Today is Primidi, 11th Frimaire in year 234 of the first French Republic. This month’s notable is Madame Roland, an important and influential Girondin. One of my goals for Pluviôse (February for our Royalist readers) will be to create high quality scans of these paintings.
Frimaire 234, watercolor and ink on paper, 2025
Today is 23 Brumaire, year 234. This month’s Jacobin is Saint Just. I’m going to try to have Frimaire posted on the first of the month, but we’ll see … it’s still half done and there’s only 7 days to go…
Citizens, have you ever been seized with such zeal for the Republic that you forgot if it was Primidi or Duodi? Is your heart filled with Jacobin enthusiasm? Rejoice! Vendémiaire is just passed, but let’s commemorate it together:
Recently, within the past four or five years, rabbits have really moved in to my neighborhood and are eating everything. I thought I’d keep track of the things they didn’t like, as that would make life easier. I attempted to use various types of sprays to keep them away, but nothing really seemed to work, or work for long without constant maintenance. I figured it’s better to just focus on planting things they don’t like, and everyone will be happier. Anyway, this is my personal experience…I can’t vouch for all rabbits, but this is the stuff that the ones in my yard seem to like and dislike. Maybe it will be useful to you, as well.
These are plants that rabbits will devour entirely and will go out of their way for.
Clematis: although established clematis will be fine as the leaves will grow above their heads and they don’t seem to care for the woody stems. They’ll eat leaves close to the ground though.
Cilantro
Crocus
Decorative grasses
Grape hyacinth
Morning Glory
Mums
Phlox
Tulip
Pansies
Crabgrass: this one is kind of a benefit. A weed, but one that rabbits absolutely love. I haven’t had a crabgrass issue in my yard since the rabbits moved in.
Hostas: it seems to me that they prefer green hosts varieties to blue ones. They’ll devour young hostas, but may leave large hostas more or less alone. A hosta that is off their trail may be left alone, where one that is in a highly trafficked area might be entirely consumed.
Gladiolus
Stargazer Lilies
Lavender: not sure about this one. I had a lavender plant that they ate last year, but this year won’t touch
Basil: also not sure. They ate one year, but another wouldn’t touch. I now grow it in a container out of their reach, so I’m not sure
Siberian Iris
Ferns
Shiso
nb: young or juvenile (or perhaps just adventurous) rabbits will take a taste of just about anything, but these seem to be untouched in my experience
Azalea
Columbine
Daffodil
Ground Elder (variegated)
Hyacinth
Hydrangea
Iris
Lily of the Valley
Montauk Daisies
Orange Daylily
Oregano
Peonies
Rosemary
Sage
Salvia
Silvermound
Snowdrops
Stonecrop
Thyme
I missed this when it was originally published, but this is a fascinating interview with Catherine Zuckert, author of Machiavelli’s Politics and professor at Notre Dame. I’m particularly interested in how she contrasts Machiavelli to Plato here:
What I did not see so clearly until I had completed the book was that in Machiavelli I had found the great alternative to Plato. Plato presents philosophy as the simply best form of human existence. Machiavelli challenges that conclusion by arguing that the most important aspects of human life are political. There is no great human achievement that does not presuppose the existence of a political order; yet political order is extremely difficult to establish, and even harder to maintain. As Xenophon indicated when he presented political leadership as the competitor to Socratic philosophy as the best way of life, great statesmen are characterized by extraordinary virtues—both practical and intellectual. Machiavelli goes beyond Xenophon, however, by showing how a political order can be founded and maintained that satisfies the desires of most human beings to secure their own lives, property, family, and liberty rather than serving the interests of a few.
Machiavelli represents, to me, a transitional figure in the shift from natural philosophy to that of modern science. He observes and reports the outcomes of political action in a way that very much anticipates the way that scientists like Galileo would approach their experiments in the physical world.
Around many of the old palazzos of Florence, you’ll see these sconces, made of wrought iron, with an iron hoop and sometimes with a sconce for a torch above, as in those of the Palazzo Strozzi, shown above. These are ferri da facciata or facade irons. Their purpose caused me some consternation when researching Machiavelli, as some of my (later) sources indicated they were used for hanging banners or ribbons. This didn’t make a lot of sense to me, as they seemed designed for far more durable use than that.
Indeed they were used for tying horses, as you can see in the Nerli Altarpiece by Filippino Lippi. In a detail in the background, you can see a ferro da cavallo in use:
I have sixteen copies of my Kickstarter special edition of Machiavelli left. They’re signed and numbered, and I’d like to clear them out as I’m starting (no really this time I swear) a new project and want a clean slate. I’ve reduced prices by half to help them move ($9.00 for a paperback, $5.00 for a PDF). If you’d like to read a preview you can do so here, and if you’d like to order, here’s the order page.
Thank you so much for your support!
–Don
See me talk about Machiavelli at TEDx Boston:
I watched Beat Takeshi’s Zatoichi the other day and cranked out some art on the iPad using Adobe Draw. Takeshi had an incredible creatively fertile period in the 90’s and early aughts where he wrote, directed, and starred in a number of excellent movies in his own idiosyncratic style. He worked together with Joe Hisaishi before the composer exploded into popularity with Studio Ghibli and Hisaishi’s scores provide a lot of the emotional impact to films like Hana-bi and especially Kikujiro. Takeshi’s movies tend to be odd and darkly humorous, focusing on misfits and eccentrics. They’ll use some genre notes, like having a Yakuza or samurai protagonist, but then structure the plot around a vacation or a trip, focusing the plot around their personal life and relationships rather than a heist or battle. Here’s Takeshi as Zatoichi, the blind swordsman:
Brad Enseln has posted a nice call to action on rebuilding the Web. He argues, and I agree, that one way to reduce the dominance of social silos is to rebuild and reinforce the interconnections between independent blogs. (I also think some nice trustbusting on the part of the federal government w/r/t Facebook would excellent policy.)
We, the little people, need to rebuild the web. It does not do to just complain about silos and then point out other corporate alternatives, first and foremost the web needs websites built by individual humans, not just corporations, SEO’s and people trying to get their hand in your pocket. This is the foundation of everything. [emphasis in original]
As I have written before, the ways that large social media advertising companies manipulate us has a corrosive effect on society and ourselves. I’m excited by the work that some folks are doing to get back to blogging, like Brad and Kicks Condor, and others like Duncan Black at Eschaton, who never left. I’ve been working harder to post here on my own site and happy that I am not contributing to something malign. I’ve had good experiences on both Twitter and Facebook, finding new friends on the former and reconnecting with old ones on the latter. But these companies have not been good stewards of the free labor we have given them. Here, on my own site, I published my comic for the first time and was an early web comic artist, trying to hack together weekly pages in comicspress after the financial crisis scuttled a book deal. Even aside from any larger societal impact, I can’t say that anything I have done on social media has been nearly as worthwhile. The past year, since about March, I’ve committed to spending less time on social media, and my creative output is way up. I can see it not only in the posts I’m creating, but also in the artwork I’ve created, on both paper and iPad.
So. Back to blogging. Back to drawing.
So if you’re looking to do a little less Facebook and Twitter and a little more RSS reading, here’s what I use:
Feedly: Since Google Reader went away, you need a way to organize your feeds that will sync across your various devices. I use Feedly. It’s free for basic use (there’s a pro option if you need to have multiple feed groups or want to follow more than 100 blogs, or want to use it for teams) so it’s a good place to start. I’ve also heard Feedbin recommended.
Reeder: Now, you can use the Feedly app to do your reading, but I use a third party reader, Reeder. NetNewsWire is another good option, it’s in the process of being rebuilt from the ground up, and it’s a bit of a beta right now, so Reeder is probably a better place to start.
WordPress.com: But what if you want to write? WordPress lets you create a blog for free with an account, and you can even use it as a one-stop shop for reading as well, perhaps obviating the need for a reader and a sync service. I haven’t ever used it this way, so I can’t vouch for it, but I do use WordPress as a CMS for this site, hosted on my own domain. For simplicity of use, I also highly recommend Tumblr. Tumblr is probably the simplest way to get up and running with a blog. Although it is a bit of a walled garden, the fact that a Tumblr blog creates RSS feeds and if fully interoperable with the open web. If it’s a walled garden, it’s a small wall, like a little stone border you can easily step over.
Finished my drawing of the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (you can see the work in progress here) and added some text from Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead:
