250 Years Ago ... The Lay of the Land

*Part of my continuing blog series leading up to the 250^th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis in February 2014.

In October 1762, my ancestor Jean Baptiste Becquet lived in the village where he was born: Nouvelle Chartres.  Despite its name, Nouvelle Chartres was not located in France; it existed in what is now Southern Illinois.  Nouvelle Chartres was the little village that lay outside the walls of Fort de Chartres which was located along the Mississippi River about 50 miles south of what would become St. Louis and about 85 miles north of the confluence with the Ohio River.

It is probably helpful to understand the geographical relationship of the French villages along the Mississippi.  The following map will help.  You can orient yourself to St. Louis in the north and Kaskaskia in the south. Just above St. Louis, on the western side, would be the Missouri river.  Further below Kaskaskia, on the eastern side, would be the Ohio River.  Of course in 1762 St. Louis did not exist.  But Cahokia, across the river did exist as did all the villages reflected further south on the map.

Both Cahokia and Kaskaskia began as Indian villages in which Catholic missions were established.  The Mission of the Holy Family was founded in Cahokia in 1699 by the Recollect Fathers to serve the Tamaroa and Cahokia tribes.  The Mission of the Immaculate Conception in Kaskaskia was even older, being founded by that great exploring Jesuit priest Father Marquette in 1675 near Starved Rock on the Illinois River.  In about the year 1700, the Kaskaskia tribe decided to move away from Starved Rock and find a better location in the south.  The Mission of the Immaculate Conception travelled with them. 

First they crossed the Mississippi and settled near a small river in what is now south St. Louis which the French called River des Peres.  But the Kaskaskia were unhappy with the location and soon were on the move down the Mississippi again, finally settling in 1704 near the confluence with what became known as the Kaskaskia River.  In 1714 the Mission built a stone church and by 1718 there was a village with French settlers, mostly fur traders and their Indian wives. 

 

During this time both Cahokia and Kaskaskia came under the jurisdiction of New France, governed out of Quebec.  But in 1717 the Illinois Country, as it was called, was transferred to the new colony of Louisiana, to be governed out of the new town of New Orleans.  The following year the governor of Louisiana sent the Sieur de Boisbriant north to Kaskaskia to establish an administrative center.  When Boisbriant arrived in 1718, he brought sixty-eight soldiers, hired workers and convicts (who were required to work off their debt to society), greatly increasing the European portion of the population.

Listening to the complaints by the Jesuit missionaries that the French traders were corrupting the Indian converts, Boisbriant divided the community into three parts.  The French stayed in Kaskaskia, the Kaskaskia Indians moved to their own village six miles up the Kaskaskia River and the Metchigamia Indians moved sixteen miles up the Mississippi.  Then Boisbriant set about choosing a site where he could set up operations. 

The site Boisbriant chose for the new fort was about 16 miles upstream from Kaskaskia, just below the new village of the Metchigamia, right on the edge of the Mississippi.  The first fort was small, only a wooden palisade shaped in a square with two bastions.  Upon completion in 1720, the center of government for the Illinois Country moved to the fort and a small village grew around it that was sometimes referred to as Nouvelle Chartres. 

Meanwhile, in 1719 a Frenchman named Phillipe Renault arrived from France having obtained the rights to conduct mining operations in the area.  He used part of his land grant to create a small village, just north of the Metchigamia village, where his workers might live.  He named it St. Phillipe after his own patron saint. The mining operations were not successful but the village remained after Renault left. 

There were two other villages that are not on that map.  In 1722, Boisbriant's nephew was given land between Fort de Chartres and Kaskaskia and he founded the small village of Prairie du Rocher which means “Prairie by the Rock”.  It was located about four miles south of Fort de Chartres.  If Nouvelle Chartres existed to support the Fort and Kaskaskia existed to support the fur trade, Prairie du Rocher was primarily intended as an agricultural community.

The town of Ste. Genevieve is also not on the map.  It lies on the west side of the Mississippi just above Kaskaskia. It is the oldest permanent European settlement in Missouri.  There is some dispute as to the date it was founded, oral tradition setting the date about 1735 but later historians believing it was not founded until closer to 1750.  In any event it was in existence in 1762.   Ste. Genevieve was founded mostly as an agricultural community, the land on the western bank being very fertile.

Of all the settlements in existence in 1762, only three survive today.  Cahokia remains and is essentially a part of the St. Louis metro area, with a population in excess of 16,000 in 2010.  It contains the Church of the Holy Family (formerly the Mission) which is an original French building.
 

Ste. Genevieve also remains, having a population in excess of 4,000 people in 2010.  It is a picturesque little town that still retains its French roots and has the best collection of French colonial houses in the country.  Prairie du Rocher also still exists as a tiny little village with a population of 604 in 2010.  Just up the road from Prairie du Rocher is the restored Fort de Chartres (only the Magazine is original) which is now operated as a state park.   

Nouvelle Chartres disappeared when its raison d’etre disappeared –the French surrendered the fort to the British who abandoned it in the 1770s during the War for American Independence and the Americans had no interest in using it.  All trace of it was eventually destroyed by the flooding Mississippi.

  

Kaskaskia had the most dramatic ending.  The town was destroyed in 1881 when the Mississippi River changed course.  The River, which once ran to the west of the town, completely shifted and now runs to the east and Kaskaskia, although still a part of Illinois, is now only reachable from Missouri. It is essentially an island.  There is still a Church of the Immaculate Conception on the land, but not much else. The Church is a brick building dating from the mid 1800’s that was moved brick by brick when the town was moved.   There is no town anymore but the church remains.

The enclave of French villages along the Mississippi were far from other French settlements but it is surprising how many travelers passed through them.  The French traders traveled widely and news traveled with them. And of course news traveled with military convoys traveling to and from the Fort.

 By 1762 it seemed that all the news was bad news. But that is another story. 

No More Doctor Who For a While

The mini-season of Doctor Who is now over and, all in all, I think it was a really good season.  Maureen Ryan, in her review of the season, was disappointed because she didn't think the episodes leading up the the conclusion showed enough of the Ponds. 

And that's what has bothered me most about this shortened season; not just the shortcuts and compressions, but the fact that the shortcuts and compressions didn't serve a Pond-worthy exit arc. A lot of time has been devoted to what the Amy and Rory mean to the Doctor -- and there were some sweet moments along these lines in "The Power of Three" -- but what about what they mean to the audience? We not only care about them as a couple, we respect Rory's steadfastness and devotion as well as Amy's courage and fearlessness. Why didn't we get to see more of those qualities? Why not show us more about what we loved about them -- not just their love for each other, but their bravery and agility as companions and characters? 

 Basically she thought that Amy and Rory were inconsequential to the first few episodes.

I agree with her but I considered that a feature not a flaw.  Oh don't get me wrong, I like Amy and Rory in general but I was ready for them to leave at the end of last year.  I was really not looking forward to this season because I thought it would be more of a mess on the Pond-front like last season was.  And it would be heavy on the Pond "exit arc". 

But fortunately, Maureen Ryan was right and they were fairly inconsequential in the first three stories and so it didn't matter.  I could just sit back and enjoy the adventures.  Which I did.  Very much.

I thought A Town Called Mercy was one of the best episodes of Doctor Who in a few years and partly because of the cinematography.  Oh sure it was full of cliche "western" movie shots but they all worked.  It was a visual treat.  And Murray Gold's score was good - I've missed his over the top movie style scores the last couple of years. 

I like Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.  It wasn't high drama or anything, just good old fashioned Doctor Who fun.   Considering that I usually don't like Dalek episodes, Asylum of the Daleks was very entertaining mostly because of Oswin.  I figured Oswin for a Dalek early on but that might be because I had no idea that the actress playing Oswin was the person cast to be the next Doctor's companion.  I thought the Amy/Rory are divorced story dumb but ... it didn't matter!  It wasn't really important.

Finally in The Power of Three we had a nice Amy/Rory story and I thought it should have ended with them choosing to stay home and not travel anymore.  But nooooo.   So we have the big farewell episode.

Why, I ask you, is it necessary to have big farewell episodes?  I know, I know, I'm jaded because my favorite companion, Sarah Jane Smith, was simply dropped off by the Doctor one day without a backward glance.  That's the way Companions are supposed to leave in my Who universe.  All this 21st century drama isn't my cup of tea.  But I knew it was coming so I could prepare.  

So, to me 4 out of the 5 episodes were very entertaining and the 5th was ok enough that I didn't mind watching it.  I call that a winner of a season.

250 Years Ago ...

In February, 2014 St. Louis will celebrate the 250^th anniversary of its founding by Frenchmen Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau.  With them were a group of men who came to be known as the “Thirty Worthies”.  

  

My ancestor, Jean Baptiste Becquet, was one of the Thirty Worthies and, together with his wife, children and in-laws, made the new community called St. Louis his home.  Rather than simply marking the occasion with one blog post in 2014, I’ve decided to spend some time over the next year blogging about the political situation that led to the founding of St. Louis and how Becquet came to become one of the Thirty Worthies.  

Don’t worry, this won’t be the only thing I blog about.

But before we meet Jean Baptiste Becquet and his family, let’s take a peek at the location of St. Louis before the French decided to settle it.  What would a traveler on the Mississippi River 250 years ago in 1762 have seen as their boat passed what is now the site of the Gateway Arch?  And who would this hypothetical traveler have been?

Certainly the traveler most probably would have been a Native American.  But the traveler could also have been a Frenchman traveling between Montreal, the capital of the French colony of New France, and New Orleans, the capital of the French colony of Louisiana.  Given the great distance between these cities it is surprising how often this trip was made in the eighteenth century.  But the lure of profit makes travelers of many people even when that travel is long and laborious.

If this hypothetical traveler began his journey in Montreal, he and his crew of boatment might have traveled by boat to the Great Lakes, through the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, stopping at Michilimackinac, one of the most important French trading posts.  They would have continued down Lake Michigan to La Baye, a French settlement that would one day become Green Bay, Wisconsin.  From there they would journey across what became Wisconsin, portaging all of their goods between local rivers, until they reached the Mississippi River near the settlement of Prairie du Chien.  From there it was a straight, but long, shot down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

 

As they traveled down the Mississippi they would pass the confluence of the Illinois River and the Mississippi on the eastern side of the river and then, shortly below that, the confluence of the Missouri River and the Mississippi on the west.  There they would notice how the river changed to a muddy brown color.  Just below the Missouri River they would probably portage around the Chain of Rocks, a rocky outcrop into the river that creates a series of dangerous rapids.   Then they would continue down the river past the site, on the western bank, that would one day become St. Louis.

Frederick Hodes described the location in his Beyond the Frontier:  A History of St. Louis to 1821 which I highly recommend.  There are many places to locate the history of the City of St. Louis but he has gathered all them into one location and most of the story I relate here is found in his book.  He tells us:

At the first place south of the confluence [with the Missouri River], a hill rose gradually from the riverbank, neither an inconvenient high bluff nor a dangerous low floodplain.  The nineteenth century traveler John Bradbury pointed out;  “Such situations are rare, as the Mississippi is almost universally bounded by high perpendicular rocks or loose alluvial soil, the latter of which is in continued danger of being washed away by annual floods …”. 

In 1762, there was no permanent settlement at this advantageous location but at an earlier period there had certainly been settlers.  The main geographical feature our hypothetical traveler would have noticed would have been the series of mounds along both sides of the Mississippi.    Between 100 BC and 900 AD one of the most advanced civilizations in North America made its home along the Mississippi where present day St. Louis is located and across the river at what is called Cahokia.   We know almost nothing about them, not even what they called themselves.  We call them the Mound Builders or the Mississippian Culture. I've written about the mounds here and here.

 Again, I’ll let Dr. Hodes describe it:

The number of mounds involved is astounding.  At the beginning of the twentieth century (after many of the mounds had been destroyed), Louis Houck located 28,000 mounds in eastern Missouri alone. This did not include the vast area of Illinois where they were obviously present.   The Mound Civilization style of design for the Mississippian culture spread over a vast area.  This apparent large population was in stark contrast to the small population of native inhabitants in the area when the Europeans arrived.  The population density for the Mound Civilization in this area may well have matched that of the great Indian civilizations south of the Rio Grande.

By the time Europeans arrived in the Mississippi valley, the Mound Builders had disappeared and the local native peoples had no oral tradition that told what happened to them.  But the mounds remained, including the great Cahokia Mound on the east bank of the Mississippi which still remains, as do about 45 other mounds in the general vicinity.  There were also many mounds on the west bank of the river including what was called the “Big Mound” which stood at what is now the intersection of North Broadway and Biddle Streets. The French would call it La Grange de Terre (“the Barn of Earth”). 

The Missouri Department of Transportation’s website gives a good description:

The St. Louis Mound Group was first described in detail by Henry Marie Brackenridge in 1814. He wrote that there was a group of nine mounds north of the village of St. Louis, located “on the second bank just above the town”. Brackenridge described the Big Mound as being located six hundred yards north of the other mounds. Big Mound was estimated to be one hundred and fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, and the flattened top was about 15-18 ft wide. The group of mounds formed a rough square border around a central plaza, with a semi-circular area on the west side formed by three smaller mounds. Brackenridge (1814:189) continued by stating “the enclosed [plaza] is about three hundred yards in length and two hundred in breadth”. The largest of the mounds in this group was known locally as the “Falling Garden” and was nearly 50 ft high, rising in three stages up the second terrace. In June 1819, Dr. Thomas Say and Titian Ramsey Peale surveyed the mound group and identified 27 “tumuli” (including Big Mound), although two of the features were probably not Indian mounds (Peale 1862; Marshall 1992; O’Brien and Wood 1998:286). Using a compass and tape, Say and Peale measured Big Mound at 319 feet long and 158 feet wide with a height of 34 feet. It was located roughly 1,460 feet north of the other mounds. The mound group was all but destroyed by the expansion of St. Louis in the mid-19th century, and no evidence of the mounds is currently visible. (emphasis mine)

These mounds would be the basis for the nickname St. Louis had as the “Mound City”.   Today only one mound remains in St. Louis and it was recently purchased by the Osage Nation which intends to build an interpretive center next to it to educate visitors about the Native American heritage of this area.

But although the Mississippian culture had disappeared, the land was not empty.  In 1762 Native American tribes hunted and lived throughout the region on both sides of the river. 

 

Although the members of what we call the Illini Confederation hunted on both sides of the river, their villages were mostly located on the eastern side of the river.  The members of this confederation spoke variations of an Algonquian language and were known to Europeans as the Peoria,  Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Tamaroa and Michegamea tribes, with the Kaskaskia and Peoria being the largest.

 

Again, Dr. Hodes:

The Illini were semi-nomadic.  In the spring they came together from scattered small winter villages, gathering at the summer village sites and planting their crops.  They went on the buffalo hunt from June to mid-July.  Next they returned to harvest their crops and set aside food for winter.  In the early fall they left the summer villages and returned to the smaller winter villages.  They continued to hunt for food but in smaller groups and for shorter periods of time.

On the western bank of the Mississippi the native Americans could be divided into two general groups which both spoke versions of Siouan languages.  One group had broken off from the Winnebago in Wisconsin and moved south and west.  They were known as the Missouri, Iowa and Oto.  They mostly hunted north of the Missouri river up into Iowa and west into what is now Kansas.  The Missouri tribe had a village along the Missouri river. 

The other group originated in the Ohio valley and had moved west.  They were known as the Osage, Kansa, Quapaw and Omaha-Ponca. They hunted south into Arkansas, in Missouri south of the Missouri River, along the Kansas River and up  into Northeastern Nebraska.

The largest and ultimately the most powerful tribe was the Osage who had originally settled the headwaters of the Osage River in Missouri and controlled the southwest third of what is now the State of Missouri plus a large part of northern Arkansas and even parts of Oklahoma and Kansas. Eventually the Osage split into two tribes:  the Grand Osage which stayed at the Osage River and the lesser Osage (or the Little Osage) who moved up toward the Missouri river and settled near the Missouri tribe.

Again, Dr. Hodes:

The Osage were semi-nomadic, and for long periods each year a large part of the tribe would leave the more permanent lodges and go hunting.  On the move small tipi structures composed the temporary villages.  The first hunt was for bear in early spring.  The Osage then returned in time to plant crops.  Next, it was off for the buffalo and deer hunt.  After that the tribe returned to harvest the crops.  Then came the fall hunt for buffalo and deer.  Also on these hunts, the tribe would gather nuts and wild fruit.  The elderly men, most of the women, and the young children remained at the lodges, looking after the crops while the rest of the tribe was on the move hunting.

Europeans traveled among the tribes on the western bank but in 1762 had not yet attempted a permanent settlement near the Missouri confluence.  For a brief period in the late 1600’s, French Jesuit missionaries had tried to settle, with the Kaskaskia Indians, on the west bank of the Mississippi near  a small river now located in south St. Louis and known as River des Peres.   But the Kaskaskia were unhappy with the location and moved back to the eastern bank of the river and further south near what is now called the Kaskaskia River.  Their French missionaries left with them.

In the 1720’s the French learned that a Spanish expedition had ventured north into present day Nebraska .  Although the expedition had been destroyed by the Pawnee, the French saw this expedition as the thin edge of the wedge and they were determined to maintain control over the region.  Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont, who had explored the Missouri River valley and lived among the tribes, was given command of an expedition up the Missouri River to establish a trading post.  He left New Orleans in winter of 1723 and made his way to the small French village of Cahokia, which stood south of the Great Mound of the Cahokias. With assistance from the Missouri tribe he made his way up the Missouri River to their village.   

Bourgmont established himself and his men nearby at what came to be called Fort Orleans and began to reach out to the Osage who were located to the south. Bourgmont also traveled into what is now Kansas, trading with the local tribes, including the Apache, and tried to cement their relationship with the French.  With him was a young French officer named Louis de St. Ange de Bellerive who would later be given the command of the French post at Vincennes on the Wabash river.  Bellerive would end his career in the newly founded St. Louis.

But Fort Orleans was not profitable for the French and by 1727 it was ordered abandoned.  Although historians know that it was located on the north bank of the Missouri River about ten miles northwest of Marshall, Missouri, the exact location has never been found.

The next French attempt to make a permanent presence along the Missouri  River was to establish Fort de Cavagnal in 1744 near what is today Fort Leavenworth.  Although french posts were often called "forts" they were first, and primarily, trading posts.  The military commanded because they were given the authority to resolve disputes, not because they were afraid of attack.  The first commander was Francois Coulon de Villiers.   It was the death in 1754 of his brother, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, while in the custody of George Washington that would begin the Seven Years War between France and England.   In 1762 that war was just ending and France was on the losing side. 

As our hypothetical traveler of 1762  floated past what would become St. Louis, Fort de Cavagnal still existed and he might have passed travelers headed up the Missouri River en route to it.  But within a few years it would be abandoned.   In 1804, Lewis and Clark passed its ruins and William Clark noted in his journal:

"the French formerly had a fort at this place, to protect the trade of this nation, the Situation appears to be a verry elligable one for a Town, the valley rich & extensive, with a Small Brook Meanding through it and one part of the bank affording yet a good landing for boats . . ."

Our traveler by now was probably tired and might have put in to spend the night on the east bank of the river at the small village of Cahokia (located a few miles south of the Great Mound of the Cahokias and four miles south of the future location of St. Louis).  

Cahokia was founded by the French in 1699 by Fr. St. Cosme and two other “Recollects” or members of the “Society of Foreign Missions of the Seminary of Quebec” as a mission to serve the nearby Tamaroa and Cahokia tribes.   It is said that on their way south to live among the tribes they crossed the Mississippi and camped in what would become the City of St. Louis before traveling south to explore as far as Arkansas.  Finally they returned in March 1699 and established the Mission of the Holy Family in the villages of the Tamaroa and Cahokia.  Eventually the settlement became known simply as Cahokia.   Although other Frenchmen arrived to live in the village, many taking wives from the local tribes, there were never many permanent Europeans living in Cahokia.  However, it received many French traders as visitors, being a natural stopping point on the journey from La Baye to points south or for travelers intending to travel up the Missouri River. And there was even an overland road that could take travelers south from Cahokia to the French villages in Southern Illinois.

 

The next morning our hypothetical traveler would be on his way.  Perhaps he might think that the western bank could provide a good location for a settlement.  But crossing the river couldn’t have been easy and why make life difficult?  After all, the French controlled both sides of the river.  The small settlement of Cahokia was a perfect stopping place for the few French who travelled up the Missouri.  There was no need to establish a settlement on the western side.

Within a few months that would change.  And life for the French in North America, including Jean Baptiste Becquet and his family, would never be the same.

 

Doggone Fun

Today, it was once again time for the annual dog swim at the local pool.  Each year, after Labor Day when the pools close to people patrons but before the pool is drained for the winter, a fund raiser is held for the local dog park.  For a small fee, you can bring your dog(s) to swim in the pool and cavort with the other dogs.

 The above picture doesn't really show how many dogs showed up with their people.  It was hard to take pictures on my iphone because it was so sunny.

Here's another but it still doesn't show everyone on all sides of the pool:

My sister took her dog Truman to swim and I tagged along.  Truman LOVES to swim and he must have remembered the last time he was brought to Swim Day because he practically dragged my sister from the car to the entrance of the pool complex. He was sooo excited.  And once in the water, it was impossible to get him out.  I swear he would retrieve until he was so tired he would drown.

Here is a very wet Truman waiting for his floating toy to once again be thrown into the water so that he can retrieve it.

And here he is, bringing it back (he was in the "lazy river" portion of the pool).

He had a great day and was one tired puppy when it was over.

Swamped with a Donkey and a Monkey

I'm almost to the end of my vacation book blogging and by now I'm kinda-sorta cheating because I didn't read these books on vacation; I read them just after I got back from vacation.  One I took with me to the lake but never got to it; the other I thought about taking to the lake but didn't throw it into the box. 

Swamplandia, by Karen Russell is a debut novel.  It is an odd story about thirteen year old Ava Bigtree who lives with her family at Swamplandia, a gator-wrestling theme park in Florida.  Her mother has died of cancer and without her the theme park and the family are falling apart. Ava's father neglects the children.  Her brother Kiwi abandons them.  Her sister Osceola disappears, having eloped with a ghost. A creepy guy called the Bird Man shows up and offers to take Ava to find her sister. I won't give any more away but you can see why I say it's an odd story.

As a first novel, it is promising.  It will be interesting to see what her second novel does. The biggest reason I didn't care for this novel was that the whole concept of a gator-wrestling theme park seemed like a gimmick to disguise the fact that she was writing yet another story about a modern dysfunctional family .   The truth is, I was bored by the descriptions of the gators and the wrestling.   Once you take away the alligators the plot didn't seem that original.  I was surprised by nothing that happened to any of the characters. 

Russell does, however, create interesting characters and does a fairly good job with the voices of Ava and Kiwi.  Despite being able to predict pretty much every thing that was going to happen to them, I still cared about Ava and Kiwi (Osceola, not so much).  That's a good achievement in a first novel and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Beatrice and Virgil is a novel by Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi which I really enjoyed.  I enjoyed this one much less.  It started out promising, an author very similar to Martel writes a novel involving animals that has unexpected success (just like Life of Pi).  But the author's next novel is unpublishable.  It isn't really clear why it is unpublishable but it has something to do with the fact that he tries to write about the Holocaust in a creative way that has never been done before.  Whatever that means.

The Holocaust has been written about so much I can't imagine there is a new way to write about it that would work.   And, in fact, the rest of the novel is supposedly Martel writing about the Holocaust in a whole new way involving the story of a strange taxidermist and two of his "stuffed" animals:  a Donkey and a Monkey named Beatrice and Virgil.  The taxidermist is writing a story about them which involves long (looong) conversations about nothing.  I mean nothing in the way that Seinfeld was about nothing.   The conversations were sometimes entertaining or informative and I would get engrossed only to finally realize that they weren't going anywhere.

I'm just going to admit right now that when I got to the end of this novel I felt like I had totally missed something.  I have no idea what Martel was trying to say or show with this novel.  And I do feel that Martel was trying to say something or show something.  I just don't think that people killing animals (even wholesale slaughter of animals) is the same as the murder of millions of Jews.  And I truly didn't understand why the bloody end of the novel was necessary.  I felt that perhaps I should go back and re-read the end of the novel but, the truth is, I didn't care enough to take the time. 

As I said a few posts ago, maybe this year it was just me and I wasn't in the mood for the kind of reading I brought with me.  Or maybe I chose novels that weren't as good as in past years.  But, whatever the reason, I found this summer's reading disappointing compared to other summers. 

Ah well, maybe my winter reading will be better.

The Swan of Tuonela

In my never-ending struggle with iTunes, I have yet again had to recover all of my music after a hard drive crash.  I've gotten smarter over the years and keep a back up on an external hard drive.  But this time I decided I was really tired of the whole process (which seems to happen to me at least once a year) so I subscribed to iTunes Match which allows me for a yearly fee to upload all the music I have from my own CD's up into the Cloud - there to be retrieved whenever I need it.   It takes forever to upload it, but that is not the point of this post.

Since I was going through the whole time-consuming process I decided to load all of my remaining CDs into iTunes.  These were the CDs that for various reasons I had never thought it worth the time to load previously, mostly classical music CDs.  I never feel like listening to them except at home where there is a CD player right there.  But now they are available in the cloud to me through all of my various devices.

Before you read the rest of this you might want to click play and listen as you are reading:

As is probably predictable, this process caused me to listen to some pieces that I hadn't heard in a few years.  One of them was Sibelius' The Swan of Tuonela.  I've always liked Sibelius and Swan is a lovely, calm, soothing work that features an English Horn.  Although I've always liked the piece I don't think I've ever heard it live and I've never bothered to find out why it is called The Swan of Tuonela.  I think I knew that the English Horn is meant to be the Swan, but that was about it.

So, I looked it up.

The Swan of Tuonela is "tone poem" - a piece of orchestral music meant evoke the content of a poem, story, or painting.  Swan is part of a four part suite of tone poems (Op. 22 Lemminkäinen) based on stories from Finnish mythology.  Just as in Greek mythology the underworld (Hades) is separated from the world of the living by a river (Styx) with a ferry man (Charon), so in Finnish mythology the underworld (Tuonela) must be reached by crossing a river (Tuoni) via a ferry (this time the ferry man is a woman - Death's Maid).  Tuonela is actually an island (I assume it is in the middle of the river). 

In the myth, the hero Lemminkäinen wants to win the hand of a daughter of Louhi, a powerful witch and the queen of a land called Pohjola. Louhi has many daughters and she sets the suitors impossible tasks in order to win them.  Lemminkäinen must cross to Tuonela and kill (or capture, depending on the version) the swan that swims around it.  He fails.  He is shot with a poisoned arrow and dies, falling into the river.  But his mother searches heaven and earth for his body and eventually is able to bring him back to life.

The Swan of Tuonela is the second part of Sibelius' suite.   The music is meant to evoke the image of a swan swimming around the island of the dead, with the English Horn playing the part of the Swan.

Thus endeth the lesson.

More Summer Book Reports

When I go on vacation I take a whole box of books.  It helps that my parents drive up to the cabin in advance with a large vehicle and I can send the box with them.  I save books throughout the year, thinking "oh, I'll read that on vacation."  Even now that I regularly read on my iPad, I couldn't imagine not having a box of books to read.  And of course I don't get through all of them.  I live in fear, however, of running out of books on vacation.  At one time there was a fairly good little bookstore in Fort Frances Ontario.  If it rained and we went "into town" I could pick up a book.  But it closed long ago.  So it is important to come prepared.

I think, however, that the iPad experience this year caused me to put fewer "real" books aside for vacation.  As the date approached when the box was due at my parents I started to worry that I didn't have enough books.  So I made a trip to my local book store and picked up a couple to throw in.  I ended reading them both.

The first was Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.  Truthfully, I think it was the cover art that attracted me.  It was a photograph of an elegant woman on an outdoor chaise lounge with a man in evening clothes sitting on a chair in front of her with his back to us, cocktails on the table next to them.  The cover said it was about Manhattan during the Depression.  It started, however, in the 1960's at an art exhibition where an artist was exhibiting photographs he took during the Depression.   The novel is told in the first person (mostly) and the narrator and I got off to a bad start.

The narrator, who isn't immediately identified, is describing the 1960's:

So all of us were drunk to some degree. We launched ourselves into the evening like satellites and orbited the City two miles above the Earth, powered by failing foreign currencies and finely filtered spirits. We shouted over the dinner tables and slipped away into empty rooms with each other's spouses, carousing with all the enthusiasm and indiscretions of Greek gods.  And in the morning, we woke at 6:30 on the dot, clearheaded and optimistic, ready to resume our places behind the stainless steel desks at the helm of the world.

The narrator then, a few paragraphs later, mentions Val, a man who the narrator calls sweetheart.  Ok, I thought. A gay couple in the 1960's.  Ok.  But then it turns out the narrator is a woman.  Wait.  A Woman?  I went back and read the first few pages again wanting to see why I had assumed it was a man.   Perhaps because no woman in the 1960's would have said that "we" woke at 6:30 ready to resume "our" places at the desks at the helm of the world.   This was the 1960's!   Women weren't at the helm of the world! Or at least not enough of them to be a "we".

From that point on I became obsessed with instances where I thought the (male) author screwed up the voice of the female narrator.  It didn't happen often but it did occasionally and it really pretty much ruined the whole experience for me. 

The other book I picked up at the last minute was Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (not that Elizabeth Taylor, the other one - the author).  I had never read any of Ms. Taylor's novels before but had heard good things about them so I thought I would give this one a whirl.  I quite enjoyed it.  Mrs. Palfrey is an elderly widow who moves into a hotel for elderly people - one of those residence hotels that used to exist everywhere.  It is actually a sad story but not maudlin.  I enjoyed Taylor's style which is spare but still descriptive.

From the window she could see - could see only -- a white brick wall down which dirty rain slithered, and a cast-iron fire-escape, which was rather graceful.  She tried to see that it was graceful.  The outlook - especially on this darkening afternoon -- was daunting; but the backs of hotels, which are kept for indigent ladies, can't be expected to provide a view, she knew.  The best is kept for honeymooners, though God alone knew why they should require it. 

I will definitely read more Elizabeth Taylor.

Finally, I started The Absolutist by John Boyne before I left on vacation and I finished during my layover.  It is another World War One novel and I think in finishing this one, I have them out of my system now.  At this point I was pretty sure I had read everything about the Great War and couldn't be surprised.   Again you have a damaged man who has returned from the War. Seen that before.  He seems haunted by another character that you eventually learned was shot by a firing squad for refusing to fight.  Seen that before.  Soon it becomes clear that the returning character is not just a former soldier, he's a gay former soldier.  Seen that before too.  But in the end Boyne did manage an ending that I had not predicted and explored a little bit of the human psyche that I hadn't seen explored in other novels.  So on the whole it was a good reading experience.