Esperanto at USC

As opposed to teaching
the old Esperanto?

In the early twentieth century, several American universities—formally or informally— started Esperanto classes. At Harvard, these were promoted by visiting celebrity professor Wilhelm Ostwald, but in many places, language professors became interested in the new language and after learning it started teaching it. Sadly (from the point of view of the Esperanto movement) the rising tide of Esperanto classes soon receded, and if I had to make a guess at the number of colleges and universities in the United States where you could study Esperanto in a classroom, I’d put the number at one.[1]

There is a good reason for schools to teach Esperanto: it’s a good starter language. One of the justifications for studying a foreign language is that it will help you understand language better. It will even help you in your native language. Esperanto, since it’s stripped of all the irregularities of natural language, helps you get to the concepts faster, since you’re not dealing with the intricacies of seven strong verb forms, or multiple ways to make a plural, or things like that. If you want to learn French, you might actually be better off with a year of Esperanto (assuming you know no other language but your own), and then jumping into French after that.

A Virginia Esperantist on Ido

Defended the honor of
Esperanto

The Esperanto Association of North America started at something of an inopportune time. Less than a year before the EANA was launched, the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language had thrown their weight behind Esperanto-with-modifications (that is, Ido).[1] One of the first things the EANA had to deal with was a somewhat fractured movement in which some of the early luminaries were jumping ship.[2]

In Virginia, the honor of the Esperanto movement was defended by George H. Appleton of Lynchburg, Virginia, who wrote to the Times Dispatch defending Esperanto as it was set down by Zamenhof, and putting some of the news about the fracturing of the movement into context, basically arguing that the whole Ido movement was getting more intention than its actual numbers warranted.

Prepare for the Fina Venko — Duolingo Has Esperanto

La strigo parolas esperante!
(Image © Duolingo)

Duolingo, the popular language learning site and app has been promising Esperanto for quite a while (more than a year). It’s probably the language courts that attracted the most attention while still in incubation (although my perception of this may be skewed in that I follow the Esperanto groups where people have been saying “when will Esperanto come to Duolingo?” seemingly forever). If you’ve been waiting to learn Esperanto until Dueling offered it, now’s your chance (unless you’re waiting to do it on iOS, for which there will be a brief wait).

I have to confess that I’ve been delinquent in my own use of Duolingo, despite my initial enthusiasm for the program. I’ve just found that language lessons were getting squeezed out of my schedule these days, despite that I even used Duolingo while traveling. I really need to brush up on my French again.

Esperantist Couple Studied Law Together

That second period after "Mrs." isn't the only mistake

To anyone who has sweated their way to a law degree, it might be galling, that Edwin C. Reed and Ivy Kellerman-Reed took up law school as a recreation, obtaining their law degrees simultaneously on May 28, 1913. It would seem that after the end of the 1910 Universala Kongreso, and many months to come before their only child was conceived, they needed something to fill up the time. So they studied at the Washington College of Law.

In a way, the Reeds were the American Esperanto movement’s power couple. She was a noted linguist, and the author of one of the first American textbooks on Esperanto, A Complete Grammar of Esperanto (despite the title, it’s a textbook, not an analysis of the usage patterns of Esperanto), and an editor of Amerika Esperantisto. He was the secretary of the Esperanto Association for North America, but as the presidency was pretty much an ceremonial position during the first four years of the organization (during the presidencies of George Harvey and John Barrett), the secretary was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the EANA.

The North American Review Abandons Esperanto

All the way to the wilds of Hoboken

The timing should have raised some alarm, but if it did, that alarm was not raised to any great volume. On May 27, 1908, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser of Honolulu, Hawaii, had noticed that Esperanto had come to an end in the North American Review. With the first United States Esperanto congress coming later that year, wasn’t this a cause for concern?

Let’s consider the timeline here.
1. March 16, 1905 The American Esperanto Association is founded in Boston.
2. November 1906 The North American Review starts promoting Esperanto.
3. May 1908 The North American Review stopped its support of Esperanto (according, at least to the Pacific Commercial Advertiser).
4. July 19, 1908 The first North American Congress begins.
3. July 22, 1908 George Harvey is asked to be president of the new Esperanto Association of North America.

Why did they do that? Admittedly, although volume 187 of the North American Review (January to June, 1908) has no reference to Esperanto, there are plenty of references to Esperanto in the succeeding volumes (188–191, and others), and in part, the set of lessons that the magazine published had come to an end. Imagine your position if you’re a subscriber who wasn’t particularly interested in the Esperanto lessons (say an ardent Volapükian). How are you going to feel if they started the whole thing up again? Or if you got to the end of the lessons (and had joined the Esperanto Society). Did you need them again?

The New York Times Discovers Esperanto

All the Esperanto news
that's fit to print!

Although the New York Times is one of the United States’ most prominent newspapers, they were scooped on Esperanto, finally deciding to report on the “well-written little pamphlet” on March 26, 1897, nearly a decade after Zamenhof’s publication of the Unua Libro. Esperanto seems to have been fairly unknown in the United States at the time, but it had already hit the American press, including other New York newspapers.

Two newspapers (and I know of a third that I haven’t written about yet) managed to write about Esperanto in 1887, almost ten full years before the Times (the pamphlet wasn’t released until July 1887). They were the Deutsches Correspondent of Baltimore, and the New Orleans Daily Picayune. I’ve actually tracked down seven articles (so far) that precede the New York Times writing about Esperanto. I’ve also noted that articles in the New York Sun seem to far exceed those in the Times. (Although the Times didn’t make the error that the Sun did and attribute Esperanto to a Spaniard)

Mr. Barrett Believes

Believed in Esperanto.
Didn't speak it.
But he believed!

It seems clear to me why George Harvey took command of the Esperanto movement in 1908 (it also seems clear to that his leadership might not have been the best thing for the movement). To put it simply: Harvey had spent a year promoting Esperanto in his magazine, The North American Review. I suspect that his editor, Henry James Forman, had convinced him that wealth and power came with Esperanto. It’s not clear to me why John Barrett of the Bureau of American Republics agreed to become the second president of the Esperanto Association of North America.

Did John Barrett believe that there would be some benefit to him as a diplomat once everyone else switched to using Esperanto in an international context? It would have to be everyone else, since Barrett didn’t learn Esperanto, nor did he use his position as director of the Bureau of American Republics to push Esperanto in a diplomatic context. “We’re having an international conference. All delegates are asked to provide their statements in Esperanto.”

Esperanto on the Hog Latin Principle

But what about the book?

The 1907 review of Esperanto in Twenty Lessons that appeared in the May 23, 1907 issue of Life says next to nothing about the book itself (it sold for fifty cents), or the author (C. S. Griffin, a name that expands out to Caroline Stearns Griffin). For that matter, Life’s book reviewer of time, J. B. Kerfoot, shares a name with a nineteenth-century clergyman and writer (probably a relative, but not father and son). However, it’s hard to believe that the Right Reverend J. B. Kerfoot would say such things about Esperanto (and he didn’t; he died in 1881, far to early to have reviewed C. S. Griffin’s Esperanto in Twenty Lessons).

Kerfoot makes the (inaccurate) statement that Esperanto was “assembled on the Hog Latin principle,” and then continues in insulting language that woulnd’t make it past an editor of popular magazine today. Life today would probably decline any future services of a reviewer who turned in anything like J. B. Kerfoot’s review of Esperanto in Twenty Lessons.

Esperanto on the Air

Our man
on the air

In the early twentieth century, radio—transmitting voice over the air—seemed like something out of science fiction. It was the technology that was going to transform the world, bringing the world closer together. With that great advance, there needed to be a way that all those distant broadcasts could be understood. What a better match for radio than Esperanto?

And who better to promote this than Professor Arnold Christen (misnamed in this article as Arnold Christian). At the time the Washington Herald wrote about his plans for a series of lectures and addresses in Esperanto, he was still using his (former) affiliation with the University of Glascow, although he had been in the United States since 1909, without holding any formal university affiliation. At the time that he was proclaiming that Esperanto and radio were a perfect match, he had been a naturalized citizen since 1914.

The Tenth Planet — Blogging Doctor Who

Resistance is useless!

I’m going to miss William Hartnell, but at least his send-off was on par with “The Daleks” and not with “The Gunfighters.” As the First Doctor’s final story, we meet the #2 baddies of Doctor Who, the Cybermen. But first a few quibbles.

The serial is called “The Tenth Planet” because, at the time, Pluto was viewed as the ninth planet. The problem came up later that there were plenty of other things that were as much as planet as Pluto is, so we either demote Pluto or decided that a lot of other things are planets. A bigger point is that there is no way that Mondas, the home world of the Cybermen, could have formed as a twin planet to Earth. No, you can’t have two planets sharing the same orbit.

To make things worse, even a “twin” planet to Earth, that is one with the same composition and mass certainly wouldn’t have the same landmasses. Sure, the absolute equivalence of Earth and Mondas does create a plot bit where the planet is initially dismissed as some sort of bizarre reflection of Earth, but let’s not strain our credulity too far.

Torta Caprese

A food stylist would have removed
the crumbs. The yummy crumbs.

If the slice of torta caprese that I had on Capri wasn’t my first one, it was certainly a memorable one. There I was, sheltered under a tree on the patio of a trattoria, ready for something to eat and drink. We paired it with espresso, which is a wholly non-Italian thing to do, but the Italians aren’t sticklers in matter of food and drink. Its possible that it was my first piece of torta caprase, since it probably falls into the category of “Italian desserts that don’t show up much in American restaurants.”

There are hundreds of Italian desserts—dolci—but the same ones keep showing up on the menus of Italian restaurants again and again. There’s always the tiramisu, which (according to Wikipedia) isn’t terribly old. Then again, neither is torta caprese, which seems to be another invention of the twentieth century. One site notes that none of its ingredients are specific to Capri. The principal ingredient—chocolate—is foreign to Italy. (Wikipeida notes that Italy produces about 110,000 metric tons of almonds per year, but Italy is not among the countries where the cacao tree is grown.)

“It Was Born in Me,” But Who Was He?

Can we have more detail here?

When Henry Dorwart was arrested for sodomy in May 1889, the word “homosexual” was still three years away from being introduced into English. Yet, it seems that there were some people who were already getting the idea that sexuality was something innate. Even the (now outmoded) term “sexual invert” was only a few years old (and probably hadn’t come to the attention of those who were not in medicine), but still, Henry Dorwart was able to explain what he had done by saying “it was born in me.”

Dorwart was preceded in this by Joseph Carp of St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1883, Carp stated that his “excessive passions were unlike those of other men.” Unlike Dorwart, Carp was given the column inches to make this clear: “He loved his own sex with strong passions” (to quote the St. Paul Daily Globe). The Lancaster Daily Intelligencer didn’t give Dorwart more than the five words, so we don’t even know what happened (but given only one arrest mentioned, we can make a guess or two).

No Lies in Esperanto

Lies. All lies.

The Honolulu Star Bulletin doesn’t offer any clues as to the identify of the (deluded if not mendacious) college professor mentioned in their (wholly untrue) short item about Esperanto, so unless I get lucky, I won’t be tracing this claim back to its source.

People have devised languages around various ideals far more utopian than that Esperanto (that is, to enable people to communicate in a shared, easy to learn language, not one imposed by the stronger party). While many early wags made the claim that you couldn’t cuss in Esperanto (and I’ve recently found an early rebuttal to that by Joseph Silbernik), the language Triniti was created with the intent that there would never be an indecent word in it. So why not a language that made it impossible to lie?

Joseph Silbernik, the UEA's Man in New York

Joseph Slibernik
Eminent Esperantist

Oddly enough, the editorial that Joseph Silbernik refers to in his letter in the May 14, 1915 New York Sun does seem to appear in any of the preceding issues. There is no editorial titled “World Speech and Cacography” in the issues of May 13 or 12. was it in an earlier edition, replaced later? In any case, we’re left wondering just to what Joseph Silbernik was referring. Something about world speech. Oh, and “cacography,” which means (I looked it up) comic misspelling, typically to represent substandard or dialectal speech. It’s clear from what Silbernik wrote that the editorial did mention Esperanto, although this article is the only entry for “Esperanto” that can be found in the scanned copies of the Sun for the first two weeks of May 1915.

Fortunately, the identity of Joseph Silbernik is clear. He was not only the Delegate for New York of the Universal Esperanto Association (as noted at the bottom of his letter), but he was also involved in his local club and the Esperanto Association of North America.

Yes to Esperanto, No to Photos at World’s Fair

Please don't photograph
the Esperanto speakers.

Whenever I find that a tourism venue forbids photography, my immediate thought is that they’re tying to push you to buy the souvenir photo book instead. They don’t want to compete with their vendors. They want to squeeze more tourist cash out of you. Ironically, in some of these places, they have people running about taking flash photos, and I can understand a ban on flash photography. A museum might claim that flash photos can harm artworks (I’ve heard that this is utter bullshit), but more believably, the claim can be made that flash is distracting to other patrons (which is true). But a world’s fair?

But that’s what the organizers of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition did. They announced their ban on cameras on May 10, 1913, while the Expo was still under construction. However, contemporary reports made it clear that the ban continued when the fair was actually opened. And article in the San Francisco Call made it clear that permission to take photographs lay with the Department of Concessions. See, you don’t need to take photos; we have this wonderful souvenir book with professional photography.

Words from an Early Esperantist

He wrote the book on
Esperanto. Well, okay,
he translated it.

There is nothing that would be news to an Esperantist in Richard Geoghegan’s essay about Esperanto in the May 10, 1912 San Juan Islander of Friday Harbor, Washington. He gave the principles of the language and a little history. He gives nothing of his own personal history in Esperanto, although an accompanying article does note one bit of Geoghegan’s history as an Esperantist, though it gets it wrong.

According to the San Juan Islander, “the first translation of any of Dr. Zamenhof’s work into English was made by Mr. Richard H. Geoghegan.” Yeah, that’s not true. There was an earlier translation by Julian Steinhaus, but (as Wikipedia notes), Steinhaus wrote in poor English and Geoghegan made a fresh translation. The San Juan Islander does not mention that Geoghegan was the first president of the (by that time already defunct) American Esperanto Association. The item goes on to note other early Esperanto speakers in the United States, and that’s what I’m going to focus on.

Sodomy Counts — How do 19 people vote 17 to 4?

Did math work differently in 1885?

An item in the Perrysburg Journal of May 8, 1885 covers the recent activity in the state senate. The bill in question, set the penalty for sodomy for twenty years. This bill was introduced in the Ohio Senate by George H. Ely. One online biography of Ely notes (approvingly) that his service as a state senator was largely expended the interest of the iron ore industry, which was not only a concern of his district, but also a personal concern, as his brother had made “large investments in iron ore lands.”

I’m a little late on this, because while the Journal didn’t pick up on this story until May 8, 1885, the Wellington Enterprise reported on the passage of the bill on May 6, and the bill itself was passed on April 27. (The Springfield Globe-Republic reported on May 5 that the House had also passed the bill.) There’s something odd about the reports of the Senate vote.

The War Machines — Blogging Doctor Who

Conquer the earth
with those?

Honestly, I think the best parts of “The War Machines” are the nifty serial-specific titles and that we get rid of Dodo (and in that case, somewhat unceremoniously). The rest of it, well, it’s a bit of a mess. Let’s be blunt: for an evil computer bent on domination, WOTAN is a bit of an idiot. This is going to include Spoilers (though to what degree I can spoil something forty-nine years after its initial broadcast is unclear; by the way, in Hamlet, the prince dies in the end, as do lots of other characters).

Ironically, the idea of linking up the world’s computers sounds a lot less like science fiction than it did in 1966, considering that when I created this document, the application I use, Byword, opened a new document in iCloud, which has servers in North Carolina. I then moved the document (as I titled it) onto my local drive. Three years before ARPANET, Doctor Who is proposing linking up the world’s computers. The computers actually in the initial ARPANET cluster were somewhat more research oriented than the ones proposed by Doctor Who. Not the White House, Cape Kennedy, or the Royal Navy, but UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah. No British computers (ARPANET was a US-government project), and certainly no WOTAN.

Queen Elizabeth, Esperantist

But did she write in it?

Not that Queen Elizabeth. The current Sovereign of the United Kingdom wasn’t even born when this particular Elizabeth was queen. Nor even her mother (another Queen Elizabeth). Not British royalty at all, but instead a German princess who became Queen of Romania (when she married the King of Romania). Our Esperantist Queen Elizabeth is referred to on Wikipedia as Elisabeth of Wied, daughter of the Prince of Wied, whose principality had gone out of existance before he was born.

In addition to being minor German nobility, Elizabeth was a writer, which she did under the name of Carmen Sylva. She was a prolific writer, although when you’re queen of Romania, you can get away with How I Spent Sixtieth Birthday. But it wasn’t all Thoughts of Queen, she also wrote things like Legends from River and Mountain, and Songs of Toil. She was also an Esperantist.

An 1888 Critic of Esperanto — The First American Esperantist

Henry M. Phillips, Jr.

Henry Phillips, Jr. was called “the pioneer of the language in America,” as he most likely was the first American to learn Esperanto. Unfortunately, he died in 1895, a full decade before the Esperanto movement started in the United States. He learned Esperanto because the American Philosophical Society was behind the idea of an international language, and was looking for the right one to support. Phillips was the secretary of the American Philosophical Society. (The Society has a Henry M. Phillips Prize for writing on jurisprudence, but that was created in memory of his uncle, for whom he was named).

An 1896 obituary in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society make his intellectual achievements plain , yet leaves quiet the source of the funds that allowed Phillips to pursue a life of the mind. Suffice to say that his publications on numismatics was unlikely to bring him much coin (sorry, I had to say that). His publications range wider than those listed by Albert H. Smyth in the APS obituary, although Smyth does mention his work in Esperanto.

“Speak Now” — Well Spoken

Read now!

I’d like to start with belated congratulations to Professor Kenji Yoshino for his marriage (truly belated; he married in 2009). The day Speak Now arrived at my door, my husband and I were watching Professor Yoshino on the The Rachel Maddow Show, where he was discussing the (then) upcoming Supreme Court hearing on same-sex marriage with Steve Kornacki (who was subbing). I made a comment about two gay men watching two gay men talk about same-sex marriage.

“Is Yoshino gay?” I noted that he was. “Is he married?” That I didn’t know, although I opened my copy of Speak Now and read as far as the dedication to Ron Stoneham. Perhaps? I didn’t need to read further than page 1 to find out the answer. Yoshino and Stoneham married in 2009. They have two children. In of themselves, they embody the sort of people that lawyers for marriage equality might want to have as plaintiffs, a point that he brings up in his book.

Speak Now has the longer title of Speak Now; Marriage Equality on Trial; The Story of Hollingsworth v. Perry (shades of the eighteenth-century long title, because that is a long title), but in addition to being the story of Hollingsworth v. Perry, it contains a lot of biographical information about Kenji Yoshino, bringing to mind the old adage, “the personal is political.” That Yoshino made Speak Now personal, even though he was not personally involved in the Perry trial in any way is something that gives the book much of its power.

Esperanto Saves the World!

An alien!
(from another story)

I would think that if aliens were monitoring Earth broadcasts in order to determine what language they should use in contacting Earth, they would choose English. This was not the conclusion of the aliens in J. G. Frederick’s The Planet Juggler, which was originally published in the November 1908 All-Story, and then subsequently serialized in the Washington Times in 1910, from May 5 through 12. I cannot pretend that there is anything more than incidental reference to Esperanto, but as this story hits two of my major interests (Esperanto and science fiction), it’s pretty irresistible (if only Frederick had worked in cooking, although in 1908, there’s no way he could have worked in gay rights, which didn’t even exist as a concept).

But the alien isn’t actually monitoring Earth broadcasts. Radio was in its experimental days, and the first successful transmission of speech was only a few years before. It would be likely that no Esperanto had been transmitted by radio before the end of 1908. However, Frederick makes clear in the second chapter that the alien voice, a individual from Canopus, has been monitoring the sights and sounds of earth for ten years, but it was only with the developments in wireless that the alien was able to speak to Earth. There had been suggestions at about the same time that civilizations on other worlds would speak Esperanto.

The Sun Casts a Sunbeam on Esperanto

Did all Sun articles cast sunbeams?

The May 4, 1901 article in the New York Sun was not the first time that the newspaper had written about the language, they had managed that in January 1891, but given the passage of a decade without any further reference to Esperanto, they can be excused for writing about it as if none of their readers would have had cause to have heard of it beforehand. Esperanto was fairly unknown in the United States in 1901, although it was beginning to enter the American consciousness.

The Adresaro de la Esperantistoj covering January 1900 to January 1901 lists just two Esperantists in the United States. That particular series (XXI) is the first to make a list of editions by country, making the Americans quick and easy to find. They were Edward L. Steckel of Doylestown, Pennsylvania (#5146) and Frederic L. Savageau of 1337 East Fourteenth Ave, Denver, Colorado, who is described as a student (#5496). 1901 saw the addition of three more Esperantists to the subsequent Adresaro. Unfortunately, few of the prior are available online (I have this fantasy of buying reprints of the series and then using that as the information for a database to create a better picture of the early Esperanto movement). Of those that are available, we see Salomon Goldfeder, 124 Pitt Street, New York (#3775) and Alex. Duff (tie maker, the Esperanto is kravatisto), 304 E. 98 street (#4505). Out of these three editions, I’ve found five Americans, while the same volumes have a variety of European cities with more than five new Esperantists.

An Esperantist on the Lam

Oscar Whitehead
The mad Esperantist

There was an odd overlap of the Esperanto movement and the theosophy movement, and so many early twentieth-century Esperantists were also Theosophists. The Theosophist advertised from time to time in Esperanto journals, and the Esperantists advertised from time to time in theosophy journals. Various Theosophic works were published in Esperanto, and Theosophic groups would have lectures on Esperanto. Despite all this, there is no esoteric aspect to Esperanto.

Most of the news items about the intersection of theosophy and Esperanto don’t have much of interest going for them. However, on May 3, 1914, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story that brought together Esperanto, theosophy, and (for good measure) kidnapping.

The background of the story seems to be that Oscar R. Whitehead, who had been an actor, decided that his half-sister, Helen Burns Whitehead, ought to be an actress, and so spirited her off to California, after her mother had said no. She vanished in late December 1913, when (as the New York Times put it) she was “lured from home by her half brother.” There was quite a difference in ages between the two; Oscar was forty-one years old, and Helen was eleven.

First a Girl (1935) — Review

Not a great title, but it's
a fun film!

If you’ve seen the 1982 Blake Edwards film Victor/Victoria, you know the plot of the 1935 British film, First a Girl, since the the later film is a remake. Well, so’s the earlier film, which is based on a 1933 German film Viktor und Viktoria, which was also remade (in German) in 1957. Wikipedia adds a 1975 Argentinian film, Mi novia el… (the title, according to Wikipedia was originally Mi novia el travesti—“My Girlfriend the Transvestite”—but censors made them chop the title). Before Julie Andrews sang “Le Jazz Hot” the story had been told four times, twice in German, although in 1982 it just seemed to radical that such a story could make it to the screen.

The films don’t map completely. It’s not like the 1931 Ricardo Cortez and 1941 Humphrey Bogart versions of The Maltese Falcon (Warner Brothers re-made The Maltese Falcon because the 1931 version couldn’t be re-released under the Motion Picture Code; leading them first to make 1936’s Satan Met a Lady). While the 1931 Falcon was too risqué for the screen by 1936, because of its suggestions that Spade has had sex with just about every female character in the film, plus there’s a stronger current of Spade gaybaiting men he doesn’t like, and Joel Cairo is more clearly depicted as gay, the British First a Girl seems to have made it past the censors, despite its flirtation with gay themes, as it opened in New York on January 3, 1936.

The Antichrist Speaks Esperanto

Father Benson
Said the Antichrist would
speak Esperanto

Quick check: does Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders speak Esperanto? If so, some people might be afraid, very, very afraid. Let me be quite clear here that I am not suggesting that Senator Sanders is the Antichrist; the idea is utterly absurd. It’s just that on May 2, 1908, the New York Sun ran an article on Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel[1] The Lord of the World, in which the Antichrist is a Senator from Vermont who becomes President of Europe, and eventually President of the World, and imposes Esperanto on the world.[2] Benson was a Roman Catholic priest and writer, though Benson was raised in the Anglican Church, as his father was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I’ll admit to never having heard of the novel before this, and my expectation was that it would turn out to be a forgotten early-twentieth century work. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, as Wikipedia notes, Popes Benedict XIV and Francis have praised the move. It seems to be favored reading among conservative Catholic intellectuals. It’s an apocalyptic novel, treating progressive social movements as harbingers of the End Times.[3] The novel makes it clear that the establishment of world peace is a rejection of God. A quick glance through it shows Father Benson’s fears were that modernity was a sign of the approach of the Antichrist, and so various internationalist movements like the Peace and Esperanto movements seem to have troubled him.[4]

First Blogaversary

He does graphics too!

I started this blog one year ago today with a short post about blogging (I’ve tracked a few blogs back to find their writers started with the same thing). From there, I went to cooking, but it wasn’t until the blog was three weeks old that I started looking at old articles about Esperanto and other constructed languages (something that now dominates my blog). Yet, when I did that first post on Esperanto, it wasn’t my intent. I figured I’d fill in with posting on something on Esperanto from time to time.

There are, ironically, some things I wanted to do with this blog (including reading through The Faerie Queene) that I haven’t done. Nor have I done as many cooking posts as I’d like to, which is a little surprising to me. Ironically, I keep thinking of cooking posts I should write, but then they don’t get written.