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Bring Back the Salons

Salon culture
Today if someone mentions a “salon” you probably think about a haircut or manicure. But in the 18th century, prior to the French Revolution, salons were the focus of civil debate, intellectual curiosity, and culture. They were  centres of discussion on everything from manners to literature to philosophy to science. And they were run by women. Salons were the bright stars of the Enlightenment; cauldrons of intellectual, cultural, and social development.

More than ever, we need a salon culture today. Social media is driving us to ignorance, stupidity, rigidly polarized views, and a culture of confrontation and abuse.

Guests to salons were invited to attend by the salonnières who ran them, and meetings were held in the host’s home, often in her bedroom. Should a guest engage too loudly, exhibit bad manners while there, express themselves too foolishly or show ignorance of the topics under discussion, they were not invited back. And in a highly social society like 18th-century France, to be exiled from participation was a humiliating loss of face. To be well-regarded, one needed to be an active and engaging participant in the salon culture: you gained more points for being amusing, witty, well-read, well-spoken, and polite.

Participants weren’t selected simply for their charm or wit: hosts wanted challenge, lively discussion, and even controversy. They chose people who could offer contrast; those who could speak to opposing views and raise difficult questions for proponents to wrestle with. Salons were even places for musicians, composers, painters, and poets to show off their work and have them critiqued by the guests.

Salons were egalitarian: men and women both participated and engaged in the discussions, breaking away from the male-dominated society of the time, and providing both an informal education for women and an opportunity for them to develop their own views. Women could engage in political discussion in salons while they were barred from them outside. But they also allowed the aristocracy and the bourgeoise to mix and mingle; to engage in ways they could not do outside the salon, breaking down the social barriers.

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Lessons from History

It is common practice to look back and conflate the events of the past with those of the present, seeking parallels, resonance, and answers from previous events that help explain today’s. We learn from others, from their experiences, and we like to find commonalities in our shared experiences, even from our or other’s historic past. We see ourselves reflected in our past and we sometimes mistake that reflection for the reality.

Machiavelli did it in both The Prince and The Discourses, didactically using examples from classical Greek and Roman texts to explore the events, politics, and governance in his contemporary Italian states, and drawing conclusions on his modern events from parallels in the past. That was one of his great achievements: to explore how people behave similarly in similar situations across the ages, and thus extrapolate how we will behave under similar conditions in the future. This is why his books remain relevant today. In The Discourses, he warned in what could be seen as prescient to the current US administration:

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.
Discourses on Livy Book I, Ch. 3

It’s a losing battle to argue that the US administration isn’t filled with evil, vicious, self-serving people, because all the evidence points otherwise. But I digress.

Legend, mythology, poetry, and literature in every culture has always provided examples from which to learn. From the earliest stories of Gilgamesh and the Bible to modern novels, we learn that human behaviour has not changed in any dramatic manner, and we can always discover our modern selves in reading about our past. And we may find new ways of seeing events and issues from another perspective. An article in The Atlantic noted,

…beyond providing an introduction to troubling issues, historical fiction can offer the chance, if taught conscientiously, to engage students with multiple perspectives, which are essential to understanding history; to help students comprehend historical patterns and political analogies; and to introduce students to historiography—how history is written and studied…
Humanizing history not only means it’s easier for students to connect the historical dots, research shows that it also encourages empathy. Being told a story via historical fiction helps students identify with the characters’ points of view, and that ability to recognize different outlooks… is an essential historical skill…

If anything, history and literature have show us that humans today remain as greedy, parsimonious, warlike, loving, compassionate, lustful, treacherous, loyal, curious, wise, affectionate, and pigheaded as we were at the dawn of recorded history. This also is why classical philosophy and — some non-supernatural parts of — religion still have relevance today, too: human behaviour has not changed in the millennia since we started writing about it.

Machiavelli wrote,

To exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have conducted themselves in war, and discover the causes of their victories and defeat, so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former.
The Prince, Ch. 14

Of course, all such comparisons are at least partially epigonic, because despite parallels, changes in cultures and technologies over time have created situations and events that cannot be duplicated nor simply overlaid on the past by mere ideological association. Looking back can offer many lessons, but one must be wary of aligning the past too closely with the present, and confusing allegory and metaphor with current reality. It’s far too easy to make false equivalences or grand generalizations from a cursory knowledge of the past.

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Juet’s Journal in Word format

For those readers interested in the voyages of the late-16th-early-17th century adventurer, Henry Hudson, or in the European explorations of North America, I have recently scanned and edited a copy of Juet’s Journal into Word format and placed it online here. Here is my website on Henry Hudson, too. I haven’t done much with it of late, but that may be slowly changing as I find I have more time these days, during my recovery.

The journal documents how Hudson and his crew ‘discovered’ parts of North America and sailed up the river that now bears his name. For Americans, especially those in New York state, this is important history.

I have long wanted to turn the journals of Hudson’s voyages — replicated in Samuel Purchas’ classic 17th-century work, Purchas His Pilgrimes (aka Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World, in Sea Voyages, & Lande Travels, by Englishmen and others — the 1625 publication was actually the fourth edition of his work that first came out in 1613 as Purchas His Pilgrimage) — into readable, copyable, modern text.  However, because the original text is not suitable for scanning into OCR form, I tried to manually input it by reading the original and retyping it in Word.

My initial efforts to retype the text from the vintage typography into modern form were slow and frustrating. It’s difficult to read, even with a magnifying glass poring over  the facsimile editions I have. The printer used the “long f” for an “s”, “v” for “u” and “i” for “j” — all of which need to be substituted. Plus he and the authors of the journals used forms of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization far from today’s standards. As much as I wanted to “correct” these for modern usage, I had to try to retain them for authenticity.

Although I put the project aside for the last decade to pursue other interests and ventures, while I was recently perusing my bookshelves for an unrelated title, I came across a reprint of Juet’s Journal of the third (1609) voyage. My interest was again piqued. I have spent several days scanning, editing, formatting this into a text format that can be used easily. This reprint came from the New Jersey Historical Society, published in 1959. As far as I can tell, it was the first and only reprint of Juet’s journal in modern type.

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Dandelions and civilization

Whenever I see a lawn with dandelions, I think, “This is the home of civilized people. This is the home of people who care about the environment and their community. This is where bees are welcome.”

When I see a monoculture lawn, bereft of weeds or dandelions, I think, “Here is the home of an anti-social family; a place where life is restricted, wildlife discouraged; where community and the environment don’t matter.”

I feel the same when I see a lawn sign advertising that an anti-“weed” toxin has been applied: “Here is the house of someone who dislikes their neighbours, the local wildlife, and pets.” It’s the home of someone who doesn’t care about their and their neighbours’ drinking water, either, because everyone knows that those poisons drain off into our local water supplies and eventually poison everyone.

Bland lawns bereft of texture and colour, bereft of even a single dandelion just seem so artificial, so hostile, so arrogant. So anti-bee, so anti-life, so impoverished.

Dandelions, on the other hand, are a bright icon of civilization and conscience. After all, who doesn’t know that bees and other pollinators are in trouble, are suffering from the excesses of toxins sprayed egregiously on lawns and fields? Who really believes a drab, one-colour lawn is more attractive, let alone beneficial than a flower garden?

Dandelions have a long, storied history in human company: brought over from Europe in the 17th century for their healing properties, they have spread across the continent. 

Weeds get a bad rap, says Dan Kraus, national conservation biologist at the Nature Conservancy of Canada:

Weed is a very subjective term. There is no scientific definition that says: this is a weed, this is not a weed. They’re basically plants that are in a place where people don’t want them. People consider dandelions to be a weed, but if you just change your mind about dandelions, and you don’t mind them on your lawn, then they’re no longer a weed.

Just google lawns and weeds and up pop a horde of commercial sites offering to cleanse your lawn of weeds, mostly by spraying some toxic concoction on them that will also poison wildlife and your drinking water. And they do it for money, of course.  But that’s modern life and the culture of me-me-me: as long as your lawn is perfect, who cares the consequences?

Lawns have a long history, mostly as status symbols rather than anything useful. The word itself comes to us from the Old Enligh launde, meaning a communal grazing space. It devolved into laune by 1540. Back in Henry III ‘s time it meant a private area exquisitely and laboriously manicured (first by livestock, then by peasants’ hands, and later by paid workers) to show off your wealth and status. Nothing communal about them.

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Decades, centuries and millennia

Blame it on DennisJanuary 1 is NOT the start of a new decade. To the CBC and the other arithmetically-challenged media who insist otherwise: it isn’t. You just don’t understand how to count to 10. No matter how you spin it, 9 years is not 10.

And even if it was, starting or ending a decade or any other period of time has no magical significance. Neither history nor culture, neither politics nor science work along calendrical timelines and our own calendar is an arbitrary construct for convenience only. But back to the numbers. It all comes down to simple numbers.

I get that counting from one to 10 is tricky for some folk (like CBC editors). It’s easy to get lost and forget that there are ten digits in there. “One, two, three, uh… seven… nine… four… is that it?” But here’s how it works:

1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… 7… 8… 9… 10

Feel free to print this sequence out for future reference. Try it using your fingers. See? Ten numbers when you count from one to ten. Pretty amazing, eh? Well, that’s how our calendar works, too.

So if the above arithmetic hasn’t boggled your mind too much already, let’s do some basic counting. We’ll start with a decade. The word itself comes from the ancient Greek through Latin: dekas is in ten in Greek, decas is Latin. A decade can mean a set of ten things, such as books, chapters, or even prayers, but for this article we’re interested in one use: counting years. A decade is ten years. Not nine, not eleven.

Sure, you can pick any arbitrary group of ten years and call them a decade, but that dilutes the significance considerably. 1964-1973 is a decade, technically, but unless it’s associated with a significant historical event or issue, so what? Who celebrated the start of a new decade in 1974?  Same with 2010-2019 – technically correct only as a decade in marketing or in slipshod media reckoning. (I’m sure you are aware that, in the example decade above, it marked the ten years of direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.)

The first decade in the western calendar starts with year 1, just like your fingers do,  and ends with… have you figured it out yet? That’s right! Year 10. Years 1 through 10 are the first decade. Now with a little effort, you can calculate the first century – 100 years. Spoiler alert: that’s years 1 through 100. And the first millennium? Right: years 1 through 1000. See the pattern? You start counting with 1, not 0. Decades, centuries and millennia all start with a year ending in 1. And they close with a year ending in zero. Just like counting from one to 10 on your fingers. You don’t count from 0 to 9, do you? Then why do it with years?

So what is 2020 in those terms? Start with 2001, the first year of this millennium and count 10… 2001 to 2010, then another 10; 2011 to 2020. So 2020 is the LAST year of the current decade, not the start of a new one. Got that? Apparently the CBC doesn’t, but like local media, their credibility is long past its best-before date. I digress.

Calendars are not like the odometer on your car. Odometers start at zero, so when you see 1, you’ve travelled 1 km (or miles if you prefer the archaic imperial system). When the numbers on an odometer roll over to 2,020 it means you’ve travelled a full 2,020 kilometers and number 2,021 is just starting. Calendars, on the other hand start at 1, and the appearance of year 2020 indicates we’ve done 2,019 years and the 2,020th is about to begin, not ending.

You can also count years like you count the pages in a book. You start with one. You don’t begin reading the second set of 10 until you read to the very end of page 10. Or like money – count from one. If I owed you $10 and gave you $9 because I started counting from zero – would you accept it? Think of years as pennies. How many pennies are in $20? Is $19.99 the same amount as $20? Would a bank give you a $20 bill if you gave it $19.99 in pennies? We count house numbers, cookies, bottles of beer – everything else from one. So why are some people trying to make us count years from a non-existent year zero? Zero isn’t a number – it’s a place marker. Doesn’t anyone take math in schools these days? Or maybe they think there’s a ‘decade’ with only nine years lurking in the calendar.

I blame Dennis.
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Fire and Fury reviewed

Trump and BannonDysfunctional. Childish. Self-centred. Narcissistic. Ideologically myopic. Illiterate. Cranky. Capricious. Arrogant. Scheming. Petty. Ill-educated. No, I’m not writing about our local council (although, yes, all those words apply equally to The Block). These are some of the words that came to mind as I read Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Dysfunctional popped into my mind most often as Wolff described the lurching, staggering, fumbling and bumbling of Trump’s staff and family advisers after their unexpected – and for some unwanted – victory. (I know: curiously coincidental how that description also echoes our own council’s meandering, aimless and destructive governance, but let’s not talk about The Block right now…). Not that it’s surprising: the amount of political experience among the core group and family that stuck together through Trump’s campaign combined was less than an hour’s worth.

It’s like reading about a train wreck described in excruciatingly minute detail: the trajectory of every rivet and bolt as it shakes loose from the engine and flies off into space is chronicled, measured and examined. Or perhaps it’s better described as reading about the antics of an entire kindergarten class where cranky children fed on high-sugar treats are not given sufficient nap time.

And despite my initial expectations, the book is less about Trump than about his minions and the limpets who cling to him. While it’s not flattering about the Ignorati-in-Chief, it scorches the hangers-on. There’s a point made that American democracy could survive Trump and manage well enough if the White House had a competent, experienced, educated and literate staff of professionals to mitigate his inabilities. But with its cast of amateurs and grasping opportunists it hasn’t a chance.

I had already read much of what Wolff described online and in newspapers and magazines (such noteworthy publications as the Washington Post, New York Times, Maclean’s, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and others which Trump labels ‘fake news’ because they fail to tug their collective forelocks and genuflect to his self-described “very stable” genius). The madcap antics, the sordid affairs, the flailing and failing of Trump’s staff are already as well documented as the president’s own erratic bumbling governance and noxious tweets. But I’ve not had it all served in a single dish before, nor had I been aware of the backgrounds of many of the players. That’s the strength and delight – and fright – of this book.

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