Happy Birthday, Julian Schnabel!

 In 1996... I was about to write this other painter's name, but why do that?

In 1996, another painter, famous, interesting, but a very unpleasant human being, told me about a recent auction he had attended, where one of Schnabel's plate paintings came up for sale. Nobody bid on it. Then one of the plates fell off.

Then, as the interesting, unpleasant painter told it, a ripple of laughter began, which soon became riotous.

The way he told the story, Schnabel, in 1996, was already a has-been, a joke.

In Sydney Pollack's documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, Schnabel calls Gehry's critics "fleas buzzing around the head of a lion." That's exactly how I think of that other painter now in relation to someone as great as Schnabel. That other famous painter, that unpleasant, cruel man who for a time had me somewhat under his sway, could only relate to others in terms of dominance, conflict, sneering laughter and degradation. Great artists such as Schnabel have a completely different spirit, a spirit which overflows with generosity. I believe that this sense of generosity comes from an awe felt at some things which religious people have been explaining for thousands of years, and which we atheists often have a very hard time describing, let alone explaining, but which exist.

I've never met Julian Schnabel, but I've felt those things through his work. Don't put too much stock in meeting your artistic heroes, be they painters, musicians, actors or what have you. If they're good at their jobs, they've already given you the important things. You don't need to meet them, and if they're famous, there aren't enough tiny little pieces of them for all of their fans. Give them a break, leave them alone, let them work. 

In 1997 I parted ways with that other painter. He's passed away since then. I can only hope, for his sake, that he got some soul before he departed. Like I said, this is hard for atheists to talk about coherently. I hope he was touched by some of the grace that flows from great artworks, such as Schnabel's paintings, but to which he had been blind because of a pre-occupation with dross such as in-crowd reputations, the buzz of the fleas.

Latin After the Classics

I'm writing this post for very much the same reason I've written several earlier posts: because I encounter people who equate Latin with ancient Latin and seem unaware of how much Latin literature has survived which was written after the ancient era ended around AD 450, the date of the latest "pagan" Latin texts.

There are some other people, who seem to believe that ancient Latin is the only WORTHWHILE Latin ever written, the only Latin worth reading. On that subject, I would ask you to consider this: only a tiny fraction of what was written by pre-Christian Latin authors has survived to the present. What we have now, to a great extent, is what people considered to be most worth preserving. No doubt much was written in ancient Latin which was of much lower quality. Much more of the writing of lower quality has survived from the Medieval, Renaissance and more recent eras. If you compare ancient Latin to more recent Latin, it's only fair to compare the best to the best.

 

But --  must you compare? I doubt that I will be able to stop anyone who is so disposed from disparaging Latin from post-ancient eras. But perhaps I can encourage others to read what they like, without allowing snobs to ruin things for them.

So: I am not comparing the following Latin works to ancient Latin. Plenty of others do that full-time, and find the newer stuff wanting. Such comparisons don't interest me. 

Boethius wrote in the earliest post-"pagan" period. He lived from ca AD 480 to 524. His magnum opus de consolatione philosophiae is well-known. In addition to that, many of his writings on music and mathematics have survived.

Isidore of Seville, ca AD 560 to 636, is also known for one work above all, his Etymologiae. Many others of his work survive, some on physics, some theological, some historical.

Gregory of Tours, c538-594, wrote an Historia Francorum which is one of our few written sources of information about the Merovingian dynasty down to Gregory's time.

Alcuin of York, born around 735, died 804, was the chief architect of Charlemagne's massive program of educational reform. Like Charlemagne, Alcuin seems to have been very charismatic and persuasive. He would debate with Charlemagne over matters of policy, often daring to chide and contradict the Emperor. Many of his written works survive. His poems, while not always masterpieces, are very expressive and winning.

Matthew Paris, died 1259, an English Benedictine monk, besides being one of the very best of Medieval historians, was also a gifted drawers of pictures, as can be seen in some of the manuscripts of his works which he himself made, as well as in maps which are considered some of the finest of the Middle Ages. I would heartily recommend all of his historical writings, but above all the Chronica majora. 

The examples could be endless. Reading some Medieval or later Latin works will tend to lead you to others.

It seems that often, people these days read translations from the Latin without realizing that they are translations. Bacon and Hobbes wrote about as much in Latin as they did in English. As did John Milton. No, I'm not talking about Paradise Lost, that was written in English, but Milton's Defense of the English People, for example, was originally Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. Kant, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Romain Rolland all published works in Latin. Prefaces to works of classical Greek and Latin are routinely written in Latin to this day. And if you say you are studying Medieval history, and you don't read Latin, then I have to risk sounding like one of the snobs I began this essay by denouncing, and wonder exactly what you are studying.

Amateur and Professional Sports

Chess has existed for well over 1000 years. Tennis has been around for at least 600 years, golf for at least 500. In western Europe, all three of these sports were originally exclusive pastimes of the aristocracy. Playing golf has continued to be primarily the preserve of what Veblen called the leisure class, a status symbol affordable only by a small portion of the population. Tennis, by comparison, has become somewhat less exclusive, and chess is now a mass phenomenon.

 

All three of these sports, as well as other Medieval aristocratic pastimes such as tournaments (jousting) and horse racing, are individual sports. The most popular team sports of the present day did not become popular until the 19th century: baseball, rugby, what Americans call football, what the rest of the world calls football and Americans call soccer, basketball, handball and so forth.

These team sports grew simultaneously in two categories: amateur sports for the upper class, as sports had been, and, something new, professional sports which were much more open to the entire society, and which, indeed, were often looked down upon by the aristocrats and the rich middle class wishing to join the upper classes. And large-scale amateur sports persist to this day in the US in the form of school sports, including college sports.

And perhaps it is better to call them "amateur" sports, in quotation marks, because, right from the start, university football and baseball and basketball teams cheated, and included players who were not really university students. 

Back in the mid-19th century in the US, attendance at universities was still mostly confined to relatively wealthy white men. It was a status symbol of the upper classes, as sports traditionally had been. However, as team sports grew explosively in popularity, and they began to generate huge amounts of revenue from ticket sales, and as college sports began to gain fans who had never been to college, the code of exclusivity was regularly broken, and the pool of players expanded far beyond the upper classes, in order to find the very best players. 

And from the mid-19th century until today, most people have known that the claim that most of a college's athletes are actually students, is untrue. 

In the rest of the world, many sports -- above all soccer, by far the most popular sport in the world -- developed in an entirely different way, with none of this pretense of amateurism. The revenues are openly shared with the athletes, not just in the "major leagues" as is the case in the US, but in all leagues. 

Baseball still has its minor leagues, although these have been mostly replaced by college baseball. Each major league team owns or is closely and exclusively associated with teams in several minor leagues, which form a pool of young talent for the major leagues to pick from. 

Most of the soccer teams outside of the US are independent entities. Typically, a country will have many soccer leagues, and a team can move up to a higher, more prosperous league by leading the league below it, while the team which did worst in the higher league moves to the lower league.

It's a much more sensible way of doing things. The American system is much more like a battle royal, with millions of children competing for a few thousand positions in which their financial compensation may begin to reflect the revenue they generate for others. There are only a very few, very impoverished and unsuccessful independent minor leagues in American football and basketball. Quite a few American athletes have figured out that they will be better treated in other countries, where basketball and baseball leagues and leagues in still other sports are modeled upon the soccer model.

And so, ironically, in the US, which supposedly was founded upon a rejection of things like aristocracy -- although that's a pretense about as transparent as that in which college athletes are supposed to be students -- amateur sports has become a very cruel exploitation of young poor people. 

Perhaps even more ironically, one of the few other parts of the world who indulged in a lie about amateur sports was -- the former Soviet bloc. Were they doing this in order to compete with their great rival and enemy, the US? I don't know.

Michigan Wine

Stop laughing, this isn't a joke: there is some good wine being made in Michigan. Although I can't blame you you if you didn't know. I didn't know until very recently that some Michigan wine is world-class, and I've lived in the general vicinity of Detroit for 14 years. Maybe Michigan's PR isn't as good as, for instance, its wine. 

Most of the very best wine in the state is made up north, on the north shore of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. The Lower Peninsula is the mitten-shaped land mass which many of you may think is the entire state of Michigan. But no! There is also an Upper Peninsula, which is fabulous in many ways. Serious vineyards are popping up here in significant numbers. 

But for now, most of truly world-class Michigan wine is made near Traverse City, on the north shore of the mitten. Left Foot Charley, which would probably have to be called the best of the best in the state, is actually IN Traverse City. It's a little unusual for a vineyard to actually be in a city. Bryan Ulbrich, 

 owner and winemaker of Left Foot Charlie, is gaining a serious reputation as a white-wine genius. 

Among the celebrated wineries of Sutton's Bay, just a few miles from Traverse City, is Mawby Wine, which specializes in sparkling wine. You want a quote? Okay, let me quote from page 631 of The New Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia: "Mawby is making wines as good or better than any other sparkling wine in the country."

Yeah that's a pretty good quote! You thought I was fooling around here! *LOUD BUZZER SOUND* Wrong!

Black Star Farms, also on Sutton's Bay, makes some serious pinot noir.

How about a local specialty?  Ice wine is made from grapes harvested when they are frozen on the vine. Ice wine is sweet and syrupy, a nice dessert wine. Canada, Germany, Austria and China are known for their ice wine, and, increasingly, so is Michigan.

The second-largest clustering of top-tier Michigan wineries, apart the Traverse City-Suttons Bay cluster and a scattering here and there, are in southwest Michigan, an hour or two's drive from Chicago. St Julian Winery of Paw Paw is perhaps the best of this bunch. They're known for their cream sherry and Riesling.

But these are just a few of the highlights. To cite the Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia again, Michigan ranks 6th among the 50 states in acreage devoted to wine grapes, and there were 160 wineries here as of 2019. 

And all the signs I can see say that the number is growing fast. You know that feeling people sometimes get, when they know that something around them is about to become world-famous?

If you're a wine connoisseur, when you think of wine from the US, maybe you think of California, Oregon, Washington state, New York state and the Finger Lakes, and Virginia, and Texas and the Hill country. As well you should, all those regions, and still others, make very fine wine. But Michigan should be on your radar, too. I know, these days, all 50 states, or at least the contiguous 48, want to be wine-growers, everyone's clamoring Look at me! Look at me!. But I'm telling you. We're well above-average.