Notes

Notes

 

    1. Piazza: (Navonna) Fountain of Four Rivers, 1650, by Bernini. The statue of Africa wears a veil because the source of the Nile was still unknown.
    2. Numismagic: In Greek mythology, Helios is the sun god. The rose is the symbol of the island of Rhodes. This is, by the way, one of the most refulgent tourist destinations in the world, its, harbor, where once the great Colossus stood ( Over 100 feet high, it was built by Chares about 240 BCE, but was destroyed by an earthquake soon afterwards, the metal sold for scrap 800 years later.), now sports colorful sailing boats. Above it is the Castle of the Counts, a Turkish town, and a delightful European city. And on and on: Greek temples, the Valley of the Butterflies….
    3. Endymion: There is another version in which Selene bore him 50 daughters.
    4. Prepossession: The maenads dumped his remains in the Aegean. His severed head floated singing to Lesbos. Orphics believed in transmigration, and therefore abstained from killing animals or eating their flesh.              “The birds wept. The trees shook down their leaves” 
    5. Constantine the Eleventh: There is still considerable uncertainty except to coin dealers, as to whether those coins attributed to him were actually of his unfortunate reign (1448-1453) or of his predecessor. Allegedly they were struck to pay the army defending Constantinople against the onslaught of the Ottoman Turks. They failed. The coins found are unused, crudely made, and rather ugly.
    6. Decline and Fall: After the murder of Pertinax the Praetorian guards announced that they would elect as emperor whoever would pay them the highest price. Julianus, whose wealth resulted from the importation of wheat from Africa, offered each soldier 25,000 sestertii ($18,666). He was duly declared emperor, but this aroused such indignation in the Roman populace that he was deposed(Or was it because he ran out of money?)and beheaded after a reign of only 66 days. According to Gibbon, this was the real beginning of the Empire�s decline.
    7. Beta-Catenin: Well, it turns out that there really is a difference between mice and people. Mice have smooth brains, and therefore little surface area. We have lobulations: gyri and sulci, massively increasing the external surface. In recent experiments, merely supplying beta-catenin to mouse embryos, gives them larger, more convoluted brains. And (better watch out) it does make them smarter.(Tech note: There are 2 principle kinds of cells: neurons (nerve cells) and glia. The neurons are formed deep in the brain, on the ventricular (fluid sac) surface. The glia form chains (like a ladder) going from the ventricle up to the cortical (outer layer) of the brain. When this is set up the neurons “climb” up the ladder to the cortex where they then interconnect with each other. The glia seem to direct the neurons to the correct locations, and also have some function in maintaining the proper action of the synapses.) 
    8. L’ Enfant Prodige: Print  by Durer-The Return of the Prodigal Son. Should be compared to the one by Rembrandt, or those of Callot.
    9. The Grand Comneni of Trebizond: The Empire of Trebizond ( at the Eastern end of the Black Sea) was founded in 1206 when, in the 4th crusade, the Venetians took and pillaged Constantinople, and ruled it, first with puppet emperors, then with various Latin princes.The Empire was reestablished in 1261, but Trebizond (now Trebzon) remained separate. Surrounded by the Ottoman Empire, it was eventually absorbed.
    10. Art and Being: Print by Callot-from the Miseries of War. Diphylobothrium latum is a tapeworm, and amaurotic idiocy is a congenital disorder which results in demise as an infant.
    11. A Suicide: The painting is the Sower.  There is another “Sower”, better, but I haven’t been able to find a reproduction of it.
    12. Broch: Born Jewish, converted to Catholicism, had to leave Germany anyway, After the Sleep Walkers (one of the great novels of the 20th century) and Death of Virgil, he wrote Mass Psychology while teaching in California.
    13. Under the Wave: Print by Hokusai-The Wave, from 100 views of Mt. Fugi.
    14. Appraisal: Oort (Comet Cloud) or Layer: area from which comets originate, about 50,000 AU (astronomical units:1 AU= distance of earth to sun). There are about a thousand billion comets in the Oort layer. A planet-sized thing out there (Nemesis) has been conjectured, which may, at any time, start moving into the inner solar system.
    15. Note to Cavafy: A fine Greek poet from Alexandria, but with strong prejudices against women and pagans. Anna Comnena (1082-1154) was the daughter of Alexius I, the Byzantine emperor during the 1st Crusade. She was brought up to become empress, but that hope was negated by the birth of her brother. When her father died there was a feeble attempt at a coup, but her husband turned state’s evidence. Her life was spared, but she had to spend the remainder of her life in a nunnery. There, however, she wrote the Alexiad, the first major historical work by a woman. Very critical of her brother, John II, who was, however, quite competent as emperor.
    16. Appropriately Mislaballed: Boltzmann (1844-1906) developed an equation which expressed the distribution of energies for a collection of particles at a fixed temperature. His ideas, now accepted, but rejected during his lifetime, resulted in his becoming depressed and committing suicide.
    17. The print is by Hollar, a fine artist in his own right, whose work, however, consisted mostly of portrait etchings derived from well-known paintings, in this case the self portrait of Giorgione (1475-1510)as David, with the head of Goliath.
    18. Anthropic Principle: relating the nature of the universe to the fact that we, human beings, are observing it.
    19. I was going to call these 3 liners Haiku, but that is, officially, incorrect, since Haiku are 3 lined, unrhymed poems with, respectively, 5, 7, and 5 syllables.
    20. Aurora (Latin name: Eos in Greek) and Tithonis (os in Greek) One version has him progressively transformed into a cricket (Family: Gryllidae) or grasshopper (Sub-order: Saltatoria), (is there a difference?) and he chirps away forever.Sappho has them, I think, stay together. 
    21. Phthisis is formal name for Tuberculosis.
    22. Alexander: Every book you read has a different cause of his demise. The coin is one produced by Alexander and shows Heracles wearing a lion’s skin. Coins of his successors allegedly are portraits of Alexander as Heracles.
    23. McCauliffe: There’s a lot written about this. Essentially it was Big PR, I don’t know, maybe to justify the cost of the space program. They wanted to show that space was accessible to anyone, so they picked a H.S. social studies school teacher to go up. Actually, she applied. There were 11,000 applicants. She was the mother of two. Nothing in what I read mentioned a husband. Or what anyone in her family thought about her going. On 1/28/86 the Challenger had already been delayed 6 days. It was really too cold, with ice build-up. It turned out that there was a leaky gasket. Anyway they had to launch before Reagan’s State of the Union address that evening in which he was to talk about her and education, and space.
    24. Continued Evidence: nice word “oxymoron”: from the Greek oxys=sharp, and moros=foolish, from which we also get moron.
    25. Or Is It Love? The Hippocampus is the inner (medial) aspect of the temporal lobe of the brain. Its main function seems to be to move current information into memory. It also has to do with emotional stability. In mental diseases (Bipolar, Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s) it deteriorates (actually it shrinks) because of a lack or loss of cells. Interestingly, it is one of the few areas in the brain where new cells (neurons) are formed later in life, so it may be possible, perhaps by means of stem cells, to compensate for the damage.
    26. Tolstoy: I think the novel, “Kreutzer Sonata” is one of the last things he wrote. Comparatively short, very intense, very passionate, very fine, equal in quality to the same piece of music by Beethoven.
    27. According to Aristotle: Mattsu Picchu is unquestionably one of the wonders of the world. At 8400 feet, you should see it before you develop respiratory insufficiency. The poem, “The Heights of Mattsu Picchu” by Pablo Neruda is quite lovely.
    28. Planning Mt.Fugi: a beautiful book, “The Japanese Garden”, by Teiji Ito, and Takeji Iwamiya (Yale Univ. Press)
    29. Re: O’Hara: I really don’t mean to disparage him. For a short life (1926-1966-He died subsequent to injuries in a car accident) his was quite accomplished, worked at MOMA, published a number of volumes of poetry. His stuff isn’t “great”, but is breezy and enthusiastic (infectiously), and, as Whitman was for America, O’Hara was for New York. (see: Selected Poems of Frank O”Hara,Edtd by D.Allen) Here’s a typical quote: “Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat and potatoes…I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not….Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them…”  So, after reading some of his poems, I wrote this
    30. Picture by Blake: Cleaning the sorcerer’s parlor
    31. Six Days: Plath wrote daily, but stopped 6 days before committing suicide. It should be noted that her son also killed himself; and 5 years after Sylvia her husband’s new wife did the same, along with her children. Golly
    32. Barcarole: from the Italian, barcarola=gondolier A venetian boat song characterized by an alternation of strong and weak beats suggesting a rowing rhythm.
    33. Miniver Cheevy: Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1865-1935) See poets.org.
  1. 34. Snow Drop–produced in Russia in 1950 as Galantine. It is an Acetyl Cholinesterase Inhibitor used in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, but caused lucid dreams and out of body experiences.
  2. 35. The coin was designed to replace the defunct gold hyperpyron, the highest denomination coin in circulation. Hence it was made heavier than any previous Byzantine silver coin, or for that matter any contemporary European coin, weighing initially 8.5 grams, but falling later to 7.4 grams. It still had only half the value of the hyperpyron, however, which remained in use as a notational currency. It featured a bust of Christ on obverse and an Imperial bust on the reverse. Only 90 coins of Constantine XI (1449-1453) have been found.
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