From yesterday, in the posting “nostalgie du ciel’, from an exchange with Hana Filip about nostalgia, with a reference to (from my father, long ago):
guidebooks [to Alpine flowers], including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia.
Now, an inventory of my postings about the one with those marvelous illustrations.
My dinner for June 27 was delivered by a courier bubbling over in delight about the coming Fourth of July, which he identified as my national day (adding that he was Peruvian and his national days came at the end of July — surprising details below). I suppressed my complex reservations about American Independence Day (some of which I will unload later) and chose not to add that we were at the eve of one of my people’s celebratory days — Stonewall Day, June 28 (the tank top I was wearing had a rainbow flag on it) — though I did point to my gym shorts, whose white cross on red is in fact the Swiss flag, adding that Swiss national day was coming in August (August 1, to be precise). I didn’t develop the theme of my absurd pride in the remnants of Swissness that cling to me, most especially the egalitarian, aristocrat-free ideals the federation has espoused since the original alliance was formed in 1291, over 7 centuries ago; there is nothing like it in all of Europe.
After he left, I checked out the Fiestas Patrias peruanas, or Peruvian National Holidays, which officially are celebrations of Peru’s independence from the Spanish Empire (Wikipedia entry here), but in fact have become an entire holiday season, in character very much like the secular Christmas season (at, however, the end of July). It sounds delightful.
Explorations of the channels on my Comcast cable subscription led me to a big block of “music choice” channels in the very high numbers, where I (with my basic cable subscription) don’t normally venture. And there I found channel 942, “classical masterpieces”, offering what ordinary Americans think of as “classical music” (of the serious variety, not the soupy stuff intended for elevators or supermarkets).
Some experience with 942 suggests that it’s very heavily biased towards orchestral music (including orchestral transcriptions of vocal, solo-instrument, and chamber music), especially from the Romantic period. My personal tastes are centered on solo-instrument music (especially for my instrument, the piano), chamber music (which I think of as musical conversations), and opera and art song — especially from the Baroque and Classical periods — so 942’s programming is an imperfect fit for me.
On the other hand, the programming tends to favor obscure composers (a fair number are people I’ve never heard of, though you might take that just to mean that I’m a poorly educated philistine) and obscure compositions by more well-known composers (for instance, a work by Elgar I’d never heard of) — which brings me to what was playing when I first tuned in to 942: Joachim Raff’s (very long, and dramatic) Symphony No. 1, in a recording by the Bamberg Symphony under Hans Stadlmair.
I had somehow missed this Wikipedia page until I stumbled on it this morning:
Zwicky is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Sweet Gee (an alter ego of Gadi Niram’s) wrote on Facebook yesterday about a character in the delightful Hetty Wainthropp Investigates tv show, who I took to be the character played by the adorable Dominic Monaghan, but turned out to be Joe Peluso’s. I wrote:
Ah, I am mollified. I’d completely forgotten JP. Meanwhile, I know that mollify has to do, etymologically, with softening, but I couldn’t help thinking of it as Molly-fy ‘make into a Molly’, presumably by getting into drag.
Two clusters of things here: the Wainthropp show and DM; and the verb mollify and the noun molly / Molly.
… and call it Cochon de lait rôti. Put a mouth on that green apple and call it Le fils de l’homme. Mash them together in a nightmare and you get today’s Bizarro strip, a Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon that’s a re-play of an earlier Bizarro, but with the dream figure of William Tell’s son (with an apple on his head) replaced by a roasted wild boar (with an apple in its mouth):
(#1) Surrealist René Magritte’s Son of Man on the therapist’s couch (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Two things here: apples in the mouths of roasted pigs (as in the patient’s nightmare); and the previous Bizarro strip (from 2022), with the same patient and the same therapist (a caricature of the artist Magritte), positioned differently in the strip, and suffering from dramatically different nightmares.
I have long noted the happy coincidence of Valentine’s Day and my daughter Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday (for me, stirring memories of Boston Lying-in Hospital — now part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital — in 1965), but this morning I got a Facebook posting on one of the websites devoted to memorializing the astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky and his work, somewhat delayed in transit, celebrating FZ’s birthday, on VDay in 1898! Let’s just call it Zwicky Birthday.
Unus pro omnibus
Omnes pro uno
This display came by me on my Facebook feed this morning; as a grandson of Switzerland I found it offensive (and, by the way, inaccurate):
(#1) From the Holy Roman Empire Association, the coats of arms of “European Kingdoms, Duchies and Principalities in 1519”
Switzerland is a confederation, with no ruler — not king nor duke nor prince — and has been (with occasional hiccups) since its founding in 1291. Like the Friends / Quakers, it is (in principle) radically egalitarian, as am I personally (though I concede that every person, and every human institution, is imperfect, flawed; but that’s a core principle of radical egalitarianism).
On my Pinterest feed yesterday — no doubt because of my interest in men’s bodies — this portrait of Prometheus, writhing mad-eyed in agony, shackled on a rocky ledge, as Zeus’s punitive eagle flies in to gnaw on his liver once again:
(#1) Frank Buchser, Prometheus Forged on a Rock (1855)
To come: first, notes on Prometheus and the eagle, from previous postings on this blog.
Then about the artist, who was, first of all, Swiss, from the town of Solothurn. There will be a digression on the town, which is almost impossibly picturesque.
But for the middle part of his life FB wandered from Solothurn, traveling widely around the world, including five years in the US, where he changed his personal name from Franz to Frank and painted a huge series of works depicting post-Civil War America for an European audience — three of them reproduced here.
For 1/2, New Year’s Morrow, on Facebook, Ryan Tamares reports:
First Postcossing card received in 2025. Woohoo!
AZ sagt: in the traditional Swiss sport of thong skiing, the placement of the Helvetic cross is crucial
