Deutsche Panzer Museum: World War II Self-Propelled Guns

During World War II, the German Army made many self-propelled guns (SPGs) based on all of their main battle tank chassis designs: The Panzer MkIV, Panther and Tiger all had SPG variants. They used a variety of main guns. 

The Deutsche Panzer Museum displays all of the variants that could be restored by their staff.

 

A Visit to the Orangerie in Paris

Almost a year ago, I was in Paris and visited the Orangerie Musee on the north bank of Seine  in the Tuilleries Garden. The featured exhibit was the work of David Hockney in his pandemic year in Normandy.

Vogue  magazine wrote about the exhibition:

Normandy through David Hockney's eyes at the Musée de l’Orangerie

Four years after the exhibition devoted to him at the Centre Pompidou, David Hockney is coming to the Musée de l'Orangerie from October 13, 2021 to February 14, 2022. From the window of his house in Normandy, the painter tells of the tireless cycle of nature and the long-awaited arrival of spring.

The successive lockdowns of the past few months have had many facets, whether they be boring, solitary or creative. For David Hockney, this period brought the opportunity to create a titanic work, conceived over an entire year spent in France. Since 2019, the British artist has been living in Normandy, in a quiet house with a garden that he can observe from his window. He then had the idea of using this peaceful view to create his next work. No sooner had the cycle begun than the first lockdown in March 2020 was announced. Gone were the Californian swimming pools, with the painter choosing to devote himself to an atmosphere rooted in the French landscape. Armed with his iPad, David Hockney sets about representing the changes in nature, and its colours and textures. His inspiration? The seventy-meter long Queen Matilda Tapestry, which he observed during his visit to the Bayeux Museum. This frieze relates the conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy, and makes the 83-year-old painter want to tell the story of the arrival of spring.

Spring will always come back

The ban on going out, gathering in groups, or crossing borders will never change one thing: the world continues to turn and the seasons continue to pass. Confined to his house in Normandy, David Hockney created a frieze painted on an iPad, measuring eighty meters in length and depicting the unchanging renewal of nature. While our modern world stands still, digital painting allows Hockney to quickly and accurately create more than a hundred images. From the nuanced shades of green in the trees to the flow of the river in its bed to the pop of flowers that spring with the arrival of the warm weather, the exhibition A Year in Normandy reminds us that after humanity, the world shall remain. Displayed in the main gallery of the Musée de l'Orangerie, the frieze is reminiscent of Claude Monet's water lilies, which are housed in the same building. While the museum continues to keep the details of the event secret, we can expect a visit to the Pays d'Auge through Hockney's eyes, as seen in the intimate tour My Normandy, organised by the Lelong Gallery a few months ago. This artistic return is already considered to be the most anticipated exhibition of the year. 

While there, I also saw some of the water lilies paintings of Claude Monet done at the gardens in Giverny. 

Paintings by Claude Monet

The street just outside Musee Orangerie

Poems in English by Samuel Beckett, Book 45 0f 2022

I picked up this book at the Franklin and Marshall College Library Book Sale. I have lately been reading Shakespeare's sonnets, so I thought I would reading 20th Century verse by a witty playwright.  The wit and wordplay are there, but after reading the hope and ardor in Shakespeare, Beckett is very sad in a visceral way. 

From a summary of his work by the Poetry Foundation:  

Throughout Beckett’s work we can find evidence of his conviction that everything is hopeless, meaningless, purposeless, and, above all, agonizing to endure. Beckett’s people are leveled off and merged into each other by being all more or less physically disabled—as if this were really the common condition on earth. … Beckett is a prophet of negation and sterility. He holds out no hope to humanity, only a picture of unrelieved blackness; and those who profess to see in Beckett signs of a Christian approach or signs of compassion are simply refusing to see what is there.” Perhaps Beckett himself stated his dilemma most succinctly in L’Innommable: “Dans ma vie, puisqu’il faut l’appeler ainsi, il y eut trois choses, l’impossibilite de parler, l’impossibilite de me taire, et la solitude.” (“One must speak; man cannot possibly communicate with his fellows, but the alternative—silence—is irreconcilable with human existence.”)

Which is what I felt reading the book.  

Here is the poem "What I Would Do Without This World"

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness

Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.  

First 44 Books of 2022:

Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide by Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh

Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide by Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh, Book 44 of 2022

 I first read about epigenetics in Nature magazine almost 20 years ago. The feature article summarized the current state at the time of research into what happens around genes and how it affects our lives--and future generations.  

This fall I have been reading Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer. The two books work well together.  Zimmer shows the reader how difficult it is to draw a line between living and not-living.  

In Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh demonstrate that the dividing line between the influence of our genes and our environment is as blurry as defining life.  A human genome lives at the center of all our cells. If it were stretched straight it would be a meter long. So those millions of genes that make up our genome are folded thousands and thousands of times. 

All of this folding and the mechanisms protiens use to copy genetic instructions from folded genes mean that the shape of the genome and the cell it is in influence our lives.  Folded genes can be activated and inactivated by attaching and detaching small methyl molecules. This methylation process is part of life, but can go wrong.  Epigenetics studies who these processes outside the genome influence our lives.  

I was left with more questions than answers, but glad to know a little bit more about how deeply complex life is.  

First 43 Books of 2022:

Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Life's Edge:The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer, Book 43 of 2022

 

The book for this semester at the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College is Life's Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer.

Zimmer has been writing about science since the 1990s for the New York Times, Discovery, and National Geographic. He is the author of several books, Life's Edge is the latest.  

Every chapter of the book brings up another question about what it means to be alive, what is life, and what is not life.  

We are intro­duced to a mena­gerie that perches in the gray area bet­ween alive and not-alive: creatures like tardi­grades and nema­todes that can re­emerge from crypto­biosis with the touch of water. 

Zimmer describes pythons whose basal meta­bolic rates can grind almost to a halt, slime molds that display a brain­less kind of mem­ory and problem-solving abil­ity, and a girl named Jahi McMath, who was dec­lared brain-dead yet had a beat­ing heart and con­tinued to grow before dy­ing (again) five years later. 

COVID makes an ap­pear­ance. A book on the def­ini­tion of liv­ing would not be com­plete with­out a look at viruses. Zimmer intro­duces to var­ious def­ini­tions of life, coming from many sources from sci­entists to phil­osoph­ers. From them he derives five special hall­marks of life: meta­bolism, infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing, homeo­stasis, re­pro­duc­tion, and evol­ution. 

The sheer diver­sity with­in these traits is clear in his beautiful writing, as is the elu­sive­ and com­plex nature of life. As Zimmer says, biol­ogy is a "sci­ence in which the most impor­tant object [life] has no defin­ition." 

Wonders abound through the book. Zimmer's description human reproduction and when life begins shows the kind of complexity that makes absolute beliefs on where life begins look hopelessly ludicrous. 

If you are interested in biology, read the book. It's fantastic. 

First 42 Books of 2022:

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy Book 42 of 2022

 

When I began my Jewish journey after torch-carrying Nazis marched in Charlottesville. In my search after that horrible night, Bernard-Henri Levy in his book The Genius of Judaism was one of the first writers to show me I really am a Jew.  

Jews themselves fight over who is a Jew. My family and Jews I knew growing up said I was not a Jew.  I do not have a Jewish mother. When I joined a Synagogue, it had to be a Reform Synagogue. To be Conservative, especially to be Orthodox, I would have to convert.  

For non-Jews, my Jewish Dad means I am a Jew, the same way that having an Italian Dad would make me Italian.  Of course, every white supremacist and Nazi in America hates me even if my mother is not Jewish.  

Levy went showed me what an amazing tribe I am a part of.  To be a Jew is to have a unique place in the world in so many ways. Who loses their country and gets it back after two millennia? And keeps its culture together during that entire two thousand years.

I wrote this about my first reading of the book in 2018:  

The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.   

I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, But this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.   

Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Which brings up another aspect of Judaism which Levy makes so simple and beautiful. We Jews, at our best, are committed to Justice, to repairing the world.

Until this year, I was ambivalent about Ukraine as was Levy.  From the beginning of the war, I have volunteered for Ukraine, sometimes three or four days a week making combat medical kits.  Levy made a documentary backing the fight to keep Ukraine free.   

When the Russians invaded, Ukraine needed all free people to rally to her defense.  Whatever problems I had with Ukraine before February 24 are insignificant compared to the unjust attack on an innocent country.

Glory to Ukraine.

The book is a celebration of Jewish history and life and is beautifully written.

First 41 Books of 2022:

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen