tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32840096212599339752024-03-13T09:41:16.753-07:00Hits and MissesHunting, fishing, cooking, and other critical aspects of life.Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.comBlogger118125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-33151200233867119402019-10-05T08:06:00.000-07:002019-11-22T06:06:57.223-08:00Wizards Metal Renew Polish<a href="https://wizardsproducts.com/metal-renew-8-oz/">Wizards Metal Renew Polish</a> is new to me, but I must confess to all the enthusiasm of a convert. Browsing the web, I came across Mark Harrell's video, <a href="http://www.badaxetoolworks.com/tool-care.php">"Maintaining your Saws"</a> on his site Bad Axe Tool Works. Given the outstanding reputation of these saws, I figured that if Mark Harrell recommended Wizards Metal Renew Polish for cleaning saw blades I should try it out. Reader, I love it.<br />
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You may well ask, What is it? I had no idea where to shop for Wizards Metal Renew Polish, so I took the easy route and ordered it from Amazon. It turns out to be part of a product line focused on car car. It's also available through chains like NAPA. It removes discoloration from a variety of metals, including steel, pewter, and brass (be warned, though: if the brass is lacquered, it will also remove the lacquer). You can apply it with a cloth and then wipe it off and polish the metal with a clean cloth. Unlike some other polishes, it has an agreeable smell.<br />
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I tried it first on the blade of a heavily oxidized back saw, a Jackson, a secondary line for Disston. As I wanted to save the saw's etch if possible, I applied it generously and gently used a sanding block with 320 grit wet-or-dry paper. You can tell immediately that it's working because the cream-colored liquid starts turning brown. I wiped the blade off and repeated the process. The etch was long gone, it appeared, but the blade once more looked like steel. What I like about the result is that it retains the look of use and age. The steel doesn't look overly polished, just well-cared for.<br />
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With "well-cared for" in mind, I looked around for what else might illustrate how Wizards Metal Renew Polish works if I took some "Before" and "After" shots. And I realized that the table of my Delta band saw provided a relevant example. I bought this band saw in non-working condition at least twenty-five years ago. I got it working and cleaned it up then, but I haven't touched the band saw's table since. So here's the Before shot:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpK7eFQlJwEdZlBdwwYFIhmoxsE5N0H6LlkIxhW1Nhqz2CF_Q9439k41nvgl8K8PKBJH0mCm7BblEc0W1GZmSMfMloP30Zlf8YKJTvAeq8qDtnxvPVAplmc72zfarK353emSHV9CSbADDJ/s1600/polish+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpK7eFQlJwEdZlBdwwYFIhmoxsE5N0H6LlkIxhW1Nhqz2CF_Q9439k41nvgl8K8PKBJH0mCm7BblEc0W1GZmSMfMloP30Zlf8YKJTvAeq8qDtnxvPVAplmc72zfarK353emSHV9CSbADDJ/s400/polish+1.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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And here is the outcome after two applications of Wizards Metal Renew Polish followed by buffing the table with a cloth:<br />
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The table now is clean enough to reflect some of the colors of the polish's container. I personally don't want it any shinier, but if you do you might go on to use <a href="https://wizardsproducts.com/metal-polish-3-oz/">Wizards Metal Polish</a>.<br />
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The label of Wizards Metal Renew Polish says nothing about corrosion protection. To protect the newly cleaned steel, I wiped it down with Break Free CLP, waited a few minutes, and then wiped it dry.<br />
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<br />Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-36064940183311235052019-03-18T06:58:00.002-07:002019-04-01T06:35:32.086-07:00Another French Comment on BrexitGiven that Brexit is a mess with negative economic implications for the United Kingdom, it's a momentary relief to learn that not everyone is filled with doom and gloom. In <i>The Independent</i>, Jon Stone reports that France's Europe Minister Nathalie Loiseau has named her cat "Brexit."<br />
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Why? Because "he meows loudly to be let out but just stands there when I open the door."Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-6744503872822491522019-01-05T07:58:00.000-08:002019-12-09T08:01:32.006-08:00Dillinger's With Saw, Plane & Chisel: How to Build Historic American Furniture<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">As a collector of American Colonial furniture for over fifty years and a user of hand tools for over thirty, I read Zachary Dillinger’s </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">With Saw, Plane & Chisel: How to Build Historic American Furniture </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">(Popular Woodworking Books, 2016) with keen interest. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver what its title promises.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dillinger’s six projects span a good hundred years. With detailed instructions and excellent photographs, Dillinger shows how to build a Jacobean chest of drawers, a William and Mary side chair, a Queen Anne stool, a Queen Anne desk, a Chippendale bookcase, and a Hepplewhite hunt board. But how historically accurate are these reproductions? A critical look at these projects soon reveals that they are generic, based less on specific surviving examples than on stylistic features generally attributed to whatever so-called period is in question. The sources for these six projects remain vague: Dillinger says that the William and Mary side chair copies a chair he owns and that the Hepplewhite hunt board comes from Vermont, but he does not give sources for his other projects. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even worse, three of his six projects distort what historic examples looked like. </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dillinger’s version of a “Queen Anne” stool, for example, is nothing less than grotesque. Upholstered stools with cabriole legs were common in England with its more stratified society but rare in America. Squatty with bandy legs, Dillinger’s stool looks as if it had been whelped by an English bulldog. His “Queen Anne” desk also has faulty proportions: Colonial slant-top desks with drawers were generally about as wide as they were high. At 29 1/2” wide, Dillinger’s desk is unusually narrow for its height of 41”, so it looks top heavy. His “Chippendale” bookcase possibly could be considered an example of early 20th century Colonial Revival style, but it certainly isn’t representative of American bookcases from the second half of the eighteenth century. It’s a modern bookcase with some period details applied to the carcass the way icing is applied to a cake.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Half of the six projects, therefore, present distorted versions of Colonial American furniture. To that extent, they are not remotely “historic.” Dillinger’s </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">With Saw, Plane & Chisel</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> is a useful guide to hand tool techniques, but anyone who wants to understand period styles or reproduce furniture that looks right will be far better served by Jeffrey Greene’s </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">American Furniture of the 18th Century: History, Technique and Structure</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> (Taunton Press, 1996) or by Norman Vandal’s </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Queen Anne Furniture: History, Design and Construction</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> (Taunton Press, 1990).</span></span></div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-62088023535193311052018-06-10T16:34:00.000-07:002018-09-20T06:08:28.405-07:00A Singles AdI just discovered this singles ad in my files: you may have seen it a few years ago, but it bears rereading. The ad appeared in the Atlanta <i>Journal</i>.<br />
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"Single black female seeks male companionship. Ethnicity unimportant. I've a very good looking girl that loves to play. I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping, fishing trips, and cozy winter nights lying by the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand. I'll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me.<br />
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Call xxx-xxx-xxxx and ask for Daisy."<br />
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Over 15,000 men found themselves talking to the Atlanta Humane Society about Daisy, an eight-week-old Black Lab.Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-5917890140809503872018-05-03T09:51:00.000-07:002018-05-05T07:31:15.733-07:00Just What Is A Leisenring Lift?James ("Big Jim") E. Leisenring of Allentown, PA, was a tool maker by trade whose expertise at fly fishing led to him becoming known as the Wet-Fly Wizard of the Brodheads. He published <i>The Art of Tying the Wet Fly</i> in 1941 and died ten years later. His name has endured among fly fishers because he invented the "Leisenring Lift," a technique of fishing a wet fly or nymph underwater. <br />
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I thought I understood this technique: you fished the fly in the typical manner, casting it upstream and letting it drift down as drag-free as possible. At the end of the drift, you raised your rod tip so that the nymph rose in the water column, thereby imitating a nymph swimming to the surface to metamorphose into a dun. I had tried this lift from time to time, but never had enjoyed success with it.<br />
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Earlier this spring, while reading William C. Black's engaging survey, <i>Gentlemen Preferred Dry Flies: The Dry Fly and the Nymph, Evolution and Conflict</i> (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2010), I came across a quotation from Leisenring that stopped me in my tracks. What I thought I knew about the Leisenring Lift seemed to be altogether mistaken, so I decided to read what the Wizard himself had written. Leisenring's book was reprinted by Crown with additional material by Vernon ("Pete") S. Hidy in 1971 as <i>The Art of Tying the Wet Fly & Fishing the Flymph</i> ("Flymph<i>" </i>is Hidy's coinage for a nymph near the surface or in the surface film that is about to become a dun).<br />
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Leisenring describes the lift in his last chapter, "Fishing a Wet Fly". His technique is based on first spotting a trout and then casting a fly upstream some fifteen feet or more above the trout. As the fly sinks to the bottom, the angler follows it with his rod, allowing no slack but being careful not to make the fly move unnaturally. <br />
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"Now watch the fly," Leisenring instructs the reader, invoking a dramatic scene: "It is almost to him, and would only have to travel about four more feet to pass right by his nose without his looking at it unless it can be made to appear alive and escaping. At this point the progress of the rod following the fly is checked, and the pressure of the water against the stationary line and leader is slowly lifting the fly."<br />
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As the fly rises in the water current, Leisenring continues, its movement attracts the attention of the trout. As Leisenring explains, "Now the fly becomes slightly efficient or animated and deadly, and the trout notices it. The hackles or legs start to work, opening and closing, and our trout is backing downstream in order to watch the fly a little more, because he is not quite persuaded as yet. Now you can see the fly become even more deadly. As more water flows against the line, the fly rises higher off the bottom and the hackle is working in every fiber. It will jump out of the water in a minute, now, and the trout is coming for it. Bang! He's got it" (p. 123).<br />
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The Leisenring Lift, then, is not caused by the <i>angler</i> raising the rod tip after the wet fly or nymph has come to the end of its drift. Instead, the angler stops tracking the nymph's movement with his rod tip partway through the drift, some four feet or so upstream from a specific trout's position. Stopping the rod makes the<i> current</i> begin lifting the fly to the surface. From the trout's point of view, it seems to be alive and to be escaping, and so the trout goes after it.<br />
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In the next to last paragraph, Leisenring repeats that elevating his rod tip is not what makes the fly seem alive and therefore desirable to the trout: "I do not try to impart any fancy movements to my fly with my rod but simply allow the fly to advance naturally with the current over the stones and gravel until I check its progress gently by ceasing to follow it with my rod. Then the slight tension from the water pressure flowing against my leader and line causes the fly to rise slowly, opening and shutting the hackles, giving a breathing effect such as a genuine insect would have when leaving the bottom of the stream to come to the surface. The water will do all that is necessary to make a fly deadly if it is properly tied" (p. 124).<br />
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Twice, therefore, Leisenring states that checking his rod's movement causes the water current's pressure to move the fly upwards. He does not elevate his rod tip to perform the Leisenring Lift.<br />
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That much seems clear. One complicating factor is that apparently Leisenring practiced other techniques as well. Dave Hughes knew Pete Hidy, commenting in <i>Wet Flies</i> (Stackpole Books, 1995) that Hidy had told him that Leisenring and he had meant to write another book on fishing the wet fly. "'The Lift,' Pete said, 'was just one of many techniques that Jim used. It's too bad that today everybody believes it was the only method he used'" (p. 29).<br />
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I believe we can see another method in an account by Ed Zern. Leisenring gave Zern a demonstration of nymphing one day on the Brodheads. As Zern tells the story in <i>The Masters on the Nymph</i> (ed. J. Michael Migel and Leonard M. Wright, Jr.; Nick Lyons Books, 1979), he was sitting on the bank, fishless, when Leisenring appeared (pp. 257-58). Zern told him he had been reading <i>The Art of Tying the Wet Fly</i> and didn't understand how one could let the fly drift freely in the current and still maintain contact with it. "I'll show you," Leisenring said. <br />
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Leisenring then proceeded to stand quite close to a run and flipped the fly upstream, holding the rod tip high as the fly swept down beside him and then downstream. Zern comments that the fly traveled no more than fifteen feet. It was obvious to him that it drifted freely and Leisenring would have felt, and probably seen, any trout that touched the fly. The demonstration over, Leisenring went on downstream. Zern stepped into the river, cast as Leisenring had, held the rod tip high, and proceeded to catch one brown trout after another!<br />
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Several points seem worth noting about this episode. First, Zern did not ask Leisenring to demonstrate the Lift (perhaps because the term was as yet unknown in the early '40's?). Instead, Zern asked him how he maintained contact with the fly as it came drifting down the bottom. We can't tell from Zern's description whether Leisenring let the water current raise the fly or not. I'd say perhaps not, as the fly continued to drift downstream. He wasn't trying for a specific trout but fishing the water. So why was the rod tip high? I'd guess, and it's no more than a guess, that first Leisenring and then Zern had to hold the rod high to avoid drag from other currents, much indeed as one must when fishing a dry fly.<br />
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It's a shame Leisenring and Hidy never managed to write their book on fishing the wet fly. We have Leisenring's own words describing the Lift, and we can extrapolate from Ed Zern's account that Leisenring also fished a nymph on a short line with rod tip held high when he was fishing the water and not targeting a specific trout. What his other techniques for fishing a nymph or wet fly consisted of is a question that can't be answered.<br />
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But now I know that I was wrong about how to do the Leisenring Lift, I'm going to see what happens when I do it the right way. What worked once should work again. I'd also like to hear from anyone who has used the Lift successfully. Please comment. Stay tuned, and tight lines! <br />
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<br />Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-72768674752837619302018-01-07T13:11:00.000-08:002018-01-30T07:01:09.281-08:00Handplane Essentials by Christopher SchwarzIn a time when books often provide less than their titles promise, Christopher Schwarz's revised and expanded <i>Handplane Essentials</i> (Cincinnati, OH: P+W Media, 2017)<i> </i>does the reverse: it is a compilation of his articles from the last fifteen years that goes well beyond what a beginning woodworker needs to know. <br />
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Sensibly, Schwarz doesn't go over the history of hand planes, already well described by books like Seth Burchard's translation of Josef Greber's <i>The History of the Woodworking Plane (1991), </i>John M. Whelan's<i> The Wooden Plane: Its History, Form, and Function </i>(1993), and Garrett Hack's <i>The Handplane Book</i> (1999), which also deals with how to use planes. Instead, he divides his book into five sections, dealing successively with Basics, Sharpening, Techniques, History & Philosophy, and Reviews of high-end planes. <br />
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Because the book is a compilation of articles, there is some repetition. For example, we read a bit too often about the three essential bench planes, a jack, a jointer, and a smoother. And there are a few minor inconsistencies in this repetition, as in mentioning the availability of differently angled plane beds for the Lee-Neilson smoothing plane in one place but not in another (cf. p. 41 and p. 178).<br />
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But so much information is here, in fact, that a more accurate title would be <i>Hand Planes: Essentials and Beyond. </i>I can imagine someone who just beginning to use hand tools becoming overwhelmed. (That person might be better served by John Sainsbury's <i>Planecraft: A Woodworker's Handbook, </i>1989.) Conversely, anyone with some experience is bound to learn some new things from <i>Handplane Essentials</i>. Including an index would have been useful (and might have called attention to instances of repetition), but one can make notes on the blank end pages.<br />
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<i>Handplane Essentials</i> is a relatively large book, 8 1/2" by 12", weighing in at nearly 3 1/2 pounds. Thankfully, Chris Schwarz's talents as a writer plus the excellent black and white photographs make <i>Handplane Essentials</i> a pleasure to read, if a bit heavy to hold while reclining. I rarely finish a 350 page book and wish that it had been longer, but I did so here. Highly recommended.<br />
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-6163863712110572902017-12-09T11:46:00.001-08:002019-12-16T06:40:27.475-08:00Knife, by Tim HaywardTim Hayward's <i>Knife: The Culture, Craft and Cult of the Cook's Knife </i>(Quadrille Publishing, London, 2016) is an appealing book, with excellent photography by Chris Terry, first-rate illustrations of knives by Will Webb, and Shokunin Manga by Chie Kutsuwada. But the more one reads of the text, the more one is put off by its over-the-top rhetoric.<br />
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Hayward is clear that he intends <i>Knife</i> not to be comprehensive but selective, reflecting his own personal views. It's not surprising, therefore, that he never mentions the Inuit <i>ulu</i>, a wonderful chopping and cutting tool, nor the existence of ceramic knives, despite his avowed love of technology. But he seems not to know how handy a small knife with a serrated edge is: not only does it slice tomatoes easily, it saws through corrugated cardboard and plastic clamshell packaging. <br />
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His own views owe less to personal experience than to the desire to write vividly. The result is pretentiously vacuous. Take the sentence from the last paragraph of his introduction: "A knife has a beautiful purity of purpose, it's almost the perfect expression of form that precisely follows function, and yet it is at once a seething mess of elusive, impalpable qualities." <i>Some</i> knives have a purity of purpose, agreed, but knives are too varied (as the book itself illustrates) to be lumped together and then abstracted as "a knife." Form in a knife can indeed follow function, so what is the quality that calls for "almost" and hinders or prevents that "perfect expression of form"? And if to some degree these claims are valid, how can "a knife" at once be "a seething mess of elusive, impalpable qualities"? A seething mess? In a knife? Give us a break!<br />
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In like fashion, a horizontal cut is described by Hayward as "the utterly lethal and desperate 'last slice' cut, in which a piece of (usually) bread or meat is squashed flat to the board with the palm of the hand, the fingers stretched back and up in fervent but usually futile hope, and the blade sawn between hand and board" (p. 15). Ever since I first read Marcella Hazan nearly forty years ago, I have been using that cut to slice a chicken breast horizontally in half so it cooks faster and stays tender. I've never, ever cut myself. So what are we to make of "Utterly lethal"? "Desperate"? "Fervent but usually futile hope"? This is a seething mess of feverish rhetoric.<br />
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Let me just touch on other problems with Hayward's statements: <br />
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Steel is<i> not</i> "a metaphor for permanence, solidity and purity" (p. 18).<br />
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Slicing a lemon with a carbon blade will <i>not</i> turn the lemon black, as he asserts (p. 45). The citric acid of the lemon will discolor the blade, however, unless you clean it promptly. <br />
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Making a knife blade from steel involves two heat treatments, not one: he ignores tempering the steel. <br />
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A newly purchased Chinese cleaver does <i>not</i> arrive "with a lifetime of patina and dripping with butch chic" (p. 78)--at least none of mine ever has. <br />
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His first rule of carving, "Rest the Meat," contains an amusing mistake: let the meat rest until its core temperature has dropped to 50 degrees Centigrade <i>or 32 degrees Fahrenheit </i>(my italics, p. 174).<br />
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Leaving aside the empty rhetoric, Hayward's major shortcoming is ignorance about sharpening knives: not only does he misunderstand wire edges, he doesn't realize what steeling and honing a blade accomplish. As a consequence, he abrades his knives to get them sharp. That is a waste of good steel.<br />
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Sharpening poses a problem for many people, but the solution is not to be found in Hayward. Rather than spend the money for Hayward's <i>Knife</i>, buy a book or video on how to sharpen knives. One book I can recommend is Ron Hock's <a href="http://www.hocktools.com/products/perfectedge.html">The Perfect Edge</a> (it's also available in video). You'll learn about steel from a master blade smith as well as learn how to sharpen a knife properly.<br />
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-55799851493026970142017-09-02T07:19:00.001-07:002018-11-28T06:21:12.887-08:00Millers Falls Hand Drill No. 1, Before and After a Paint Job<br />
Hand tool woodworkers are periodically confronted with a dilemma: either the tool you want is no longer in production, or, if it is once again being made, it's pretty expensive. Tools manufactured to a handyman's price point are almost never of adequate quality. Buying a cheap tool and then having to replace it because of its defects wastes both time and money.<br />
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One way out of this dilemma is obvious: buy used tools. Yes, you will make mistakes, but typically those mistakes will cost you less than buying a new tool of poor quality and then having to replace it with a better one. One old tool I especially like is an eggbeater hand drill with double pinion gears made nearly 100 years ago by Millers Falls. Here is a picture of my well-used Millers Falls No. 1.<br />
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My reasons for liking this drill are simple: if I'm restoring a piece of antique furniture, I try to take it slow and carefully. An electric drill is indispensable, but it can go <i>zzzzzp!</i> and suddenly you have a hole to patch, one that due to Sod's Law is always in the worst possible place. Cranking a hand drill, you proceed slowly, so you have ample time to realize you are on the verge of making a mistake. </div>
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These eggbeater drills are pretty straightforward, but I don't recommend buying one sight unseen. One or more of the three jaws in the chuck can be missing, screws can have vanished, and the handles of older ones--they started being made in the late 19th Century--can be cracked. If the drill is otherwise fine, cracks in the handle can be re-glued with <a href="http://www.caglue.com/HS-4-bHot-Stuff-2ozb-thin-CA-glue_p_11.html">Hot Stuff</a>, a glue with no surface tension that wicks into cracks. The No. 1 has a bit container in the handle, but the eight bits may or may not be there. For me, that's not important because the chuck accepts drill bits up to 13/64". </div>
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At some point, you may consider repainting the drill. I rather like the indications of honest use on a wooden tool: they remind me of the better woodworkers who used this tool before, and imitation is the first step toward mastery. But badly worn paint seems a different matter, and I recently felt the urge to restore the paint on my Millers Falls. After all, these drills when new were meant to call attention to themselves: the wood on my No. 1 is cocobolo; what now appears to be a brass collar was nickel plated; and the iron frame was splendid in glossy black with the drive wheel in glossy red. </div>
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A local hobby store had a wide selection of gloss enamels, including a red that replicated what the now faded remnants must have looked like when new. I unscrewed the drill's handle, unscrewed and lifted off the drive wheel, and scraped the chipped black paint off the frame. After lightly sanding the metal and degreasing it with brake cleaner, I applied two coats of enamel. To my eye, it looks much better than it did: decidedly not new, but better cared for. Some Break-Free CLP in the two lubrication holes on the back of the frame and some dry lube on the gears made it run even more smoothly.</div>
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If you want to have the ultimate version of this kind of drill, check out two websites. One is <a href="http://www.wktools.com/index.asp">Wiktor Kuc's</a> website. According to <a href="https://www.popularwoodworking.com/woodworking-blogs/chris-schwarz-blog/better-than-new-restored-eggbeater-drills">Christopher Schwarz</a>, when Wiktor Kuc has finished restoring a Millers Falls drill, it's better than new. The other is Ted Hoeft's at <a href="http://lonepinetoolworks.com/about-me.html">Lone Pine Toolworks</a>: he restores a variety of tools, charging according to the amount of work involved. Judging by his photos, he does beautiful work.<br />
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For myself, I'm happy with the middle road between buying a remade drill meticulously restored and buying a ratty one and leaving it alone: that five dollars I spent on gloss enamel and the few hours I spent cleaning, painting, and lubricating it have resulted in a Millers Falls No.1 that looks as good as it works. Come to think of it, a couple of coats of Tru-Oil would bring up the sheen of the cocobolo handle and knob and make it look even better.<br />
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-23431862715799067112017-07-06T05:54:00.002-07:002017-08-23T05:45:23.913-07:00Republican vs. Democrat: A Longer Perspective<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">My wife and I recently acquired an antique sideboard.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The surfaces are made of walnut, and the interior woods are yellow pine and tulip poplar.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">These interior woods strongly suggest a Southern origin.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Mahogany was readily available at this time in coastal cities of the South, but the use of walnut indicates it was probably made in the "backcountry" of the South.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Hoping to find out more about the furniture from this area, I borrowed though Cornell’s library </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Southern Furniture 1680-1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> by Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown (1997).</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Their book wasn't helpful in regard to our sideboard, but Prown's description of how the Southerners living in coastal cities regarded the people living inland started me thinking of the way Democrats tend to regard Republicans today and vice versa.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The longer-settled, more urban, better educated, and more mercantile inhabitants of the 18th and early 19th centuries in the South were unquestionably prejudiced about the inhabitants of the backcountry. As Jonathan Prown comments, "Regarded by outsiders with a combination of fear, fascination, amusement, and contempt, the backcountry represented a place of cultural chaos. Nonurban and noncommercial, the early backcountry rarely is hailed for its cultural achievements. Instead, the region more often is cited for its cultural anomalies--whiskey stills, minimal education, family feuds, desolate living conditions, first-cousin marriages, and rowdy behavior." It's much to the point that these aspects resonate even more strongly today.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As David Hackett Fischer has persuasively argued in <i>Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America</i> (1989), the settlers in the Southern backcountry <i>were</i> different from those who had come to the colonies earlier because they came from a different part of Great Britain and determinedly kept to their own traditions. Caricatured--think of <i>Ma and Pa Kettle, Hee-Haw,</i> or<i> Justified</i>--these anomalies soon were appropriated. With a reversed kind of pride, "backcountry" became "country." Jeff Foxworthy’s red-neck jokes going viral are an obvious example. Those in the backcountry looking outward toward the coastal population probably saw themselves as embattled defenders of traditional values of hearth and home, family and kin, the Bible and the rifle. They were the pioneers of what became known as Manifest Destiny, those who made America great. And they are still with us as those who passionately believe that Donald Trump will indeed make America great again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From the Republicans’ point of view, the best government is the least government (as long, of course, as reformers don't touch their Medicare benefits). In the 18th century, this backcountry distrust of government and the governing class was rational: North Britons wanted to escape oppressive regulation by the government; French Huguenots and German Protestants wanted freedom of religion. They all wanted land of their own and to have like-minded people as neighbors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But, as my son used to say as a five-year-old, "That was then and this is now." In our time, regulation by the federal government is the only hope of preventing the excesses of 21st century capitalism, be they fraudulent investment practices, pollution of air, ground, and water, the crippling cost of medical operations, or the obscene pricing of medications. As Trump and the Republican majority in Congress make government (except for the Defense Department) smaller, it is a near certainty that they will destroy America in order to save it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What used to be a cultural divide in the South has gone national, and it cannot be overcome by ever more narrowly pointed political targeting of fly-over country. We have far less to fear from terrorists from without than from fanatics within. Cultural chaos is at hand. Unfortunately, we need something more than "a combination of fear, fascination, amusement, and contempt" to restore a moderate balance of power. I have no suggestions for a solution, but I can say that unless one is found quickly, we are entering the last days. It's one thing for America's greatness to wane; it's another for it to implode.</span></div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-50892577771915579112017-05-16T11:26:00.000-07:002017-06-10T05:49:40.282-07:00The Need for Revision in James' The Ambassadors<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Henry James’ <i>The Ambassadors</i> may well be the world’s worst-written great novel. His prose calls out for for an editor with a red pencil. At best, a number of his sentences have to be read twice to be comprehensible; at worst, some remain incomprehensible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Here, in a least-to-worst listing, are nine faults I see in <i>The Ambassadors</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1. <b>Confusion over pronoun references. </b></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Some of the dialogue so mixes “he” and “him” or “she” and “her” that one has to mark up the text to figure out who is saying what.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">2. <b>Comma omissions. </b>T</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">he story goes that when the novel was going to be printed James systematically removed commas from the text that had been published in serial form in </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The North American Review</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">As a result, we are faced with many unpunctuated heaps of modifiers:</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Mme. de Vionnet makes a remark with a look of</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“refined disguised suppressed" passion on her face (IX.1).</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The similar endings in “ed” in that sentence come through strongly in another heap:</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“He was . . .</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">easy and acute and deliberate—unhurried, unflurried, unworried, only at most a little less amused than usual” (VIII.i).</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Here the “ed” endings chime strongly, while James’ habitual use of negatives in this novel—“un-, un-, un-” plus the internal rhymes of “hurry, flurry, worry” together form a sentence that pleads to be rewritten.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">3. <b>Telling, not showing</b>. Often</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">, James uses lists to convey information about a character. These lists are almost like getting something down in brief, a kind of shorthand </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">that he would come back to and expand--except he doesn't do so.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Take his description of Mamie on the balcony in IX.iii:</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">a second look presents her as “beautiful brilliant unconscious” Mamie, a Mamie used rather shabbily, but “absorbed interested and interesting.” </span>This pattern of listing <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">reaches its extreme in James’ statement when Strether thinks about the cessation of Mrs. Newsome’s letters.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">In her silence, Strether reflects, she demonstrated a greater intensity:</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">"deep devoted delicate sensitive noble” (VII.iii). </span>For this reader, his listing is unpersuasive: we may know what James wants us to think, but there's no context to make us respond accordingly.<br />
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An even greater problem concerns Strether's characterization. Near the end of the novel, we have character after character telling Strether how "wonderful" he is. The problem is that saying so doesn't make it so. James simply has other characters testify to this without providing the context for such a view.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">4. <b>Odd locutions.</b> In their first meeting (I.i), Maria Gostrey remarks to Strether, “My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it.” “Too many”? Another, Strether to Chad: “You see therefore to what tune I’m in your family” (IV.1).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Another example: “He [Chad] was modestly benevolent, the boy—that was at least what he had been capable of the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had one’s self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him” (III.ii). </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">5. <b> Excessive Repetition of significant words and phrases.</b> “Came over” in the fourth paragraph of II.i is an example. How many times does “case” occur? So many times it becomes a crutch. Equally overused are “in” versus “out.” “Save” occurs so often it becomes tedious.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">6.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Mysterious allusions that remain mysterious.</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Waymarsh seems to function primarily as a foil to Strether.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Rather than being open to what Europe in general and Paris in particular have to offer, Waymarsh glowers grandly at what’s before him.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> This glowering is described as Waymarsh's sacred rage. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“It’s the sacred rage, Strether had had further time to say [to Maria Gostrey]; and this sacred rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the description of one of his periodical necessities” (closing paragraph of I.iii).</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Repeated periodically (II.i; IV.ii; VI.ii; X.ii), this phrase “sacred rage” never becomes comprehensible, let alone conveniently so.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The term “pagan” is another. Strether realizes relatively early on that Chad must be a pagan: “Pagan—yes, that was, wasn’t it? what Chad <i>would</i> logically be. It was what he must be. It was what he was” (IV.1). But what does this mean? And why does James capitalize it near the end of this chapter?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">7. <b>Excessive rhetoric.</b> Some extended metaphors simply expire from their own weight. For example, in II.ii, Strether is taking a walk: "</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">He wasn’t there for his own profit—not, that is, the direct; he was there on some chance of </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">feeling the brush of the wing of the </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">stray spirit of youth.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">He felt it in fact, he had it </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">beside him; </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> sound, as </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">from far off, of the</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> wild waving of wings.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">They were folded now over the breasts of </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">buried generations; but a</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> flutter of </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">slouch-hatted loiterers . . . "[and off</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> the sentence goes in another direction.]</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Perhaps aligned with “pagan” are the sacrifices to strange gods on alien altars.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Strether comments to Bilham, “I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether” (X.i). Are we meant to respond to such phrases with appreciation of Strether's facetious irony?</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">I don’t believe so.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">If this is the case, James is altogether too heavy handed.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">And if it’s not the case, why is James employing “embrued with blood,” the kind of heightened rhetoric derived from Senecan tragedy and delightfully parodied in the Pyramus and Thisby episode in </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">?</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">8. <b>Strether’s incomprehension that love can be carnal. </b>Strether’s realization that Chad and Mme. de Vionnet are physically intimate is set up as the climax of the novel, and he is shocked, truly shocked, by this knowledge. But, as indeed Maria Gostrey asks in effect, What did he expect? She herself wondered if Strether were grandly cynical or grandly vague (XII.iii). Perhaps the most we can say to excuse Strether’s incomprehension is that he took Bilham’s reassurance that their relationship was “virtuous” to mean “chaste,” but that only ducks the question of why James chose to have Strether be so credulous.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">9. <b>Inept portrayal of women. </b>James is not good at portraying women in this novel as anything other than perceptive listeners who can help a man formulate his thoughts about other issues. Mamie Pocock is a good example. Her role in the novel appears to be the person who can save Chad (II.i). For Strether, she represents the best of American womanhood: “she was handsome and portly and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring” (IX.iii). Even her teeth are lovely. And, unlike her sister-in-law, she turns out to be altogether on Strether's side. But what does James make Strether reflect? “Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would always be the person who, at the present sharp hour, had been disinterestedly tender” (IX.iii). Why on earth would James include the dismissive attitude of the first half of that sentence? Might it tell us more about James than about Strether?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Maria Gostrey starts off as someone attractive, but her function in the novel is soon reduced to being a sounding board for Strether. Were she more, we might be bothered by Strether’s paying no attention to her assertion,“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you,” and then following that with: “There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world” (XII.v). The scheme of the novel demands that Strether finally stand on his own two feet and face an uncertain future with less than adequate financial resources, so we can understand why James has to have Strether insist on his own disinterestedness. Whether we are persuaded that is what someone like Strether actually would do in these circumstances is a different matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sarah Pocock is almost completely unrealized. The second of the two ambassadors, she exists only as the real presence in Paris of Mrs. Newsome's unyielding will in Woollett, Massachusetts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Mme. de Vionnet fares much better, in part because Strether has to ascertain who she is and her status. Even when he has, however, James is careful to keep her at a remove from Strether. When Strether meets her accidentally, it’s in the sacred precincts of Notre Dame. Strether appears to be afraid of entanglements with her, even though he is determined to “save” her. As I noted above, he has a less than accurate notion of how Chad relates to her until, in a pastoral scene that owes much to landscape painting, he finally sees them on the river. After that episode, James has Strether lecture Chad on how he should treat her: if Chad were to leave her, he would be “a brute,” “guilty of the last infamy,” “a criminal of the deepest dye” (XII.iv). At the risk of appearing insensitive to the text, I detect no irony here on James’ part. He appears to believe what Strether says but, unfortunately, what Strether says is not only hyperbolic but absurd. Like saying to a child, “Don’t even think of putting string beans up your nose,” Strether's condemnation implants the very idea he means to prohibit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is a long list of negative aspects, I realize. What, then, are we to make of this novel? At moments, it is wonderful. I daresay that no one who has read it ever forgets Strether lecturing Bilham: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to” (V.ii). At its best, the novel represents a relatively cultured older American trying to come to terms with a European mode of life he doesn’t understand. If he makes some mistakes in enlarging his comprehension, he imagines most of it correctly, and through this sustained effort of imagination he gains his own independence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have never read a biography of James, so I have no idea about what was going on in his own life while he was composing <i>The Ambassadors</i>. Did he write it in his own version of a hurried, flurried, worried state of mind? If so, why didn’t he revise it when it was going to come out in novel form? There’s no question he could write better prose: <i>The Beast in the Jungle</i> was also published in 1903, and its prose is deft, direct, and to the point. (It’s also possible, I suppose, that a good editor went over that piece before it saw print.) As the old saying has it, writing is comparatively easy; it’s revision that’s hard. Good as <i>The Ambassadors </i>is, it would have been even better if James had spent more time revising.</span></div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-63796959270099903962017-03-31T06:46:00.000-07:002017-03-31T06:46:29.619-07:00An Army Flying Instructor Hoist with His Own PetardIn his memoir, <i>Burning the Days </i>(1997), James Salter gives a wonderful example of an action backfiring on its initiator. A flying instructor in the Army Air Force (as it was called in WW II) had a favorite trick he'd play on students who were slow to learn how to land:<br />
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"After exhausting the usual means, above the traffic pattern somewhere he would shake the control stick from side to side, banging the student's knees--the front and rear sticks were connected--to get his attention. He would then remove the pin holding the rear stick in place and, with the student twisting his neck to see what was happening, wave it in the air and toss it over the side, pointing at the student with the gesture <i>You, you've got it</i>, and pointing down. It had always worked. One day for still another lagging student he rattled the stick fiercely, flourished it, and tossed it away. The student nodded numbly, bent down, unfastened his own stick, and ignoring the instructor's cries, threw it away also. He watched as the frightened instructor bailed out and then, fame assured, reached down for the spare stick he had secretly brought along, flew back to the field, and landed."<br />
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<i>Burning the Days</i> has the best account I've read of what it was like fighting the Russian MIG's in the Korean "conflict." Salter eventually left the Army to become a writer of novels and screenplays, but the second half of his memoir doesn't match the interest of his West Point and flying days. The first half, though, is well worth reading.Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-88678526077211302912017-02-10T12:37:00.000-08:002017-05-18T10:29:47.794-07:00You Have to Laugh: Voter FraudWe all know that the Democrats fraudulently rigged the vote for the presidency, right? That's why Hillary beat Trump in the popular vote: voter fraud!<br />
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I just caught up on one instance of fraudulent registration, and golly gosh, guess whom it concerns? None other than Gregg Phillips, one of Trump's go-to experts on this topic! Here's what <i>Salon</i> reported on Jan. 31, 2017--you just have to laugh:<br />
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"A man who President Donald Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, the Associated Press has learned.<br />
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"Gregg Phillips, whose unsubstantiated claim that the election was marred by 3 million illegal votes was tweeted by the president, was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states. He voted only in Alabama in November, records show.<br />
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"In a post earlier this month, Phillips described 'an amazing effort' by volunteers tied to True the Vote, an organization whose board he sits on, who he said found 'thousands of duplicate records and registrations of dead people.'<br />
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"Trump has made an issue of people who are registered to vote in more than one state, using it as one of the bedrocks of his overall contention that voter fraud is rampant in the U.S. and that voting by 3 to 5 million immigrants illegally in the country cost him the popular vote in November.<br />
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"The AP found that Phillips was registered in Alabama and Texas under the name Gregg Allen Phillips, with the identical Social Security number. Mississippi records list him under the name Gregg A. Phillips, and that record includes the final four digits of Phillips’ Social Security number, his correct date of birth and a prior address matching one once attached to Gregg Allen Phillips. He has lived in all three states.<br />
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"At the time of November’s presidential election, Phillips’ status was 'inactive' in Mississippi and suspended in Texas. Officials in both states told the AP that Phillips could have voted, however, by producing identification and updating his address at the polls.<br />
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"Citing concerns about voters registered in several states, the president last week called for a major investigation into his claim of voter fraud, despite his campaign lawyer’s conclusion that the 2016 election was 'not tainted.'<br />
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<b>"'When you look at the people that are registered, dead, illegal and two states, and some cases maybe three states, we have a lot to look into,'</b> Trump said in an ABC interview [DJT's incoherence; my emphasis]."<br />
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Oh, and Mr. President? While you're investigating this topic, would you mind glancing at how many black and Hispanic votes were suppressed by legislative rulings in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas after the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder (2013) that those states no longer needed to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965? Just a thought!<br />
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Update on voter fraud: Salon also reported on 3/22/2017 the arrest of Steven Curtis, the former chair of the Republican Party in Colorado, for voter fraud.<br />
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According to Salon, <span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16px;">The former chairman of Colorado’s Republican Party, who just last year suggested on his “Wake Up!” talk radio show that Democrats were largely to blame for fraudulent votes, has been charged with voter fraud and forgery.</span></span><br />
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According to the Weld County District Attorney’s office, Curtis allegedly filled out his ex-wife’s absentee ballot for last year’s presidential election after it had been sent to his house, and forged her signature. He was charged with one count of misdemeanor voter fraud and one count of forgery, a Class 5 felony, according to local media. The 57-year-old radio jock, who served as state party chairman from 1997 to 1999, faces up to three years in jail if convicted.</span></h4>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-63947582454762811922017-01-15T14:40:00.000-08:002019-04-11T06:32:15.780-07:00Spinach Pasta with Fresh Spinach and Gorgonzola SauceI live in the Northeast, and when the temperature goes below freezing, I start to think about pasta with gorgonzola sauce. This is not a dish for dieters, but hey--you need calories to keep warm in the winter, right? Rationalizations aside, if you try this <i>please</i> spend a bit more money for imported gorgonzola (preferably piccante) and imported pasta. Otherwise, I don't see why you'd bother.<br />
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Ingredients:<br />
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1 16 oz. package of spinach pasta (if you can't find this, substitute fettuccine)<br />
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped<br />
1 cup of heavy cream<br />
1/2 pound Italian gorgonzola, cut into bits<br />
4 generous handfuls of baby spinach, washed and spun dry (a tip of the hat here to Rachel Ray)<br />
2 tablespoons of butter, ditto of olive oil<br />
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Bring pasta water to a boil, add a teaspoon of salt, then cook pasta <i>al dente.</i><br />
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<i>W</i>hile that is cooking, heat butter and olive oil in a large sauté pan. Add chopped garlic, cook briefly but do not brown (which makes it bitter).<br />
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Add cream. When it bubbles, add the gorgonzola and lower heat. If it looks too thick, add some pasta water.<br />
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Drain pasta and add to the pan. Stir, then add baby spinach leaves until they have wilted, stir again, and serve. If your pasta pot has a strainer, a faster way to wilt the spinach leaves is to dump them in the hot pasta water and then add them to the pasta. Lashings of black pepper are in order. Parmesan could be added, but I typically don't. Salt to taste.<br />
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If you don't care for spinach, toast some chopped walnuts in peanut or walnut oil, then sprinkle on the pasta after serving.<br />
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Enjoy!<br />
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<br />Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-31605373239532220752017-01-12T07:25:00.000-08:002017-01-23T06:03:23.632-08:00How Long, O Lord? Trump's Delay in Releasing His Tax ReturnsGail Collins has a good comment in her January 11, 2017, Op-Ed piece in the <i>New York Times</i>, "Trump, Sex and Lots of Whining."<br />
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Referring to his press conference the day before, Collins notes wryly that President Elect Trump declared that "he'll release his taxes once the audit is finished. (You remember that audit. Its friends call it Godot.)"<br />
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Jan. 23, 2017, Postscript: Today's <i>NY Times</i> reports that Kellyanne Conway declared on ABC's "This Week" yesterday that Trump "is not going to release his tax returns."<br />
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That puts our new president in the dubious position of being the first president since the early 1970's to decline to release information on his taxes.<br />
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Why is this important? Two reasons. Only by releasing his taxes can we assess how much he owes to whom. Only through examining his returns can we see whether he's separated himself enough from his businesses and therefore will not be subject to conflicts of interest. Nothing about the audit would have prevented him releasing this information earlier; nothing prevents him releasing it now.<br />
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So three questions emerge. First, what is President Trump determined to hide?<br />
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Second, What alternative universe is he living in that he thinks he can get away with this?<br />
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Third, Just how stupid does he think we are?Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-17168521267243531082016-12-24T06:54:00.000-08:002016-12-24T06:54:28.004-08:00Duly Noted: Deplorables, or Disposables?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“Duly Noted” are posts that call attention to work by other people.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“Deplorables, or Disposables?” summarizes my friend Arthur J. Kover’s research on the degree to which Americans feel that they are disposable.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Arthur Kover adapted his work for publication in a magazine, but apparently no editors appreciated its relevance.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">His work deserves a wider recognition because it presciently identifies an attitude that led to Donald Trump’s election.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">In 2013, Arthur Kover and Howard Moskowitz did a study of 250 people drawn randomly from a larger, representative panel.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The 250 people were asked to evaluate the chances of six hypothetical persons being laid off.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">These hypothetical individuals were from varying occupations:</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">a hotel maid from Jamaica; the owner of a local deli; a machinist in a US company; a teacher in an urban high school; a stockbroker; and an executive in a large international company.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">A subsequent study included two more hypothetical people, a fashion model and “a person like me.”</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A constant was calculated to give an overall idea of the probability of anyone being disposed of. This single number is the contingent probability of anyone thinking anyone else could be disposed of. For this study, the constant was 27. This number represents the estimate that between one-quarter and one-third of the populace would think that others—any others—could be thrown away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">27 may not appear to be a large proportion, but there are some surprising aspects here. One is that there is relatively little difference from this base contingent probability for any of the six hypothetical people. That means that people believe that nearly everyone in our society has an equal chance of being disposed of. Everyone is vulnerable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The case was different in regard to the two added hypothetical people. As one might readily expect, most respondents viewed the fashion model as having a greater chance of being disposed of. In contrast, “the person like me” was viewed as having a lower chance of being thrown away. Objectively, perhaps, a respondent might acknowledge that this could indeed happen, but subjectively it would be more likely to happen to somebody else. (The research data is noted at the end of this post.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Early in 2015, Arthur Kover did a second study that was qualitative rather than quantitative. He wanted to explore how people <i>felt</i> about their perceived vulnerability. He interviewed six men and two women, ranging in age from mid-twenties to almost ninety. Their occupations included a retired police chief from a small town, a college student, a truck driver, a retired professor of sociology, a building contractor, a homemaker, a high school teacher with tenure, and an unemployed laborer. The retired police chief rejected the idea that people could be thrown away: “When bad things happen, you just dust yourself off and find something else. It’s a question of character.” The high school teacher saw disposability coming down the line in the not so distant future: “Just wait and see—tenure won’t mean anything in five or ten years.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The other six all viewed themselves at risk of being disposed of. Socio-economic level mattered less than the drastic external changes time could bring about: no one was secure; everyone was living on the edge.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What both of these studies revealed is that nearly all feel their livelihoods at risk. But Kover points out that the disposability of people is not restricted to employment, even though that is a large part of it. Nor is it about a kind of passivity, a refusal to take charge of your own life and find something else—a defect of character, as that retired police chief described it. Rather, the disposability of people involves the specter of being abandoned. People don’t return your calls. Friends melt away. Family life deteriorates. The world becomes indifferent to you, and then you internalize that difference.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In this situation, Kover suggests, individuals will not band together to become a larger force. Every abandoned person carries the past within his or her being. The former executive and the former machinist had little or no contact in their past lives. Their pasts prevent them from seeing their common plight, The more the stressful present impinges on them, the more they will retreat into the past to erect new walls.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kover concluded this portion of his study by asking an acute rhetorical question, one the more striking because he formulated it well before the Republican primaries. He asks, “Does America need a demagogue to effect even some change? Who will be the next Savonarola, willing to take on that risk? and what group, faith based or political, corporate conglomerate or some idealized 1776 revolutionists—will he or she represent?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now we know the answer to that question, even though many of us are dreading what those changes may involve. In these terms, “Make American Great Again” was the perfect slogan. The voters who gave Trump his Electoral College (if not popular) majority are more accurately characterized not as deplorables but as disposables. Their only hope lay in a demogogue, and Trump told them what they wanted desperately to hear. Arthur Kover nailed it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For supporting data, see Howard Moskowitz et al., Directory 40 (Mind Genomics Books), vol 12 (Fraying of America): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/su4cyn94o0w5x21/AAB-ITyP_sqwmFXH1hB_WksJa/40.MG.Books.New.Novum.Organum?dl=0&preview=New.Novum.12.Fraying.Nov.2014.pdf. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The qualitative research is copyrighted by Arther J. Kover and reprinted with permission.</span></div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-34804962590924831292016-11-01T11:08:00.000-07:002016-11-02T10:58:47.292-07:00Duly Noted: Do Roe Deer Know North and South?"Duly Noted" posts pass on information gathered from other sources. This post was sparked by my reading Jason G. Goldman's summary of some research on the escape patterns of European roe deer that appeared in the October 2016 <i>Scientific American</i>. I found his summary so interesting that I looked up and read the original article.<br />
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This research was funded by a grant from the Czech Republic and published as "Compass-controlled escape behavior in roe deer" by Petr Obleser, Vlastimil Hart, E. Pascal Malkemper, et al., in <i>Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, </i>20: 1345 (August 2016). Roe deer graze in open fields and run away when they see humans, so these researchers deliberately spooked 188 groups of deer grazing in three different areas during April and August of 2014. 68 were males, 120 were females. 115 were singles; 45 were pairs; 19 were groups of three; 5 were groups of four; and 4 were groups of five. Rather than running directly away from the humans or toward the nearest cover, the <i>roe deer preferred heading toward magnetic north or south.</i><br />
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This magnetic alignment was more pronounced in groups than in singles. When an observer approached from the east or the west, the deer did not flee in the opposite direction, but northward or southward. There are advantages in a herd fleeing in the same direction: individuals can escape without colliding with each other, and they can reassemble easily as a group once the perceived threat is over. But that would be true for any direction the herd took--the question is, why did these deer so consistently escape to either the north or the south? These researchers conclude that the deer might be able to detect the earth's magnetic field.<br />
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All kinds of questions immediately come to mind. Is this behavior consistent in other seasons of the year? In areas other than South Bohemia and West Moravia? And if so, to what degree, if any, does it hold for other species of deer?<br />
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I confess I've never paid attention to the escape directions of the mule deer or whitetails that I've hunted, but I'm going to start. If anyone else does the same and passes on the information, I'll be happy to post the results. You can reach me at ghcox3@gmail.com.<br />
<br />Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-23407308546684568982016-09-26T16:25:00.001-07:002016-10-04T12:09:11.123-07:00Fitting New Grips to a Uberti 44 Army & Fixing Three MistakesThe 1860 Colt .44 Army revolver has been called the best looking revolver ever made. That is debatable, of course, but I tend to agree. Perhaps more to the point is how well the 1860 Army points. This may be due to its balance (or, perhaps more accurately, its moment of inertia) and, to me personally, its grip, which is longer than the Colt Single Action Army's and thus fits my hand better. I own an 1860 Army reproduction by Uberti, and I decided that replacing its walnut grips with synthetic ivory would keep it just as pointable but make it even better looking.<br />
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After looking at a number of websites, I ordered a kit from <a href="http://www.tombstonegrips.com/">Tombstone Gun Grips</a> of White City, OR. Its website has detailed instructions for making templates from 3x5 index cards; Dave Corbin casts the polyurethane resin grips from these templates. Although the web site warned that there might be a rather long interval before the order could be filled, my kit--two grips and two spacers--arrived in just a few weeks.<br />
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The instructions are quite detailed. The first step is to make sure that the grips are oversized in all dimensions. It's relatively easy to reduce them, but not to make them larger. If they are too small, Dave Corbin will replace them as long as they haven't been altered.<br />
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The instructions recommend using contact cement or Gorilla Glue to glue the spacer to first one grip and then the other. I readily admit to not being the most adept person at gluing objects together, and my previous mistakes have made me prefer glues that are reversible. That is, if you make a mistake, you can take the pieces apart and start over again. Contact cement made me uneasy because I almost never have used it. As for Gorilla Glue, which I have used, I was pretty sure that it was not reversible. I called the company to check: once it's set up, I was told, it's permanent. I decided therefore to use Brownell's <a href="http://www.brownells.com/gunsmith-tools-supplies/stock-work-finishing/stock-bedding-adhesives/acraglas-gel--prod1038.aspx">ACRAGLAS</a> epoxy, which can be reversed with a heat gun.<br />
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The process begins with flattening the grip frame. Then you flatten the frame side of each grip. As the instructions recommend, I used 100 grit paper on a flat surface--in my case, the surface of my drill press table. The instructions suggest that you paint what you want to flatten with a magic marker. Assuming you've held the piece vertical, when all the black marks are erased, the surface is flat. Next, work on the corner where the each grip joins the frame: everything follows from this angle being correct. My grips were close, but each one required some judicious sanding and trying before it fit.<br />
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While the grips are still a bit oversized, fit the spacer. Here is where I made the <b><i>first</i></b> of my three mistakes. The instructions state, "Shape the spacer to fit between the hammer spring and the back strap. It must be as close to a snug fit as you can make it." Two spacers came with the kit, so I fitted the one with the curve that most closely approximated the inside curve of the back strap and glued it to the right grip panel, clamping them with a C clamp and rubber bands.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhof-__vJhlVzo20nRCAL5aZgWILm9KueJF6oy3HGdG3T_RdyknTbx08i5vWQG12HFs2j98fqXhc0YThOH8IDrleI3oTwxeDGEqljXdfNAMLF1609gkZZSMgtE6wCdmNfbhMDwKh-h5tYar/s1600/IMG_0960.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhof-__vJhlVzo20nRCAL5aZgWILm9KueJF6oy3HGdG3T_RdyknTbx08i5vWQG12HFs2j98fqXhc0YThOH8IDrleI3oTwxeDGEqljXdfNAMLF1609gkZZSMgtE6wCdmNfbhMDwKh-h5tYar/s400/IMG_0960.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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See that empty space just above the bottom of the grip frame? What I failed to realize--and what the instructions don't mention--is that not only the side of the spacer must fit against the back strap (which continues around the butt as well) <i>but the bottom of the spacer must fit snugly as well</i>. If not, the grip will not keep vertically aligned. <br />
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I could have avoided this mistake by looking more closely at the original wooden grip. Fortunately, the solution was simple. I measured the gap between the bottom of my glued spacer and the frame and cut a piece from the second spacer to fit. Some sanding and fitting soon made it a snug fit, so I epoxied that extension to the grip as well.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiReR_fvmAsFWo_pJS1uTY9nhnfCcqr6LmWkoFCKkx_FuUAYEo_nXyM_FF9AAj2OngKpesB5_3x_sOuU7oBWfP_gygz0v4kza6FcB3oxjHL5eNfoCLgD4Ae6cM903IzkxgPv-vs7t-mEgFf/s1600/IMG_0963.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiReR_fvmAsFWo_pJS1uTY9nhnfCcqr6LmWkoFCKkx_FuUAYEo_nXyM_FF9AAj2OngKpesB5_3x_sOuU7oBWfP_gygz0v4kza6FcB3oxjHL5eNfoCLgD4Ae6cM903IzkxgPv-vs7t-mEgFf/s400/IMG_0963.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The spacer will now protrude above the frame on the remaining side. The instructions say to make the spacer flush with the frame but leave the method up to you. I used a piece of 100 grit sandpaper wrapped around a finger plane (with the blade raised, of course), making sure that the base of the small plane was always over two sides of the grip frame.<br />
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This approach worked well for making the spacer flush with the frame, but--my<b><i> second </i></b>mistake--I failed to realize that using epoxy to glue the second grip to the spacer would push the grip away from the spacer. Even a thin layer of epoxy has volume, after all, so epoxy between flush surfaces must leave a narrow but discernible gap. That was the bad news.<br />
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The good news was that the epoxy was reversible. My heat gun mysteriously had gone missing from my shop, so I directed the heat from my wife's hair dryer to the spacer and soon had the bond weakening. A bit more heat and I could separate the two pieces and scrape off the epoxy. Making sure to keep the side of the spacer flat, I sanded it until all of it was just a tad below the edges of the back strap. That gap would accommodate the epoxy and still keep the edges of the grip tight against the grip frame. Six rubber bands held the grip in place while the epoxy cured.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-qefEDJIfsWzQOE_tWGViP0AzHbCEnuz8E1jClzBfubSD9flVi7ykhzEsnyIw7uA91GAgQ0o7-67NNfJO255kyFC5w94ii86zQ5LlPHuiSKpWSJn3jVSPBP0vAOEnhBC0MUbwqk0RnRkj/s1600/IMG_0965.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-qefEDJIfsWzQOE_tWGViP0AzHbCEnuz8E1jClzBfubSD9flVi7ykhzEsnyIw7uA91GAgQ0o7-67NNfJO255kyFC5w94ii86zQ5LlPHuiSKpWSJn3jVSPBP0vAOEnhBC0MUbwqk0RnRkj/s400/IMG_0965.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
The left grip slipped just a bit away from the action in the clamping, but I decided I could live with it. The grips were far from pristine, but I knew that sanding them to be flush with the frame would soon clean them up.<br />
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Next came the final fitting and polishing of the grips. I started with 220 grit paper with the grips off the frame, putting them back on to check my progress. I soon decided, however, that the quickest way to a flush fit between brass grip straps and poly grips was to depart from the instructions and sand them simultaneously in a shoe-shining fashion. I took the sandpaper and backed it the long way with duct tape. I then cut strips into the widths I needed. As best I could, I was careful to follow the curves of the original grip. The brass of course became scratched, but each successive grit lessened the scratches. After sanding with 600 grit, I thought I was through. Two thin coats of wax, and it looked pretty darn good.<br />
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And that was how I made my <b><i>third</i></b> mistake: I depended on artificial light to determine I was through. Given the number of gun stocks I've refinished, I should have known better! The grips were nicely fitted, but looking at them in natural, raking light showed up a number of scratches I had simply not noticed in artificial light. I marked and sanded each one, and then went through the grades of sandpaper all over again, finishing up this time with 1000 and then 1500 grit--all in natural light. This time, the grips passed scrutiny. <br />
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Two thin coats of Renaissance wax made them look even better. Here's the result:<br />
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<br />Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-77560762047240079112016-09-25T07:00:00.000-07:002016-12-10T06:43:24.791-08:00Mussels and Garlic Sausage, Portuguese Style<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">My wife and I have just returned from a wonderful trip to Portugal, where we ate seafood almost every day.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">This recipe adapts the Portuguese method of cooking clams and garlic sausage together in a covered pot, a </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">cataplana.</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> Portuguese clams are different from ours, so I have substituted mussels. B</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">utter clams would also be good.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">2 pounds of mussels</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1/3rd of a pound Spanish chorizo sausage, cut into 1/4” cubes</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1 green bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1/4” squares</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">2 garlic cloves, minced</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">2 onions, sliced and minced</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1 box Pomi brand chopped tomatoes (26 oz.), or two cans</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1 bay leaf</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1/2 teaspoon paprika (I like smoked paprika)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1/2 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1/2 cup dry white wine (or vermouth)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Chopped parsley</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In a large pot with a lid, melt the onions in olive oil, then add the garlic. After a minute or two, add the chopped tomatoes, sausage, bell pepper, bay leaf, paprika, and hot pepper flakes. Simmer for 20 minutes. Taste for seasoning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Add the white wine, stir, and then add the shellfish. Cover and cook for 5-6 minutes, then check that all the shellfish have opened. If not, re-cover and cook a few more minutes. Discard any that remain closed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I shell half the mussels, then s</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">poon those and the remaining mussels and tomatoes into soup plates and sprinkle with parsley.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Serves 2.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">For more servings, add 1 pound shellfish per person, more onions (1 for every 2 people) and garlic (ditto).</span> <span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-71763035000092593452016-08-06T14:26:00.000-07:002016-08-13T05:04:25.187-07:00Brad Watson's New Novel, Miss Jane<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> That fine writer Brad Watson has just published a new novel, <i>Miss Jane </i>(W. W. Norton, 2016). Drawing in part on family stories about his great aunt, Watson has set Jane Chisolm’s story in the east-central Mississippi farm country of 1915. Jane is born with a urogenital sinus anomaly with persistent cloaca—her urethra, vagina, and anus fused into a common channel, precluding intercourse, and her sphincter doesn’t function. Corrective surgery was not possible at that time, so Jane remains incontinent and must wear diapers all her life. Jane is strangely different, and that difference propels the novel. As an adolescent, Jane has a crush on a neighbor boy, so her parents promptly send her away to the nearby town to help her elder sister run her dry cleaning and laundry business. After her father drinks himself to death, she returns to the family farm to care for her increasingly despondent mother. After her mother’s death, Jane lives alone on the farm. Eventually, she is offered corrective surgery, but she refuses it. She continues to live on the farm until she dies in her sleep.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> The voice of the narrator is matter of fact yet sympathetic about Jane’s otherness, and it immediately establishes our senses of Jane and of place. Take the first sentence: “You would not think someone so afflicted would or could be cheerful, not prone to melancholy or the miseries.” Instead of keeping the audience at arm’s length, that “you” pulls us in and makes us complicit. At the same time, the reference to “the miseries” reminds us of an earlier, country mode of speech. The next sentence about Jane is straightforward narration: “Early on she acquired ways of dealing with her life, with life in general.” But the next, concluding this opening paragraph, hints at what Watson does so skillfully, alluding to a dimension that remains just out of reach: “And as she grew older it became evident that she feared almost nothing—perhaps only horses and something she couldn’t quite name, a strange presence of danger not quite or not really a part of the world.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> As a young child one evening on the verge of dropping off to sleep, Jane hears “the low growling of something, a growl of something that sounded massive, slow, and fierce passing just below the window of her room. Some unspeakable monster. Her heart seized and she shouted out" (p. 61). Her father checks the ground outside her window for tracks: nothing is there. Her sister Grace ups the ante by suggesting that it could have been a bear, but her father dismisses that possibility scornfully. “‘Not only would we’ve heard that,’ her father said, ‘we sure would’ve smelled it. Nothing stinks quite like a bear.’” Comforted by Grace’s presence, Jane does go back to sleep. What the narrator makes clear is that this unspeakable monster remains in Jane’s mind, even though she is never conscious of it: “her only nightmares would be about the nameless beast she had heard, her sleeping mind imagining it in all kinds of forms, none of which she was ever able to recall upon waking” (p. 62). Later, when as an adolescent Jane is trying to figure out the mechanics of making love, she spies on the young couple who are sharecroppers for her father. Afterwards, Jane worries that she has done something terribly wrong, with the result that <i>she </i>has become the monster outside the window, the other who cannot do what normal people do in loving one another.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> Jane’s guilt is assuaged by Dr. Thompson, the man who delivered her and who continues to care (in every sense) for her. As she matures, he explains the facts of life to her, facts that unfortunately will never apply to her personally. Dr. Thompson never loses hope that eventually surgical procedures will be discovered to correct her problems. In this sense, he serves as a foil to Jane: what he sees as an abnormality, she of course takes to be normal for her, and she adapts reasonably successfully. Both of them learn how to live alone and not be lonely, and their love for each other is no less real for being Platonic. At some point after Dr. Thompson has died, Jane receives a letter from Johns Hopkins offering to perform the operation they have pioneered, free of charge. She feels indignant because she sees no reason to be “fixed”; she has long since become accustomed to who she is, and that’s the end of it.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> But Jane’s life is not defined by loss. On the contrary, she possess an altogether remarkable and to some degree compensatory awareness. It ranges from relishing the mud squishing up between her toes the first time she goes wading in the beaver pond to her visits to her secret meadow, a clearing in the woods she considered her very own. There she could step altogether out of time: “The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it” (p. 75). At their most intense, these feelings deepen from sensuous to sexual (although Watson is careful to say that she was too young to verbalize what this meant): the taste of her first raw oyster, the soft skins of wild mushrooms, the pecan nuts in their smooth brown shells that she rolled between her palms—these were all more than sensuous for Jane. They produced a sexual climax: “She felt it inside herself though, as deeply and truly as a lover. She fell into the grove’s rough, tall grass and into darkness, some charged current running through her in pleasant palpitations of ecstasy” (p. 110).</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> Over time, the peacocks that Dr. Thompson had introduced on his place so multiply that they come to inhabit Jane’s farm as well. He had introduced them on his farm because they were at once beautiful and strange—he felt people didn’t know what to make of them. In this sense, the peacocks are like Jane. The peacocks are also the creatures Jane sees before she goes to sleep for the last time. As she does, she dreams she moves through her secret clearing and, in her yard, enters a secret avian cathedral. It’s not filled with peacocks—that would be too easy. No, these are “some kind of winged and feathered things” that she had never seen. They don’t appear to be the monsters she dreamed about in her youth but never recalled when she woke up, but neither do they appear to be altogether benign. <i>Miss Jane</i> ends with the sentence, “They stood very still, hushed, their gleaming black eyes fixed on her, white beaks open in a strange, alert anticipation.” Is this the “strange presence of danger not quite or not really a part of the world” that Brad Watson invokes in the opening of the novel? Or is this one last suggestion that this wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful character Jane can perceive what the rest of us cannot know, tethered as we are by being altogether ordinary?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> Sir Francis Bacon observed in his essay “Of Studies,” “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, . . . some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” <i>Miss Jane</i> falls into the third of Bacon’s categories. A tour de force, it abundantly rewards reading with diligence and attention.<i> </i>I would add only that the best of these books are to be read slowly and with appreciation, their language heard in the mind's ear the way good whiskey is savored on the tongue. Brad Watson’s <i>Miss Jane </i>is one of those.</span></div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-22371753591770494552016-07-20T12:11:00.000-07:002016-07-30T06:34:39.095-07:00Plagiarism: What Is It & Why Does It Matter?When you use another writer's intellectual property--language, visuals, or ideas--in your own work without giving proper credit to that person, you commit <i>plagiarism</i>.<br />
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Pretty simple, right? And I bet you didn't realize that this description of plagiarism is itself plagiarized: I took it word for word right from Diana Hacker's <i>A Writer's Reference </i>(Bedford/St. Martin's). I did make a few changes. I substituted "writer's" for her "author's," I left out some of her statement, and I added "to that person," but these minor changes in no way get me off the hook. I used Diana Hacker's language and her ideas without giving her credit. I passed them off as mine. I stole them, to put it bluntly, and that constitutes intellectual theft. If I used Hacker's definition in public--in a blog post, a speech, or an essay--and didn't give her credit, I would add fraud to theft.<br />
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The first time I ever taught a Shakespeare course at the University of Washington in Seattle, I discovered a wonderful example of plagiarism. I had been preparing to teach this introductory course for some months, but a fair amount has been written on Shakespeare's plays and I was barely keeping one week ahead of my class as I continued to read up on the plays I was teaching. Then the term papers came due. As I started to read a student's paper on <i>The Winter's Tale</i>, I had a sense of <i>deja vu</i>: this was very like something I'd only read a week or so ago. I reached over to the stack of books on my desk and pulled out E.M.W. Tillyard's <i>Shakespeare's Last Plays</i>, turned to the chapter on <i>The Winter's Tale,</i> and there it was: the term paper copied Tillyard word for word, and without any acknowledgment.<br />
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I wrote at the end of the paper, "This is an excellent paper, but of course Tillyard is an excellent critic. Because you have plagiarized without any acknowledgment of your source, your grade is F. Please see me if you have any questions."<br />
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A young woman promptly came to see me. I have long since forgotten her name; I'll just call her Jane Doe. Jane Doe kept repeating that she just couldn't understand her grade. Finally, in some frustration, I said, "Miss Doe (this took place many years ago, remember), <i>I </i>can't understand why you don't understand. You copied your paper word for word, paragraph for paragraph, from Tillyard's book, <i>Shakespeare's Last Plays</i>, and you never acknowledged him as your source. This is plagiarism, and that is why I am failing your paper."<br />
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At this, Miss Jane Doe burst into tears. I silently handed her a box of tissues. Finally she said, "Oh, Professor Cox, I copied this from my sorority's file of term papers. But if I had known it was <i>plagiarized</i>, I<b> <i>never </i></b>would have copied it!"<br />
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We now have the spectacle of the Trump campaign denying that Melania Trump's speech on July 18th was in part plagiarized from the speech given by Michelle Obama in 2008. It is bizarre to have a possible First Lady quoting from the current First Lady (as opposed, say, to Mrs. Hoover), but all anyone has to do is look at the two passages side by side to realize that part of the speech did plagiarize both language and ideas without acknowledgment. Melania Trump reportedly told NBC's Matt Lauer before she gave the speech, "I wrote it. And with as little help as possible." Oh, right. But who wrote the speech is not the issue, it's who plagiarized it. Even more bizarrely, the people running Trump's campaign apparently thought that that she/they could get away with this. These days, all you have to do to identify plagiarism is type a phrase or two into a software program.<br />
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Most bizarre of all is the level of dishonesty on display. For the Trump campaign initially to deny that plagiarism ocurred is beyond belief. Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, came up with the statement, "We don't believe there is anything in that speech that doesn't reflect her thinking"--as if thinking and plagiarizing were synonymous. The opposite is more likely: people plagiarize to avoid thinking. And Chris Christie bloviated that ninety-three percent of the spech is completely different--as if plagiarizing only seven percent of the speech made the problem somehow recede into something acceptable. At least Miss Jane Doe acknowledged (albeit comically) that she had copied someone else's work. She ended up passing my course. So far, Donald Trump's campaign managers and staff writers deserve an F for plagiarism.<br />
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<br />Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-76106412073716330102016-06-06T11:10:00.000-07:002016-09-29T06:19:27.352-07:00My Family's Puritan Ministers, Part 3 of 3<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">This is the third of three posts about my recent discovery that my father's side of the family abounded not only in Puritans but in Puritan ministers. The first post focuses on why Puritan ministers left England for what they hoped would be a "New" England. The second post concerns those who came in the early 1600's to Masachusetts Bay Colony. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">Other Puritan ministers in my father's family went first to Massachusetts Bay and then on to what is now Connecticut. Reverend Nicholas Street (1603-1674) was from Bridgewater, Somerset. Atypically, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Pembroke College, Oxford, before changing to Emmanuel College at Cambridge, where he received his A.M. in 1636. After coming over on the <i>Susan & Ellen</i> in 1635, he was ordained in Taunton in 1640/1. Nearly twenty years later, in 1659, he removed to New Haven, the most strict of all the colonies. So far, I haven't discovered why he moved.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Ephraim Hewitt (1604-1644) was from Wraxall, Warwickshire. He attended St. John’s, Cambridge, and then became a curate at Knowle, Warwickshire. He was silenced by John Thornborough, Bishop of Worcester, in 1638; Laud reported that Hewett had “condemned the decent ceremonies commanded by the Church.” Hewitt consequently arrived in Windsor, CT, the following year. He was ordained in Windsor in December 1639. He died five years later.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Reverend John Jones (1593-1665) followed the more typical route of coming to Massachusetts Bay first and later moving to Connecticut. Born in Northamptonshire, he went to Queens’ College, Cambridge, receiving his A.M. in 1616. He had become a deacon at Peterborough in 1613; he became rector at Abbot’s Ripton, Huntingdonshire, in 1619. He served there until 1630, when he was deprived of his living "for refusing to adhere to rites and ceremonies in the book of public prayers." I don’t yet know how he survived the years between 1630 and 1635, when he sailed on the <i>Defence</i>, together with Peter Shepard. He lived in Concord from 1635 until 1644, becoming ordained in Cambridge in April 1637, with Peter Buckeley as teacher. (His daughter Sarah married Bulkeley's son Thomas about 1640.) In 1644, he moved to Fairfield to become the minister there for the next twenty-one years. He presumably was present when Goody Knapp was hanged as a witch in 1653. He died between January 17th and February 9th, 1665.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>The most influential of these ministers in my family who came to Connecticut was Thomas Hooker (1586-1647). As did so many Puritans, he attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, earning an A.B. in 1608 and an A.M. in 1611. He then became a Fellow there. After serving first as a rector in Surrey and then as a lecturer at St. Mary, Chelmsford, in Essex in 1625-29, he was silenced for non-conformity. Hooker then kept a private school at Little Baddow, Essex, for two years (his usher in the school was John Eliot, later to become famous for his work with the Indians). Becoming persecuted again, Hooker left for Holland. He preached at Delfthaven for two years and then hoped to accept a position in the English congregation at Rotterdam. But because he became involved in a dispute with John Paget, he didn’t obtain that position.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>In 1633, Hooker came over with John Cotton on the <i>Griffon. </i> He became the minister at Newtown (Cambridge), where some 58 from his congregation in Essex, England, had already settled; 53 more were soon to follow, according to Bailyn. Believing the Boston-Newtown-Watertown area was too crowded, Hooker applied to the General Court for permission to leave and settle in Connecticut. Fearing that geographic dispersal would weaken the spiritual support afforded by these nearby congregations, the Court denied his petition. </span><br />
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Undaunted, and never less than contentious, Hooker reapplied the next year, and this time he was successful. In 1636, he led most of his congregation overland to the Connecticut River, where they founded Hartford. Although Benjamin Trumbull declares in his romanticized <i>Complete History of Connecticut</i> (1818) that they had to travel “more than a hundred miles, through a hideous and trackless wilderness” with no guide but a compass, they actually could follow an existing Indian trail. Even if they had more provisions on their way to Hartford than the milk of the 160 cattle Trumbull says they subsisted on, theirs was quite a journey. Hooker’s wife, my 9th great-grandmother Susanna Garbrand, was so sick that she had to be carried on a litter the entire way. (She recovered, however, and outlived him by nearly thirty years, marrying twice in succession during that period). He was the minister for the Hartford church until he died in 1647. He had at least twenty works published. His <i>Survey of the Sum of Church Discipline </i>(published in 1648) has been called one of the classic statements justifying congregational policy. Their son Samuel went to Harvard College, became a Fellow there in 1654, and was ordained at Farmington, Connecticut, in 1661.</div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>While in Hartford, Hooker mentored Roger Newton (1620-1683). Newton had matriculated at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1636 but left before graduating. He arrived in New England in 1638 and in 1640 studied at Harvard College (which had been founded in 1636) but again left without graduating. Not only did Newton study theology with Hooker, he wooed and married Hooker's daughter Mary in 1644. How long Newton continued to study with his father-in-law is unclear. Thomas Hooker died in 1647, but Newton did not follow him as the minister at Hartford. In October 1652, Newton was ordained as the first minister of Farmington, being installed the first day the church was formed. He left after three years, and it doesn’t seem to be known what he did in the interval before he was installed at Milford on August 22, 1660. Newton remained at Milford until his death on June 7, 1683. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Scholars disagree on how many Puritan ministers came over to New England. Estimates range from somewhere in the 90’s up to perhaps 130. The nine ministers in my family that I’ve written about here therefore make up less than 10% of the total. But all of them had been tried by adversity and not found wanting. Even after the Parliamentary forces gained control in England, these ministers remained in New England. (Susan Hardman Moore has estimated that 25% of the ministers who had emigrated returned to England during the Interregnum.) After their arrival, they devoted themselves to making the best they could of this "new" England, hoping that its renewal would become the saving revival of the older one. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">Even though I find nothing appealing in their Calvinist theology, the research I've done on these ministers has made me respect their integrity. </span><span class="s1">Part of Thomas Shepard’s journal has survived. He dedicated it to his son Thomas, writing on the top of the second leaf Paul's admonition in 1 Thessalonians 5:21: “Try all things and hold fast that which is good.” </span>Thomas Shepard the younger earned a bachelor’s and a master's at Harvard in 1653. Like his father before him and his son Thomas (who also became a minister) after him, we can assume he did his best not only to move his congregation to practice what he preached, but to follow that way himself. I have no sympathy for their Puritan theology, but I do respect their unyielding resolution, generation after generation, to do what they conceived to be good, no matter what trials they had to withstand.</div>
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<span class="s1">Selected sources:</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Ashely, Maurice. <i>England in the Seventeenth Century</i>. Penguin Books, 1965.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Bailyn, Bernard. <i>The Barbarous Years. The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Civilizations, 1600-1675.</i> New York: Vintage, 2012.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Bremer, Francis J. <i>Shaping New Englands: Puritan Clergymen in Seventeenth-Century England <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>and New England</i>. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Delbanco, Andrew. <i>The Puritan Ordeal</i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Fischer, David Hackett. <i>Albion’s Seed: </i> <i>Four British Folkways in America</i>. Oxford Univ. Press, </span>1989.</div>
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<span class="s1">Gura, Philip F. <i>A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660. </i></span>Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1984.</div>
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<span class="s1">McGiffert, Michael, ed.. <i>God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge. <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></i>Rev. ed. Amherst: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1994.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Mather, Cotton. </span><i>Magnalia Christi Americana.</i> London, 1702. Bk. III, Ch. xvi.</div>
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<span class="s1">Moore, Susan Hardman. <i>Pilgrims: New World Settlers & the Call of Home. </i> New Haven: Yale </span>Univ. Press, 2007.<br />
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Seller, W. C., and R. J. Yeatman. <i>1066 and All That. </i> New York: Barnes & Noble, 1931.</div>
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<span class="s1">Weis, Frederick Lewis. <i>The Colonial Clergy and the Colonial Churches of New England </i>[1936]. La</span>ncaster, MA, 1961.</div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-89007954088781430532016-06-06T10:49:00.001-07:002016-06-15T09:35:44.544-07:00My Family's Puritan Ministers, Part 2 of 3<div class="p1">
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<span class="s1">One of my forebears, Reverend Thomas Shepard (1605-1649), left a manuscript describing his encounter with Archbishop Laud (see list of sources at the end of Part 3). We should perhaps allow for Shepard heightening the drama, but he represents Laud in the interview as enraged: "</span>He asked how long I had lived in his diocese. I answered, Three years and upwards. He <span class="Apple-tab-span"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span>asked who maintained me all this while, charging me to deal plainly with him, adding <span class="Apple-tab-span"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span>withal that he had been more cheated and equivocated by some of my malignant faction <span class="Apple-tab-span"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span>than ever was man by Jesuit, at the speaking of which words he looked as though blood <span class="Apple-tab-span"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span>would have gushed out of his face and did shake as if he had been handed with an ague <span class="Apple-tab-span"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span>fit, to my apprehension by reason of his extreme malice and secret venom." Shepard, by all accounts one of the mildest of men, begged to be excused from answering (in fact, he had been supported in Essex by Dr. Edmund Wilson, the brother of my ancestor Reverend John Wilson, whom I’ll mention below). Laud then began to rail bitterly at Shepard, eventually sentencing him as follows: “I charge you that you neither preach, read, marry, bury, or exercise any ministerial function in any part of my diocese, for if you do, and I hear of it, I will be upon your back and follow you wherever you go, in any part of the kingdom, and so everlastingly disable you.”</div>
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We need to recall that Laud wielded both religious and political power. Laud’s “charge” to Shepard was legal and all-encompassing, having effect throughout the realm of England. It quite literally took away Shepard’s means of supporting himself as a minister. Not only that: I take Laud’s use of “everlastingly” at the closing of his charge—“and so everlastingly disable you”—to mean that any disobedience of Shepard will mean that he’ll be lost both in this life and in the life to come. The interview ends with Laud exclaiming, “Get you gone, and now make your complaints to whom you will!” “So away I went,” Shepard relates, and his next phrase quietly underscores that he serves a greater master: “and blessed be God that I may go to him.” <span class="s1"></span><br />
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>For Thomas Shepard and other ministers of the Puritan persuasion, Archbishop Laud’s burning zeal to enforce uniformity made many of them question whether they should—or could—stay in England. In <i>The Barbarous Years</i>,<i> </i>Bernard Bailyn magisterially sums up the outcomes of Laud’s campaign: “It created fear and a sense of desperation, forged a mutually supportive community of previously scattered dissidents, steeled their resistance, propelled many from a ‘loose conformity’ to outright nonconformity, and precipitated a willingness on the part of certain of the Puritan leaders to contemplate flight.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>One of the ministers in my family tree who did take flight was Samuel Whiting (1597-1679). Originally from Boston, Lincolnshire, Whiting received his A.M. from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1620, and, subsequently, his D.D. He served as Rector of Skirbeck, Lincolnshire, from 1625 to 1636. His second marriage was to Elizabeth St John in 1629. When his case came before Laud’s Court of High Commission, the Earl of Lincoln intervened on his behalf. Having momentarily escaped Laud’s clutches, as he presumably saw it, Whiting came over to New England in 1636 and served as minister in Lynn for the next 43 years. Three of his sons followed him into the ministry.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Another forebear was Reverend John Wilson (1591-1667), the brother of the Doctor Edmund Wilson who helped support Thomas Shepard in Essex. He could have had an illustrious career in the Church of England: not only had he gone to Eton, but his father was a canon at Windsor and his mother was a niece of Archbishop Edmund Grindal. At King’s College, Cambridge, however, he became a Puritan. He received his A.M. in 1613. From 1616-1618 he was a Fellow of King’s. A lecturer in Sudbury, Sussex, Wilson was suspended in 1627 and imprisoned for seditious speeches. He was restored after the Earl of Warwick intervened on his behalf. When he was investigated again, he resigned and emigrated to Boston in 1630. His wife, Elizabeth Mansfield, flatly refused to accompany him, so he went back to England the next year and eventually persuaded her to return with him. After being the teacher in Boston, he became the first minister of the First Church in 1632, with John Cotton following him as teacher. He volunteered to be a chaplain in the Pequot War in 1637. He remained in Boston until his death in 1667. His son, grandson, and great-grandson all became ministers in their turn.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Reverend Peter Bulkeley (1583-1659) was the brother of my ancestor Judith Bulkeley. Their father Edward came from a landed family in Odell, Bedfordshire; he had been a Fellow at St. John’s, Cambridge, earned a D.D., and then became the Rector of Odell. Peter Bulkeley followed his father to St. John’s, earning his A.M. in 1608 and then on his father’s death becoming Rector in Odell. The Lord Keeper Williams was a long-standing friend of the family, so he had overlooked first Edward’s and then Peter’s non-conformity, but when Laud became Archbishop in 1633 that was no longer an option. Bulkeley was silenced with his case being referred to the High Commission. With no hope of reinstatement, he sold his estate and came over to New England with his family in 1635. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>This brings us back to Thomas Shepard, whom we left right after his interview with the furious Archbishop Laud. Silenced and unfrocked, Shepard, his first wife Margaret Toutville, and their son Thomas (who would also become a minister) sailed on the <i>Defence</i> to Massachusetts Bay in 1635, arriving on October 3rd. Thomas Hooker baptized their son, who was about a year old at that point. </span></div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-64106316913256746022016-06-06T10:45:00.000-07:002016-08-01T06:14:57.128-07:00My Family's Puritan Ministers, Part 1 of 3<div class="p1">
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Some fifty years ago I took two graduate courses at Stanford on the New England Puritans. I disliked their doctrinal hairsplitting, their emphasis on predestination, and, closely related to that, their perpetual anxiety about whether they were sanctified. Ironically, thanks to <a href="http://ancestry.com/"><span class="s2">ancestry.com</span></a>, I have discovered recently that nearly all the branches on my father’s family tree stem from Puritans. And not just Puritans, but Puritan ministers. Faced with this version of cognitive dissonance, I’ve done a lot of research in early American history. After much reading, I still don’t agree with their doctrines, but I have come to see these Puritan ministers in a different light. </div>
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<span class="s1">The program <a href="http://ancestry.com/"><span class="s2">ancestry.com</span></a> is a great resource for discovering familial relationships extending back in time. Not surprisingly, it is best at identifying names and supplying relationships: parental, marital, siblings, and so on. Previous users have scanned in additional material on what some of these people did, but not all of it is relevant, any more than all the familial relationships are factual. </span>I perhaps should admit here that tracing generations back into New England is relatively easy. There are baptismal records, marriage records, wills, and probate records—all of which are in English and many of which can be accessed through <a href="http://ancestry.com/"><span class="s2">ancestry.com</span></a>. Research in New England is thus considerably simpler than trying to find information about forebears who may have been living in this country but who continued to use the language of their country of origin. It is exciting to trace back members of a family, discovering relations between generations, but what I found even more exciting was trying to discover who these people were, fleshing out their names, so to speak, and trying to understand why they were in a given place at a given time.</div>
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<span class="s1">As I began to get back eight or nine generations, I began to notice that many of them were living in Connecticut. I wondered why so many of them were there. Then, going back another generation, I noticed that many of these same families had been in Massachusetts, or, more accurately, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Only at this point did I realize that these ancestors of mine had to be Puritans, and therefore the same as the ones I had so disliked studying when I was getting my PhD at Stanford. These weren’t the equivalents of English Cavaliers, “<i>Wrong but Wromantic</i>,” to quote <i>1066 and All That</i>; these forebears were Puritans, the equivalent of English Roundheads, “<i>Right but Repulsive</i>.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Nevertheless, I was related to them, and I felt I owed it to them as my forebears to learn more about them. I had read David Hackett Fischer’s <i>Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America </i>some years ago, never dreaming that the chapter on “East Anglia to Massachusetts: The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-41” had anything to do with my family. I reread that chapter, impressed all over again by the disparate elements Fischer is able to pull together into a coherent whole, and then began to ask historians I knew at Cornell what I should read. Bernard Bailyn’s <i>The Barbarous Years, </i>a study of the “Peopling of British North America” from 1600-1775, was recommended by everyone. It is a breathtakingly good overview, and its extensive documentation provided me with a useful guide to further research. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">As I read Fischer and Bailyn and then the primary and secondary sources they cited, I began to notice some names that were similar to the ones I’d traced through <a href="http://ancestry.com/"><span class="s2">ancestry.com</span></a>. Could they be the same people? I checked their dates of birth and death, and to my surprise, they were the same. Not only were many of my forebears Puritans, some of those Puritans were ministers, key figures in settling first Massachusetts Bay and, very soon after, Connecticut (which at first was an extension of the Bay Colony).</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But why, I wondered, were <i>ministers</i> key figures in the Puritan migration to New England? From what I was reading, a given minister would decide to emigrate, and many in his congregation then would emigrate with him. I could imagine that a minister might well inspire his flock to follow him, but what factors in England made the ministers want to leave? Trying to answer that question gave me even more information about these forebears. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">For the sake of convenience, I have divided a longish essay into three parts, the first dealing with the conditions in England that motivated ministers to emigrate; the second with those in my father's family who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay; and the third with those ministers who settled along the Connecticut River. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">It’s alway useful to define terms, so let me begin with the term, “Puritan.” A Puritan is someone who believed that the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century had stopped too soon: the Church of England still needed to be “purified” further. Their ideal church was one similar to that of the early Christians. Puritans wanted to substitute a congregational structure for the hierarchal one of archbishop, bishops, and priests; they wanted to reduce the number of sacraments from seven to two, baptism and communion. The Puritans viewed The Book of Common Prayer as merely a collection of empty forms that a parrot could pronounce. What the Puritans believed important for salvation was neither participating in the liturgy nor partaking of grace through the sacraments. What was critical was reading the written Word in the Bible and hearing the Word explicated in sermons. Puritans wholeheartedly agreed with Paul in Romans 10:17, “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Under Queen Elizabeth, who ruled from 1558-1603, the Church of England more or less successfully kept to what has been termed the <i>via media</i>, a middle way between the traditions and practices of Roman Catholicism and those of Continental Calvinism. Unlike the recrusants, the English Roman Catholics who were persecuted as traitors both to the Church of England and to Queen Elizabeth, the Puritans who kept their heads down were left pretty much alone.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">After James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in 1603, however, the Puritan challenge to the hierarchical nature of ecclesiastical authority became an issue. The reform-minded faction urged the abolition of bishops because they were not sanctioned in the Bible or the early church. King James correctly saw this issue of ecclesiastical hierarchy as part and parcel of the notion of order that would later became known as the divine right of kings. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, James agreed to three of the four requests by the Puritans: he was willing to countenance abolishing baptism by women, let a “preaching ministry” continue, and reduce the number of livings a cleric could have. But when one of the Puritan representatives suggested that “prophesyings”—meetings of the clergy to expound doctrine—should be revived and any disagreements resulting from them should be referred not to the bishop but to a group of presbyters, King James blew up. He smote the table with his fist and declared, “No Bishop, no King!”</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Matters became even more strained when King Charles I succeeded his father James in 1625. King James had appointed William Laud as Royal Chaplain, Not only did Laud continue in that position, but under Charles he gained more and more influence. Laud became first the Bishop of London and then in 1633 the Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud controlled the Church’s Court of High Commission and the Privy Council’s criminal Court of Star Chamber. To ensure uniformity of worship, Laud began the practice of “visitations” all over the country to verify that worship followed the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. If he saw his efforts as curing the Church of a malignancy, Puritans saw them as persecution of the godly. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>And thus we have come to compelling reasons for ministers of the Puritan persuasion to migrate. As visitation after visitation occurred, as minister after minister was stripped of his living, excommunicated, or imprisoned, Puritan ministers began to believe that a new age of martyrs was almost at hand, one that would soon replicate the imprisonments, the tortures, and the burnings at the stake in the reign of Queen Mary. </span></div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-13962369368316995152016-05-20T15:12:00.001-07:002016-05-22T14:43:26.857-07:00Not Coming Over on the Mayflower<div class="p1">
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I’ve been doing some genealogical research on my father’s side of my family. He knew some names as far back as his great grandfather and several stories, but that was about it. One family story had some ancestor (name unknown) settling in Long Island in 1642, and another story posited someone equally unknown being a major in the Great Swamp Fight (whenever that was), but that was the extent of it. As so often happens, neither of those stories appears to be true. What I have discovered, however, is that some were captured by the Indians, or fought in various wars, or founded towns. I thought I’d devote a series of posts to some of these individuals, trying to place their lives in their historical context. This post focuses on my ancestor who refused to come over to America on the <i>Mayflower</i>. <span class="s1"></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>His name was Thomas Blossom, and he was born in in 1568 in Parham, Somerset County, England. Blossom was one of those who fervently believed that the Church of England required further reformation. He shared with those reform-minded Puritans the conviction that the entire episcopal hierarchy of archbishop, bishops, and priests was a corrupt, papist innovation, sanctioned neither by the Bible nor by the practices of the early Christians. Instead of this top-down structure, as we might describe it, Blossom wanted a bottom-up, congregational structure. A few God-fearing worshippers would form their own congregation, elect a minister and perhaps a teacher, and remain altogether independent of every other congregation. This independence meant in turn that their congregation would be entirely apart—separate from—the Church of England. As a consequence, in their time they were called Separatists; we have mythologized them as the Pilgrims.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Under the successive reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, the Church of England was the national church. Attendance at Sunday service was obligatory; you were fined for being absent. The more radical Puritans like the Separatists had therefore only two choices: they could meet to worship in secret, or they could leave the country and go to Holland, another Protestant country, and one far more tolerant than England. Blossom may well have done both, marrying his first wife Ann Sarah Palmer (1570?-1650) about 1588 or so and taking care to avoid notice by the ecclesiastical establishment. His daughter Frances (1589?-1635) apparently was borne by Ann Palmer. Blossom’s second marriage took place in 1605: he married Anne Elsdon, who was the mother of his two sons Thomas and Peter. In 1609, his daughter Frances married William Palmer (no relation to Blossom’s first wife), by trade a maker of nails. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>At some point, Blossom and his family emigrated to Holland, first probably to Amsterdam, where William Brewster had established a congregational church in 1608, and then, like Brewster in 1609, to Leiden, where they became members of John Robinson's church. In Leiden, the Separatists were indeed free to worship as they pleased. The difficulty was that, with a few exceptions, the Separatists were desperately poor. Not only were most of them at an initial disadvantage in knowing no Dutch, but many of them had been farmers and herdsmen. In Leiden, an urban center, they could gain only menial employment at minimal wages. Worried about their children becoming more Dutch than English, anxious that the twelve year truce between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland would be expiring in 1621 and war might resume, the Separatists began to consider emigrating to North America.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> When their congregation finally obtained financial backing from a company of investors in London, Blossom decided that he, his wife, and his two sons would be among the 30 or so passengers on the <i>Speedwell</i>, a ship that would sail from Holland, meet the <i>Mayflower</i> in England, and then sail in company to New England. The <i>Speedwell</i> had been fitted with new masts and sails, and there is some evidence that its master deliberately overmasted the ship because he had no desire to cross the Atlantic. The two ships met up at Southampton and duly sailed. Both began to leak, the <i>Speedwell</i> alarmingly so, with the result that they returned to Dartmouth for repairs. Again they set out, and again the <i>Speedwell</i> leaked alarmingly. Back they went to Plymouth, and this time the master refused to continue in the <i>Speedwell.</i> The outcome was that the already crowded <i>Mayflower</i> took aboard some of the <i>Speedwell’s</i> passengers and made the voyage alone (it may be relevant that the <i>Speedwell</i> continued subsequently as a trading vessel for a number of years). They arrived late in the year, and what with inadequate shelter, insufficient food, diseases, and the cold, nearly half of the passengers died that winter.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Thomas Blossom and his family were among those who decided not to go on the <i>Mayflower</i>. They returned to Leiden, presumably hoping that they could soon make the crossing to New England. Money continued to be scarce, so not many more were able to emigrate. His son-in-law William Palmer came over on the <i>Fortune</i> in 1621; his daughter Frances, on the <i>Anne</i> in 1623. Not until 1629, nine years after the <i>Mayflower</i> sailed from Old Plymouth, did Blossom and his family finally reach New Plymouth—on, coincidentally, a ship also named the <i>Mayflower</i>, but an altogether different vessel. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Thomas Blossom was soon elected a deacon of the church in Plymouth. (Robinson's church in Leiden appointed deacons for life, so Blossom may well have been a deacon before coming to Plymouth, but there's no record of it.) A</span><span class="s1">pparently he fulfilled that lay office well for the three years he had yet to live. He died in 1632. </span>In his history <i>Of Plymouth Plantation</i>, William Bradford mentions Blossom by name as one of the "ancient friends" from Holland dead from an "infectious fever" that struck upwards of twenty people. In <i>The Barbarous Years </i>(New York, 2012), the first volume of his work on “The Peopling of British North America,” Bernard Bailyn quotes a contemporary description of Deacon Thomas Blossom: he was “a holy man and experienced saint, . . . competently accomplished with abilities” (349). That sounds to me like a worthy epitaph.</div>
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Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3284009621259933975.post-36412065910187179192016-04-06T07:47:00.002-07:002016-04-26T06:18:05.840-07:00Unnatural Sex and the PuritansI've been doing some research on my father's side of the family, and I've discovered that nearly all of them came not from New York, as I'd assumed, but from Massachusetts and Connecticut. Most of them had left England by the mid-1600's, so I've been reading up on the Puritans and Pilgrims. One of the things I've found out is that they were appalled by unnatural sex. By that phrase they meant everything except intercourse between a husband and wife. Masturbation was condemned everywhere in New England and made a capital crime in the colony of New Haven. Following the Bible, adultery and sodomy were capital crimes.<br />
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And so was bestiality, sex with animals and fowls. In <i>Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America</i> (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), David Hackett Fisher relates the case of George Spencer, a servant with only one eye in New Haven. Spencer had been anything but a model servant, and when a sow gave birth to a piglet with only one eye, Spencer was accused of bestiality. Under great pressure, Fisher relates, Spencer confessed, then recanted, confessed a second time, and then recanted again.<br />
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Two witnesses were required to convict him of bestiality, but the magistrates, determined to find him guilty, got around that inconvenient technicality. The one-eyed piglet was admitted as one witness, and Spencer's confession was admitted as the other one, even though he'd recanted it. Although Fischer is silent on this point, New England courts treating cases of bestiality followed the Biblical injunction of Leviticus: "And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast" (20:15), So both George Spencer and the sow would have been executed.<br />
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Fortunately for John Lawrence at his trial in 1677, the Court of Assistants in Cambridge was not willing to circumvent the required two witnesses for bestiality. In <i>Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699,</i> (Univ. of Mass. Press, 1986), Roger Thompson relates that John Lawrence was seen by Thomas Michelson between seven and eight in the morning "standing on a tree that lay along on the ground having his face towards his mares tail and his hand clasped about her Buttock." After awhile, he deposed, Lawrence "turned the mares tayle on one side and then he again clasped his hands about her Buttocks as before and wrought with his body against hers." But a second person near the scene, one Isaac Amsden, deposed that he was too far away to witness the act, so the case was dismissed.<br />
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Another notable case was that of Thomas Granger, a sixteen or seventeen year-old servant in Duxbury, one of the Pilgrim settlements in Massachusetts. William Bradford found it horrible to mention his case in his history, <i>Of Plymouth Plantation</i>, but he believed that the truth of history required it. Granger was first seen copulating with a mare ("I forbear particulars," Bradford comments primly), and when he was examined on that topic, he confessed to buggery not only with the mare "at sundry times" but with "a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey" (Bk. II, Chapter 32).<br />
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Although Granger at first denied this charge, he eventually confessed to the entire court and was condemned to death. But there was some difficulty in following Leviticus. One sheep looked much like another, with the result Granger had to identify each one he'd had sex with: "whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not." On 8 September 1642, the executions took place: "first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face," and then Granger himself was executed.<br />
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Remarkable as these cases are, they seem far from typical. Roger Thompson points out in <i>Sex in Middlesex</i> that only two men were executed for bestiality in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. (The one-eyed George Spencer lived in Connecticut.) Thompson's meticulous study of town and court records led him to believe that most people in that county were as law abiding about sexuality as they were about other matters. Not all inhabitants were members of the church, and not all church members were godly, but bestiality was not common. In part, the occurrences we know about may have been the few ones in which the act was observed (as it was not in the case of George Spencer), and more perhaps may have taken place in private. But many members of these communities believed that God was watching them--"God can see you in the dark" was a common warning--and might well punish all of them for the sins of the few. So were they taught, and so they believed--at least for the greater part of the seventeenth century. They were called to be communities of their brothers' keepers for the greater glory of God, and in that watchful context what they termed "abominations in the eyes of the Lord" accordingly would have been rare.Gerard H. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04893768189194224022noreply@blogger.com0