Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable History Breaching Space and Time.

First of all, Thinking Ape Blues is back! Nobody was kinder to us when we first began than Mark Poutenis, and so nothing is better than seeing this comic back on the web – nifty!
Now, Pericles. Of course, I’ve gone right by the sage advice, the beautiful oration, the deft handling of state, and decided to nitpick on two minor points – one of which is probably true, and the other of which is largely based on rumor and the pens of humorous playwrights. The first is that the glory of the Athenian state, and the relative stability during the Periclean period, were largely brought about as a result of Pericles’s inter-Greek protection racket. Okay, racket is a strong word – the smaller city states sent regular quantities of money to Athens on the understanding that Athens would use it to maintain an army for the general defense of Greece. Pericles, seeing that the money came to more than he needed to sustain the army, and not wanting to send it back, decided to spend it on Making Athens Rad, the building boom all but eliminating unemployment and quieting civil unrest, allowing Pericles uncontested control of government and giving the rest of Western Civilization something to marvel at down to the present day.
Now, for the dodgier bit. Plutarch includes it in his work on Pericles, though reluctantly. There was this remarkable woman, Aspasia, who was renowned for beauty, intelligence, and elocution. Many Athenian statesmen are on record as having gone to her for instruction – though whether that’s a euphemism or not I don’t think we’ll ever know. She was from Miletus, which was constantly at war with Samos. Athens had been called in to negotiate a peace and, when Samos persisted in pressing Miletus against Athenian orders, Pericles rolled out an entire fleet and land army to crush Samos, the conflict ultimately ending with the razing of that city’s walls and the paying of a massive indemnity. The vigor of the assault was taken by comedic writers to be only explainable because of Pericles’s desire to please his lover, Aspasia. The victory parade Pericles celebrated after his return was bitterly remarked upon, as were the casualties incurred during the “attacking of an ally,” as it was seen. That is the sum of the evidence – that the action was out of character for Pericles, and against the wishes of Athens, and that Aspasia happened to have been born in Miletus. Pretty flimsy, but there it is.
The consequences, however, were immense. Between the protection scheme and this newest bit of Throwing Their Weight Around, everybody had pretty much had enough of Athens by this point, and were now biding their time, leading soon to the Peloponnesian War, and thence the precipitous decline of Athens.
– Count Dolby von Luckner

The American Revolution was uniquely gifted in the number of its leaders who were not hideously deformed. The French Revolution less so. Marat’s skin disease, compounded with his reluctance to change clothes. Mirabeau’s portliness and (don’t let his wikipedia portrait fool you) gargoyle-like features. Robespierre’s skeletal creepiness. And then our friend Danton – immense, face ravaged by pox marks. When he was an infant, his mother couldn’t nurse him, so they used a cow instead. A bull wandered by, somehow became incensed by the scene, and trampled him, splitting his lip. Nose broken six years later by another, presumably different, bull. Nonetheless, he was a spell-binding orator and one of the key figures in the French Revolution as long as he kept one step ahead of its logic, one of its greatest sacrifices when finally he could not.
Beethoven similarly suffered from small pox. Recent studies of a hair sample that had been preserved in a locket revealed that he had literally HUNDREDS of times more lead in his body than an average human, meaning that he was either that bad-ass and ate it like corn flakes or that it is in the forefront of Things That Killed/Encrazied Him.
The film I’m thinking of is the one where Depardieu played Danton – I haven’t watched it since high school, when I checked it out of the library (a VHS tape, by jove!) after reading Buechner’s play. I thought it pretty awesome at the time.
– Count Dolby von Luckner

I am coming off a mightily satisfactory winter celebration – The Countess got me a ridiculously awesome kaiser helmet and, strapping on a pair of aviator goggles and waving about a light saber, I’ve been having a fine time chasing the kids about the house as Darth Kaiser. Now, there is much to be said about Ms. Carrington, but first…
I have finally had time to sit down and work through my pile of unread comics, and on the top, the first two volumes of Cardboard Angel which, surprise of surprises, happens to be our Webcomic of the Week! It is delightful to me for a number of reasons which I imagine you might share as well. It is a story about a fifteen year old girl who must put up with the presence of the ghost of a Japanese rock guitarist. She needs to help him tie up loose ends on this world, while he obtrusively and occasionally effectively meddles in her life. Teaching at a predominantly Asian school as I do, the characters are wonderfully familiar and true – I have had versions of each of them sitting in my classroom at one time or another, and in a way reading the comic is like revisiting old friends and good times past. You, perhaps, are not a high school teacher at a Predominantly Asian Boarding School, and so for you I would say that the comic is worth a check-out as an example of what happens when adolescent wishes go awry and collide with reality, hurtling everybody about and burning them down to their most resilient core.
Now, Carrington. I like Dora Carrington – even after reading Gretchen Gerzina’s biography, which is one of those rare examples of a book that, every time it tries to show its central figure in a positive light, ends up making her look just trifling and awful. There is a wonderful person there, but you have to dig down through the book to get there. I will say, though, that, in the unusually self-obsessed circle that was Bloomsbury, few lingered over their relationship issues at the expense of everything in the outside world to the extent of Carrington. The Woolfs engaged with political and social issues, Strachey poured himself into rebellion against Victorianism’s conception of itself, but Carrington’s life is primarily centered around various love triangles (and, for one period of time, a love square) and the turmoil they caused, preventing her from devoting as much time to her art as she might have had she not continued to stoke the hopes of various antagonistic suitors simultaneously. The time that she spent writing contradictory things to suitors, bemoaning her situation to other Bloomsbury members, and working out her secret assignations is staggering, and the heartbreak of it is that the few works that we have from her are so charming, and the central story of her life – her time with Strachey – is so profoundly moving, that it is hard to focus on what is in the face of what Might Have Been.
– Count Dolby von Luckner