Covid-19: the curve is really worrying

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coronavirus Switzerland Vaud

Since my last post, the number of people who have been diagnosed with the virus has continued to spike unabated in this country (Switzerland). For the canton I live in, Vaud, from 695 on Wednesday 18th March (the date I published my last post) we are now, i.e. on Monday 23rd March, at 1,880. The 2,000 mark will be crossed tomorrow, barring some miracle.

I chose to display only the four worst hit cantons; source:  https://dashcoch.herokuapp.com/

So Vaud is the canton with the largest number of detected covid-19 carriers, although it is Ticino (which is closest to Italy and which employs many cross-border workers from that country) where the death toll is the worst:  48 versus 16 for Vaud. This reading is still nothing in comparison with the staggering numbers of deaths recorded in Italy, Spain or Iran, but the death toll in Switzerland (118 as at 23rd March) is bound to get worse.

Source:  https://dashcoch.herokuapp.com/

It is really disheartening to think that as early as tomorrow the above map will show several hundred cases more, presumably spread mostly between the cantons of Vaud (VD), Ticino (TI), Geneva (GE), Zurich (ZH), Wallis (VS), Berne (BE) and Basle City (BS).

Let us hope that this country does not get to experience as harrowing numbers as those which are being recorded by Iran:

One Iranian dies of coronavirus every 10 minutes, 50 get infected every hour – health ministry
19 Mar, 2020 14:18
https://www.rt.com/news/483508-iran-coronavirus-deaths-infected/

Coronavirus – worrying spike here in Vaud

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coronavirus Vaud Switzerland

On 5th March, I realised that the number of newly detected carriers of the coronavirus here in Switzerland had started to show worrying increases:

On Saturday 7th March, as I extended my condolences to a neighbour who is active in local politics and having spent 40 minutes with him discussing various topics,  including the coronavirus, I became even more worried as I was under the impression that both the cantonal (Vaud) and communal (Lausanne) authorities were not taking the risk of a pandemic outbreak in the canton seriously enough. So that the following day, while holding my daily Skype conversation with my wife (presently in Southeast Asia), I confided to her that I feared that we were lagging behind the curve in this country with regard to the precautionary measures that ought to have been taken to contain the spread of this much-feared virus. On the 12th, I told my wife that the only possibility to limit an explosion in the number of people contaminated here would be to put everybody off work for a fortnight, except for, of course, those employed in essential services (medical staff, the police, the firebrigade people, etc.).

However, mea culpa too, as it was only on Friday 13th March that I started to warn relatives and friends of the danger of being contaminated based on my own back-of-the-envelope calculations and that I strongly urged them to stay at home as much as possible (limiting shopping outings to once a week), as I was still more interested in events going on in the Middle East (including the spread of the coronavirus in Iran) and elsewhere than in what was taking place in my own country.

On the same day, the Swiss federal government announced in a press conference a new set of measures to be followed by all those living in Switzerland (e.g. barring entry to anybody coming from Italy except for cross-border workers; forbidding public and private gatherings of more than 100 people, etc. — see the French version of the communiqué I archived here).

With the leap in the number of newly detected carriers reported on Sunday (EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY-ONE), Monday saw a scramble for which canton would issue the most stringent set of measures (as regards public and private gatherings, it was Geneva, which limited them to only 5 people) and some cantons, including this one (i.e. Vaud) even issued two sets of measures on the same day (the first set, the second)! Most cantonal measures which were proclaimed on Monday 16th March were superseded by those of the Swiss federal government, which came out with a new set of measures whilst holding a new press conference at 5pm on the same evening.

However, the curve has only steepened here in Vaud, with as many as FOUR HUNDRED people having been tested positive in this canton alone between Sunday 15th and Tuesday 17th March.

So I fear that unless we see some drop in the number of new cases reported tomorrow and in the days immediately after, hospitals in this canton will not be able to cope with such huge increases for very long.

To anybody reading this post, please spare a prayer for Italy and Iran, which have been hit even much, much harder.

The frontpage of the Italian national news agency which I archived for 18th March:  https://web.archive.org/web/20200319050637/http://www.ansa.it/english/

Iran’s supreme leader issues fatwa banning ‘unnecessary travel’ as coronavirus death toll mounts
17 Mar, 2020 15:35
[…]
If the citizenry continues to disregard the health guidelines issued by the authorities, the situation could easily spin out of control, Iranian scientists have warned. Iran will see ‘only’ 120,000 infections and 12,000 deaths if the people actually stick to the health guidelines, a study by Iran’s Sharif University of Technology indicates.

Complete disregard of any guidance, however, is likely to collapse the country’s entire healthcare system – in which case, four million cases and 3.5 million deaths are likely to occur, they stated.

Iran is among the countries hardest-hit by the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, it saw a 13-percent increase in the death toll, which is nearing 1,000.
[…]
https://www.rt.com/news/483337-iran-coronavirus-travel-ban/

Liz Specht, ‘I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure due to #COVID19 because they simply haven’t run the numbers yet.’, 7th March 2020   https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909

“Flattening the Curve” is a deadly delusion
Joscha Bach
Mar 14 · 9 min read
[…]
There will be some countries that do not have the necessary infrastructure to implement severe containment measures, which include widespread testing, quarantines, movement restrictions, travel restrictions, work restrictions, supply chain reorganization, school closures, childcare for people working in critical professions, production and distribution of protective equipment and medical supplies. This means that some countries will stomp out the virus and others will not. In a few months from now, the world will turn into red zones and green zones, and almost all travel from red zones into green zones will come to a halt, until an effective treatment for COVID-19 is found.
Flattening the curve is not an option for the United States, for the UK or Germany. Don’t tell your friends to flatten the curve. Let’s start containment.
https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727

No celebration for the summer solstice this year again

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Menhirs in Switzerland

[…] Hecataeus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. […] And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. […] The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished […]

At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the cithara and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades, expressing in this manner his delight in his successes. And the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreadae, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family.

Diodorus Siculus, Book II, 47-48 (trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library edition, 1935)

Here I am late mid-summer’s night (i.e. 21st June), in front of my desk computer, when today I should have gone to the canton of Grisons or, better, to England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany or even Italy. Why? Because the summer solstice was a special time of the year for the inhabitants of this country (as well as for those of the countries just listed), not thousands of years but maybe as few as two or three centuries ago – see the paragraph about the church of Elm (canton of Grisons) towards the end of this entry.

According to my Shorter Oxford English dictionary, the noun solstice is derived from two Latin words: the noun sol (the sun) and the verb sistere (to stand still). However, the solstice (both the astronomical concept and the accompanying celebrations) predates the Roman civilisation by at least two millennia and it was not limited to Europe (e.g. the Sumerians, the Egyptians, etc.).

Dolmen, Bugibba Temple, Malta, 3000 to 2000 BC, 3rd March 2011

Yet I am not really interested in experiencing the summer solstice anywhere else than at a prehistoric site here in Europe (so not even at Göbekli Tepe) because the beauty of megalithic* structures has fascinated me ever since I saw Stonehenge for the first time many, many years ago – even though I did not get to visit the site on that particular occasion. By the way, this infatuation with European megaliths also rules out the dozens and dozens of Christian churches which were built on pagan places of worship – and in some cases on foundations dating back to prehistoric times – and which ended up incorporating allusions to or even direct solstice ‘practices’ into their own architecture. This also excludes places like Lascaux, a world heritage site famous for its prehistoric paintings, because even though its ‘altar’ is claimed to be illuminated on the summer solstice with the golden rays of the sunset, Lascaux is a cave, not a megalithic structure (anyhow the site is no longer open to the public).

When last year I came across a poster advertising the musical celebrations which are traditionally held in Lausanne to celebrate the solstice (Fête de la Musique, or Music Day in English) together with another poster announcing some forthcoming classical music concert, it struck me that there must have been much more behind the launch of the event than the intention to simply stage a musical celebration of mid-summer’s night. Confirmation of this I found in the history of Fête de la Musique, which is why I decided that if I were ever to do anything again in connection with the 21st of June, it would have to take place at a prehistoric site, in connection with the ancient custom of celebrating the summer equinox.

Standing stones at Lutry (canton of Vaud)

So on the eve of the summer solstice last year, I found myself wondering whether to get up very early to reach the prehistoric site nearest to home, an alignment of menhirs at Lutry, the village which marks the beginning of the world heritage region of Lavaux, just before the first rays of the sun would chase the shadows of the night away from this set of upright prehistoric stones. However, I recalled the words of a lady I had met on a Celtic Festival held at La Riponne in Lausanne some fourteen months earlier, who having told me that she had lived just opposite the alignment of menhirs had answered my question as to whether she had been able to feel any telluric effects from the stones by a resounding ‘no way given that they had set the stones back up in any old fashion’…

Many authors have pointed out that the stone-assemblers who left us the thousands of menhirs and the scores and scores of dolmens that are to be admired across several European countries (and on other continents too) did not erect them at random, i.e. without due consideration to the physical properties of the terrain – this is why some authors even claim that such structures can heal both people and animals (e.g. Dr René Bouchet, La Guérison par les courants telluriques, Éditions Trajectoire, 2009)!

The problem in Switzerland is that there are not many prehistoric megaliths left which have not been tinkered with in one way or the other, so that any telluric properties that the stones might have had in the past could well have been wrecked forever. For instance, the stone alignments at Clendy and Corcelles-près-Concise, both located towards the north-eastern extremity of the canton of Vaud (more precisely, on the south-western tip of Lake Neuchâtel), are not in their original state, either having been pushed back up and even moved in 1986 for the former or having received a replacement menhir already in the 19th century for the latter.

Standing stones at La Mutta (Grisons)

As I had not planned any trips well beforehand, I found myself facing the same conundrum yesterday night (20th June), being far too late, for example, to register for the summer solstice at Parc la Mutta, Falera, in the canton of Grisons (Graubünden in German), which is by far Switzerland’s largest stone circle. Located on the eastern end of Switzerland and in a mountainous region, the canton of Grisons is less easy to access than, say, the Grandson area, south west of Lake Neuchâtel.

This is why I believe that it would be almost better, should I decide to celebrate the summer solstice next year, to go to the British Isles (say Newgrange in Ireland or England, Scotland), Italy (sacred well at Paulilatino, Sardinia), Germany (spending the night in the the vaulted rock at Externsteine) or France (too many sites to list here)…

Otherwise I could settle for a non-prehistoric site on one of the other equinox dates (vernal or autumnal):

There are two days in the spring and the summer in Elm when sunrise is especially eagerly anticipated. Or to be precise, the spectacle takes place shortly before sunrise. For it is then that the sun shines through the Martin’s Hole directly onto the Church of Elm.

https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/martinsloch-the-sunny-window.html

* Megalith: a large stone, especially one forming (part of) a prehistoric monument (SOED, electronic version)

Some links

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/united-kingdom/articles/summer-solstice-events-and-pagan-sites-around-britain/

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/topics.php?countries=1

La Pierre aux Fées, Reignier, France

Unusual accommodation for a special birthday

[All names and meta data intentionally removed except for the very last picture.]

‘Far from the maddening crowd’, so goes the title of a famous novel written by Thomas Hardy. This is also how one of my best friends chose to celebrate his fiftieth birthday a week ago. The venue he opted for was an old farm building in the Jura mountains, approximately an hour’s walk from the nearest town, a favourite with the Genevese in winter when there is enough snow for people to be out enjoying the cold, but generally immaculate, fluffy and deep white which it is also so nice to listen to one’s feet plod through.

[Notice the container for carrying milk with the strap hanging loose]

My wife was still recovering from the flu, so she decided not to join us. Anyhow I am not sure that she would have enjoyed it as much as I did, as there was no running water, and therefore probably not even a toilet in the building itself. In addition, we had to sleep in a cold room, just under the roof, because it had not been heated for many days, as the building is uninhabited in winter.

[‘La nuit, tous les chats sont gris.’; French saying.]

As one of the participants’ walking ability is slightly impaired and in fact I was not in my best shape either (my right knee has been troubling me since my first run in the snow mid-January), it took us more than three hours to reach our lodgings for the night. What is more, before that, we had to plough through the snow in the dark – even if the other members of the party all seemed to have far more powerful headlamps than the one I was wearing…

[Morning chore: drawing water from the well in front of the farm]

One of the first things we did once we had reached this high pasture farm (cows graze in the area in summer) was to haul some water out of the well with a bucket (we needed it for the cooking, the tea and the dish-washing) and then get the stove to spread some heat into the kitchen/dining-room as well as into the adjacent bedroom (fortunately, there was also an electrical heater in the bedroom), both located at the far-end of the building, just under the roof (shaped a bit like a Mayan pyramid).

In keeping with the rustic quality of our lodgings for the night (and also because the food had to be carried by back, mainly by the ‘master of ceremonies’), the birthday meal was very simple: potatoes and raclette cheese, in addition to some organic champagne produced in Geneva and some white wine from the Valais and Geneva’s countryside. Fortunately, the ‘birthday boy’ did not have to carry the machine for melting the cheese as there was one there – as you would expect from any self-respecting kitchen belonging to a building where cows are milked in summer.

These places are also called cartnotzet; they tend to be associated with bottles…

So although it was certainly not the largest gathering of people I had seen for a birthday held by this long-time friend of mine, it was certainly the most intimate. It was also the birthday party during which I saw him work the most, poor him. This was also because he had been lent the key to this high pasture farm as his father knew the person in charge of the mountain association to which the farm belongs. This is why the ‘birthday boy’ made sure the following morning that we would leave the place in exactly the same state as we had found it – not, of course, that we would have not done so had he not known the person who had lent him the key to the place.

[The bedroom]

Unfortunately, the ‘birthday boy’ had to be back in Geneva by 1:30 pm the following day, so it was a bit of a rush to get back to the car park the next morning. However, I shall certainly look back on this short mountain excursion, overnight stay and birthday party with fond memories: the sense of camaraderie and the cheerful mood shared by all of the participants plus the cosy feeling the farm lodgings seemed to exude all made for a highly memorable experience.

***

In summer, most high pasture farms (‘chalets d’alpage’ in French) will sell refreshments or snacks (at a place called ‘buvette’ in French); some even provide (affordable) accommodation, for example at this chalet d’alpage in the Alpes vaudoises (and with pictures showing plenty of snow, courtesy of the Internet Archive, so the page might take a minute or two to download).

Here is a website for locating chalets d’alpage in Vaud, Valais and in other cantons with a buvette: http://www.buvette-alpage.ch.

***

For my next pair of snow boots, I shall make sure that I purchase a brand that manufactures them in Europe (not in some country which never sees any snow)… Strangely, one of the participants had experienced the same problem with exactly the same brand.

Visit your local library

Tags

high energy places in French-speaking Switzerland, sacred geometry

I simply love books*. Not only do I own hundreds of them, but I continue to buy books at a rate which is not really sustainable… As we are fortunate to live in a city which is ‘book friendly’ (in terms of the number of bookshops, libraries, publishing houses, etc.), in an attempt to keep my passion for buying books somewhat in check, I try to borrow as many as possible from the university (and public) library (whose city centre branch is only some 30 minutes away from home on foot, at place de la Riponne) or from the municipal libraries. As for the latter, I tend to go for the main branch, whose location is also pretty central, being adjacent to place Chauderon – one of Lausanne’s main open space areas in the older part of the city.

Borrowed in 2006, 2007 or 2008; purchased in March 2015; look up Masaru Emoto.

From the main municipal library, I tend to borrow books on computing, nature, politics or societal topics, history, archaeology, sports, the arts, travel guides or books loosely classified under the umbrella label of the esoteric (with holdings as heteroclite to comprise a biography of one of the ‘fathers’ of ‘free energy’, Viktor Schauberger). I came to the latter category as I was trying to find information as wide ranging as possible on water a number of years ago, even though I had borrowed or purchased books belonging to the esoteric category probably some twenty years ago.

A particularly pesky piece of malware from Asia, not Russia, for once. 😉

On 2^nd January as I was trying to locate the PDF version of a book still protected by copyright laws (reminder: a book falls into the public domain normally 70 years after the death of its author) from the computer of my parents (I had wanted to make a point more forcefully by providing evidence from printed material, i.e. in book format as opposed to web pages), I got my parents’ computer infested with various malware applications which were extremely hard to remove (because they would download again whenever the computer would connect to the Internet).

Books borrowed on esoteric subjects

Having failed to remove the malware (even though I had used the trial versions of three malware ‘killers’), I had to go back to my parents to sort out this problem after they had called me to inform me that they were getting prompts for fake IT technical support. Fearing that I would have to tinker with the registry of Windows (which I am not too familiar with), I decided to borrow a book on the subject from the municipal library at Chauderon. I also decided to borrow a study of a medieval church in the Jura chain of mountains I would like to visit in the format of an A4 novel with some very interesting illustrations (click here for the book’s website, in French). Housed in the section ‘sacred architecture’, I stumbled across a book I had never seen, entitled The energy grid of sacred places (in French).

Even though I am still a little suspicious of unorthodox science, I fully share the intuition of the English novelist David Herbert Lawrence, who wrote that:

Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarised in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like, but the spirit of place is a great reality.

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, volume 2, page 17

Screenshot from 94-lieux-sacres-et-particuliers-de-suisse-et-france-voisine

I also know that the region of Switzerland where we live is replete with such places. The above screenshot, taken from the page devoted to high energy places in Suisse romande and neighbouring France, posted on the website of an author of some beautiful books (I am tempted to use the epithet ‘unique’) on sacred places and buildings, their energy, their architecture from an esoteric perspective, should certainly put the point through – as far as such claims are concerned, that is, because, of course, everybody is entitled to remain sceptical and have their opinion on the matter; it is more a question of having had or of not having had the opportunity to experience D.H. Lawrence’s ‘vital effluence’ for themselves.

Stéphane Cardinaux’s books on sacred geometries; borrowed many times; purchased  in January 2015

***

Should you think that esoteric books (with beautiful illustrations) emerged only with the manufactured, ‘subversive’ (CIA-backed) hippie, counter- and Christian-shunning cultures of the sixties, seventies, eighties, etc., think again because there were plenty of such books as far back as the Middle Ages (technically these were not books, but codices – plural of the Latin word codex). One particular example is the so-called Voynich Manuscript (now part of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library):

[…] Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” the world’s most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich […]

http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300217230/voynich-manuscript

Picture search for the Voynich Manuscript on Yandex

To put an end to an entry which might become a little long winded otherwise, I thought I would conclude with something in this vein:

Visit your local library as you are bound to find a book that will expand your knowledge, or even your consciousness, this being without the mediation of an electronic device such as a television set, the screen of some computer or even the narrow display of your so-called smartphone…

* I am also married to an ex library manager…

no more newspaper headlines near home

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Demise of the printed press

The still ongoing consolidation of the press in this canton will make at least one person happy: me!

Newspaper boxes, Lausanne, Sunday 29th Jan 2017

In what I believe to be a totally misguided attempt at forcing readers to switch to the electronic versions of the two most-read newspapers in the Swiss canton where I live (Vaud) with a view to saving money, Ringier, the Swiss-German group that owns 24 Heures and Le Matin (issued respectively Monday to Friday and on a daily basis), has decided to stop making these newspapers available from coin-operated boxes. Except for the Sunday edition of Le Matin, readers now have to buy either of the two main Lausanne-based newspapers from their newsagent or ‘go digital’ (i.e. subscribe to the online version). This means that newspaper boxes and the headline sheets placed just under them (or inside the box) are likely to disappear from the streets of Lausanne in the near future.

The choice is yours!

Leaving aside my firm belief that this will diminish the respective readerships further* and my suspicion that this also has to do with the present war on cash, I hereby wish to extend my sympathy for those whose job has been or will be axed (for instance, the early birds who would stack the many newspaper boxes scattered around Lausanne and at many, many other locations in the canton on weekdays and collect the coins) and the journalists likely to be let go of, as with a further erosion of newspaper sales, it will only be a matter of time before another round of job cuts is made. The more so as on the 23rd of last month, the same Swiss-German group announced that today (i.e. on 2nd February) it would be pulling the plug on the only current affair magazine published in French-speaking Switzerland, L’Hebdo, which was founded in Lausanne in 1981.

The migration of news and information from paper to electronic formats (available from television sets, various computing devices, telephones) has certainly taken its toll on the printed press here in Switzerland and in particular in the French-speaking regions. Worse, the future looks very bleak for the press in this part of the country given that it seems to be trapped in a vicious circle of continuously dwindling readership numbers, ever-lower advertising revenues and, as a result, ever-poorer journalistic quality.

The robots and Matt Damon are coming! (14th Jan 2017)

For my part, even though I reiterate that I feel deeply sorry for those affected by the redundancies, I must admit that I shall certainly not miss the boxes’ sensationalistic, sometimes even crass, headlines printed onto a A6 or B5-sized sheet hanging loose under each box and penned to grab the attention of the passer-by with the hope of getting them to purchase a copy of either newspaper belonging to the same group.

Existential question: cat meows (miaows with an American accent), 12^th March 2016

This is because far too often, I would find the subject matter plastered across the placard either to be trivial, irrelevant to my life/concerns or that the headline was titillating the reader in the wrong direction, for instance, by pandering to the reader’s baser instincts (e.g. the voyeuristic streak in humans). In addition, I came across several posters most likely designed to add to the current climate of tension between the (post-)Christian and Islamic worlds. In particular, I found the following headline poster especially objectionable:

Jihadists at the gate? Haute-Savoie is the region of France on Geneva’s southern border, 11th March 2016

To cut a long story short, this recent, additional cost-cutting measure by a media group based miles and miles from home means one source of mental pollution removed from my life…

*The unstated objective is probably to have at most two Lausanne-based newspapers in the group’s portfolio, either of the two quasi-tabloids 24 Heures and Le Matin plus Le Temps, a slightly higher quality title owned jointly by the same Swiss-German group and a well-known German media conglomerate.

External link

‘As print journalism declines, fate of sidewalk newspaper boxes is unclear’,  Max Kutner,  Newsweek, 20 Dec. 2015

Frankenstein exhibition: yes or no?

Tags

Frankenstein

Statue of Dr Frankenstein’s monster, Plainpalais (Geneva, 31st May 2015)

Almost as if to make up for the fact that until very recently there was no local official recognition of the Genevese background to the Frankenstein story (see photo above), on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the novel’s ‘birth’ in a mansion in the Genevese countryside during a stormy night in June 1816 a major exhibition on the cultural context of Mary Shelley’s work at Geneva’s ‘Book Temple’ (the Fondation Bodmer), a cycle of conferences exploring the story’s relevance to contemporary bioethics organised by a foundation concerned with the impact of medicine on man and society (the Fondation Brocher), a forthcoming colloquium at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Letters (‘Frankenstein, le Démiurge des Lumières’ – ‘Frankenstein, demiurge of the Enlightenment’) were commissioned and either are still being held (until 9^th October for the former) or are scheduled to take place later this year (early December for the academic colloquium). What is more, the small city of Vevey, located near the other end of Lake Léman, also organised an event in connection with the summer of 1816 to celebrate Lord Byron’s literary association with the most visited monument in French-speaking Switzerland, the castle of Chillon:

Strangely for somebody who started to build a collection of books relating to Mary Shelley’s story as a university student (the novel was compulsory reading for first-year English literature students at my alma mater) and who many, many years ago even contemplated setting up a website* in honour of this novel which has held such a powerful a grip on the collective imagination since it was published nearly two hundred years ago (in 1818 and there were two other editions during Mary Shelley’s lifetime), so far I have not attended any of these Frankenstein-related events. In part because of a lack of time; in part because I have become a little wary of the ‘interpretational grid’ the exhibition at the Bodmeriana seems to be espousing – for instance, notice the allusions to very contemporary concerns here in Europe that have found their way in the issues allegedly raised by Frankenstein (climate change, the refugee crisis, etc.):

To be straightforward, I also fear that the Bodmer exhibition may have dismissed non-traditional or overlooked source material for the genesis of Frankenstein, e.g. the Kabbalistic story of the Golem, ‘conspiracist’ views of the French Revolution (Mary Shelley’s husband had read Barruel’s Memoirs illustrating the history of Jacobinism after his expulsion from the University of Oxford**), the Frankist Movement*** as the most likely source for the ‘free love philosophy’ Lord Byron, the Shelleys and others in their entourage were either advocating or putting into practice, etc.

The Genevese/Lake Léman background: a magnet for the Romantic writers

Of course, only a visit to ‘Frankenstein: Creation of Darkness’ will confirm or disprove my apprehension that this major exhibition will have failed to institutionalise ‘darker’ interpretations of Mary Shelley’s Gothic tale. However, I had better make up my mind fast about when to do so because I only have a few days left before the exhibition closes its doors and the manuscripts, first editions, paintings, et cætera are sent back to England or to other countries…

Links

• ‘Frankenstein: Creation of Darkness’, Fondation Bodmer (until 9th October 2016)
• ‘Un dialogue entre littérature et science’ [programme in French], Fondation Brocher (last conference is to be held on 14th October 2016)
• ‘Frankenstein, le Démiurge des Lumières’, colloquium (in French) organised by the  University of Geneva’s Faculty of Letters (plus some links to other conferences or events held for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frankenstein, at the University of Geneva or elsewhere)
• Forthcoming exhibition at Musée Rath in Geneva on the Gothic imagination since Frankenstein, 2nd December 2016 until 19th March 2017
• Frankenstein cinematographic adaptations (Cineclub of the Faculty of Letters)
• ‘Human head transplant edges closer to reality: Chinese surgeon teams up with Italian doctor to perform controversial procedure in 2017’, Daily Mail, 9th  September 2015

Footnotes

*I abandoned both the Frankensteinia book-collecting and the website project in 2001; as regards the latter, I had started with a bibliography of works on Frankenstein, available here (please note that the page might take a minute or two to download on to your computer as it is a version that was saved by the Internet Archive).

** Mary Shelley’s (at the time future) husband had read about Abbé Barruel’s claims regarding the French Revolution (page 63 of James Rieger’s The Mutiny Within: the Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley, New York, 1967):*** Frankism and ‘Women’s lib’ [table of contents of ‘Women and the Messianic heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666-1816’]

Funny metalwork high up in the (Swiss) mountains

I caught sight of these funny pieces of metalwork on two (out of three) trips to the mountains this summer, so I thought that I could use WordPress as a repository for such pictures. The beauty of publishing material on the Internet is that additions are ever so simple to make.  Hopefully, many more pictures of funny metalwork will be published on this page based on future mountain trips…

Three monkeys near Belalp (region of Aletsch, Valais/Wallis)

Chameleon on mountain wall, Pas de chèvres (region of Arolla, Valais/Wallis)

My encounter with literary ponerology

Highly ironic autograph because this book indeed allowed me to ‘evolve’, but probably not as the author had intended.

On the first Saturday of September last year, I attended a lecture given at a literary festival in a small town near home (Morges) which literally changed my Weltanschauung (view of the world). Little was I expecting that a French science fiction writer whom I had become interested in after having stumbled across a bibliography he had posted on the Internet under a pseudonym on a subject I was researching (group think, strategies of manipulation in the media) would allow me to experience an ‘apocalyptic’ moment – to use a metaphor, it was as if the blinkers that had covered my eyes all my life were removed by some benevolent hand.

In a way, it was the culmination of several years of trying to make sense of the events presented in the media since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran and especially of the mental conditioning we are being subjected to here in the ‘West’ with regard to the Islamic world, but it was also for me the realisation that under the veneer of media-manufactured literary respectability and the trendiness of ‘New Age’ topics are to be found elements of a less savoury nature. As such, it was my very first encounter with ponerology masquerading as literature (ponēros means evil in ancient Greek) and it marked the start of my emancipation from this conditioning – looking back, there was definitely a ‘before and after’ 4th-6th September 2015 ‘Books on the quay, Morges’, which is why I abstained from being exposed to more of the same fiendishly malignant brainwashing this year:

‘Another tomorrow is possible.’

Notes

• The origin of the word ‘apocalypse’ is surprising to say the least: it is derived from old French and modern French from Ecclesiastical Latin apocalypsis from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein uncover, from apo- + kaluptein cover – according to the OED, shorter version.

• New Age: 2 A broad movement characterised by alternative approaches to (or rejection of) traditional Western culture and interest in spirituality, mysticism, holism and environmentalism; the culture or philosophy of this movement. [same source]

I have yet to expand the book review I wrote roughly a year ago on this highly disturbing piece of eschatological propaganda I had bought at ‘Books on the quay, Morges’ and read during this literary festival; however, this would entail a second reading of ‘The voice of the earth’, for which I still lack any enthusiasm (to use an understatement)…

 

Lots and lots of rain this spring

We have had so much rain this year that it makes me wonder whether there might not be some truth to the claim made by some that the weather is deliberately being tinkered with… Somehow this brings up to my mind a passage from a science-fiction novel I had read about in an academic book published in 2003 and which is bent on discrediting (no, casting opprobrium on) some of the conspiracies that were circulating in the USA around the time it was written; the quote is as follows:

I can see it now … frozen in an energy crisis, saddened by the Watergates of the world, dying from environmental
pollution, starving from food shortages, frightened of a global nuclear war, sick of the moral decay, afraid of the daily news, bankrupted by global monetary fluctuations, unemployed from economic depressions, crowded by the ever present birth rate, frightened by the suspicion that a global weather catastrophe was about to happen … mankind … would have been ready for ‘Alternative Three.’

Stan Deyo, The Cosmic Conspiracy, rev. ed. (Kempton, Ill.: Adventures Unlimited, 1994), quoted in Michael Barkun, A culture of conspiracy (page 59), University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003.

Rather than being stuck with this negative memory, I think that I am more likely to remember the feeling that I was enjoying a moment of quasi transcendental beauty when I was contemplating these queens of the meadows in Préalpes vaudoises as the sun was about to set on the last Saturday of May.

Believe me, to paraphrase quite freely a wise Christian theologian from the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux, there is more truth in nature than in books [aliquid amplius invenies in silvis quam in libris; ligna et lapides docebunt te quod a magistris audire non possis]…

This despite the fact that I like to plan my next set of excursions (should the weather become sunnier) with the help of books: