BOOKS OF MY LIFE: "If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you."

I'll be purchasing this one.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if my entire motivation for traveling in Europe has been to track down the legacy of the Habsburgs, particularly in their final iteration as overlords of the Austrian (and later, Austro-Hungarian) empire: from Sarajevo to Konopiště, and Rudolf's Mayerling to Madeira (Karl's island of exile).

In 2003 during the Danube River bicycle ride my friend Bob and I bicycled up the hillside to Artstetten, the heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that I'd visited Vienna for the first time in 1985 and learned that Franz Ferdinand's grave wasn't there because he could not be buried with his beloved wife in the "official" imperial crypt owing to their morganatic marriage.

Their final resting places were at Artsetten, hence my visit, albeit 18 years later. I very much wanted to view the crypt at Artstetten.

Franz Ferdinand's marriage is relevant to the book review below, because here was an instance of a Habsburg marrying for love, quite apart from the wishes of the realm. That's why family protocol denied their children rights to the throne, and cruelly withheld from the couple many of the ceremonial perks of royal existence.

The attendant regretted there was no public access to the final resting place of this Habsburg. I understood and didn’t ask for favors. When I started to leave the facility she called to to me; I walked back to the desk and she silently pushed a key across and winked.

That was very nice of her. I was respectful of my time with the victims of Princip at Sarajevo, and took a photo (above). This is the first time it has been seen on the internet.

A breed apart: The Habsburgs’ marriages consolidated lands as well as faulty genes (at The Economist)

European history is unimaginable without the once-imperious family

The Habsburgs. By Martyn Rady. Allen Lane; 416 pages; £30. To be published in America by Basic Books in August; $32.

Martyn Rady’s new book is billed as “the definitive history” of the clan. Not, it must be said, a hotly contested title. Once the names of Europe’s most powerful families—the Bourbons and Battenbergs and Garibaldis—were known across the world. Today, beyond the biscuit tin, they are largely forgotten.

Except, that is, for their eccentric matchmaking. If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you. For centuries they experimented with marriages between first cousins, second cousins and cousins so multiply intertwined that the traditional familial vocabulary breaks down. A mother might double as a cousin; the wife of Leopold I referred to him throughout their marriage as “Uncle”.

The result was less a family tree, branching and widening, than a convoluted web. At one point the mortality rate of Habsburg children reached 80%, four times the average of the time. Of those who lived, many were hideously misshapen, with the infamous drooping lip and jutting Habsburg jaw. It is one of the abiding puzzles of European history that its aristocrats, so good at breeding horses, should have been so bad at breeding themselves.

BOOKS OF MY LIFE: Elizabeth David's "An Omelette and a Glass of Wine."

My belated column this week was devoted to explaining why I dislike the term "foodie."

ON THE AVENUES: Food is my friend, but please, I'm no foodie.

In the increasingly remote days of my youth, certain of the elderly wits around town used to say “I don’t eat to live – I live to eat,” and while this statement encapsulates my own point of view, chronologically as well as measured by a current poundage in the neighborhood of 265, the word “foodie” has never seemed proper as a descriptor.

The column was late because there's a lot on my plate, pun intended.

In my capacity as Digital Editor at Food & Dining Magazine, I've inaugurated posts on Sunday morning, something we hadn't been doing previously.

Overall, with prospects for a Summer 2020 print edition fairly chancy owing to the COVID food and drink disruptions, we've shifted emphasis to the web site. It's ambitious, at least for us, and the jury's out. But I'm having fun.

Consequently, today's post over there is an example of writing I once would have done right here.

Edibles & Potables: Elizabeth David and the noble art of food writing

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine is a collection of articles and ephemera by the British food writer Elizabeth David (1913 – 1992). To tell the absolute truth, I hadn’t the first idea who she was. Now, after reading the book, I’m horribly chagrined at my ignorance and correspondingly eager to delve into her other works, like Italian Food and French Provincial Cooking.

If you have a few minutes, hop over to F&D, read the piece and tell me what you think.

BOOKS OF MY LIFE: Confederates in the Attic, and what it says about past versus future.

I’ve been a Civil War buff since childhood, but even so, the genre of battlefield reenactments always has puzzled me.

In his entertaining book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (published in 1998), the late Tony Horwitz considers the Civil War’s numerous legacies, including the meticulous and obsessional efforts at authenticity on the part of those engaged in bringing 19th-century military campaigns back to life.

Horwitz describes one of the participants:

"One hardcore took this method acting to a bizarre extreme. His name was Robert Lee Hodge and the soldiers pointed him out as he ambled toward us. Hodge looked as though he'd stepped from a Civil War tintype: tall, rail thin, with a long pointed beard and a butternut uniform so frayed and filthy that it clung to his lank frame like rages to a scarecrow."

When I was much younger, I had the good fortune to visit more than a few of the Civil War battlefields -- Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, among others -- and these occasions always seemed appropriate for reflection about cataclysmic events in times long since passed. You’d think the vivid colors and immediacy of a battlefield reenactment would complete the scene, except that it never scratched the itch with me.

The very thought of reenactments being staged to observe every detail of conflict sans the indescribable pain and sure death borne of extreme human violence seems a sophomoric intrusion of sorts, something conflicting quite jarringly with any notions of sacrificial hallowed ground – assuming even these thoughts have any genuine merit in the first place.

Men and their machines come and go, but ideas live on, and perhaps it is because the reenactment genre misses this fundamental point about the power of ideas that I fail to grasp it. It’s the future that matters, as approached with accumulated experience gleaned from the past’s examples. The future is why any of us bother getting out of bed in the morning. The past is gone, and the present is a figment of conceptual imagination, one entirely ephemeral.

Concurrently, yes, the precise details of how a 150-year-old cotton tunic was sewed together have their place, as do pageantry and spectacle, but re-animated hardtack and nighttime spooning (soldiers huddling for warmth) pale in comparison to the sad fact that in the year 2020, roughly half the American populace -- generally the paler-hued ones -- seems to have willfully forgotten what the Civil War was all about, hence the word “unfinished” in the title of Horwitz’s book, itself 22 years old.

In a thoughtful 2013 essay, Horwitz suggesteds "the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is too narrow a lens through which to view the conflict."

150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz (The Atlantic)

... It's hard to argue with the Gettysburg Address. But in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?

Convincing these people that certain foundational issues pertaining to human rights were resolved long before the advent of the internal combustion engine probably ranks as more important than reenacting battles, assuming there is a future without a further round of secession.

Acting out uniformed history? Fine.

Knowing what history is trying to tell us? Priceless.

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The preceding was written on October 31, 2013, and I touched it up a tad to reappear six and a half years later. Confederates in the Attic is a fine book, and I recommend it heartily. It has been a while since I read it, but I'm confident the subject matter remains relevant. 

In 2013, my aim was to relate the book to a situation in our own city, this being the New Albany Bicentennial celebration of 2012-2013. Current city council president Bob Caesar was in charge of the Bicentennial. Six and a half years later, the public has not seen the financial records documenting these events. In response to public access requests, the city denied possessing them. Caesar once suggested they were in his possession, although nothing came of this. 

Here's the second half of my 2013 Confederates in the Attic digression. Ironically, the attic probably is where those records reside to this very day. 

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Such is the critical error committed repeatedly during the past year by the cadre of well-intentioned, history-loving New Albanians who were brought together to contribute planning for this year’s Bicentennial celebration – an event that shouldn’t be occurring until 2017, anyway, since that’s when the city was incorporated … sorry, I digress.

The customary guiding lights have hoarded the process and tried to imbue the celebration with symbolism of their choosing, and yet the enduring difficulty with symbolism is the variability of the symbols themselves. They mutate incessantly, depending on one’s perspective and general vantage point.

Do you remember the centerpiece of the grand American bicentennial in 1976, when the old, tall, “masts from the past” sailing ships came into the harbor at New York?

It was a wonderful and epochal party, redolent with symbolism – flags, patriotism and Americana. The newspaper accounts agreed, but the late Randy Shilts, author of And the Band Played On, saw something else. To Shilts, the occasion of July 4, 1976, might well have been the point when Patient Zero kicked off the worldwide AIDS epidemic (this supposition has been disproved, by the way).

Wooden ships were on the water, and the future was pounding on the door. It is quite possible that owing to Ronald Reagan’s backward-looking obsession, we took far too long reacting to the scary reaper out on the stoop.

And so it is that from the very start, New Albany’s bicentennial program template was locked into a pattern so utterly predictable that Year Zero itself has been a massive yawner of an anti-climax.

Opposing ideas have not only been dismissed; they’ve been actively resisted, and it’s both sad and infuriating to contemplate the extent of an opportunity wasted. Apart from the solitary tangible gain of an over-priced, generically designed public area, variously known as Somnolent Estates, Rent Boy Park and Caesar’s Folly (the “official” designation is Bicentennial Park), we’ve been given a carpetbagger writer’s coffee table book to remember our rare old times and what seems like 4,762 occasions to watch as the selected don period costumes, dance the minuet, and recite the enumerated hagiography of the historic preservation code -- cookie-cutter events priced primarily to recoup the book’s lamentable costs.

It’s all safe, white-bread and oh-so-conservative, and fully appropriate for the buck-a-day extras at yet another Lewis & Clark expedition commemorative film, but it remains that the problem with making our bicentennial entirely about the city’s past, and not in any discernible way at all about our future, is that the situation begs a rather embarrassing question.

Why were our urban forefathers adept at city building for the times to come, but their modern-day ancestors are able to muster little more in terms of achievement than decay management?

You're thinking: Haven’t we come a long way during the past few years?

(We have. But what about the three decades before that?)

Downtown is revitalizing, isn’t it?

(If eating and drinking’s your thing, yes it is. If retail gains, residential enhancement, community engagement and two-way, calmed and completed streets interest you, then welcome to our default condition of perpetually self-flagellating stasis)

But Roger, don’t I look marvy dressed up as a Scribner?

(You needn’t ask me. I’ll be sober in the morning, but we’ll collectively experience this bicentennial hangover for the rest of our lives. You might direct your inquiry to that child slouching over there, assuming he’ll relinquish his iPhone)

And so, the safe and genteel rewriting wrought by the Coup d’Geriatrique winds its way toward the inevitable reenactment of New Year’s Eve, 1893, when a slew of white folks gathered somewhere amid Benedictine sandwiches and non-alcoholic cider, and chatted amiably about keeping the lower classes firmly in their place.

In the vacant lot where daughters once were paired and insider trading schemes consummated, the future is now. An empty liquor bottle meets pavement, drivers ignore pedestrians, and Farmers Market expansion plans are recycled by the same-way-every-single-time design suspects as Big Gulp cups flutter to the pavement.

Somewhere in the city, a dog barks.

BOOKS OF MY LIFE: "The Botanist and the Vintner," by Christy Campbell.

I'm the beer guy, not the wine guy, but this shouldn't be interpreted to suggest that wine doesn't interest me.

It's just that I keep my wine knowledge casual, the easier to enjoy it without the obligations and annoyances of expertise. Rather, if the wine tastes good to me, then it's good wine.

Disclaimers aside, I've always known a little bit about the European wine blight of the 19th century, when an aphid native to the Americas called phylloxera hitched a ride across the Atlantic to France on those newfangled steamships and began (a) feasting on the roots of grape vines, and (b) multiplying rapidly, coming close to destroying the wine industry on the continent in the process.

I'm almost finished reading The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World, by Christy Campbell, a British writer who tells the gripping story of the phylloxera invasion and chronicles the many years required for scientists to gather sufficient information to devise a strategy for repelling the aphid: rootstock from American vines, which enjoy a degree of evolutionary immunity to the pest. These eventually were grafted with native European vines (programs of hybridization also were pursued), reversing the tide. 

Science hasn't ever been my gig, but I'd like to think that I know how to appreciate good writing on almost any topic, and this certainly is an example. The book reads like military history grafted onto a detective story, with plenty of human foibles as part of the bargain and even a hero or three.
  
This review is from 2008, and it's superb. Thumbing through the blog from whence it comes, it's also fascinating. The whole review is reprinted here, but it seems to me that wine lovers should click through and check out Vinography.

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Book Review: The Botanist and the Vintner by Christy Campbell, reviewed by Ader (Vinography)

They say those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but many of the events of the past were so dependent upon the knowledge of the times, that there is simply no way they could ever occur again. Indeed, those of us who are alive today take certain moments in history for granted, precisely because our modern experience blinds us to the extent of the crisis that these events most certainly represented at the time.

Such is the case for the modern wine lover, who enjoys a bottle with the carefree ignorance that there was a period of time when, had things not gone quite right, civilization may have lost wine forever.

The date was 1862, just three years after the publishing of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and the people of Western Europe were just weaning themselves off of some of their more fanciful suppositions about the way the world worked. Many of the complexities of biology and botany were still shrouded in mystery (thankfully bloodletting had been abandoned by this point), which meant that the unfortunate vignerons of France were completely unprepared to deal with the utter devastation about to be wrought upon them in the form of an unusually diabolical insect that would come to be known as phylloxera vastatrix.

Christy Campbell's The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World, recounts in vivid detail the events that would unfold over the following forty years as France, and soon the rest of the wine regions of Europe, grappled with a foe they could hardly see, let alone understand. These events, and the various personalities that emerged to both explain and do battle with the insect that would eventually kill nearly every single grape vine in continental Europe make for an epic drama that is as fascinating as it is important for our understanding of the wine that we enjoy even today.

A single glance at the bibliography and footnotes of Campbell's impeccably researched book demonstrates the sheer accomplishment this narrative represents. For no other reason than the author's ability to puzzle out the precise sequence of events that began with a parcel of just a few American grapevines planted in the backyard of a French nursery and ends four decades later with a scene of devastation worthy of Hollywood's best, the book would be a triumph of scholarship. But Campbell has managed to do more than simply connect the faded dots of correspondence and news stories across two centuries and several continental wars. The Botanist and the Vintner brings to life the enormity of the struggle, confusion, and desperation of a continent that is forced to watch its treasured wine industry literally wither on the vine, as well as the exhausted relief (or continued denial) of a people who finally find a solution.

With elegant and vivid prose, Campbell does an admirable job of constructing a real narrative out of what were doubtless a quagmire of confused, frantic, and altogether chaotic communications between and among the many players in this turn-of-the-century drama. At times, however, the thread that connects the several botanists and the many vintners gets lost amongst the jumbled events of the times. I emerged from the reverie of the compelling story not knowing exactly which of the several heroes did what, or about when they did it, but that hardly matters. Neither the strength of the story nor the quality of the book hang on a precise reconstruction of the relationships and actions of the characters, as the plot remains inexorably clear, and compelling, from ignorance to devastation to rebirth.

It's the devastation, and the way that so many tried to deal with it that proves to be some of the most fascinating and entertaining stuff of the book. The farmers of France do battle with their adversary as best they can, and it's hard not to feel empathy for a people fighting an enemy that is practically invisible to them, not to mention so utterly complex and sophisticated in its biology that it might as well be an advanced alien race. A member of the aphid family, Phylloxera has a lifecycle so complex it is difficult to understand even today. It manifests in roughly 10 different forms throughout its cycle, including eggs, larvae, winged, non-winged asexual, non-winged sexual, aboveground crawlers, belowground crawlers, and more. Capable of reproducing on the scale of billions within just a few months, it is the ultimate vine killing machine.

Its many forms and sheer ferocity drove French winegrowers (as well as many entrepreneurial souls) to devise the most amazing, and sometimes hilarious, variety of attacks against the insect: hazel-branch crosses gilded with flowers and prayers to ancient gods; roots drenched with white wine; toads should be buried near the blighted vines; strong smelling plants should be planted as cover crops; leaves should be doused with cow's urine, copper sulfate, powdered tobacco or walnut leaves; whale oil and petrol should be applied to the roots; hot sealing wax on the leaves; crushed bone and sulphuric acid on the ground; moles, crayfish, magnetism, "electrical commotions"; and countless other "miracle cures."

In the end, the scientific method and deductions using Darwin's new principles lead to the grafting of traditional French grape varieties onto American rootstocks that have evolved resistance to the insect, and the world's wine industry can breathe a sigh of relief. The happy ending leaves the reader marveling at the perseverance and ingenuity of the many protagonists of the times, but also at the fact that they succeeded at all. This is one of those few books about wine that nearly anyone can enjoy, just as it easily deepens a wine lovers appreciation for the source of their passion.

BOOKS OF MY LIFE: Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was a slog, but thanks to Bob, I dunnit.

The irony is so delicious I might just dine on it for weeks, because all those looters, parasites and second-raters populating Ayn Rand's barely readable Atlas Shrugged turn out to be precisely the same ones citing her novel today as their primary formative influence as they busily calculate the price of human life compared to the bare necessities of accumulating capital and enhancing profits amid our cancerous late-stage capitalism.

COVID-19 shortly will become their own personalized Taggart Tunnel. I don't want anyone to die, but these real-life moochers need to go far, far away where they can live happily ever after making mad, passionate love to their fattened wallets.

John Galt, my pasty white ass.

However, perhaps even bizarrely, I've read Atlas Shrugged. It's actually one of the most influential 32 books of my life (a list that needs updating this summer). How I came to read Atlas Shrugged is a story worth retelling, though only briefly.

Rest assured that I didn't choose the novel for leisurely beach reading, or because of a fondness for its mentally unbalanced author, her bizarre message or the self-indulgent cult politics it spawned: Woman meets married man and falls for the steel he invented, and they don't live happily ever because her real spirit animal is another guy who is stopping the engine of the world to lead a rich dude's revolution so that millions will starve, and in the process, somehow prove his point.

No, the reason I read Atlas Shrugged is that the late, great Bob Youngblood, my literature teacher as a senior in high school, commanded me to read it in two weeks flat or risk failing his course, this edict coming after I'd devoured the class assignment (Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations) in a single weekend, then openly taunted Bob on Monday about it not being sufficiently challenging.

"Fine, you little shit": I was kept after class to be informed that if I was so incredibly bright and advanced -- if I wasn't willing to help my classmates understand Dickens -- a book like Atlas Shrugged should be the ideal, advanced challenge I so evidently craved.

Scoffing, I agreed ... and got schooled, hearing Bob's message loud and clear long before the infamous section in Rand's novel where Galt commandeers the planet's radio frequencies and delivers the single best cure for insomnia ever conceived by a speech maker. It asphyxiates me even now, 43 years later.

Atlas Shrugged was in fact completed, the college prep course passed and Bob's letter-perfect point very well taken ... and retained. I hope I never have to read that book, ever again.

R.I.P. Bob Youngblood, 1943 - 2016.