It was very difficult to make him work but to get him to tell the truth was well-nigh impossible

From the Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.

Insofar as readiness for war was concerned, the regime was personified by its Minister for War, General Sukhomlinov, an artful, indolent, pleasure-loving, chubby little man in his sixties of whom his colleague, Foreign Minister Sazonov, said, “It was very difficult to make him work but to get him to tell the truth was well-nigh impossible.” Having won the Cross of St. George as a dashing young cavalry officer in the war of 1877 against the Turks, Sukhomlinov believed that military knowledge acquired in that campaign was permanent truth. As Minister of War he scolded a meeting of Staff College instructors for interest in such “innovations” as the factor of firepower against the saber, lance and the bayonet charge. He could not hear the phrase “modern war,” he said, without a sense of annoyance. “As war was, so it has remained … all these things are merely vicious innovations. Look at me, for instance; I have not read a military manual for the last twenty-five years.” In 1913 he dismissed five instructors of the College who persisted in preaching the vicious heresy of “fire tactics.”

Sukhomlinov’s native intelligence was adulterated by levity to cunning and cleverness. He was short and soft, with a catlike face, neat white whiskers and beard, and an ingratiating, almost feline manner that captivated those like the Czar whom he set himself to please. In others, like the French ambassador, Paléologue, he inspired “distrust at first sight.” Ministerial office, both appointment and dismissal, being entirely at the whim of the Czar, Sukhomlinov had won and kept himself in favor by being at once obsequious and entertaining, by funny stories and acts of buffoonery, avoidance of serious and unpleasant matters, and careful cultivation of “the Friend,” Rasputin. As a result he proved immune to charges of corruption and incompetence, to a sensational divorce scandal, and to an even more resounding spy scandal.

Smitten in 1906 by the twenty-three-year-old wife of a provincial governor, Sukhomlinov contrived to get rid of the husband by divorce on framed evidence and marry the beautiful residue as his fourth wife. Naturally lazy, he now left his work more and more in the hands of subordinates while, in the words of the French ambassador, “keeping all his strength for conjugal pleasures with a wife 32 years younger than himself.“ Mme. Sukhomlinov delighted to order clothes in Paris, dine in expensive restaurants, and give large parties. To gratify her extravagances Sukhomlinov became an early and successful practitioner of the art of the expense account. He charged the government traveling expenses at the rate of 24 horse versts per diem while actually making his tours of inspection by railroad. Netting a lucrative balance, augmented by inside knowledge of trends on the stock market, he was able to bank 702,737 rubles during a six-year period in which his total salary was 270,000 rubles. In this happy exercise he was aided by an entourage who lent him money in return for military passes, invitations to maneuvers, and other forms of information. One of them, an Austrian named Altschiller who had supplied the evidence for Mme. Sukhomlinov’s divorce and who was received as an intimate in the Minister’s home and office where documents were left lying about, was revealed after his departure in January 1914 to have been Austria’s chief agent in Russia. Another was the more notorious Colonel Myasoedev, reputed to be Mme. Sukhomlinov’s lover, who though only chief of railroad police at the frontier was possessor of five German decorations and honored by the Kaiser with an invitation to lunch at Rominten, the imperial hunting lodge just over the border. Not surprisingly Colonel Myasoedev was suspected of espionage. He was arrested and tried in 1912, but as a result of Sukhomlinov’s personal intervention was acquitted and enabled to continue in his former duties up to and through the first year of the war. In 1915, when his protector had finally lost office as a result of Russian reverses, he was rearrested, convicted, and hanged as a spy.

Central Cygnus Skyscape

From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Click to enlarge

Central Cygnus Skyscape
Image Credit & Copyright: Mauro Narduzzi (acquisition) / Roberto Colombari (processing)

Explanation: Supergiant star Gamma Cygni lies at the center of the Northern Cross, famous asterism in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Known by its proper name, Sadr, the bright star also lies at the center of this gorgeous skyscape, featuring a complex of stars, dust clouds, and glowing nebulae along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. The field of view spans almost 4 degrees (eight Full Moons) on the sky and includes emission nebula IC 1318 and open star cluster NGC 6910. Left of Gamma Cygni and shaped like two glowing cosmic wings divided by a long dark dust lane, IC 1318's popular name is understandably the Butterfly Nebula. Above and left of Gamma Cygni, are the young, still tightly grouped stars of NGC 6910. Some distance estimates for Gamma Cygni place it at around 1,800 light-years while estimates for IC 1318 and NGC 6910 range from 2,000 to 5,000 light-years.

Woman with a parrot by Courbet

From The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide, 1983 page 229.

Click to enlarge.

132 GUSTAVE COURBET, French, 1819-1877
Woman with a Parrot
Oil on canvas; 51 x 77 in. (129.5 x 195.6 cm)

Painted in 1865-66, Woman with a Parrot was one of two works that Courbet showed in the Salon of 1866. It is the best known of the series of nudes that he painted in the 1860s. The model's sensuality is emphasized by the exotic richness of details like the bird's bright plumage and the landscape and tapestry backgrounds. Critics censured Courbet's "lack of taste," as well as his model's "ungainly pose" and "disheveled hair." Their comments made clear that Courbet's woman was perceived as provocative. In 1866 Manet began his version of the subject, Woman with a Parrot (no. 139). H. 0. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. 0. Havemeyer, 1929, 29.100.57

La Guardia American Airlines Terminal by Jacqueline Osborn

La Guardia American Airlines Terminal by Jacqueline Osborn

Click to enlarge.

Woof. That's within my memory.

A kind of fin de siècle fecklessness that hung like a faint mist over the city

From the Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.

The cohorts of Vladimir dominated a court that was living out its age of Nero, whose ladies enjoyed the thrills of afternoon séances with the unwashed Rasputin. But Russia also had its Democrats and Liberals of the Duma, its Bakunin the Nihilist, its Prince Kropotkin who became an anarchist, its “intelligentsia” of whom the Czar said, “How I detest that word! I wish I could order the Academy to strike it from the Russian dictionary,” its Levins who agonized endlessly over their souls, socialism, and the soil, its Uncle Vanyas without hope, its particular quality that caused a British diplomat to conclude that “everyone in Russia was a little mad”—a quality called le charme slav, half nonchalance, half inefficiency, a kind of fin de siècle fecklessness that hung like a faint mist over the city on the Neva which the world knew as St. Petersburg and did not know was the Cherry Orchard.

Trapezium: At the Heart of Orion

From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Click to enlarge.

Trapezium: At the Heart of Orion
Image Credit: Data: Hubble Legacy Archive, Processing: Robert Gendler

Explanation: Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait, at the heart of the Orion Nebula, are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium. Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, they dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster. Ultraviolet ionizing radiation from the Trapezium stars, mostly from the brightest star Theta-1 Orionis C powers the complex star forming region's entire visible glow. About three million years old, the Orion Nebula Cluster was even more compact in its younger years and a recent dynamical study indicates that runaway stellar collisions at an earlier age may have formed a black hole with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun. The presence of a black hole within the cluster could explain the observed high velocities of the Trapezium stars. The Orion Nebula's distance of some 1,500 light-years would make it the closest known black hole to planet Earth.

Verdi Overture, Nabucco

Verdi Overture, Nabucco by the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra


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What a long, strange trip it's been

Abel Meerepol wrote the anti-lynching poem, Strange Fruit, in 1936.

Strange Fruit
by Lewis Allen (Abel Meerepol's nom de plume)

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

It is a remarkable extended metaphor in that it so viscerally juxtaposes positive images (Southern trees, breeze, gallant, pastoral scene, magnolia) with wrenching images (crows to pluck, blood, black body swinging, bulging eyes, twisted mouth). You are both seduced and repelled at the same time. Once read, you don't ever really want to read it again except as a reminder of inconceivably evil times.

Strange Fruit was made famous by Billie Holliday.


Double click to enlarge.

There is an interesting backstory to Meerepol. He was a high school teacher when he wrote the poem and a member of the American Communist Party. He eventually left the party but in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried, convicted and executed as Soviet spies who provided the Soviet Union top-secret American information about radar, sonar, and jet propulsion engines and were also accused of transmitting nuclear weapon designs. They left behind two young sons.

From an NPR piece.

At the time, the Rosenberg sons, Robert and Michael, were 6 and 10, respectively. News photographs of the boys show them dressed in suits visiting their parents in prison.

"They're these little boys and they're wearing these caps, and they look so young and so vulnerable. It's really a very poignant image," says Margolick.

Robert Meeropol says that in the months following his parents' execution, it was unclear who would take care of him and his brother. It was the height of McCarthyism. Even family members were fearful of being in any way associated with the Rosenbergs or Communism.

Then, at a Christmas party at the home of W.E.B. Du Bois, the boys were introduced to Abel and Anne Meeropol. A few weeks later, they were living with them.

"One of the most remarkable things was how quickly we adapted," Robert says. "First of all, Abel, what I remember about him as a 6-year-old was that he was a real jokester. He liked to tell silly jokes and play word games, and he would put on these comedy shows that would leave me rolling."

There is something else about Abel Meeropol that seems to connect the man who wrote "Strange Fruit" to the man who created a loving family out of a national scandal. "He was incredibly softhearted," Robert says.

For example, there was an old Japanese maple tree in their backyard, which sent out many new seedlings every year.

"I was the official lawnmower," Robert says, "and I was going to mow over them, and he said, 'Oh, no, you can't kill the seedlings!' I said, 'What are you going to do with them, Dad? There are dozens of them.'

"Well, he dug them up and put them in coffee cans and lined them up along the side of the house. And there were hundreds of them. But he couldn't bring himself to just kill them. It was just something he couldn't do."

Strange Fruit was not Meerepol's only poem which became a musical hit. In 1954 Peggy Lee released his Apples, Peaches, and Cherries - a song as life-affirming as Strange Fruit was evil incarnate.


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Apples, Peaches, and Cherries
by Lewis Allen (Abel Meerepol's nom de plume)

There once was a peddler passing by
His cart with fruit was laden high
And as he drove along he cried
Across the village green

Crying apples, peaches and cherries (Scooby-dooby-scoo-zoo)
Apples (apples), peaches (peaches) and cherries

His daughter sat beside him there
She was young and she was fair
All glowing with a beauty rare
A maid of sweet sixteen

A young lad beckoned from the door
He bought some fruit and then bought more
His longing eyes were begging for
The lovely maid to stay

He sought and found her at the mart
He wooed and won the maiden's heart
And now ten children ride the cart
Across the village green

Crying apples, peaches and cherries (Scooby-dooby-scoo-boo)
Apples (apples), peaches (peaches) and cherries

Now if there is a moral here
Such fruitfulness should make it clear
So shut the window when you hear
A peddler passing by

Crying apples, peaches and cherries (Scooby-dooby-scoo-boo)
Apples (apples), peaches (peaches) and cherries
Apples (apples)
And peaches (asparagus)
And apples (Brussels sprouts)
And peaches (string beans)
And cherries (and broccoli)
And cherries (and zucchini)
No! cherries (and cherries)
And cherries (Scooby-dooby-scoo-boo)
Scooby-dooby-scoo-doo, and (Scooby-dooby-scoo-doo)
Hah-hah-hah, cherries

Here is a man passionately committed to civil rights, a poet who crafted an iconic poem of civil rights before the civil rights era, a man so compassionate he adopted the children of two executed Soviet spies at the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and yet a man who also naively dabbled in the raw evil of communism.

The twists and turns don't stop there. Through my childhood, in school, the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial was held up as an example of a miscarriage of justice, the Rosenberg's railroaded into a false conviction, innocent of any crime, simply because they were Jewish and/or Communist. The Rosenberg sons Meerepol adopted believed this to their core. From Wikipedia:

For decades, the Rosenbergs' sons Michael and Robert Meeropol and many other defenders maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent of spying on their country and victims of Cold War paranoia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, much information concerning them was declassified, including a trove of decoded Soviet cables, code-named VENONA, which detailed Julius's role as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets and Ethel's role as an accessory. Their sons' current position is that Julius was legally guilty of the conspiracy charge, though not of atomic spying, while Ethel was only generally aware of his activities. The children say that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted. They continue to campaign for Ethel to be posthumously and legally exonerated.

In 2014, five historians who had published works based on the Rosenberg case wrote that Soviet documents show that Ethel Rosenberg hid money and espionage paraphernalia for Julius, served as an intermediary for communications with his Soviet intelligence contacts, provided her personal evaluation of individuals Julius considered recruiting, and was present at meetings with his sources.

What a strange mélange of heroism, beautiful art, horrifying art, naive infatuation with evil communism, misplaced filial conviction of a miscarriage of justice against parents who were indeed traitors and Soviet spies who in turn contributed to the deaths and tragedies of the Cold War.

Reminds me of the Grateful Dead song Truckin' - What a long, strange trip it's been.


Double click to enlarge.

Truckin'
by the Grateful Dead

Truckin' got my chips cashed in. Keep truckin', like the do-dah man
Together, more or less in line, just keep truckin' on.

Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street.
Chicago, New York, Detroit and it's all on the same street.
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.

Dallas, got a soft machine; Houston, too close to New Orleans,
New York's got the ways and means; but just won't let you be, oh no.

Most of the cats that you meet on the streets speak of true love,
Most of the time they're sittin' and cryin' at home.
One of these days they know they better get goin'
Out of the door and down on the streets all alone.

Truckin', like the do-dah man. Once told me "You've got to play your hand"
Sometimes your cards ain't worth a dime, if you don't lay'em down,

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me,
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.

What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same
Livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine,
All a friend can say is "Ain't it a shame?"

Truckin', up to Buffalo. Been thinkin', you got to mellow slow
Takes time, you pick a place to go, and just keep truckin' on.

Sittin' and starin' out of the hotel window.
Got a tip they're gonna kick the door in again
I'd like to get some sleep before I travel,
But if you got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in.

Busted, down on Bourbon Street, set up, like a bowlin' pin.
Knocked down, it get's to wearin' thin. They just won't let you be, oh no.

You're sick of hangin' around and you'd like to travel,
Get tired of travelin' and you want to settle down.
I guess they can't revoke your soul for tryin',
Get out of the door and light out and look all around.

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me,
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.

Truckin', I'm a goin' home. Whoa whoa baby, back where I belong,
Back home, sit down and patch my bones, and get back truckin' on.

Haystacks: Autumn

From The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide, 1983 page 229.

Click to enlarge.

130 JEAN-FRANcOIS MILLET, French, 1814-1875
Haystacks: Autumn
Oil on canvas; 331/2 x 43% in. (85.1 x 110.2 cm)

This picture is from a series depicting the four seasons that the industrialist Frederick Hartmann commissioned in 1868. Millet, a member of the Barbizon school, worked on the group intermittently during the next seven years. He completed Spring (Louvre, Paris) in 1873; by spring 1874 he reported that Summer: Buckwheat Harvest (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Haystacks: Autumn were almost finished. Winter: The Woodgatherers (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) was incomplete when he died. Series of paintings depicting the seasons had long been created by European artists, but during the nineteenth century the subject grew increasingly rare. Bequest of Lillian S. Timken, 1959, 60.71.12

Theirs are the Halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our Argosy had so stoutly weathered

From Founders Online My own paragraphing.

From Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 25 March 1826

Monticello March 25th 1826

Dear Sir,

My grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, being on a visit to Boston, would think he had seen nothing were he to leave it without having seen you. Although I truly sympathize with you in the trouble these interruptions give, yet I must ask for him permission to pay to you his personal respects. Like other young people, he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learnt of the heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.

It was the lot of our early years to witness nothing but the dull monotony of colonial subservience; and of our riper ones to breast the labors and perils of working out of it. Theirs are the Halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our Argosy had so stoutly weathered. Gratify his ambition then, by receiving his best bow, and my solicitude for your health by enabling him to bring me a favorable account of it. Mine is but indifferent, but not so my friendship and respect for you.

Th: Jefferson