Pride

We are proud to be a
community!

Pride, Celebrating Diversity and Community, by Robin Stevenson (Orca Books) is geared to middle readers (8-12). I would suppose it would be perfect for a teen who is becoming aware of LGBT relatives or even teens who becoming aware that they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. I would be remiss in my review if I didn’t note that I, who was seven when the Stonewall Riots happened, actually learned something from this book.

No fooling. It wasn’t something that happened in the last year or two that had slipped my attention, but the origins of gay-straight alliances, which Stevenson notes started at George Washington High School in New York City in 1972. She further cites a 1976 pamphlet from the Youth Liberation Front (her research and scope is impeccable) which exhorted gay teens to come out, a message that still needs to be heard today by people who have left their high school days behind.

An American Anthem…In Esperanto

Dr.James McFatrich
Sought to select anthem
Probably not the Esperanto one

The status of the “Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem, has apparently been of discussion ever since it was chosen (and clearly a bit before that). While it’s been the United States national anthem for forever, it only become so in 1931,[1] despite that the lyrics, “Defense of Fort M’Henry” were written in 1814.[2] People have complained that the song is difficult to sing, and that the music comes from a drinking song (which must have been damn difficult to sing drunk), “To Anacreon in Heaven,”[3] so maybe not the best tune for a sober nation.

There were various attempts to find a national anthem, because all the cool nations had one. England had “God Save the King,”[4] France had “La Marseillaise” and even the Esperanto movement had “La Espero” as anthems before 1911.[5] Unofficially, the United States was using “My Country, ’tis of Thee,” which has the problem of using the tune of “God Save the King.”

I Stalk Dead People

Someone got buried in 1881, but probably not someone
named Mary Anne Maddicks

This blog is two years old, and this is the first time I’ve really covered genealogy. Oops. It’s odd that it hasn’t come up since not only have I used genealogical research over and over on this blog, but I’ve been researching my own genealogy for about the last sixteen years.

In the blog, I’ve used genealogical research to find out more details about the people I’ve written about as part of the general background material of the blog post. “Hey, this person seemed so active in the Esperanto movement. What happened? Oh, they suddenly died.”[1] The same techniques that go into finding out where great-great-grandpa lived.[2]

Second Blogaversary

Two years!

It’s been two years. On May 1, 2014, I wrote my first post on this blog and on May 1, 2015 wrote a followup. If the first year of the blog was filled with great hopes, the second year, reality set in. In the first year of the blog, I turned out 528 posts (more than one a day), but in the second year, I turned to other things, and only wrote a further 103 posts (call it one every three and a half days). Ouch. What happened?

Mostly I was busy. I started the blog with a few things in mind, although there was the hope that somehow the blog would bring me an ever-increasing readership. This is not the case. If you’re reading this post, you’re one of the few. Be proud of it. After a few months, in anticipation of the coming readership, I started serving ads on the page, but at my current readership, that should pay off sometime in 2034 (and then again in 2054).

One of my goals was to recapture my own voice, to make this blog sound like me. In my prior life, I did a lot of corporate writing, and I found that when I got home I would be writing in that same corporate speak. Who wants to read that? Not even the recipients of those corporate screeds really wanted to be reading it, but that’s what I had to write. I am happy to say, in that respect, the blog has done its job and I am writing something that is my own voice, for better or worse.

No Exodus, And Maybe Moses

Mummy!

Passover starts today. According to the Torah[1] the holiday is the annual commemoration of the escape of the Hebrews from Egypt. It’s a great story, but the problem is that it’s almost certainly a story. It doesn’t hold together, and that’s even without getting into the magical elements, but the whole thing is more mythic account than clear reporting. It’s a story.

The first little hint is that we now know that the Egyptians used contract labor to build their pyramids.[2] No slaves. The phrase “for we were contract laborers in Egypt” just lacks something. There’s no indication that the contract laborers were some sort of foreign presence either. But someone could argue that the records of all this were lost.[3] Not gonna wash.

The bigger problem comes at the other end, where all the archeological evidence of Bronze-Age Israel indicates a standard slow rise of populations (with the occasional falls due to the usual, followed by slow rise). No big jumps in population because a major group suddenly came in, or city suddenly being established that didn’t start out as much smaller communities.[4] As you add up the evidence, it seems clear that there was no Exodus.

When Charities Become Telemarketers

The ones in the middle
are phone spam too.

I know that fundraising is hard. I understand that charities need money with which to pursue their missions. I would ask them not to follow the example of spam and scam telemarketers. But they do.

Looking over my phone records since the beginning of the year, I find that there are two phone numbers, both of which exceeded the number of calls that I received in the same time period on our home phone from my own husband. I actually like talking to him. When he calls me, it’s usually for a reason that I’m interested in. And he almost never calls and hangs up if I don’t answer (sometimes he calls my cell phone, because unlike telemarketers and fundraisers, he knows my cell phone number).

Although I tend to ignore phone numbers with weird names, call enough, even if you don’t leave messages and my curiosity and ire might actually get the better of me, as I entertain the fantasy that the person who keeps calling me every freaking day and doesn’t leave a message on the answering machine might actually listen if I tell them that in my opinion that their calls have crossed the line into misuse of the telephone.

Mr. Privat Goes to Washington

Li iris al Vaŝingtono

One of the early great celebrities of the Esperanto movement was a young man from Switzerland. You cannot fault Edmond Privat for a lack of fervor: he walked to the first Esperanto Congress, from Geneva to Boulogne-sur-Mer.[1] at the age of fifteen (the conference ended shortly before his sixteenth birthday). By 1907, he was actively promoting the Esperanto movement and had become a prominent Esperantist, and had been sent to the United States to promote the language. In late 1907 (check the link), the New York Sun dubbed Mr. Privat “the principal commercial traveller for the original manufacturer of Esperanto.”

Privat began his visit to the United States in New York, but in February 1908, he came to Washington, D.C. At the time that he was there, the national organization was the American Esperanto Association, headquartered in Boston. It was later that year that they would be supplanted by the Esperanto Association of North America.[2] In February 1908, D.C. wasn’t the center of the Esperanto movement in the United States,[3] but it had been national capital for a good long time. And who knew? Maybe Mr. Privat could get President Roosevelt interested in Esperanto.

Kiam Mi Esperantiĝis

Ne! Oni diris
secretario, ne
sekretario!

Okaze, mi blogas esperante. Hodiaŭ estas la 35a datreveno de la dato kiam mi komencis lerni Esperanton. Do, ŝajnas al mi ke hodiaŭ me devas verki esperante.[1]

Antaŭnelonge, ĉe la reto, mi vidis demandon, pri kiel oni lernis Esperanton antaŭ la interreto. Ho ve! Kompatinda D-ro. Zamenhof, kiu havis nek interreton nek komputilon, kiam li reklamis Esperanton. Ĉu oni vere povas lerni Esperanton sen komputilo? Oni ne povas kredi tion!

Sed tio estas vera. Mi estas la pruvo. Je February 18, 1981, mi prenis malgrandan broŝuron el tablo ĉe scienc-fikcia congreso. Ĝi estis nur paĝo de verda papero, faldita duople. Dum multaj jaroj, la verda estis kaj estas mia plej preferita koloro. Do, mi devis scii kio estis sur la verda papero. Eble reklamo por alia scienc-fikcia congreso, certe. Aŭ eble por klubo. Samtempe, estis la komenco de mia vivo en la mondo de scienc-fikcio.

A Promising Young Esperantist

William P. Bonbright in 1904

There was more than one William P. Bonbright in 1909. One of them was the founder of a banking firm which bore his name, with offices in New York, London, and Colorado Springs. (The New York Times referred to him as a “New York banker.” Those other places don’t count.) To provide a small amount of clarity, in his case, the P stood for “Prescott.” The other was his first cousin once removed, William Parker Bonbright. That’s the William P. Bonbright who was also an Esperantist.

This is the moment where I need to clear up the genealogy, since the question probably has arisen, “just what is a ‘first cousin once removed.’” If you’re Chico Marx, this would be followed by list of reasons for which the cousin was removed. I could point you to the Wikipedia entry on cousin, and I was tempted to bury this in a footnote,[1] but it seemed to make much more sense to explain it in the main text.

A World Government in French and Esperanto

This monarch, are we going to have an election, or will it
be done by strange women lying in ponds?

Herbert Stanley Jevons (1875–1955)[1] was a British professor of economics, the author of several books, such as The British Coal Trade, The Theory of Political Economy, and The Economics of Tenancy Law and Estate Management.,[2] but he seems to have been overshadowed by his father, William Stanley Jevons, as the elder Jevons is the one with the Wikipedia entry.

In 1909, the elder Jevons had been dead since 1882 and it was H. Stanley Jevons’s moment of prominence, for he was the prophet of a whole world monarchy, as reported in the Chicago Tribune (where I cannot find it), and then reprinted in the Washington Post on February 7, 1909. The reference to Esperanto in the piece is somewhat slight,[3] amounting to a single reference in the entire piece, but it’s interesting how far off Jevons was in his predictions.

A Traveling Professor Talks about Esperanto

Ĉu lil parolas esperante?

It seems fairly likely that “Professor R. B. Maitland of San Francisco” is responding to a 1895 New York World article, “Volapuk Has a Rival,” one of the early articles on Esperanto.[1] What isn’t clear is just who R. B. Maitland was, or even if his name was “Maitland.” Several online sources have indexed the name as “Maltland,” which is a real, though more obscure name. There doesn’t seem to be a Professor Maltland in the Bay Area at the end of the nineteenth century either. He doesn’t show up in the University of California Register for 1894 through 1897. There is a reference in the 1896–1897 volume, but it to Maitland, Nova Scotia.

Perhaps the Los Angeles Herald expected its reader to instantly grasp who Prof. R. B. Maitland (or Maltland) was, but to use the reference has dropped below the obscure all the way to the opaque. If I had to make a bet, I’d say they garbled the name, but my skills at name de-garbling haven’t been of any help here. Or maybe the person identified himself as “Prof. R. B. Maitland” with no further checking from the Herald. The item appeared in a column “Talks with Travelers,” which was presumably a reporter talking with recent arrivals to Los Angeles.

This item is one of the rare references to Esperanto in the nineteenth century. As the years progressed, there would be articles on Esperanto made with the assumption that the reader had never heard of it, and that it was something new. On February 6, 1896, Esperanto still was very new.

Mondays, Mrs. Roe Teaches Esperanto

Ŝi volas paroli esperante kun vi

Esperanto seems to have been at the center of the social world of Omaha, Nebraska in the period before World War I. In 1909, according to the Adresaro published by the Esperanto Association of North America, the Omaha Esperanto Club had forty-two members, with an additional twenty-two in the evening class (what this distinction indicated, it’s not quite clear). Oddly enough, Omaha had fifteen additional members of the EANA who were not members of the Omaha Nebraska Club.[1] Given this, it’s no surprise that the Omaha Daily Bee covered the local Esperantists so thoroughly.

I’ve already written about two of these Omaha early Esperantists, Charles J. Roberts (EANA membership number 923) and Mrs. W. B. (Alice) Howard (1346). Alice Howard’s mother, Mrs. E. A. (Abigail) Russell (1713) was a member of the First Nebraska Esperanto Club, of Ord, Nebraska (her number seems to indicate that she joined the EANA some time after her daughter did). According to Wikipedia, about this time Omaha had a population of 124,000 people. Not bad to have sixty-four people speaking or studying Esperanto.[2]

A New Day for Day One

Day One
I use it daily

I have been keeping a journal (with no great regularity) since March 14, 1978. I only wish I had been more diligent about it. There are vast stretches of time for which I have no journal entries. The first few are in composition notebooks (I’ve lost one of those, unfortunately), followed by a collection of notebooks of varying sort, not all of which are filled in to the last page. It’s more-or-less a portrait (sketchy at times) of my life over the last thirty-eight years.

The Holy Grail of journaling for me has been to write in my journal every day, something I have never done. I’ve already missed a day this year, and we’re only thirty-five days in. But missing a day is nothing considering that I look at my journals and find that six months elapse at times between entries. It became clear to me long ago that scribbling in a paper notebook would never get me to my goal of writing in my journal daily (or at least nearly daily).

The Mysterious A. E. Handley

There might not have
been any takers.

What you can accomplish through research can only go so far and every once in a while, instead of tracking down an early Esperanto speaker, I come up with nothing. Such is the case, unfortunately in the case of A. E. Handley, who lived in Ocala, Florida in 1908.

In 1908, starting on January 28, (Mr.? Mrs.? Ms.?) Handley ran a series of advertisements in the Ocala Evening Star, offering his services in the teaching of French, elementary German and Spanish, and Esperanto. The advertisement ran in the 17 subsequent non-Sunday issues of the paper, from January 28 to February 24, exclusive of the 2nd, 9th, 16th, and 23rd, additionally missing the 19th (a Wednesday). That last one was probably the fault of the newspaper, since the advertisement appears on both pages 5 and 6 of the February 18, 1908 newspaper.

Playground — Not Feeling the Love

You gotta work for my love.

If I had gone planning to write a review, I probably would have done the hipster foodie thing and shot pictures of my plates; we had plenty of lighting for it. I was there for my anniversary and didn’t feel like spending the meal shooting pictures of my food. I did shoot a picture of my menu, and I’ll get to that.

Playground is #66 in Jonathan Gold’s recent list of the 101 best restaurants in the L.A. region, and in all honesty, I can think of three restaurants in Orange County that are better than Playground that didn’t make Gold’s list (these are places that I prefer to Marché Moderne, #50 on his list). But since Jason Quinn, the head chef at Playground, has a mission statement (or something like that) that said “people only judge what we put on the plate,” I’m starting with the table.

Never Too Late to Learn Esperanto!

Ŝi esperantiĝis kiam ŝi havis 70 jarojn!

We can all learn from the example of Agnes Corliss, who passed her preliminary examination in Esperanto in mid–1912, as was reported in the June 1912 Amerika Esperantisto. What the magazine didn’t report was that Mrs. Corliss was a seventy-four year old woman. She began her study of Esperanto, according to her obituary,[1] when she was seventy, which would have been either late 1907, or during just about any part of 1908.

That makes her a fairly early Esperantist, learning it just about at the beginning of the Esperanto Association of North America. Her earliest connection to the movement seems to be in 1910, when she gave 50¢ to EANA.[2] As the annual membership in the organization was also 50¢, I suspect she sent in a dollar and made a contribution of the other part, although I do not see her in the subsequent membership lists. The 1911 EANA Adresaro lists twelve Esperantists in Vermont, eleven of them the membership of the Brattleboro Esperanto Society.

Gathering Esperantists in Iowa

State? I'll settle for local

Oh, for the days when there were both state and local Esperanto organizations. By the time I had joined the Esperanto movement, most states had but a single Esperanto organization, and if a state (like California) was large enough, it had regional groups, but nothing more. In the mid–1980s, I was a member of the Esperanto Society of New England,[1] shows from what a (theoretically) large area we were drawing our potential members; it might have more truthfully been called the Esperanto Society of Greater Boston. I lived in Cambridge, and the furthest I ever remember going for a meeting was Concord, some 15 miles away.

The same was true, about the same time, when I was one of the founders of the Gaylaxian Science Fiction Society.[2] As the first, we didn’t attach any geographic designation to our name (subsequent groups did, usually on the form [Place] Gaylaxians), but we really were a group for LGBT (and LGBT-friendly) science fiction fans in the greater Boston area. A meeting has to be pretty compelling to spend an hour getting there.

Those Bloodthirsty Esperantists!

Bloodthirsty?

At least such was the contention of Ellis O. Jones, writing in the January 1908 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine of January 1908.[1] Really, Mr. Jones? Are Esperantists “surely a bloodthirsty lot”? It sounds unjust.

Mr. Jones seems to have been predominantly a writer of sketches for the stage; most of the contributions to which his name is attached are one-act plays, such as Husband Wanted or Faint Heart, although those are both 1929, and it’s twenty-one years earlier that he’s writing about Esperanto (assuming it’s the same Ellis O. Jones, which seems likely). A little web research turns up more about him.

He had somewhat of a varied career, doing everything from working at Life magazine, to activities in the Socialist movement. Not long after that, he contributed a few “Little Essays” to the New York Times, but came back to their attention more than a decade after writing for Lippincott’s as the Chairman (or, as in the subhead, “chairamn”) of the People’s Day Committee, which gathered in Central Park on December 13, 1918 to mourn the death of Liberty. At the time that he wrote for Lippincott’s, he was thirty-four years old. According to Metapedia, where I stumbled on an article, but with which I am not familiar, in 1908, Mr. Jones was the Socialist candidate for Congress from Ohio.

Longhand Writing in a Digital World

My writing tools.
The Pencil kept sliding down the iPad;
I had to position it high and shoot fast.

Longhand or keyboard? I won’t call this the eternal writers’ debate, since even into the early twentieth century, writers sent handwritten manuscripts to their publishers.[1] Don’t try that now. Even tin the era when publishers would still read a manuscript in yours or someone else’s handwriting,[2] some still sent their manuscripts to be typed (Oscar Wilde, for one). It doesn’t matter how beautiful your handwriting is, no publishers wants to see 5,000 or especially 80,000 words of it. I, for one, doubt my ability to turn out 5,000 words in fair hand, while I know I can type my handwritten draft quickly and easily. I like to draft my fiction longhand.

I need to issue a series of caveats here: I am not a professionally published writer; if everyone who has my stories were to show up at my house for an impromptu cocktail party, I could cope.[3] When I’m writing for my blog, I do not typically draft things out in longhand, but instead compose while typing in a word processing application. For this blog post, I took the atypical step of writing a draft out by hand at first. It would have been faster to just do my typical thing, but it would miss the point.[4]

Max Nordau and the Breakdown of Esperanto

Max Nordau
(about 1895)
No fan of Esperanto

Detractors of Esperanto have claimed almost from the beginning that were the language adopted across the world, it would splinter into countless mutually unintelligible dialects, the way that English really hasn’t. Yes, the vulgar[1] Latin of the Roman Empire did split into a variety of languages, but there were some special circumstances and a whole lot of time applied there.

Time alone probably isn’t enough. Some years ago, when I was getting my bachelors degree, one class had a single lecture (out of a survey course) on glottochronology, the idea that not only languages change over time, but there’s a a specific speed for such changes. To quote Wikipedia, “any replacements happen in a way analogical to that in radioactive decay in constant percentages per time elapsed.” Then I went to my advanced Old English seminar, where we had a jolly laugh over the idea. (Wikipedia does describe glottochronology as “controversial,” notes attempts to disprove its mathematics, and says that it “has been rejected by many linguists.”)

Bowie, Rickman, and Cancer

On Tuesday, January 12, 2016, when President Obama said that he wants a “moon shot” for cancer, comparing it to the “space race” of the 1960s, I paused the television,[1] turned to my husband and brought up the recent death of David Bowie, who had died of liver cancer at the age of 69 only two days prior.[2] “We need, not a ‘moon shot,’ not a ‘war on cancer’ (because “war” is always the wrong metaphor), but a global research initiative, so that one day people say, ‘yes, there was a time when sixty-nine-year-olds died of cancer.’”[3]
There is a problem with President Obama’s metaphor of the “moon shot.” The space race[4] might as well have been called the space war, since it was almost a proxy war with national pride at stake. The Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, leading to fears that the Soviet Union was technologically superior to the United States. We’re really not worried that someone—China, Russia, France, or Liechtenstein—is about to find the cure for cancer before we do.

About This Blog

This is the sort of thing I see

This is my first entry to this blog since December 15, 2015, and that was something special, since prior to that, the last entry had been on October 17. I did not intend to put it aside quite so long; that was not my intention on the morning of October 18. October’s spotty posting (four posts in a month of thirty-one days) was not wholly intentional, but I knew there would be a slow-down, as I intended to spend October writing some stories.

It had to be October, because November was my month for writing an application to an MFA program in creative writing (as of this moment—January 14, 2016—knowing whether or not I got into the program is well into the future). I think inertia just carried me through December.