Holy Roman Empire
Posted: April 19, 2026 Filed under: Savoy, Switzerland Leave a commentReader, don’t make the mistake I did. This book:
and this book:
are the same.
I can’t tell you what peace The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of European History by Peter H. Wilson brought me. I read a page or two at night before going to sleep. Perfect: both interesting but distant, engaging and somnolent at the same time.
When I was finished, I felt like I’d barely scratched the surface, so I checked out The Heart of Europe, but that’s just a British reprint or something of the same work.
Wilson’s work is one of those books where every sentence feels like it’s a summary of some Ph.D thesis. A selection at (near) random:
Charles’s victory of the Schmalkadic League in 1547 at the battle of Mühlberg appeared to offer an opportunity for him to attempt a significant reorganization of imperial governance at the “Armoured Reichstag” in Augsburg the following year
If you’re a reader of Helytimes you’ve no doubt heard Voltaire’s quip about “neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.” Wilson goes even further and says it was barely even called The Holy Roman Empire:
The words Holy, Roman and Empire were only combined as Sacrum Romanum Imperium in June 1180, and though used more frequently from 1254, they never appeared consistently in official documents. Nonetheless, all three terms formed core elements of the imperial ideal present from the Empire’s foundation. This chapter will consider each in turn, before investigating the Empire’s troubled relationship with the papacy.
When did it start? When did it end? Start:
First, the Empire was a joint creation of Charlemagne and Leo III, ‘one of the shiftiest occupants of the throne of St Peter’. Accused of perjury and adultery, Leo was unable to assert authority over the Roman clans, who orchestrated a mob which attacked him in April 799, nearly cutting out his eyes and tongue – acts of mutilation that were considered to render their victim unfit for office.
Already at his accession, Leo had sent Charlemagne a banner and the keys to St Peter’s tomb, symbolically placing the under Frankish papacy protection. Charlemagne was reluctant to assume this responsibility, which could require him to judge and possibly remove a wayward pontiff. Writing a generation later, the Frankish chronicler Einhard claimed Leo sprang the idea of an imperial coronation when Charlemagne finally visited Rome in November 800.
End:
On the morning of 6 August an imperial herald full regalia rode through Vienna to the Jesuit church of the Nine Choirs of Angels. After climbing to the balcony, he summoned the inhabitants with a silver fanfare to announce the end of the Empire. The Reichstag was formally informed on 11 August, while letters were sent to foreign diplomats over the following week. The Empire was certainly not dead by the late eighteenth century, and if it was sick, as Zedler and others suggested, it was not yet on life support. If revolutionary France had not intervened, the most likely prognosis was that the Empire’s socio-political order would have persisted further into the nineteenth century, but it is unlikely that this could have been sustained against the levelling and homogenizing forces unleashed by capitalism and industrialization around 1830.
But hang on:
Much of the socio-legal order survived… Prussian manors enjoyed tax exemption until 1861, police authority up to 1872, and favourable control over servants until 1918, with lordly influence over local churches persisting even after that. Manorial districts remained the primary units of state administration in Prussia until 1927, all despite the fact that reforms between 1807 and 1821 emancipated serfs from the manorial economy. Hamburg’s Jewish Ordinance from 1710 remained in force into the later nineteenth century, while Bavaria’s partially codified civil code from 1754 persisted until 1900. Prussia lacked a uniform commercial code before 1861, while a supreme court for the German states was not established again until 1879. Codification of civil law across the states of the Second German Empire took from 1879 until 1900 to complete. Some cultural elements of the old order displayed still greater longevity: Buchenbach parish near Freiburg assumed the spiritual responsibilities of the Swabian monasteries secularized in 1803 and continued to say prayers in memory of Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ until after the First World War.
The postal service kept going until the 1870s.
The Pope needed a strong guy to protect him, and the strong guy needed the Pope to give him authority:
This assertion of imperial authority did not unduly trouble most popes at this point, since they wanted an emperor who was strong enough to protect them, yet not so close by as to be an oppressor. The Carolingian civil wars after 829 exposed Rome to the Arabs, who sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter’s in 846.
How did the Church maintain this authority?
The Empire’s elite was uniformly Christian and shared a concern for salvation and the belief that God influenced earthly events. The idea of penance was powerfully attractive to a warior elite engaged in killing, fitted with Germanic legal customs that demanded reparations for victims, and encouraged lavish endowments of material resources to the church. The development of indulgences at the end of the eleventh century allowed warriors to gain remission from in by serving in the crusades. Endowments were additionally encour aged by the belief in vicarious merit in which prayers and intercessions by the living benefited the donor’s soul long after their death.
To even understand the Holy Roman Empire we have to just assume the power of Christianity over hearts and minds, which is its own huge topic (next up maybe is Tom Holland’s Dominion, on how and why this wacky cult was so damn powerful).
Origin of the Guelph/Ghibelline conflicts that vexed poor Dante so bad:
Northern Italy was a dense mosaic of bishoprics, lordships and cities, often enmeshed in their own conflicts.
Support from one for the emperor usually prompted its rivals to back the papacy.
…
Ghibelline sentiment persisted during the prolonged imperial absences after 1250 amongst those like Dante and Petrarch who believed only a strong imperial presence could provide the order that Italy so urgently needed. The papacy’s ‘Babylonian Captivity’ in Avignon after 1309 increased interest, while many opposition groups within Italian towns hoped the emperor could liberate them from their local opponents. Given such unrealistic expectations, most imperial visits inevitably disappointed. Charles IV was criticized for appearing more concerned to extort money than address local problems. Moreover, Italian cities were accustomed to self-governance and resented paying for the expensive imperial entourage. The Pisans rioted in May 1355, setting fire to the palace where Charles and his wife were staying.
Disparate authority:
Meanwhile, the Empire was undergoing a fundamental transformation through rapid institutional growth, consolidating its definitive, early modern form as a mixed monarchy in which the emperor shared power cities collectively known as the imperial Estates
It’s easy to get confused, and hard to put our modern conceptions on territories of the past:
The Empire’s principal kingdoms were not clearly delineated before the eleventh century. Their inhabitants lacked maps and regarded geography differently from later generations. For example, rivers like the Rhine were medieval expressways rather than potential frontiers. Politics involved networks and chains of obligations and responsibilities, not uniform control of clearly bounded territories.
You sometimes see this map pop up on Reddit:
And when you look at that it is like, yeah, the HRE seemed kooky, how did all this work. But then, consider a political map of just Los Angeles County:
(source). Here where I live, there’s the City that runs the police and paves the streets (in theory, and some of those are federal, and some are CalTrans), the County that runs the schools and most of the courts, the State that runs some courts, its own police, then there’s the federal government. Was it that much more confusing to live in an imperial immediacy?
Small astounding details:
Emperor Basil II blinded 14,000 Bulgarian prisoners, earning the title of the ‘Bulgar Slayer’.
The French turn up their noses:
French writers increasingly drew disparaging contrasts with the Empire, which they presented as declining from an (allegedly) hereditary monarchy under Charlemagne’s ‘French’ rule into a degenerately elective one under the Germans. It was no longer an empire, but merely a sorry shadow of one, whereas the continuous line of Christian French kings had existed beyond the combined span of republican and imperial Rome. France was a divine monarchy, with its king chosen by God through hereditary succession. As the Sun King, Louis outshone any other ruler. Thanks to his Christian credentials and practical power, he, not the emperor, was the natural arbiter of Europe.
What is an Empire, anyway?:
Although Napoleon’s Grand Empire collapsed in 1814, his nephew ruled a Second French Empire between 1852 and 1870, while the subsequent republican regime expanded the country’s overseas possessions into a large colonial empire from the 1880s. Prussia’s victory over the Second French Empire led to the foundation of the German Second Empire in 1871. Queen Victoria finally formalized British imperialism by assuming the title ’empress of India’ in 1876. Throughout, Austria, Russia and the Ottomans remained imperial states. There were now six empires on one continent. ‘Empire’ ceased to mean a singular ‘world order’ and became the title accorded a monarch ruling a large state.
I bought this book to better understand the history of Annecy in what’s now France but was once Savoy, a subset of the HRE:
The significance of this is demonstrated by the anomalous position of Savoy, which assumed such significance in the process of Italian unification in the nineteenth century, yet remained the one Italian lordship formally integrated within ‘German’ imperial structures. Unlike the rest of imperial Italy, Savoy remained in the hands of an old lordly family, the Humbertines, who were originally Burgundian counts. Conrad II rewarded the Humbertiner for their help in securing Burgundy in 1032 with the gift of Alpine lordships. Further grants followed their support during the Investiture Dispute, developing Savoy as a secure anchor at the intersection of the Empire’s three main kingdoms in the western Alps. Its strategic position prompted Charles IV to incorporate it within the kingdom of Germany in 1361, where it formally remained until 1797….
Savoy, champion of Italian unification, in fact emerged from the kingdom of Burgundy and between 1361 and 1797 was formally part of Germany. This, of course, did not prevent its ruling family, the Humbertines, from pursuing territorial ambitions south of the Alps. Later national perspectives make little sense given that Savoy also encroached on what is now Switzerland, held land that is now part of France, and claimed royal status through tenuous links to Cyprus…
the House of Savoy became full royalty in the settlement ending the War of the Spanish Succession, which awarded it Sicily in 1713. Subsequent Austrian pressure forced the Humbertines to trade this for Sardinia in 1720, placing them in a position roughly equivalent to the Hohenzollerns in holding land within the Empire but also a sovereign kingdom beyond it.
Savoy’s position within the former German kingdom was not entirely meaningless, since it sustained influence within the Empire. Cooperation with Charles V was instrumental in Duke Emanuel Filiberto’s recovery of his possessions 23 years of French occupation. Savoy’s 1559 after dukes either attended in person or sent a representative to every Reichstag between 1541 and 1714, and they accepted jurisdiction of the Empire’s other supreme court, the Reichskammergericht, over themselves as imperial Estates. Even after their elevation as sovereign kings, Savoy’s rulers continued to pay feudal dues on behalf of their imperial fiefs. They remained interested in imperial politics. Duke Charles Emanuel I was a serious candidate for the Bohemian crown in 1619, while the family pushed after 1788 to receive a new electoral title, securing Prussian backing for this ambition. The overall situation of imperial Italy and Savoy thus remained relatively stable until the shock of the French Revolutionary Wars saw both severed from the Empire in 1797. Now styled the House of Savoy, the Humbertines were restored in 1814 and eventually became monarchs of united Italy between 1861 and 1946.
The Empire splits into something closer to modern countries:
The developments around 1490 have largely been interpreted in national terms as the secession of Italy, Burgundy and Switzerland from the Empire, reducing it to a ‘German Reich’. Austria has also often been regarded at this time as distinct, either by those seeking to trace that country’s ‘origins’ or by nineteenth-century critics accusing the Habsburgs of pursuing their own interests to the detriment of alleged common ‘German’ ones. Prussia’s rise as a second German great power from the mid-eighteenth century appears to confirm this perspective. However, it would be wrong to reduce the Empire’s later history to that of ‘Reichstag Germany’: the mass of smaller principalities and imperial cities with little or no chance of a separate existence in a Europe now more obviously composed of independent national states. Rather than seeing early modernity solely as the origins of later nations, it is better to interpret it as a significant reordering of how the Empire’s different components interacted.
You can’t go back to before people had one name:
The transition from one to two names was completed between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries amongst the urban population and adopted by the early fifteenth century in the countryside
What is history, anyway?:
Early chronicles are largely by clerics recounting the deeds of kings with varying levels of approval. However, it was common by the eleventh century for monks to compile lists of abbots or bishops to demonstrate the continuity and purity of local religious practice. They were joined by secular chroniclers during the later Middle Ages who traced the origins of their home town, often in considerable detail.
Most were commoners, but they proclaimed the ‘nobility’ of their own town, boasting a lineage equal to that of any aristocrat. Other, more personal documents also testify to individuals’ identification with specific places, such as nuns writing for the edification of their community, or Jewish memory books of local martyrs
how did you become the Emperor?:
variety of methods were used to decide the succession prior to their standardization in the Golden Bull of 1356. The elective element has long been blamed as a prime source of political weakness. For the following, it is important to remember that until the late Middle Ages contemporaries did not regard ‘elective’ and ‘hereditary’ monarchies as sharply defined constitutional alternatives. Even English kingship contained elective elements in that the aristocracy’s consent was required for a succession to be legitimate, while hereditary rule in France was achieved in practice by many kings crowning their sons as successors during their own lifetime.
women:
Women were disbarred from citizenship in imperial cities on the grounds they could not bear arms, but those in the countryside could still stand in for sick or absent husbands in village assemblies, or in some cases represent a household themselves as widows.
writing and records:
There was certainly a surge in writing: 7,000 manuscripts survive across continental Europe from the ninth century, compared to 1,800 for the previous eight centuries combined
Cities were bought and sold:
Only 13 imperial cities were never pawned between 1273 and 1438. Unlike transfer by gift or enfeoffment, the king retained the option of recovering the erty by redeeming the mortgage. However, the mortgages were often so high as to make redemption unlikely: Louis IV mortgaged Eger for 20,000 pounds of silver in 1322 back to Bohemia, which retained it permanently. Eger is still today the westernmost point of the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, mortgages cut the king off from the real value of the land since the mortgagee drew the revenue and other benefits in the meantime. Lucrative assets like Rhine tolls, mints, and ore and salt mining rights were repeatedly mortgaged until they were effectively permanently alienated
The Emperor didn’t really have a place, he moved around. The one stop he had to make was Aachen:
History records the Empire’s kings as members of different dynasties, and this is certainly a useful shorthand. However, true dynasticism only emerged in the fourteenth century, and in fact simply reinforced existing ideas that each ruler could claim descent from his illustrious predecessors. Wipo of Burgundy expressed this as ‘Charlemagne’s stirrups hang from Conrad [II]’s saddle’.” Most medieval kings tried at least once in their reign to sit on Charlemagne’s stone throne, which was carefully preserved in Aachen. Frederick I renovated the Carolingian palaces at Ingelheim and Nimwegen. As time progressed, Charlemagne became an idealized role model.
Wilson brings all this into the modern era by pointing out how some contradictions and struggles of the Empire continue with the EU. The President of the EU is Ursula von der Leyen.
Wilson notes:
The von der Leyen family, elevated from imperial knights to counts as recently as 1711, became princes in 1803 and survived after 1806 thanks to kinship with both Dalberg and Josephine Bonaparte. Their possessions were only mediatized in 1815, passing first to Austria and then Baden after 1819.
You might not think the Holy Roman Empire is that relevant today, but then you turn on the news and there’s the US President, our closest thing to an emperor, chosen in an election that has a strong element of money/bribery, ruling over a fragmented polity, and spatting with the Pope.
Embracing Cormac
Posted: April 18, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, cormac, writing, writing advice from other people Leave a comment
Interesting that James Merrill may have launched Cormac McCarthy:
This book isn’t for casuals – most of it is intense analysis of the drafting and editing process of Cormac McCarthy’s first three books. An interesting aspect that comes out is how difficult it was to revise a novel in the days before word processors. Copying and retyping were time consuming and expensive. It got me to wondering whether any really great novels have emerged post-word processor. McCarthy was still using a typewriter, and passing revisions with his publisher back and forth was laborious.
Between all this stuff a thin biography emerges. For a McCarthyhead every nugget can be meaningful.
His sister Barbara (Bobbie) McCooe reports that although his first assignment in the Air Force was as a navigator, he preferred his second role as a radio disc jockey for the base in Alaska, not only because it gave him more autonomy, but also because it allowed him to work at night and fish in the daytime (Interview with Bryan Giemza and Dianne Luce).
Family:
McCarthy’s ex-wife Anne De Lisle has remarked that McCarthy’s analytical, pragmatic father “didn’t know what to make of him” (Conversations). And his sister Barbara McCooe recalls that it was the impracticality of his chosen career in the arts to which his parents objected (Interview with Bryan Giemza and Dianne Luce).
McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, was discovered through the slush pile. Would this happen today? (could it not happen today because word processors/computers make it too easy and thus the slush pile too full?)
The novel immediately garnered attention. Bensky recalled: There was a protocol in the place where you read from the slush pile. The manuscripts came in by the cartloads. Really: every day a hand-truck full of manuscripts arrived. Jimmy, the drunken mailboy, would bring them upstairs and dump them in this office … at the reception area…. The office had shelves up to the ceiling. You read them in order of arrival. Usually the readers, Maxine [Groffsky] and Natalie [Robins], would read three or four pages, decide if they wanted to read more, or say: “This is ridiculous.” (Josyph, “Damn Proud” 16–17)… Groffsky alerted Bensky that McCarthy’s novel had potential, jotting “Larry/ This might be good” in a note she affixed to McCarthy’s cover letter (Groffsky, Note to Larry Bensky, [May 1962]).
why did this change in reading habits occur? It feels drastic:
Cerf, who had purchased the Modern Library imprint from Horace Liveright in 1925, recalled, “When I started publishing, fiction outsold nonfiction four-to-one. Now that ratio is … reversed, [and] … the bulk of new fiction doesn’t sell at all. It’s heartbreaking to bring out a good first novel and watch it die virtually at birth” (Cerf, At Random, 203–204).
I put this question to WDM who suggested it’s because people now read nonfiction to gain advantage in making investment decisions. Maybe it all comes back to the collapse of Bretton Woods.
Sales were low but esteem was high:
Between 1965 and 1969, when a second printing was issued, the book sold 3,926 copies (Lane, Letter to J. Howard Woolmer). Since the publishing summary for the book prepared in October 1964 had projected that the publisher would break even if 3,155 copies sold, this was a modest success for the publisher of a first novel. McCarthy was to receive $ 2,105 in royalties or advances, whichever was larger. But the novel was more successful by the measure of critical esteem than it was financially.
for context:
Partly to keep his hopes realistic, Scribner had informed F. Scott Fitzgerald that a good sales performance for a first novel would be 5,000 copies; but This Side of Paradise (1920) proved dramatically more successful, with 35,000 sold in the seven months after publication; and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) had initial sales of 20,000 (Berg, Max Perkins 20, 41, 100). Both had been edited by Scribner’s legendary Maxwell Perkins, who energetically promoted his writers and who had an uncanny instinct both for talent and for what would sell. On the other hand, Boni and Liveright had less confidence in Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), and had printed only 2,500 copies. By the end of the depression year of 1930, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying together had sold fewer than 4,000 copies (Blotner, Faulkner I 494, 685).
It’s astounding the number of reviews McCarthy’s early books got, especially in our age of declining local newspapers and book sections. He’s getting reviewed in the Tampa Tribune, the Charlotte Observer, the Anniston (Alabama) Star.
Travel:
McCarthy met and fell in love with English dancer Anne De Lisle on his trans-Atlantic voyage on the Sylvania, where she was employed as an entertainer, half of the duo The Healey Sisters. She spotted him on the dance floor, asked him to dance with her, and they quickly bonded, spending their spare time together. Anne recalls that his trip terminated in Ireland, while she sailed on to Southampton, England.
…
Cormac and Anne married in the old Norman St. Andrews Episcopal Church of Hamble (c. 1100) on May 14, 1966. Since none of his family attended, Anne’s younger brother Richard stood as Cormac’s best man. Her performing partner, singer Nicky Banks, was her maid of honor, and some one hundred friends and members of Anne’s family attended the wedding and the reception at her father’s sports club. The couple rented a car and honeymooned for two weeks in Devon and Cornwall on England’s southwestern coast. They stayed in Mousehole Village and toured the thirteenth-century Tintagel Castle (constructed on the birth site of King Arthur, according to the twelfth-century legend that had originated with Geoffrey of Monmouth). On their honeymoon, they attended the Bugatti races in Cornwall, when Anne first discovered Cormac’s love of race cars, and later that summer they took a train from Paris to see Le Mans, sleeping in the open air (De Lisle, Conversations).
…
This letter is composed on stationery from the Hotel Mont-Joli on Rue Fromentin near the Moulin Rouge and Sacré-Coeur Basilica. Anne had introduced him to the hotel, and it became their usual place to stay in Paris (De Lisle, Conversations). In The Passenger, Western stays at the Mont Joli and McCarthy describes it as “favored by traveling entertainers and any morning there would be jugglers and hypnotists and exotic dancers and trained dogs in the lobby coffeeshop” (198)…
the couple took a twelve-day automobile trip in a used gold Jaguar XK-120 convertible that Cormac had bought and repaired. The car had a torn black ragtop, and when he first saw it, chickens were roosting inside it, as in one of the junkyard cars of Child of God (De Lisle, Conversations). Their tour began in Paris and wended through France to Geneva, across Italy and back along the southern coast of France to Barcelona, where they stayed a few days before they took the car ferry to Ibiza in early August 1966. There they settled in a finca on the outskirts of town…
They also socialized with Clifford Irving and his fiancée Edith Sommer, who hosted them several times at their finca. Their electricity was unreliable, so they often baked potatoes in foil in the fireplace…
Late in summer 1967, he and Anne finally left Ibiza and traveled back to her family home in Hamble via Madrid and the mountain hamlet, Burgete, in Navarre, where Hemingway’s Jake Barnes enjoys fishing in The Sun also Rises. McCarthy too did some trout fishing there. Then they drove back to Paris, where McCarthy sold the Jaguar (De Lisle, Interview with Bryan Giemza and Dianne Luce).
As he left his friend Leslie Garrett, who later developed serious addictions, McCarthy advised him to give up the drinking and partying life in Ibiza for fear it would kill his work (Williams, “An Interview with Leslie Garrett” 54), and concerns about drinking and over-socializing may have been one reason for his own return to the United States. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking,” he later told Woodward (Woodward, “Venomous Fiction” 36). De Lisle recalls that McCarthy drank, but never so much that it could affect his writing ability—only his discipline (Conversations).
Stonework:
In summer 1971, McCarthy and Bill Kidwell collaborated for six weeks on the creation of two marble and river rock mosaics set in mortar in downtown Maryville, funded by an urban renewal grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Kidwell had secured the grant, De Lisle remembers, but he did not have the masonry skills to execute the project, so he asked for McCarthy’s help. Kidwell reminisced that as they were constructing the mosaics in full view of the public on Main Street, passersby would stop and comment on their work. Kidwell wanted to engage them in conversation, but McCarthy asked him to keep still and listen. He was gathering speechways for his fiction.
(You can see it here, I’d argue he was more impressive as a novelist). Lifestyle:
When Mark Owen interviewed McCarthy in 1971, he found him witty, uncynical, and happy with the independent life he had created, a life of reading among his 1,500 books, writing his novels, and building his house. “I’ve always been horrified by the way people live their lives,” McCarthy remarked. “On one hand there is a nine-to-five job you don’t like and a totally artificial life. At the other end is the life of a hermit. But I don’t want to be cut off from society and have to … compromise.”
…
McCarthy would usually write for four or five hours each day (Runsdorf, “Recognition Acceptable” 5). In the late afternoon, he would announce to Anne, “Well, it’s cocktail time” and “take a shower as if washing all that stuff out of his hair,” after which they would enjoy a candle-lit dinner (Williams, “Cormac McCarthy” E2). In the evenings, he would often read her some of what he had written that day.
As noted earlier, on Thanksgiving 1964 he had recorded on a draft page of Outer Dark “writing = happy”
Sheddan in The Passenger was a real guy:
Sheddan features as an important character in The Passenger, one of Bobby Western’s friends from East Tennessee with whom he converses in New Orleans bars and restaurants. Sheddan claims that Western thinks of him as a psychopath and that he may be right about that (31). In the novel, Sheddan is a petty criminal, but he is also highly intelligent and well-read. Of their friendship, Sheddan says, “I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood” (143). Wesley Morgan has learned from one of their classmates that McCarthy and Sheddan met in an American Literature course at the University of Tennessee, where Sheddan was the more vocal of the two.
I hope Dianne C. Luce continues this series.
Kress collections
Posted: April 12, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history Leave a commentSamuel Kress was born in Cherryville, Pennsylvania. He worked in stone quarries, and as a school teacher, and eventually started a store.
This eventually grew into a chain of 5-10-25 cent department stores. Kress stores had a distinctive architectural look – there’s one here in Los Angeles:
(source)
There’s a whole world of these stores, still standing across the US, repurposed or vacant. Here’s one in Lubbock, Texas:
(source).
The most distinctive and best remembered Kress stores are a group of more than fifty Art Deco buildings dating from 1929–1944 and designed by Edward F. Sibbert (1899-1982), the company’s longtime chief architect. Sibbert’s buildings streamlined the Kress image by using sleek modern facades, simple yet distinctive ornament, and colors characteristic of the Kress brand. Curved glass display windows led the shopper through heavy bronze doors into an interior of rich marbles, fine woods, and large customized counters set crosswise down a long sales floor. Well-positioned hanging lamps created a bright atmosphere for an endless array of inexpensive items (there were 4,275 different articles on sale in 1934). Everything – from the constantly restocked merchandise to the gracious retiring rooms and popular soda fountains in the basement – encouraged customers to linger. Like the great movie houses of the day, the “dime store” – and ‘Kress’s’ in particular – was a popular destination during hard economic times.
Many Kress stores had segregated lunch counters, and were a target for sit-ins during the civil rights movement. The case of Adickes vs Kress, involving a white teacher who tried to take several black students to lunch in Hattiesburg, MS made it to the Supreme Court (it gets pretty technical at that point).
Samuel Kress never married and never had children. He used his fortune to collect European art. Much of this he gave away:
Beginning in the 1930s Kress decided to give much of his art collection to museums across the country while he was still alive. Many paintings were donated to the same smaller cities that had brought him his fortune with their stores. In several cases, his gifts became the founding basis for museums in those areas which otherwise could never have afforded artworks of such importance and quality.
This continued after Kress’s death in 1955:
In the 1950s and 1960s, a foundation established by Kress would donate 776 works of art from the Kress collection to 18 regional art museums in the United States.[1]
An interesting retirement project would be to travel around viewing the regional museums with Kress collections.
I’d like to see the Crucifixion by Maestro Bartolomé (or workshop) at the University of Arizona Museum in Tuscon:
Or Rotari’s Girl in a Blue Dress, in El Paso:
That might be about it actually. A lot of this stuff looks like religious art that doesn’t burst with inspiration.
JFK and delay
Posted: April 11, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, Uncategorized 1 Comment
It was his habit–and a very good habit for a political leader–not
to make very grave decisions until they had to be made. He always left
questions open until they were required to be closed, whether by events or
because an answer had to be given or some other reason.
A quote from Joseph Alsop:
https://static.jfklibrary.org/3704qrut557lbf3gqf73b37qyr43322c.pdf?odc=20231115182908-0500
The photo is from A Very Special President which makes him sound a bit like a charity case.
never let one tragedy increase to two or three
Posted: April 9, 2026 Filed under: advice, business Leave a commentAt age 76, Charlie Munger looks back on those years and notes that time takes some of the pain out of losing a child. If it didn’t, he says, he doesn’t know how the human race could continue. Munger believes that by coping as best he could with the tragedy of Teddy’s death, he was doing the only rational thing. “You should never, when facing some unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase to two or three through your failure of will.” As for the end of his marriage, the years have given Munger a mature perspective on that as well:
I don’t spend much time regretting the past, once I’ve taken my lesson from it. I don’t dwell on it. Certainly I had more sense when I was 32 than I did when I was 22. But I don’t have any feeling of terrible regret. We ended up with nice children. I think my ex-wife has been reasonably happy in a different situation.
Heavy stuff from Munger. Many of the saddest movies (House of Sand and Fog, Breaking The Waves?) involve one tragedy increasing. On a smaller scale, feels like in sports you often see one misfortune or error begin a cascade.
That’s from:
Spot the pattern
Posted: April 5, 2026 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
(Sam) Houston
San Antonio
San Diego
(George) Dallas
(Andrew) Jackson(ville)
(William Jenkins) Fort Worth
San Jose
(Stephen) Austin
(Queen) Charlotte
(Christopher) Columbus
San Francisco
(Chief) Seattle
(James) Denver
13 of the 20 largest US cities by population are named after people. These are those people, in order. Saints and military men mostly.
See if you can guess who would be next in the series.
Great one from Elif Batuman
Posted: April 5, 2026 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Cimabue vs Giotto
Posted: April 4, 2026 Filed under: art history Leave a comment
The Castelfiorentino Madonna is both moving and kinda funny at the same time, right? Middle-aged baby Jesus facepalming his mom?
(I glean by the way the name is pronounced Chim-ah-boo-eh.)
Cimabue’s Mocking of Christ has a great story:
The painting was discovered hanging above the hotplate in the kitchen of an elderly woman living in Compiègne, northern France. The woman was in her nineties and was selling the house, which had been built in the 1960s, and moving from the area. Ahead of the move in June 2019 the owner called in a local auctioneer to determine if any of her possessions were worth selling; the remainder were to be thrown away. The owner and her family recognised the Mocking of Christ only as an old religious icon and thought it had little value. The owner could not remember how the work came to be in her possession, but thought it to be of Russian origin.
The auctioneer had only one week to evaluate the contents of the house, but noticed the Mocking of Christ almost immediately. They thought it to be of an Italian primitivist nature and possibly worth €300,000 to €400,000. The owner was advised to send it away for testing and it went to Eric Turquin and his colleagues at the Turquin Gallery in Paris. Testing under infrared light revealed similarities with other works by Cimabue and it was attributed to the artist. Some other items from the house sold at auction for €6,000 and the remainder were sent to landfill.
The work was put up for auction at the Actéon Hôtel des Ventes, in Senlis, Oise, on 27 October 2019 with an estimate of €4–6 million. Some 800 people attended the auction and there was interest from several foreign museums. The work reached a hammer price of €19.5 million, which reached €24 million once selling fees were included. The winning bid was placed by the London-based dealer Fabrizio Moretti, on behalf of two anonymous collectors. This set a new world record for a pre-1500 artwork sold at auction. The price was believed to be so high as it was the first time a work by Cimabue had sold at auction. Both seller and purchaser decided to remain anonymous, though the buyers have been reported to be two Chilean nationals living in the United States.
Cimabue also did a Flagellation of Christ, which is now at The Frick:
Cimabue is mentioned in Purgatorio Canto XI:
Oh vana gloria de l’umane posse!
com’ poco verde in su la cima dura,
se non è giunta da l’etati grosse!Credette Cimabue ne la pittura
tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è scura:
Or, as Google Translate puts it:
Oh, vain glory of human powers!
How little green endures upon the summit,
unless it is overtaken by cruder ages!Cimabue believed that in painting
he held the field, but now Giotto has the acclaim,
so that the fame of the former is dimmed.
Giotto does seem to take it to the next level for sure:
It’s sometimes claimed that this is a portrait of Dante by Giotto, but that doesn’t add up to me. Why would an exiled politician be painted inside the Palazzo de Podesta?! From the Dante’s Library site at Duke:
In either case, the frescoes were completed long after Dante’s exile from Florence in 1301, a fact that has cast some doubt on whether or not the fresco would actually have been intended to represent the poet. An exiled traitor, it is questionable that he would be glorified in the Palazzo of the Podestà. We can also note dissimilarities between this representation of Dante and Boccaccio’s description of him in the Vita di Dante as a man with a dark complexion and a thick, curly beard.
Let’s get back to a straight up head to head: Cimabue?
Or Giotto:
Vote in the comments!
I searched for a companion book to the show Cheers
Posted: April 1, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, books Leave a comment
John Steinbeck on Bob Hope
Posted: March 30, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, comedy, Uncategorized Leave a comment
At the Steinbeck Center in Salinas I picked up this edition of Steinbeck’s reporting from World War Two. I was surprised by this piece on Bob Hope, who is not often thought of as a hero these days.
Bob Hope
LONDON, July 26, 1943—When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven.
It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people.
Moving about the country in camps, airfields, billets, supply depots, and hospitals, you hear one thing consistently. Bob Hope is coming, or Bob Hope has been here. The Secretary of War is on an inspection tour, but it is Bob Hope who is expected and remembered.
In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter. He has created a character for himself-that of the man who tries too hard and fails, and who boasts and is caught at it. His wit is caustic, but it is never aimed at people, but at conditions and at ideas, and where he goes men roar with laughter and repeat his cracks for days afterward.
Hope does four, sometimes five, shows a day. In some camps the men must come in shifts because they cannot all hear him at the same time. Then he jumps into a car, rushes to the next post, and because he broadcasts and everyone listens to his broadcasts, he cannot use the same show more than a few times. He must, in the midst of his rushing and playing, build new shows constantly. If he did this for a while and then stopped and took a rest it would be remarkable, but he never rests. And he has been doing this ever since the war started. His energy is boundless.
Hope takes his shows all over. It isn’t only to the big camps. In little groups on special duty you hear the same thing. Bob Hope is coming on Thursday. They know weeks in advance that he is coming. It would be rather a terrible thing if he did not show up.
Perhaps that is some of his drive. He has made some kind of contract with himself and with the men that nobody, least of all Hope, could break. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this thing and the responsibility involved.
The battalion of men who are moving half-tracks from one place to another, doing a job that gets no headlines, no public no-tice, and yet which must be done if there is to be a victory, are for-gotten, and they feel forgotten. But Bob Hope is in the country.
Will he come to them, or won’t he? And then one day they get a notice that he is coming. Then they feel remembered. This man in some way has become that kind of bridge. It goes beyond how funny he can be or how well Frances Langford sings. It has been interesting to see how he has become a symbol.
This writer, not knowing Hope, can only conjecture what goes on inside the man. He has seen horrible things and has survived them with good humor and made them more bearable, but that doesn’t happen without putting a wound on a man. He is cut off from rest, and even from admitting weariness. Having become a symbol, he must lead a symbol life.
Probably the most difficult, the most tearing thing of all, is to be funny in a hospital. The long, low buildings are dispersed in case they should be attacked. Working in the gardens, or reading in the lounge rooms are the ambulatory cases in maroon bathrobes. But in the wards, in the long aisles of pain the men lie, with eyes turned inward on themselves, and on their people. Some are convalescing with all the pain and itch of convalescence. Some work their fingers slowly, and some cling to the little trapezes which help them to move in bed.
The immaculate nurses move silently in the aisles at the foot of the beds. The time hangs very long. Letters, even if they came every day, would seem weeks apart. Everything that can be done is done, but medicine cannot get at the lonesomeness and the weakness of men who have been strong. And nursing cannot shorten one single endless day in a hospital bed. And Bob Hope and his company must come into this quiet, inward, lonesome place, and gently pull the minds outward and catch the interest, and finally bring laughter up out of the black water. There is a job. It hurts many of the men to laugh, hurts knitting bones, strains at sutured incisions, and yet the laughter is a great medicine.
This story is told in one of those nameless hospitals which must be kept safe from bombs. Hope and company had worked and gradually they got the leaden eyes to sparkling, had planted and nurtured and coaxed laughter to life. A gunner, who had a stomach wound, was gasping softly with laughter. A railroad casualty slapped the cast on his left hand with his right hand by way of applause. And once the laughter was alive, the men laughed before the punch line and it had to be repeated so they could laugh again.
Finally it came time for Frances Langford to sing. The men asked for “As Time Goes By.” She stood up beside the little GI piano and started to sing. Her voice is a little hoarse and strained.
She has been working too hard and too long. She got through eight bars and was into the bridge, when a boy with a head wound began to cry. She stopped, and then went on, but her voice wouldn’t work anymore, and she finished the song whispering and then she walked out, so no one could see her, and broke down.
The ward was quiet and no one applauded. And then Hope walked into the aisle between the beds and he said seriously, “Fellows, the folks at home are having a terrible time about eggs. They can’t get any powdered eggs at all. They’ve got to use the old-fashioned kind that you break open.”
There’s a man for you— there is really a man.
Mysterious statue
Posted: March 29, 2026 Filed under: art history 1 Comment
I was looking up what happened in the 8th century and found this. From a 2011 Wall Street Journal article about this fellow:
Made in China during the latter part of the eighth century, this unusual Tang dynasty burial figure today sits on a shelf in the Museo di Arte Orientale (MAO) of Turin, Italy, exuding as much mystery as he does energy. To date, nobody can say exactly who or what he is—his clothes, his pose, his expression don’t add up. Even his manufacture is atypical: While almost all other known burial statuettes are hollow and cast in molds, this one is solid clay and appears to have been sculpted by hand.
Tracy Kidder
Posted: March 27, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentI see that Tracy Kidder has died. Several of his books made an impression on me. Here’s a page from his war memoir, My Detachment, which I enjoyed:
How about this:
How does that interview work? “Hey um couple questions in case you die.”
Purgatories
Posted: March 7, 2026 Filed under: Italy Leave a commentCanto IV of Dante’s Purgatorio. Dante’s trying to describe the mountain of Purgatory:
Vassi in Sanleo e discendesi in Noli,
montasi su Bismantova in cacume
con esso i piè; ma qui convien ch’om voli;
dico con l’ale snelle e con le piume
del gran disio, di retro a quel condotto
che speranza mi dava e facea lume’
Or:
One goes to Sanleo and descends to Noli,
one climbs the summit of Bismantova
with his feet; but here one must fly;I mean with slender wings and the feathers
of great desire, following that guide
who gave me hope and gave me light.
Gerald Davis gives us this as:
San Leo (source)
Noli (source)
Bismantova (source)
I’d like to visit some day. It may have looked bleaker in Dante’s day:
At the time he saw it, Pietra di Bismantova probably looked even more barren than it does today, because of the intensive deforestation that took place in the surrounding area at the time. In recent decades, the area around the rock has been reforested as a result of the abandonment of local agriculture and a different use of forest resources.
Dateline: Hollywood
Posted: March 5, 2026 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
from this Deadline article about the premiere of HBO’s “The Rooster.” The mood here is on edge. But isn’t it ever thus? One of California’s themes is: on the edge.
F2: Fridericus II
Posted: March 1, 2026 Filed under: hely's history, Italy, Savoy Leave a commentAn important offscreen character in Dante’s Inferno is Fredrick II, the Holy Roman Emperor (to use an anachronistic term).
was he really born in the marketplace?
Friderick II (you’ll see why it’s important to spell it that way later) lived from 1194-1250 common era . This was the extent of his domain, in orange and red.
(I got that map from Reddit, you can see that the first commenter is already finding fault, but for our purposes it works).
You can see why Friderick would have conflict with the Pope, who had the lands in white that separated Friderick’s lands from each other. Thus begins (or thus continues) the conflict that tore apart Dante’s Florence, between Guelphs and Ghibellines, supporters of the Pope and supporters of the Emperor, that had such a huge impact on Dante’s life (Dante was Team Pope, but then his own side split into White and Black and he (White) lost and was exiled.)
He knew bird:
Frederick II is the author of the first treatise on the subject of falconry, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (“The Art of Hunting with Birds”)…
For this book, he drew from sources in the Arabic language. Frederick’s pride in his mastery of the art is illustrated by the story that, when he was ordered to become a subject of the Great Khan (Batu) and receive an office at the Khan’s court, he remarked that he would make a good falconer, for he understood birds very well. He maintained up to fifty falconers at a time in his court, and in his letters he requested Arctic gyrfalcons from Lübeck and even from Greenland. …
David Attenborough in “Natural Curiosities” notes that Frederick fully understood the migration of some birds at a time when all sorts of now improbable theories were common.
Now here’s something interesting:
In the language deprivation experiment, young infants were supposedly raised without human interaction in an attempt to determine if there was a natural language that they might demonstrate once their voices matured. It is claimed he was seeking to discover what language would have been imparted unto Adam and Eve by God. Salimbene alleged that Frederick bade “foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments”.
Our source for that is the Cronica of Salimbene di Adam:
(source)
More experiments reported:
As for his appearance?
A Damascene chronicler, Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, left a physical description of Frederick based on the testimony of those who had seen the emperor in person in Jerusalem: “The Emperor was covered with red hair, was bald and myopic. Had he been a slave, he would not have fetched 200 dirhams at market.”
It’s very possible we would put this guy today into one of several categories ranging from oddball to neuroatypical. Some clues are he did weird experiments, looked weird, and had a guy’s finger cut off for spelling his name wrong.
Lansing and English, two British historians, argue that medieval Palermo has been overlooked in favour of Paris and London:
One effect of this approach has been to privilege historical winners, [and] aspects of medieval Europe that became important in later centuries, above all the nation state…. Arguably the liveliest cultural innovation in the 13th century was Mediterranean, centered on Frederick II’s polyglot court and administration in Palermo…. Sicily and the Italian South in later centuries suffered a long slide into overtaxed poverty and marginality. Textbook narratives therefore focus not on medieval Palermo, with its Muslim and Jewish bureaucracies and Arabic-speaking monarch, but on the historical winners, Paris and London.
Dante preferred Friderick’s successor, Henry VII.
“well he would say that, wouldn’t he”
Posted: February 28, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
I misremembered the famous phrase of Mandy Rice-Davies.
The UK is so odd:
In 1980, with Shirley Flack, Rice-Davies wrote her autobiography, Mandy…Subsequently, journalist Libby Purves, who had met Rice-Davies when Mandy was published, invited her to join a female re-creation on the River Thames of Jerome K. Jerome’s comic novel Three Men in a Boat.
This expedition was commissioned by Alan Coren for the magazine Punch, the other members of the party being cartoonist Merrily Harpur and a toy Alsatian to represent Montmorency, the dog in the original story. Purves recounted how she “immediately spotted that this Rice-Davies was a woman to go up the Amazon with” and, among other things, that “only Mandy’s foxy charm saved us from being evicted from a lock for being drunk on pink Champagne.”
Nothing new
Posted: February 27, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentThe idea that AI is gonna give us all too much free time doesn’t worry me. From McCullough’s Truman:
first time I lol’d at Dante’s Inferno
Posted: February 25, 2026 Filed under: Italy Leave a commentCanto 17:
that’s from Gerald Davis translation. John Ciardi gives us:
Mandelbaum:
if we just put “Tedeschi lurchi” in Google translate it gives us “German slugs.”
Cheers to Tom B., age fourteen or something, describing the Inferno as “self insertion fan fiction.” It is!
My two year old daughter saw this guy on the cover of John Sinclair’s translation
and said
he’s sad. he misses his mommy.
correct, this is from Canto 28, the Schismatics, who are cut apart as they cut families apart.
Restaurants and Railroads: hospice brands
Posted: February 14, 2026 Filed under: business, railroads and restaurants Leave a comment
Sad. From ValueLine.
John Dormandy’s Savoy
Posted: February 7, 2026 Filed under: Savoy Leave a comment
Savoy was a small state – a principality, a dukedom, a kingdom – that covered parts of what’s now northwest Italy, Switzerland, and southeastern France. The borders were always shifting. For a time Savoy was its own country. The ruling family ended up as kings of Italy, until that ended shortly after World War Two. I’m interested in Savoy because I’ve twice been lucky to travel to the animation festival at Annecy, France, historically part of Savoy.
I judged this book by its cover, thought it might be kinda slop, and ignored it even though I have a strong interest in the history of Savoy. But after burning through most English language Savoy specific content, I bought and started reading it, and it’s fantastic! John Dormandy is a great, conversational, witty writer. He makes a great case for the importance of Savoy as a topic. Blessed with some clever rulers it managed to survive a long time while many other small states like Burgundy were swallowed up. Just an excerpt:
In 1858, Emperor Louis Napoleon III and Count Benzo Cavour, prime minister of King Victor Emmanuel, met secretly in the small spa town of Plombières in the Vosges mountains to hatch a plot. The two men, equally devious, agreed to provoke an attack by Austria on the Kingdom of Sardinia that included Savoy; the French would then promptly come to the aid of poor Sardinia, and together they would expel the Austrians from northern Italy. Following that happy outcome, Sardinia would acquire all of northern Italy and in recompense for his help, Napoleon III would be allowed to annexe Savoy to France. That was exactly what happened, except that by the mid-nineteenth century, Europe, particularly Victorian England, was beginning to baulk at countries being traded as commodities, especially if the recipient of the gift was France under a second Napoleon. Cavour and Napoleon, ever resourceful, organised a ‘free’ plebiscite in Savoy in which 99 per cent of the population voted for annexation to France.
I looked up John Dormandy, and sadly, he’s died. He wrote this book as a retirement project. He led a remarkable life. Here’s an edited version of an obituary I found here:
John Dormandy was born on 3 May 1937 in Budapest. He was the son of Paul Szeben, a pea grower who was accustomed to exporting his crop to the UK, and his wife Clara, who was an author and dramatist. He had a sister, Daisy, and his elder brother, Thomas, was to become a consultant chemical pathologist, renowned for his research on the actions of free radicals. The family were Jewish and went into hiding in 1944 when the Nazis invaded Hungary. After several months sheltering in a convent, they escaped to Geneva. In 1948 they made their way to London, where they settled and changed their surname to that of a village in Hungary which was 150 miles east of Budapest, where they had a country estate. John was educated in Hungary, Geneva and Paris before enrolling at London University to study medicine and graduating MB, BS in 1961. Apart from a spell as a registrar at the Royal Free, he was to spend most of his career at St George’s Hospital, progressing from lecturer in applied physiology to senior lecturer in surgery and, eventually, professor of vascular surgery.
He was famous for his pioneering work investigating the diagnosis and treatment of peripheral artery diseases. A colleague referred to him as an unusual surgeon since he was keen to conserve affected limbs rather than to correct [the problem] immediately with a knife. Written with three co-authors, his book Clinical haemorheology (Springer, 1987) remains a standard work in the field. In the early 1990’s he was the first to advocate the use of specialist nurses to manage clinics for patients with chronic vascular disease and eventually this led to a nationwide network. He saw the benefits of multidisciplinary information sharing and was a leading figure in setting up the Trans-Atlantic Consensus for the management of peripheral artery disease (TASC) which published uniform guidelines in 2000. It was due to his personal involvement that so many vascular societies across Europe and North America collaborated in the research and adopted the recommendation. The author of five medical books and over 200 research papers, he continued to write and appear as an expert witness after his retirement in 2001.
In the 1980’s, as his fame grew, he was called upon to deal with some high profile patients. Flown to Baghdad, he operated on the varicose veins of Saddam Hussein’s mother, to be rewarded with a gold watch which was later stolen. In 1983 he went to Libya where he is thought to have treated either Colonel Gaddafi himself or one of his advisors. John was said to be extremely angry that the large bill for this was never paid due to the row over the siege of the Libyan Embassy the following year.
Due to his multicultural upbringing he was fluent in several languages. He was a popular and gregarious host, enjoying fine wines and good food often followed by a cigar. It was said that when he had to implement a no smoking policy as clinical director of St Georges he put a sign on his office door reading You are now leaving the premises of St George’s Hospital. A keen downhill skier, he also enjoyed playing golf and tennis and travelled at hair-raising speed round town on his beloved scooter. Other interests were art, architecture, theatre, opera and travelling – in retirement he published a book on his favourite part of France A history of Savoy: gatekeeper of the Alps (Fonthill, 2018).
His wife, Klara, predeceased him in December 2018 and he died suddenly in Paris on 26 April 2019. He was survived by his children Alexis and Xenia and stepchildren Gaby and Alex. His brother Thomas predeceased him in 2013.
What a guy! I feel like he’s a pal.
Dormandy thinks Konrad Witz’s Crucifixion depicts Annecy:
It does look like it. He also thinks Witz’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes depicts Lake Geneva, with Mont Blanc in the background, and that very much looks like it!:
Helytimes 
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