A perfectly good blog ...

And it’s just sitting here. It’s got a good name.

And yet I’m not using it.

I’m not using it because I learned the hard way that having multiple blogs can be a bad idea. Other people do it and do it well but ... I didn’t.

You can have, I think, three kinds of blogs:

1. A blog where you just publish thoughts just ‘cause.
2. A blog built around a personal project.
3. A blog to promote a cause.

My primary blog is the first kind. I have a secret blog of the second type. This one was also of the second type but it had elements of the third too. 

I think what I want to do with this one is turn it into a style blog. Type 3: A blog to promote a style. On my other blogs I’ve tended to be eclectic and attempted to be profound. I think I will turn this one into something more surface oriented. 

As I’ve written on my first blog I’ve come to realize, to my surprise, that I’ve been remarkably consistent. My views haven’t been fixed, they’ve evolved and devolved. But I was worried about something else. I thought they might be ... random. I worried that I had no core. It turns out that is not the case. To my surprise, I have a style and it is something I’ve been remarkably consistent about without realizing I was. (And it’s not just me; people around me think I have a style too.)

Going forward, I’d explore what that style is. At first glance that may look like narcissism. And, fair enough. But here is why I don’t think it is: I don’t think I invented this style. I think I picked it up.

At the same time, it’s not quite some other styles. It’s, for example, preppy. It’s not Ivy League. It’s close to Trad in spirit without quite being that. It has a heavy element of Yacht Rock in it. So, is it anything at all? Well, that’s what I hope to find out.

Parts of this will seem, if not narcissistic, a tad self-involved. Oh well.

A redesign is coming but I want to have some time to think about it. For the time being I’ve applied a theme Blogger calls “Simple.”.

Sources: Where I began

Why did I ever think my great-great grandfather and great grandfather were in the crimping business in the first place? For the simple reason that I found a historian who said they were.

My father used to check the phone book every time he went on a business trip to see if there were any people who might be related to us there. I Google my relatives' names for the same reason. I often come up with something but rarely do I hit a vein as rich as I did with Denis Costigan.

I hit an academic article entitled, "Masters and Friends, Crimps and Abstainers:
Agents of Control in 19th Century Sailortown" by Judith Fingard. As of today it's still available online. I strongly recommend the article for anyone trying to get a sense of what life was like in Saint John's sailortown.

And what does it say of my great-grandfather? Very little but the one thing it does say is very important.

The dissolution of the sailors' homes did not, for example, represent a victory for the boarding house keepers; by the turn of the twentieth century they too were disappearing from sailortown or turning their houses into working class tenements. With the decline of the sailing vessel, most seamen became visitors rather than short-term residents and sailortown, as their predecessors had known it, ceased to exist.

Backing that claim up, is a footnote and, for anyone doing family history of the Costigan and Warner families of Saint John New Brunswick, it's a real game changer.

By 1901-2, the boarding houses of three of the leading keepers of the 1880s had been turned into housing for themselves and various families of onshore workers. See the listing by streets for John Abbott and John Bartlett of Brittain street and Dennis Costigan of Pont street, Saint John City Directory, 1901-2.

There will be a lot to specify here. For now, suffice to say that we have a serious historian who has not just linked Denis Costigan with the crimping trade, she's identified him as a leading figure in that shady business.

It's not a surprise to me that my ancestors were sometimes on the wrong side of the law. My mother was always ashamed of them. In addition, my browsing through microfilm of old Saint John newspapers finds more mentions of family members related to various legal difficulties than you would expect to find for law-abiding types. This, however, is something of another degree.

As I've said before, I find this all very romantic. It's like finding your descended from pirates.

Sources: First man at the fire

Cities used to burn down. The most famous example of this is the Great Chicago Fire but it is far from alone. The Saint John fire of June 1877 was big enough to merit a Wikipedia entry.

A number of books were written about the fire or mention it and at least one, The Story of Firefighting in Canada by Donal M. Baird says that my great-grandfather Denis Costigan was the first witness to the fire.

It was on Wednesday, June 20, 1877, a day that had dawned cloudless and with a promise of more of the exceptional heat that the city had basked in for 6 solid weeks. Not a drop of rain had fallen for a month and temperatures had been 75 to 80 degrees for some days. A gusty wind blew up clouds of dust from the streets as the day progressed. It was very unlike Saint John, its weather normally variegated, with moderate temperatures, cool rain and fogs interspersed with clear days, always affected by the conjunction of warm land air with the cold waters of the Bay of Fundy. The unusual dryness had evidently resulted in some fires in the woods to the north and west, and smoke from them was plain to be seen, delaying the realization by many that a major fire was burning in the city, even after the fire alarms sounded.  

Getting a start on a long buggy trip early in the morning was Thomas Marter, the aging Fire Chief, accompanied by a member of the city fire committee – they were heading upriver to buy several new horses for the fire department. They would not be back until after 6 p.m. As the day got underway, industry came to life with the sound of the caulking hammers from the shipyards in Portland and the whine of the big sawmill of Kirk and Daniel at the very head of the harbor on the west side of the North Slip, where the head of Long Wharf is now.  

In the early afternoon about 2:30, a young coalheaver, Dennis Costigan, looked up from his work and caught a glimpse of a small flame on the roof of Henry Fairweather’s storage shed on the opposite wharf. He told his fellow workers and ran around to the other side of the slip. "The flame was about a foot and a half in width on the roof", he said, "I ran down the alley and got on the roof. I tore up a board and tried to make a hole in the roof to put the fire out. Just then I heard the York Point fire bell ringing. I think I was on the roof for about a quarter of an hour. I stayed until the hose came. I did not get the fire out. It ran up the roof and I got down. The hosecart came and they put the hose inside the barn." 

This is from notes I took once upon a time. Unfortunately, I don't know where I found it. I didn't read the actual book so I must have seen it online. Perhaps at this link.

A couple of things of note. There were not many Costigans in Saint John, fewer than thirty and there was only one Denis Costigan (spellings of Denis, Dennis and Dennie vary in documents of the period). He would have been 32 in 1877. That is not young and certainly was not by 1877 standards. I have no record of him being a coalheaver but his actual profession is a complicated story I will get to later. For now, suffice to say that he declared a number of different jobs over the years so coalheaver is plausible.

Not mentioned in this story is the fact that Dennis Costigan was a member of the fire department. Another book, History of the Great Fire in Saint John, June 20 and 21, 1877 (p. 353) by Russell Herman Conwell tells us that Costigan was one of twelve members of Hose Company 3. Why would Costigan head off to fight the fire alone instead of joining his company? What did he think he was going to do up on that roof with nothing but his bare hands?

Name change

I've changed the name of the blog. The "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" name has been applied to my other blog. This blog now has a name that matches it's URL.

In the future, I will use this blog solely for family history posts, which was it's original purpose. It has a very limited readership, getting only 2-5 page fews per day as opposed to several hundred for my other blog.

Why "A Crimp's Diary" because my great grandfather Denis (Dennie) Costigan and my great-great grandfather James Costigan were crimps.

This is a sensitive issue with some of my relatives. That is not surprising but I think it's far enough in the past that we can get over it now. Besides, it's very romantic and I like romance.

I will move all posts not related to family history over to the other blog and then delete them over the next few days. I may also change the design of this blog.

Anyone can be moral (or ethical) but only a passionate person can be virtuous

Thomas Aquinas was premodern but he was premodern in several ways. In some regards, we should be grateful that we have left that world behind. We should be grateful that we no longer live in a world where people believed that original sin was passed on sexually through the male. In other regards, we might feel ambivalent, for example, in that we no longer can easily believe that the world is oriented towards a single, divinely determined end. And there are other differences that we might simply regret.

Here is Thomas discussing "Whether all men have the same last end?" [I-II, Q1, Art. 7] He means by that whether we are aimed at the same last end and not, as our modern reading would imply, whether all humans have the same fate. It's an interesting question for, at first glance, people seem to have different goals in life. Indeed, we take it (correctly) that one of the great things about (real) liberalism is that it allows citizens considerable latitude in determining what the good life is for them. Thomas gives us an answer that may be compatible with that but isn't the usual one.

He begins, being a good medieval theologian, by making a distinction.

We can speak of the last end in two ways: first considering only the aspect of the last end; secondly, considering the thing in which the last end is realized.

I take this to mean that we can thing of the last end simply as something that is aimed at or we can consider it terms of the ways it is realized.

So, then, as to the aspect of last end, all agree in desiring the last end; since all desire the fulfillment of their perfection, and it is precisely in, and it is precisely this fulfillment in which the last end consists.

We might argue that we no longer believe that human beings have a given end which they seek to fulfill but I don't think that will hold. My counter-argument is an empirical one: most people seek to reach some sort of fulfillment of some end to which they feel they were ordained. Think of the notion of gender indeterminacy: the argument is made not in terms that a person can simply randomly pick a gender and go with it. The argument is always that people have some deep, inner sense of what they really are and a desire to become that. Which brings us to:

But as to the thing in which this aspect is realized, all men are not agreed as to their last end; since some desire riches as their consummate good; some, pleasure; others something else.

Gender identity would presumably fit under "something else". Thomas would be shocked, even stunned at the possibility but it's hard to think of a clearer example of people acting towards the end of happiness but seeing the thing through which happiness is achieved differently from others than through gender indeterminacy.

I also find it hard to imagine a project less likely to succeed. In a liberal society, however, we allow people to pick the thing that they believe will bring them happiness. That said, how do we determine what is the right answer, if only for ourselves. Here modern society has nothing to offer. We are sometimes told to look within ourselves as if there can be an answer there. Thomas's premodern answer still seems the right one to me.

Thus to every taste the sweet is pleasant but to some, the sweetness of wine is most pleasant, to others, the sweetness of honey, or of something similar. Yet that sweet is absolutely the best of all pleasant things, in which he who has the best taste takes most pleasure. In like manner that good is most complete which the man with well disposed affections desires for his last end.

We could say a lot about this. For example, "What are well-disposed affections?" In this particular instance, Thomas would likely say they are the ones in accord with natural law and go on to argue that the idea of gender fluidity is contrary to natural law. That is problematic because it involves an inconsistency in the use of natural law. Simply put, Thomas rarely uses the notion of natural law to directly derive norms in this way. Indeed, the only matter in which he (and the Catholic Church follows him in this) makes such derivations seems to be in matters of sexual morality. That sort of inconsistency tends to be self-refuting.

There is much more to Church arguments in this regard than the current culture would allow. It seems to me that if you wanted to make certain you'd be miserable, trying to live a gender identity contrary to your sexual identity is right up there with opioid abuse and divorce as a way to bring it about. But that is a different argument from simply deriving laws from some perceived regularity in nature.

The more interesting aspect of this for me, however, is how it plays out in terms of how we deal with self-mastery.

Mastery, noun
1.comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment.
"she played with some mastery" synonyms: proficiency, ability, capability;
2. control or superiority over someone or something.
"man's mastery over nature" synonyms: control, domination, command, ascendancy, supremacy, preeminence, superiority;  

In the modern world, we tend to think of moral self-mastery entirely in terms of the second. Self-mastery is just an antiquated way of saying "self-control" for us. Thus the notion that we can medically over-rule our chromosomes. Far better, it seems to me, is the first definition that says we can play the roles that are given to us with mastery.

I'll stop there for now.

"Feel your feelings"

That's a bit of advice I keep seeing. It's pretty good advice, to a point. In order for this advice to be any good to you, however , you need to know how to feel them.

Your goal is to extract the greatest experience of flavor from the rum, so don't be in a rush to decide whether you "like" a particular rum or not. Suspend judgment for as long as you can. The minute you decide that you "like" the rum (or not) you stop noticing the rum and start paying attention to your judgment. Your evaluation gets in the way of your perception and tasting is a game of sharpening perception. (from A Short Course in Rum by Lynn Hoffman)

That advice can be applied to a far-wider range of experiences than just tasting rum.

One place that definitely can be applied is to feeling your feelings. Start off by noticing them. Just sit, or stand, there and feel what you are feeling. Suspend judgment as to what these feelings mean, whether they are good or bad and what you have to do about them.

Since reading his book two years ago, I've come to think that Mr. Hoffman is correct in that if you start paying attention to your judgment you lose touch with thing you should be experiencing. He's too polite to say so but the further problem is that your judgment tends to become a performance. You want people to know what you think and you want them to be impressed that you have the sort of fine, discerning tastes that they should respect.

Feelings are no different. When I decide I'm feeling sad, or happy, or vindicated I don't just get stuck on that judgment, I start to behave in accord with it. My "feeling" becomes a performance. It's a way, I suppose, of paying attention to my judgment and it rapidly becomes a way of getting others to pay attention as well. I don't think it's healthy.

Sometimes understanding the lesson is a simple matter of paying close attention to the language used. Compare these two expressions:

1. Feel your feelings
2. Express your feelings

Those are two very different expressions and yet the second is often offered as a replacement for the first. We're often told that we should learn to express our feelings. That is good advice if there is some positive benefit to letting others know how we're feeling. Oftentimes, however, people tell us that expressing our feelings is a way of "getting them out", as if expressing them was a way of letting off steam that might otherwise cause our internal boiler to explode. If little boys, for example, aren't taught to express their feelings they will learn the habit of bottling them up and, boom, male suicide rates will spike.

And male suicide rates have risen so it all seems vindicated.

Except for one tiny problem and that is that male suicide rates have risen. They used to be lower back when men were taught not to express their feelings. That doesn't prove that expressing their feelings has made men more likely to commit suicide. There may be other factors at play. There almost certainly are. It does, however, cast serious doubt on the claim that rising suicide rates are proof that men need to "express" their feelings.

The thing about expressing feelings is that, as Hoffman tells us,  it tends to validate our judgments about them and, therefore, to amplify to replace our actual feelings with a need to validate our judgments. You can prove this for yourself with a simple experiment. Next time you're all alone, think of some past betrayal. Say out loud what happened and then say how angry it made you. Just keep talking about it, expressing your anger. It's a virtual certainty that your voice will rise and your feelings will get stronger and stronger. If you really let it go, you'll work yourself up into an intense rage. If we're honest with ourselves, we will realize that this will work even if our judgment about this past betrayal is wrong, even if we were not actually betrayed.

If you tell yourself you're sad, or angry, or jealous, you will start to feel that way even though, and this is the really important thing, you might be wrong about how you're feeling.

Far better to feel your feelings. Just spend sometime noticing yourself and what you're reactions are instead.

I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing

When I was in Grade 2 I got so sick they thought I would die, my father sat by my bedside and read me The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My father died last week.

It's a great book even if deeply flawed. Like all great children's literature, it achieves a transfiguration of the commonplace by taking a commonplace situation and projecting it into an exotic world. You think you're reading all about a boy and an adult floating down the Mississippi in order that both may escape—the boy from his violent, alcoholic father and the adult from a life of slavery. What you're actually reading is the story of a boy and his father, for that is who Jim really is. The notion that fatherhood is something like being a runaway slave is shocking and, for many, offensive but there it is. Children's literature cheats in this way all the time and this is really no different from the notion that there is a passageway to a magical world through the back of the closet.

Jim's life is a fiction and not a documentary account of slavery. Anyone who read this hoping to get a glimpse into what life was like before emancipation would be seriously misled. This is a book of fiction that doesn't even attempt to get history right. But it gets something right about what a son owes his father. 

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll GO to hell"—and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.