Tsondoku

Tsondoku is the Japanese term for the quirk of buying books and letting them literally pile up unread.  If this were a deadly disease, I would have passed away about a decade before I was born.

It’s a blend of two words: tsumu (積む, "to pile up") and doku (読, "to read"), cleverly combining the act of stacking books with the intent to read them.  The term doesn’t carry a strict judgment—it’s more a playful acknowledgment of a common behavior among bibliophiles.

I have no idea how many books are in our house, but there must be thousands and thousands of them—far too many to count, and while the vast majority have been read, there is a healthy stack of books that I want to read, and that I intend to read, and that I just have not yet gotten around to actually reading…And that stack is growing.

I don’t consider that growing pile of unread books as anything bad—in fact, I view it as a sort of savings account.  I’m currently reading a book about WWI naval skirmishes in the Mediterranean and then, when I finish it tonight, I’ll be able to select a new book from a wide selection of available tomes.  I have no idea what I will read next, but I’m sure it will be a good choice.   (I’m leaning towards that book on the works of Edward Hopper.)

The proper way of thinking about Tsondoku is that having your treasure trove of unread books is the same as living in a five-star restaurant that has an extensive menu.  The selection is part of the enjoyment.

This is all a very long introduction to what I really want to talk about—the books I will never have a chance to read.  The books that have been lost.

There is no chance, for example, that I will ever get to read Hemingway’s first novel that was based on his experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.  Hemingway was working as a journalist in Switzerland and asked his wife to bring him his collection of unpublished short stories, his notes, and the manuscript of his unpublished novel.  While traveling by train, she stepped off the train momentarily to buy a bottle of water.  When she returned, the suitcase containing Hemingway’s writings had been stolen.  

His wife wept the entire eight-hour journey to Switzerland, dreading having to tell her husband of the loss.  At first, Hemingway laughed at the story, assuring her it didn’t matter, because he always made carbon copies of his work.  He stopped laughing when she informed him that the carbons were also packed into the suitcase.

Perhaps this is a good place to briefly mention that I’m still upset at the loss of the library at Alexandria.  Among the countless treasures lost was Aristotle’s Second volume of Poetics—the book on comedy that is the center point of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.  

There are a lot of books that have been lost for centuries that might still surprise you.  Did you know that there was a second volume of Beowulf?  The story you know comes from a single, singed volume that survived the 1731 fire at the Cotton Library in Westminster.  While the first volume was damaged, the other volumes were destroyed.  There were other copies in English libraries, but they were destroyed in Viking raids.  If there is a remaining copy, it has yet to surface.

Did you know that at least one of Shakespeare’s plays is missing?  Cardenio is a lost play attributed to William Shakespeare and his collaborator John Fletcher.  It was performed in 1613 by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theater company, but no known copy of the original text survives.

The play was reportedly based on an episode from Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, specifically the story of Cardenio, a nobleman driven to madness by betrayal and heartbreak.  In Cervantes' tale, Cardenio loves Luscinda, but his friend Don Fernando deceives him and marries her.  Cardenio flees to the mountains, where Don Quixote later encounters him.

There have been several attempts over the years to recreate the play, but there is so little documentation about the original script that the task is considered hopeless.  It is likely that the last surviving copy of the play was lost when the Globe Theater burned in 1613.  (The photo at left is AI generated, since none of the thoughtless residents of London remembered to pull out their cellphones to document this historic loss.)

T. E. Lawrence, more popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, lost the 250,000 word original manuscript of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom when he left his bag in the refreshment room of the Reading Station.  When he returned, his bag had been stolen.  Although he rewrote the book, the lost draft was rawer, longer, and possibly more candid about his wartime exploits and his psyche—potentially a truer epic than the polished rewrite.  (There is a moral to this—Never travel by train if you have a manuscript.)

Jacques Futrelle, an American author known for his clever, puzzle-like mysteries, perished along with 1500 other people in the sinking of the Titanic.  In his stories, the main character, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen—nicknamed "The Thinking Machine,"—used pure logic to solve seemingly impossible crimes.  Futrelle had gained significant popularity with stories like The Problem of Cell 13, and he was carrying new, unpublished manuscripts on his ill-fated journey aboard the Titanic in April, 1912.

To finish, let me tell you about the lost book I think about most often.  As a teenager, I loved the books by Donald Hamilton.  I read a half dozen Matt Helm novels in a week, then discovered his westerns, The Big Country and Texas Fever.  I was hooked.  Great literature they were not, but I really liked the way he told a story.

Donald Hamilton left behind an unpublished manuscript for one final Matt Helm novel, tentatively titled The Dominators, when he passed away in 2006. Hamilton had completed the manuscript years earlier but was unable to secure a publishing deal, partly due to declining interest in the series after the Cold War era and to shifting trends in the spy genre.

After his death, the rights to his work—including those to the unpublished novel—became entangled in estate issues. There have been occasional discussions about publishing The Dominators, but no agreement has been reached between Hamilton's estate and publishers.  There have been some suggestions that the manuscript needs some editing.

If his family reads this, I’ll finish editing that manuscript for free*.

*Editors’ note:  You, edit? Really?

Kim’s Ancestor?

Throughout history, there have been people, usually women, who have been famous for being famous.  Singularly lacking in personal accomplishments or achievements, their sole talent seems to be their ability to use looks to garner publicity to their own benefit, the public constantly wanting to know more about them.  An example would be just about anyone named Kardashian.

A few of the celebrities either married well or picked the right grandparents in order to inherit riches, but never actually seem to have used these advantages to build anything on their own (Think of Paris Hilton, Princess Diana, Nicole Richey, or Zsa Zsa Gabor).   In a generation or two, they are usually forgotten by everyone save for a few weird blogging historians.

I’ve written about a few of them.  There was Prinzessin zu Salm-Salm, who was a beautiful woman and a circus bareback rider, who then married a prince, traveled the world, met the crowned heads of Europe, and received an honorary rank of Captain in the Union Army from President Lincoln.  After her husband passed away….she was promptly forgotten. 

Then there was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the beautiful socialite who captivated the highest circles of Paris society…At least until John Singer Sargent painted her portrait—the one in which one shoulder strap of her gown was down, possibly indicating that she was either just taking her gown off or had just put it back on.  No one remembers her name anymore, but her likeness, the Portrait of Madame X, is on prominent display in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.  

A month ago, while writing about the curious history of lead white paint, I ran across another example of someone whom society simply could not hear enough about for a brief period, who then simply vanished.  She was famous for her beauty, then died because of it.

Maria Gunning was born in England, in 1732, and was one of six children of Irish aristocrats who lacked enough money to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle.  After the family returned to Ireland, Maria and her younger sister, Elizabeth, were encouraged by their mother to seek work as actresses in the Dublin theaters.  Being an actress was far from a respectable occupation at the time, since actresses were paid so little that they frequently supplemented their wages by being courtesans for the theater patrons.  At the time, this would have been a scandal equivalent to releasing a sex tape today.

When a prominent ball was held at Dublin Castle, the two sisters borrowed the costumes of Lady Macbeth and Juliet from the theatre, so they could attend the affair suitably dressed.  Effectively, this was their coming out party and they so impressed the members of high society that they were suddenly famous.  Lavished with gifts from the rich, the sisters returned to England and lived in high style, with both being presented at court to King George II.

Maria, who was notoriously tactless (which is a very polite way of saying that, while the young woman was beautiful, she was brainless) was asked by the King if there was anything she would like to see while in London.  She replied that she would like to see the pomp and grandeur of a royal funeral.  Luckily, the only person in the kingdom whose death would have provided the desired spectacle thought the answer hilarious.  

Within a year, both of the sisters had married well: Elizabeth snagged a duke and Maria married the 6th Earl of Coventry, to become the Countess of Coventry.  The new Countess remained socially very active: she was seen at all the most fashionable events and was rumored to have had an affair with the Duke of Grafton.  During her carefully orchestrated public walks through Hyde Park, the Countess was mobbed by the public, requiring a bodyguard to accompany her.  

Maria was a pale beauty who enhanced her looks by the liberal application of Venetian Ceruse makeup.   This makeup both whitened the skin and caused a pink glow that suggested both health and youth.  When a modern laboratory recently recreated the cosmetic using traditional materials, the women working in the laboratory all agreed that the cosmetic improved the appearance of the test subject.  Since Venetian Ceruse is made from lead carbonate, it’s a deadly poison, but, luckily—for humans, anyway—the test subject was a pig.  (You’re right now undoubtedly thinking of a joke about lipstick on a pig.)

The fashions at the time required women to wear low-cut gowns that revealed a lot of cleavage.  Since Maria did not want to show an obvious line where the makeup ended, she applied the cosmetic liberally.  Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the inevitable lead poisoning was skin blemishes and lesions, but these were easily covered with even more Venetian Ceruse.

Maria’s husband, the Earl of Coventry, did not like the makeup and frequently requested his wife to stop using it, but she refused.  In one infamous episode, the Earl chased her through a dinner party, attempting to wipe the makeup off her face with his handkerchief.  Shortly after this, the Earl began an infamous affair with the courtesan, Kitty Fisher, who was another young beauty who was famous for being famous.

Maria, now the Countess, had a public feud with Kitty Fisher.  When the two bumped into each other at a park, the Countess asked Kitty for the name of her dressmaker.  Kitty replied that the Countess would have to ask the Earl, since he had given her the dress.

Unfortunately, The Countess was becoming increasingly sick; her once alabaster skin was now deeply blemished, requiring ever more cosmetics to hide the condition.  Maria Coventry, the Countess of Coventry, died from lead poisoning at the age of 27.  She might have had some satisfaction that her rival, Kitty Fisher—who had also begun using liberal amounts of Venetian Ceruse—also died from lead poisoning just a few years later, at the age of 26.

Today, some historians question whether either woman actually died from lead poisoning, suggesting that a more likely cause of death might have been tuberculosis.  Since one of the side effects of lead poisoning is a diminished immune system, it probably doesn’t matter who is correct.

D.O.G.E.

Back in the sixties, there was a monthly contest at Lackland AFB, with a cash prize for anyone suggesting a helpful new way to improve base efficiency.  An enterprising airman won the contest two months in a row.  His first win was for suggesting that two existing forms be replaced with one new form.  The next month, the same airman won again, for suggesting eliminating the new form.  I don’t know where that airman is today, but he should be the patron saint of a controversial newly-minted government department.  

Government agencies and compost piles have a lot in common:  Besides having a high level of horse shit, both can benefit from periodic stirring up.  Rarely, however, does either benefit from having a hand grenade tossed into the mix.

Obviously, I’m thinking about the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, that has energized both the left and the right to run in circles and yell a lot.  Since Elon has yet to gore my ox, I alternately find this either appalling or hysterically funny.  No doubt I will become incredibly outraged as soon as Musk takes his fiscal chainsaw to one of the few federal entities that I care about (Like the Air and Space Museum, the Library of Congress, or the National Archives—Keep your hands off those, Elon!).

The chief complaint about Musk (besides his enormous wealth) seems to be that he is unelected.  I would point out that the agencies that are under review are chock full of unelected bureaucrats, who have been formulating regulations for decades.  Depending on which flavor of newspaper you read, the actions of D.O.G.E. are described as either draconian or brilliant.

While we are discussing unelected government employees, remind me again just how many primaries Kamala Harris won?  

The Constitution, Article II, Section I, allows the President to run the Executive Branch of the government, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."  If President Trump wants to delegate that authority to someone else, he has the right to do it.

As I write this, D.O.G.E. seems to be shutting down the Department of Education but is obviously doing it wrong.  The correct method would be to weld the doors shut during one of the three or four daily working hours and then fumigate the building.  Since the Department claims that only a quarter of its staff works remotely, the fumigation would eliminate the majority of the rats.  Perhaps a bounty could be placed on the escapees.  (My experiences working at Enema U may have slightly influenced my opinions about the Department of Education.)

President Carter created the Department of Education (DofE) back in 1978, separating it from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) which changed its name to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  It should be noted that within a few decades, the new HHS had as many employees as the old HEW plus all the new employees at the DofE.  This type of growth, splitting, and regrowth is typical of all government agencies, malignant cancer cells, and university committees.

This is where I suppose that I should list all the reasons why the Department of Education should be closed.  Centralized control is inefficient, local control is more responsive to a diverse population, state control would foster experimentation while being more adaptable to local conditions, and it would eliminate administrative duplication, and so forth and so on.  There is the uneasy alliance between the Department of Education and the National Education Alliance.  I could talk about the needless paperwork that I—and every other teacher in the country—had to fill out to satisfy the hair brained whim of some nameless bureaucrat in Washington.  There are a lot of reasons to close the Department, but most of them don’t really matter.

The real reason the Department of Education should be closed is that it simply has not worked.  Despite a cast of thousands, an annual budget of hundreds of billions of dollars, and endless studies—by every conceivable measure, education in the United States has grown steadily worse since the institution of the Department of Education.

The US spends as much or more per student (in some communities, much more) than every other developed nation.  We rank roughly in the middle of industrialized countries when it comes to teacher pay.  Our schools are modern, air-conditioned, well-lit, and clean, and they are equipped with the latest in technology.   For more than four decades they have been overseen by a Federal agency whose budget has gone up annually by more than the rate of inflation.  Yet, despite all of this—or perhaps because of it—student test scores are abysmal compared with the rest of the world.   Clearly, it is time to try something else.  Damn near anything else!

Maybe letting 50 different states try 50 different ideas will work.  Maybe creating a new and different Department of Education along a different model will work.  Perhaps we should just copy what some other country is doing.  I don’t know the correct answer to the problem of education, but one thing is certain:  neither does the current Department of Education.

While there is no doubt that President Trump is the constitutionally designated head of the Executive Branch, there is still some doubt whether he can close a department or lay off all the workers within a department without congressional approval—that will have to be decided in federal court and will probably take years.  

In the meantime, when Musk gets tired of D.O.G.E., I wonder if he would consider doing the same sort of job at Enema U?  I think it would be possible to cut the university budget by at least 20% with the changes going unnoticed by most of the faculty and any of the students.

The Uluburun Shipwreck

Frequent readers—and judging by my hate mail there are more than a few of you—know that I’m fascinated by shipwrecks.  The only individual topic that has appeared more frequently than Napoleon in the past seventeen years’ worth of blogs is the Titanic.  However, my favorite shipwreck (and the one that I have learned the most from), is the Steamboat Arabia.

The Arabia was a side-wheeler riverboat that sank rapidly in the Missouri River in 1856, after her bottom was ripped out by a tree stump.  Despite the rapid sinking, the only casualty was a mule that had been hitched to some sawmill equipment and was forgotten.  Within hours, the entire wreck sank in the mud, making salvage operations at that time impossible.

In 1987, Bob Hawley and his sons located the wreck in a field, now forty-five feet below the soil surface and half a mile from the river.  After being snubbed by numerous historical and archaeological groups, the Hawley family recovered the material themselves and, in the process, became the world’s experts in recovering and conserving this type of material.  When the Arabia sank she was carrying an incredible amount of cargo, including the entire starting inventory of a hardware store.

Due to the ground being perpetually near freezing, the material recovered is still in amazing shape.  Pickles in glass jars were still edible and the bottles of champagne were still drinkable.  For historians, this was like a time machine, that offered a view back at the material culture of the mid-nineteenth century.  The photo below is just a small fraction of what is on display in the museum, and the last I heard, the Hawley’s were still opening and conserving more contents from the ship.

I was a guest of the US Army at Fort Leavenworth—not the prison but the college, at which I was taking a two-week graduate course in military history.  With plenty of time on my hands, I started checking out the excellent   local history museums, of which Kansas City has more than her share.  I had never heard of the Arabia but visited anyway.  For the next week and a half, I spent every available free moment in the museum, taking notes and asking questions.  The recovered goods I saw changed the way I thought about what was then the frontier of America—including the kinds goods available and how quickly new merchandise reached the edges of settlement.

I’ll give two quick examples.  I had always heard that shoes for sale about the time of the Civil War came in only one pattern, and that left and right shoes were identical, not anatomically  specific.  There were thousands of shoes on the Arabia and nearly all of them came in pairs, with the right shoe the mirror of the left.  And I had been led to believe that wooden matches—also known as shack matches or Aggie flashlights—did not come into common use until the 1880’s.  The Arabia carried thousands of them.

While I am still grateful to the US Army for its generosity in letting me attend the prestigious school, to be honest, I learned far more at the Steamboat Arabia Museum than I did in the classroom.  If you travel or live anywhere near Kansas City, I highly recommend visiting it.

Which brings me to the Uluburun Wreck, which is the oldest shipwreck in the world.  The name comes from the site of the wreck, just off the coast of present-day Turkey, since we don’t know the name of the ship (or if she even had one).  The ship comes from the Bronze Age, in roughly the fourteenth century BC, when ships were not commonly named.  Nor are we certain where the ship came from or where it was heading, though it was probably going from somewhere near Cyprus to somewhere in Greece, along the Aegean.

The fifty-foot ship probably sank about 1320 BCE—give or take a couple of decades:  the exact date is a little fuzzy.  Radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology (dating by examining tree rings) overlap a little, but among the treasures found was a likeness of Nefertiti, so, the three dating methods together give us a pretty good idea.  Nor are we really certain exactly what the ship looked like, since 3000 years of seawater have played havoc with the ship’s timbers.

The wreck was discovered by sponge divers who reported the discovery of “metal biscuits with ears” on the sea floor.  These were copper “oxhide” ingots weighing about 60 pounds each.  To make them easier to carry, the copper was formed into rectangles with a protruding handle at each corner.  This report led to a recovery team making over 22,000 dives from 1984 to 1994.

What is important in the wreck—just as with the Arabia—is the nature of the  cargo that has been recovered.  The wreck’s cargo reveals an astonishing array of artifacts that reflects the extensive maritime trade networks of the Eastern Mediterranean.  Among the finds are raw materials such as copper and tin ingots (essential for bronze production), as well as luxury items including glass ingots, ivory, and precious gemstones.  The assortment also contains a variety of finished goods like pottery, tools, and weapons, which highlights the ship’s role in both commercial exchange and cultural interaction among ancient civilizations.

In addition to the utilitarian cargo, the shipwreck also has yielded culturally significant items that provide insight into the artistic and ceremonial practices of the time.  Artifacts of Mycenaean, Canaanite, and Egyptian origin were found aboard, including scarabs, ceremonial vessels, and intricately designed jewelry.  Some of the items had come from as far away as China, down the Silk Road.  These objects not only underscore the diverse origins of the ship’s cargo but also illustrate the interconnected nature of Bronze Age economies and societies.  Overall, the Uluburun shipwreck serves as a remarkable underwater time capsule, shedding light on the complexity and reach of ancient trade and the cultural exchanges that helped shape the ancient world (and our modern world, too).

The remarkable array of artistic objects in the Uluburun shipwreck has fascinated artists by the remarkable array of artistic objects.  Viewing the wreck’s contents is akin to an artist’s going shopping in a Bronze Age art supply store.  The ship contained 175 glass ingots of cobalt blue, turquoise, and lavender, along with ostrich eggshells, ivory of both elephant and hippopotamus, glass beads, and jars filled with resin for making turpentine.  The cargo also included intricately designed jewelry, finely crafted ceremonial vessels, and ornamental scarabs—each a testament to the sophisticated artistry of ancient cultures.  

These items, with their delicate engravings, elegant forms, and vibrant use of materials, showcased a blend of styles from Mycenaean, Canaanite, Egyptian, and other Mediterranean cultures.  This diversity not only highlighted the technical prowess of ancient artisans but also provided a tangible record of cross-cultural artistic exchange, making the wreck an invaluable source of inspiration and study for modern artists and historians alike.

I would really like to see the museum in Bodrun, Turkey that houses all the recovered artifacts.  If I argued a good enough case for it, do you suppose the Army would like to pick up the tab for a really great museum trip?