#source: thoma's second anecdote from this event

[aster-go-brrr]

MORE THOMAMA LORE: her name is ulrike :D

[amphibious-thing]

The Partnership of Mrs. Bateman and the Chevalière d’Eon

[Right: Mrs Bateman, print c.1793 by Marino or Mariano Bovi (Bova), after Ludwig Guttenbrun, via the National Portrait Gallery

Left: Mademoiselle La Chevaliere d’Eon de Beaumont, print c.1787 by Thomas Chambers (Chambars), after Richard Cosway, via the National Portrait Gallery]

Mrs. Bateman was an English actress, singer and fencer. In the 1790′s she traveled Britain with d’Eon putting on fencing displays. I could not find much about her life either before or after her partnership with d’Eon. Men and Women of Soho admits to having “not, at present, discovered the date of Mrs. Bateman’s birth or death.” (p6) However A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 speculates she may have been Mary Bateman née Humphry (1765-1829) who was buried at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. (v1 p376-8) Certainly the dates and location seem to match up.

Its unclear how the two met, but its possible Bateman was one of d’Eon’s students. In August 1792 d’Eon had “opened a fencing School, which is much frequented by the younger Nobility.” (Evening Mail, 6-8 Aug 1792) A Biographical Dictionary of Actors... states that Bateman had been “D’Eon’s pupil since 1792” but it’s unclear what their source is.

The two were clearly acquainted by the 29th of November 1792 when the Morning Chronicle reports:

The Chevalier D’Eon and Mrs. Bateman are made honorary members of the Club d’Arms; so that these heroines, if they are not, like the Fernigs, fighting in the field of war, are at least preparing for the conflict. This is, however, very menacing-if our ladies take to the small sword, the constitution is undone.

Their professional association started in January 1793. Mrs. Bateman held a series of subscription breakfasts at her house in Soho. After breakfast fencing matches were held for everyones entertainment. Both d’Eon and Bateman fenced at these events. The Diary or Woodfall's Register reported that d’Eon complimented Bateman’s fencing skills describing her as “a youngling in her nest, that would rise and support the honour of female heroism in England.”

The World reported that 500 people attended the second event on the 16th. “At one,” writes the London Chronicle, “breakfast being finished, Mademoiselle assumed her former characters and sustained two assaults; the first with Captain Ross, an Irish gentleman, the second with Mr. Scott. It was allowed by all the company, that a greater display of science and dexterity was scarcely ever seen.”

The World reported that “the greatest display of sprit and science, were between Mr. Hill and Mr. Hume, Capt. Walslby, and Mademoiselle D’Eon.” Soho and Its Associations shares the following anecdote from the event:

Mrs. Bateman gave an elegant amusement to a party of about 500 ladies and gentlemen at noon. ‘Le Chevalier D'Eon fenced,’ says a newspaper of the period; ‘she sustained four assaults from Capt. Walmsley, and in the loose play refused a mask, saying, “I have defended my virginity fifty years without, and now cannot adopt it.”’

(see Diary or Woodfall's Register, 12 Jan 1793 and 18 Jan 1793; The World, 17 Jan 1793; the London Chronicle, 17 Jan 1793; Soho and Its Associations p72)

[Admission ticket for “Geneviéve d'Eon At Mrs Batemans, No 1 Carlisle Street Soho, on Wednesday January 16 at 12 O'clock.” c.1793, via the British Museum]

On Thursday the 30th of May 1793 Mrs. Bateman held a benefit night at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket. There was a performance of All in the Wrong. Mrs. Bateman played Lady Restless. Elizabeth Farren (who was rumoured to be Anne Damer’s lover) played Belinda.

“Mrs. Bateman was honoured last night with the appearance of a most numerous and splendid company. Every part of the Theatre was full, and the Boxes were decorated by and uncommon display of beauty and fashion.” Reports the Morning Chronicle, “After the play, the Chevalier D’Eon in generosity of friendship, displayed her wonderful talent in fencing. She first pushed carte and tierce with her youthful imitator, Mrs. Bateman.” D’Eon then fenced a gentleman. In preparation she “pulled off her jacket, and thus stripped to her stays,” reports The Times, “with her handkerchief loose over them, and short petticoats that did not come half way down her legs”.

“It is impossible to describe the wonder and delight of the House, at the agility and muscular strength displayed by the Chevalier,” reports the Morning Chronicle, “Mademoiselle D’Eon has lived long enough in England to adopt the most amiable traits in our manners, and she may be assured, that it will raise her in the esteem of the country she loves.”

The Sun was less impressed by the performance complaining that “the indecent circumstance of her stripping herself to her stays, preparatory to her fencing, gave a very general disgust.” The Times conceded credit to “the Lady’s science and activity” but was horrified “to see an old masculine woman of sixty thus attired, and publicly exposing herself on the stage,” declaring that it was “an indecency which we shall never suffer to pass by without a very severe animadversion.” And the St. James's Chronicle or the British Evening Post snipes that d’Eon gratified the audience’s “curiosity rather than admiration.”

(A full cast list can be seen in the advertisement printed in the Diary or Woodfall's Register, 25 May 1793; For reports of the event see: Morning Chronicle, 31 May 1793; The Times, 31 May 1793; Sun, 31 May 1793; St. James's Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 30 May - 1 June 1793.)

D’Eon’s next fencing match took place at Ranelagh on Wednesday the 26th of June and was against Monsieur Saniville. Saniville had previously fenced the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. There was considerable excitement leading up to the match. The Times reports that the event “engrosses at present the conversation of the beau monde. This extraordinary Lady has always been renowned for her skill in the art of Fencing, and from her attacking so capital a fencer as Mr. Sainville, she must still have the same ideas of her own superiority.”

So many applications were made for boxes for the event that the Managers of Ranelagh had to “inform the public that no preference can be given any more of that night than on any other” but they assured that “the Fencing Stage which is erected before the Prince’s box, is so situated that the Assault may be seen by the Company with the greatest conveniency.”

The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser reports that: “Mad. D’Eon hit her antagonist very often in the first assault; but that in the second she received many fine thrust from Mr. Sainville!” The Morning Herald reports that d’Eon displayed “a vigour and firmness incredible to her age.” and that Sainville’s “dexterity, easiness and the sureness of his thrusts, are so much increased since his last assault with Mr. St. George”.

(For the lead up to the event see: The Times, 24 June 1793; Morning Post, 22 June 1793. For an advertisement for the event see: Star and Evening Advertiser, 22 June 1793. For the message from the Managers of Ranelagh see: Diary or Woodfall's Register, 25 June 1793. For reports of the event see: Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 28 June 1793; Morning Herald, 29 June 1793)

While d’Eon continued fencing, Mrs. Bateman had been improving as an actress. “Mrs. Bateman is in great estimation at Richmond as an actress.” Reports the Morning Post, “She has more exercise for her talents, and is of course, exceedingly improved.” (Morning Post, 21 August 1793)

On Friday the 23rd of August, 1793, the Theatre Royal in Richmond held a production of The School for Scandal followed by The Citizen. Mrs Batman played Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and Maris in The Citizen. “In the course of the Evening, (by Particular, Desire of several Persons of Distinction)” reads an advertisement in the Morning Post, “The celebrated CHEVALIERE D’EON, Will FENCE with A NOBLEMAN.”

A reporter at the St. James's Chronicle or the British Evening Post was appalled by d’Eon’s attire:

A disgusting fight was exhibited on Friday Evening last, at the Richmond Theatre—the Chevalier D’Eon fencing with a gentleman. Her merit, as a fencer, is great; but we were hurt to see her displaying that merit on a publick stage, and in a dress that was scarcely decent. She seemed to have but one petticoat on, while a pair of immense pockets dangled on the outside. If she deems is prudent to make a publick display of her fencing abilities, would it not be better to reassume the dress of a man?

( Morning Post, 21 Aug 1793; Morning Post 22 Aug 1793; St. James's Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 27-29 Aug 1793.)

D’Eon and Bateman arrived in Brighton in late August. Reporting from Brighton, The World writes that on the 31st of August “Madam D’Eon is here renovating her strength by exercise and bathing.” And on the 1st of September “D’Eon, and Mrs. Bateman, are arrived here; the latter is to make her appearance in Lady Teazle and the Irish Widow, on Wednesday next; every place is already taken-It is hinted, that Mad. D’Eon is to fence. They are much courted by the fashionables.” The military camp near Brighton was excited by the prospect of the entertainment. Especially by the news that “D’Eon is to fence with an Officer of Brighton.”

On the 3rd of September Mrs. Bateman preformed in Bridget, the Chapter of Accidents and Widow Brady. “The Theatre last night was better attended than on any former occasion ever witnessed in Brighton-” reports The World, “Mrs. Bateman went through both her parts with the upmost spirit and vivacity, and received the warmest applause; the Performers in general went beyond their usual style of acting.”

D’Eon then fenced with an officer. “She was dressed in armour, with a helmet and feathers-” reports The World, “her antagonist, with all the advantages of youth, activity and a considerable share of skill, had the worst of the contest.” The Morning Post reports that “Several of the Militia Heroes fainted during the contest.”

(The World, 2, 3, 6, 7 & 9 Sept 1793; Morning Post 19 Sept 1793)

During their stay in Brighton, Bateman preformed at the Margate Theatre. “The two nights that the Chevalier fenced the house was crowded, a circumstance rather surprising at this time of year,” reports the Morning Chronicle, “but so improvident was the engagement which Mrs. Bateman made with Mr. Wells, the Acting Manager, that their profits were by no means sufficient to defray the expenses of their journey.” When the Duchess of Cumberland heard of this she began a subscription for d’Eon, who “was so affected that she even shed tears.” Mrs. Bateman presented to the Mess, a poem “said to be written by Wm. S----d, Esq”, which included the following lines about d’Eon:

Our heroine, who, with wondrous pow’rs of art

Has play’d thro’ motley life, full many a part;

And who, with equal ease and praise alike,

Can write a folio, or can trail a pike;

Can as a deep and learned Lawyer shine,

Or coolly try the diplomatic line;

Can, like Bellona, rage an actual war,

Or at fencing-match desporting spar;

Can a fine Lady’s airs and ease assume,

The admiration of a Drawing Room;

Who, with a courage yet untaught to yield,

Has mow’d down legions in the tented field;

Has the fierce Despot’s vengeance dar’d to brave,

And mock’d alike the prison and the grave;

And tho’ a host of Myrmidons attack,

Disdain’d alike the Bastile and the Rack.

But now, alas! our matchless maid appears,

For the first time, a woman-by her tears.

Nay, she e’en boasts them as tribute due

To that support she has received form you;

And, sobbing, thus requests me to impart,

The feelings of her charged, and grateful heart:-

(Morning Chronicle, 23 Oct 1793)

The Officers of the East Essex, inspired by the Duchess of Cumberland, invited Mrs. Bateman and d’Eon to Deal where “they gave a Ball; D’Eon fenced, and a purse of ten guineas was sent to her the next day.” At the parade on Sunday one of the officers presented d’Eon to the solders as a woman who had “undergone all the vicissitudes of war. “Be only, my boys,” said he, “as brave as this woman, and the Sans Culottes may land at Deal as soon as they please.”” (London Evening Post, 5-7 Nov 1793)

On the 28th of November The World reports that d’Eon and Bateman were in Canterbury visiting Lady Fielding. D’Eon had “signified her intention of making a Public Assault in every town she visits, the profits of which are to be applied towards providing flannel and other comfortable necessaries for our brave troops". However I’m not sure which other towns the two visited.

By May 1794 d’Eon was back fencing at Ranelagh, where on the 26th she faced M. Recouvrot. “Mademoiselle D’Eon appeared upon the stage, dressed in the uniform she formerly wore as Captain of Dragoons” reports the Oracle, she “fenced with as much grace and agility as if in the vigour of youth; and met her antagonist with such dexterity as to oblige him often to retreat.” (Morning Post, 26 May 1794; Oracle, 28 May 1794)

In August d’Eon and Bateman return to Brighton. Bateman “plays all the Hoydens in an excellent stile, and D’Eon fences;” reports the Morning Post “thus they manage to draw all the Company in Town.” (Morning Post, 6, 14 & 25 Aug 1794; Oracle, 13 Aug 1794)

On the 30th of August it was announced that Bateman and d’Eon were engaged to perform in Cork and Dublin. The Morning Post writes that d’Eon’s exhibitions will “be an amazing treat to the People of Ireland, as she has never been in that Kingdom.” (Morning Post, 30 Aug 1794)

On the 16th of September d’Eon was fencing in Bristol, the Morning Post reports that “she has given a challenge, which has been received, to the Fencing Master there, to fence with marked foils on that day three months.” On the 23rd she arrived in Waterford and the next day set off for Cork. (Morning Post, 19 Sept and 21 Oct, 1794; Oracle, 30 Sept 1794)

In Cork its reported that Mrs. Bateman “cast down the gauntlet to any bold Irishman, that dare come forward and push with her Quarte and Tierce. When the Curtain arose, a Drayman in the Gallery called out, “By J--- I will accept the Challenge, and will drink four quarts to her one, and lift a Tearce with her or any other Jontleman in the Theatre” (Morning Post, 27 Oct 1794)

By the 3rd of March Mrs. Bateman had returned from Ireland but “her friend d’Eon is so much indisposed as to be obliged to stop at Liverpool.” (Morning Chronicle, 3 Mar 1795)

On the 28th of May 1795 “Mrs. Bateman nearly put an end to her existence” reports the Oracle, “Not having slept for two or three nights, she imprudently took a great quantity of laudanum with spirits of salts!” The incident was reported as an accident that was “happily perceived time enough to save her life; but she still lies very ill at her house in Wimpole-street.” (Oracle 29, May 1795)

On the 10th of October 1795 the Morning Post reports that:

Madame D’Eon and Mrs. Bateman, have dissolved Partnership, and the latter sprightly Dame, now pushes Quarte and Tierce on her own account.

D’Eon also continued fencing, on the 28th of December, the Morning Post reports that d’Eon “is now performing at Bath, unaccompanied by her former friend Mrs. Bateman.”

It’s not clear why their partnership, and it seems friendship, dissolved. But it was certainly a spectacle of the stage while it lasted.

[weavingthetapestry]

19th March 1286: “A Strong Wind Will Be Heard in Scotland”

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

On 19th March 1286, a body was discovered on a Fife beach, not far from the royal burgh of Kinghorn. The corpse was that of a 44-year-old man, and the cause of death was later diversely reported as either a broken neck or some other severe injury consistent with a fall from a horse at some point during the previous night. It is not known exactly when this body was found, nor do we know who discovered it. But we do know that the dead man was soon identified, with much dismay, as the King of Scots himself, Alexander III.

The late king had no surviving children, only a young widow who was not yet known to be pregnant, and an infant granddaughter in the kingdom of Norway. Despite this, Alexander III’s untimely death did not cause any immediate civil strife, although it did set in motion a chain of events which eventually led to the Scottish Wars of Independence. This conflict would forever alter the relationship between the kingdoms of Scotland and England, as well as the wider course of European history.

Although Alexander III was a moderately successful monarch, he had been unfortunate over the last ten years. His first wife, Margaret of England, had died in 1275 and Alexander initially showed no immediate interest in remarriage. At first the succession seemed secure: Margaret had left behind two sons and a daughter. However the death of the couple’s younger son David c.1281, may have prompted the king’s decision to arrange the marriages of his two surviving children over the next few years. In the summer of 1281, the twenty-year-old Princess Margaret set sail for Bergen, where she was to marry King Eirik II of Norway. Her brother Alexander, the eighteen-year-old heir to the throne, married the Count of Flanders’ daughter in November 1282. Neither marriage lasted long. The queen of Norway died in spring 1283, possibly during childbirth, while her younger brother succumbed to illness in January 1284. Within a few years, a series of unforeseen tragedies had destroyed Alexander III’s family and hopes, and the outlook for the kingdom seemed equally bleak...

All was not lost however. The king was in good health and believed he could count on the support of the realm’s leading men. Steps were swiftly taken to ensure their compliance with his plans for the succession. On 5th February 1284, a few weeks after Prince Alexander’s death, an impressive number of Scottish nobles* set their seals to an agreement at Scone. In the event of the king of Scotland’s death without any surviving legitimate children, they obliged themselves and their heirs to accept as monarch the heir at law. This was currently a baby named Margaret, the only surviving child of Alexander III’s daughter the queen of Norway.

(Drawing based on a seal belonging to Yolande of Dreux, Alexander III’s second queen. She later became Countess of Montfort and, by marriage, Duchess of Brittany. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Although the bishops of Scotland were to censure anyone who broke this oath, the prospect of the crown being inherited by an infant girl on the other side of the North Sea was obviously not ideal. Her grandfather struck an optimistic note in a letter to his brother-in-law Edward I of England, writing that in spite of his recent “intolerable” trials, “the child of his dearest daughter” still lived and hoping that “much good may yet be in store”. But the king would not leave everything up to chance and in October 1285, at the age of 43, he married the French noblewoman Yolande of Dreux. As the year drew to a close, Alexander might have hoped that his misfortunes were behind him. He still had his kingdom and his health, and now, with a new queen, there was every chance that he could father another son.

In fact, the king had less than six months to live. The exact circumstances of Alexander’s death are shrouded in mystery, although most sources agree on the fundamental details. Only the Chronicle of Lanercost gives a detailed account, although much cannot be corroborated, and its author had a habit of providing moral explanations for historical events. He was convinced that the calamities which befell the Scottish royal house in the 1280s were punishment for Alexander III’s personal sins. The chronicler never explicitly names these sins, but he does hint at a conflict between the king and the monks of Durham (allowing Alexander’s death to be attributed to a vengeful St Cuthbert). The chronicler also included salacious stories of Alexander’s private life, claiming:

“he used never to forbear on account of season or storm, nor for perils of flood or rocky cliffs, but would visit, not too creditably, matrons and nuns, virgins and widows, by day or by night as the fancy seized him, sometimes in disguise, often accompanied by a single follower.”

Although this does seem to back up the king’s habit of making reckless journeys, alone and in bad weather, the chronicle’s biases are nonetheless fairly obvious. On the other hand, the man who probably compiled the chronicle up to the year 1297 does appear to have had many contacts in Scotland. These included the confessors of the late Queen Margaret and her son Prince Alexander, as well as the latter’s tutor, the clergy of Haddington and Berwick, and the earl of Dunbar. It is unclear how he acquired information about Alexander III’s death, but the chronicle’s narrative is at least plausible and correct in its essentials. Although some of the anecdotes are a little too detailed and didactic to be entirely truthful, the narrative provides some interesting insights into contemporary behaviour, such as the way medieval Scots felt entitled to address their kings. In the absence of alternative narratives, and without necessarily subscribing to the chronicler’s moral views, it is therefore perhaps worth following Lanercost to begin with, supplementing this with additional information where possible.

(The northern half of a map of Britain, drawn by the thirteenth century English chronicler Matthew Paris. Matthew Paris was based in the south of England and was not overly familiar with Scottish geography, but his depiction of Scotland as split over two islands and joined only at the bridge of Stirling, is nonetheless enlightening. The map is now in the public domain and has been made available by the British Libary (x))

On the evening of 18th March 1286, Alexander III is reported to have been in good spirits. This was in spite of the weather, which the author of the Chronicle of Lanercost described as being so foul, “that to me and most men, it seemed disagreeable to expose one’s face to the north wind, rain and snow”. The king of Scots was then dining at Edinburgh, attended by many of his nobles, who were preparing a response to the king of England’s ambassadors regarding the aged prisoner Thomas of Galloway. However when the court had finished dinner King Alexander was not at all anxious to retire early. Instead, not in the least deterred by the wind and rain lashing the windows, he announced his intention of spending the night with his new wife. Since Queen Yolande was then staying at Kinghorn in Fife, travelling there from Edinburgh would not only involve riding over twenty miles in the dark, but would also mean crossing the choppy waters of the Firth of Forth. Unsurprisingly, the king’s councillors tried to dissuade him. However Alexander was determined, and eventually he set off with only a few attendants, leaving his courtiers wringing their hands behind him.

The first part of the journey passed without incident and soon the king and his companions arrived at the Queen’s Ferry, by the shores of the Forth. This popular crossing point was named after Alexander’s famous ancestress St Margaret, who had established accommodation and transport for pilgrims there two hundred years earlier. But when the king himself sought passage, the ferryman pointed out that it would be very dangerous to attempt the crossing in such conditions. Alexander, undeterred, asked him if he was scared, to which the ferryman is said to have stoutly replied, “By no means, it would be a great honour to share the fate of your father’s son.” So the king and his attendants boarded the ferry and, notwithstanding the storm, the boat soon reached the shores of Fife in safety. As the king and his squires rode away from the ferry port, intending to complete the last eleven or so miles of their journey that night, they passed through the royal burgh of Inverkeithing. There, despite the evening gloom, the king’s voice was recognised by the manager of his saltpans, who was also one of the baillies of the town.** The burgess called out to the king and reprimanded him for his habit of riding abroad at night, inviting Alexander to stay with him until morning. But, laughing, Alexander dismissed his concerns and, asking only for some local serfs to act as guides, he rode off into the night.

(South Queensferry, as drawn by the eighteenth century artist John Clerk and made available for public use by the National Galleries of Scotland. Obviously the Queen’s Ferry changed a lot between the 1280s and the 1700s, but at least during this period the ferry was still the main mode of transportation across the Forth.)

By now darkness had set in and, despite the local knowledge of their guides, it was not long before every member of the king’s party became completely lost. Although they had become separated, the king’s squires eventually found the road again. However at some point they must have realised that they had a new problem: the king was nowhere to be found.

In the early fifteenth century, local tradition held that Alexander was at least heading in the right direction when he became separated from his companions. Although he too had lost sight of the main road, the king followed the shoreline, his horse carrying him swiftly over the sands towards Kinghorn. It was there, only a couple of miles from his destination, that the king’s luck finally ran out. Since there were no known witnesses to Alexander III’s death, it is unlikely that we will ever know for certain what happened that night. However most sources agree that the king’s horse probably stumbled and threw its rider. Alexander tumbled to the ground and snapped his neck and, at a stroke, the dynasty which had ruled Scotland for over two hundred years came to an end.

It is not known precisely how long the king’s body lay on the beach, alone under the moon while the waves crashed on the shore and confusion reigned among his squires and guides. However his corpse was discovered the next day and was swiftly conveyed to nearby Dunfermline. Ten days later, on 29th March 1286, the kingdom’s ruling elite gathered to see the last King Alexander buried near the high altar of the abbey kirk, in the company of his ancestors. Near the spot where the king’s body was allegedly found, a stone cross was later erected beside the road, which could still be seen by travellers over a hundred years later. The modern belief that Alexander III died when either he or his horse fell from a cliff*** (a tradition which is not supported by any mediaeval sources so far as I am aware) may stem from the position of this old cross, which possibly occupied the same spot as that of the Victorian Alexander III monument. This monument can now be seen at the side of the modern A921 road between Burntisland and Kinghorn, a permanent reminder of the role this seemingly nondescript location once played in the history of Scotland.

(The Alexander III monument near Kinghorn. Source: Wikimedia Commons- the photo was taken by Kim Traynor who has kindly made the image available for reuse under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

The impact of Alexander’s death on a small mediaeval kingdom like Scotland, conditioned to look to its monarch for leadership, must have been great. Even the Lanercost chronicler admitted that the general populace was observed “bewailing his sudden death as deeply as the desolation of the realm.” However it is important not to exaggerate the scale of the crisis. Popular views of Alexander III’s death are inescapably informed by the accounts of fourteenth and fifteenth century writers, who depicted it as the root of all of Scotland’s later ills.

Writing in the aftermath of a century dominated by war, plague, famine, and climate change, it is perhaps unsurprising that many late mediaeval chroniclers looked back on Alexander III’s reign as comparatively peaceful. As the author of the fourteenth century “Gesta Annalia II” explained, “How worthy of tears and how hurtful his death was to the kingdom of Scotland is plainly shown forth by the evils of after times.” Meanwhile, in his “Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland” completed c.1420, Andrew Wyntoun portrayed Alexander’s reign as a Golden Age of peace and justice (when, just as importantly, oats only cost fourpence a boll). He incorporated an old song into his chronicle, perhaps written in the years following the king’s accident, which neatly encapsulates later views of the event and its impact:

“Quhen Alysandyr oure Kyng wes dede 

That Scotland led in luẅe and lé, 

Away wes sons off ale and brede, 

Off wyne and wax, off gamyn and glé: 

Oure gold wes changyd in to lede. 

Cryste borne in to Vyrgynyté, 

Succoure Scotland and remede, 

That stad [is in] perplexyté.”

Wyntoun’s younger contemporary Walter Bower, author of the “Scotichronicon”, also lamented Alexander’s premature death and even rolled out a legend about Scotland’s famous seer, Thomas the Rhymer, to reinforce his point. On 18th March 1286, he claimed, the earl of Dunbar “half-jesting” asked the Rhymer for the next day’s weather forecast. True Thomas answered gloomily:

“Alas for tomorrow, a day of calamity and misery! Because before the stroke of twelve a strong wind will be heard in Scotland, the like of which has not been known since long ago. Indeed its blast will dumbfound the nations and render senseless those who hear it, it will humble what is lofty and raze what is unbending to the ground.”

The next morning came and went without any gales, so the earl decided that Thomas had gone mad- until a messenger arrived at precisely midday with news of the king’s death. Although Bower may have been attempting to bolster Thomas of Erceldoune’s reputation as a prophet (in response to English propagandic use of Merlin’s prophecies), the anecdote reveals the significance he attached to Alexander III’s death. Similarly for John Barbour, author of the fourteenth century romance “The Bruce”, there was no doubt that the story of his hero’s story began, “Quhen Alexander the king was deid / That Scotland haid to steyr and leid.” Following this, Barbour skips ahead to the selection of John Balliol as king, dismissing the six years in between as a time when the country lay “desolate”. In this way later chroniclers created the impression of an Alexandrian ‘Golden Age’ and that Scotland almost immediately descended into chaos after his death. Though understandable, these late mediaeval interpretations have traditionally hampered analysis of Alexander’s reign and the events of the decade following his death, despite the best efforts of modern historians.

(The coronation of the young Alexander III at Scone, as depicted in a manuscript version of the fifteenth century “Scotichronicon”, compiled by the Abbot of Incholm, Walter Bower.  Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In reality, while the king’s death was undoubtedly a deep blow, the Scottish political community rallied in the immediate aftermath. In April 1286, parliament assembled at Scone and promised to keep the peace on behalf of the rightful heir to the kingdom. Six ‘Guardians’ were to govern in the meantime- two bishops (William Fraser of St Andrews and Robert Wishart of Glasgow), two earls (Alexander Comyn, earl of Buchan and Duncan, earl of Fife), and two barons (John Comyn of Badenoch and James the Steward). Despite the oaths sworn to Margaret of Norway two years earlier, there may have been some doubt as to who the “rightful heir” actually was. Certain sources claim that Alexander III’s widow Yolande of Dreux was pregnant and the political community waited anxiously for several months before the queen gave birth in November 1286. However no male heir materialised**** and by the end of the year it seems to have been generally acknowledged that the three-year-old Maid of Norway was the rightful “Lady of Scotland”. She was destined never to set foot in Scotland, but, despite her age, gender, and absence from the realm, the country did not descend into complete anarchy in the four years when she was the accepted heir to the throne. Undoubtedly there were people who had reservations about her reign: the Bruces, for example, seem to have attempted a short-lived rebellion, though the situation was soon defused by the Guardians. By 1289 the cracks were perhaps beginning to show, with the death of the earl of Buchan and the murder of the earl of Fife removing two Guardians, who were not replaced. Nonetheless, the authority of the Guardians was recognised in the absence of an adult ruler and they generally attempted to govern competently in the four years between Alexander III’s accident and the Maid of Norway’s own death in 1290.

Having received news of this second tragedy, the Guardians again acted cautiously, deciding that rival claims for the kingship should be judged in an official court chaired by a respected and powerful arbitrator. Thus they appealed to Scotland’s formidable neighbour, Edward I of England. Despite later allegations of foul play, the English king’s eventual judgement in favour of John Balliol does appear to have been consistent with the law of primogeniture and due process. It would take years of steady deterioration before war finally broke out in 1296. By then Alexander III had been dead for a decade, and though the crisis may have indirectly grown out of his demise, it was not necessarily the immediate cause of Scotland’s late mediaeval woes. Nonetheless the events of that dark night in March 1286 would leave their mark on the popular imagination for centuries, shaping Scottish history down to the present day.

(An imprint of the Great Seal used by the Guardians of Scotland following Alexander III’s death. Reproduced in the “History of Scottish seals from the eleventh to the seventeenth century”, by Walter de Gray Birch, now out of copyright and available on internet archive)

Additional Notes:

*The assembled magnates included the earls of Buchan, Dunbar, Strathearn, Atholl, Lennox, Carrick, Mar, Angus, Menteith, Ross, Sutherland, and two other earls whose titles are illegible but who may have been Caithness and Fife.  The barons included Robert de Brus the elder (father of the earl of Carrick and grandfather of the future Robert I), James Stewart, John Balliol (the future king), John Comyn of Badenoch, William de Soules, Enguerrand de Coucy (Alexander III’s maternal cousin), William Murray, Reginald le Cheyne, William de St Clair, Richard Siward, William of Brechin, Nicholas de Hay, Henry de Graham, Ingelram de Balliol, Alan the son of the earl, Reginald Cheyne the younger, (John?) de Lindsay, Simon Fraser, Alexander MacDougall of Argyll, Angus MacDonald, and Alan MacRuairi, among others. 

** The historian G.W.S. Barrow identified this figure as Alexander the saucier the master of the royal sauce kitchen and one of the baillies of Inverkeithing. 

*** There are some variations on this local tradition too- in 1794, the minister who wrote the entry for Kinghorn parish in the Old Statistical Account claimed that the ‘King’s Wood-end’ near the site of the current Alexander III monument was where the king liked to hunt and that he fell from his horse while on a hunting trip. 

****The Guardians and other nobles may have assembled at Clackmannan for the birth. Several modern historians have accepted Walter Bower’s statement that the queen’s baby was stillborn, despite the Chronicle of Lanercost’s somewhat fantastic tale of a fake pregnancy, with Yolande being caught conspiring to smuggle an actor’s son into Stirling Castle.

Selected Bibliography: 

- “The Chronicle of Lanercost”, as translated by Sir Herbert Maxwell 

- “Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, Preserved Among the Public Records of England”, Volume 2, ed. Joseph Bain 

- Rymer’s “Foedera…”, Volume 1 part 1 

- “Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland”, vol 1., ed. Joseph Stevenson 

- “Scottish Annals From English Chroniclers”, ed. A.O. Anderson (especially Annals of Worcester; Thomas Wykes; Chronicles in Annales Monastici) 

- “Early Sources of Scottish History”, ed. A.O. Anderson (esp. Chronicle of Holyrood, various continuations of the Chronicle of the Kings of Scotland; John of Evenden; Nicholas Trivet) 

- “The Flowers of History… as Collected by Mathew of Westminster”, ed. C.D. Yonge - Gesta Annalia II (formerly attributed to John of Fordun) in “John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation”, ed. W. F. Skene 

- John Barbour’s “The Brus”, ed. A.A.M. Duncan 

- “The Orygynale Cronikil of the Scotland”, vol.2., by Andrew Wyntoun, ed. David Laing 

- “A History Book for Scots: Selections from the Scotichronicon”, ed. D.E.R. Watt 

- “The Authorship of the Lanercost Chronicle”, by A.G. Little in the English Historical Review, vol. 31 no. 122, p. 269-279 

- “The Kingship of the Scots”, A.A.M. Duncan 

- “Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland”, G.W.S. Barrow 

- “The Wars of Scotland, 1230-1371”, Michael Brown

I have extensive notes so if anyone needs a reference for a specific detail please let me know.

[sciencespies]

What the heck was this blue 'luminous event' photographed from the space station?

https://sciencespies.com/space/what-the-heck-was-this-blue-luminous-event-photographed-from-the-space-station/

What the heck was this blue 'luminous event' photographed from the space station?

On October 8, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet captured something strikingly rare from on board the International Space Station (ISS).

The photo – which is a single frame taken from a longer timelapse – might look like it shows a cobalt bomb exploding over Europe, but this scary-looking blue light didn’t do any damage. In fact, most people would never have noticed it happening.

Instead, the frame shows something far less ominous called a ‘transient luminous event‘ – a lightning-like phenomenon striking upwards in the upper atmosphere.

Also known as upper-atmospheric lighting, transient luminous events are a bunch of related phenomena which occur during thunderstorms, but significantly above where normal lighting would appear. While related to lighting, they work a little bit differently.

There are ‘blue jets’, which happen lower down in the stratosphere, triggered by lightning. If the lighting propagates through the negatively charged (top) region of the thunderstorm clouds before it gets through the positive region below, the lightning ends up striking upwards, igniting a blue glow from molecular nitrogen.

Then there are red SPRITES (Stratospheric/mesospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification) – electrical discharges that often glow red, occurring high above a thunderstorm cell, triggered by disturbances from the lightning below – and slightly dimmer red ELVES (Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources) in the ionosphere.

Sticking with the theme, there are also TROLLs (Transient Red Optical Luminous Lineaments) which occur after strong SPRITES, as well as Pixies and GHOSTS. We’re sure the scientists had lots of fun naming all of these phenomena.

“What is fascinating about this lightning is that just a few decades ago they had been observed anecdotally by pilots, and scientists were not convinced they actually existed,” Pesquet explains in a photo caption.

“Fast forward a few years and we can confirm elves, and sprites are very real and could be influencing our climate too!”

Although Pesquet doesn’t explain specifically which type of luminous event we’re seeing, this particular image could be showing a ‘blue starter’, which is a blue jet that doesn’t quite make it to the jet part, and instead creates a shorter and brighter glow.

These events are particularly hard to photograph from the ground as they are both very high in the sky and also regularly obscured by storm clouds. Plus, the phenomena usually only last for milliseconds or a couple of seconds each time.

With all those things in mind, it makes the ISS a particularly great place to look for these transient events, particularly if you have a timelapse turned on. So far we’ve seen a number of these events captured by astronauts on the ISS, and a small number taken from the ground.

Interestingly, Earth isn’t even the only place where the light shows take place, with researchers discovering just last year that ‘blue sprites’ were occurring on Jupiter too.

“The Space Station is extremely well suited for this observatory as it flies over the equator where there are more thunderstorms,” says Pesquet.

“This is a very rare occurrence and we have a facility outside Europe’s Columbus laboratory dedicated to observing these flashes of light.”

We hope that this research will give us plenty more photos of this incredible phenomena in the future!

#Space

[asfaltics]

subfluences, of

  ploughs expansive sheets of flame, subfluence of the beaming sconce! — limely waving       1 useful for reference, subfluence of whom the exquisite portrait, join the following list       2 subfluence of loss       3 long under the in when mixture containing organic subfluence of       4   I’d like to know the subfluence of the fairies differences of opinion about in employment of the word       5 enterprise, and subfluence of       6 conversation to another subfluence of       7 distance as to be entirely out of the ínspire of the long wire this arrangement is subfluence of       8   subfluence of chlorómethy ! and       9       if not subfluence of slavery       10 Pages could be written upon the subfluence of water, its importance waters       11       subfluence of a large proportion of the lands       12   Therapeutical subfluence of       13 temptation to be subfluence of       14 an answer. The cause was subfluence of       15 sum and subfluence and suggestion of       16   What processes here occur, accompanying reactions take place and the and which take place especially under the in-intensity of attraction which these other subfluence of light       17 the in of books on the ever-expanding subfluence of the far       18 subfluence of a periscope       19 subfluence of style was distinctly jagged pseudo-geometrical slack       20   the azoted subfluence of       21 subfluence of “Some English and Old French forms a volume of Phrases”       22 subfluence of those decisions       23 subfluence of rays       24  

sources (all OCR cross-column misreads/confusions)

1 ex The Universal Magazine v.14 (1754) : 6 preview snippet, evidently from “A descant upon creation” by James Hervey (1714-58 *), found at his Meditations and Contemplations. In Two Volumes... (London, 1796) : 151 2 ex “Biographical Particulars of Celebrated Persons Lately Deceased,” here involving The Rev. Mark Noble and John Fleming, late Lord de Tabley, in The New Monthly 21 (August 1, 1827) : 350 3 ex E. Bellchambers, A General Biographical Dictionary : Containing Lives of the most emininent persons of all ages and nations. Vol. 4 (of 4; London, 1835) : 252 involving entries for Conrad Vorstius (“an eminent divine”; 1569-1622) and Gerard John Vossius (poet, philologist, professor of rhetoric and chronology; 1577-1649) 4 entry for “toxicology” by James Apjohn (1796-1886 *), in The Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine Vol. 4 (SOF — YAW) Supplement (London, 1835) : 189-243 (214) 5 ex T. F., “Familiar Epistles from Ireland, Letter the Fourth, from Terence Flynn, Esq. to Dennis Moriarty, Student-at-Law, London.” in Fraser’s Magazine 42 (September 1850) : 319-328 (327) 6 ex Archibald Alison, History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815. Ninth edition, vol. 12 (Edinburgh and London, 1855) : 50 7 ex John Flesher, ed., Arvine’s Cyclopaedia of Moral and Religious Anecdotes : A collection of nearly three thousand facts, incidents, narratives, examples, and testimonies... the whole arranged and classified on a new plan, with copious topical and scriptural indexes. (London, 1859) : 23 a later edition and who was Arvine? *Kazlitt Arvine, name originally Silas Wheelock Palmer, changed by Mass. leg. while at Newton, b. Centerville, N.Y., Dec. 18, 1819. Wes. U. 1841; N.T.I. 1842-45; ord. Nov. 6, 1845; p. Woonsocket, R.I., 1845-47; Providence ch., New York, N.Y., 1847-49; West Boylston, Mass., 1849-51; author, Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious Anecdote, 1848; a volume of poems; sermons; d. Worcester, July 15, 1851. ex The Newton Theological Institution, General Catalogue, Eleventh Edition (Newton Centre Massachusetts, April 1912) : 56 8 ex entry (by Joseph Henry, of the Smithsonian Institution) for “Magneto-Electricity” in George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, eds., The New American Cyclopaedia : A popular dictionary of general knowledge, Vol. 11 (MacGillvray-Moxa). (New York, 1861) : 67-72 (69) 9 ex letter to the editor on the topic of Bichloride of Methylene (from A. Russell Strachan), in The Medical record : a semi-monthly journal of medicine and surgery (March 2, 1868) : 22 on mixture of alcohol, chloroform and ether, see wikipedia 10 ex “Slavery,” in The Complete Works of W(illiam). E(llery). Channing: With an Introduction (London, 1870?) : 570-615 (591) on Channing (1780-1842), consult wikipedia 11 ex Charles McIntire, Jr., “Science in Common Things,” in Our Home: A Monthly Magazine (Devoted to Local and General Literature) 1:6 (Somerville, N.J.; June 1873) : 247-250 12 ex History of Summit County : With an Outline Sketch of Ohio. Edited by William Henry Perrin. Illustrated. (Chicago, 1881) : 280 13 ex Edwin J. Houston. A Dictionary of Electrical Words, Terms and Phrases, second edition, rewritten and greatly enlarged. (New York, 1892) : 200 14 ex John Brooks Leavitt. “On the Administration of Justice,” in The Counsellor : The New York Law School Law Journal 2:4 (January 1893) : 101-108 15 ex Birmingham Mineral R. Co. v. City of Bessemer (Supreme Court of Alabama. July 27, 1893), in The Southern Reporter 13 (June 14 – December 20, 1893) : 487-489 16 ex Josephine Lazarus, “Jewish Thought in Modern English Poetry : Robert Browning” in The Menorah (“official organ of the Jewish Chautauqua”) 38:1 (January 1905) : 42-53 (44) 17 snippet view only, ex Society of Dyers and Colourists, Bradford, Eng. (Yorkshire), The Journal 25 (1909) : 12 18 ex review of Joseph H. Longford, The Story of Old Japan, in The Oriental Review 1:11 (New York; April 10, 1911) : 212-213 19 ex “The Story of the Week” (involving Canadian War Graft, and The “Sussex” Question), The Independent vol 86 (April 17, 1916) : 96-99 20 ex The American Magazine of Art 8:3 (January 1917) : 118 involving “A fiction among futurists” and an obituary for Henry W. Ranger (landscape painter) 21 ex Andre Dubosc, “Application of Catalysis to Vulcanization,” in The Rubber Age 3:2 (April 25, 1918) : 78-79 22 ex XXIX. Literature and Language / Romance Languages and Literature, by George L. Hamilton, in The American Year Book : A Record of Events and Progress, 1918. Edited by Francis G. Wickware... with coöperation of a supervisory board representing national learned societies (New York, 1919) : 778 23 ex Thomas v. Little et al. (June 7, 1923) in Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Alabama Vol. 209 (1923) : 590-592 24 snippet view, ex International Labour Office, Occupation and Health: Encyclopedia of Hygiene, Pathology, and Social Welfare 2 (1934) : 417

—

2 of n  

[chiseler]

Utopia and Apocalypse: Pynchon’s Populist/Fatalist Cinema

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.

--from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors—two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein)—but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. My motives were both pluralistic and populist: a desire both to respect fiction and non-fiction as equal creative partners and to insist that the book was about more than just myself and my own life. Because my book was largely about the creative roles played by the fictions of cinema on the non-fictions of personal lives, the anti-elitist nature of cinema played a crucial part in these transactions.`

In the case of Pynchon’s 1964 story—which twenty years later, in his collection Slow Learner, he would admit was the only early story of his that he still liked—the cinematic relevance to Moving Places could be found in a single fleeting but resonant detail: the momentary bonding of a little white boy named Tim Santora with a black, homeless, alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee in a hotel room when they discover that they’ve both seen Blood Alley (1955), an anticommunist action-adventure with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, directed by William Wellman. Pynchon mentions only the film’s title, but the complex synergy of this passing moment of mutual recognition between two of its dissimilar viewers represented for me an epiphany, in part because of the irony of such casual camaraderie occurring in relation to a routine example of Manichean Cold War mythology. Moreover, as a right-wing cinematic touchstone, Blood Alley is dialectically complemented in the same story by Tim and his friends categorizing their rebellious schoolboy pranks as Operation Spartacus, inspired by the left-wing Spartacus (1960) of Kirk Douglas, Dalton Trumbo, and Stanley Kubrick.

For better and for worse, all of Pynchon’s fiction partakes of this populism by customarily defining cinema as the cultural air that everyone breathes, or at least the river in which everyone swims and bathes. This is equally apparent in the only Pynchon novel that qualifies as hackwork, Inherent Vice (2009), and the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it is also his worst film to date—a hippie remake of Chinatown in the same way that the novel is a hippie remake of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—seems logical insofar as it seems to have been written with an eye towards selling the screen rights. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed (while defending this indefensible book and film) in the New York Review of Books (January 3, 2015), “Perhaps the novel really was crying out for such a cinematic transformation, for in its pages people watch movies, remember them, compare events in the ‘real world’ to their plots, re-experience their soundtracks as auditory hallucinations, even work their technical components (the lighting style of cinematographer James Wong Howe, for instance) into aspects of complex conspiratorial schemes.” (Despite a few glancing virtues, such as  Josh Brolin’s Nixonesque performance as "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Anderson’s film seems just as cynical as its source and infused with the same sort of misplaced would-be nostalgia for the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, pitched to a generation that didn’t experience it, as Bertolucci’s Innocents: The Dreamers.)

From The Crying of Lot 49’s evocation of an orgasm in cinematic terms (“She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera’s already moving”) to the magical-surreal guest star appearance of Mickey Rooney in wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, cinema is invariably a form of lingua franca in Pynchon’s fiction, an expedient form of shorthand, calling up common experiences that seem light years away from the sectarianism of the politique des auteurs. This explains why his novels set in mid-20th century, such as the two just cited, when cinema was still a common currency cutting across classes, age groups, and diverse levels of education, tend to have the greatest number of movie references. In Gravity’s Rainbow—set mostly in war-torn Europe, with a few flashbacks to the east coast U.S. and flash-forwards to the contemporary west coast—this even includes such anachronistic pop ephemera as the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men and the 1955 Western The Return of Jack Slade (which a character named Waxwing Blodgett is said to have seen at U.S. Army bases during World War 2 no less than twenty-seven times), along with various comic books.

Significantly, “The Secret Integration”, a title evoking both conspiracy and countercultural utopia, is set in the same cozy suburban neighborhood in the Berkshires from which Tyrone Slothrop, the wartime hero or antihero of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), aka “Rocketman,” springs, with his kid brother and father among the story’s characters. It’s also the same region where Pynchon himself grew up. And Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus and richest work, is by all measures the most film-drenched of his novels in its design as well as its details—so much so that even its blocks of text are separated typographically by what resemble sprocket holes. Unlike, say, Vineland (1990), where cinema figures mostly in terms of imaginary TV reruns (e.g., Woody Allen in Young Kissinger) and diverse cultural appropriations (e.g., a Noir Center shopping mall), or the post-cinematic adventures in cyberspace found in the noirish (and far superior) east-coast companion volume to Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge (2013), cinema in Gravity’s Rainbow is basically a theatrical event with a social impact, where Fritz Lang’s invention of the rocket countdown as a suspense device (in the 1929 Frau im mond) and the separate “frames” of a rocket’s trajectory are equally relevant and operative factors. There are also passing references to Lang’s Der müde Tod, Die Nibelungen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Metropolis—not to mention De Mille’s Cleopatra, Dumbo, Freaks, Son of Frankenstein, White Zombie, at least two Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, Pabst, and Lubitsch—and the epigraphs introducing the novel’s second and third sections (“You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray” and “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…. –Dorothy, arriving in Oz”) are equally steeped in familiar movie mythology.

These are all populist allusions, yet the bane of populism as a rightwing curse is another near-constant in Pynchon’s work. The same ambivalence can be felt in the novel’s last two words, “Now everybody—“, at once frightening and comforting in its immediacy and universality. With the possible exception of Mason & Dixon (1997), every Pynchon novel over the past three decades—Vineland, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge—has an attractive, prominent, and sympathetic female character betraying or at least acting against her leftist roots and/or principles by being first drawn erotically towards and then being seduced by a fascistic male. In Bleeding Edge, this even happens to the novel’s earthy protagonist, the middle-aged detective Maxine Tarnow. Given the teasing amount of autobiographical concealment and revelation Pynchon carries on with his public while rigorously avoiding the press, it is tempting to see this recurring theme as a personal obsession grounded in some private psychic wound, and one that points to sadder-but-wiser challenges brought by Pynchon to his own populism, eventually reflecting a certain cynicism about human behavior. It also calls to mind some of the reflections of Luc Moullet (in “Sainte Janet,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 86, août 1958) aroused by Howard Hughes’ and Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot and (more incidentally) by Ayn Rand’s and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead whereby “erotic verve” is tied to a contempt for collectivity—implicitly suggesting that rightwing art may be sexier than leftwing art, especially if the sexual delirium in question has some of the adolescent energy found in, for example, Hughes, Sternberg, Rand, Vidor, Kubrick, Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and, yes, Pynchon.

One of the most impressive things about Pynchon’s fiction is the way in which it often represents the narrative shapes of individual novels in explicit visual terms. V, his first novel, has two heroes and narrative lines that converge at the bottom point of a V; Gravity’s Rainbow, his second—a V2 in more ways than one—unfolds across an epic skyscape like a rocket’s (linear) ascent and its (scattered) descent; Vineland offers a narrative tangle of lives to rhyme with its crisscrossing vines, and the curving ampersand in the middle of Mason & Dixon suggests another form of digressive tangle between its two male leads; Against the Day, which opens with a balloon flight, seems to follow the curving shape and rotation of the planet.

This compulsive patterning suggests that the sprocket-hole design in Gravity’s Rainbow’s section breaks is more than just a decorative detail. The recurrence of sprockets and film frames carries metaphorical resonance in the novel’s action, so that Franz Pökler, a German rocket engineer allowed by his superiors to see his long-lost daughter (whom he calls his “movie child” because she was conceived the night he and her mother saw a porn film) only once a year, at a children’s village called Zwölfkinder, and can’t even be sure if it’s the same girl each time:

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child—what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you can speed or slow at will…)?

***

Cinema, in short, is both delightful and sinister—a utopian dream and an apocalyptic nightmare, a stark juxtaposition reflected in the abrupt shift in the earlier Pynchon passage quoted at the beginning of this essay from present tense to past tense, and from third person to first person. Much the same could be said about the various displacements experienced while moving from the positive to the negative consequences of  populism.

Pynchon’s allegiance to the irreverent vulgarity of kazoos sounding like farts and concomitant Spike Jones parodies seems wholly in keeping with his disdain for David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s popular song “Laura” and what he perceives as the snobbish elitism  of the Preminger film it derives from, as expressed in his passionate liner notes to the CD compilation “Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones” a half-century later:

The song had been featured in the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke the hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors,witty repartee—a world of pseudos as inviting to…class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better.

Consequently, neither art cinema nor auteur cinema figures much in Pynchon’s otherwise hefty lexicon of film culture, aside from a jokey mention of a Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casares Film Festival (actors playing Death in The Seventh Seal and Orphée) held in Los Angeles—and significantly, even the “underground”, 16-millimeter radical political filmmaking in northern California charted in Vineland becomes emblematic of the perceived failure of the 60s counterculture as a whole. This also helps to account for why the paranoia and solipsism found in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient and Out 1, perhaps the closest equivalents to Pynchon’s own notions of mass conspiracy juxtaposed with solitary despair, are never mentioned in his writing, and the films that are referenced belong almost exclusively to the commercial mainstream, unlike the examples of painting, music, and literature, such as the surrealist painting of Remedios Varo described in detail at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49,  the importance of Ornette Coleman in V and Anton Webern in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the visible impact of both Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs on the latter novel. (1) And much of the novel’s supply of movie folklore—e.g., the fatal ambushing of John Dillinger while leaving Chicago’s Biograph theater--is mainstream as well.

Nevertheless, one can find a fairly precise philosophical and metaphysical description of these aforementioned Rivette films in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” And the white, empty movie screen that appears apocalyptically on the novel’s final page—as white and as blank as the fusion of all the colors in a rainbow—also appears in Rivette’s first feature when a 16-millimeter print of Lang’s Metropolis breaks during the projection of the Tower of Babel sequence.

Is such a physically and metaphysically similar affective climax of a halted film projection foretelling an apocalypse a mere coincidence? It’s impossible to know whether Pynchon might have seen Paris nous appartient during its brief New York run in the early 60s. But even if he hadn’t (or still hasn’t), a bitter sense of betrayed utopian possibilities in that film, in Out 1, and in most of his fiction is hard to overlook. Old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) don’t like to be woken from their dreams.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Footnote

For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical about accepting the hypothesis of the otherwise reliable Pynchon critic Richard Poirier that Gravity’s Rainbow’s enigmatic references to “the Kenosha Kid” might allude to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Steven C. Weisenburger, in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), reports more plausibly that “the Kenosha Kid” was a pulp magazine character created by Forbes Parkhill in Western stories published from the 1920s through the 1940s. Once again, Pynchon’s populism trumps—i.e. exceeds—his cinephilia.

[44four]

185 RARE BOOKS ON WITCHCRAFT, GHOSTS, OCCULT, DEMON, HYPNOTISM, ASTROLOGY ON DVD

THE LARGEST COLLECTION ON eBAY THE BEST RARE & OLD WITCHCRAFT, GHOSTS, OCCULT, DEMON, HYPNOTISM, ASTROLOGY, MAGIC & MORE BOOKS COLLECTIONOn EBAY On ONE DVD It is nearly impossible to find all these rare & old books in their original form and if found they would cost a fortune! ____________________ Great Collection Of Rare & Old WITCHCRAFT, GHOSTS, OCCULT, DEMON, HYPNOTISM, ASTROLOGY, MAGIC & MORE Great Reference Books. 185 Books in Total Contains thousands & thousands of pages of great Information about WITCHCRAFT, GHOSTS, OCCULT, DEMON, HYPNOTISM, ASTROLOGY & MAGIC and Much Much More. Many Information & Secrets Exposed Lots of Beautiful Illustrations. This DVD Contains the most comprehensive collection of Rare & Old Books on WITCHCRAFT, GHOSTS, OCCULT, DEMON, HYPNOTISM, ASTROLOGY, MAGIC & MOREon eBay. Many of these Rare books date back to the 1500s and early 1900s and all of their content is just as impressive today as it was then. All these Original Rare and Old Books have been professionally scanned in high quality, compiled and preserved forever in PDF format files on this One DVD data disc for your enjoyment You can READ, TRANSFER, COPY, CUT, PASTE, SAVE & ZOOM IN on any text, diagrams or illustrations. The pictures you see in this auction were taken from these PDF files These books can be read on your computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, Kindle, ebook reader but will not work on regular DVD Players ***********************************The Complete List of The Books Titles A collection of rare and curious tracts on witchcraft and the second sight; with an original essay on witchcraft (1820)A confirmation and discovery of witchcraft, by Stearne, John (1973)A Manual of Cartomancy And Occult Divination, by Orient, Grand (1909)A Manual of cheirosophy by E. Heron-Allen (1885)A Manual of Occultism, by Sepharial (1914)A new and complete illustration of the celestial science of astrology or, The art of foretelling future events, by E. Sibly (1826)A Record of Psychic Experiences by G. F. Goener (1922)A short history of the Salem village witchcraft trials illustrated by a verbatim report of the trial of Mrs. Elizabeth Howe, by Perlry M.V.B (1911)A suggestive inquiry into the Hermetic mystery with a dissertation on the more celebrated of the alchemical philosophers (1918)A suggestive inquiry into the hermetic mystery with a dissertation on the more celebrated of the alchemical philosophers (1850)A system of magic or a History of the Black Art (1840)Advanced course in Yogi philosophy and oriental occultism, by Ramacharaka, Yogi (1905)Albumasar De magnis coniunctionibus, by Mandato expensis M. Sessa, per J. Pentium de Luecho, (1515)Allusions to witchcraft and other primitve beliefs in the Zoroastrian literature, Frachtenberg, Leo Joachim (1911)An encyclopaedia of occultism, by Spence, Lewis (1920)An historical, physiological and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, witchcrafts, by Beaumont, John (1705)An history of magic, witchcraft, and animal magnetism, Volume 1, by Colquhoun, J. C. (John Campbell), (1851)An history of magic, witchcraft, and animal magnetism, Volume 2, by Colquhoun, J. C. (John Campbell), (1851)Ancient pagan and modern Christian symbolism, by Inman, Thomas (1922)Annals of witchcraft in New England and elsewhere in the United States, from their first settlement, by Drake, Samuel Gardner (1869)Architecture, mysticism and myth, by Lethaby, W. R. (William Richard), (1892)Ars Notoria - The Notory Art of Solomon, by Robert Turner (July 1999)Astrology, Its Technics And Ethics, by C. AQ. Libra (1917)Automatic or spirit writing, with other psychic experiences by S. A. Underwood (1896)Babylonian Magic And Sorcery, by Leonard W. King (1896)Book of knowledge - psychic facts by N Beighle (1911)Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, by Raymond Buckland (1997)Cagliostro - The splendour and misery of a master of magic, by Trowbridge, W. R. H. (William Rutherford Hayes), (1910)Card Fortune Telling; a lucid treatise dealing with all the popular and more abstruse methods by C. Platt (1920)Cheiro's language of the hand complete practical work on the sciences and experience of Cheiro by L. Hamon (1900)Clairvoyance, by C.W Leadbeater, (1903)Clairvoyance, by Grumbine, J. C. F. (Jesse Charles Fremont), (1897)Clothed with the sun - being the book of the illuminations of Anna (Bonus) Kingsford, by Kingsford, Anna Bonus (1889)Daimonologia, or, A treatise of spirits Wherein several places of scripture are expounded (1723)Das Strassburger Würfelbuch von 1529 by A. A. W. Gotzer (1918)De Occulta Philosophia LOC 1533, by Agrippa von Nettesheim & Heinrich Cornelius, (1533)De Occulta Philosophia LOC 1533, by Agrippa von Nettesheim & Heinrich Cornelius, another copy (1533)Demonology and witchcraft - with especial reference to modern spiritualism, by Brown, Robert (1889)Demonology and Witchcraft, by Scott, Walter, Sir (1800)Descriptive mentality from the head, face and hand by H. W. Merton (1899)Dictionnaire des sciences occultes, by Collin de Plancy & J.-A.-S. (Jacques-Albin-Simon) (1860)Die Elemente der Kabbalah. Ubersetzungen, Erlauterungen und Abhandlungen, by Bischoff, Erich (1913)Divine Inspiration - Psychic research of the great beyond by J. W. Williams (1916)Dizionario di scienze occulte, by Pappalardo, Armando (1922)Everybody's astrology by M. Jensen (1922)Everybody's Book of Luck (1900)First lessons in palmistry by C. T. Gaffney (1897)Fortunes and dreams by A. Cielo (1917)Forty lessons in palmistry by J. Zancig (1914)Fragments of truth, by Ingalese, Richard & Ingalese, Isabella (1921)Gypsy sorcery and fortune telling, illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes, and tales by C. G. Leland (1891)Heliocentric Astrology by H. W. Merton (1910)Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Fourth book of occult philosophy, and geomancy, by Petrus, de Abano (1655)Histoire des sciences occultes - depuis l'antiquité jusqu'à nos jours, by Debay, A. (Auguste), (1869)Hours with the ghosts, or, Nineteenth century witchcraft - Illustrated investigations into the phenomena of spiritualism and theosophy, by Evans, Henry Ridgely (1897)How to know people by their hands by J. Ranald (1938)Human animals, by Hamel, Frank (1915)Hypnotism, mesmerism and the new witchcraft, by Hart, Ernest Abraham (1896)Indian Palmistry by J.B. Dale (1895)Initiation, human and solar, by Bailey, Alice (1922)Innocent amusement, or the heiroglyphical fortune teller by Napoleon I (1832)Key to Palmistry by L. Williams (1902)King Philip's war, and Witchcraft in New England, by Hutchinson, Thomas (1890)Kirbye's original second-sight mystery and pretended clairvoyance exposed, by Kirbye, G. W. (1855)La magie et l'astrologie dans l'antiquité et au moyen âge by Maury, L.-F.-Alfred (Louis-Ferdinand-Alfred) (1864)Le clef des grands mystères, by Lévi, Éliphas (1861)Le ingeniose sorti, composte per Francesco Marcolini da Forli intitulate Giardino di pensieri by F. Marcolini (1550)Le plaisant iev dv dodechedron de fortune, non moins recreatif, que subtil & ingenieux. Renouuellé & changé de sa premiere edition by J. de Meun (1560)Le sabbat de sorciers, by Bourneville & Teinturier, E (1890)Les sciences physionomiques leur passé et leur présent by C. Godard (1908)Lessons in Astrology by J. Erickson (1898)Letters from the teacher (of the Order of the 15) by Rahmea & Curtiss, F. Homer (Frank Homer) (1909)Liber Null and the Psychonaut, by Pater J. Carroll (1978)Madame Zadkiel's Fortune teller and mirror of fate by J. Haney (1884)Magic and fetishism, by Haddon, Alfred C. (Alfred Cort), (1906)Magic and mystery - a popular history, by Thompson, Alfred (1894)Magic and religion, by Lang, Andrew (1901)Magic and witchcraft, by Moir, George (1852)Magic, black and white; charms and counter charms, by Davies, T. Witton (Thomas Witton) & De Laurence, L. W. (Lauron William), (1910)Magic, pretended miracles, and remarkable natural phenomena, by American Sunday School Union (1855)Magic, white and black; or, The science of finite and infinite life, by Hartmann, Franz, & De Laurence, L. W. (Lauron William), (1910)Manuel bibliographique des sciences psychiques ou occultes, Volume 1, by Caillet, Albert Louis (1912)Manuel bibliographique des sciences psychiques ou occultes, Volume 2, by Caillet, Albert Louis (1912)Mehemet Ali's Oriental Interpretation of Dreams by C. F. F. Kayser (1873)Mind reading, by Frazer, Persifor (1875)Modern magic, by Schele de Vere, M. (Maximilian), (1873)Mother Shipton's Gipsy fortune teller and dream book by H. J. Wehman (1890)Mysteries unveiled - the hoary past comes forward with astonishing messages for the prophetic future (1896)Napoleon's Oraculum and dream book. Containing the great oracle of human destiny by F. Tousey (1884)Narratives of sorcery and magic, from the most authentic sources, by Wright, Thomas (1852)Narratives of the witchcraft cases, 1648-1706, by Burr, George Lincoln (1914)Natural magick, by Porta, Giambattista della (1669)New light from the great pyramid, by Parsons, A. R. (Albert Ross), (1893)Notes on the history of witchcraft in Massachusettes, by Moore, George Henry (1883)Occult phenomena in the light of theology, by Wiesinger, Alois (1957)Occult science in India and among the ancients, with an account of their mystic initiations, and the history of spiritism, by Felt, Willard L. (1908)Pahlavi cartomalcy or card reading; a new and complete method adapted to the Pahlavi cards by L. V. Moulton (1904)Palmistry by G. H. Sweet (1886)Practical Astrology, by Comte C. de Daint-Germain (1901)Perin's science of palmistry; a complete and authentic treatise by C. L. Perin (1902)Philosophic chiromancy. Mysteries of the hand revealed and explained by R. A. Campbell (1879)Practical Astrology, by Comte C. de Daint-Germain (1901)Practical occultism, by Kenilworth, Walter Winston (1921)Practical palmistry - A treatise on chirosophy based upon actual experiences by H. Frith (1895)Practical Views on Psychic Phenomena by G. E. Wright (1920)Revelations of the hand by A. J. McIvor-Tyndall (1900)Salem witchcraft with an account of Salem village, and a history of opinions on witchcraft and kindred subjects, by Upham, Charles Wentworth (1867)Scientific occultism, a hypothetical basis of life, by Hatch, David Patterson (1905)Second sight explained - a complete exposition of clairvoyance or second sight, by Wicks, Frederick & Bishop, Washington Irving (1880)Secrets of the black art - a hand-book of magic, puzzles for parlour entertainments (1886)Simplified Scientific Astrology, by Heindel, Max (1919)Strange phenomena of New England in the seventeenth century, by Mather, Cotton (1846)Telling fortunes by cards; a symposium of the several ancient and modern methods as practiced by Arab seers and sibyls and the Romany Gypsies by C. B. Case (1916)The amber witch the most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known, by Meinhold, Wilhelm (1844)The astrologer of the nineteenth century, by Raphael, pseud & Anglicus, Merlinus, junior, Gent (1825)The Asuri-Kalpa - a witchcraft practice of the Atharva-Veda, by Magoun, H. W. (Herbert William), (1889)The Book of Black Magic, by (1910)The Book of Forbidden Knowledge, by Johnson Smith (No Date)The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, by Crowley, Aleister (1904)The canon - an exposition of the pagan mystery perpetuated in the Cabala as the rule of all the arts, by Stirling, William (1897)The consciousness of the atom, by Bailey, Alice (1922)The cradle of the twin giants, science and history, Volume 1, by Christmas, Henry (1849)The cradle of the twin giants, science and history, Volume 2, by Christmas, Henry (1849)The discoverie of witchcraft, by Scot, Reginald & Nicholson, Brinsley (1886)The discoverie of Witchcraft, by Scot Reginald - First Edition, (1584)The discovery of Witchcraft, by Scot Reginald, (1651)The doctrine and literature of the kabalah, by Waite, Arthur Edward (1902)The elements of astrology by L. D. Broughton (1898)The gates of knowledge with an additional chapter entitled Philosophy and theosophy, by Steiner, Rudolf & Gysi, Max (1912)The golden wheel dream-book and fortuneteller, containing an alphabetical list of dreams, and the lucky numbers they signify, by F. Fontaine (1862)The grammar of Palmistry by K. St. Hill (1893)The graven palm; a manual of the science of palmistry by A. Robinson (1911)The great secret, by Maeterlinck, Maurice (1922)The greater Key of Solomon, by Solomon, King of Israel; Mathers, S. L. MacGregor ; De Laurence, L. W. (Lauron William), (1914)The hand and its lines; a short treatise on palmistry by E. J. La Seer (1902)The history of magic, volume 1, by Ennemoser, Joseph (1854)The history of magic, volume 2, by Ennemoser, Joseph (1854)The History of Witchcraft And Demonology, by Montague_Summers (1926)The illustrated key to the tarot - the veil of divination (1916)The Kabbalah - its doctrines, development, and literature, by Ginsburg, Christian D. (Christian David), (1920)The Kabbala - the true science of light; an introduction to the philosophy and theosophy of the ancient sages, by Pancoast, S. (Seth), (1877)The Kybalion - a study of the hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece, by Initiates, Three (1908)The language of the hand, being a concise exposition of the principles and practice of the art of reading the hand by H. Frith (1899)The magical ritual of the sanctum regnum, interpreted by the tarot trumps (1896)The Mirror Of Alchemy, by Roger Bacon, (No Date)The model book of dreams, fortune teller, and epitome of parlor entertainments by C. M. Ottley (1864)The mysteries of astrology, and the wonders of magic, by Roback, C. W. (Charles W.), (1854)The Mystic oracle, or, The complete fortune-teller and dream book by F. M. Lupton (1893)The Mystic Test Book, or The Magic of the Cards by O. H. Richmond (1919)The natural order of spirit - A psychic study and experience by L. C. Graves (1915)The new and complete fortune teller by I. A. M. Hafez (1816)The new black magic and the truth about the ouija-board, by Raupert, J. Godfrey (John Godfrey), (1919)The occult sciences the philosophy of magic, prodigies, and apparent miracles (Volume 1), by Salverte, Eusèbe & Thomson, Anthony Todd, (1847)The occult sciences the philosophy of magic, prodigies, and apparent miracles (Volume 2), by Salverte, Eusèbe & Thomson, Anthony Todd, (1847)The omnium-gatherum, or, The American fortune-teller by J. T. Yarrington (1872)The other world; or, Glimpses of the supernatural, Volume 1, by Lee, Frederick George (1875)The other world; or, Glimpses of the supernatural, Volume 2, by Lee, Frederick George (1875)The philosophy of fire, by Clymer, R. Swinburne (Reuben Swinburne), (1907)The philosophy of fire, by Clymer, R. Swinburne (Reuben Swinburne), (1920)The philosophy of witchcraft, by Mitchell, J. (John) & Dickie, John (1839)The possibility and reality of magick, sorcery, and witchcraft, demostrated, by Boulton, Richard (1722)The Salem witchcraft or The planchette mystery and Modern spiritualism ;by Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1886)The science of palmistry and its relations to astrology and phrenology by I. Smith (1901)The science of the hand by C. S. Arpentigny (1886)The Seaside Sibyl, or Leaves of Destiny (1882)The secrets of black arts, by I. & M. Ottenheimer (1900)The secret book of the black arts by H. Williams (1878)The secret doctrine in Israel - a study of the Zohar and its connections, by Waite, Arthur Edward (19--)The Shakesperean Oracle by J. C. Mills (1855)The sixth and seventh books of Moses - the wonderful magical and spirit arts of Moses and Aaron, by De Laurence, L. W. (Lauron William), (1910)The spherical basis of astrology by J. G. Dalton (1908)The superstitions of witchcraft, by Williams, Howard (1865)The tarot of the Bohemians, the most ancient book in the world for the exclusive use of initiates (1896)The Tarot, Mathers, S. L. MacGregorThe witch-cult in western Europe - a study in anthropology, by Murray, Margaret Alice (1921)The witches' dream book and fortune teller by H. J. Wehman (1885)The World of wonder - a record of things wonderful in nature, science, and art (1873)Three books of occult philosophy or magic, by Agrippa von Nettesheim; Heinrich Cornelius; Whitehead, Willis F; Morley, Henry, (1898)Witch Hill - a history of Salem witchcraft, including illustrative sketches of persons and places, by Mudge, Zachariah Atwell (1870)Witchcraft and medicine - 1484-1793, by Nemec, Jaroslav (1974)Witchcraft and superstitious record in the south-western district of Scotland, by Wood, John Maxwell (1911)Witchcraft in North Carolina, by Cross, Tom Peete (1919)Witchcraft of New England explained by modern spiritualism, by Putnam, Allen (1881)Witchcraft or The art of fortune-telling unveiled, by Pinchbeck, William Frederick (1805)Within the temple of Isis, by Wagner, Belle M (1899)Work and play annual of home amusements and social sports, by Milton Bradley & Co. (1872)***********************************Please make sure to check our other Rare eBooks collections listings Each collection is unique and take advantage of our Multiple Purchase Discounts Multiple Purchase DiscountsIf you purchase 3 of our rare book collections you will automatically qualify for a free collection of your choice. Please use the eBay messaging service to let us know which collection you’d like totally free of charge! Payment Policy Only PayPal is AcceptedImmediate Payment is required after the Winning BidItem will be shipped on the same or next business day of receiving full payment Shipping Policy All items are posted Priority MailPlease allow up to 14 days for International ShippingPaypal Confirmed Addresses OnlyItems that are received damaged or faulty must be reported within 24 hours of receiving the itemReturns & Exchange PolicyDue to the nature of the item being a CD and it can be copied, there is no return on this item, but if the item is faulty please contact US via eBay's messaging service for the returns address. The item must be returned within 14 days and once received, a replacement will be shipped to you. We suggest returning items via Trackable Delivery Service. Terms & Conditions Please Note: In order to keep prices low for our customers, These ebooks are supplied on unmarked CDs (no labels) and presented in a white or clear CD sleeve for protection. The Content of this CD has been collected and compiled by US. Reproduction and sale of this CD data disc is STRICTLY PROHIBITED! Read the full article

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A real stable genius Thomas Mann

Society struggles to recognize a genius like Thomas Mann. Prejudice, politics and the human fear in front of the unknown. Phenomenal people with great minds and new ideas come in all generations. Thomas Mann is surely one of that kind. German's past generations count many famous writers, storytellers, and novelists. Friedrich Schiller, E.T.A Hoffman, Gunter Grass, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are just some of them. Their works are unforgettable. Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in meThomas Mann answers to reporters in New York in February 1938 Thomas Mann, a German short story writer, essayist, philanthropist, and novelist too. His influence survived the oppression of the Nazi-regime. He never truly stopped living among the German nation, wherever he was.

Thomas Mann's beginning and family

The father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann was a senator and a grain merchant. His mother, Julia da Silva-Bruhns, was Brazilian women of Portuguese and German provenance. He was born in Lubeck, Germany, a traditionally protestant region. His mother was a Roman Catholic. Although he was baptized into his father's Lutheran religion. What will bring Thomas to Munich? Unfortunately, the death of his father in 1891 is one of the main reasons why that happened. His father's trading company came to its end after this tragic event. And because of that, a whole family moved to Munich. Destiny is a nonwritten path and maybe this was something necessary on his road becoming a writer. This extravagant man's works caught the interests even in the world of psychology and the human intellect. This noticeable since his day one as a writer. His novellas and epic novels with an ironic tone are well-known among actual writers and academic careers. His heritage will accompany literature for many generations. Part of this heritage is surely his analyzes and critiques about the German and European souls in general. Typical for his late works are the dogmatical and mythological subjects. He is famous for his position about the ideas of popular writers. Some of them are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Artur Schopenhauer. His first novel Buddenbrooks portrays his class and family. What I must not forget to mention is that he was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family. The family Mann had truly notorious as writers. His older brother, for example, called Heinrich Mann is also well-known as a writer. One interesting aspect is that Thomas Mann was the father of 6 children. Three of them, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann, and Golo Mann became significant German writers too.

Thomas Mann's school days

Thomas Mann started his school days in Lübeck. Like Einstein, his teachers misinterpreted his geniality. He declared many times how he disliked the school years. His eclectic interests after school inspired him to new areas of interest. After that, he managed to attend the Ludwig Maximillian's University of Munich. His presence at the Technical University of Munich prepared him for his journalism career. He was studying economics, history, art history, and literature here. Later on, Thomas has been working at the South German Fire Insurance Company in 1894-95. And soon after, his first short book will get to its shining. In the year of 1898, he publishes 'Little Mr. Friedemann'. Seven years later, Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim. He had a major personal conflict with the raise from Hitler to power. He fleed to Switzerland for many reasons. One of these was the family his wife, who was partially jews. After that, he moved to the USA because World Warr II started but returned to Switzerland in 1952.

A value of the Buddenbrooks novel

This first novel by Thomas Mann had a big significance in German and international literature. Thomas Mann publishes this book in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. This book is being marked as a success after its second edition publication two years after. For English language readers, it became available in 1924 when the book got translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. Thomas Mann started to write it in 1897 and published in 1901. In this book, he describes his point of view from society and conflicts in a new environment. Partially can be understood as the conflicts between the artist's worlds and businessman. The biggest success of this book is not its two editions, of course. With this book, Thomas Mann will be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. This is the highest-ranked award that can be given to any writer. Buddenbrooks is certainly Thomas Mann's most popular novel and it will remain that forever. In Germany, it is valued for its intimate portrait of 19th-century German bourgeois life.

Thomas Mann's homosexuality

One of his central concerns was to accept and live with is his homosexuality. Although he concluded a marriage and got children, that couldn't cover his true nature. We can find the first signs of his homosexuality in Anthony Heilbut's biography. He uncovered his nature and his feelings about the same gender. Sources in his works There is an anecdote about Thomas reacting to the angelic figure of the Polish ten years boy.  Also, his personal diary can give us some conclusions too. Based on the affirmations in those, is easy to understand his attraction for his own son. Especially when Klaus Mann was thirteen years old. He will keep writing about his attraction to his son in his diary though. It will not be the rare case when Thomas write some erotic compliments on his son's looking. In addition, there is a letter where Thomas Mann wrote to Carl Maria Weber about his feeling. He was constantly focused on Klaus's body and his appearance. It is known that Thomas Mann in younger years had feelings for his friend Paul Ehrenberg. This case will have an impact on his potential marriage with an English woman, Mary Smith, in 1901. It happened again to him in 1950. He met the nineteen years old waiter in Grand Hotel Dolder, Franz Westermeier. This young man brought him to some depressive moments. Thomas Mann compared himself to Michelangelo in the Renaissance in the poetry about Tomasso Cavalieri. He denied that his novels ever had autobiographical components but he unsealing of his diaries speaks for itself. That will be enough to convince everyone in his true nature.

Style of his writing

Every classic writer has a recognizable style of writing. Like the singers that are recognizable for their tone of the voice. Thomas Mann's writing style contains a remarkable amount of irony and satire, but humor too. His style will gain its final form after the completion of his work 'Buddenbrooks'. On one level there is a deep and meaningful approach. On the other are even deeper levels of representation. That's how the author will write throughout his whole career. His writing is honored all around the world. Not only in Germany. And that can be convincing enough about his writing style. He will remain acknowledged as one of the most renowned and greatest writers of the 20th century. His life ended in a tragic way. He fought with tuberculosis was long and predictable. He died on the 12th of August in 1955 in Zurich. Kilchberg is the place where he got buried.

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Is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ real?

2015-01860 In Christianity, Jesus Christ is considered to be the Lord and Savior of mankind. In the Bible, His life can be described as counterculture which challenged the beliefs of the people during His time. He taught differently from how people viewed customs, laws, and commandments. However, He lived an upright and righteous life that was fully dependent on God. His fame also grew like a wildfire not just because of his teachings, but because of his capability to heal all kinds of diseases and his ability to command nature to follow His words. Another factor that sets him apart is the claims that he resurrected from death. This is the backbone of Christianity and once this is disproved, the religion will collapse like a sand castle. However, this claim of Jesus’ resurrection can be proven by the different fields of Science, which makes it a strong foundation for belief.

           According to the Dictionary.com, the term “resurrection” is defined as the act of rising from the dead. From this definition, there are two elements that must be present for resurrection to happen. For one, there must be death. Second, the person must rise from the state of being dead. Jesus Christ, based on many anecdotes and historically writings, was seen to have died and resurrected from the dead. But, despite these thousands of claims, there are still people, even believers themselves, who do not believe in the resurrection. In fact, a survey was done earlier this year by BBC in Great Britain, where 25% of people who considered themselves as Christians do not believe in the resurrection (BBC New, 2017).

           In the Gospels, Jesus’ suffering was documented. From the agony at Gethsemane where he experienced hematidrosis. In Luke 22:44, it mentioned that his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. This medical condition is called hematidrosis. When one person is in extreme anguish or stress, their blood vessels become fragile or they break. The blood then gets its way through the sweat pores which causes the person to “sweat blood” (Terasaka, n.d.). This happened before his arrest in the garden which He already knew was going to happen. He already knew that He was about to face the Roman punishments like flogging and the crucifixion.

           The Roman culture practiced crucifixion, along with other kinds of torture like flogging, stoning, burning, and boiling (Newsweek, 2015.). This was the most ungraceful and humiliating way to die (Fairchild, 2016). Besides the insults, spits, and hits that He took, He was also sentenced to flogging. In the culture of the Romans, metals and bones were attached to leathers whips. The people who flogged the criminals were instructed to whip forty times. Within the forty lashes, tissues and bones would already be exposed and blood vessels would already be broken. This would have already caused Jesus His life due to the loss of blood. After the lashes, a crown of thorns were placed on His scalp. The scalp is one of the most vascular areas of the body. This may have also caused Jesus to lose a very significant amount of blood. (Terasaka, n.d.). With a sleepless night, this much trauma caused to his body, he was forced to carry a part of the cross to Golgotha. This was Jesus’ condition before He was nailed on the cross. In Isaiah 52:14, Jesus’ conditioned was described as his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness.

           On the cross, a heavily injured and tortured Jesus was nailed. There are many articles written meticulously on the medical aspects of the crucifixion, where different trauma, explosions of nerves, difficulty in breathing, cardiac failure due to serum build-up and its inability to function as a blood-pump, dehydration of tissues, and many more (Davis, n.d.) are explained. But as it ended and as Jesus breathed His last, he died. Now, there are many theories that try to disprove Jesus’ death. One is that he merely lost consciousness. But one specific narrative in the Bible disproves this theory. In John 19:34, the Bible says one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. This phenomenon is called the pericardial effusion. The spear was thrusted on Jesus’ heart, because of the increase in Jesus’ heartbeat due to the traumas that He experienced, it also caused water to surround His heart. These were the fluids that came out and this is the sign that Jesus did die on the cross via heart attack (Shrier, 2002).

           With this much medical evidence, many doctors and forensic scientists have agreed that Jesus did die on the cross and there is no way, with how the Roman crucifixion was designed that He could have survived it. This is the first element of the resurrection, Jesus’ death.

           Three days after, Jesus’ body was miraculously nowhere to be found in Joseph’s tomb. Jesus, then, appeared for the first time to women as witnesses. Many theories include that Jesus did not die and that Jesus escaped, but the problem was how could He with His condition and the evidences of His death, and Roman soldiers guarding His tomb? The second theory is that the apostles stole His body. But in the Bible, after Jesus’ death, the apostles fled and hid in fear of the Jews. If Jesus did escape and the apostles did steal His body, would they also take the time to neatly fold Jesus’ burial cloth in the tomb? This was described in John 20:7, which says “while the cloth that had covered Jesus' head was folded up and lying apart from the other wrappings”. It is also important to note that Jesus chose women to be His first witnesses. In their culture, women were not allowed to testify in court and whatever they say bore no meaning. If the apostles were making up this story, they would not deliberately choose women to be the first witnesses. This would not be believable.

           The next evidences were the changed lives of the apostles after seeing, eating, and spending time with Jesus. It was said in the Bible that they saw Jesus in the locked room where they were hiding, by the Sea of Galilee, and on Mount Olives (Zavada, 2017). It was also mentioned that they were afraid, but after allegedly seeing Jesus, they were filled with fire to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection and the good news of His salvation. There were also skeptics who did not believe Jesus was alive. To name a few, people like Thomas, Paul, and James were effective missionaries who doubted Jesus’ resurrection at first. But most of them died proclaiming Jesus as Lord. No one in their right mind would die in the name of something that they knew was a fraud and was not true. Most of the apostles also died excruciating deaths like being stoned, crucified, beheaded, etc. But all died confidently in their faith in the Lord.

           Other than the apostles, there are many witnesses who saw Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15:6, it says that “he (Jesus) appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.” The major theory against this is that this was just a collective hallucination, which was later on disproved and frowned upon by many psychologists (Habermas, 2009). These witnesses also varied, which included both believers and non-believers witnesses who wrote about the event years after, fresh from their memories! This means that there are non-biblical sources regarding the resurrection. One would be Josephus, a Jewish historian, who was regarded as credible and wise, said “About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he . . . wrought surprising feats. . . . He was the Christ. When Pilate . . .condemned him to be crucified, those who had . . . come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared . . . restored to life. . . . And the tribe of Christians . . . has . . . not disappeared.” (Gleghorn, 2014).

           Lastly, the Bible was quoted a lot of times. Is it as credible? Plato is one of the most regarded prominent contributors in history. There is only about seven copies of manuscripts about his life and works, which has an approximate of 1200 years apart from the original and first copy.  Herodutus has eight copies of manuscripts which took about 1300 years to copy the earliest manuscripts. These manuscripts about these great people were written hundreds to thousands of years after them. On the contrary, the New Testament which has a great number of doubters, has about 24,000 manuscripts that support it, over 1000 times more than Plato and Herodutus. These manuscripts were written less than a hundred years after Christ’s death, by the actual witnesses or people from Jesus’ time. These manuscripts, about 19,000 of it are written in different languages like Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic by writers who are both believers and non-believers, which of most are historians. But when put side-by-side, there is a 99.5% accuracy among all thousands of it (Slick, 2008). There is no question of the credibility of the Bible.

           This is proves the second element of resurrection which is rising to life. There are many conflicts and theories that try to disprove it but the medical and psychological fields of Science prove these conspiracies wrong. Historical data also backs up the narrative in the Bible about His coming back to life.

           With these evidences presented, it is clear that Jesus Christ did resurrect. He, in fact, did die. He, in fact, did live again after His death. Science and history do not contradict but supports the narratives that were written in the Bible.

Bibliography

Fairchild, M. (2016, December 02). Roman Crucifixion. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-roman-crucifixion-700718

Gleghorn, M. (2014, August 30). Ancient evidence for Jesus from non-Christian sources. Retrieved from https://probe.org/ancient-evidence-for-jesus-from-non-christian-sources-2/

Habermas, G. (2009, June 9). Explaining away Jesus’ resurrection: hallucination. Retrieved from http://www.equip.org/article/explaining-away-jesus-resurrection-hallucination/

How the romans used crucifixion—including Jesus's—as a political weapon. (2015, April 4). Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/how-romans-used-crucifixion-including-jesus-political-weapon-318934

Resurrection [Def. 1]. (n.d). Dictionary.com. Retrieved October 14, 2017, from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/resurrection?s=t

Resurrection did not happen, say quarter of Christians. (2017, April 9). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-39153121

Shrier, C. (2002, March 1). The science of the crucifixion. Retrieved from https://www.apu.edu/articles/15657/

Slick, M. (2008, December 10). Manuscript evidence for superior New Testament reliability. Retrieved from https://carm.org/manuscript-evidence

Terasaka, D. (n.d.) Medical aspects of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. (2017, October 10). Retrieved from https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/terasaka_david/misc/crucify.cfm

Zavada, J. (2017, March 03). 7 proofs of the resurrection. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/proofs-of-the-resurrection-700603

[therightnewsnetwork]

A Federal Judge Halts California’s Confiscation of High-Capacity Magazines

Josh Blackman

In 2000, California banned the sale of firearm magazines that can hold more than ten rounds. Residents who already possessed such magazines were “grandfathered” in. Or at least that was the promise.

Recently, Californians approved Proposition 63, which would have required all grandfathered owners to surrender those magazines by July 1, 2017, or face up to a year in prison. Civil-rights groups challenged the confiscation in federal courts. With less than a day to spare, Judge Roger T. Benitez of the Southern District of California blocked the measure from going into effect. In his thoughtful opinion, he meticulously deconstructs every strawman erected by gun-control advocates, who can show no evidence that limiting magazine sizes will improve public safety. No doubt this decision will be appealed, but the higher courts should take note: Judge Benitez provided a clinic on how to scrutinize laws that restrict Second Amendments rights.

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right is not limited to guns; it extends also to the ammunition and magazines that make the gun operable. California’s law directly infringes on that right, by prohibiting law-abiding firearm owners from using their magazine of choice for self-defense. Following Heller, lower courts have held that the government can ban certain types of arms only if it demonstrates that doing so will reasonably protect public safety. Unfortunately, in the past, most judges simply rubber-stamp whatever evidence the state provides to justify gun-control measures, whether or not it fits with public safety.

If the Ninth Circuit reverses the decision, the Supreme Court could be on call very soon.

Not Judge Benitez. He refused to defer to the attorney general’s “incomplete studies from unreliable sources” about a “homogenous mass of horrible crimes in jurisdictions near and far for which large capacity magazines were not the cause.” With the precision of a scalpel, the court systemically sliced apart the government’s unpersuasive efforts to justify the ban. For example, the attorney general had relied on a survey of shootings published by Mother Jones, a progressive magazine. Judge Benitez dismissed the publication, which “has rarely been mentioned by any court as reliable evidence.” Moreover, he added, “it is fair to say that the magazine survey lacks some of the earmarks of a scientifically designed and unbiased collection of data.”

What about the government’s citation of a survey issued by the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns? Judge Benitez noted that this group, founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, “is apparently not a pro-gun rights organization.” That is an understatement. More significantly, the court concluded, the survey of 92 mass shootings — 82 of which were outside California — “does not demonstrate that the ban on possession of magazines holding any more than 10 rounds” would reasonably help the state to achieve its public-safety goals. Of the ten shootings in California, eight were not known to involve high-capacity magazines, and two involved magazines that were probably illegal. For example, the Santa Monica shooter used high-capacity magazines that were likely shipped from outside California. “Criminalizing possession of magazines holding any more than 10 rounds,” the court reasoned, “likely would not have provided additional protection from gun violence for citizens or police officers or prevented the crime.” More important, even though millions of high-capacity magazine are owned nationwide, the mayors’ survey could identify only six mass-shooting incidents between 2009 and 2013 that employed them.

The government’s expert witnesses fared no better. The court dismissed their evidence as little more than “anecdotal accounts, collected by biased entities, on which educated surmises and tautological observations are framed.” One professor said the ban on high-capacity magazines “seems prudent,” based only on what Judge Benitez labelled “a complete absence of reliable studies done on formal data sets.” Another professor justified the ban on large magazines by citing the need to force “mass shooters to pause and reload ammunition.” That argument, supported by zero data, is belied by common experience. The court noted that during mass shootings in Alexandria, Va., and Fort Hood, Texas, mass shooters were able to reload several times without difficulty; they were stopped only when confronted by another shooter. In any event, why stop at ten rounds? For example, New York sought to limit magazine sizes to seven rounds, because the average defensive gun use involves on average two rounds. Judge Benitez asked, somewhat rhetorically, why not then limit magazines to three rounds?

In other contexts, courts are perfectly comfortable second-guessing the government’s need to promote public safety — even concerning the rights of aliens outside the United States and in delicate matters of foreign affairs. For example, in recent litigation over the travel ban, federal courts have dismissed the executive branch’s goal of protecting national security as a fraud. But with the Second Amendment, courts have regrettably treated the right to keep and bear arms as a second-class right and consistently accepted the government’s interests as articles of blind faith.

Not so in Judge Benitez’s courtroom. He explained that “the phrase ‘gun violence’ may not be invoked as a talismanic incantation to justify any exercise of state power.” In any case, the measures in question would not deter crime. “Criminals intent on violence would then equip themselves with multiple weapons,” Benitez observed. Or, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted last year in an opinion striking down Texas’s abortion laws, “determined wrongdoers, already ignoring existing statutes and safety measures, are unlikely to be convinced to adopt safe practices by a new overlay of regulations.” (Of course, the right to keep and bear arms is framed in the Constitution; a right to privacy is not.) Criminals bent on breaking the law will break the law. Confiscation measures like Proposition 63 punish law-abiding citizens, limit their ability to defend themselves, and have at best a negligible impact on public safety.

On the same day that Judge Benitez issued his important decision, another federal judge in Sacramento reached the opposite result, allowing the confiscation measure to go into effect. The California attorney general will no doubt seek an emergency stay from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to nullify Judge Benitez’s decision. Second Amendment rights, alas, have not fared well in that court. Because of the urgency of this case, sooner or later an emergency petition may wind up on the desk of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who supervises appeals from California. Justice Kennedy joined the Heller decision in 2008 and two years later joined the follow-up case of McDonald v. City of Chicago. But since 2010, the Court has not heard arguments in any Second Amendment case.

Regrettably, last week the Supreme Court turned away another case from California that concerned the right to carry outside the home. Only Justice Clarence Thomas and his newest colleague, Justice Neil Gorsuch, disagreed: “The Court’s decision to deny certiorari in this case reflects a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right,” Thomas wrote. Over the last seven years, the justices have hesitated to expand gun rights beyond allowing law-abiding citizens to keep a firearm in the home. Proposition 63 is radically different from previous appeals: It attempts to take away what law-abiding citizens already have. Perhaps now that the fear of confiscation has come to fruition, five justices will intervene and ensure that Americans are not punished for exercising their constitutional rights.

Josh Blackman is a constitutional-law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and the author of Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power.

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[patriotnewsblogger-blog]

A Federal Judge Halts California's Confiscation of High-Capacity Magazines

New Post has been published on http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/a-federal-judge-halts-californias-confiscation-of-high-capacity-magazines/

A Federal Judge Halts California's Confiscation of High-Capacity Magazines

Josh Blackman

In 2000, California banned the sale of firearm magazines that can hold more than ten rounds. Residents who already possessed such magazines were “grandfathered” in. Or at least that was the promise.

Recently, Californians approved Proposition 63, which would have required all grandfathered owners to surrender those magazines by July 1, 2017, or face up to a year in prison. Civil-rights groups challenged the confiscation in federal courts. With less than a day to spare, Judge Roger T. Benitez of the Southern District of California blocked the measure from going into effect. In his thoughtful opinion, he meticulously deconstructs every strawman erected by gun-control advocates, who can show no evidence that limiting magazine sizes will improve public safety. No doubt this decision will be appealed, but the higher courts should take note: Judge Benitez provided a clinic on how to scrutinize laws that restrict Second Amendments rights.

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right is not limited to guns; it extends also to the ammunition and magazines that make the gun operable. California’s law directly infringes on that right, by prohibiting law-abiding firearm owners from using their magazine of choice for self-defense. Following Heller, lower courts have held that the government can ban certain types of arms only if it demonstrates that doing so will reasonably protect public safety. Unfortunately, in the past, most judges simply rubber-stamp whatever evidence the state provides to justify gun-control measures, whether or not it fits with public safety.

If the Ninth Circuit reverses the decision, the Supreme Court could be on call very soon.

Not Judge Benitez. He refused to defer to the attorney general’s “incomplete studies from unreliable sources” about a “homogenous mass of horrible crimes in jurisdictions near and far for which large capacity magazines were not the cause.” With the precision of a scalpel, the court systemically sliced apart the government’s unpersuasive efforts to justify the ban. For example, the attorney general had relied on a survey of shootings published by Mother Jones, a progressive magazine. Judge Benitez dismissed the publication, which “has rarely been mentioned by any court as reliable evidence.” Moreover, he added, “it is fair to say that the magazine survey lacks some of the earmarks of a scientifically designed and unbiased collection of data.”

What about the government’s citation of a survey issued by the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns? Judge Benitez noted that this group, founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, “is apparently not a pro-gun rights organization.” That is an understatement. More significantly, the court concluded, the survey of 92 mass shootings — 82 of which were outside California — “does not demonstrate that the ban on possession of magazines holding any more than 10 rounds” would reasonably help the state to achieve its public-safety goals. Of the ten shootings in California, eight were not known to involve high-capacity magazines, and two involved magazines that were probably illegal. For example, the Santa Monica shooter used high-capacity magazines that were likely shipped from outside California. “Criminalizing possession of magazines holding any more than 10 rounds,” the court reasoned, “likely would not have provided additional protection from gun violence for citizens or police officers or prevented the crime.” More important, even though millions of high-capacity magazine are owned nationwide, the mayors’ survey could identify only six mass-shooting incidents between 2009 and 2013 that employed them.

The government’s expert witnesses fared no better. The court dismissed their evidence as little more than “anecdotal accounts, collected by biased entities, on which educated surmises and tautological observations are framed.” One professor said the ban on high-capacity magazines “seems prudent,” based only on what Judge Benitez labelled “a complete absence of reliable studies done on formal data sets.” Another professor justified the ban on large magazines by citing the need to force “mass shooters to pause and reload ammunition.” That argument, supported by zero data, is belied by common experience. The court noted that during mass shootings in Alexandria, Va., and Fort Hood, Texas, mass shooters were able to reload several times without difficulty; they were stopped only when confronted by another shooter. In any event, why stop at ten rounds? For example, New York sought to limit magazine sizes to seven rounds, because the average defensive gun use involves on average two rounds. Judge Benitez asked, somewhat rhetorically, why not then limit magazines to three rounds?

In other contexts, courts are perfectly comfortable second-guessing the government’s need to promote public safety — even concerning the rights of aliens outside the United States and in delicate matters of foreign affairs. For example, in recent litigation over the travel ban, federal courts have dismissed the executive branch’s goal of protecting national security as a fraud. But with the Second Amendment, courts have regrettably treated the right to keep and bear arms as a second-class right and consistently accepted the government’s interests as articles of blind faith.

Not so in Judge Benitez’s courtroom. He explained that “the phrase ‘gun violence’ may not be invoked as a talismanic incantation to justify any exercise of state power.” In any case, the measures in question would not deter crime. “Criminals intent on violence would then equip themselves with multiple weapons,” Benitez observed. Or, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted last year in an opinion striking down Texas’s abortion laws, “determined wrongdoers, already ignoring existing statutes and safety measures, are unlikely to be convinced to adopt safe practices by a new overlay of regulations.” (Of course, the right to keep and bear arms is framed in the Constitution; a right to privacy is not.) Criminals bent on breaking the law will break the law. Confiscation measures like Proposition 63 punish law-abiding citizens, limit their ability to defend themselves, and have at best a negligible impact on public safety.

On the same day that Judge Benitez issued his important decision, another federal judge in Sacramento reached the opposite result, allowing the confiscation measure to go into effect. The California attorney general will no doubt seek an emergency stay from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to nullify Judge Benitez’s decision. Second Amendment rights, alas, have not fared well in that court. Because of the urgency of this case, sooner or later an emergency petition may wind up on the desk of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who supervises appeals from California. Justice Kennedy joined the Heller decision in 2008 and two years later joined the follow-up case of McDonald v. City of Chicago. But since 2010, the Court has not heard arguments in any Second Amendment case.

Regrettably, last week the Supreme Court turned away another case from California that concerned the right to carry outside the home. Only Justice Clarence Thomas and his newest colleague, Justice Neil Gorsuch, disagreed: “The Court’s decision to deny certiorari in this case reflects a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right,” Thomas wrote. Over the last seven years, the justices have hesitated to expand gun rights beyond allowing law-abiding citizens to keep a firearm in the home. Proposition 63 is radically different from previous appeals: It attempts to take away what law-abiding citizens already have. Perhaps now that the fear of confiscation has come to fruition, five justices will intervene and ensure that Americans are not punished for exercising their constitutional rights.

Josh Blackman is a constitutional-law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and the author of Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power.

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