Provincetown As A Stage, Leona Rust Egan, 1994 -- DRAFT

Personal notes, not from the book, specifically:
In Europe, the "lost generation" known as the "Generation of 1914," the year World War One began.

Some Americans stayed in Europe when war broke out (some becoming ex-patriots, and the "lost generation); but most returned to the states, many to Greenwich Village. About 1915, the Greenwich Village crowd was looking for an alternate location to, perhaps, escape attention. Somehow they happened upon Provincetown.

The "beginning" of the Provincetown "we" know occurred between 1915 and 1917. Eugene O'Neill arrived in 1916 and stayed for nine years. His first two years in Provincetown, 1916 through 1917, coincided with the birth of "modern-day" Provincetown.

July 28, 1916: the evening of Eugene O'Neill's successful debut as a playwright: Bound East for Cardiff.

Introduction:

Chapter One: Eugene O'Neill's First Stage: Provincetown:

The New York Review Of Books -- December 19, 2024

 

**********************************
The Book Page

9:55 p.m. CST. Friday night. I'm reading the current issue of The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2024, and watching 60's and 70's folk music. Memories. 

Never quit reading. 

"You Only Live Twice," Alexander Leggatt, an essay on two books, both from the Yale University Press, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips, 218 pp; and, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, Marjorie Garber, 2023, 392 pp. 

I would have no interest in reading the first book, the one by Leggatt, but the second one is intriguing. Bloomsbury is a metonym for Virginia Woolf and her crowd. I've gone through "my Shakespeare phase" multiple times, and "my Virginia Woolf phase, both several times. At one time I had extensive libraries of both but have since culled the shelves and only a dozen or so of each have survived. I'm tempted to order the book, hardcover, list price $35, but 36% off at Amazon, $22.50, and free shipping. At $22, practically being given away. But it appears to cover what I've covered before -- except for the last section on Shakespeare and the theater. 

It turns out Ms Woolf preferred Shakespeare read to Shakespeare acted, and I agree. I find Shakespearean stage places -- the tragedies -- boring and slow and unnatural. When one reads Shakespeare, Woolf says the reader has "special privileges. He can pause; he can ponder; he can compare .. He can read what is directly on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written." She wrote in her diary: "Shall I read King Lear? Do I want sucha strain on the emotions: I think I do." One senses that for her the private experience of reading King Lear was more emotionally demanding than seeing it on the stage. And private reading can produce a deep response whose effect an outsider can only guess at.

Speaking of "a deep response whose effect an outsider can only guess at" takes me to an essay in the same issue, "Lebanon's Year of Living Ambiguously," Charles Glass. After reading the essay, I wrote at the top, "probably one of the saddest essays I've ever read."

Who is Charles Glass? A former Chief middle East Correspondent for ABC News and the author of They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France (sounds intriguing, interesting) and Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. Much could be said. 

For the archives. Nothing to do with the Bakken.

The Privileged Planet, Guillermor Gonzalez And Jay W Richards, 2004 -- November 5, 2015

c. 2004

Introduction

Evolution -- Sharks -- December 6, 2024

Books:

• Evolution: The Whole Story, General Editor, Steve Parker; Foreword by Alice Roberts, Thames & Hudson.
• The Secret History of Sharks: The Rise of the Ocean's Most Fearsome Predators, John Long, c. 2024

 

Lessons learned:

• a better understanding of mass extinctions
• sharks -- one of the longest living vertebrates?
  
• years to evolve: 465 million years and counting
• is there any vertebrate that's been around longer?
  
• remarkable for ability to survive the huge mass extinctions, changing environments; changing predators (p. 11)
• cartilaginous -- unique; more flexible than bony fish
• diverse species; unique niches
• evolution: homeobox genes probably more important than mutations -- p. 11 -- homeobox discovered 1984 (I graduated from high school, 1969; college, 1973; and, medical school, 1977.

The Age of Fish

Paleozoic ERA
    Permian                        jawless (agnathans)
    Ordovidian -- first fossils of oldest shark? -- one example
    Silurian -- one example
    Devonian -- appearance of teeth and teeth replacement like modern sharks
    Carboniferous             

        Hagfish
        Lampreys

Only surviving jawless fish: hagfish and lamprey

Mesozoic -- Age of Dinosaurs (ERA)
    Triassic period
    Jurassic period
    Cretaceous period

 

Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Sub Phylum: Vertebrata
Infra Phylum: Gnathostomata -- jawed vertebrates -- 99% of all living vertebrates (incl. humans)
Clade: Eugnathostomata
Class: Chondrichthyes

 

Infraphylum of jawless fish: Agnatha
    so, Agnatha vs Gnathostomotata

Placoderms: back to the Ordovician

2013: discovery in China -- the transition of placoderms to jawed fish greatly affected the evolution of sharks.

Placoderms: ur-jawed fish. 

Jawed fish: a class

Age of Fishes

Silurian (begins)
Devonian (huge)
Carboniferous (plays out)

The first jawed fish separated into four groups.

spiny sharks            placoderms            chondrickthyans            osteichthyans
(acanthodians)        (plated skins -        (cartilaginous fish)        (bony fish)
                                bone)

 

 Progression
    jawless --> jawed --> teeth (although teeth existed in jawless fish)
    respiratory relationship

400 mya: lots of water; warm climate / global warming --> jawed fish took off --> 200 genera

Once jawed fish arrived, only the jawless fish lampreys and hagfish survived.

Placoderms -- 400 mya but extinct by 359 mya -- obviously bony plates did not work; probably not a bit agile; by end of Devonian completely extinct when fish were flourishing

Acanthodians: survived until about 250 mya, later Permian;
    small spiny sharks (not true sharks)
        features of both sharks and bony fish
        Climatius -- huge advantageous adaptation
            an active hunter

Placoderm:
    Dunkleosteus -- top predator of the late Devonian -- and then disappeared

SHARK -- DEVONIAN
ORIGINS UNCLEAR

Absolutely fascinating: everything else went with bones; exception, sharks (and a few cousins)

chondrichthyans

    sharks, rays, skates, chimaeras (ratfish)

cartilage / bony teeth / dermal denticles

*** 2013: early type of placoderm shed light on evolution of sharks.

Thesis: bony fish may have retained ancient structure
    sharks may have been the ultimate innovators
    possible; bony skeletons came first
    then, cartilage skeletons evolved from bones!!
    rather than the other way around which was long assumed!

*** Shark evolution: a triumph of simple design -- and survived many mass extinctions; survived every mass extinction to which they were exposed.

    Sharks swam with placoderms and acanthodians but sharks outlasted them all.

Sharks: issue of sinking (p. 191)
    livers with lighter-than-water oils; and,
    large pectoral fins, buoyant (similar to birds)

LATE DEVONIAN MASS EXTINCTION

killed off placoderms, acanthodians, and most jawless fish

CARBONIFEROUS: bony and cartilaginous fish 

Reminder: chondrichthytes -- a CLASS of jawed fish.

Four classes of jawed fish; two classes extinct; two classes extant.

Sharks: 45 families (today, 40 families0

This period also saw emergence of the HOLOCEPHALI --
    another surviving group of Chondrichthyes

Subgroups:
Holocephali
    chimaeras, rabbit fish, elephant fish
Elasmobranchi
    sharks, rays, skates

Carboniferous extinction: rainforest collapse
    did not affect sharks

PERMIAN EXTINCTION
The Great Dying or the Permian-Triassic Extinction

252 mya: wiped out 90% of marine / 70% of land vertebrates.

200 mya: the sharks that survived the Permian extinction -- did very well -- great wave of evolution -- also produced true Batoids -- flattenend skates / rays - "wings"

100 mya: most moder shark groups had appeared

Cretaceous Extinction
This was the Cretaceous - Triassic
The Meteor

Again, the sharks survived and their cousins survived.

50 mya -- Hammerhead sharks appeared

    -- also the baleen whale and
    -- magamouth sharks
    -- manta rays

 

Well into the Cenozoic Era

Big mouth sharks
    great white shark -- contemporaries with the
    megalodon 

Megalodon last 14 million years
    two million years ago -- megalodon died out
    still around: great white shark

Ends with the Sixgill Shark -- cow sharks -- deep water
    

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Secrets of Sharks

Sharks:

• oceans' most feared predator, the white shark
• the oceans' weirdest-shape fish, the hammerhead
• the magnificent giant filter feeding whale shark and manta rays
• the voracious garbage eaters of the sea, the tiger shark
• the extraordinary bullhead sharks, docile little fished that are true living fossils, virtually unchanged from when dinosaurs ruled the land 150 mya

Their capabilities set them apart from all other fishes

• due to their long evolution: spanning some 465 million year

Other

• superb sense of smell
• can detect faint electrical fields of other living creatures (p. 9)
• teeth, remarkable; every species of shark has unique teeth

Origin of sharks: one of the last great unsolved mysteries in the 500-million-year-old evolution of backboned animals (vertebrates).

• did sharks evolve from first jaws and teeth or some other ancestral archaic fish group before them
• unlike most other vertebrates, no transitional forms found

Early on, p. 11: homeobox genes

paleontology: definition, p. 12

long periods of time, tens or hundreds of millions of years as deep time.

biostratifgraphy: use of fossils to date rocks within a narrow time range (p. 13)
within one or two million years
fossil sharks' teeth are often found as microfossils, useful for dating

*******************
Chapter Two

Arandaspis: the first early jawless fish. Oldest known fossil shark scales were found in the same layers of rock. So, a shark a contemporary of a jawless fish. 

Ordovician.

465 mya -- let's call it 500 mya -- half a billion years ago.

Australia part of Gondwana (southern continents). Laurentia (North Amerian) 3,000 miles away to the north.

Northern boundaries of Gondwana straddled the equator; nestled against what would be northern China. 

Global sea temperatures sweltering around 100°F at the equator -- boiling -- high seas -- between 380 and 680 feet above today's levels.

Larapintine Sea: shallow marine seaway the traversed Australia at the time.

Nautiloid, trilobites.

Jawless fish. Metasprigginia. Also found at the famous Burgess Shale in British Columbia, lived around 508 mya.

Diverse number of protovertebrates called conodonts.  Jaw-like mouthparts.

Cartilage notochord supporting their body rather than a backbone.

The biggest was Arandaspis. 

Also, Iowagnathus. Jawed predators hunting jawless prey.

The warm inland Larapintine Sea was home to the world's first shark, named Tantalepsis (p. 25). 

A nice time to review the continents at this time:

• pre-Cambrian: one large continent, Rodinia
• Paleozoic: initially breaks into two main continents (Gondwana and Laurasia)
• then further changes, greatly affecting the flora, fauna, and evolution of the age of fishes, from the Ordovician to the Silurian to the Devonian.
• the Larapintine Sea appeared during this period and was a major site of fish evolution

 

The Vendian is the period before the Cambian. The Vendian Period is divided into two epochs, the Varanger and the Ediacara. The Ediacaran epoch was marked by the appearance of the "Vendian biota" or "Ediacara fauna," a group of large soft-bodied organisms. 

Note:

Links:

• although this is about the Baltic Basin, the summary is very useful.

Middle Ordovician:

The Permian -- Pangaea (the two "P's" -- Permian and Pangaea; or three "P's" -- Permian -- Pangaea -- Perish) -- way too big; huge deserts:

*****************************
Sharks

 

NOW, back to sharks.

Page 26: sharks for the beginners. 

Page 34: Tantaleopsis: first shark?

• central Australia, south of Alice Springs; 2006
• placoid scales
• Tantalepsis: likely an early chondricthyan (cartilaginous fish) but not sure
• similar scales found in a group of ancient jawless fishes, called thelodonts
• tubular to flattened fishes
• but there is a difference between the scales of the thelodonts and sharks, including Tantalepsis
• based on this information from scales, Tantalepsis is as close as we can get to the oldest evidence for the origins of the shark group, the chondrichthyans (cartilaginous fish).
• the scales are very similar to the scales found on the nurse shark. Nurse sharks may be among the oldest sharks? Bottom feeders.

Time line of sharks. Very, very good site. Smithsonian.

Shark scales, p. 38.

First major mass extinction! End of Ordovician. Second worst mass extinction.

Remember, the period before the Ordovician was the Permian. The Permian explosion (of life). 

But all life on earth was marine so if there was going to a mass extinction of note, it would be marine life.

And that's exactly what it was. p. 39+. Great discussion.

The Ordovidian mass extinction, very clearly marked between 445 and 443 mya. Remember, the first sharks about 450 mya.

The shark that survived best represented by Solinalepsis, in the group of sharks with the most advanced scale structure, called the mogolepid  sharks. Very complex crowns made of a denser noncellular dentine with neck canals present -- a feature seen in the scales of living sharks.

Most sharks, shallow water, near the coasts, would have been knocked sideways by the declining water levels, but the author believes that there were sharks in deep ocean water that survived and were unaffected by the Ordovician mass extinction.

So, some sharks survived the Ordovician mass extinction.

Progress in the short but dramatic Silurian period.

Silurian Sharks

Fossil evidence:

• rising diversity of sharks are known from scales, as wells as the first fossil records of:
• isolated fin spines, and
• one nearly complete fossil shark

Sinacanthids.

Acanthodian-like stem sharks.

Mongolepid scales.

Oldest early shark known from an almost complete body fossil is Shenacanthus from Chongqing, South China, which lived around 437 mya.

Shenacanthus might bridge the gap between sharks and another early jawed fish called placoderms. Placoderms appear in the Early SIiurian at exactly the same time. 

Recap of the first 46 million years of shark history: bottom of page 42.

See graphic page 43: Tantalepis (Ordovician); Shenacanthus (Silurian) -- both branch off from main line leading to modern sharks.

Chapter 3: Sharks Become Predators
Sharks' First Superpower: Deadly Teeth

Searching fo the oldest known shark teeth

In Spain.

Early Devonian.

• oxygen levels about 8% higher than the present
• oxygen supercharged the metabolism of the first jawed vertebrates, which in trun drove an explosioin of fish diversity
• bizarre fish appeared and more diverse sharks appeared
• 415 - 408 mya
• a site where the oldest known sharks' teeth are found
• author's understanding of early sharks increased exponentially
• sharks' teeth are enlarged mirror images of their tiny placoid scales -- p. 47
• placoid scales around the mouth --> teeth --> first seen int eh Devonian -- p. 47
• how teeth developed may have been linked to their taste buds
• the same embryoni stem cells form both the teeth and the taste buds
• the regulator gene: Sox2
• see theory -- p. 48
• sharks' first real superpower: ability to replace teeth -- p. 50
• replacing teeth in a matter of days

Now, describing the Devonian (419 - 393 mya).

• throughout first 15 million years, sharks underwent radical changes
• prior to this:
• protosharks known only from scales, or acanthodians (stem sharks)
• all of a sudden paleontologist found sharks with teeth and replacing teeth like modern sharks
• again, early Devonian sharks
• until 2000, no complete shark fossil from this period had been found
• then, in 2000, serendipity -- not one, but two complete shark fossils found, in Canada

Author visits the Canadian site in 2014 -- p. 53.

 

Sharks' second superpower: smell.

Antarctica: big shifts in evolution.

Three big shifts:
larger
freshwater for the first time
higher diversity: at least four species living together in same ecosystem; fish were becoming very diverse and plentiful, allowing different species of sharks to feast on different species of other fish

Chapter 4: The First Rise of Sharks -- Sharks Lash Out

Late Devonian: 383 - 359 mya.

So the Devonian is very long: an early Devonian and a late Devonian. Plenty of time for sharks to get a real toehold.

Late Devonian: huge change for earth -- 24 million dramatic years, especially on land
vegetation changed dramatically
middle Devonian forests had low to midlevel canopies, while in the
late Devonian: the world's first towering forests made of gigantic plants
first tetrapods, early amphibians appeared
the seas were teeming with plankton; more free-swimming than floating forms
sharks flourish; mostly the same as before but one shark group rapidly increased in size

 

Late Devonian: recurrent events that shook up the earth

• events that choked the seas of oxygen
• not one but two rather minor extinctions
• p. 68
• the first: devastated life in the seas
• the second: culled all life in saltwater and freshwater

Finding a new Devonian shark 

again, back to Australia
the author's discovery, p. 70

Then Morocco

 

Then Southeast Asia, the Golden Triangle, p. 78

 

SHARKS REINVENT THEMSELVES, FOR THE FIRST TIME -- page 85.

Page 85: sharks reinvent themselves for the first time (they reinvent themselves twice; the first time was in the late Devonian: the first known holocephalan -- the group containing chimaerids, ratfishes, and spookfishes. These fossils are generally found in younger Carboniferous rocks.

Chapter 5: Sharks' Armored Rival -- Sharks Versus Placoderms
Dunkelosteous -- dark lord of the Devonian deep and the shark's mortal enemy -- p. 88

Ancient American sea, 359 mya

 Why the placoderms were such a threat to the sharks.

The dunkelosteous and the Gorgonichthys.

Ohio -- p. 90

 

Page 105: tree of life -- bony fishes + tetrapods (US)

Trunk: Placoderms (jawed-skull made of bony plates) -- main line leads to early ray-finned fish; breaking off from main line:
"conventional" placoderm
maxillate placoderms
main line: bony skull retained and refined; breaking off from this main line:
bony skull lost: toward SHARKS (toward sharks, rays and ratfishes)
lobe-finned fishes, the main line of this branch leads to tetrapods, mammals and humans
twigs branching off from this branch: early lobe-finned fish; living lobe-finned fish
main line: still trending toward early ray-finned fish, and living ray-finned fish

So: main line from placoderms to ray-finned fish
branching off:
sharks first
later, lobe-finned fish --> tetrapods

finale: Devonian sharks triumph over placoderms
placoderms: bony plates, probably less maneuverable; large energy requirements for weight
sharks: stream-lines; cartilage, less heavy than bone

See tree of life: Cambrian - Ordovician - Silurian (brief) - Devonian (long and impactful) -- p. 116.

Part 2
Sharks Rule

Chapter 6: The First Golden Age of Sharks -- Sharks Take Over The World

An ancient Montana bay, 318 mya
describes the supercontinents at this time, bottom of page 121

This is amazing: like the dinosaur finds in Montana, the same for sharks in Montana

p. 146: Carboniferousshark wrap-up.

sharks and their kin, the holocephalans, diversified as never before in the first few million years of the Carboniferous period; 100's of new species, representing both predatory and shell-crushing species, suddenly appeared.

If the Cambrian was the "Big Bang" for life on earth, the Carboniferous was the "Big Bang" for sharks.

Bear Gulch, Montana. New York Times, 1976.
Bear Gulch, fossil hunting, 2007.

Chapter 7: Swamp Sharks -- Sharks Take Over Rivers And Swamps

Chapter 8: Rise of the Buzz-Saw Sharks -- How Sharks With Wheels of Teeth Dominated the Oceans

 

Part 3
Sharks Under Pressure

Chapter 9: Sharks And The Great Dying -- Earth's Biggest Extinction Event Shapes Shark Evolution

The chapter begins with a recap.

Chapter 10: The Jurassic Rise of Modern Sharks -- Little Sharks Hold Their Own

Chapter 11: Sharks Go Large -- Sharks Versus Giant Marine Reptiles

Part 4
The Age of the Megasharks

Chapter 12: Sharks After The Impact -- The Rise of Modern Sharks

Chapter 13: Ascent of the Superpredators -- How Shark Predators Got Very Large Very Quickly

Chapter 14: Megalodon -- The Greatest Superpredator Ever

Part 5
Sharks Today

Chapter 15: White Shark -- A Natural and Cultural History of an Iconic Living Shark

Great tree of life, p. 365.

 

Chapter 16: Sharks and Humans -- Can Sharks and Humans Live Together?

Epilogue: The Wisdom of Sharks

Acknowledgments

Notes on Sources

Glossary of Terms

Index, p. 449

******************************
An Extinction Nineteen MYA

 

a

 

 

********************
Whales

Why they appeared so late.

 

*******************************
Montana: Paleontology

In the United States, in Montana:

If you want to study dinosaurs, you go to Hell Creek, eastern Montana.

If you want to study the evolution of fish / sharks, you go to Bear Gulch, Fergus County, near Lewistown, Montana.

The Bear Gulch Limestone is commonly considered to be part of the Heath Formation, the youngest formation in the Big Snowy Group of central Montana. 

Some authors instead consider the Bear Gulch Limestone to be an early member of the Tyler Formation, a patchy but widespread unit of Carboniferous limestone and terrestrial sediments.

Most of the Heath Formation is represented by black shales and marls, indicative of brackish and salty littoral environments. It developed along a transgressive sequence in a narrow saltwater seaway, known as the Central Montana Trough  or Big Snowy Trough. This seaway flowed into the Williston Basin, a shallow inland sea further east. The Central Montana Trough would have also been linked to fully marine basins on the western coastline of Laurussia, but this connection may have been broken by the time of the Bear Gulch Limestone's deposition.

Many distinct limestone lenses (localized sediment packages) are developed in the Heath Formation. They overlap each other in an east-to-west sequence which extends over a distance of 160 km in the Central Montana Trough. The only exposed portions of the sequence are found at Potter Creek Dome, a small uplifted area northeast of the Big Snowy Mountains. The last few limestone lenses form a large portion of the Upper Heath Formation, which is sometimes termed the Bear Gulch Member in recognition of the most well-exposed and fossiliferous lens in the sequence. This lens, the Bear Gulch Limestone, was also one of the last in the sequence, only succeeded by the Surenough Beds immediately west of it.  The Bear Gulch Limestone can be observed in numerous outcrops, spread out over an area of more than 20 square miles in Fergus County, Montana.

The creation of limestone lenses in the Heath Formation has been linked to tectonic activity extending the seaway by excavating bays out of the surrounding land. As old bays are filled in and buried by sediment, faulting and seismic events form new bays in a long eastward to westward succession.  It may have taken a mere 1000 years for the bay responsible for the Bear Gulch Limestone lens to fill in completely, after only 25,000 years for the entire bay formation sequence to run its course across Montana. 

The final limestone deposits in the area were succeeded by freshwater lake sediments of the Cameron Creek Formation, the oldest unit of the early Pennsylvanian-age Amsden Group.

Vishnu

Two books on India.

• India: A History, John Keay, c. 2000, 2010. Notes here.
• Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India Since The Great Rebellion, Maria Misra, c. 2007 

The notes below are from Vishnu's Crowded Temple.

The first long paragraph in each chapter below is the first paragraph from the book itself. 

Chapter 1: Tropical Gothic

On 1 January 1877 Queen Victoria was made Empress of India. To mark the occasion an Imperial Assemblage was held, not in Calcutta, the first city of British India, but in the capital of the old Mughal emperors, Delhi. The preparations began a year earlier. A vast area of land a few miles north of Old Delhi was chosen and its unlucky inhabitants, thousands of villagers, were summarily evicted. In their place, in an arc stretching for over 5 miles, 8000 tents, of varying degrees of luxury, were erected. Though each encampment was carefully calibrated to reflect the precise status of its occupant, the most up-to-date sanitation had been provided for all. In this city of palanquins and marquees resided the delegations of princes, aristocrats, officials and their various retinues, which included 85,000 camp followers and their attendant animals. At 10 a.m. on the appointed day the assemblage officially began. Two hundred and fifty elephants, one hundred and fifty horses, forty-five camels, several hundred spear-bearing sepoys, armed horsemen and thousands of caparisoned bearers trooped behind the procession of over ten thousand dignitaries as it made its way towards the ceremonial amphitheater. At exactly noon, after a roar of guns and a display of firecrackers, a fanfare of six trumpeters announced the arrival of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, who, to the strains of Waner's Tannhäuser, strode across the parade ground before installing himself on a throne set atop a large elevated dais. From there he loftily surveyed the ranks of princes, nobles, gentry and other Indian worthies banked in ascending tiers before him. The seating had been arranged according to strict rules of precedence. Closest to the Viceroy were the greatest princes: the Gaekwad of Baroda, the Nizm of Hyderabad and the Maharaja of Kashmir; behind them the thirty of so slightly less important princes, and behind them the six hundred minor princelings. Next came the great aristocratic landowners and wealthy merchants, and finally the lesser gentry and other native gentlemen at the back. Once enthroned, the Viceroy mused on the 'providential' nature of the British Raj, its intention to bring 'progressive prosperity' and its place as worthy successor to the 'House of Tamerlaine' (India's erstwhile Mughal emperors), before he grandly proclaimed Queen Victoria's accession as 'Kaiser-I-Hind" (emperor of India). This was a curious Indo-Germanic sobriquet considered the least likely of all possible titles to be mispronounced by Indians.

Chapter 2: Babel-Mahal

Hindu temples in nineteenth-century South India were rather like pre-Reformation monasteris -- not merely places of worship, but axes of local economic, political and social life. The managers of these institutions were hardly mere 'churchwardens' (as the British imagined them), but petty potentates and arbiters of socail prestige: they were, literally, the temple gatekeepers, empowered to determine which castes had the right of temple entry and which were forbidden. Before teh British, temples wer often run by a surprising motley of groups and individuals. Men of quite lowly caste status often preided, sometimes even Christians and, in one case, a major Hindu temple ....

Chapter 3: Far  Pavilions

At thier most philosophical, the British saw empire as cricket. For some, cricket was the greatest gift imperialism could bestow, because it could transform 'native' into gentlemen. In 1893 this 'wicket imperialism' acquired it most promient theorist in teh shape of Aurthur Haslam, Oxford historian and wicket-keeper for the 'Oxford Eccentrics,' the first British team to tour India. Cricket's rules and culture, he insisted, were the platoni embodiment of English virtue:

 

 

Chapter 4: Spinning the Nation

 

On 15 August 1947 the Union Jack of the Raj was lowered one last time and in its place was hoisted teh Indian national ensign, a flag bearing the image of the humble spinning-wheel (chakra). for it the British saw India as a set of competing cricket teams to be marshalled into sportsmanly coexistence under the tutelage of an all-powerful umpire, the nationalists themselves favoured a more organis, hand-crafted metaphor and produced spinners of a very different kind. The notion of nation-buildign as a cottage industry ultimately found its way on to the national flag.

 

Chapter 5: A House Divided

 

... the seventh Delhi ... the traveler ... makes ready .. to evoke those of Greece, of the Renaissance, and the Moguls.

Delhi has been rebuilt seven times since its foundation in 1450 BC, surprisingly perhaps, as an old prophecy warns that anyone who builds a new city in Delhi is sure to love it. In 1911 the British began work on a new imperial capital in Delhi...

Chapter 6: The Last Viceroy

On 26 January India celebrates Republic Day with a great parade in New Delhi. It is staged on that great icon of the British Raj, Lutyen's awe-inspiring King's Way, now renamed Rajpath. Beginnings relatively modestly with a few fly-pasts and flag-hoistings, successive celebrations became increasingly elaborate, and by 1960 had blossomed into full maturity requiring a vast retinue of committees, planners and organizers and lasting over two-and-a-half hours.

 

Chapter 7: Flames

 

In 1975 the most successful Indian film of all time -- Sholay (Flames) -- was released. Despte its vast expense it was, initially, a flop. A grizzly revenge drama, heavily influenced by Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and through that by the Japanese classic Seven Samurai, Sholay was a chappati western It tells the story of Baldevd Singh, a powerful village boss or thakur and sometime police officer, who, over the course of a decade pursues a vicious bandit chief, Gabbar Singh, who, not satisfied with terrorizing the local village, has massacred the landlord's entire family and lopped off the arms of the unfortunate thakur for good measure. Realizing that the official forces of the state are literally armless in the face of this anarchic violence, the landlord enlists the assistance of two petty criminals whose intelligence and resourcefulness he had encountered while a policeman. After  a series of hair-raising encounters with the villain, including a famous episode where the heroine is forced to dance on broken glass to save the life of her love, the anti-heroes eventually being nemesis upon the terrifying bandit.

Chapter 8: Leveling the Temple

BJP -- wiki.

On 25 September 1990 a pilgrimage began from the ancient temple city of Somnath in Gujarat. The pilgrim caravan was an untidy assemblage of trucks, scooters, buses and lorries festooned with marigolds and bedecked with huge images of Ram -- the mythical king of the Ramayana -- images of fearsome lions and the Hindu mantra Om. Others bore the more mundane emblem of the recently formed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a fetching lotus flower. Accompanying these unlikely 'chariots' was a motley collection of pilgrims; these included young people in yellow bandanas waiving lotus-emblazoned orange banners, hordes of cheering old ladies proclaiming themselves The Lord Ram Birth Festival Assembly,' and dozens of. youths dressed-up as heroes from the Ramayana and the Mahabhrata. In their wake marched a bizarre escort of young men in simian costumes, in emulation of Rams' famous monkey army, and brandishing swords and trishuls (tridents). But the centrepiece of the spectacle was a rather humdrum vehicle - a DCM-Toyota truck -- bearing a far less exotic occupant - a portly BJP politician of advanced years, L. K. Advani. The grille of this truck-cum-chariot bore the legend 'From Somnath to Ayodha,' and some of the banners exhorted this unlikely avatar of Ram to build a great temple. 

Epilogue, or Divine Developments

On 18 September 2006 students at the prestigious Ahmedabad Indian Institute of Managment were presented with a curious case study. The subject of the presentation wasthe remarkable metamorphhosis of an industry many had dubbed a lumbering white elephant into a mode of managerial efficiency and commercial élan, a transformation, moreover, masterminded by a CEO of world-class business acuity, What made the presentation curious was that the company in question was not some private-sector high-tech software giant but the Indian Railways -- the largest state-owned business in the world. More remarkable still was the identity of the corporate wizard who had engineered this management miracle, for it was none other than Laloo Prasad Yadav, sometime chief minister of Bihar, scourge of Brahmanhood and political showman extraordinaire. In 2004 Laloo, armed with a valuable cache of parliamentary seats and thus considerable leverage ...

Henry VIII -- Wives

 

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, c. 2015 --- What A Bunch Of Crap -- October 27, 2024

 

Re-posting from January 2, 2019, just a snippet:

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The Book Page
What a Bunch of Crap

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, c. 2015. First published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011. A New York Times bestseller. Recommended by everyone, including Bill Gates and Barack Obama. Author: a PhD in history from the University of Oxford.

A few weeks ago our oldest granddaughter was telling me how one of her teachers was talking about the "agricultural revolution" as a fantasy and that, in fact, the "agricultural revolution" left humankind more worse-off than what they had as foragers and hunter-gatherers. I thought the instructor was an idiot, but I didn't say anything negative. I continued to listen to Arianna's theses and arguments.

And then here it, almost verbatim, from Sapiens by Harari, pp. 78+, exactly what Arianna was saying. I am not convinced. But I am thrilled that this suggests to me that her instructor is well-read, and, in fact, has probably read this book and this is where he/she is getting some of his/her ideas.

It also means this is a great resource book for Arianna for this particular class and this particular author. Despite the fact that the book is pathetic; a bunch of crap. This is the author's theme, found on page 415 in the afterword:

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.

India: A History, John Keay, c. 2000, 2010

October 26, 2024

I'm currently in my "India" phase -- the subcontinent. The history, the politics, to compare and contrast Indo-American relationships with Sino-American relationships. There's so much personal "background" that led me to this Indian phase. 

I look forward to meeting with my Indian friends and compare notes. 

My two sources:

• India: A History, John Keay, c. 2000, 2010. 
• Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India Since The Great Rebellion, Maria Misra, c. 2007

Absolutely fascinating how many dots connect.  

The first is the better of the two if one wants the entire history of India. The second is really a "poli-sci" book focused on the British colonization and subsequent revolution and independence of India.

Original Post

India: A History, John Keay, c. 2000, 2010.

For the blog: a reader asked his followers what book they planned to read by the end of this year, 2024.

My response: India: A History, John Keay, c. 2000, 2010.

“John Keay’s India: A History earned wide acclaim as the greatest single-volume book about India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh when it was [first] published in 2000. It has now (2010) been fully revised with four new chapters that the reader up to the region’s present day.

“India: A History spans five millennia in a sweeping narrative that tells the story of the peoples of the subcontinent, from their ancient beginnings in the valley of the Indus to current events in the region.

“In charting the evolution of the rich tapestry of cultures, religions, and peoples that comprise the modern nations of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, Keay weaves together insights from a variety of scholarly fields to create a rich historical narrative. Wide-ranging and authoritative, India: A History is a compelling epic portrait of one of the world’s oldest and most richly diverse civilizations.”

I would assume that somewhere along the line Steve Jobs and Tim Cook (metonyms for the entire C-suite of the Apple corporation) were given intense briefings on the history of China and  India.

Of the two, the India briefing would be the most interesting, the most complicated and the most challenging for the presenter to put together.

The US is one country: politically, economically, culturally, socially.

China is one country: politically, economically, culturally, socially.

India is not one country. India is a land mass with 36 Indian countries (28 states and 8 union territories). The 28 states have their own governing body; the eight union territories are administered by the central government (think District of Columbia in the US).

In the US one can move from Boston to Los Angeles to Dallas to Spokane and “fit in” immediately. No new language; no new religion; no new nothing. At most, politically from red to purple to blue or vice versa.

I assume it is quite similar in China. I could be wrong. Probably am.

But India: 36 Indian countries. Moving from one Indian country to another Indian country means a new language, a new culture, a new religion, and  unless it’s a union territory, a new political system.

Do not take this out of context.

Instead of one Chinese country with one party, the Communist Party with one clear-cut leader, or one American country with one president “straddling” two political parties, India has 36 countries gerrymandered based on language.

The Indian subcontinent has 18 official languages. Most Indian states / territories have a single official language. Some have two or a few more. One state has one official language and sixteen additional unofficial languages. Another state has a corresponding two and eleven; and a third state has a corresponding four official languages and eight unofficial languages.

Five states and one territory have English as an official language. English is the only official language in one state and in one territory.

The second bullet for the brief for Tim Cook: there are only two important dates in Indian history —


• 1947: independence of the Indian subcontinent; and,
• 1956: the Indian subcontinent completely reorganized into states and territories based on the language used in that locale.

A third date is, perhaps, also important: separation dates of Bangladesh and Pakistan from “India.”

So, two initial bullets:


• India does not exist as a country (as Americans would define a country),

• the Indian subcontinent has 28 states and eight union territories “organized" by language.
• 
there are only two important dates in the Indian subcontinent for outsiders to know: 1947 and 1956

The third bullet: geographically —

• the Indian subcontinent is the size of Europe with none of the geographic diversity of Europe

• the Indian subcontinent is boring with the same relatively dry, flat land north to south, east to west
• think of the United States from, perhaps, Indiana to Utah, without the rivers and the lushness, or Americans would say, “fly-over country."

The fourth bullet: know the state / union territory in which you plan to do business


• the major urban center(s)
language
• religion
• politics
• economic system
• what that “country” (state or union territory) brings to the table

And that’s it.

Geographically, the map:

Although the size differences are entirely different, overlay a map of the US island of Manhattan over the entire Indian subcontinent.

• mountains separate Manhattan from Canada (Himalayas — northeast; and, Kirthar Range — northwest)
the Hudson River is the Arabian Sea
• the East River is the Bay of Bengal
• there is no counterpart to Long Island 
Delhi / New Delhi is in the Bronx — perhaps close to where the NY Mets call home
• Bombai (Mumbai) is on the Hudson across from New Jersey
• Tamil Nadu is the Manhattan Battery
Sri Lanka would have the Statue of Liberty
• West Bengal (and Bangladesh)  would be Westchester on the way to Connecticut, Yale, and Rhode Island
• Calcutta: West Bengal (the far northeast)
• Bhopal: geographic center of subcontinent India; perhaps Harlem?
• Pakistan: Pennsylvania
Afghanistan: upstate New York
• Nepal: north of the Bronx
• Tibet: north of Nepal

Next: where does Apple plan to place its factories?

The states / union territories of note:


• Delhi: a union territory (need to check) squeezed in between Haryana and Uttar Pradesh
• New Delhi: national capital of India
  
• Calcutta: Indian state of West Bengal

• Bombay (Mumbai): state of Maharashtra; third largest state by area
  
• Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh, second largest Indian state


History:  history as John Keay divides the chapters of his book

• 
“no" history until fairly recently

• Pre-1750; pre-British colonization
• 13th century AD, Islamic conquest but very biased and often unhelpful
• The British Conquest, 1750 - 1820
• US Civil War - War of 1812
• Pax Britannia: 1820 - 1880

• American expansionism
 Awake the Nation: 1880 - 1930
American railroads
US Labor Movement
• At the stroke of the Midnight Hour: 1930 - 1948

• WWII
• Gandhi
• Surgical Procedures: 1948 - 1965

• US post-WWII

• US Civil Rights movement

• India: massive reorganization(1956)
• The Spectra of Separatism: 1962 - 1972
• Vietnam, 
Bangladesh, Pakistan
• Demockery (sic): 1972 - 1984

• Bangladesh
• Pakistan
• Midnight’s Grandchildren: 1984 —
• the end of the Cold War
• immense changes in global alliances