Let's Play! Operation Ichi-Go: The Solitaire Game (Overview & Review)

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The Rock of Chickamauga

There, in January 1862, he sent a bulletin of encouragement to a Union hungry for good news. After an 18-day march on muddy roads, his division confronted Rebels at Mill Springs, Kentucky. Amid cold rain and gun smoke, he led his outnumbered troops in repulsing Confederates under Maj. Gen. George Crittenden and then drove them across the Cumberland River. Though not a massive victory, it was the first notable Northern success of the war, turning back a Confederate move from eastern Tennessee into Kentucky. Thomas was promoted to major general, an advancement that would soon create friction with his old roommate "Cump" Sherman and Grant, who had become so close that an affront to either was resented by both.

After winning praise for capturing Forts Henry and Donelson in western Tennessee, Grant had fallen out of favor for mismanaging and very nearly losing the bloody Battle of Shiloh. He was criticized for taking 13,000 casualties and was suspected of drinking on the job. Sherman, whose excitability and wild overestimates of Rebel strength had caused some to question his sanity, had fought bravely after an initial mistake at Shiloh. When Union forces moved south toward Corinth, Mississippi, that spring, Union general Henry Halleck shunted Grant into a figurehead role and gave Thomas temporary command of the wing that included Grant's Army of the Tennessee. Grant, angered, was talked out of quitting by Sherman. Grant would not forget the incident.

Grant and Sherman would redeem themselves by grasping control of the Mississippi River in the costly, circuitous campaign that resulted in the capture of Vicksburg in mid-1863. While they were operating on the Mississippi, Thomas led a corps in Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland, earning respect in fights like that at Stones River, where he declared, "This army does not retreat," and backed up his words with actions on the field. There and at Tullahoma, Rosecrans' force pressed the Confederates back into eastern Tennessee.

As Thomas rose, he proved to his men that his addiction to detail and his insistence on preparation saved lives and won battles. His generalship behind the front, before the battle, was generations ahead of his peers. He organized a professional headquarters that made other generals' staff work seem haphazard. His mess and hospital services, his maps and his scouting network were all models of efficiency; he was never surprised as Grant had been at Shiloh. He anticipated modern warfare with his emphasis on logistics, rapidly repairing his railroad supply lines and teaching his soldiers that a battle could turn on the broken linchpin of a cannon. He demanded by-the-book discipline, but taught it by example. He made no ringing pronouncements to the press. His troops came to understand his fatherly concern for their welfare, and when they met the enemy they had faith in his orders.

In late summer, Rosecrans moved against the Rebel stronghold of Chattanooga, a crucial gateway between the eastern and western theaters of war. Confederate general Bragg pulled out of the town onto the dominating nearby mountains, waiting for Maj. Gen. James Longstreet to bring reinforcements from Virginia. When they came, Bragg threw everything into an assault on Union lines along Chickamauga Creek, just inside Georgia. Thomas' corps was dug in on the Union left. On the second day of furious fighting, a misunderstood order opened a wide gap on his right. Longstreet's Rebels crashed through; with the always aggressive John Bell Hood's division leading, they bent the Union line into a horseshoe.

Rosecrans, certain the battle was lost, retreated into Chattanooga with five other generals and thousands of blue-uniformed soldiers. But Thomas inspired his men to stand fast, and only their determined resistance saved his army from destruction. They held all that afternoon against repeated Confederate assaults, withdrawing into Chattanooga after nightfall. It was the greatest of all battles in the West, and since that day, Thomas has been known to history as the Rock of Chickamauga.

For their actions, Rosecrans was fired and Thomas took command of the Army of the Cumberland. But the Union situation remained dire. Bragg, still holding those formidable mountains, laid siege to Chattanooga. Grant, commanding Union armies between the Mississippi and the mountains, ordered Thomas to hold the city "at all costs," and rushed troops east to help.

"I will hold the town till we starve," Thomas replied, and they almost did starve. Cut off from supplies, his army was living on half rations. Thousands of horses and mules died. Weeks passed before Grant assembled strength sufficient to lift the siege. The key terrain was towering Missionary Ridge. Grant ordered Sherman to drive onto the ridge from the left and Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker from the right, with Thomas aimed at the center. Sherman tried and failed to carry his end, but Hooker's troops took Lookout Mountain on the far flank. Thomas waited for Grant's order to advance. When it came, Thomas took his time studying the crest with his binoculars, then sent his troops ahead with orders to occupy only the first line of the Confederate works. They did so in fine style—and then, seeing that they were exposed to fire from above, kept going. Thomas was surprised and Grant angry, demanding "Who ordered those men up the hill?" No one had. The troops plunged ahead, pressing on against heavy fire, struggling up the steep slope and jubilantly planting their flag on the heights for all to see.

Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, an eyewitness, called the assault "one of the greatest miracles in military history....as awful as a visible interposition of God." Thomas, moved by the sight, ordered that a cemetery be created for his soldiers on a beautiful slope of the battlefield. When a chaplain asked if the dead should be separated by state, Thomas did not hesitate. "No, no," he said. "Mix them up. Mix them up. I'm tired of states' rights." Once he had made up his mind to stay with the old flag, he never expressed misgivings; if he had them, they had long been erased by seeing so many men die to preserve the Union.

By late 1883, U.S. Colored Troops were filling some of the gaps opened in Federal forces by battle and disease. Although Sherman had resisted using black soldiers, Thomas gladly accepted them. In the drastic move from serfdom to freedom, he wrote, it was probably better for ex-slaves to be soldiers, and thus gradually learn to support themselves, than "to be thrown upon the cold charities of the world without sympathy or assistance."

As the Federals gathered strength to thrust into Georgia, this was not the only disagreement between the tightly strung Ohioan and the calm Virginian. In early March, Lincoln called Grant east to become general in chief of all Northern armies. No one was surprised that Grant's friend Sherman, rather than Thomas, replaced him as commander in the West, even though as a major general Thomas was senior to Sherman. Ex-colonel Donn Piatt, a 19th-century booster and biographer of Thomas, called it "the nakedest favoritism that ever disgraced a service."

At the start of his 1864 drive toward Atlanta, Sherman rejected Thomas' plan to take his command through Snake Creek Gap to cut off and smash Joseph Johnston's Confederate army. More than a month into Georgia, an impatient Sherman complained to Grant that Thomas' Army of the Cumberland was slowing his advance—"a fresh furrow in a plowed field will stop the whole column." He was still in this mood a few days later when he ignored Thomas' advice against attacking the strongly entrenched Rebels head-on at Kennesaw Mountain. The Federals lost more than 2,000 troops in trying to take what Thomas had warned was an impregnable position.

Thomas commanded about two-thirds of Sherman's infantry; his army was the center force, the sledgehammer in the four-month campaign, and led the way into Atlanta. But neither Sherman, Grant, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton nor Lincoln cited Thomas in their congratulations. As in the 1864 Virginia campaign, where all the official praise and headlines went to Grant, in Georgia it was all Sherman. In his special order announcing the victory, Sherman credited Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum's corps with entering the city first—although Slocum was under Thomas' command and had headed the corps for only six days.

When Atlanta's mayor protested Sherman's harsh military rule, the general replied, "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it...those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out....You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm." Then he set out on his storied march to infamy and greatness, pillaging the countryside as he cut a great swath through the Confederacy.

Thomas took a different view. Stern though he was in combat, he posted a guard at the house of a citizen suspected of disloyalty because, he said, "We must remember that this is a civil war, fought to preserve the Union that is based on brotherly love and patriotic belief in the one nation....The thing becomes horribly grotesque...when we visit on helpless old men, women, and children the horrors of a barbarous war. We must be as considerate and kind as possible, or we will find that in destroying the rebels we have destroyed the Union."

Opposite in personality, tactics and philosophy, Thomas and Sherman were thereafter gratefully separated in geography as well. While Grant grappled with Lee in Virginia and Sherman gutted the eastern Confederacy, Thomas was sent back to Tennessee to reorganize the stripped-down Army of the Cumberland and deal with Hood. The Confederate general had got away from Atlanta with some 40,000 troops and evaded Sherman's effort to catch him. Now he was marching north through Tennessee. Thomas' Federals under John Schofield slowed and badly damaged the Rebels in the fierce battle of Franklin, but by December Hood was dug in on the high ground facing Nashville. Thomas fortified the city while he gathered strength for a decisive blow, but to carry it out he needed more men, horses and supplies.

Grant, 500 miles away, grew impatient. He sent telegrams urging Thomas to move, then ordered him to "attack at once." Thomas said after the war that he was tempted—"grossly improper as it would have been"—to ask why Grant himself, who was entrenched around Petersburg, was not fighting. Defeat at Nashville "would have been a greater calamity than any which had befallen the Federal forces," he said. "It would have cleared the way for the triumphant march of Hood's army through Kentucky, and a successful invasion of Indiana and Illinois, in which there were no Federal troops. It was therefore of the last importance that the battle upon which so much depended should not be fought until I was ready for it." Thomas continued planning, training, stocking—equipping his horsemen with the new breech-loading Spencer carbines.

Then, just when he was ready, a sleet storm froze both armies in place for days. Grant, furious that Thomas had failed to engage the enemy, decided to relieve him from command, first with one general, then another. Finally he started to go west to fire him in person. But before he left Washington, the ice melted in middle Tennessee.

On December 15, Thomas, unaware that Grant intended to fire him, roared out of his works against Hood. In two days his troops crushed the Rebel army. His infantry, including two brigades of U.S. Colored Troops, smashed into Hood's troops while the Union cavalry, dismounted with its fast-firing Spencers, curled around and behind the Rebel left. Almost a century later, historian Bruce Catton summed up the battle in two words: "Everything worked."

Thomas "comes down in history...as the great defensive fighter, the man who could never be driven away but who was not much on the offensive. That may be a correct appraisal," wrote Catton, an admirer and biographer of Grant. "Yet it may also be worth making note that just twice in all the war was a major Confederate army driven away from a prepared position in complete rout—at Chattanooga and at Nashville. Each time the blow that finally routed it was launched by Thomas."

Nashville was the only engagement in which one army virtually annihilated another. Thomas B. Buell, a student of Civil War generalship, wrote that in Tennessee, Thomas performed the war's "unsurpassed masterpiece of theater command and control....So modern in concept, so sweeping in scope, it would become a model for strategic maneuver in 20th-century warfare." After it, there was no more large-scale fighting west of the Blue Ridge.

When the bloodshed was over at last, after Lincoln was assassinated and the nation was recovering from the shock, 150,000 soldiers of all the Union armies converged on Washington for the most memorable victory parade in the nation's history. All of them, that is, except the Army of the Cumberland. When Sherman proudly passed in review before Grant, President Andrew Johnson and multitudes of cheering onlookers, Thomas had already said goodbye to his few remaining troops. Back in Nashville, in a message that his innate reserve did not let him utter in person, he described his thoughts as he watched their last parade:




"The coldest heart must have warmed" at seeing the men who had endured "this great, modern tragedy," he wrote—men "who had stemmed with unyielding breasts the rebel tide threatening to engulph the landmarks of freedom, and who, bearing on their bronzed and furrowed brows the ennobling marks of the years of hardship, suffering and privation, undergone in defense of freedom and the integrity of the Union, could still preserve the light step and wear the cheerful expressions of youth."

EID MAR

Q. Servilius Caepio (M. Junius) Brutus AV Aureus. Military mint travelling with Brutus in the East, late summer-autumn, 42 BC. L. Plaetorius Cestianus, moneyer. Bare head of Brutus to right; BRVT above, IMP before, L • PLAET • CEST behind / Pileus between two daggers of differing design, their points downwards; below, EID•MAR. A. Campana, Eidibus Martiis (forthcoming), 13 (O1/R6) and pl. 1, 13 (this coin); Crawford -; Sydenham -; BMCRR -; Bahrfeldt -; Babelon -; H. A. Cahn, Eidibus Martiis, QT XVII (1989), pp. 211-32, 4a = CRI 215 = NFA XXV, 1990, 306 = Sotheby’s Zurich, 1993, 87 (same obverse die) = R. Walburg, Zeitzeugen. Münzen aus der Sammlung der Deutschen Bundesbank. Hirmer Verlag, München 2018, pp. 48-9 (Kat. 65, 66); Cahn, L’aureus de Brutus avec EID MAR, Actes du Congrés Internationale de Numismatique 1953, obverse die ‘A’; Calicó 58 = Biaggi 39 = Cahn, Actes, Actes du Congrés Internationale de Numismatique 1953, p. 213 = Cahn, Eidibus Martiis, 24a; for this type in silver see: - A. Campana, Eidibus Martiis, 14-18 (same dies); Crawford 508/3; Sydenham 1301; BMCRE East 68; Cahn, Eidibus Martiis, 6 (same dies); S. Nodelman, Brutus the Tyrannicide in Ancient Portraits in the J. Paul Getty Museum: Volume 1, p. 51, fig. 8 (same dies); Vagi, vol. II, p. 198, 95 = Feirstein Collection, NAC 39, 2007, 89 (same dies); John Work Garrett Collection, part I, Leu-NFA, 1984, 685 (same obverse die); Loscombe Collection, Sotheby, 1855, 683 = BMC II 480, 69 (same obverse die); Lanz 158, 2014, 373 (same obverse die); Künker 124, 2007, 8483 = Leu 71, 1997, 265 = Münzen & Medaillen 19, 1959, 150 (same obverse die). 8.06g, 19mm, 12h.
Near mint state and highly lustrous; the usual die breaks, minor surface marks, light red-brown calcite deposits on obverse and reverse.
Authenticated and encapsulated by Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) and graded MS★ 5/5 - 3/5, Fine Style (#5770688-001).
Excessively Rare; the third known example: one on long-term loan to the British Museum, the other in the Deutsche Bundesbank collection.

From the collection of the Baron Dominique de Chambrier, original attestation of provenance included;
Ex collection of Bernard de Chambrier (1878-1963) and Marie Alvine Irma von Bonstetten (1893-1968);
Ex collection of the Baron Gustave Charles Ferdinand von Bonstetten, Chamberlain to Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria.

Marie Alvine Irma von Bonstetten was daughter of Gustave August Arthur Albert von Bonstetten (1864-1935), the founder of the ‘Automobile Club Suisse’ in 1898, and great-niece of Gustave Charles Ferdinand von Bonstetten (1816-1892), who was a distinguished antiquarian and collector who published many articles in the Recueil d'antiquités suisses (1855, 1860 and 1867) and L'Essai sur les dolmens (Geneva, 1865), an authoritative study on European dolmens erected between the 5th millennium BC and the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Later, Gustave Charles Ferdinand von Bonstetten worked as an independent researcher and carried out archaeological excavations in both Switzerland and France. In 1873 he donated a part of his important collection to the ‘Antiquarium of Bern’ and his collection formed the basis of the Bernisches Historisches Museum. The Musée Romain of Avenches also owns pieces from his collection.

Nothing resonates so deeply with those knowledgeable in ancient Roman coinage as the dramatic EID MAR type struck by Brutus in 42 BC, nor indeed is any type more sought after by connoisseurs. Herbert A. Cahn’s 1989 study entitled Eidibus Martiis noted 56 examples in silver and 2 in gold. Anecdotal comments have long suggested the extent of the surviving population of EID MAR denarii could approximate as many as a hundred specimens - a reasonably high figure for what is considered to be an extreme rarity – and Campana’s as yet unpublished Die Study indeed identifies 88 examples (at last count) in silver (of which at least 34 are now in institutional collections) and 3 in gold. On account of its enormous historical importance and enhanced by its virtual unobtainability to all but the most fortunate of collectors, this coin type like no other has inspired great admiration, fascination, disbelief and desire in the hearts of historians, numismatists and collectors.

Foremost of the reasons for the exalted position of the type in the collective consciousness is its naked and shameless celebration of the murder of Julius Caesar two years earlier in 44 BC. This brutal and bloody assassination had been prompted by the well-founded belief among the Senate that Caesar indented to make himself king, which in truth he was already in all but name. By special decree of the Senate Caesar had been made dictator perpetuo - dictator in perpetuity - and granted the extraordinary and unprecedented honour of striking coins bearing his own likeness, thus breaking the ancient taboo of placing the image of a living Roman upon a coin. By these and other affronts to the traditional values and institutions of the Republic did Caesar seal his fate. On 15 March, 44 BC, in a room adjoining the east portico of the Theatre of Pompey, Caesar was stabbed twenty three times by the gang of Senators numbering over thirty and perhaps as many as sixty, men that Caesar called his friends, and of whom many had been pardoned by him on the battlefield and now owed their ranks and offices to him. The simple but bold reverse design employed by Brutus for this aureus contains the three principal elements of this ‘patriotic’ act of regicide committed to liberate the Republic from monarchical tyranny. Most striking are the two daggers of differing design, the one symbolising that wielded by Brutus himself, the other that of Cassius his co-consipirator. These flank the pileus, the cap of Liberty as worn by the divine twins and patrons of Roman armies Castor and Pollux, and which was conferred upon all freed slaves as a mark of their emancipation. The legend EID MAR is the abbreviation of EIDIBVS MARTIIS – the Ides of March. Thus, in an act of unparalleled braggadocio, we are at once presented with the murder weapons used to slay Caesar, the precise date of the deed, and the motive.

While the leaders of the Second Triumvirate Antony, Octavian and Lepidus embraced the practice of striking coins bearing their own images, the hypocrisy of Brutus placing his own portrait on the obverse of the EID MAR type cannot not have been lost on the Liberator. Both a betrayal of his personal devotion to the ancient traditions of the Republic, and an emulation of the tyrant he had slain, it may well be that he was convinced into allowing his image to be co-opted by the Republican party as a rallying symbol for the swiftly approaching engagement between their legions and those Antony and Octavian. As a descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder and first consul of the Roman Republic, who in 509 BC had sworn on a bloody dagger to overthrow the unjust rule of the Tarquin kings, the clearly drawn parallels must have been heady propaganda to the Republican cause.

Notes on die state:
The present coin exhibits the characteristic die breaks common (to greater or lesser degree) to all of the known examples of Cahn die ‘A’ (Campana O1). The most prominent of these are a sickle-shaped feature located behind the nape of Brutus’ neck, a further break emanating from the peak of Brutus’ forehead where it meets his hairline, and an area of roughness directly before Brutus’ brow that can be seen to evolve into a pronounced pellet-like break on late die-state examples. Additional die breaks are located above the tip of the nose, between the back of the head and ‘A’ of PLAET, between and above the letters ‘P’ and ‘L’ of PLAET, and extending vertically downwards from below the chin.

The evolution of the die breaks can be seen to exist in at least six distinct stages, as noted by Cahn in Eidibus Martiis, and exemplified by the below listed coins, in order by earliest die-state to latest. The comparison of these die-states permits us to determine the progression of said breaks.
Denarius: Jameson 7 = Hess 1954, 214 = Hess-Leu 41, 54 (hereafter referred to as the Jameson example).
Denarius: Sotheby, 1855, 683 (BM example).
Aureus: NFA XXV, 1990, 306 = Sotheby’s Zurich, 1993, 87 (Deutsche Bundesbank example).
Denarius: NFA-Leu 1984 (Garrett example).
Aureus: Present coin; cf. also NAC 39, 2007, 89 (Feirstein example).
Denarius: Künker 124, 2007, 8483 = Leu 71, 1997, 265 = Münzen & Medaillen 19, 1959, 150 (M&M example).

Stage 1:
Cahn 1, 2. The obverse die used to strike of the five examples examined by Cahn is intact - the coins are sharply struck and detailed. This is confirmed by inspection of the available image of the Jameson example.

Stage 2:
Cahn 3. A linear die break has appeared above the ‘C’ of CEST, behind the nape of the neck. Although not discernible on Cahn’s plate, this is visible in the BM example’s published image of the coin.

Stage 3:
Cahn 4. The Deutsche Bundesbank example shows the linear die break having evolved into the distinctive sickle-shape it retains for the remainder of its use. Also present now is the very beginning of the forehead break, and the area of roughness before the brow. Also present is the break above the letters ‘PL’ of PLAET. The breaks above the tip of the nose, between the letters ‘PL’ of the legend, and between the head and the ‘A’ are as yet absent.

Stage 4:
Cahn 5, 6. The Garrett Collection example now shows the vertical break below the chin, as well as the presence of the break between the back of the head and the ‘A’of the legend.

Stage 5:
The present aureus exhibits an enlargement of the forehead break, in both the vertical and horizontal axes, and strengthening of the ‘dot’ above the tip of the nose – a distinct advance from Cahn 6a, 6b, and the Garrett example. The other principal change is that the break between ‘PL’ is now present. The forked break before the brow exhibits little to no progression. The Feirstein example may be another example of this obverse die state, however it is so weakly struck that prior to the clarification provided by of the present aureus and Campana’s Die Study, its place in the die state progression was uncertain.

Stage 6:
Cahn 7, 8, 9. The latest known die-state may be observed on the M&M example, which in addition to the breaks clearly visible on the present aureus, also possesses a break just inside the beaded border at 2 o’clock. Furthermore, the break before the brow has now become a very prominent pellet-like protrusion.

Conclusions:
The present aureus occupies a logical but previously unrepresented gap in the die break progression as laid out by Cahn, since the Feirstein example lacked sufficient detail to be of useful comparison, and other specimens are either too worn or otherwise poorly conserved. While the forehead break on this aureus is much advanced from Cahn 6a, 6b, and the Garrett example, the break before the brow has not yet progressed to being a fully-formed pellet as it already is by Cahn 7a-d and the M&M example, among others (see also Lanz 158, 373), nor is the additional ‘dot’ break at 2 o’clock inside the beaded border present yet. Campana’s forthcoming die study confirms the die state progression laid out above, and furnishes a great many additional examples for comparison.

Considerations on the EID MAR type:
In ‘The EID MAR type of Brutus, an overview of current research and portfolio of related papers’ (private publication, available on request from Roma Numismatics Ltd.), Andrew McCabe provides a comprehensive summary of all numismatic texts devoted to the EID MAR type in both gold and silver. Gathering together ancient sources, antiquarian studies and archaeological evidence, the Overview traces the known references to the type from the second century AD, through the renaissance and into modern times. It furthermore aggregates the available information concerning the dispersal and rediscovery of known examples, bringing to light hoard evidence that establishes a clear archaeological context for a number of these. Moreover, the Overview draws on and expands upon the works of Mattingly, Cahn, Woytek and others to provide important insights into the series, particularly as concerns their place in the ‘Liberator’ coinage series, their method of manufacture, and the likely timing and location of minting. The Overview has clear implications for cultural property considerations (confirming that the type is pan-European in dispersal, rather than provenant from the soil of any one modern nation) while providing hard evidence for the reaffirmation of the now prevalent acceptance of both the Biaggi-Winckless and Deutsche Bundesbank EID MAR aurei.

Our own conclusions drawn from a study of the die-state progression of Cahn die ‘A’ clearly have important bearing on considerations concerning the present coin. That the EID MAR type was indeed struck in gold by Brutus as well as in silver must be considered to be beyond all reasonable doubt, as represented by the ‘Biaggi-Winckless’ coin now in the British Museum, and the NFA-Sotheby’s coin now in the collection of the Deutsche Bundesbank, which until recently were believed to be the only two surviving examples of the issue. The fact that the present aureus occupies a previously unrepresented stage in the die-state progression, combined with the fact that it is die-paired (O1/46) in accordance with the die progression prescribed by Cahn and confirmed by McCabe and Campana, and obvious physical properties of the coin (fabric, die axis, and strike properties) which are entirely consistent with the Deutsche Bundesbank example (being closer in state of preservation than the Biaggi-Winckless coin) and other contemporary ‘Liberator’ aurei in general, provides an unassailable argument in favour of the piece, which further augments our understanding of both the Biaggi-Winckless and Deutsche Bundesbank examples, and the series as a whole.

David Roberts (1796–1864)

 

Dictionaria

https://dictionaria.clld.org/




Dictionaria is an open-access journal that publishes high-quality dictionaries of languages from around the world, especially languages that do not have a large number of speakers. The dictionaries are published not in the traditional linear form, but as electronic databases that can be easily searched, linked and exported.
Aims and scope

Dictionaria publishes electronic dictionaries in electronic format that can be linked via their comparison meanings to other dictionaries and word collections. The dictionaries need to be submitted as databases, consisting of different tables of a relational database (entries, senses, examples). Authors will not have to worry about technical implementation, as long as they conform to the submission guidelines. The dictionaries are refereed like other books or journal articles. The dictionaries are easily searchable (by lemma, meaning, semantic domain, and in other ways), they are easily exportable, and media content (pictures and sound) can be included.

FDR knew what to do

 

Chess Boxing

 

Erskineville Kings

Scots law in Australia

One Billion Americans

Crows in moonlight, Ohara Koson, 1927

Literati Use of Oral or Oral-Related Genres to Talk about History in the Late Ming and Early Qing: From Yang Shen to Jia Fuxi and Gui Zhuang, and from Education (Jiaohua) to Cursing the World (Mashi)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01937774.2015.1096543

THE HISTORY OF A HISTORIAN: PERSPECTIVES ON THE AUTHORIAL ROLES OF SIMA QIAN

https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/580129798.html?FMT=AI

In the first century BCE, Sima Qian compiled the Shiji, a history of China from mythological beginnings to his own day. Soon after, readers of the Shiji began producing both continuations and extensive comments. This dissertation examines the changing ways in which pre-modern Chinese readers understood authorship through an analysis of their perspectives on Sima Qian. I argue that we cannot know the “real” Sima Qian: the tragic authorial figure of Sima Qian is a construction by later readers. I trace the development of this authorial construction from the Han through Song dynasties, examining readers' comments within their historical contexts. The dissertation has three parts. The first outlines Sima Qian's fortunes in the textual world of traditional China, exploring how his authorial role was seen in relation to the Classics and to historical texts (in chapter 1), as well as to literary theory and composition (in chapter 2). Chapter 3 discusses formal aspects of the Shiji and how they were considered an aspect of Sima Qian's creative authorship.

The second part juxtaposes two competing interpretations of the Shiji. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze how Sima Qian's personal tragedy was thought to relate to his work on the Shiji. Initially such motivations were viewed in a primarily negative light. It was not until the Song that the autobiographical connection came to be valorized. In chapter 6, I consider an alternative position, that the Shiji was a “true record” and how the meaning of that term changed over time. I show how this aspect of Shiji interpretation reflected and influenced traditional Chinese attitudes toward history.

The third part explores textual issues. In chapter 7, I consider three problems related to Shiji authorship that go beyond Sima Qian: the question of Sima Tan, the work of Chu Shaosun, and the idea of a damaged Shiji text. In chapter 8, I discuss issues related to the authenticity of the “Letter in Reply to Ren An,” which is often read as Sima Qian's finest autobiographical statement and a crucial interpretive key to the Shiji.

Outland

Beijing from the Great Wall

π 1,000,000 digits

As the crickets stridulate: Texts and textual weaving in the Ballad of Mulan" by Timothy Wai Keung Chan 陳偉強, in Willow Catkins, ed. Shirley Chan et al. (2014).

Great Picture Book of Everything

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?keyword=Banbutsu&keyword=ehon&keyword=taizen

Lathe Machining of Bronze Coin Flans

http://www.classicalcoins.com/flans8.html

The machining of bronze flans began with the very large and heavy bronze coins that were issued by Ptolemy II. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that its development is related to technological problems that were discovered in the process of making these unprecedentedly large and heavy coins. Ptolemy I had truck bronze coins up to 31 mm in diameter whose flans were not machined, and the Roman Empire later struck sestertii in diameters up to 30 mm whose flans were not machined. There were also medallic Roman Provincial issues up to 40+ mm in diameter whose flans were not machined, at least not by any process that left a dimple or concentric marks. The machining process clearly was not necessary for striking large bronze coins, but that does not mean that it was not advantageous.

One might object that inventing a new technology of rotary cutting and a complex lathe machine to correct a simple casting quality problem is not reasonable. There is an assumption in this objection that is not justified: that the technology was new and that the machine that did this cutting was invented specifically for this purpose. Rather, it was most probably adapted from other related machines that were already being used to cut metal for other purposes. We must remember that the archaeological record is more than 99% incomplete with respect to ancient machines. There were not ever large numbers of these valuable devices, and they were very rarely lost or buried in such a way as to be preserved. They were much too valuable for the metal "scrap" and reusable parts in them.

It is also a misconception to think that the machine used was complex by the standards of the time. The machine that is illustrated here may be indeed more advanced in some ways than what was actually used (Robert Kokotailo has suggested that the rotating platen may actually have been a large stone flywheel, which seems quite reasonable), but it is not complex in the sense that it is more complicated or more difficult to make than other apparatus that was being built at the same time and in the same area, Hellenistic Egypt. In the early Ptolemaic period, Alexandria was the center of the most advanced technology in the Mediterranean world. The question of complexity really has to be judged in the context of what would have been needed to do the work with the necessary speed, quality and efficiency. The ancient Greeks, in fact, had wonderful technological capabilities which we are still learning about. One fascinating example of this was the Antikythera Mechanism, http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/triton2.htm , an ancient analogue computer that in many ways was more advanced than the devices that later Europeans were able to make before the Industrial Revolution. It is thought to have been used for astrological purposes.

There were also elaborate mechanisms used in some ancient temples to instil a sense of awe in the visitor, such as for automatically opening doors, and many other amazing devices: http://www.tmth.edu.gr/en/expo/ancient_greek_technology.html presents some examples of these. More glimpses into ancient Greek technology can be found at http://www.greece.gr/ENVIRONMENT/ScienceAndTechnology/ancientyetsomodern.stm .

Finally, lathes were quite well known to the ancient Greeks (they were in fact used by the Egyptians before them) and were used to turn not only wooden rods such as chair legs, but also wooden bowls and plates, large wooden objects such as shields, stone objects as large as column drums, ceramic objects in the "green" or unfired state, and even to machine many axisymmetric metal objects, such as bells and goblets.

Short of the discovery of a well preserved Ptolemaic or Roman Provincial mint in which archaeologists can accurately reconstruct what was actually being done, which is not likely to happen any time soon, we have to base our interpretations on very incomplete information. What is needed now is more thought by numismatists and more data - more images of coins whose flans bear tooling marks, if possible images of coins with flan defects such as the Ptolemaic bronze cited here that give us hints about the nature of the tool used. Possibly fortune will really smile on the enterprise, and someone will make a connection between this monograph and some archaeological evidence. The reason for publishing this sort of speculation is, after all, to start people thinking about the subject. Then bits of information that others know or will come to know, which otherwise would not get any special attention, may be seen to add in some way to our knowledge of the subject. A few more pieces of the puzzle are fitted in, and our knowledge becomes a bit less incomplete

The Manchu Script

https://www.manchustudiesgroup.org/

Batavia Arrack

As Slow As Possible

https://www.aslsp.org/de/home.html



The longest music piece in the world is being performed in the city of Halberstadt in Germany: John Cage's composition for organ Organ²/ASLSP - As SLow aS Possible - is resounding here in an extreme interpretation of 639 years, that means until the year 2640! Halberstadt is a town (43,800 inhabitants in 2015) in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and the capital of the district of Harz.

The performance began on 5 September 2001, the 89th birthday of the avant-garde composer and artist John Cage, with a seventeen month-long pause before the first tone of the organ, especially built for the performance of this piece, was to be heard. What at first seemed to be only an utopian idea developed very quickly into an impressive and innovative art project generating a widespread interest. The Halberstadt Cage concert, which fascinates people all over the world, is being accompanied by many additional events and has proved to be a point of attraction wholly in the open spirit of John Cage. Aside from tone changes as determined by the organ piece, further events are taking place in the course of the organ project.

Michael Praetorius, a composer and important theorist of music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, wrote that an organ with the first modern keyboard arrangement had been built in Halberstadt's cathedral in 1361. This organ was the first of its kind with a claviature of 12 notes, and this claviature is used on our keyboard instruments today. So one can say that the cradle of modern music was in Halberstadt. Subtract 1361 from the millennial year 2000, and the result ist 639. In the year 2000, - 639 years had passed since the "fatal day of Halberstadt" (Harry Partch) - the performance of Cage's "as slow as possible" for the coming 639 years began.

The place is St. Burchardi, one of the oldest churches of the city. Built around 1050 at the behest of Burchard of Nahburg, bishop of Halberstadt at that time, this church functioned as a Cistercian convent for more than 600 years. In the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), St. Burchardi was partially destroyed, but was rebuilt in 1711 and secularised by Jérome, the brother of Napoleon, in 1810. For 190 years the church was used as a barn, hovel, distillery and a sty.

St. Burchardi was rediscovered, and is now the venue of this extraordinary project, that has aroused the fascination of many people around the world. In view of our fast moving age, this piece of music is a way of trying to slow down our hectic lives. The "discovery of slowness" and the planting of a "musical apple tree" can be understood as symbols of confidence in the future. The length of this performance symbolises not only, and that was Cage's intention, the perception of music or a piece of music. It also means the perception of time, supposed standstill and transitoriness. As a generational project, this piece of music resists fast reception, the simple solution which is preferred in our society.


This Saturday, the chord that has been held since 2013 will change.

Volgograd Panorama Museum

The Fever - Wallace Shawn

The Fever
by Wallace Shawn

I'm traveling—and I wake up suddenly in the silence before dawn in a strange hotel room, in a poor country where my language isn't spoken, and I'm shaking and shivering.— Why? There's something—something is happening—far away, in a different country. Yes, I remember. It's the execution. The newspaper article said this would be the hour, this was the date.

I catch my breath. And so now they come—they come for the man who lies in his cot, the cat-like man whose face is so large, so black, that the guards who open his cell are once again frightened, shaken. They shave his head, a section of his leg, so the electrodes will fit closely on the skin.

And now the guards lead him into the chamber, and he's tied into the chair with leather straps. His arms are strapped down to armrests so the witnesses won't see them move, his legs strapped to the legs of the chair— Does panic mount in the man's heart? An attendant covers his head with a hood so none of us will see his pain, the horror, the distortion of his face. The breaking of the skin! All we see is the body shifting upwards, slightly in the chair.

Don't you think—when you're traveling in a strange country—that the smells are sharp and upsetting? And when you wake up in the middle of the night—unexpectedly—when you wake up at an odd hour—when you're traveling somewhere and you wake up in a strange place—don't you feel frightened?

I can't stop shivering.

The lamp by my bed doesn't work, the electric lights won't turn on. The rebels have blown up the electricity towers. There's a small war going on in this poor country where my language isn't spoken. The hotel rooms all have candles with little candle holders. I get up, light the candle, take the candle into the bathroom. Then I put the candle in its holder on the floor, and I kneel down in front of the toilet and vomit.—Then I'm sitting, shivering, on the bathroom floor, this cold square of tile on a hot night in a hot country, and I can't stand up to go back to bed—I can't stand up—so I sit there quietly, shaking as if I were sitting in the snow. And in the corner of the bathroom—brown against the tile—there's an insect, big, like a water bug—it's flat, heavy—very tough legs, they look like metal—and it's waiting, squatting, deciding which way to move.—And in a second it's crossed behind the sink, and it's slipping itself into a hole too small for it to fit in, but it fits—in—it fits—it's gone. And I see myself. I see myself. A moment of insight.

It's the birthday party in the fancy restaurant. Yes—there's the table with its sweet and pretty decorations, the fanciful centerpiece, pink and green, and there are all the women in bright red lipstick and the men in beautiful shirts, and all the gifts—outrageous, unexpected, and funny gifts—and there are the waiters serving the salmon and pouring the wine, and there I am. I'm talking quietly with that small, pale woman in the red-and-blue dress about the love affair with the older man, that film that disturbed her, the actress, the psychiatrist, the criminals, the walks at night through the woods in the country, the insatiable appetite for violent sex, the suffering of the people who live in desperation in the crowded shelter across the street from the fancy restaurant. And as I talked with that woman in the red-and-blue dress, I thought I was a person who was thinking about a party, who had so many complicated feelings about it, who liked some aspects of the party, but not others, who liked some of the people but not all of them, who liked the pink-and-green centerpiece, but didn't really like that red-and-blue dress. But no. No. I see it so clearly. I see myself with my little fork—I wasn't a person who was thinking about a party. I was a person who was at a party, who sat at the table, drank the wine, and ate the fish.

We didn't talk about the fish, we didn't talk about the restaurant, we talked about the lakes in the mountains in the north of Thailand and the crowded shelter across the street. But where were we? Where were we? Not by the lakes, not in the shelter— We were there, just there, at that table, in that restaurant.— Well, maybe for certain people—maybe for certain people who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century—what was hidden and unconscious was the inner life. Maybe the only thing those people could see was the outward circumstance, where they were, what they did, and they had no idea at all of what was inside them. But something's been hidden from me, too. Something—a part of myself—has been hidden from me, and I think it's the part that's there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw me out the window of a passing train.

Because I know quite a bit about what's inside me. I've been a student of my feelings since I was nine years old! My feelings! My thoughts! The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life—my behaviour, my actions—that's a slim volume, and I've never read it. Well, I've never wanted to. I've always thought it would be terribly boring. What would be in it? Chapter One: My Childhood. I was born, I cried. Chapter Two: The Rest: I maintained myself. I got up, I went to work, I went home, I went to bed. I went to a restaurant, and I ate fish. Who cares? For God's sake—did I have to travel to a poor country where no books are printed in my own language—did I have to be cast down onto a bathroom floor in a strange hotel—in order to finally be forced to open that dull volume, the story of my life?

And I vomit again. Dear god.

No, I'm not going to read it. I won't read it. My parents loved me. They raised me to think about the people, the world, humanity, beauty—not to think about restaurants and fish. I was born into the mind. Lamplight. The warm living room. My father, in an armchair, reading about China. My mother with the newspaper on a long sofa. Orange juice on a table in a glass pitcher.

And they read me a book about all the people in so many different uniforms who came to our house to help our family: coming from every corner of our beautiful city, the delivery man from the grocery store, the mailman with the mail. All so kind. And down the street, the woman who worked in the bakery, who bent down and gave me sugar-covered buns. And, dear God, I never doubted that life was precious. I've always thought life should be celebrated.

Today, I went to an office, a quiet office—a few cabinets and chairs—and its job was to make a record of all the cases of political murder, and torture, and rape—rape used as a form of torture or in the course of torture. There were photographs on the wall of the bleeding corpses of friends. The blood was bright red. One was a schoolteacher, killed near her school. And there were black-and-white snapshots of shyly smiling women and men at some time before their deaths, and these were pinned u next to the pictures of their corpses. The faces, radiant with goodness.

And I thought of the delicacy with which my parents had taught me to urinate into the toilet, to be careful around toilet seats, to wash my hands, always with soap, to avoid people with the flu, with colds, to avoid drafts, to avoid rooms that were cold or wet.

And I thought of how they taught me to love traveling—the wonderful train trips. The magic of riding at night through the farmland in our little compartment, brushing our teeth on the moving train.

And here, from my spot on the bathroom floor, I can see through the window, gorgeous in the moonlight, the gorgeous mountains of the poor country, soaked with the blood of the innocent, soaked with the blood of those shy faces, battered shy faces.

Walking through the garden with my mother—enormous roses. And through a dark pine forest—my father pointing to a yellow bird. Save me.

You see, I like Beethoven. I like to hear the bow of the violin cut into the string. I like to follow the phrase of the violin as it goes on and on, like a deep-rooted orgasm squeezed out into a rope of sound. I like to go out at night in a cosmopolitan city and sit in a dark auditorium watching dancers fly into each other's arms.

Yes, suppose that certain people—certain people whose hearts admittedly filled with love—are being dragged into a stinking van with a carpet on the floor and stomped by boots till their lips are swollen like oranges, streaming with blood. Yes, I was alive when those things were being done, I lived in the town whose streets ran with the blood of good-hearted victims, I wore the clothes which were pulled from the bodies of the victims when they were raped and killed.

But I love the violin. I love the music, the dancers, everything I touch, everything I see. The city with its lights, theaters, coffeeshops, newsstands, books. The constant celebration. Life should be celebrated. Life is a gift.

And I can't stand the way people say, "When I was a child, I loved elephants," "When I was a child, I loved balloons." Are they trying to say that if they stopped and looked at a balloon today or at an elephant today, they would not love them? Why wouldn't they love them? I think we still love what we have always loved. How could we not? And one of the things that I always loved—I wonder if you did—was the wonderful way that valuable small objects—the Christmas presents and birthday presents that adults always gave to each other—were wrapped, were packed. Say the present was a small china cup or saucer or a tiny china vase. Well, first there'd be a brown cardboard box from the shop that looked like it ought to have a rocking horse or tricycle inside, because it was just so big—except that, if you lifted it, it was always incredibly, miraculously light—and you would always imagine that that big brown box had been packed up and sealed up by some sort of huge and muscle-y industrial workers who were completely indifferent to the contents of the box. And then someone would make a cut with a knife in the brown tape at the top of the box, and when they pulled the two halves of the top apart, there would always be a huge sort of industrial snapping sound. And then inside that big cardboard box you'd find another box, wrapped in thick shiny paper and tied with some brightly colored thick shiny ribbon, which wasn't really needed to keep the box closed, and you would naturally imagine that this inside box had been wrapped by some very refined and modest looking lady whose hands were softened with sweet-smelling cream and who very definitely cared a great deal about whatever it was that was inside the box. And then when the paper and ribbon were undone and removed, and the box itself, with it smooth surface like clear milk, was finally revealed, someone would take off the top of the box, and you would hear at that moment a little rustling or nestling sound, like the sound of a hamster moving in its cage, and that would be the sound of all the tiny little pieces of squunched-up paper that filled the box giving a sort of quiet little sigh as the taking off of the top of the box gave them some sudden extra breathing space. And then the most exciting part of the opening would start, which was the attempt to find out what in particular was inside the box aside from all the pieces of squunched-up paper, if in fact there was anything else inside there at all, because at first you always thought, Well, really, this time there is nothing else. So then someone—maybe you—would plunge their hand down deep into the box as if they were a diver searching for a pearl, and eventually they would come upon something hard, something tightly wrapped in a different sort of paper, and when that last bit of wrapping was finally undone, there would be the cup or saucer or vase, just suitable for one little flower. And maybe if you'd seen that cup or saucer or vase just sitting on a shelf in a shop somewhere, you might have thought it was nothing in particular, or maybe if you'd seen it lying in a pile with heaps of others like it in the corner of some dark dusty place that sold odds and ends, you would have thought it was an old piece of junk, but by the time it had been pulled out of all that paper, out of that milk-white box, out of that cardboard carton, it seemed like the most shining, sparkling thing in the world. And how delicate it seemed—how breakable and precious. And you were right, it was.

And my friends and I were the delicate, precious, breakable children, and we always knew it. We knew it because of the way we were wrapped—because of the soft underwear laid out on our beds, soft socks to protect our feet.

And I remember that my darling mother, my beautiful mother, my innocent mother would say to me and my friends, when we were nine or ten, "Now be very careful, don't go near First Avenue. That's a bad neighborhood. There are tough kids there."

And we had no idea what she meant. She had no idea. We thought that certain kids were tough—maybe they just liked to be. And they lived in certain neighborhoods—maybe because their friends were there. Nice people had gathered in our neighborhood, had formed a community, and it was a good neighborhood. On First Avenue and other avenues, there were bad neighborhoods, where tough people had gathered together, and those were the neighborhoods we had to avoid.

We still avoid them—all of my friends. Bad neighborhoods. The people who live in places like that would hurt you, beat you, cut you, kill you. All the ones who would hurt you collect in those neighborhoods, like water in drains. And it's terrible. It's awful. Why should people want to hurt each other? I always say to my friends, We should be glad to be alive. We should celebrate life. We should understand that life is wonderful.

Shouldn't we decorate our lives and our world as if we were having a permanent party? Shouldn't there be bells made of paper hanging from the ceiling, and paper balls, and white and yellow streamers? Shouldn't people dance and hold each other close? Shouldn't we fill the tables with cake and presents?

Yes, but we can't have celebrations in the very same room where groups of people are being tortured, or groups of people are being killed. We have to know, Where we are, and where are the ones who are being tortured and killed? Not in the same room? No—but surely—isn't there any other room we can use? Yes, but we still could hear the people screaming. Well, then—can't we use the building across the street? Well, maybe—but wouldn't it feel strange to walk by the window during our celebrations and look across at the building we're in now and think about the blood and the deaths and the testicles being crushed inside it?

Who are the ones who are being tortured and killed? It was explained to me: the followers of Marx.

The dizziness drops my head to the floor. I feel as if a rope that's been wrapped around my temples is being tightened and release, tightened and released, and there's an aching pain in the center of my stomach.

In my own country I've always loved staying in the hotels. In fact, one of the things I think I like best is to sleep in a hotel in some new city and then get up early while the birds are singing and call room service and get them to send me up a big pot of coffee, and then to lie in bed and call my friends on the telephone while I sip my coffee. I can spend literally hours like that, just talking on the telephone and laughing and drinking more coffee and watching the sun come in the window and moving around the room. And then I get up and go about my day.

But staying in a hotel in a foreign country is always different.

I'll tell you about a funny incident that happened at lunch today. Well, it was my own reaction that was funny, really. The hotel had a banquet. Everyone had huge plates of food: pork, shrimp, lobster, game. I stood outside, and there was a girl of maybe sixteen who sat on some steps not far from me. She was a peasant girl, barefoot, her legs peeping out from a faded skirt. Her eyes were blurred, as if she'd been whipped. She was waiting for something, carved into the corner of the stone steps in an attitude of incredible gravity and grace. Suddenly, a young man with a foolish expression came out of the hotel, dressed in a suit. He was heading toward the small girl on the steps, and from the way he waved at her I realized she must have been one of his family's maids. He was holding out to her a tiny little plate with a few beans on it. That was her lunch. Well, she smiled to acknowledge the gift of food, and I had an immediate reaction—I wanted to punch that young man in the face, throw him in the bushes. It was really quite funny. What did I think I was, this week's radical guerrilla. Then he went back inside—oblivious of me, of course—and the moment passed.

About a year ago I spent a day at a nude beach with a group of people I didn't know that well. Lying out there, naked, in the sun, there was a man who kept talking about "the ruling class," "the elite," "the rich." All day long, "The rich are pigs, they are all pigs, some day those pigs will get what they deserve," and things like that. He was a thin man with a large mustache, unhealthy-looking but very handsome, a chain-smoker. As he talked, he would laugh—sort of bitter barks that came out always unexpectedly. I'd heard about these words and these phrases all my life, but I'd never met anyone who actually used them. I thought it was quite entertaining. But for about a month afterward a strange thing happened. Everywhere I went I started getting into conversations with people I met—on a train, on a bus, at parties, in the line for a movie—and everyone I met was talking like him: The rich are pigs, their day will come, they're all pigs, and on and on. I started to think that maybe I was crazy. I thought I was insane. Could this really be happening? Was everyone now a Communist but me?

And this was all happening at the very same time that Communism had finally died, and social pathologists were arguing over what had caused its death. The newspapers and magazines reported no nostalgia for the defunct system, and it seemed as if all the intellectuals and political leaders who had ever been known to have fallen under its sway were running in all directions looking for shelter. So then who were all these people who kept grabbing hold of me?

One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn't understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds." People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.