Aristotle

 Perhaps Aristotle’s most important legacy is one that I have not touched on at all, but that also runs throughout the history of zoology, It is his insistence that the organic world is structured into natural classes that our classihcations should not tear apart. For the modems -Linnaeus and almost all systematists since this idea became the search for a Natural System of classification. Darwin told us what such a system means and why it exists. ‘I believe’, he wrote, ‘that propinquity of descent, v the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings, is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by our classifications.’ Now the problem is to recover the shape of that hidden bond, the topology of the great Tree of Life. It’s being revealed by scientists using very fast search algorithms that feed on terabytes of DNA sequences. Now the animals are divided into three great SupervPhyla (plus a few basal groups such as sponges) which, in turn, are divided into thirty-ocld Phyla which, in turn, are divided into ever smaller groups unto species, which although not exactly innumerable can scarcely be said to have been numbered for there may be anywhere between 3 and 100 million of them on earth. The leaves on Darwin’s great tree are almost uncountable.

The great tree, a metaphor for the history of life, serves as a metaphor for the history of ideas too. That nature does not make jumps; that there is a Ladder of Nature; that natural groups of animals exist; that those groups should be defined by the homology and analogy of organs; that organs are shaped by their functional and economic relations all these ideas, I claim,

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can be found in Aristotle. They have also structured modern zoology for much of its history; they still do. We may wonder, however, whether they are the same ideas.

It all depends, of course, what you mean by ‘thc samc'. Ideas arc the organs ofour thought, and like the organs ofa cuttlchsh and a tctrapod they may be ‘the same’ by virtue of common descent or ‘thc .samc' by Virtue of being independent solutions to similar needs. Aristotle himself was fond of remarking that the same ideas have occurred to many men at many times. (If that seems trite, no doubt that is because it is self-rchx’ ively true.) For the cluster of ideas that I have discussed here. however, I believe that a good case can be made for identity by descent. intellectual homology if you will. Linnaeus, Geoffroy and Cuvier and their predecessors read Aristotle; Darwin read them; we’ve read Darwin. The genealogical thread is clear.

Among historians the tracing of conceptual genealogies across the ages the ‘history of ideas’ (ideas pure and simple) rather than ‘intcl/ lectual history’ (their social and cultural context) is rather unfashionable. They point out that thinkers of every age appropriate their predecessors’ terms and concepts and apply them to their own ends; and that they do so even when the underlying structure of their thought has transformed their sense entirely. Philosophers call this process ‘conceptual shifting’ and delight to spot it as terriers do rats. Scientists always $10ppy with terminology, forever pushing new theo’ ries E are notorious for it. The ever’mutable meanings of ‘analogy’ and ‘homology’ are a case in point. Aristotle is addicted to it too his eidos and psyche are expressly not Plato’s.

Historians are right to stress this particularity, though not to the extent of denying the logic of modification by descent, a logic that applies with equal force to the realm of ideas as it does to life itself. In a way, it’s just a matter of how you look at it. Focus on the cuttleiish at home in its cuttlefish world and its weird geometry appears as a solution to its own cuttleiish problems. But take a broader view, and it looks more like a small twist on a basic plan that was laid down a long time ago.

That zoologists drew their ideas from, struggled against or simply used Aristotle, and that they did so for centuries, seems incomprehensible to us now. Darwin eclipsed his predecessors; he became to us what Aristotle was to them: an authority to inspire or merely invoke. Yet, though we have forgotten their ultimate source, Aristotle’s ideas, transformed and applied in ways that he could not have imagined, remain With us.

Saints and Scholars

 This passage! ❤ From Saints and Scholars by Terry Eagleton:

He took little in life seriously although one twang of a balalaika was enough to reduce him to a slobbering wreck. He had been a student and then a freelance lecturer in the philosophy of language at St. Petersburg University in the early years of the twentieth century. The whole city at the time was in spiritual ferment awash with dim intimations of impending apocalypse. University life was one incessant party, everyone drunk on theoretical debate and dizzy with polemic. Minor prophets reeled delirious through the streets and shabbily dressed avatars of the infinite swarmed through the public parks. Libraries and street cafes were crammed with Rasputin lookalikes. Poets milled in the streets like pickpockets, trying to scribble their verses on the petticoats and shirtfronts of the bourgeoisie. Great tides of mysticism surged and slopped in the city’s snow-packed squares. Everyone seemed to be healing, doping, poisoning or hypnotizing someone else, nailing each other unsuccessfully to homemade crosses or practising malign long-distance mesmerism.

It was a violent time. Drunken soldiers raided hostels to torture Bolsheviks, while Dostoevskian drop-outs stalked the tenements in search of old women to slaughter. A deaf Georgian who claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ sank without trace in the Neva while trying to cross it on foot back to his digs. The whole city had gone under ground. Most people seemed to belong to some mystical or political brotherhood, many to several ideologically incompatible societies at the same time.

And

sitting in a chair in accordance with regular practice, either Walsh or McGrath would have kicked the chair away suddenly with their foot on a signal from Mather, and while the prisoner’s arms were outstretched to break his fall the other warder would have seized and handcuffed them.

This was established death cell routine, though it was a tricky operation and easily bungled. Warders, however experienced, were likely to be nervous at the time, and had to rehearse the manoeuvre several times before the morning of execution, using each other as guinea pigs. Practically speaking it was not really necessary to kick away the prisoner’s chair, but from a psychological viewpoint it was a useful piece of ritual violence which broke the ice for the larger piece to come. It was a symbolic announcement that the rough stuff had begun, which converted the prisoner at a stroke into an object and so made it easier for warders who by now knew him well to carry him to his death. It assumed that he would not come quietly, thus defining him as potentially violent, cowardly and uncooperative. There would be something indecorous, even nauseating, about executing a man who rises casually from his chair when you enter and walks with you voluntarily out of the door. One would risk the intolerable possibility of his passing a few remarks about the weather, or enquiring after your children.

In this case, since the prisoner was not seated, Walsh and McGrath moved across to his bed, draped his arms around their shoulders and helped him gingerly to the floor. Crichton noticed that Connolly heaved himself upright a little as they approached, to make this easier. Crichton moved instinctively out of the way of the cell door, clearing a path for the prisoner to be carried through. He was not aware that condemned convicts do not exit from their cells through the door by which they came in. It would be needlessly troublesome to march someone about to be executed down winding corridors.

And 

sitting in a chair in accordance with regular practice, either Walsh or McGrath would have kicked the chair away suddenly with their foot on a signal from Mather, and while the prisoner’s arms were outstretched to break his fall the other warder would have seized and handcuffed them. 

This was established death cell routine, though it was a tricky operation and easily bungled. Warders, however experienced, were likely to be nervous at the time, and had to rehearse the manoeuvre several times before the morning of execution, using each other as guinea pigs. Practically speaking it was not really necessary to kick away the prisoner’s chair, but from a psychological viewpoint it was a useful piece of ritual violence which broke the ice for the larger piece to come. It was a symbolic announcement that the rough stuff had begun, which converted the prisoner at a stroke into an object and so made it easier for warders who by now knew him well to carry him to his death. It assumed that he would not come quietly, thus defining him as potentially violent, cowardly and uncooperative. There would be something indecorous, even nauseating, about executing a man who rises casually from his chair when you enter and walks with you voluntarily out of the door. One would risk the intolerable possibility of his passing a few remarks about the weather, or enquiring after your children. 

In this case, since the prisoner was not seated, Walsh and McGrath moved across to his bed, draped his arms around their shoulders and helped him gingerly to the floor. Crichton noticed that Connolly heaved himself upright a little as they approached, to make this easier. Crichton moved instinctively out of the way of the cell door, clearing a path for the prisoner to be carried through. He was not aware that condemned convicts do not exit from their cells through the door by which they came in. It would be needlessly troublesome to march someone about to be executed 

And

It was hard luck for the Gaelic League that their drive to unlock the ancient tongue coincided with one of the richest flowerings of writing in English the land had ever witnessed. The two parties clashed violently in the stalls of the Abbey theatre during the first production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. From his vantage point in the lightly gallery, Finbar Tierney watched a dozen blue-tunicked members of the Royal Irish Constabulary rush down the theatre aisles amidst the baying of affronted Catholic patriots, while more police patrolled outside the building The trouble had started with a reference in the play to girls wearing shifts, and the protagonist’s revelation that he had killed his own father. No decent Irishman would speak of women’s shifts while ladies were present, and no Irishman had ever killed his own father. The West Brits were smirching the honour of Irish maidenhood once again, and impugning the morality of their menfolk. The play carried on like a dumbshow, not a word from the stage audible through the howling and braying of the god-fearing audience, who broke out into a slurred rendering of ‘A Nation Once Again’. A young drunk tried to clamber on stage, keeled over like a felled tree into the orchestra pit and was promptly arrested. Yeats stood impotently on stage, flapping his arms like a great crow to pacify the simple faithful, who enraged by the sight of his pagan cravat and effete hairstyle bayed even louder. Producing a play in Dublin was more like exploding a bomb than providing an evening’s entertainment. Finbar climbed down from his perch and knee-jerked a bulbous-nosed navvy who was clambering from row to row of seats, holding aloft a foaming bottle of stout and screaming imprecations. Finbar was collared from behind by two of the navvy’s mates.

And

The British had begun to forget what they were about, infected by the unreality of this knockabout nation. There was something blurred and devious about the Irish, genetically bent, worryingly impenetrable. Truth for them meant not correspondence with what was the case but coherence with what seemed the least trouble. Everything in the place smacked of something else you couldn't quite put your finger on. There was a terrible lack of clarity about the natives’ speech. Most of them spoke only English but somehow it was as if they didn’t, as though they were Speaking a foreign tongue but oddly using your own words. This made them appear more akin and intelligible than they probably were. Their speech was English all right, but poeam, askew, slanted, out of true. Perhaps they were mocking the whole time; perhaps this was the secret of the Dubliner Oscar Wilde with his English high society plays, a deft mimickry of English culture whose very effortlessness was insulting, a look-no-hands affair, the impudencc of the circus clown who nips off with the suitcase the strong man has been struggling to lift. Wilde’s wit took English plati‘ tudes and ripped them inside out, stood them cheekily on their head while keeping a straight face. Maybe all the Irish were somehow inverted.

and

The Citizen Army wasted valuable time digging trenches in Stephen’s Green, apparently oblivious of the fact that it was overlooked by buildings on all four sides. The dour Irish-Spaniard Eamon de Valera, tall enough to have been described as looking like something uncoiled from the Book of Kells, was covering with his troops the main road from Dun Laoghaire along which soldiers landing from England would have to pass. Into his view tottered a company of the Dublin Veterans Corps, a pro-British body composed largely of elderly dons from Trinity College. They were known as the Gorgeous Wrecks, after the Georgia Rex initials on their armbands, and carried rifles but no ammunition. To their surprise the Wrecks came under fire from Dev’s men, and five of them fell dead. A dozen republican lighters on Mount Street bridge held up the advance of British reinforcements from Kingstown for a whole day, as several companies of Sherwood Foresters hurled themselves repeatedly and unavailingly against their gunfire. A Dublin nurse liberal-mindedly tending wounded British soldiers in the street was later awarded the Military Medal for bravery and a part in a West End review.

V 

"THIS," he smacked his belly -‘is what history can’t encompass.’ 

‘You don‘t establish a criterion of reality,’ said Wittgenstein coldly, ‘by an emphatic stress on the word “this”. Or by punching your stomach, which in your case nothing could encompass.’ 

‘Only philistines and politicians deny history,’ aid Connolly. ‘lf the ruling class admits that it was once bom, then it also acknowledges that it can die.’ 

‘Some nations,’ remarked Bakhtin, ‘die of inertia. The Irish will die of nostalgia.’ 

‘The Irish need to keep remembering their past became the British keep forgetting it.’ 

‘It seems to me,’ said Bakhtin, ‘that this uprising ofyoun is simply re-enacting the tragedy of the past. Only this time as farce.’ 

‘If we republicans don’t remember the past, who will? Our rulers rewrite it in order to make it continuous with the present. That’s why not even the dead are safe from them.’ 

‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ said Bakhtin. ‘It’s through the past that death came into the world. The past reminds us that life is short, that the future will soon be over. That’s why we claw so desperately at each other in the present. If we could only forget the past we might be free.’ 

‘The past of this nation,’ said Connolly, ‘is certainly one the British would rather forget. They teach children in British schools about Good Queen Bess, but do they tell them that she mustered the greatest army of her reign to exterminate the Irish people? The poet Edmund Spenser: himself no friend of this nation, wrote of the defeated rebels crawling on their knees from every corner of the woods, happy to feed oil dead carrion which they scraped from the graves, flocking to a plot of shamrock or watercress as to a sumptuous feast. Or perhaps the children are told of the time of Cromwell, who ordered that no quarter should be given to the garrisons of Wexford and Drogheda.

Jacqueline S

 From Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!

In Jackie’s mind, all that stood between herself and stardom was a publicity blitz. Says Pogrebin, “Her self-confidence and selfpossession were breathtaking and unshakable. She wasn’t going to be somebody, she already was somebody.”

Jackie and Irving set up residence in a swank Essex House apartment, but when Mansfleld was otherwise engaged, Susann leaped headfirst into a fling with the very married, much older Eddie Cantor, as big a deal as anyone could be in vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies, radio, hlms, and stage. For Susann such side affairs with father substitutes tended to be transient and mercenary. The Cantor liaison produced the kind of dividend she most valued: a walk-on in the star’s newest Broadway vehicle, Banjo Eyes, which opened in December of 1941. In March of 1942, Jackie repeated the pattern. Irving had been drafted into the army, and Jackie was in Chicago playing in the all-female cast of Cry ‘Havoc’ appearing in town at the time was Joe E. Lewis, the cocky, mobbed-up comedian often called “the father of stand-up.” Lewis had been a pop singer in Chicago nightclubs and gin joints during Prohibition. Famous for his ribald patter between songs and for his boozing it up onstage, Lewis enraged the owners of his North Side home club the Green Mill when he announced he was relocating to the rival Rendezvous Club Cafe. A week after Lewis’s successful opening, Al Capone’s enforcers invaded the entertainer’s hotel room, fractured his skull, slit his throat, and sliced off part of his tongue. Lewis recovered, reinvented himself, and enjoyed a major comedy career. Frank Sinatra called him one of the four or five greatest artists in American pop history and played him in the movie biography The Joker is Wild. As unlikely as it may seem, Susann fell hard for Lewis. She took up residence at the Royalton and left Mansfield, telling a friend that she refused to live with a man who now only made an army recruit’s salary. After Mansfield’s army discharge, he and Jackie recoupled circa 1946, but Susann never stopped caring for Joe Lewis. When she acquired her adored black poodle in the ’505, she named the dog Josephine in tribute. A catchphrase of Lewis’s nightclub act was “You only live once-but if you work it right, once is enough.” On his deathbed in 1971, Lewis told Susann he was mistaken: “Once is not enough.” Jackie made that the title of her third novel, published in 1973.


Through the late ’405 into the ’505, Susann poured herself into several pursuits. One was her complex and troublesome hxation 0n Ethel Merman. Becoming chummy with the siren-voiced hityone-year-old musical comedy legend quickly turned into Susann behaving, according to singer Hildegarde’s manager Anna Sosenko, “absolutely loony, like a 12-year-old . . .she had really fallen for her.” The open-secret relationship between Susann and Merman raised eyebrows among denizens of the Great White Way, as had rumors of Susann’s earlier relationship with fashion designer Coco Chanel. Manhattan partygoers attest to having witnessed Merman and Susann making out late one night on a couch-horizontally and at some length. Susann proudly boasted to intimates how she had performed a sensual bump and grind private striptease to help Merman prepare for her career-defining “Rose’s Turn,” the now legendary 11 o’clock number in the hit 1959 Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical Gypsy.

Though both women were volatile and quick to anger, their relationship seemed to be going along swimmingly until a loud, nasty argument broke out between them at a New York restaurant. Things got so heated that Irving hurled a drink at Merman, not only publicly humiliating bona tide show business royalty but also outraging his wife. According to multiple sources, Susann was so shaken by the incident that she turned up that night at Merman’s apartment door, loudly weeping and repeatedly wailing, “I love you!” Susann grew so unhinged that Merman called security to have her ejected and, from that time forward, froze her out of her life. Susann, shaken and desolate, threatened suicide convincingly enough that Irving persuaded her to check into a psychiatric hospital.

The Way of All Flesh

 On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old Mr Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the village according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of the century; the loaf was called a dole.  We had never heard of this custom before, besides, tho On on the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old Mr Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the village according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of the century; the loaf was called a dole.  We had never heard of this custom before, besides, though we had often heard of penny loaves, we had never before seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown up people, for our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent them, but only one.  We had never yet suspected that we were inhabitants at all; finally, the little loaves were new, and we were passionately fond of new bread, which we were seldom or never allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be good for us.  Our affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand against the combined attacks of archæological interest, the rights of citizenship and property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness for food of the little loaves themselves, and the sense of importance which was given us by our having been intimate with someone who had actually died.  It seemed upon further inquiry that there was little reason to anticipate an early death for anyone of ourselves, and this being so, we rather liked the idea of someone else’s being put away into the churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme depression to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new earth had been revealed to us in our perception of the possibility of benefiting by the death of our friends, and I fear that for some time we took an interest in the health of everyone in the village whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least likely.

Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we were astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually living person.  We had thought such a great man could only have lived a very long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it were at our own doors.  This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement might indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was all right now, and she knew.  In those days the snow lay longer and drifted deeper in the lanes than it does now, and the milk was sometimes brought in frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the back kitchen to see it.  I suppose there are rectories up and down the country now where the milk comes in frozen sometimes in winter, and the children go down to wonder at it, but I never see any frozen milk in London, so I suppose the winters are warmer than they used to be.

And

As was natural for the daughter and intended wife of a clergyman, Christina's thoughts ran much upon religion, and she was resolved that even though an exalted position in this world were denied to her and Theobald, their virtues should be fully appreciated in the next. Her religious opinions coincided absolutely with Theobald's own, and many a conversation did she have with him about the glory of God, and the completeness with which they would devote themselves to it, as soon as Theobald had got his living and they were married. So certain was she of the great results which would then ensue that she wondered at times at the blindness shown by Providence towards its own truest interests in not killing off the rectors who stood between Theobald and his living a little faster.

Maugham on violins

From Up at the Villa

 "He sent a substitute but he only plays the violin. I'll tell him to play."

"If there's anything I dislike it's the violin," she answered. "Why one should want to hear anyone scrape the hairs of a horse's tail against the guts of a dead cat is something I shall never understand "

Feathers of Death

by Simon Raven

Yes, they say your Sanvoisin is a good man to work with. But what about our friend Percy Berkeley?”

“Percy will do as everyone tells him. He has Duthwaite, Lynch and Byrt. to do that. They’re all intelligent men. Hathaway’s just a baby-but a nice baby and capable of being taught.”

“In no army other than the British would it be for a moment tolerated that a detached company should be commanded, on active service, by an incompetent drunk.”

“Now you’re being unsubtle. Percy’s fatness and drunkenness give us all a feeling of comfort and security. The men feel it---they feel Percy’s Burgundy glow radiating through the dark like a beacon of hope. And they know that he’s tolerant of their shortcomings. Kind. Forgiving. They look to him as they might to the Baron in ‘Cinderella’---as a figure of fun, yes, but one who has appeared every Christmas they can remember. Percy represents an important side of human nature-the inefflcient, debt. bilking priapic and boozy side. People like to have this summed up and ready for them on the spot, to be trotted out for their reassurance when they’ve had an overdose of competence and self-sacrifice and heroism plugged at them. Hence those deplorable slapstick charades traditionally performed after Shakespearean tragedies. We’d be unhappy without Percy.”