Monthly Archives: February 2017

When 11 Days Disappeared by an Act of Parliament, and the 11th Anniversary of LibriVox

Odd Bits & Tangents audiobooks, librivox

Above: a detail from “Continuity,” January 31, 2015

In 1750, the British Parliament threw out the Julian calendar. To align dates with the seasons of the year necessitated Draconian measures. The old-style year had always begun on March 25. Parliament mandated that, beginning in 1752, the new year would begin on January 1. Parliament also decreed that “the natural day next immediately following the second day of September (1752) shall be called, reckoned and accounted to be the fourteenth day of September, omitting for that time only the eleven intermediate nominal days.” In other words, those eleven days of September 1752 would never happen. Time would skip over them.

I am quite sure I would have been troubled by the year 1752. Those missing days would have stayed in my head. Selective amnesia was being called for, and I prefer clarity and continuity.

Which brings me, by a leap of time travel, to the 11th Anniversary of LibriVox. LibriVox is a quirky group of volunteers, and we have, since our 5th year (2010) annually celebrated our existence with an eclectic, multi-lingual, melange of prose, poetry, and song held together by some reference to the anniversary number. The first collection of recordings, which focused on the number “5” morphed into collections 6, 7, 8 , 9, 10, and — then came eleven. Here, time and enthusiasm seemed to stall. There were murmurs that it would be hard to find works that related to “11.” And then, the question was posed whether we really needed to celebrate “each and every anniversary” and “not just the big ones with fives or zeros.”

Just celebrate the big anniversaries? the ones with fives or zeros? My immediate response to this line of reasoning was “that’s youth speaking!” My husband and I had just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in 2015, and I was exquisitely aware how precious each and every anniversary had become.

So, I volunteered to coordinate the 11th LibriVox anniversary collection. Then, of course, I had to search for readings that related to the number eleven, which is how I discovered the missing eleven days of 1752!

I discovered quite a few things about “11.”

that 11 is a prime number
that there is an 11 year sunspot cycle
that there is an 11th chord in music

My contribution to the collection was an essentially silly “How to Furnish and Decorate an Eleven Hundred Dollar Cottage. (1890)” And it was pointed out to me that my bargain decorating scheme did not include indoor plumbing.

Our contributors came up with many imaginative eleven-themed selections, and we ended with a diverse group of readings, which included “Eleven Important Duck Foods,” and a short story by Kafka, “Elf Söhne,” read in German.

We also sang an original 11th Anniversary LibriVox song, written by Maria Kasper, which is included in the collection:

It’s a long road to meet our mission,
It’s a long road – but fun!
Every book in the public domain,
We will read them one by one.
It’s been eleven years now,
And still we’re far from done.
There are more books waiting on the doorstep –
We’ve barely begun!

Ancient classics, or modern sci-fi,
History’s rebels and kings,
Mighty novels and witty essays,
Tender poems that take wing.
Playing drama and melodrama,
We sometimes even sing.
Whether comic, tragic, or historic,
The book is the thing!

Some of us lend our voices,
While some lend our ears,
Some dig for hidden treasures
In archives far and near,
From all around the world, we
Have come together here,
How many books have we recorded?
Ten thousand by this year!

So let’s celebrate together,
Throw a party that rocks,
Sing “Happy Anniversary!”
Shout “Hurrah for LibriVox!”
It’s been eleven years now,
And still we’re far from done.
There are more books waiting on the doorstep –
We’ve barely begun!

(Finish with whoops, huzzahs, as the spirit moves you.)

The Journal of Lewis and Clark

Explorers American West, audiobooks, librivox, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark

Above: The Pacific Ocean, Rialto Beach, Olympic Peninsula, Washington, 2007

Meriwether Lewis (1774–1800) and William Clark (1770–1838)

The journal of Lewis and Clarke to the mouth of the Columbia River beyond the Rocky Mountains in the years 1804-5, & 6 : giving a faithful description of the river Missouri and its source – of the various tribes of Indians through which they passed – manners and customs – soil – climate – commerce – gold and silver mines – animal and vegetable productions, &c.

Listen here:
Read the text here:

The Journal of Lewis and Clark was a collaborative LibriVox reading, to which I contributed a chapter.

The Inquisition of Spain

Odd Bits & Tangents anti-semitism, audiobooks, judaism, librivox, Spain

Above: “Universal Light,” December 2016

Henry Charles Lea (1825- 1909)

Henry Charles Lea’s monumental four volume History of the Spanish Inquisition, published in 1906-1907 was considered groundbreaking at the time. It is opinionated and densely written, not exactly what you would pick to read on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but Lea researched his history from original sources, making his work still valuable as a scholarly resource. LibriVox undertook as a collaborative project to read all four volumes of the history. Three have been completed, the fourth is still underway. My contribution to the project was Chapter 3 of Volume I, “The Jews and the Conversos,” (pp. 81-144), which details the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.

“The edict of expulsion was signed on March 30, 1492. It gave the entire Jewish population of Spain until July 31 in which to change their religion or to leave the country under penalty of death. During the interval… they were permitted to sell their effects and carry the proceeds with them, except that… the export of gold and silver (i.e. coined money ) was prohibited (!)”

“Men might admit that it was unwise from the point of view of statesmanship and damaging to the prosperity of the land, but this only enhanced the credit due to the sovereigns whose piety was equal to the sacrifice. Such were the convictions of the period in the fifteenth century after Christ had died for man, that this crime agasinst humanity met with nothing but applause among contemporaries.”

“The sacrifices entailed on the exiles were enormous. . . An eye-witness tells us that the Christians bought their property for a trifle… they were compelled to give a house for an ass and a vineyard for a little cloth or linen: in some places the miserable wretches, unable to get any price, burnt their homes … Penniless, friendless and despised they were cast forth into a world which had been taught that to oppress them was a service to the Redeemer. The whole world was pitiless to these wretched outcasts, against whom every man’s hand was raised. From Aragon and Cadiz they put to sea for Italy or the Moorish lands or whersoever fortune might drive them. Most of them had evil fate, robbery and murder by sea and in the lands of their refuge.”

“The sum of human misery was incomputable.” Henry Charles Lea

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Artists & Intellectuals audiobooks, Benvenuto Cellini, librivox, memoirs

Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571)

The autobiography of the great artist Benvenuto Cellini was a collaborative LibriVox reading to which I contributed. Begun in 1558, Cellini’s account of his art, as well as his loves, hatreds, passions, and delights, is written in a full-out extravagant style, which would delight a tabloid journalist of today.

In the section I read, Cellini recounts how he cast his bronze Perseus, who holds up the severed head of Medusa. Cellini is a master of suspenseful storytelling. Doubters tell him there is no way he can force the bronze to fill the uplifted Medusa head. He sets out to prove them wrong. He is meticulous in preparing the clay mold from the wax original. He orders loads of pinewood from the forests of Serristori to stoke the furnace to melt the bronze. All goes well until “the” day, when Cellini calls out “heartily to set the furnace going.” Then things fall apart. The workshop roof catches fire; a storm of wind and rain blows into the workshop, cooling the furnace.

Cellini battles with these “untoward circumstances” for several hours, until “with despair of heart,” expecting to die any minute, he takes to his bed, abandoning his assistants to supervise the crucial casting! He lies in bed for two hours, at which point, according to his account, he sees the figure of a man enter his chamber “twisted in body into the form of a capital S” who announces “O Benvenuto, your statue is spoiled, and there is no hope whatever of saving it.” “No sooner,” Cellini writes,” had I heard the shriek of that wretch than I gave a howl which might have been heard from the sphere of flame.”

He jumps out of bed and runs to the workshop. There he finds is that the bronze in the furnace has curdled. The alloy needs adjustment. Cellini sends for “all his pewter platters, porringers, and dishes, to the number of two hundred” and dumps them into the furnace. This drastic measure saves the day. The mold fills. “After all was over,” says Cellini, “I turned to a plate of salad on a bench there and ate with hearty appetite, and drank together with the whole crew.”

You might enjoy Dallam’s Travels with an Organ to the Grand Signieur

The Art of Travel

Nature & Science audiobooks, Francis Galton, librivox, nature

Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911)

Sir Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin. His The Art of Travel (1872) is aimed at the Victorian adventurer in foreign lands, and contains advice on such topics as organizing an expedition, climbing and mountaineering, and rafts and boats. I read the chapter on bivouacking, or sleeping out-of-doors without a tent. Galton begins on a romantic note: “Men who sleep habitually in the open, breathe fresher air and are far more imbued with the spirit of wild life, than those who pass the night within the stuffy enclosure of a tent. It is an endless pleasure to lie half awake watching the stars above… When the fire is low… and there is no sound but of the wind and an occasional plaintive cry of wild animals, the traveller finds himself in that close communion with nature which is the true charm of wild travel.”

“Study the form of a hare!”

Galton admits, however, that “bivouacking is miserable work in a wet or unhealthy climate.” Most of his chapter is taken up with how to survive adversities. In a wind storm, he advises “study the form of a hare!” A man, as he lies upon his mother earth is an object so small and low that a screen of eighteen inches high will guard him securely from the strength of a storm.” Galton then goes on to say that the traveler can “live through a bitter night, on a perfectly dry sandy plain without any clothes besides what he has on, if he buries his body pretty deeply in the sand, keeping only his head above ground.” Galton quotes a Mr. Moffat, who recorded “with grateful surprise how he passed a night, of which he had gloomy forebodings, in real comfort, even luxury by attempting this method.”

I chose Galton’s chapter on sleeping out-of-doors to read since it evoked for me memories of my many childhood camping trips and of the one single night I can remember that our family actually bivouacked, that is slept outside our tent. It was somewhere in dry desert country, maybe New Mexico. We arrived at our camping place late, after dark. The night sky was filled with shooting stars, so instead of pitching our tent, we just laid it flat on the ground, put the sleeping bags on top and spent the night watching the magnificent light show above us. I never forgot that night.

You might like these true tales of “roughing it.” Journal of Lewis and Clark, Rough Notes–Across the Pampas and Among the Andes, The Journey of Coronado,

Telegraphing Across the Ocean Without Wires

Nature & Science librivox, Marconi, nonfiction collection, telegraphy

Ray Stannard Baker (1870–1946)

Above: “Preparing to fly the kite which supports the receiving wire; Marconi on the extreme left.”

St. Johns, Newfoundland, December 12, 1901

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) in 1902 at Newfoundland

“Think for a moment of sitting here on the edge of North America and listening to communications sent though space across nearly 2,000 miles of ocean from the edge of Europe! . . . Nothing but space, a pole with a pendant wire on one side of a broad, curving ocean, an uncertain kite struggling in the air on the other — and thought passing between.”

Early Wireless Receiver on a Steamship

“On Thursday, the 12th (1901), a day destined to be important in the annals of invention . . . Marconi sent up one of his kites, a huge hexagonal affair of bamboo and silk nine feet high . . . The weather was so blustery that it required the combined strength of the inventor and his assistants to manage the tetherings (but) they succeeded in holding the kite at an elevation of about 400 feet. Marconi sat waiting, a telephone receiver at his ear, in a room of the old barracks on Signal Hill. A wire ran out through the window, thence to a pole, thence upward to the kite . . .”

Receiving Station, Cape Cod

And the implications —

“When Marconi’s discoveries were first announced . . . the public inquired “How are you going to keep your messages secret? Supposing a warship wishes to communicate with another of the fleet, what is to prevent the enemy from reading your message? How are private business despatches to be secured against publicity? Here, indeed, was a problem.”

Recorded for Vol. 46 of the Nonfiction Collection; originally from
McClure’s Magazine, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, February 1902, p. 291 ff.

You might enjoy an account of another inventor, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who did early work in microscopy.

Specimen Days

Artists & Intellectuals audiobooks, librivox, memoirs, Walt Whitman

Above: Sunrise, November 20, 2016

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Down in the Woods, July 2d, 1882…

Walt Whitman, 1872

If I do it at all I must delay no longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862 -’65, Nature-notes of 1877 -’81, with Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour,—(and what a day! What an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me, body and soul),—to go home, untie the bundle, reel out diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages, and let the melange’s lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves.

It will illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of life’s days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted. Probably another point, too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy hour’s command, which seems curiously imperative. May be, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.

Specimen Days by Walt Whitman was a collaborative LibriVox reading, to which I contributed a chapter.

Listen to Whitman’s prose works here:
Read on-line here:

Pliny, Historis Naturalis, astronimical engraving, 1582

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, cerca AD 77-79

Nature & Science audiobooks, librivox, Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Elder (AD 23–AD 79)

Historia Naturalis, 1469

Plinius Secundus Gaius, Pliny the Elder (AD 23–AD 79), was a Roman army and navy officer, natural historian, and author of the word’s first encyclopedia, which included information about lands and people which he had acquired during his travels. The first printed edition, in Latin, was published in Venice in 1469. The Smithsonian Library owns a copy of this edition of the Historia Naturalis, from which an illuminated initial is shown

I was one of many contributors to the LibriVox reading of the 4 volumes of the Natural History, in an English translation by John Bostock (1773-1846) and Henry Thomas Riley (1816-1878). This was my first forray into Pliny, and I was amazed at the detail and vigor of his writing. One of my selections was on lions: “The tail of the lion gives indication of the state of his feelings, just as the ears do in the horse. Hence it is that, when pleased, the tail is without motion, and the animal fawns upon those who caress him, a thing however, that very rarely happens, for his most frequent state is that of rage. He begins by beating the earth with his tail; and as he becomes more furious, he lashes his sides, as if trying to excite himself.” Pliny then goes on to say that Cesar staged an exhibition fight between gladiators and lions which featured 400 lions. I can imagine the spectators witnessed a lot of furious tail lashing then.

We know the actual date of Pliny the Elder’s death (August 25, AD 79), because he died after trying to evacuate, by ship, of some of the Romans trapped at the base of Mount Vesuvius by the eruption of the volcano. A good and noble death in my opinion.

Nine-banded Armadillo

Odd Bits & Tangents audiobooks, librivox, nature

Above: 9-banded armadillo in Silver River State Park, Florida; photo by Mwcolgan8

How I came to record anything about 9-banded armadillos is one of those “LibriVox stories.” I read this small selection for the 9th Anniversary of LibriVox Collection, where every title had to relate to the number “9.” I honestly wouldn’t recommend listening to my recording for accurate information about 9-banded armadillos, since there is much more up-to-date information available on the web. Everything read for LibriVox has to be in the public domain (that is without copyright), which generally means material published before 1923, and in this case my reading comes from the 1840 Outlines of a Popular History of the Class Mammalia; with a Particular Notice of Those Mentioned in Scripture. The section on 9-banded armadillos in this book includes such first-hand observations as that by a Mr. Waterton, who says that armadillos “burrow in the sand-hills like a rabbit; and that if, on introducing a stick into the hole, a number of mosquitos come out…”

The nice photo of the 9-banded armadillo shown above was kindly released into the public domain by Mwcolgan8, who states the photo was taken in Silver River State Park, Florida on February 14, 2009, The photo can be found in Wikipedia Commons.

Magic in a Clump of Cattails

Bookish (the Blog) nature

Above: Cattails along the edge of the pond, October 21, 2016

Reflections, November 27, 2016

Familiar places can be magical sometimes. For me, yesterday (2/21/2017) the familiar place turned magical was a clump of cattails on the edge of the pond in the forest preserve. The pond itself is a quiet, beautiful spot, where there is always something to see at any season of the year.

In summer, the pond’s edge is alive with frogs that kerplunk into the water as I go past. Although I’ve tried, I’ve never been fast enough with my camera to catch a frog in a photo. I’ve had better luck with herons. (Addendum–see frog photo below!)

Heron, October 12, 2015

In winter, the pond is ice-covered.

Cattails, January 21, 2015

Cattails, January 3, 2017

December 26, 2017

Ice on the pond, Dec. 26, 2017. It was minus 6 degrees during the night

Cattail Seeds, Dec. 21, 2017

A couple of years ago, the cattail clump held a surprise for me. The snake photo dates from May 4, 2015. I’m no wildlife photographer, so you have to use your imagination to see the hidden snake. But I stood entranced watching it from just a few feet away. We didn’t have big snakes like that in Seattle, where I grew up. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has an informative identification website, and looking through the photos there, I’ll guess “my” snake was a northern water snake, but whatever its name, it was a treat to see.

Water Snake, May 4, 2015

Grass disturbed by muskrats, February 21, 2017

Yesterday (2/21/2017), the same cattail clump was again showing me its magic. As I approached, my impression was that the cattails looked rather “end-of-winter” ratty. The grass several feet out from the bank was trampled revealing dark muddy soil underneath. I thought the damage was caused by people or maybe by the Canadian geese. Then I spotted a muskrat! I’d never seen one up close before. There were actually two muskrats, and they put on quite a show, diving in and out of the cattails, and periodically running out on the bank for a nibble of grass.

The muskrats made magic in my day.