EB calls this author “[o]ne of Denmark’s most important representatives of literary Impressionism.”
That intrigued me because I had no idea that Impressionist ideas could be transferred from painting to literature.
Here are some characteristics of Impressionism from Wikipedia (“Impressionism”):
an emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time)
ordinary subject matter and
inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience
It’s hard for me to see how this would translate into novels. If the common element is “ordinary subject matter,” then I would call Bang’s work Realism, not Impressionism.
However, what an interesting thought experiment! How would one translate Impressionism into a literary form?
Depriving one bacterium of blue light drops its reproductive rate by 90%.
Dr. Bang discovered this bacterium, Brucella abortus, in 1897. (Present in unpasteurized milk, it can cause pregnant cattle to abort and causes undulant fever in humans.)
Brucella contains a class of signaling proteins called LOVs. In plants, these proteins react to the presence of light, oxygen, or the voltage of a weak electrical current. When activated, LOVs encourage plants to grow toward light, but their role in Brucella was unclear. When exposed to the blue wavelengths of sunlight, the LOVs in Brucella signal other proteins that tell the bacterium to reproduce at will.
I wonder if an LOV could be attached to chemotherapy, sent to tumors, and then activated safely with light, oxygen or electricity.
(And, of course, this is another reminder of why people should only drink pasteurized milk.)
Hindus calculate their ages from the date of conception rather than the date of birth.
That is why Banerjee, an early leader in India’s fight for independence from the British, was rejected from the Indian Civil Service. The British thought he had misrepresented his age.
What an interesting custom! I wonder if the focus on conception means that Hindus have a different set of beliefs and attitudes toward sex than Christian-dominated cultures.
This Italian’s Novelle, with 214 stories (EB), was the inspiration for several Shakespearean works: Cymbeline (part 1, story 19), the Claudio subplot of Much Ado about Nothing (part 1, story 20), Romeo and Juliet (part 2, story 6), and Twelfth Night (part 2, story 28), plus one from the Shakespeare Apocrypha, Edward III (part 2, story 29) (Wikipedia, “Matteo Bandello”).
I want to read this because, according to Wikipedia, “[t]he vast majority of the stories derive from those Bandello heard from contemporaries, reported as real life events:”
two whores seeking to win their husbands back
two brother thieves in cahoots to rob the treasures of the king of Egypt
a disdained lover voluntarily choosing to live inside a cave
a woman killing herself only out of fear that her good fortune will turn bad
Filippo Lippi, released from slavery in Africa because of his talent as a celebrated painter
a woman disdaining a man and then killing herself when he no longer pursues her
an abbot making music from a chorus of pigs
an adulterous lover buried alive and then saved
a merchant’s murder of another
a case of double adultery whereby each husband cuckolds the other
two women yelling at each other after being falsely told they are hard of hearing
These stories actually happened? Count me in! Which ones do you think would make good movies?
Also, I think it would be interesting to see the thought process of Shakespeare as he changed these stories.
Here’s a handy rule of thumb: the more teats, the bigger the litter.
And thus began one of my weirder journeys on the internet, all because the Britannica said this regarding the Bandicoot rat of India and Sri Lanka: “The litter size is probably large, since the female has 12 teats.”
Sadly, there are people who actually research this stuff (I mean, besides me). According to the scientist Avery Nelson Gilbert (http://bit.ly/1UQExYr), Aristotle first suggested this relationship between the mammary number and litter size. However, it has not been proven and is somewhat controversial among evolutionary biologists.
After studying rats, mice and squirrels, Gilbert’s conclusion? “Mean litter size is typically one-half the number of available mammaries, while maximum litter size approximates mammary number….Mammary number may have operated as a selective constraint on litter size over evolutionary time.”
To save you the embarrassment of examining your own pets, here are the numbers:
Teats Litter sizes
dogs, 8-12 2-8 (varies widely, with bigger dogs having bigger litters)
cats, 8 3-5.
Photo credit (from the actual photographer–check out his site!):
American soldier being hazed (1904) by being thrown high in the air.
Have you ever been initiated or even hazed? If so, was it a good experience, ultimately?
The Banda are an ethnic group in the Central African Republic, and I found that two aspects of their culture raised interesting questions.
Britannica states that “[t]hey used age grades and initiations called semali to assure unity in time of war.” This made me wonder why military organizations so often have initiations or hazings. According to Wikipedia (“Initiation”), initiations often act out a ritual death, which helps conquer the fear of a real death. They help boys become men, and they help people accept spiritual realities. These purposes do seem appropriate for the military.
Psychologists have this to say about initiations:
In the study of certain social forms of initiation, as hazing in college fraternities and sororities, laboratory experiments in psychology suggest that severe initiations produce cognitive dissonance [conflicting thoughts that need to be reconciled somehow]. Dissonance is then thought to produce feelings of strong group attraction among initiates after the experience, because they want to justify the effort used.Rewards during initiations have important consequences in that initiates who feel more rewarded express stronger group identity. As well as group attraction, initiations can also produce conformity among new members [as do uniforms and similar haircuts]. Psychology experiments have also shown that initiations increase feelings of affiliation. (Wikipedia, “Initiation”)
I was also interested in some economic aspects of Banda society. According to Britannica, “Marriage traditionally required bride wealth [a payment from grooms to brides’ families], often in iron implements. Polygamy, while still practiced, has declined with the rise of a money economy.”
I wonder why the rise of a money economy (which I assume is more efficient and prosperous than a barter economy) would lead to less polygamy. I also wondered whether polygamy is primarily an economic phenomenon or has other causes.
Thomas William Robertson’s play Ours (1866) was scandalous. Was it because of sex? No. Violence? No. The furor was caused by a pudding being made on stage. In The Vicarage (circa 1877) the characters shocked the audience by making tea. People were not used to seeing such realistic tasks in a stage setting (http://bit.ly/1jqiBBm).
It was Sir Squire Bancroft and his wife who financed and promoted this new realism. They produced and starred in comedies all written by the new young playwright Thomas William Robertson, beginning in 1865. Robertson introduced realism to the stage, and today, it’s hard to imagine anything else. In Robertson’s plays, actors
Prior to Robertson, a designer would put as many chairs into a dining room scene as there were actors who needed to sit down. Robertson would place on stage as many chairs as would realistically be found in that dining room, even if some were never actually used. Or, if someone came in from a blizzard, snow would blow in from the doorway. Other Robertson trademarks:
the importance of everyday incidents,
the revealing of character through apparent small talk, and
the idea that what is not said in the dialogue is as important as what is said (http://bit.ly/1o7uobA).
The Bancrofts gave Robertson an unprecedented amount of directorial control over his plays, which foreshadowed the power that directors wield in the theater today (http://bit.ly/1LI51IS). Robertson insisted on retaining control over his scripts and casting and required that his actors follow his directions–a novel concept for that time. Robertson was also a leader in requiring a fee from his managers for every performance of his plays, thus pioneering the modern royalty system (http://bit.ly/1o7uobA).
The Bancrofts were innovating, too (http://bit.ly/1jqiBBm). They constructed rooms on stage which they dressed with the care of an interior decorator, with sofas, curtains, chairs, carpets on their stage floors. Instead of painted flats they had real doors with real door handles. The actors wore well-made fashionable dress, not the trappings of a dusty theatre wardrobe. The Bancrofts redesigned their theater to suit the increasingly upscale audience: The cheap benches near the stage, where the rowdiest elements of the audience used to sit, were replaced by comfortable padded seats, carpets were laid in the aisles, and the “pit” was renamed the “stalls.”
Emplaced in orange calcite is a lustrous, black, octahedral crystal of uraninite, .7 cm across, which has been twinned and penetrated by another uraninite crystal.
Ever wonder what raw uranium looks like?
Bancroft is a center for rock collectors, with 80% of Canada’s minerals (including uranium) found nearby. The Bancroft Rockhound Gemboree attracts many rock hounds every August.
With a scenic cliff called Eagle’s Nest, abandoned mines, and wildlife parks to explore, it sounds like an interesting place to visit.
Was Edward Bancroft a British double agent who fooled not only John Paul Jones but also Benjamin Franklin?
American leaders hoped to embroil Britain in a war against other foes (specifically, an alliance of France and Prussia), which they hoped would distract Britain. Bancroft was unenthusiastic about American independence, and the possibility of a French war against Britain alarmed him; hence he decided to spy for Britain. Simultaneously, Bancroft pretended to spy for the Americans Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin (Wikipedia, “Edward Bancroft”).
Bancroft reported to the British under the cover of weekly letters to “Mr. Richards,” signed “Edward Edwards,” about “gallantry” (exploits with the ladies). But between the lines of the cover text, Bancroft wrote his reports in a special ink. Every Tuesday after 9:30 PM, he put the letter in a bottle, tied a string around it, and left it in a hole in a certain box tree in Paris. A British official retrieved the message and replaced it with new orders. Bancroft would return later that night to recover the bottle. Through this method, George III may have seen the French-American Treaty of Alliance just two days after it was signed (Wikipedia, “Edward Bancroft”).
When Arthur Lee accused Bancroft of being a traitor, U.S. Navy Captain John Paul Jones came to his defense (Wikipedia, “Edward Bancroft”).
There is some suggestion by historians that Franklin was aware of Bancroft’s betrayal, citing Franklin’s comment in response to a friend’s warning about British spies (https://fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci1/ch1c.htm):
“I have long observ’d one Rule which prevents any Inconvenience from such Practices. It is simply this, to be concern’d in no Affairs that I should blush to have made publick, and to do nothing but what Spies may see & welcome. When a Man’s actions are just and honourable, the more they are known, the more his Reputation is increas’d and establish’d. If I was sure, therefore that my Valet de Place was a Spy, as probably he is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other Respects I lik’d him.”
Although some historians believe the letter indicates Franklin’s suspicion of Bancroft, others have noted that after the war, Franklin remained on good terms with Bancroft while he shunned other Loyalists, including his own son, William (Wikipedia, “Edward Bancroft”).
Bancroft’s activity as a double agent was not revealed until 1891, when British diplomatic papers were released to the public (Wikipedia, “Edward Bancroft”).
As a sidenote, how did Revolutionary War spies communicate? While serving in Paris as an agent of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, Silas Deane is known to have used a heat-developing invisible ink, compounded of cobalt chloride, glycerin and water, for some of his intelligence reports back to America (https://fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci1/ch1c.htm).
Even more useful to him later was a “sympathetic stain” created for secret communications by James Jay, a physician and the brother of John Jay. Dr. Jay used the “stain” for reporting military information from London to America. The stain required one chemical for writing the message and a second to develop it, affording greater security than the ink used by Deane earlier. Later Jay supplied quantities of the stain to George Washington at home (https://fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci1/ch1c.htm).
Washington instructed his agents in the use of the “sympathetic stain,” noting in connection with “Culper Junior” that the ink “will not only render his communications less exposed to detection, but relieve the fears of such persons as may be entrusted in its conveyance .. . .” Washington suggested that reports could be written in the invisible ink “on the blank leaves of a pamphlet . . .a common pocket book, or on the blank leaves at each end of registers, almanacs, or any publication or book of small value.” Washington especially recommended that agents conceal their reports by using the ink in correspondence: “A much better way is to write a letter in the Tory stile with some mixture of family matters and between the lines and on the remaining part of the sheet communicate with the stain the intended intelligence” (https://fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci1/ch1c.htm).
“One of the principal composers of madrigal comedies, choral pieces that suggest plots and action to be imagined by the performers and listeners (EB).”
I wonder if that idea could be extended to other art forms, where the plots are only suggested and are largely in the imaginations of both performers and readers/viewers/listeners. What might such a work of art look like?
“Formerly, madrigal comedy was considered to be one of the important precursors to opera, but most music scholars now see it as a separate development, part of a general interest in Italy at the time in creating musico-dramatic forms (Wikipedia, “Banchieri”).
Since this art form combines two previously existing forms (music and drama), I wonder what other art forms could be combined?
Hindus calculate their ages from the date of conception rather than the date of birth.
Here’s a handy rule of thumb: the more teats, the bigger the litter.
RippleMark 