish and French forces. Afterwards there was resistance, but it was abject in its heroism, and only led to more reprisals - the bombing of the Lysaker Bridge linking Oslo to its airport in Fornebu, for instance, for which thousands paid with their lives.

In the meanwhile King Haakon had fled, and every politician who could find a way out likewise, all of them stating their determination etc etc, but in empty words. Their replacement in Oslo was a government led by the former Defense Minister, now the leader of the local Nazi party, the vile Vidkun Quisling (yes, that's where the term Quisling comes from that is now part of our language; and no, I am not going to glorify him with a photograph). Not surprisingly, Quisling called for capitulation to the invaders.




It was February 1942 when that call was answered, Reichskommissar Josef Terboven giving him the formal authority to run Norway in the Fuhrer's name, and bringing every civilian institution from the police to the civil service under that authority. So the Nuremburg Laws applied in Norway too, introduced by decree in May 1940, when Jews were instructed to hand in any radios in their possession. Registration of Jewish property began that October, with many Jewish businesses quite simply confiscated, most of the rest declared bankrupt by the "Liquidation Board of Confiscated Jewish Assets" which Quisling set up for the purpose; by treating them as bankrupt, their assets could be sold, but they continued to exist as legal entities, which allowed expenses to be levied against them and further money thereby obtained. (This practice remained in effect even after the war, when a democratic government was established again in Norway.) Anything made of gold or silver was handed over to the SS; the rest stayed in Norway, and by the end of the war it was estimated that about 30% of those stolen assets had been sufficient to cover all the expenses of the "Liquidation Board"; no documentary evidence has yet been found to explain what happened to the other 70%.



The stamping of Jewish identity cards with a simple red 'J' began in January 1942. The first arrests too that month, the victims sent to prisons or labour camps inside Norway, though not yet the 1,700 Jews who had come to Oslo as refugees from Germany. That would happen in June 1942, when a reception camp for Jews was established at Berg, near Tonsberg, followed by a general registration of all Jews, and the completion of the confiscating of all Jewish property by October. The Chief Rabbi, Julius Samuel, had been arrested on September 2nd, with more than 200 other men; a group the same size was arrested on October 25th - these however were not sent to Berg, they were shipped directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

 But this is Berg, in Norway, not Bergen-Belsen, which is in Lower Saxony, in northern Germany, 1747 kms, just over a thousand miles due south. And I am inclined to think that, maybe, English family members hearing Berg thought they were hearing some shortened form of Bergen-Belsen. Unless Kai, at some point, had left Norway for somewhere further south in Europe, and was rounded up there. I have no way of finding out, but I do know that Berg was primarily a transit camp from which Scandinavians were sent on to slave or death camps elsewhere, so perhaps Kai was at both.

 And does it really matter, in the end? Ungassed, but tatooed, both physically and, more important, mentally, Kai survived, and if it was Berg and not Bergen-Belsen, then he must have been among those who were in the third round-up, the one in November 1942 which was not included in the Auschwitz transport, but rather were imprisoned at Bredveit prison in Oslo to await deportation to Poland. Three months later, on February 24th 1943, along with twenty-five women from the concentration camp at Grini, one hundred and fifty-eight of those were taken on the steamer Gotenland to Stettin, from where they too travelled to Auschwitz, most of them to be "employed" at the Monowitz sub-camp. Only thirteen of those survived the war; maybe Kai was one of them.

Most of the remaining 930 Norwegian Jews found ways to escape across the border into neutral Sweden, where they stayed for the remainder of the war. Many others went into hiding, or gained exemption from deportation by marrying Aryan women and accepting internment inside Norway. Some found other ways to get out of Norway, hoping to make it to Scotland - the nearest safe place by boat.

Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, which lives on as a museum - and hopefully will for all eternity, or at least until the human race has finally learned its lessons, and implemented them irrevocably, which is probably just a complicatedly idealistic way of trying to avoid saying "for all eternity" - unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, when Bergen-Belsen was liberated, the British burned as much of it as they could; and not for the pleasure of vengeance through destruction, nor with the purpose of destroying history, but because there was no other way to rid the place of quite so many rats and lice and other vermin that would have spread their diseases otherwise. As Camus described it at the end of his novel "La Peste", the fire, even the fire of Hell itself, is insufficient.




The liberation of Auschwitz can be found on Jan 27, and that of Birkenau on April 10. My piece about Terezin is on April 1. A piece about Hélène Berr, who died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen on April 10 1945, and who left behind a diary quite as significant as that of Anne Frank, will be published on this blog shortly. My piece about Simone Jacob (Veil), who was a survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, will be published shortly in the Woman-Blindness section of this blog, though you can read her obituary in the meanwhile on June 30.





Amber pages
Margaret of Anjou,  wife of Henry VI of England, and mother of Edward IV, founded Queen's College in Cambridge, today in 1448


Founded may be a tiny over-statement: she issued her Charter to establish the Queen’s College of St Margaret and St Bernard on 15 April 1448, the same day that the foundation stone was laid by her chamberlain. In all likelihood, given his state of mental health, it was she not the king who was behind the establishment of the first proper school ever in this country, now known as Eton College, and also King’s College in Cambridge. Her heraldic arms, derived from those of her father René, became the basis of the Arms of Queens’ College, and the connection with her is remembered in the name of the Angevin Room at Queens’ (click here for the college website).

So we can say that the college was only one manifestation of her achievement; born on March 23 1430, at Pont-à-Mousson, in the Lorraine district of France, she bears the primary responsbility for bringing the active use of the brain, both female and male, to England, for the first time since... well, ever really, unless you count the occasional anomalies like Bede and Roger Bacon ... but since the impact of another great lady, Aliénor d'Aquitaine. 

English accounts also imbue her with primary responsibility for the loss of France, save only Calais, as an English domain, but the reality is that she was French - the daughter of René, Duke of Anjou, Bar, Lorraine and Calabria, Count of Provence and Piedmont, titular King of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem - England had been conquered and ruled from Poitiers for centuries and was now trying to move the throne to Westminster; and frankly (though perhaps not anglickly) France needed to be independent France, as Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem needed to be independent Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem, and Aengland needed to be independent Aengland: and history in every one of those places has done nothing ever since but benefit from this new arrangement.

Inside Aengland her ambitious cultural aspirations were thwarted by barons who were less concerned with national equanimity than with personal power: the Wars of the Roses the outcome of that minor disagreement. Husband Henry suffered from mental illness, and though Richard of York was the official Regent, it was she who ruled in his place. Until she was captured after the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, and sent packing back to France, where she died on August 25 1482 (more on this tale of power-squabbling here)

Many of her letters - highly intelligent letters, discussing serious themes, and rarely mere chatter - were preserved in a publication by the Camden Society in the 1830s, and are now available through the Royal Historical Society (click here to read them).

She was also responsible for the development of one of the great historic buildings, the original Queen's House in Greenwich, for which click here.

How much influence she had on the other Margaret of the period, her sister-in-law Margaret Beaufort, is difficult to determine, but see the latter's listing on April 29, to understand why I am raising the matter: and isn't it extraordinary that this incipit of the transformation of peasant Britain, ruled in illiteracy and innumeracy by the church and the barons for so very long, should be attributable to two quite remarkable women. 





Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, Italian painter and inventor, born today in 1452

Samuel Johnson's "A Dictionary of the English Language" published, today in 1755.


Étienne Pierre Théodore Rousseau, French painter, born today in 1812, and less well-remembered than either the philosopher Jean-Jacques or the tax-collector Henri Julien Félix (for whom see May 21), but actually one of the key founders of Modernism - the Barbizon movement, following on from Claude and Poussin, broke with the rigid requirement to paint à la Neo-Classique and set out in the style of Constable to paint nature. (I feel an essay coming on, but those lights are stuck on amber... see my piece on Constable in Private Collection by clicking here)


Henry James Jr, born, in Washington Square, New York - where else? - today in 1843


Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Smith, the original Chattanooga Choo-Choo, though there was nothing Choo-Choo about the way she delivered those blues, born today, in said town, in 1894.


And today in 1980, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, philosopher, author, playwright, and househusband of Simone de Beauvoir, ceased to be existential (though of course he remains essential, to literature and philosophy anyway - I shall try to find a way to phrase that so that existence may precede essence while essence definitely proceeds from and outlives existence; any offers of help that do not lead to cul-de-sacs will be coolly appreciated).






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The Argaman Press

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June 16


Amber pages
Geronimo, born today in 1829, in the No-Doyohn Canyon of what is now New Mexico, a son of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache tribe.  

Geronimo was his Spanish name. Goyaałé, pronounced "Goyathlay", in his own language, and meaning "one who yawns", though Apache websites say his name was really Goyakhla, and "Goyaałé" just an affectionate nickname.

The conquest of the Apache by the Anglo-Saxons was completed on September 4th, 1886, when Geronimo really had no choice but to accept the disgraceful and shameful conditions of surrender imposed by the invaders. He died on February 17th 1909, at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and was buried at Beef Creek Apache Cemetery, likewise at Fort Sill. I am not aware of any campaign to Boycott, Diversify, or Place Sanctions against the United States of America for its illegal occupation of these lands, or for the policy of apartheid that it has practised against its native population for the past four hundred and fifty years, but would certainly support one if it were to be initiated.




Joan Van Ark, actress, born today in 1943. Never heard of her? Me neither, but the name came up in an almanac, so I looked her up on the Internet and... never heard of any of the things she's done. Do I care? No. Do I have any interest in finding out more? No. Would I even have written this much, were it not for her name? Not a chance. But what really pleases me, and why I'm writing it, is that it isn't a pseudonym, an actor's name, a clever idea by an agent or a PR company to get her noticed; she really is called Joan Van Ark.



Hammurabi-ili died, today in 1686 BCE, in Babylon... I wonder what would happen if we were to publish the Hammurabic Code, and maybe the Mosaic Code alongside it, in an Idiot's Guide to Human Responsibility, as a challenge to those who claim to be Responsible let alone Ethical Capitalists? 

 Lists, simple headlines, no essays or polemics, just the basics, and put a box next to each one, with a scoring system, 1-5, one equals "fails entirely", 5 equals "hits every target" - and then send it out to every employer and employee in the western world, private retail outlets, home businesses, government institutions, global corporations, everyone, private and public, regardless of size and scale, and with the rider that you must score an overall average 3 or better or you will lose your license to trade....

You can read the entire codex here (well, almost entire, there are fragments of the original which the archaeologists have been unable to discover).


The great Soweto uprising took place today, in 1976, in what was still apartheid South Africa, but would not be for very long, given who it was that rioted, and why, and what they did. Schoolchildren. Refusing to be taught in Afrikaans. Burning down the schools rather than collaborate in their own victimhood. Nelson Mandela and the terrorism of the ANC? International sanctions and boycotts? Nope. None of them did any good. But when schoolchildren are ready to put their lives on the line and say enough is enough. It would take 12 more years, but this was the catalyst.





The First Congress of Soviets was convened in Russia, today in 1917  - interesting date: Kerensky was still in power, and the October revolution still four months away, Lenin having arrived back from exile in Zurich on April 16.


And funnily enough, while Lenin was still in Zurich, hoping, plotting, soon, very soon, he spent his days at a café named L'Odéon, which was regularly frequented at exactly the same time by an Irish emigré who the World War had forced to leave Trieste, which he had made his home; and by several accounts they sat at adjacent tables many times, but by no accounts did they ever actually speak, or even know who the other was. James Joyce.
And funnily enough.... because for writers like me, today, more than anything else, is Bloomsday, the day in 1904 on which James Joyce set his masterpiece, "Ulysses" - the date of his first date with Molly Bloom, or Nora Barnacle really. But also, and surely it was this as much as that, though I appear to be the only soul ever to have noticed it, the anniversary of the publication of the only version of Homer's "Iliad" that Joyce knew, Alexander Pope's translation - today in 1716. I wonder if that's really why he chose the date.



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January 12

Late 2nd century CE


Women do not generally get mentioned in the writings of the Jewish Rabbis, not even in passing, certainly not by name. The one exception is Beruriah, who is mentioned in the Talmud Bavli (Tosepha Kelim, Bava Kamma 4:17) as the daughter of Hananiah ben Teradion, a Mishnaic sage who directed a Torah academy in Siknin, in Babylonia, and was renowned for his scrupulously honest administration of charity funds. He was one of the Ten Martyrs whose stories are told on Yom Kippur, in his case wrapped in a Torah Scroll and burned alive by the Romans for publicly teaching Torah.

 By all accounts Beruriah was an accomplished scholar, which may have been a situation particular to her family, or may tell us that universal adult literacy in those days applied to women too. Even as a young girl, it is recorded, her intelligence surpassed that of her brother, though the suggestion that she learned "three hundred laws from three hundred teachers in one day" (Pesahim 62b) is absurd; in the Jewish world there are always at least that number of people willing and available to provide the instruction, but there are only 613 laws, so her entire education would have been completed by period two of day three of her first week in school; the phrase is simply a hyperbolic way of expressing admiration for her knowledge, and then diminishing it by placing her in a context of surfeit, of plethora, of glut, of male teachers obviously, but no other mentioned woman.

 Born in the first quarter of the second century, she moved to Tiberias after the Hadrianic persecutions had taken her mother and brother as well as her father. But death pursued her; married to Rabbi Meir the miracle worker, himself one of the great sages of the Mishnaic period, her two sons died suddenly in a single day, and then her sister was carried off into exile.

Her name means "purity" (Psalm 18:27 says IM NAVAR TITBARAR - עִם־נָבָ֥ר תִּתְבָּרָ֑ר - with the pure you will show yourself pure"), and whether of soul or spirit or heart or mind is difficult to say, though accounts of her always point out how very loving and gentle she managed to remain, even with her husband, who was as arrogant a man as ever declared himself superior among scholars. But she could be sharp herself, and is recorded as telling her husband off one time for not saying his prayers properly, and in the same passage (Berakhot 10a) she ridicules a sectarian for being one, while Eruvin 53b finds her deriding a student for making a simple error, and then making a complete fool of Rabbi Jose the Galilean when he met her on the road (Eruvin 53b) and dared to suggest that she wasn't fully living up to the meaning of her name.

That name, that meaning, is key to all the myths and legends about her, which end up focusing on male Rabbis asking her opinion on matters of female purity, or male Rabbis daring to suggest that she was secretly something of a loose lady. Quite probably none of the stories relating to her purity are true, neither the positive ones nor the negative, but there was her name, lying around in Talmud with implausible history all around it (did you notice, for example, that her father, who died in Judea, was also the head of a yeshiva in Babylon?), and something had to be said to those male students who asked.

So there is the legend of Beruriah's sister, how she was in fact not killed but spared by the Romans, only to be trafficked by them to Antioch for non-Rabbinic purposes. Beruriah urged her husband to go to Antioch and rescue her, and not only did he succeed but - and again the central core of the story reflects the name - he even brought back witness testimony, signed and actuaried, that confirmed her continuing virginity: her purity. Fearful that the Romans would take revenge for his heroism, all three fled to Babylonia - a very convenient place of exile, if you are also trying to explain that passage that insists she was Hananiah ben Teradion's daughter.

 Purity was the tale of her end as well, and Rashi himself recorded it ('Ab. Zarah 18b), so it must be authentic! According to the legend, she scoffed at a Rabbi who quoted the Talmudic proverb that "Women are light-minded", and her husband responded by telling one of his students to try to seduce her - which, had he succeeded, might have proven her to be "light-bodied", but not "light-minded", and so again we can tell that the tale is a made-up piece of nonsense. Nonetheless it lives on, and continues until, after repeated efforts, she finally yielded, and then the shame of it drove her to the ultimate act of impurity, suicide. "Tortured with guilt and remorse," the Talmud tells us, "Rabbi Meir fled from his home". 

 The trouble is, Rabbi Meir had already fled from his home, with Beruriah, and her sister, and proofs of both of their states of purity.

For those of you who can read Hebrew, without pointing, below is from Midrash Proverbs 31:10, and is the principal account of Beruriah, though you can also read a paraphrase of it, and her full tale, in English, here:


מעשה היה ברבי מאיר, שהיה יושב ודורש בבית המדרש בשבת במנחה, ומתו שני בניו. מה עשתה אמו? הניחה שניהם על המטה ופרשה סדין עליהם. במוצאי שבת בא ר' מאיר מבית המדרש לביתו. אמר לה 'היכן שני בני?', אמרה 'לבית המדרש הלכו', אמר לה 'צפיתי לבית המדרש ולא ראיתי אותם', נתנו לו כוס של הבדלה והבדיל, חזר ואמר 'היכן שני בני?', אמרה לו 'הלכו למקום אחר ועכשיו הם באים', הקריבה לפניו המאכל ואכל ובירך, לאחר שבירך אמרה לו 'רבי, שאלה אחת יש לי לשאול לך', אמר לה 'אמרי שאלתך', אמרה לו 'רבי, קודם היום בא אדם אחד ונתן לי פקדון, ועכשיו בא ליטול אותו, נחזיר לו או לא?', אמר לה 'בתי, מי שיש פקדון אצלו, הוא צריך להחזירו לרבו', אמרה לו 'רבי, חוץ מדעתך לא הייתי נותנת אצלו', מה עשתה? תפשתו בידה, והעלה אותו לאותו חדר, והקריבה אותו למטה, ונטלה סדין מעליהם, וראה שניהם מתים ומונחים על המטה, התחיל בוכה ואומר 'בני! בני! רבי! רבי! בני בדרך ארץ, ורבי שהיו מאירין פני בתורתן!', באותה שעה אמרה לו לרבי מאיר 'רבי, לא כך אמרת לי—אני צריך להחזיר הפקדון לרבו?', אמר (איוב א כא): "ה' נתן וה' לקח, יהי שם ה' מבורך".


The illustration at the top of the page is not a portrait of Beruriah, because no such portrait exists. What is the nearest you can get to the first and only woman to be mentioned in the Talmud? Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained as a Rabbi, in 1935 (see Dec 27). The portrait is of her, by Marlis Glaser, dated 2014.



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December 28


Amber pages
Manuel Puig, Argentine writer, born today in 1932...and apparently his full name is Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne... but I've never read him, can't even name a book, just saw the name and thought I ought to...

whereas


Aleksandr Isayevitch Solzhenitsyn published the first volume of "The Gulag Archipelago", today in 1973... I read it on night-shift in a plastics factory in Israel the following winter, in one minute and five second bursts - that was the waiting time between pressing the button for the mould to start pouring, and the door opening to take out the next piece of finished product. As to the substance and the significance of the book... that is going to require an essay.


 The photo is also key. From the day that he was kicked out of the Soviet Union, with his Nobel Prize for Literature in his hand, he has been ignored, even derogated, in the West; and not entirely obvious why. Probably it's because, having dedicated twenty-five years to bearing personal witness to the Soviet Holocaust, detailing it with a precision that combined Primo Levi with Elie Wiesel for the Nazi Holocaust, and then some; having decried the religion of Communism for the evil ideology that it was, he spent those latter years in Vermont, a fervent advocate of that other evil ideology which had holocausted the human world for even longer, Christianity, and did so with such vocation that he became a role-model in the writing of Pope John Paul II (click here to read it, but caveat lector, as they say in Latin).
   That is why I have posted the photo of him in his prison uniform, beardless, his camp number tatooed on both his heart and brain. The paradox will be the subject of the essay, when eventually I get around to writing it. The work - his work, I mean - remains among the most important of that most stupidly tragic of all human centuries, the twentieth.


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December 5

One of several Towers of Babel by Emily Allchurch

"The library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveller were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order)."
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library At Babel”


Early comments on this blog include several asking why so many dates appear to be "random" and "arbitrary" - "why this one's birth but that one's death?" is the most common. And indeed, sometimes, appearance is as appearance seems; blogs get posted in an entirely random and arbitrary manner, because that is when I happened to research it; or on a whim; or because it took my fancy (God apparently works in the same haphazard manner, and also calls it Order); in several cases because I had no date for the item (Beruriah coming soon on Jan 12 for example, and Nursery Rhymes ditto on March 15), but also dates with nothing at all on them... and so I resolved both problems by employing each other as each other's solution.

 But behind the randomness there is also a serious purpose: a wish to break away from the illusion of linear time and create a structure for the book that more accurately represents the helictical nature of time. Helictical, not spiral, certainly not cyclical. That is another of our illusions about time. Cyclical infers that the identical events recur, whereas in reality they are only similar events, containing elements of the previous one, but still uniquely individual, like genomes. But it seems to me that our ability to learn from history depends, to a considerable degree, on our ability to transcend both of these illusions, to see history as part of time, and time as part of history, eternally simultaneous, in constant flux and reflux, and with each cause leading to each effect, but also altered, at least in our perception, by that effect, and by the next cause, the next effect.

So, on today's page, because my diary for December 5th 2003 has an annotated page of possible choices for the day's entry, but almost nothing that I even want to place in amber mode, let alone consider for a journey into the green; so why not take the opportunity to have this conversation - which is, after all, about the method and the substance of this book.




December 5 (2003)

Choices for the Book of Days should eventually, over a period of many years, have the same effect as bowling averages or cost-of-living indexes, the provision of a mean statistical outcome. On any given day that I scour the almanacs, I am looking for something or somebody that interests me sufficiently to pass a half an hour finding out a little more about them. What I choose becomes a predictable pattern, and thereby holds up a mirror to identity. What I do not choose is also a usable statistic, and for the same reason. In between there are people/events that I might well have chosen, and rejected only because they were too similar, or too elaborate, or... so perhaps even these indices are still only provisional, hypothetical, speculative. (Perhaps Douglas Adams’ 42 is not actually an answer in itself, but only the rounding up - or down - of the mean of several possible answers!)

So, taking today, but stopping at 1920 because there is no more room on the page:-


1301
Pope Boniface VIII’s decree Ausculta fili
not interesting
1349
500 Jews are massacred at Nuremberg in Black Death riots
not again!
1448
Bishop Jonah of Moscow chosen as Metropolitan of Kiev
how exciting!
1456
Earthquake strikes Naples; about 35,000 die
cf Voltaire’s Candide
1492
Columbus discovers El Hispaniola, Haiti
cf Grahame Green: The Comedians [1]
1496
Jews are expelled from Portugal by order of King Manuel I
again again! [2]
1590
Niccolo Sfondrati chosen Pope Gregory XIV
worth a look; no, looked, not interesting
1602
Giulio Caccini’s “Eurydice” premieres in Florence
never heard of it
1757
Battle at Leuthen: Prussian army beats Austrians
no
1766
London auctioneers Christie’s holds their 1st sale
could be fun to use Chatwin for this
1776
Phi Beta Kappa. 1st American scholastic fraternity (William & Mary College) is founded
not the college but the Greek & the Oxbridge connections
1792
George Washington re-elected US President, John Adams Vice-President
no
1798
Government troops occupy Hasselt
Where is Hasselt?
1804
Thomas Jefferson re-elected US President, George Clinton Vice-President
no (any relation of Bill?)
1813
Lubeck surrenders to allied armies
I've heard of Lubeck
1830
Hector Berlioz’ “Symphonique fantastique” premieres in Paris
worth an entry (but I already have Berlioz on Dec 11)
1831
Former President John Quincy Adams takes his seat as member of House of Representatives
no
1832
Andrew Jackson re-elected President of US, Martin Van Buren Vice-President
no
1837
Hector Berlioz’ “Requiem” premieres
no, because of 1830
1837
Uprising under William Lyon Mackenzie in Canada
Yes, but only because of my move to Toronto; and then no, because he's already in "Leo Bloom"
1846
C.F.Schoenbein obtains patent for cellulose nitrate explosive
Who? What? Why?
1848
President Polk triggers Gold Rush of ’49, confirms California gold discovery
A good idea for a short story - by Jack London, not me
1854
Aaron Allen of Boston patents folding theater chair
worth a cartoon? [3]
1859
Dion Boucicault’s “Octaroon” premieres in New York NY
Are you kidding?
1861
Gatling gun patented
another cartoon?
1862
Battle of Coffeeville MS
just because of the name, yes
1868
1st American bicycle college opens (New York)
just because it’s so weird, yes [4]
1876
Daniel Stillson (Massachusetts) patents 1st practical pipe wrench
no, because of the 2 above
1876
Fire at Brooklyn Theatre kills 295, trampled or burned to death
possible cf with Shakespeare's Globe?
1879
1st automatic telephone switching system patented
no
1881
47th Congress (1881-83) convenes
come off it
1887
Stanley’s expedition reaches plateau at Lake Albert, Congo
"Doctor Noah I presume"
1890
Berlioz’ opera “Les Troyens” premieres in Karlsruhe
no - is this coincidence or satire?
1892
Anti-semite Hermann Ahlwardt elected to Germany’s Reichstag
ought to be but not
1893
1st electric car (built in Toronto by William Joseph Still) could go 15 miles between charges
yes, but see 1837
1894
Georges Feydeau's “L’hôtel du libre échange” premieres in Paris
worth a momentary thought, then reject it
1896
Henrik Ibsen’s “Kejsor og Galileer” premieres in Leipzig
ibid
1905
Henry Campbell-Bannerman (Liberal) becomes PM of England
no [5]
1906
British Government - Balfour resigns
no [6]
1908
1st football uniform numerals used (University of Pittsburgh)
potential for some serious fun; but no
1914
6th CFL Grey Cup: Toronto Argonauts defeats University of Toronto. 14-2
no [7]
1918
Oil refinery on Curaçao opens
no
1920
Pro football playoff game Akron v Buffalo 0-0 tie, title undecided
no [8]


[1] and my tale "The View From Hispaniola" in "The Captive Bride"

[2] and see Roderigo Lopes

[3] worth noting that I have no note on the page as to where I found this particular list, but I didn’t generally use American-generated ones, because frankly there weren’t many; and yet this list is quite ludicrously US-centric; did nothing at all happen, in the whole of history, between Baghdad and Kabul going eastwards, between the Yukon and Yokinawa, going west? “A Journey In Time’ suffers from precisely this flaw.

[4] and a follow-up satire on today’s US colleges - PhDs in quarterbacking and the number of top golfers who went to - Atlanta was it? High-school students who I knew, who got scholarships to wear sexy bikinis while playing beach volleyball, or lycra suits for rowing. Or the "experiential" work for another student-I-knew's film course, in which his essay on Truffaut and Film Noir was late because he had to film the training sessions before the college superbowl. I like the idea that Americans need to go to college in order to learn how to ride a bike. With or without training wheels? (On the other hand, see 1908)

[5] shouldn’t that be “PM of Great Britain”? Or of “the United Kingdom” even? Bizarre enough to see what the historians choose to remember, what to ignore, what to wilfully and deliberately leave out; but then there is history as propaganda. “PM of England and its Welsh, Scottish, Irish and other colonies”? I must go back and see what dates of significance are missing from this catalogue, and footnote them.

[6] and then there is the simple laziness or ineptitude of the chronicler, the historian, the journalist. Has he simply cut and pasted data from other sources, not bothering to check, cross-check, edit, correct? How else does "England" in the last become "British" in this? And if so, is that how Wikipedia works - a bot, a computer robot, trawling cyberspace like an Atlantic fisherman, bringing back the intended cod, but mixed up with so much bream and sea-weed, halibut and crab, the entire enterprise is rendered worthless? And sadly, yes, that is precisely how Wikipedia works, and why I will not use it.

[7] that should read "why would anyone have given a damn, even at the time?" And, December 5th 1914 - wasn’t that there a minor skirmish of some sort going on in Europe at the time?

[8] Fool, Prashker - you missed out on an opportunity to write the greatest satirical novel in human history. A sequel to the David Kalischer novel entitled "A Journey In Non-Time", in which a severely dislectic historian writes an account, spelled as best he can, and grammatically and syntactically error-riddled, of all the most insignificant non-events of history, the ones that somebody actually bothered to record, like this one. (And wouldn’t that last entry be even better if it could have recorded that nobody turned up to watch the game).

and an update, years later, rather than a footnote, then: Gatling did get a listing, on Nov 4; and he and William Joseph Still are among the scientific achievements on Jan 1


Amber pages

But there are one or two items that can be parked behind the STOP sign, waiting till the road is tarred and the traffic lights plugged in

Christina Georgina Rossetti, born today in 1830
Friedrich Christian Anton (“Fritz”) Lang, film director, born today in 1890
Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, composer, died (yes, this one definitely on his death-date), today in 1791: in poverty, possibly driven to it by Salieri... and yes, I have the name correct. He was born Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart;"Amadeus" is a Latin translation of Theophilus, and was not his name but simply Mozart amusing himself 
And today in 1955, the bus boycott began in Montgomery, Alabama (see Dec 1). Did it really take so very little time, from Rosa's refusal to a black people's boycott? Amazing.




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