Family history

For many years I’ve been aware that I’m descended from a Swiss soldier (or “mercenary,” as family tradition has it) who arrived in the American colonies before the revolution.

I knew, too, that I had an ancestor named Henry Wisner who was a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses, and who missed signing the Declaration of Independence for reasons not entirely clear. On a trip to Washington when I was in high school, I went into the lobby of the National Archives and was thrilled to look inside a glass case and see his signature on a document called the Articles of Association.

My father recently gave me a book called The Wisners in America: A Family of Patriots and Pioneers, by G. Franklin Wisner. Published in 1918, it has a heavy green binding, softened with age, and an ornamentally embossed title in faded gilt. There are many fold-out pages of genealogical charts in the back, on smooth brittle paper that has to be handled carefully. One of them traces the line from Johannes Weesner (the original Swiss soldier) to my paternal grandfather.

I had seen the book many times but had never felt the impulse to delve into it. I hadn’t gotten much farther than the Wisner coat of arms, which also appears at wisner.com, the website of a manufacturer of antique-looking view cameras. The motto is Amore nonvi, which my father used to say meant “Nobody loves Violet.” (It’s just possible that this is incorrect.)

Boggs by Lawrence Weschler

My colleague Steven Lydenberg, author of Corporations and the Public Interest, recommended this entertaining and thought-provoking book about an artist who draws money. In some ways, Boggs reminds me of the work of Donald Evans, who created beautiful imaginary stamps from imaginary countries.

Boggs is not a counterfeiter — he’s just fascinated by the artistry of currency and by the value we ascribe to it, now that the U.S. dollar, for instance, is no longer backed by gold or silver and has value mainly because we agree it does.

Boggs draws Swiss francs and British pounds with very fine-tipped pens, but that’s only the beginning. The artwork is not complete, in his view, until he is able to use it to purchase something. That is, rather than sell his work he uses its face value to buy something, which is only possible when the seller agrees that its value as an artwork is at least as much as the note that it imitates.

Finding someone who agrees to the transaction is often the hardest part. Another hard part was Bogg’s prosecution by the Bank of England, and his persecution by the U.S. Secret Service.

The Sean Bell verdict

Three police detectives were acquitted this morning of all charges after firing 50 bullets at an unarmed men and his two friends outside a club in Queens. Sean Bell was killed on his wedding day, and his friends were wounded. The barrage was so reckless that video cameras caught bullets careening through the glass walls of the Jamaica metro station nearby.

I expected at least some of the charges to stick in this case. Now that I see they haven’t, I’m not so much angry as deeply discouraged. There’s not much more to say about it: This picture and the quotes below tell the story.

“They got away with murder in there,” said Calvin B. Hunt, a man in the crowd.... William Hargraves, 48, an electrician from Harlem brought his 12-year-old son, Kamau, to the courthouse this morning. He said this verdict parallels the outcome of previous police shootings of black men. “Connect the bullets,” he said. “How many times did they shoot Diallo? Forty-one times. They were acquitted. They got a pension.”

His son said: “I think it’s not right, because they shot him 50 times. They knew he was hurt, and they kept shooting him. He didn’t even have a gun.”

Let them eat mud

As food prices around the world are skyrocketing, and hungry people are becoming even hungrier, the TV news asks whether Reverend Wright loves America, and whether, when Senator Obama was scratching his face, he was actually giving Senator Clinton the finger.

The other day I saw a photo, very much like this one, of a array of mud pies. Each one was neatly made and smoothly finished, with an artistic swirl. They are being made by starving people in Haiti to stave off hunger pains. When I tried to find the photo again I discovered a post called Mud Pies in Soleil at the blog Dying in Haiti, one of several blogs written by Dr. John Carroll and his wife, who live and work in Haiti several months each year.

I’ve been interested in Haiti for well over a decade, and visited the country in 1996, during a peaceful period in the presidency of Rene Preval. The constant media emphasis on Haiti’s problems — and the problems are dire enough — tends to overshadow the beauty and uniqueness of the country’s religion, music, art, and language. I hope the day will come when we read articles about those things. Until then, I can always reread Herbert Gold’s Best Nightmare on Earth.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

At my book group the other night, I brought copies of Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje and The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. Both were books I’d read before, and both are extremely quotable.

It only occurred to me that evening that the protagonists of both books are young, highly intelligent, emotionally guarded women who are conducting an investigation. Anil wants to find out what happened to “Sailor,” whose skeleton was hidden among ancient remains at an archeological site in Sri Lanka. Lila Mae Watson in The Intuitionist wants to find out what caused the crash of an elevator she had inspected a short time before.

Rereading The Intuitionist, I noticed a certain similarity to Saul Bellow in the way that Whitehead plays intellectual and colloquial language against each other. At our group, we each read a paragraph from the book we’re presenting. This is from the very long paragraph I read, which begins on p. 227:

How often do catastrophic accidents touch down here. The last one in this country was what, she searches after it, thirty-five years ago, out West. The ten passengers (midjoke, aimless perusal of the inspection certificate, fondling house-key weight in trouser pockets, trying not to whistle) had time to scream, of course, but not much else. The investigators (and what a hapless bunch they would have been, the field so young) never found any reason for it. Total freefall. What happens when too many impossible events occur, when multiple redundancy is not enough.