Querquedula hottentota

William Burchell, Descending from the Sneeuberge near Graaff-Reinet (ca. 1813)

Arma uirumque cano

Of gentle Burchell will I sing

And Stoffel Speelman

His Khoekhoe (Hottentot) aide, or wing

man, traversing

South Africa, collecting

Stuff, the wizard,

That might shed light

On Nature named and pondered on in Fulham:

Burchell's zebra, Burchell's coucal, Burchell's sandgrouse, Burchell's courser,

Pedioplanis burchelli—a lizard,

And, needless said, forget we can't,

Eciton burchelli—the ant.

Stoffel's credited with zeal,

And, of course, his novel hat:

Sic biscuitus disintegrat!*

The blue-billed or spotted teal

(or duck)

Anas punctata Burchell called his,

but in 1838,

Perhaps recognizing Stoffel's part in this,

Tom Eyton renamed the bird Querquedula or Spatula hottentota.

Eyton was a friend of Darwin's and played county cricket for Shropshire

So naturally that stuck.

*"That's the way the cookie crumbles" in cod Latin.

For William Burchell's is

“Portrait of Speelman, a Hottentot,” see https://library.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/africa/burchell/burchell-images.html. Stoffel, short for Christoffel, or Christopher, is a fairly common Afrikaans name, and Speelman was reportedly a Dutch occupational name for a musician tumbler or jester, from spelen "to play" + man. Since he would obviously have been born under VOC rule, Speelman could have been a name gratuitously bestowed on a slave forefather. Stoffel must thus presumably have been what later generations would call a Cape Coloured rather than the Khoekhoe/Hottentot Burchell identifies him as.

Glückspilz

“Vanity and pride are different things. . . . Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”—Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice

“Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.”—Jonathan Swift

I would have others think of me things I fear I am not.

I would have others think me virtuous.

I would have others think me good.

I would have others think me clever.

I would have others think me wise.

I would have others think me modest.

      In 1870, the inhabitants of a settlement on the Tuolumne River in California’s Central Valley asked permission of the financier William Chapman Ralston, director of the Central Pacific Railroad,  to name their city “Ralston” after him, but the great tycoon refused, protesting his modesty. So they named their city Modesto.

But I would not have others think me lucky, since I know that I am fortunate—and why should I be, rather than another?

Notes: Glückspilz =  lucky dog/devil; from German Glück (luck, happiness) + Pilz (mushroom, hence, “upstart”). Ralston:

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=William_Ralston.

On University Avenue: The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Photo credit: PRD 2024.

Custer’s cavalry once clattered down this street,

Here loveless debt earned Edgar Allan Poe the boot,

The Pléiade immortel Julien Green*

Gazed, like Keats’s “stout Cortez,” on waving seas—of wheat,

Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County sank its root,

Robert Aldrich forged his “macho mise-en-scène,”

Paul Bowles in far Morocco pondered now and then.

The great Library, rebuilt at immense expense,

Calls all these makers to its latter-day defense!

If Alderman** was a mere Philistine

(Or perhaps an unmitigated swine)

The sky above whose head was brass and iron,

Who failed to feel the hurtful prick of present sense,

Woe betide us! Say it ain't so!!

Seduced by the flirty whims of time

in conflict with its self-inflicted face,

T. J.’s academic village's become a promiscuous place

Embracing the hottie Wither—screwing dumb Whence!

March 15, 2024

*In 1971, the Paris-born American writer Julien Green (1900–98), an alumnus (1919–22) of the University of Virginia—where he was astonished to see farm fields from his classroom window—was elected to the Académie française (whose forty members are called les immortels), the first non-French national to be thus honored. “Green’s reputation rests principally not on his novels, but on his journals, which spanned the years 1919 to 1998, and which he edited and published in nineteen volumes” (Wikipedia). See on these works https:/www.la-pleiade.fr/Auteur/Julien-Green.

**The University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors voted on February 29, 2O24, to rename its main library, known since 1938 as the Alderman Library in memory of its first president, the Progressive reformer Edwin A. Alderman (1861–1931), latterly discovered to have been a racist eugenicist like almost everyone else of academic or intellectual note in that era. It is now called the Shannon Library, memorializing UVA's fourth president, the (so far) irreproachable Edgar F. Shannon Jr. (1918–97).