Writing Madly, Birthday NotMoney

My brain's been full lately of the novel I'm working on, based in the Neddeth's Bed universe ('ware: Neddeth's Bed is an intermittent, first-draft worldbuilding exercise, not to be confused with finished product!), and it (the manuscript) has been eating my life, in a much slower way than I would wish. Describing things always takes so much longer than reading said descriptions! It feels like the characters are moving at a snail's pace. So I apologize for being absent so much, but I really, really want to get this thing done! So close...

That said, I had a birthday (harrumph), and was given some very cool stuff. So, at the risk of eroding a reputation for actually having thoughts, I will present you with the following very interesting filler.

It seems that during World War I, in Austria and Germany, there was a moment when the metal that coins were made of became more valuable than the money it represented. People began hoarding coins, and during the war, the metal which was available was needed for the war.

The shortage of metal meant people were having trouble, well, making change. So individual cities, local banks and citizen's organizations and so on began to take it on themselves to print what were called "Notgeld," which means "emergency money" or "necessity money", mostly colorful paper notes in low denominations (although they also used linen, tin foil, porcelain, and coal, to name a few unusual materials).

Notgeld began during the war and carried on into the period before and slightly overlapping the height of hyperinflation, when it took the proverbial wheelbarrow of money to buy an egg (more on that next post), which happened in the early 1920s. So I suspect a lot of these notgeld were printed. And, since they were really, really beautifully-designed (this was the height of German Expressionism, after all), people began to collect them. And, since people collected the pretty ones, there began to be some competition about who could produce the prettiest.

Which goes to show that even in the worst of all possible worlds, there are microcosms of beauty.

So the long and short of it is, my friend Gwyan got me some paper notgeld (and one porcelain coin which doesn't scan well) for my birthday. And they are really, really beautiful. So I will share a selection of them with you...

My Own (Borrowed) Menagerie

My last post got me thinking, so here is a nominal set of interesting and strange animals I might consider putting around my Baroque pavilion.




• The Aye-Aye, a "native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world's largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unique method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out."


• The yeti lobster, a very recently-discovered creature which lives, of course, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where all the really weird and interesting creatures come from nowadays.


• The cyclops kitten was an accident, and unfortunately didn't live very long. Not totally unheard-of, just less horrible than most.


• Pill Bugs, or woodlice, or roly-polies, are weirder than you think: they are actually crustaceans, related more closely to lobsters and shrimp and so on than to insects or spiders. They are one of the world's old, (relatively) unchanged species, much, much older than the species I think of as old, like sharks and kauri trees, and they have some pretty interesting and strange habits.


• I thought the Liger was a joke when I first heard about it, along with its relative the Tigon. Or at least, some kind of hoax. But no, it's not - and they are enormous, I don't know why.


• My favorite creature: the Tarsier. I have a tiny picture clipped from a magazine of a tarsier staring with its trademark surprised look at the camera with a big bug sticking out of its mouth. For some reason, it's been a symbol for me of beloved dorks everywhere, and has inspired me to go on being silly despite everything.


• The Star-Nosed Mole is just odd. Always has been, always will be.


• Leafy Sea Dragons are something I have always wanted to see. They are endangered because they are so particular about their environment and eager collectors are always trying to take them home (where they die). But in their home environment - unbeatable.


• I had to include a Komondor because, although they aren't particularly exotic, they have great hair. They do make you scratch your head and wonder how many other strange kinds of dogs you didn't know about? (And yes, they look like a tall version of Dougal, from the Magic Roundabout)


• Grimpoteuthis, or Dumbo Octopi, are benthic creatures, living at extreme depths (up to 400 meters), and are some of the rarest octopi. Plus they use at least three different types of locomotion. Cool.


• Blobfish. What can I say?

There are a few others who aren't quite weird enough, such as Cantor's Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle,


the Long-eared jerboa,


or Pink fairy Armadillos, but they're definitely strange. If I had space, I might consider them.



Come to think of it, many of the above creatures are a bit too attractive. I'd want to make my menagerie a bit more creepy, but the strangest and most disturbing creatures I know of are all parasites, which would make them difficult to display - except in jars, and that is really something more for a Cabinet.


Just for balance, though, perhaps I ought to include the Coconut Crab, a giant terrestrial hermit crab. I do find myself actually glad that I don't live where these creatures roam, cracking coconuts and garbage cans with their bare claws (thanks, Jeff!).

In any case, my beautifully-constructed, circular, conceptual menagerie needs only a beautiful (borrowed) pavilion to complete it, and I can go to sleep secure in the knowledge that I have expressed all the (borrowed) power and wealth I have to hand. Who needs royalty after all?





Thanks to World's Strangest Looking Animals for some of the pictures.

Getting Small: Toys and Miniatures

People have been fascinated by miniatures for millennia. The ancient Egyptians made miniatures of the things which a dead person should have in the afterlife; the Romans were very fond of lewd little figures for self-apparent reasons. There are endless tiny sculptures of gods and goddesses from the Stone Age through the Bronze age and onward.


There are, of course, mundane examples of miniatures, things that are neither romantic nor religious. I encountereded some when we went to Croatia: moving to another country with children is tricky. What toys do you take? What other supplies? Puzzle books? Journals? (No, this is not going to be a "parenting is wonderful" blog post).

My answer to that is: Playmobil. Plenty of Playmobil.

If you're not familiiar with the stuff, imagine a company that makes sets of what my family calls "little people," about two inches high, with almost any tiny attendant articles you could imagine for what my kids call a "set-up:" A roman colosseum, for example, with lion, tiger, gladiators, weapons, and even an emperor to give the "yea" or "nay". Knights and castles; pirates and pirate ship (including working cannon and cannon balls, guns, swords, and a little island with a skeleton); native americans with tipis and bits of rocky landscape, complete with plants and waterfall. And on and on.


My personal favorites are the Safe-Crackers, who all sport five o'clock shadows and come with a safe, money, gold bars, a suitcase, a flashlight, and a tank of acetylene. Or the HazMat people, with suits and masks and special clean-up vacuums.


In any case, the best thing about Playmobil is that, if your kids are (like mine were) stuck in a foreign place with no friends, they can get really creative with it. In fact, it wasn't until we did go away that I fully appreciated the power of childrens' play and the incredibly flexible possibilities in that kind of miniature universe. Not so much that the HazMat crew can become astronauts, but that the fence-panels can become a tree-platform can become a house can become a raft, with the onion bag from the kitchen as a fishing net. And so on.

But most importantly, they are small. Whole worlds can be created, stories unfolded, and imaginary landscapes enacted. It is better than TV, because it is under your control. The tininess allows you to make things happen, and if you're someone (like a child) who has little say in what happens around them, it is a boon.

One short story which had a great impact on me when I was a kid was Microcosmic God, about a man who creates his own race of tiny, intelligent creatures, whose generational span was very small, and who could therefore evolve fast enough to tackle all kinds of problems and discoveries. He has a way of communicating with them which was a bit like a teletext machine to God. When the government finds out what he's doing, they send bombers to destroy the island, so the scientist asks his little people to protect him: and they do. A smooth, impenetrable wall is erected, bomb-proof and pretty much anything-else-proof, and so there he is, trapped in there forever with his little people.

This story kept coming back to me when my kids, isolated from Croatian children's culture and unable to make any headway at the local parks, would retreat to their room and take up the little people. Voila! Protection, microcosmic-style.


Controllable mannikins aside (where is Mini-me when you need him?), there is something about tiny reproductions of our inner and outer life which continues to fascinate us. Wandering around in Napoli, Italy, on the way back from the wonderful Ospedale delle Bambole, I got lost, and found myself in a district where they sell all kinds of tiny figures and items to do with the creches, or nativity scenes, of which the Neapolitans are so proud.


There were tiny baskets of fruit, tiny wagons, tiny tools, tiny trays full of tiny fish; there were miniature sausages and angels and people burning in hell (what that has to do with nativity scenes, I have no idea). There were political figures (in varying sizes) and teeny-weeny loaves of bread. The creches themselves, I learned, are traditionally made from natural materials: cork bark, wood, and moss, and are prized for their natural-seeming rustic quality.



They were completely absorbing: we looked at tiny things for literally hours. The array was stunning. You could barely walk from one shop and you'd find another shop, with entirely different sets of the same kind of stuff. They even had DIY bambole (dolls):


(Curiously, sprinkled in among them were other strange and tiny things, things that couldn't possibly be related to creches. For example, tiny versions of the red peppers that seem to be symbolic of some very particular Neapolitan magic, whether for good luck, or fertility, or what, I could never tell -


- except I got the sense that it was related to the Comedia del Arte's Pulcinella character - the precursor to Punch - a personality whom the Neapolitans clearly identify with. There was one display which had statues of Pulcinella as well as relatively large models of his mask, with a long nose, and larger (nose-sized) red pepper things - and several rather similar things which were decidedly phallic, leaving me wondering what, exactly, the symbolism of the peppers might be.)


Later, in the Archeological Museum, I came across this mind-boggling miniature Pompeii, the ruins of which lie just across the Bay of Naples. It is a perfect 1:100 scale model and shows the excavation as it was in 1879, complete with some of the paintings before they were worn away.


After I walked around it for awhile I noticed a little info plaque which told me it had been made from cork-bark and bits of wood - just like a creche (and thus, by conjecture, made by local model-makers in the creche tradition). It reminded me of the work of Charles Simmonds, who in the 1970's used to build tiny buildings out of teensy clay bricks into the neglected buildings and odd urban corners of Manhattan. I only know of one which survived, and it's in the stairwell at the Whitney, left over from his show there.


What makes people so obsessed with making tiny scenes? Prisoners building bridges and towers out of toothpicks, boys and their model airplanes. There is a level of control, as I said - one only has to look at the wide world of gaming miniatures and dioramas, famous or fantastic battles modeled on a 1" to 6' scale, to see a desire to manipulate worlds, to be the microcosmic god and step back from the painful intimacy of everyday life (I am ignoring the strategy side of this hobby, but still... actual miniatures are not necessary to the study of strategy - they just make it more fun).

I won't go too far into the idea of actually shrinking real people so that they are miniature versions of themselves, like in the Twilight Zone, where the people discover the sink doesn't work and all the food is made of plaster. But think of the old wives' tale about the witch who put her husband in a bottle. And then, of course, there's the miniature of a real person, containing nail clippings or hair from that person, said to be so powerful in voudun. How satisfying, to reduce your enemy to doll-size and then inflict all manner of misery on them! Of course, there's always the chance that they will do the same to you... and I have to admit to a creeping horror of anything small which might be alive (see my post on puppets and humuncula).

...But miniatures are not only about godlike manipulation. Maquettes, for example, are models built to help explain an architectural or sculptural commission to people who are no good at understanding arm-waving and verbal explanation: "[A maquette] is used to visualize and test shapes and ideas without incurring the cost and effort of producing a full scale product. It is the analogue of the painter's cartoon or sketch." [wiki] By building a scale model, the sculptor or the architect can make a layman "see" what they're getting - and at the end of the day, some maquettes become valuable in their own right, and are displayed by such museums as the Museo dei Bozzetti, in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Similarly, traveling salesmen as far back as the 1700's would carry perfect miniatures of their products so that prospective buyers could examine the merchandise before putting in an order. If you wanted a set of chairs, for example, you would look at the miniature to see how well it was put together. If the miniature was good, chances were that the real thing was good, as well. This was especially handy for such things as iron fireplaces and ceramic fixtures, like toilets, which were carried about the countryside to sell product to far-flung individuals.


In the seventeenth century, at about the same time that Wunderkammern were in vogue, "baby houses" - a precursor to dolls' houses - were all the rage among European women, comparable in obsession to the cabinets which housed their husbands' collections. A woman might spend as much money on one of these "cabinet houses" as a real house would cost. The one above "...was commissioned by Petronella Oortman, a wealthy Amsterdam lady. The house is remarkable in that all of the components are made exactly to scale. Petronella ordered miniature porcelain objects from China and commissioned furniture makers and artists to decorate the interior." (courtesy of the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam).


Then there's Queen Mary's doll house, made on the whim of "...the queen's cousin, Princess Marie Louise, who discussed her idea with one of the top architects of the time, Sir Edwin Lutyens at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1921. Sir Edwin agreed to construct the dollhouse and began preparations. Princess Marie Louise had many connections in the arts and arranged for the top artists and craftsmen of the time to contribute their special abilities to the house. As a result, the dollhouse has an amazing collection of miniature items that actually work... The bathrooms are fully plumbed that includes a flushable toilet and miniature lavatory paper. In addition, well known writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote special books which were written and bound in scale size, and painters provided miniature pictures. Even the bottles in the wine cellar were filled with the appropriate wines and spirits, and the wheels of motor vehicles are properly spoked."


And that, I think, is taking it too far, although my 6-year old daughter (the proponent of Playmobil) might disagree.



Links:

- Little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves: this is wonderful and amazing.

- Playmobile as prep for an operation

- Playmobil re-enactments of news items:



- A very interesting, if dense, article about miniatures, childhood, and fetish in the Quay Brothers' Street of Crocodiles.

...And lastly, I came across this extremely creepy video when looking for stuff on the Opedale delle Bambole - look carefully, and shudder

The Rise and Fall of the Green Fairy

Swiss-y Stuff, part 1


On the spur of the moment we decided to go to Switzerland for a couple of days. True, it's four hours from Bourgogne, where we are staying, to the Jura, the Swiss mountains on the edge of France, but we had recently heard about an option for sleeping in the straw at farms around the Swiss countryside, so what had been unaffordable before was suddenly within our grasp.

So what do you think of when you think Switzerland? I had all sorts of programmed preconceptions which had gone completely unquestioned: I saw Switzerland as this country full of ultra-clean people who were money-minded and held themselves apart from the world. There was also, of course, Heidi and the sort of "Hills Are Alive" views (yes, I know that movie's about Austria); the low wooden houses and the Swiss chalets; ski resorts, cuckoo clocks, cheese and snow. Oh, yeah, and the Matterhorn. And yodelling.

However, when we got there I think my daughters summed it up: "I thought it would be all cold and..." said the elder, and the younger finished her sentence "...Swiss-y." Instead we found this place with a wild variety of - well, attractive - attractions: a nationwide system of excellent bike trails; old underground mills full of wooden gear-work; a cliff-walk, where you hang on ropes and creep along above a hundred foot drop; two separate luge ("la ligne fée") and toboggan runs; a strange entertainment where they take your bike up to the top of a mountain and then let you ride down real fast (1000 foot descent in 4 minutes); and the farm we stayed at had not only animals and so on but a zip line, a trampoline and wine with the (relatively) inexpensive swiss-french farm dinner.

All right, this is sounding like a travelogue. But when we left for this trip the thing that I had forgotten was that this was the canton of Neuchatel, and the town we accidentally chose to stay near was called Travers. As in, the Val-de-Travers. As in, absinthe country. And two valleys away? Le Locle and Chaux-du-Fond: the center of clock-making country.

So here we had two days in Switzerland, with nary a yodel nor cuckoo clock nor Matterhorn in sight. Instead, we had the farmer pouring out glasses of absinthe as an aperitif (and using the fresh spring water pouring into the horse trough to water it down). A local bakery had at least eight different labels of the stuff from local micro-distillers.


According to the label of La Motisanne, an artisan absinthe made by Roger Etienne (which by the way has the lot number written on the label by hand), "This home made elaboration is an authentic Absinth from the original region of this drink, the Val-de-Travers. Distilled to a recepy [sic] of the time of prohibition it develops a remarkable balance and an exceptional harmony of plants, which is the essence of its reputation. Ingredients: Alcohol, water, big and small Wormwood, aromatic plants."

Absinthe has, in the past twenty years or so, acquired a reputation as a fascinating drink, given its spotty history and the extreme rituality associated with its drinking. The traditional French way of drinking is to pour it into the bottom of a special fat, conical stemmed glass. Then a slotted spoon is suspended across the rim of the glass with a lump of sugar on it, and icy water is poured through sugar and spoon to sweeten the drink. Proper absinthe will louche, or go cloudy, when water is added.


The myth of absinthe's mind-altering properties is based on the idea that a chemical in wormwood called thujone causes hallucinations and other mental instability, and even addiction. Thujone works on the GABA receptors in mammals: "Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)... the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system.... disrupted GABAergic signaling has been implicated in numerous and varied neurological and psychiatric pathologies including movement and anxiety disorders, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and addiction."


Nowadays, it is held that thujone taken in large doses doesn't do much other than cause muscle spasms - and in mouse overdose it has caused convulsions. But it seems it doesn't actually make you hallucinate. There is some speculation that much of the bad rep that absinthe had came from the fact that there were many inferior types of absinthe out there being drunk, especially, by bohemians that couldn't afford the good stuff and, like bathtub gin, it did rot their brains - but not because of the wormwood. It was more likely due the poisonous additives and colorants used, or the fact that the old stuff tended to contain 70 to 80 percent alcohol, as opposed to 40% for more standard brandies and whiskeys.

There is some evidence, however, that the herbal elements in absinthe actually have a mild speedball effect: some of them are stimulants and some are sedatives, and the resulting effect is one of heightened alertness and calmness. Wormwood is an antiparasitic, and some of the herbs also contain painkillers. So you can see why the drink was so popular in the 19th century, when the advent of the Industrial Revolution was filling the cities with soot and stink, and the average worker, without laws governing how long their work-days were, hardly had time to sleep at night.


"According to legend, absinthe began as an all-purpose patent remedy created by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor living in Couvet, Switzerland, around 1792... [but] a certain Major Dubied acquired the formula from the Henriod sisters and in 1797, with his son Marcellin and son-in-law Henry-Louis Pernod, opened the first absinthe distillery, Dubied Père et Fils, in Couvet. In 1805 they built a second distillery in Pontarlier, France, under the new company name Maison Pernod Fils. Pernod Fils remained one of the most popular brand of absinthe up until the ban of the drink in France in 1915."

"Absinthe’s popularity grew steadily through the 1840s, when absinthe was given to French troops as a malaria treatment. When the troops returned home, they brought their taste for absinthe with them. It became so popular in bars, bistros, cafés, and cabarets that, by the 1860s, the hour of 5 p.m. was called l’heure verte (“the green hour”). Absinthe was favored by all social classes, from the wealthy bourgeoisie to poor artists and ordinary working-class people.


"By the 1880s, mass production had caused the price of absinthe to drop sharply. This, combined with a wine shortage [due to vine death from grape phylloxera] in France during the 1880s and 1890s, caused absinthe to become France’s drink of choice. By 1910, the French were drinking 36 million litres of absinthe per year, a quantity that was greater than their consumption of wine."[wiki]

In a curious twist, the winemaker's association, looking to the horrors of Prohibition in America, decided to take control and steer the temperance movement in France. Accordingly, they got together with the teetotalers and made the green fairy into the fall guy, working hard to publicly associate absinthe with crime, poor health and degeneracy. Various anti-absinthe people, thick in the movement, were inspired to produce scientific studies "proving" absinthe's evil properties:

"One of the first vilifications of absinthe was an 1864 experiment in which a certain Dr. Magnan exposed a guinea pig to large doses of pure wormwood vapor and another to alcohol vapors. The guinea pig exposed to wormwood experienced convulsive seizures, while the animal exposed to alcohol did not. Dr. Magnan would later blame the chemical thujone, contained in wormwood, for these effects." [wiki]


The campaign was so successful in changing the popular conception of the drink that by 1915, when the French finally banned it, it was illegal in most of Europe - and the lingering cultural effects were relatively far-reaching. The word "louche", for example, now means "Of questionable taste or morality; decadent." The roots are "French, from Old French losche, squint-eyed... from Latin luscus, blind in one eye.)" It looks from the outside like the term louche, as applied to absinthe, comes from a reference to the whitening eye of cataract, but the French dictionary carries all three meanings: squinty, dissolute, and cloudy. It would be interesting to see if one of the meanings evolved according to the media frenzy of a lost era.

Being careful and conscientious people, the Swiss make of absinthe was considered to be of the finest quality. Their product is clear, being the product of distillation, and therefore referred to as la Bleue, a term originally used for bootleg absinthe but now applied liberally to most Swiss product. The green absinthes come from a process wherein some of the herbs are then soaked in the distilled absinthe. This adds color (chlorophyll) and some additional subtleties of flavor.

I once tried to make my own absinthe by distilling it in vodka with an old still my father gave me, following a recipe I found God knows where, but it tasted awful. The exact ratio of herbs is important, and some of the herbs aren't available in the US. So now I stick to the occasional attempt at perfume manufactury, and hope it doesn't taint the still.

Absinthe has had a resurgence in legality now. Some places, such as Spain and the Czech Republic, never banned it, but also didn't seem to have the knack of making the proper distilled stuff, producing instead something called "Bohemian-Style Absinth", or just "Absinth" (without the "e"), which is inferior in flavor and apparently not too good for you. But most of the places which once produced it - and then banned it - have now repealed their laws, except for the French, who curiously don't allow liquor labeled "absinthe" to be sold in France, but do allow the same thing to be sold as long as the label says "liqueur à base de plantes d’absinth" or some such. But they do label it as absinthe when exporting it. Go figure.


As of 2005 the people in the Val-de-Travers are able, once again, to legally produce their traditional drink. Little mountain villages like Côte-aux-Fées (in English, Fairyside), which were nothing but a collection of Swiss-style farmhouses (uh, and a small and discreet building housing the company headquarters/factory of Piaget) are now proud to show everyone they are "the Cradle of Absinthe." And my, how the Green Fairy has changed.




Part 2: And Clocks on the Side - coming soon.


Links:

The Virtual Absinthe Museum has lots of interesting stuff, including a good selection of period posters and drawings about absinthe which you can buy.

One of the best books I've seen on the subject - Absinthe: History in a Bottle. Great stuff: