(After three weeks in the grip of infections, both viral and bacterial, some potentially life-threatening, I’m limping back to life and my blog, with a return, both sentimental and high-tech, to the ancestral home of the Zwickys, the village of Mollis, Canton Glarus, Switzerland.)
I’ll lead with a photo of impossibly picturesque Mollis in the summertime, when it’s green:
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Just mounted on the wall I face when I’m at my work table: a digital reproduction of the famous Zwicky Cat poster by Donald Brun (for the Zwicky silk thread company in Wallisellen, Canton Zürich), and a postcard Amanda Walker sent me because it reminded her of the cat Kurniau (what cats say in Estonian — it’s a purr and a meow) from the Zwicky household in Columbus OH many years ago:
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I’ve posted the Zwicky Cat image before, and about Brun. To come here: about the source of the framed poster (the Wee Blue Coo company in Edinburgh); about the fuller version of the poster, in which a cat may look at a cat icon (as Kurniau seems to be doing above); and about another entertaining Brun poster that I came across while searching for a copy of the two-cat version of the Zwicky silk thread poster.
Cool. That’s the URL for (francophone) Swiss artist Christine Zwicky-Lehmann’s website; it’s as if I had managed to get amz.us. In any case, she came to me via Google Alerts, alerting me to one of her exhibitions back in 2013. From that website:
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(So much to find in French âme (very roughly) ‘soul’.)
Mostly watercolors, but also acrylics.
The town of Wallisellen in Canton Zürich, Switzerland, has just come up again on this blog (in the posting “Three Züricher Peter Zwickys”), as the site of the Zwicky silk-thread company and now the Zwicky construction and real estate company. Two notable things about the place (from its Wikipedia page): the etymology of its name, which looks like a compound (and is), but without easily identifiable parts; and a Swiss German nonsense rhyme that incorporates the town’s name.
A comment on my posting on the 24th, “A Swiss thread in Paris”, about a handsome Zwicky & Co. building on the Boulevard de Sébastopol in Paris:
The building was used as sales office for Zwicky [silk] sewing threads until 2000 and is still owned by the Zwicky Family.
This from one Peter Zwicky, from a Swiss e-mail address. Now, there are great many Peter Zwickys in Switzerland, a fair number just in the Zürich area alone — one of whom (cellist Peter, son of Conrad) I’ve mentioned in passing in postings on this blog. (Zürich is relevant because the headquarters of the Zwicky sewing thread company are in Wallisellen, in Canton Zürich not far (about 5.5 miles) from the city.) I thought this might be that Peter, but no, he’s an executive in the silk-thread Zwicky & Co.
In gathering information about Silk PZ (as opposed to Cello PZ), I came across another notable Züricher PZ, an earthquake specialist in a Zürich firm of consuting engineers — Earthquake PZ for short.
Then, as an unexpected bonus, it turns out that one of Silk PZ’s daughters is the Joëlle Zwicky (of IWC, the International Watch Company in Schaffhausen, Switzerland) that I posted about on 6/6/18, in “Swiss watchmakers”.
This Instagram photo by Eric Darvoy @Pixdar on Twitter:
(#1) Soies Zwicky & Co. door at 36 Boulevard de Sébastopol, Paris
The Zwicky silk thread company (of Wallisellen in Canton Zürich, Switzerland), most recently visited in my posting on the 19th, “A Swiss thread”. Apparently, in the 1940s, the company had an office in Paris, with these imposing doors.
Yesterday, in the posting “Return to the E. Zwicky grain mill”,
Kim Darnell has been preparing a Page on this blog linking to my postings about Switzerland and the Swiss. This has caused her to discover still more Zwicky-related sites — thus giving me still more things to post about. The great cycle of posting.
That posting took us to the Schweizerische Schälmühle (‘Swiss hulling-mill’) E. Zwicky and its muesli. Meanwhile, the Page on “Switzerland, things Swiss” is now finished and available for consultation.
And Kim has turned my attention back to another well-known Swiss firm, the Zwicky & Co. silk thread factory (Seidenzwirnerei), recognized to many people through Swiss artist Donald Brun’s elegantly playful 1950 ad poster for the company:
Kim Darnell has been preparing a Page on this blog linking to my postings about Switzerland and the Swiss. This has caused her to discover still more Zwicky-related sites — thus giving me still more things to post about. The great cycle of posting.
First up is a return to an old topic, the E. Zwicky company that makes, among other things, Zwicky muesli. See my 10/17/16 posting “More Zwicky postings”, with image #1 of muesli from the E. Zwicky AG [‘Ltd., LLC’] mill, with brief copy about the company. But now more detail, starting with the company’s logo, which involves both a stylized Zwicky signature and the company mascot, a little gnome:
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Kim Darnell, laboring to assemble a Page for this blog on postings about Switzerland and the Swiss, passed on a charming BBC News video from the 4th, “The Swiss master watchmaker running out of time”:
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Philippe Dufour [born 1948 in Le Sentier, Canton of Vaud, Swtzerland] has been making watches by hand for 50 years but has no-one to pass his skills on to.
He tells the BBC what it means to be one of the very few watchmakers remaining in the craft.
The watches sell for $50,000 and up each — but then each watch takes months of labor to make, and they are artworks in themselves.
I then thought to look for Zwickys in the Swiss watch business, and immediately netted Joëlle Zwicky, at the International Watch Company in Schaffhausen — industrial watchmakers, but at the very high end of the industry. And with an office of Corporate Social Responsibility, which JZ heads.
(This posting was a couple of sentences from being finished when the Ramona Xfinity Internet Crash occurred, two days ago (service has finally been restored). This in the midst of the (overlapping) Ramona Respiratory Pestilence and the Ramona Gastroenterological Pestilence. It’s been an unfortunate week.)
A posting about my family, and, mostly, about the fragility of memory. But first, an ornament, a layered spiral design from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s Instagram site yeserday:
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I prefer to see this as a fancy script Z, for Zwicky.
Then the story starts with a day Luc Vartan Baronian and I spent together back in late December, talking about linguistics and our lives. (Luc is a 2006 Stanford Ph.D.; now Associate Professor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi; specializing in phonology and morphology, French varieties and creoles of the Americas, and Armenian studies.)
