Going Biking Despite Chance Of Rain -- Off The Net For Awhile -- November 15, 2017

Comments will be moderated later.

Typographical and factual errors will be addressed later.

The usual disclaimer applies.

E-mail will be read later.

If the Director's Cut is released in the next couple of hours, I will catch up later. Here is the NDIC site.

From The Bismarck Tribune:

Kyle Hass of Bowbells harvested a monster of a non-typical white-tailed deer during the season opener last Friday. His dad was there too, and his best friend. The quality company made an exciting hunt even more memorable.

As for the deer, about as non-typical as you can get, Hass said, "It was kind of a freak of nature to even have that thing around."

Non-typical white-tailed deer, those that have antlers that differ from the traditional matching sets on the left and right sides, are not completely unusual. There's a few taken every year in North Dakota. What makes the Hass buck stand out is its large size and the fact that very few people, if any, had previously seen the deer in the area only about 12 miles south of the Canadian border and 52 miles northwest of Minot.

Much more at the link.

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The Literature Page

Siegfried Sassoon, Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend: A Life In One Volume, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, c. 2014.

From the inside back jacket:

Jean Moorcroft Wilson lectures in English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is married to Leonard and Virginia Woolf's nephew, with whom she runs a publishing house. Her previous books include two other biographies of First World War poets, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Isaac Rosenberg, and she is currently working on a biography of Edward Thomas. She is considered the foremost expert on Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon:

• More than any other figure from that period, with the possible exception of Rupert Brooke, however, Sassoon has become the prototype of the brave young soldier-poet, a serving officer who entered the war ready to lay down his life for his men and country. 
• his courageous public protest about the handling of the conflict, once he encountered it at first hand, does not quite fit the stereotype, but his qualifications for the role in almost every other respect are impeccable:
• he came from the right social background: though half-Jewish, his paternal relatives were wealthy merchant princes, who hobnobbed with Kind Edward VII
• his maternal relatives were well-known sculptors, painters, and engineers
• he had received the "correct" education at Marlborough and Cambridge, though he did poorly at both
• he was an officer adored by his men
• moreover, he was a conspicuously brave officer, awarded an M.C.for bringing in his wounded Corporal under intense fire in May, 1916, and
• involved in several other daring raids
• finally, like Brooke who died before he could qualify fully for the role, Sassoon was extremely handsome, and inestimable advantage for icondhood
• the one condition Sassoon failed to satisfy was that he did not die in the war, though he told Charles Causeley as late as 1952 that "most people" thought he had

Yet his life after 1918 is as interesting, if not more so, than before it, and not just in personal terms.

Page 5: he threw his Military Cross into the River Mersey; must have been in 1918 before the war was over; frustrated that the war dragged on. Says the M. C. meant as much to him as his "point-to-point cups." "Point-to-point" is steeplechase horse racing. "Cup," of course, is the "trophy" as in "world cup."

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Siegfried Sassoon

Family History

Paternal history: Jewish

• his father's family, the Sassoons, often referred to as the Rothschilds of the East
• almost completely Oriental in outlook, manners and dress until the arrival of Siegfried's grandfather in England in 1858
• this made their rapid acclimatization to Europe within one generation all the more remarkable
• they claimed to trace their ancestry back to King David himself, but it is not until the birth of Sason ben Saleh in 1750 that any reliable documentary evidence exists
• by the time the family had settle in Baghdad, Mesopotamia (moder day Iraq), among the first Jews to do so
• Sason ben Saleh was the last in line to serve as "Nasi" (prince of captivity) to the Caliph's court in Baghdad
• his eldest surviving son, born in 1792, was forced to flee Baghdad (under siege by the Ottoman Empire) in 1817 (or thereabouts)
• by 1830 David had started a small export trade from Basra to India an din 1832 settled in Bombay
• the trading venture mushroomed, refounding the Sassoon dynasty
• to his great-grandson Siegfried Sassoon the story of "old David's starting the enormous merchant business" from scratch was the main interest of his father's family
• David's third son, Sassoon David ("S.D.") Sassoon, the first child of his second marriage was sent to London to open a small branch, 1858
• [Siegfried, the grandson, inherited physical and emotional qualities from his grandfather and not from his father, Alfred Ezra
• S.D. set out for London in 1858; his young wife Fahra (anglicized to Flora) and their two children, 3-y/o Joseph and baby Rachel, would follow
• S.D.'s next to youngest child, Alfred (Siegfried's father) was the first Sassoon to be born in England, in 1861
• the Sassoon family became increasingly bound up with England
• with their wealth, eventually turned to the arts

Maternal history, quite the opposite, the Thornycrofts

• this family had been dedicated to art, for three generations in some cases by the time Siegfried was born
• his mother's maternal grandfather, John Francis (1780 - 1861) had begun life as a farmer at Thornham on the Norfolk coast but had become a sculptor

But it was not the art that separated the two families

• Sassoon: urban
• Thornycrofts: rural

To be continued at this blog.