BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old-fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851.

In Lancaster, England, the terraced house still stands wherein was born, on January 7, 1832, Sir William Turner, FRS, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, distinguished anatomist and brain surgeon, supporter of Darwin’s theories and long-time professor in and finally Principal (1903-1916) of the University of Edinburgh. While the house was substantial enough to survive (today it bears a plaque in Turner’s memory), it seemed an unlikely beginning, a humble place for a humble child whose father was a craftsman in Lancaster’s burgeoning furniture industry. Worse still, Turner’s father died when he was only five. Soon his older brother and younger sister died of epidemic diseases, and William and his mother were left to fend for themselves in early Victorian England. Not a comfortable prospect, to be sure, but between them the local Church of England and Mrs. Turner’s family saw to it that the talented boy got a good schooling and then secured a good apprenticeship. Apprenticeship was a normal training for medicine in those days (in the USA too), but Turner’s genius became so apparent that he was encouraged, and financially supported, in his efforts to obtain modern academic qualifications (from St. Bart’s Hospital and London University) where he did pioneering clinical work with a spinal bifida patient and, only 22, presented a paper on it to the Royal Society. From there he moved to Edinburgh, proceeding with all decent speed to a professorial chair, a good marriage, a much grander terraced house, roles as leading citizen of the city and of the university, overseer of Andrew Carnegie’s charities in Scotland; and throughout William Turner pursued an astonishingly wide field of research that included anatomical work on evolution (notably of whales and humans). Always he carried his Anglicanism with him, for 60 years a faithful member of St. John’s, Edinburgh, from whence he was buried in February 1916. ©

[Stanley]

Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent . . . A F Wallace, reporting on a conversation with Darwin about the human species.

One of evolution science’s more whimsical quotations runs to the effect that God must have been “inordinately fond” of beetles: because there are so many of them. Coleoptera, to name the order properly, contains about 400,000 living species, and we’re still counting. Who actually said it is a puzzle. Often Charles Darwin is credited, but some years ago Stephen Jay Gould tracked it down to the English biologist (and atheist) J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964), for whom it was a favorite phrase (save that he added stars, also quite numerous). But if we want to persist in error then let’s give the cliché to Alfred Russell Wallace, beetlist extraordinaire and co-discoverer (with Darwin) of descent by natural selection. Wallace, of Anglo-Scottish stock but born in Wales on January 8, 1823, collected beetles for several reasons, but not least because he needed the money. From an early age fascinated by nature’s cornucopia of species, Wallace spent a lifetime figuring it out but without Darwin’s advantage of inherited wealth. His century was a great one for collectors, for Victorian gentlemen paid good money for, inter alia, panels of beetles (and birds’ eggs, and butterflies, etc. ad infinitum) and so on his many expeditions Wallace collected specimens, pinned them, and sold them. In an early trip to the Amazon (1848-52), he collected thousands. But Wallace thought a lot, too, and working in the East Indies in the ‘50s he came up with his own theory of speciation and sent it to Darwin. It caused a kerfuffle, but issued in 1859 with the simultaneous publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Wallace’s essay “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” Their subsequent (friendly) relationship, their common ideas, and their disagreements offer fascinating and rewarding study: and several ways to think about those 400,000 Coleoptera. ©

[Stanley]

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.

These anniversary notes have often cited the “first woman” to do this, that, or the other (graduate from college, practice medicine, map the heavens, and so on). It’s testament to a problem of perspective, and as such it occupied the attention, for most of her life, of the 9th woman to graduate from the Sorbonne. She was Simone de Beauvoir, born in Paris on January 9, 1908, a talented child, who according to her father’s boast, thought “like a man.” Once again, a problem of perspective. According to de Beauvoir’s later writings, this set her up as the odd one out, and “man” (men in general, maleness) as the “normal,” the criterion against which she, herself, was judged but did not wish to be judged. But by whatever judgment you wish to make, de Beauvoir moved through her education at speed and with brilliance, completing her diplôme at 20, then at 21 becoming the youngest-ever to pass the agrégation in philosophy (a national, ranked exam in which she placed second to Jean Paul Sartre’s first), and very soon after submitting her thesis (on Leibniz). Her “open” relationship with Sartre (brilliantly recounted by Louis Menand in The New Yorker a few years ago) is legendary, but began conventionally enough with a marriage proposal, which she refused, conventionally enough (she had no dowry), but then they forsook convention for a life together and apart, exchanging ideas as equals, exchanging lovers too, jointly editing Les temps modernes, and writing for each other before, so to speak, they wrote for the world. De Beauvoir’s production, which began during the German occupation and ended only with her death (1986), was phenomenal, many of her works (fiction, memoir, and philosophy) serving as catalysts for the rise of philosophical feminism and (in The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947) providing a clearer account of—and justification for—existentialism than ever came from the ‘other’ (or male) pen. ©

[Stanley]

She was our favorite aunt.. . . she treated us with all the respect she showed to adults. Katharine Blodgett's niece, Dr. Katharine Gebble, an astronomer, at the dedication of the Katharine Blodgett School, Schenectady, NY, 2010.

One of the cleverer military inventions of WWII was a smokescreen oil that vaporized into molecules so small that you only needed a couple of quarts to lay down a smokescreen over several acres, and then it would hover for a long while, not feeling much in the way of gravity. It was the product of the fertile brain of Katharine Burr Blodgett, who was born in Schenectady, NY, on January 10 1898 and died there in 1979. Her father worked (as a patent lawyer) for the General Electric Laboratories in Schenectady, and she did too, as a working scientist. A home town girl made good? Well, yes, she was, but it took some travel and some learning. Katharine’s father was killed (by a burglar) when she was a baby, and her childhood was spent in New York City and Paris. When she was 18 and finishing her degree at Bryn Mawr (she was precociously brilliant) she came back to the GE labs and was told that they would hire her if she learned more science. So she got her Masters at Chicago and then worked under Ernest Rutherford (whom she did not like) at the Cavendish labs where, at 28, she became the first woman to achieve a Cambridge PhD in Physics. Back in Schenectady, in the GE labs (she was the first woman scientist hired there), Blodgett invented a number of things, in particular how to apply—and measure almost exactly—molecule-thin layers of varied composition on varied glasswares. Thus she is credited with the invention of non-reflective (“invisible”) glass and also of superthin glass coatings that enabled super-conductivity. Her experimental procedures at GE were notable for their simplicity and elegance. Outside the labs, her life was notable for her “Boston marriage”, her innovative approach to gardening, and her tireless civic service. In Schenectady, on Katharine Blodgett Day in 2010, in recognition of that service and of her achievements in science, a new elementary school was named after her. ©

[Stanley]

This is the hour of hush and wonder . . . when the shadows deepen on the edge of the forest, and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn. Bernard DeVoto.

With the Republicans greedily engaged in the process of “returning” federal lands to the states (itself an historical sleight of hand that demonstrates their affinity with the Bundys, vandals, trespassers, and welfare chiselers), it’s good to remember one of the most effective crusaders for careful, responsible management of “our” forests, grasslands, and parks. He was Bernard DeVoto, born in Ogden, Utah, on January 11, 1897. Odd man out in Mormon Utah (his mother defied her Mormon family to wed his father, a Catholic), DeVoto fled to Harvard and, in due course, became one of our leading public intellectuals, living by his wits and his writing. I knew him first as the editor-in-chief of the Mark Twain papers and as the author of award-winning “popular” histories of the American west (The Year of Decision: 1846, Across the Wide Missouri, and The Course of Empire.) Now (thanks to Paulette’s clear eye for great secondhand books) I know him as the subject of one of the best biographies I have read, Wallace Stegner’s The Uneasy Chair: A Biography . . . (1974), in which Stegner, who also lived by his wits and his writing, celebrates the public life and private tensions of Bernard DeVoto as an entrepreneur of ideas. Stegner’s odd title reflects what DeVoto was probably most famous for, his monthly column in Harper’s, “The Easy Chair” (1935-1955). From that apparently comfortable perch, DeVoto levelled his sights and loosed his cannon (and his sniper fire, for he had been an army marksman and was a gifted essayist) on a range of topics. In the beginning his critical, passionate gaze fell usually on literature, but from the late 1940s he focused increasingly on those among us who would use our public lands to enhance their private wealth through overgrazing, clear cutting, opencast mining, and reckless water policies. It would seem, today, here and now, that we could use another Bernard DeVoto. ©

[Stanley]

Once upon a time there lived a king and queen who were grieved, more grieved than words can tell, because they had no children. Charles Perrault, La belle au bois dormant, 1697.

This morning I want to brush up your French (mine is unbrushable by now, despite the very best efforts of Vicki Creed to make it sparkle). We will try some titles, OK? Barbe bleu. La belle au bois dormant. La petit chaperon rouge. Le chat botté. Got it yet? How about Cendrillon? They are, in order, Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss ‘n Boots, and Cinderella, and these “fairy tales” as we know them today were the product, or perhaps we should better say the “added value” of Charles Perrault, born in Paris on January 12, 1628. He was the seventh son of an haute bourgeois family, royal servants, and in due course he followed his father and brothers in that bureaucratic trade, acquiring considerable influence with the Sun King, Louis XIV, ten years his junior, and becoming chief secretary to the greatest bureaucrat of the age, Jean Baptiste Colbert. Something of Perrault’s literary tastes may be inferred from his success in convincing King Louis that the new extravaganza at Versailles should include 39 fountains, each themed on one of Aesop’s fables. But he did not turn to his fairy tales until after he lost his government post (to Colbert’s son!!) and decided to dedicate himself to his children (he had married late in life). He told them stories, published as Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec morales, the subtitle giving copyright credit to our old and (now) traditional friend, Mother Goose (“ma mère l’Oye”). In later centuries, France would war with Germany on several issues, not least whether Perrault, or the brothers Grimm, “invented” the fairy tale. I think Perrault has it, hands down, for his versions are more child-friendly, but he should not be wholly identified with ancient tales. Indeed, in the great culture wars of Louis XIV’s France, Charles Perrault was known as a champion of Les modernes against Les anciens, and thought Molière and Alceste superior to Euripides and Sophocles. ©

[Stanley]

The most precious gift you can bestow on a child is your time. Michael Bond, Reflections on the Passing of the Years, read last year by the 90-yr old David Attenborough at the 90th birthday celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II.

One of the wonderful lessons one learns in parenting is that one’s favorite children’s books do not necessarily become one’s children’s favorites. When our first-born was on his way, I rushed into Blackwell’s, Oxford to buy classic editions of the Pooh Bear stories, beautifully illustrated, nicely bound, only to find that the world and time had displaced Pooh, Tigger, and Eeyore and landed me instead with reading to my son, and then to his sister, about a scruffier bear, orphaned at a busy train station and taken home by the kindly Mr. & Mrs. Brown, parents whose liking for bears may well have originated with Milne’s Pooh but were easily transferred to this usurper, whom they named Paddington after the railway station. This bear’s creator is Michael Bond, born on January 13, 1926, fairly close to the main line that serves Paddington Station. His ordinary middle-class upbringing was brought to a full stop in 1943 when he was nearly killed by the Luftwaffe. Aged 17, he immediately volunteered for the RAF (as if to retaliate), only to find that he suffered irremediably from airsickness. After the war, thinking he might like to be a writer but not doing so well at it, he suddenly typed out “Mr. & Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform.” 35 books and untold legions of franchised bears later, Paddington still works for me and may well charm my granddaughter when she gets around to Bond’s tattered refugee “from darkest Peru.” On the other hand, experience suggests that she may well find a different bear, one more in tune with her life. Michael Bond has moved on too, with a series of (eighteen) rather charming “gastronomic” mysteries solved by Monsieur Pamplemousse, recently retired from the Surété but now a restaurant inspector, and his olfactorily empowered dog, Pommes Frites. But if you have never yet read a Paddington, there’s still time, and it’s entirely likely that another one is one the way. ©

[Stanley]

Tableau des genres de végétaux fossiles considérés sous le point de vue de leur classification botanique ... Adolphe-Theodore Brongniart, Paris, 1848.

My copy of Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century (1961) is long gone, a victim of downsizing, but its gist is easily remembered. Darwin’s brilliance is not diminished by understanding how heavily he depended on those who, before him, took on the great puzzle of how life had acquired (and lost) such a plethora of forms. Geologists were particularly important, producing not only better than biblical estimates of how long it took to ‘make’ modern species, but also discovering, in different strata, extinct anatomies (fossils) that looked a lot like modern species. So it was that in France, Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart built on his father’s geological work to create, himself, a taxonomy of fossil plants. Born in Paris on January 14, 1801, Brongniart was already in his teens a budding plant paleontologist and published his first scientific paper at age 21, when he seems to have set himself the life work of classifying fossil plants and determining their likely relationships with other extinctions and with living species. Depending on where they fall, plants can fossilize in intricate, indeed beautiful detail (think of the first discovery of the bird Archaeopteryx, feathers and all), and some of Brongniart’s fossils were so detailed that he could begin to unravel the puzzle of the relationships between gymnosperms and angiosperms by tracing the fossil histories of pollens and seeds. Much of this was already collected and published when Darwin began to puzzle things out for himself. We know Darwin found inspiration in all this for in a marginal note on Brongniart’s 1836 paper on Sigillaria elegans Darwin (circa 1848) wrote “Hurrah!” And, turnabout being fair play, when Darwin’s On the Origin of Species hit the streets, it found a quick and enthusiastic ‘Hourra!’ from Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart, one of many scientists who by 1859, bang in the middle of Darwin’s Century, could say “bien sûr.” ©

[Stanley]

Say what you know, do what you must, come what may. Sofia Kovalevskaya.

Child prodigies in math often produce odd stories about how they came to realize their genius, but when the child was a girl in imperial Russia, the odd became bizarre. So here’s Sofia Korvin-Krukovskaya, born on January 14, 1850. Her father was a general in the royal artillery. Her mother descended from a German immigrant scientist, an astronomer, and had scientific brothers. Thanks perhaps to her mother’s influence, Sofia was well educated (by a private tutor), which may explain her later successes in poetry and prose, but not her mathematical prowess. That came when her uncle Peter noticed little Sofia (not yet 11) taking an unusual interest in her nursery wallpaper, wallpaper that consisted largely of her father’s calculus notes from military school. Sofia was rewarded with more formal schooling, but when she finished that there was no place for a young woman of 18 to go on to higher studies. It’s a long story of a short life after that, but Sofia married at 18 and she and her husband (a scientist of progressive views) moved to Germany where Sofia Kovalevskaya studied math informally (women were not admitted even to lectures) but with the support of sympathetic professors, notably Hermann von Helmholtz at Heidelburg and then Karl Weierstrass at Berlin. Three mathematical papers Sofia wrote for Weierstrass were adjudged brilliant enough to qualify her for a PhD, awarded when she was but 24. Kovalevskaya became something of a sensation, a beautiful and courageous woman of great talent and radical political views, the editor of Acta Mathematica and scientific prizewinner, but unable to achieve her goal—a university professorship—because of her gender (and, perhaps, her politics) until, finally, in 1889, Stockholm made her Professor of Mathematics, another “first.” Sadly, Kovalevskaya died of influenza two years later, and was buried (as poet and mathematician) in Stockholm’s Northern Cemetery. ©

[Stanley]

Alienation . . . isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up. Susan Sontag, 1992.

Whatever Mr. Trump’s virtues, and I am still looking for them, his election must surely have made Susan Sontag spin in her grave at a world record rpm. Among other possibilities, the Donald could be defined as the anti-Sontag. And there are those who might consider that a Trump virtue, for in her fields (criticism, philosophy, literature, and photography) Sontag was at least as controversial as our president-elect is in his (gambling, property speculation, beauty “pageants,” and “reality” television). However, one would have to go to Paris to confirm that rpm statement, for Sontag was buried at Montparnasse in 2004. It was an appropriate location for, as she always said, her intellect awakened when she studied there in 1957-1958. Born Susan Rosenblatt (in New York, on January 16, 1933), Sontag’s father died in 1940 and her mother married an army officer, Nathan Sontag. She lived in a number of places and seems to have studied in more: Berkeley, Chicago (BA, 1951), then Harvard (MA, 1953), and then Oxford and Paris for a doctorate that never came. What did come were increasing measures of fame, starting with cultural criticism in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. on the ‘Camp’ style in art and on photography) and very quickly morphing into politics and feminist philosophy. She wrote widely and her essays were eagerly snapped up by leading publications (e.g. The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Cosmopolitan), partly for circulation potential but also for substance. She attracted heavy fire, too, not least for her tendency to raise political criticism to a performance art, perhaps most famously at Sarajevo in 1993 when, amidst all the genocidal brutality of the siegetime, she staged Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. For that, and for much else, Susan Sontag was loved and hated, revered and ridiculed. But few would deny that she was a person of real courage and strong intellect. And now, over to Trump. ©

[Stanley]

I am learning all the time. My tombstone will be my diploma. Eartha Kitt.

The prospects were not good for Eartha Mae Keith when she was born, in rural South Carolina, on January 17, 1927. She had a white father, but her mother never told her who, and her “high yaller” complexion set her at odds with both white and black in a race-conscious society. Pretty soon (she was only 8) she was sent to New York where an auntie took her in. Then her luck—never wholly good, we might say—improved. Encouraged by her school Eartha Kitt (now 16) auditioned successfully for Miss Katherine Dunham, joined the Dunham crew as a dancer and singer, and began to be noticed. Touring with Dunham in Europe, Eartha learned French and soon was headlining in Paris. Back in New York, her distinctive voice and, without any doubt, her sultry toughness brought her to the notice of Orson Welles who thought her “the most exciting woman in the world” and cast her as a lead in two 1950s productions, most notably his 1951 Dr. Faust (as Helen of Troy). So as well as singing and dancing, Eartha was a talented actress who, by the time she finished, in 2008, had garnered several Emmy awards and two Tony nominations. She could also write, and in the process of developing that talent her political consciousness became stage worthy, too. So it was that at a 1968 White House luncheon she offended Lady Bird Johnson by calling attention to the Viet Nam fiasco: “Mrs. Johnson, we raise children and then we send them to war.” This led to a decade’s exile in Europe, where Eartha was always popular (and by now she sang competently in several European tongues), but by the 1980s she was back in town and back on top, even performing for Disney. In 2006 that high yaller girl helped George and Laura Bush light the White House Christmas Tree. But sadly, and to her disappointment, she died never really knowing who her father really was. ©

[Stanley]

A commonwealth's the thing that kingdoms want. John Partridge, Almanack for the Year of our Redemption, 1687.

Books, a certain school of modern critics reminds us, often breathlessly, are not only written but produced: chosen, edited, printed, wholesaled, and retailed. How much attention we should pay to that is a matter of dispute, but marketing has always been part of the book trade. So when I research 17th-century publications on religion, politics, and trade (important subjects of course), it’s sobering to find their end pages loaded with the printer’s notices of other books for sale. Sobering because, generally (and by some printers overwhelmingly), the books being pushed are not on “my” subjects but on alchemy and astrology. Those should be, but are not, ephemera. I haven’t done a survey, but I have noticed titles by one of the most prolific astrologers of what was clearly an astrological century, John Partridge. Partridge was born into respectable poverty (a cobbler’s son) on January 18, 1644, imbibed strong “commonwealth” values in his youth, learned Latin, and broke into the astrology trade with a 1677 almanac, Calendarium Judiacum. He went on from strength to strength, sometimes publishing as John Wildfowl (his radical politics made a degree of anonymity occasionally prudent), and during the culture wars of Queen Anne’s reign Partridge’s radical whiggery (in politics and religion) and his astrology made him (in 1708) the target of a mildly famous Jonathan Swift hoax, an elaborate report of Partridge’s death (“Here, five feet deep lies on his back/A cobbler, starmonger, and quack”). But whatever Dean Swift’s Tory hopes, John Partridge, and his astrology, continued to flow mightily through the London press until his actual death, in 1715, but not before his last almanac celebrated the coronation of George I and the nation’s delivery from “Popery, French slavery, and English traitors.” It had been, of course, fated by the stars. ©

[Stanley]

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

My infrequent contributions to UMSL’s new course in “Science Literacy” focus on science’s effects on society, particularly its economic impact. Students learn that it’s rarely quick and it’s almost never straightforward. Take one of the signal discoveries of the 17th century’s ‘scientific revolution’, Robert Boyle’s exhaustive proofs (1658 et seq) that air, the atmosphere, had weight (or “spring” as he called it), and that it (therefore) had interesting attributes when manipulated (heated, burned, cooled, pressurized, or de-pressurized). Logically, Boyle’s work led to the invention of the steam engine and the industrial revolution. But this apparent inevitability took a very long while to work itself out, starting with Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 steam engine: a brilliant invention with a couple of drawbacks. These were not really addressed until James Watt took an interest. Watt was born on January 19, 1736, into a prosperous Scottish family, and through apprenticeships and good connections became an expert instrument-maker in Glasgow, doing contract work with various clients. In 1763, in the process of repairing a Newcomen engine for Glasgow University, Watt hit upon a way to improve its efficiency, essentially by ‘hiving off’ the condensation part of the steam engine’s cycle, thus enabling the heat to make steam more quickly and consistently. Great idea, but one that in turn took another two decades of experiment (and investment, and a couple of bankruptcies, and six separate patents) in metallurgy and machine tooling before the Watt engine could be loosed on the world. So Robert Boyle’s painstakingly brilliant experiments on ‘the spring of air’ (there were 43 of them, ‘pure’ science) waited well over a century to have their “inevitable,” “logical,” and profoundly transformative economic impact. We might learn from this to be patient with science, and with scientists, but, alas, history teaches no lessons. ©

[Stanley]

Man can rebuild a pyramid but he cannot rebuild an ecology. Joy Adamson.

My actual face to face encounters with white society in Kenya have been fleeting, but in my senior seminar paper (for Martin Wolfe, in 1965) I found out more than I wanted to know. The title was “The Land Problem in Kenya, 1890-1950,” and a big part of that problem was known as the “White Highlands.” The leader of white society there, Lord Delamere, had acquired about 150,000 acres at peppercorn rents. Delamere died in 1931, but his influence lingered on and, I argued, had much to do with the rise of the Mau Mau Rebellion. Much later I was not surprised to see his society (and its social mores) murderously and lecherously portrayed in the 1987 film White Mischief. By then, however, I’d discovered several very different European Kenyans, notably Karen Blixen (who left in the year of Delamere’s death) and the Leakey family (who stayed). Blixen (writing as Isak Dineson) and the Leakeys (as paleontologists and conservationists) offered a more encouraging picture of the land and its people (certainly its Europeans and Africans). And then there was Joy Adamson, who’s best known for her portrayal of its wildlife, especially in Born Free (1960 et seq). Adamson was born Friedericke Victoria Gessner in Austrian Silesia on January 20, 1910. Her getting to Africa is a long tale, including marriage to a Jew, fleeing Hitler with him, settling in Kenya, and then in 1943 (after two divorces) marrying a game warden, George Adamson, and moving in with him and his various menageries at Shaba on the edge of the highlands. The Adamsons and most of the Leakeys stuck with Kenya through Mau Mau and independence, and their lives (and even their tragedies) suggest somewhat better hopes for a land that has through African and then Asian migrations (and European imperialisms) become host to so many tribalisms. Meanwhile, Delamere Avenue in Nairobi became Kenyatta Avenue, yet another Kenyan story. ©

[Stanley]

Loud, clear English will carry a man anywhere in the world. Sebastian Snow.

The vote in England on ‘Brexit’ struck me as strangely as our vote for Trump. I called it “Little England taking revenge on itself,” but that was unkind and inaccurate. In truth, “little England” has looked out to the world for centuries, Notably, it spawned generations of explorers, beginning famously with Drake and Raleigh, but there were others before them and have been many since. As the places we might call terrae incognitae have become smaller and fewer, little England’s explorers became more eccentric. Richard Francis Burton, in Victoria’s age, and Francis Chichester, in the second Elizabeth’s, made eccentricity respectable by being knighted, but not Sebastian Snow. A barrister-banker’s son born in civilized Sussex on January 21, 1929, Snow’s conventional childhood ended when he left Eton with a broken leg and recuperated by motorcycling through Lapland and then hiking from Istanbul to Karachi. He became mildly famous when at 21 he joined a French expedition to find the real source of the Amazon. When he returned, England was cheered by finding “a six-foot live hero, straight from the Bumper Book for Boys.” It went to his head. He proved unable to keep down a job (at Lloyds) or to succeed at chicken farming (in Devon). He was a fine writer, albeit one given to the mock-heroic, and this (and sponsorships) kept him going until, in 1971, he bit off more than he could chew, walking from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow. Chris Bonington (a much less eccentric explorer who later became Chancellor of Lancaster University) went out to find Sebastian and talk him into a simpler route, or coming home, but failed. Snow was picked up, starving, in Costa Rica, and never quite regained his original imbalances. The next 30 years were marked by increasing debilities and finally marred by dementia. But his 2001 death occasioned a long New York Times obit: “Eccentric English Explorer Dies at 72.” Can you spot the redundancy? ©

[Tizer]

I'd not heard of Point Barrow but guessed from the context that it would be the opposite end of the American continent. Looking up something always triggers a lot more information, and just so in this case. Wikipedia says:

Point Barrow or Nuvuk is a headland on the Arctic coast in the U.S. state of Alaska, 9 miles (14 km) northeast of Barrow. It is the northernmost point of all the territory of the United States.....It was named by English explorer Frederick William Beechey in 1826 for Sir John Barrow, a statesman and geographer of the British Admiralty. The water around it is normally ice-free for two or three months a year, but this was not the experience of the early explorers. Beechey could not reach it by ship and had to send a ship's boat ahead. In 1826 John Franklin tried to reach it from the east and was blocked by ice. In 1837 Thomas Simpson walked 50 miles west to Point Barrow after his boats were stopped by ice. In 1849 William Pullen rounded it in two whale boats after sending two larger boats back west because of the ice.

Point Barrow has been a jumping-off point for many Arctic expeditions, including the Wilkins-Detroit Arctic Expeditions and the April 15, 1928, Eielson-Wilkins flight across the Arctic Ocean to Spitsbergen. It is 33 km (20.5 mi) northeast of the Rogers-Post Site, the scene of the airplane crash on August 15, 1935 that killed aviator Wiley Post and his passenger, the entertainer Will Rogers.

The "Shooting Station," is located a few miles southwest of Point Barrow. so named because between 1965 and 1972 it was a launch site for Nike-Cajun and Nike Apache sounding rockets. It is the site of a Global Atmosphere Watch atmospheric monitoring station and summer cabins constructed by locals and used for subsistence hunting and fishing.

[Stanley]

Wiley Post..... I'd forgotten him but the name is familiar because I once had a wonderful book on the History of flight. It started with Lillienthal and the early gliding men and went right through to post WW2 which was then 'the present day'. Like a lot of other books it vanished while I was in the army..... Parents? Who needs 'em!!

She may very well serve as a Looking-glass, wherein we may see the Vices of this Age Epitomized. F. Kirkman, The Counterfeit Lady, 1673.

Political journalists face a problem that has recently moved from chronic to acute. To quote a 1673 tract, “how can Truth be discovered of [one] wholly composed of Falsehood?” As per usual, the answer was that you start digging for it and keep on digging. Here, the pamphlet in question, The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, was not the first effort to dig up the truth about one of the 17th century’s most successful frauds (and that’s saying something), a woman who went by many names (as became her trade) but is known to us as Mary Carleton, born Mary Moders and baptized as such on January 22, 1642, but in her life known by various aliases, partly because of her various marriages, and partly because of her varied roles (for instance “the crafty Whore of Canterbury” and “The German Princess”). Mary was born respectably poor but from time to time lived disgracefully rich, absorbing many of the traits of gentility, including an aristocratic manner of speaking English and good command of French and German (acquired, along with quite a bit of loot, during a prolonged raid on respectability in Paris and Cologne). She was tried for bigamy at least twice (in 1655 and 1663) and cleverly got off the hook, claiming forgetfulness the first time and (possibly) suborning a witness the second time. She acquired notoriety, too. In 1663 Samuel Pepys visited her in prison, and she was cheered on her acquittal (which, in turn, produced a minor Restoration comedy, A Witty Combat, in which Mary herself may have acted). The many-headed, it has been said, will vote for anything once but they can run out of patience. So the play was a failure, and Mary was eventually brought down by another of her roles, burglary, at the time a hanging offense. Dressed in her “German Princess” finery and now jeered by the crowd, Mary Carleton was hanged at Tyburn on her baptismal day, January 22, in 1673. Sic semper mendax, as one might say. ©

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A poster . . . is designed to answer certain strictly material needs. It must have a commercial fashion. Cassandra

“What is Art?” is a question often raised when an “artist” kicks over the traces, for instance with Andy Warhol’s soup cans, all 32 flavors I think, which surely, surely, surely could not be art. Time and again, however, the world says that art it is. A more constant undercurrent of the “this cannot be art” conversation has to do with design matters: e.g. furniture, jewelry, and “graphics.” Graphics (for the sake of argument, “graphic art”) occupies us now, for today is the birth anniversary of Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, born (in the Ukraine) on January 23, 1901, and destined to become the most famous graphic artist of the interwar years. He would be known, personally and professionally, as Cassandra, but he had first to study in Paris (at the École des beaux arts, with ‘proper’ painters) and then break into the design game with a prize-winning poster in the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Art. It was a poster of a woodcutter. Cassandra went on from there to fame and fortune, with iconic posters incorporating the styles and sometimes “quotes” of modern art, new typefaces (to fit his style, so to speak), and latterly prestigious and profitable American commissions. His most famous posters are still recognizable and now, if you can find an original, command Sotheby’s-level prices. The passenger liner Normandie looms massively out of a flat sea, precisely cutting its surface and filling the eye of the beholder; it promises to take you wherever you want to go, right now, today, and in style. A single hand, elegantly cuff-linked, holds a luxury cigarette, its smoke curling lazily into a blue sky. A Dubonnet is poured (for you, surely?) by a derby-hatted drinker, in profile. See Cassandra posters on line, and ask yourself, is this art? Cassandra said it was not; the world dissents. ©

[Stanley]

Perhaps bacteria themselves may tentatively be regarded as biochemical experiments. Marjory Stephenson, 1930.

At the UMSL Honors College, several scholarships in the science fields are set aside for ‘underrepresented minorities,’ a category that still includes women. Indeed, of all the areas of academic study, the sciences have been slowest to admit that, maybe, women can do “a man’s job.” And for individual women scientists, it has often been a long haul. The biochemist Marjory Stephenson may stand in this case for many others. She was born on January 24, 1885, in the outskirts of Cambridge and, you might say, stayed on the outskirts for most of her life. But her father, a prosperous farmer of progressive notions, encouraged her interest in science, and in due course Marjory entered Newnham College, Cambridge, to read natural sciences (a combined degree of lesser challenge then thought especially suitable for women). She read very well, and after a few years cooling her heels and teaching domestic science in a London institute (30 years later my mother’s major at Iowa State!!), Marjory was invited back into ‘real’ science first at London University and then, after spells of war work in France and Salonika, at Cambridge. There she was supported by annual grants from the Medical Research Council and a small Newnham fellowship while compiling a research record (mainly in the biochemistry of human metabolism) so formidable that, in 1936, she was awarded a PhD by research but still offered no permanent appointment on the Cambridge science faculty (all this while, by the way, Marjory was tutoring the young ladies of Newnham in science). Finally, in 1943, Dr. Marjory Stephenson was made University Lecturer in Biochemistry. Two years later, in 1945, she became the first woman to be elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society. And it’s worth noting that that august body had to change its statutes before it could commit that solecism. Fast work but overdue at the same time. ©

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If the biographer respects facts, he can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Virginia Woolf, The Art of Biography, 1939.

For various reasons (royalty, aristocracies of blood and wealth, etc.) “middle class” has a peculiar weight in England, and so when we say that Adeline Virginia Stephen was (on January 5, 1884) born into the Victorian high middle class, we are saying something. Her childhood home was right on Hyde Park, soon augmented by a summer place in Cornwall, and both her father’s and her mother’s families were of long, distinguished, and generally prosperous lineages, eminent civil servants, Wilberforcian reformers, artists and a couple of writers, including her father Leslie, the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. So when little Virginia began to scribble (“in the manner of Hawthorne,” she later said) she was encouraged to continue, to tell her father a daily story, and to fill with fictions her idyllic Cornwall summers. Soon, however, family deaths (and family tendencies) filled Virginia’s mind with horrors and thoughts of suicide. It might be said that she wrote herself out of them, in more than one way, and it was as an accomplished writer, severe melancholic, and acknowledged leader of the fledgling Bloomsbury Group that Virginia Stephen met and (in 1912) married Leonard Woolf. Writing as Virginia Woolf, both critical essays and fiction, she became ‘the high priestess of modernism,’ experimenting with time and voice and structure to “give you my life” (as she has one of her lead characters, a writer, say, in The Wave, 1931). She even transformed biography, self-consciously rebelling against her father’s DNB obsession with the great and the good to write, instead, about those who were obscured and extraordinary: and especially about women. For perhaps the most lasting achievement of Virginia Woolf’s tragic, noble life was to gift intellectual shape and heft to modern feminism. She died a suicide, by drowning, in 1941. ©

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I never let practical considerations clutter my youthful dreams. Roy Chapman Andrews, 1943.

Has the book been written about the dependence of science on brilliant administrators, people who (whether or not scientists) have made good science possible? One thinks of the Nobel-studded record of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratories and asks “who was running that show?” The answer turns out to be some scientist or other. But among non-scientist scientific administrators, pride of place may belong to an English major, Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was born in Beloit, WI, on January 26, 1884, attended Beloit College, and graduated (in English) in 1906. Unusually for that time and that major, he took courses also in evolution and archaeology, developed a fascination for them, and went to New York looking for a job at the Museum of Natural History. So what do you do with an English major in a science museum? You have him sweep the floors, of course, as a lowly and unskilled assistant in the taxidermy room. But by 1911 (!!!), due in part to the illness of a senior staffer but mostly to Andrews’ ambition and intelligence, he was acting director of the museum’s Department of Mammals and pushing plans for a $2.5 million addition to its exhibition and research spaces. And he had already been on expeditions to East Asia and Norway and made notable discoveries about Cetacean evolution. In 1923 a new news magazine, Time, made him into its cover story. But Andrews’ greatest triumph, the 1925-26 expedition to central Asia, and much else paleontological and anatomical lay in his future. After 1934, as Director of the whole museum, Andrews became the guiding force behind its multifarious and outstandingly successful scientific activities. But you can’t keep an English major down, and in 1943 he succumbed to temptation to write a fine if somewhat egocentric autobiography, Under a Lucky Star. He could have entitled it Indiana Jones, English Major and Science Bureaucrat. ©

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I write because I have some questions I need answers to, and the only way I know to find the answers is to write my way into them. Julius Lester.

St. Louis is a city that likes to keep its fame to itself, and that unbecoming modesty extends to a reluctance to acknowledge its distinguished natives. University City’s “St. Louis Walk of Fame” is, please pardon the pun, a step in the right direction, but nowhere among its 150 or so brass stars can you find the prolific singer, writer photographer and scholar Julius Lester, born here on January 27, 1939. True, Lester left St. Louis when he was only two, but there are others embedded in the Walk whose town ties were shorter. Anyway, Julius didn’t leave willingly. His father answered the ministerial call to an AME church in Kansas City in 1941, and then again in Nashville, in 1952, and St. Louis was left behind. Julius Lester himself, very well educated, fetched up in New York City, where he married, converted to Judaism, and began his multi-colored career, hosting a local TV show, getting deeply involved in the blues and folk scene, learning photography, and beginning his wide reading in Afro-American history and literature. His first book, co-authored with Leadbelly and Pete Seeger, was about how to play the 12-string guitar. That came out in ’65; since then he’s been at UMass Amherst, teaching in African-American Studies and then Judaica (and winning several university and state teaching awards); he’s published 48 books (nine of them award winners or nominees); and he’s put on photography exhibitions at venues like the Forbes Library and the Smithsonian Institution. He also put out a CD of folk and blues songs. What intrigues me most is that 31 of those books are children’s stories, most or all of them on African-American themes, including three volumes that revise Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories (of which we might say they were in need of revision). I think you should read one of them before Julius Lester finally gets his star in our St. Louis Walk of Fame. ©

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Here I stand; I can do no other. Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms.

On January 28, 2017 we reflect that in human conflict, as on the dance floor, it usually takes two to tango. For it was on January 28, 1521 that the Diet of Worms convened, in Worms, of course, at the behest of Emperor Charles V. The sole order of business was a recalcitrant priest called Martin Luther, who had in 1517, famously, nailed 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Pope Leo X duly found 41 errors in Luther’s 95 Theses, which might lead one to posit that 54 of the theses were (at least minimally) OK (one would be mistaken), but in any case Luther remained in the Catholic Church and the matter remained open. Luther’s defiance excited people across Europe, carried hither and yon by the printing press and by the international community of learning. But from the Church’s point of view it was “open” like a running sore, and so Luther was summoned to explain himself at the Diet of Worms. After receiving promises of safe conduct (that, unusually, were honored), Luther appeared and made his case, while one Johann Eck was the attorney for the prosecution. As is sufficiently well known, Eck won his case, Martin Luther was declared an outlaw (literally, a person entirely outside the protection of the Emperor), and all Catholic subjects were ordered to assist in Luther’s capture and punishment. Thus spake the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Pope Leo endorsed the Diet’s declaration, and the tango we now call the Protestant Reformation officially began. Much blood would be shed, much flesh would be burnt, before the church and the state would be sufficiently separated to allow people to worship (or not) as they wished (which, by the way, was no more Martin Luther’s aim than it was Pope Leo’s). ©

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Faubion Bowers came from a small town in Oklahoma and did lots with his life. Bob McLaughlin, private correspondence, 2016.

What in the world does a young lad do with his life when he’s born in a small Oklahoma farming community, of partly Cherokee ancestry, and early determines that he’s homosexual? This fairly describes Faubion Bowers, born on January 29, 1917, one century past. One would have to say that most of Bowers’s answers were surprising. The unsurprising one is that for most of his life Bowers stayed “in the closet,” and indeed married (the Asian Indian author Santha Rau). Beyond that, nothing was conventional. At the University of Oklahoma, where he studied for one year, he learned Russian (so he could present an Alexander Scriabin concert). Then he was off to the Julliard (to train as a pianist), then to Columbia University, then to France, and then to Japan (on a tramp steamer) where he taught English, learned Japanese, and (eventually) became a world expert on Kabuki, a traditional music and dance theatre that was often on the fringes of respectability (partly because of its dependence on “crossing” in gender roles). In a longish life, Bowers would become a leading scholar of Kabuki, but he was also a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, held several visiting professorships, and matured as a noted (and widely published) author on Asian art generally. Bowers also finally got around to writing a 2-volume biography of Scriabin (a successful study which has had its second edition). But before all that Faubion Bowers received the Bronze Star and Oak Leaf Cluster for bravery and special merit in WWII and then (1945-48) served brilliantly and with great distinction as Secretary and principal translator to General Douglas MacArthur during the American Occupation of Japan. During the occupation, MacArthur appointed Faubion Bowers official “censor” of Japanese theater, where he became that rare case of the censor as liberator. It all goes to show that you can’t tell a book by its cover. ©

[Stanley]

Dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors. Gene Hackman, 2002.

Gene Hackman cannot possibly be 87 years old, but today he is. He was born in “San Berdoo,” California on January 30, 1930 (American father, Canadian mother). But in his last movie role that I remember, Welcome to Mooseport (2004), he looks a vigorous 50 (or so) and as per usual plays his character (a comic, scheming ex-president whose nastinesses get washed away in small town politics and romances) well, and to the hilt. But acting doesn’t seem to have been in Hackman’s blood. His family, even before his parents divorced, was migratory, and as Hackman grew up he held several jobs (including dog-catcher in Danville, IL) of lesser challenge. Along the way he did a full tour in the Marines before, age 28, deciding that acting might be a better wrinkle and starting up with one of those Hollywood incubators, the Pasadena Playhouse. There his classmates included Dustin Hoffman, another unprepossessing figure, and Hackman and Hoffman were voted (by their brood mates) “the least likely to succeed.” They took that distinction with them to New York, where they took up with another unsuccess, Robert Duvall, and where Hackman worked when he could, at what he could, including doorman at a Howard Johnsons. That was 1962. Since then, this trio of failures has scored 19 academy award nominations (Hackman has five, including two wins). Gene Hackman’s most memorable roles were probably in Bonnie and Clyde (1967, his ‘breakthrough’), The French Connection (1971), and Superman: The Movie (1978), none of which I have seen. I like him well enough, anyway, in Hoosiers (1986), Mississippi Burning (1988), The Birdcage (1996), and The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), four roles requiring the remarkably wide range of talents that Hackman’s Pasadena classmates seem to have overlooked. ©