BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

I got mail from Paulette this morning. Bob fell off a ladder on the 23 October and was put into ICU after a seizure. (God knows why he was up the ladder! I suspect Paulette will have something to say about that.) Here's what she has written this morning;

Still in hospital, but recovering. Feeding tube was removed this forenoon and he ate some pasta, minced meat, tomato sauce and diced carrots for lunch. His first solid food. No more seizures and no further bleeding in his brain. Slow going with a couple of setbacks, but the general trend is improvement. When he leaves the hospital he will go to a rehab unit and have intensive therapy. He is talking and making sense now.
Daniel is here to help and I go each day to the hospital from 12-8. Because of COVID, only one person is allowed during that period and cannot swap with anyone else. If someone goes for even 10 minutes, then no one else can visit that day, although the first person may go back during the visiting hours. Masks everywhere at all times. I am glad they are taking it seriously. It is a big teaching hospital of international repute, connected to Washington University medical school. It is only 1.5 miles from our flat.
Must get some sleep now. Don’t worry. He is getting very good care. Love, P.

I have asked P to tell him we are all rooting for him.

[PanBiker]

Sounds like a similar situation to a mate I made in hospital. He was in the first bay after I left the HDU and we progressed up the ward together. We hit it off immediately, two blokes with different frustrations, we lent on each other for mutual support.
He had slipped in the shower and bumped his head then had a bleed. That removed his speech and his swallow reflex so he had to be temporarily fed by tube. Intense speech therapy followed. He had all the words but struggled to get them out. We used to sit in the day room and chat and I always say that I had some fantastic 5 minute conversations with him that took about an hour or more to get out. We improved together and M could do nearly a whole sentence eventually, we talked about anything and had to be chucked out of the day room on more than one occasion when we were still chatting at midnight. M was discharged a couple of days before me but he and his partner J still keep in contact via Facebook.

Bobs in the best place anyway.

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

I got mail from Paulette this morning.
"Bob is recovering and now able to make his own phone calls, Eat, dress, take a shower (sitting down), and generally own his life again. Thinking, when people talk fast can get pretty tiring, but some of the fastest talkers don’t say anything worth listening to in any case. He is slated to come home from the rehab institute on Wednesday the 25th. "
Things are looking up. I haven't mailed him direct, I'll bet his inbox filled long since! I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything but suspect we might get a message from Himself.

[Cathy]

Ah, I thought there was something missing from the Topics List and couldn’t quite work it out.
Oh dear, wishing you a speedy full recovery Bob.
Thanks Stanley.

[Stanley]

I'm keeping on top of it Cathy but without being a nuisance to Paulette. She has had her plate full!

[PanBiker]

Encouraging news Stanley.

[Stanley]

Mail from Bob!
Thanks, everyone!!!!!!
So many friends, new and old, have expressed concern about my progress and prognosis, that it became a problem to devise a workable way of responding. I’ve been pondering that problem since I got out of hospital (November 23), and now have decided that there is no way to solve it. I suppose I should have asked one of my therapists, who would have said that “right now it’s beyond your capabilities” (their therapies include my brain and how to whip it back into shape), but I’ve come up with a partial solution, which is to write first to all my “Anniversary Note” subscribers. Not good enough, but OK given the circumstances, which is what my therapists say about everything I try.
So, yes, I thank you all for your thoughts, good wishes, and prayers, and to say that they’ve been answered in my gratitude and with some good effects. Thank you. I am now out and ambulatory (with the assistance of a walking frame). Whether I’ve suffered any permanent damage to my brain remains an open question, but permanent or fleeting there was some, with technical names that I’ve already forgotten, and all because I fell off a stepladder on October 23. After some discussion (including Paulette, several neighbors, Dr. Stanley Vriezelaar and, apparently, myself, it was decided first to put me to bed at home. Then in the wee hours an involuntary seizure settled the matter and a cheerful, efficient, and very strong St Louis fire department ambulance crew took me to the Barnes-Jewish Hospital emergency room and then into intensive care.
I remember almost nothing from all this, although apparently I took part if not always constructvely. Puzzling out what actually happened over the next nine days or so has become a topic of conversation, boring to others no doubt but endlessly fascinating to me. Since about November 3 full participatory consciousness returned gradually. I spent my last two weeks in hospital at the St. Louis Rehabilitation Institution, also on the Barnes-Jewish campus, and since last Friday (Nov. 26) have been participating in a therapy project for people like me (or at least with similar problems) under the auspices of a couple of Catholic hospitals. The assessment so far (I am ‘tested’ periodically) is that I am progressing pretty well, although some brain functions are sub-par and I am physically quite weak. They are not yet willing to say whether I can return to teaching or driving and have suggested that, at first, I set interim goals for myself.
So that’s where I am. I regard one of my interim goals as resuming, on a regular basis, my anniversary notes. Another interim goal but of a higher order is to send letters and thanks to specific people, but let me start that last process here and now by expressing my thanks and love to our near neighbors in the Oxford for their help (given immediately and then sustained) in getting me to hospital and then getting Paulette there for visits. They are Bob and Neela, Michael and Richelle, Lizzie, Sally and Dick, Art and Carolyn, and Teg. And please spare a thought, too, for our children, Daniel, Greta, and Greta’s family (Dan and Vina), who immediately threw over what they were doing (making a living) to come to St. Louis and help their mom to whip their dad back into shape. I am sure that all these would not want me to think of their help as so many debts, and so I won’t. And that’s a good thing, for they could never, ever be repaid.
The anniversary notes will, I hope, resume tomorrow, or soon. I’ve always enjoyed writing them and now, I hope, will be therapy as well as pleasure.
Bob

My Reply:
Dear Bob, That's the best item in my mail box for some considerable time. I shall be passing it on to your fans on OG. I take it stepladders are now verboten? I'm sure they will all join me in wishing you the best recovery possible.

Love, S

[PanBiker]

Excellent news Stanley. Please relate to Bob that in some ways I have been there so speak backed by experience and know of others who had the same issues. Recovering from brain injury is a slow job but slowly, slowly, catchy monkey is the way to go.

[Cathy]

Very good news. Keep up the good work recovering

[Tripps]

So pleased to see this reply. Worth waiting for.
The fact that it has been written, is in itself very encouraging.

[Tizer]

Oh, wow, that's such good news to see Bob's words and know he's feeling so well and positive.

I got mail from Paulette this morning.
...Thinking, when people talk fast can get pretty tiring, but some of the fastest talkers don’t say anything worth listening to in any case....

Well said, that lady!

[chinatyke]

I've just caught up with this thread and had no idea Bob had been in hospital. Best wishes to him for a speedy recovery which I see is well underway, and to his wife and family.

[Stanley]

Thanks to all of you. I'm not loading him or Paulette with mail.
BTW, you're right about Paulette Peter, she's your kind of woman.

[Stanley]

"I'm a raucous Puerto Rican." Rita Moreno.

Perhaps the least well known of American art awards is the EGOT: little known because so rarely awarded, for it goes only to those who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. In 1977, an EGOT went to Rita Moreno when she won an Emmy for her performance in The Muppet Show. Most people my age, however, will remember her as the fiery Anita in the movie version of West Side Story, for which she won an Oscar (best supporting actress) in 1962. Rita was born Rosita Delores Alverio in Humacao, Puerto Rico, on December 10, 1931. Four years later her mother, now divorced, moved to New York, taking Rosita with her (but leaving behind Rosita’s brother), and set up as a seamstress. Rosita, meanwhile, took acting and dancing lessons, took gainful employment dubbing Spanish for child actors in movies made for the Hispanic markets and took a new name, Rosita Moreno (her stepfather’s surname). She did land minor roles on stage and in film, now as Rita Moreno. Employment was, however, hard to find for a Puerto Rico woman, and in Moreno’s memory she was too often typecast as an exotic or as a sexpot. Ironically, the Anita role in West Side Story was a bit of both, but it was made more by the imaginations of the composer, the lyricist, and the film’s director. And we can give Shakespeare a nod, too, for Anita is modeled partly on the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. To my mind, I’d add Natalie Wood, the film’s nominal heroine whose passive presence highlighted Moreno’s Anita, angry and cynical, a girl whose fire matches her perfectly to the main drama of gang warfare and racial violence. That Oscar was a great boost for Moreno’s career, or should have been, but she still found it hard going to land parts equal to her many talents. She persisted, though, and by the 1980s had become a heroine of efforts to diversify the American stage and screen. She continued to contribute award-winning performances, but now was also being noticed (and awarded) as Rita Moreno, citizen and agent of change. ©

[PanBiker]

Welcome back to Bob.

[Stanley]

I'll pass that on Ian. Nice to see him back.

[Stanley]

"Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul." Edvard Munch

Any contest to name the world’s best-known painting by its least-known artist would have to list in its top ten The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch. And then one would have to exclude Munch’s native Norway (where he was born on December 12, 1863) where he and his works are very well known, indeed. That has not always been so, for Norwegian critics greeted his early exhibitions with contempt and derision. He was an outsider, untrained in painting, a man of no “school,” an unknown who, they said, should stay unknown. Worse, Munch’s favored subjects or themes discomfited viewers, offering despair and pain rather than assurance or inspiration. The Scream, for instance, is not the sort of image one would want to hang in one’s front parlor, let alone in one’s dining room. And Munch did not mean it to comfort. His German title for the painting translates as “The Scream of Nature,” but in his native Norse ‘scream’ becomes ‘shriek,’ and if you look at the image more than once “shriek” is likelier to stick. Biographically, Munch’s alarming images may have come from his death-stalked family, thinned by tuberculosis, weakened by mental breakdowns. His mother and favorite sister died of TB while Munch was still a child, and Munch’s own frailty made him seem a likely victim, too (on this theme, look online for Munch’s The Sick Child (1886) and the Dead Mother (1900)). So he was kept at home, away from school- or play-mates, by an over-protective father whose own “morbid pietism” offered no real protection, only terror. Thus “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies—a heritage of consumption and insanity.” Today, however, Munch’s work lives on, made more important because of its influence on German expressionism, and serving also as prelude to the horrors of the 20th century. Munch also lives on because, at his death in 1944, he willed the entire corpus of his unsold works to the nation, since 1963 housed in the Munch Museum in Oslo.

[Stanley]

"Just because I am a librarian doesn't mean I have to dress like one." Attributed to Bella La Costa Greene

Bella da Costa Greene, for decades the head librarian and archivist at the Morgan Library, was born into the African-American aristocracy of Washington DC on December 13, 1883. Then, her name was Belle Marion Greener, and on her birth certificate she was labeled as “colored.” She was a daughter of Richard Greener, a leading attorney in the capital who was the first black graduate of Harvard, and for a time, during Reconstruction, the head librarian at the University of South Carolina. When the Greener marriage dissolved in divorce, Belle’s mother Genevieve decided it would be best to “pass” as white, and her children followed suit, Belle becoming Bella da Costa Greene, an attractive young woman of Portuguese descent (her mother “passed” as Genevieve Van Viet, of Dutch descent). Bella moved to Princeton where she worked at the university library and, largely self-taught, became an expert in the rare book and illuminated manuscript collections. It was in this guise that she met the banker J. P. Morgan, who had decided to house his vast collection next to his New York City mansion. He had already hired a professional librarian for the collection, but he hired Bella too, calling her his personal librarian. She quickly became the collection’s director, and there is some evidence that she may also have attracted Morgan sexually. But that’s beside the point. Her beauty aside, Bella had made herself into an expert librarian and an aggressive and successful agent in the book and rare manuscript trades. Morgan’s death in 1913 left Bella $50,000 richer (the equivalent of about $1.3 million today) and she also stayed on at the library, improving it in various ways and by her own direction. She died in 1950, two years after retiring as director of the Morgan Library, having transformed it into a public foundation and a center of scholarship. ©

[Stanley]

“Love ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a secret.”― Aphra Behn, The Lover's Watch

I know of few women authors (in English) before Austen, so when one breaks the surface of my ignorance I expect her to be unusual in some other, additional way. It’s unfair: but Aphra Behn easily exceeds even unfair expectations and is now working her way into the canon of early modern English literature. Baptized on December 14, 1640, Aphra Behn was a playwright and poet, could be called a novelist, was a spy, a prominent courtier in the London of Charles II, and was too much else to get her tucked safely into a short note. But it would be very wrong not (also) to call her a feminist. Because she was that, too, and before her time. Interestingly, she had American connections, with the Willoughbies (West Indies) and Culpepers (Virginia), and she made something of them with her Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (1688), but her beginnings were mixed and was aged 20 she first surfaced as a royalist spy, codename Astrea, working to shop republican plotters lurking in Amsterdam. The king didn’t pay her (Charles II was often tardy in settling his accounts, and Aphra was merely a woman. It was, then, after a spell in debtors’ prison that Aphra Behn turned to her pen and made history. Some do dissent from this judgement. The gatekeeper-critic Harold Bloom doesn’t think she belongs in the canon, but if you let your reading be ruled by the gatekeepers you’ll miss a writer whose poems and plays explore sex, love, and gender in creative ways. So thumb your nose at Bloom. Aphra Behn’s work was sometimes coded, for in her era licentiousness was under male ownership, but she proved capable of trespass, and perhaps a bit of poaching. See for instance her poem “The Disappointment,” a rather explicit exploration of a love affair torpedoed by male impotence. And she was a success. Given the other known facts of her life, we must call Aphra Behn fearless, a writer of note, and not an artist to be lightly missed. ©.

[Stanley]

The criteria which govern university admissions and scholarship policies have been at issue for generations, not least because they raise genuinely difficult issues around the principles of equality and equal opportunity. The academic career of Dr. William A. Hinton may be taken as a case in point. Hinton was born in Chicago on December 15, 1883, the son of Augustus and Maria Hinton, both former slaves freed by the Civil War. A bright lad, he did well in integrated public schools, at the University of Kansas, and at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1905. Intent on a career in medicine but without the funds needed to continue his studies, he taught for a few years, and then was admitted to Harvard’s medical school in 1909 with a minority scholarship. Hinton turned it down, concerned that it might imply he owed his admission to his race. Instead, he competed for (and won) the medical school’s most prestigious “open” scholarships, and graduated MD with honors in in only three years. That was pretty good going for an African-American in the early 20th century, but Hinton’s success could not sweep under the carpet the plain fact that his race was a handicap. Unable to find a medical internship, persisted as a “volunteer” in the pathology lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he did brilliant work on the diagnosis of syphilis. He returned to Harvard as a faculty member, but only as an instructor, and despite further evidence of his brilliance (and his professional generosity) he did not attain professorial rank until the eve of his retirement. But his racial sensitivities continued to govern his life, for in 1938 he turned down the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for fear that it might cast doubt on the importance of his many scientific and medical achievements. At his death in 1959, Hinton left much of his estate to Harvard as a fund for medical school scholarships but directed that it should be named for Dwight David Eisenhower and be an “open” scholarship. ©

[Stanley]

“With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody's destiny." Jane Austen, "Emma".

In the early 1800s, Europe’s instabilities and its strange vogue for constitutional monarchy made a career for Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. To give him his full due, he was Leopold George Chrétien Frederick of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. But he was only a third son, and because he was born on December 16, 1790, nearly contemporaneously with the French Revolution and its European wars it was unlikely that he would ever attain princely rank. He and his family were driven from Saxe-Coburg by the French invasion of 1805, and although the Treaty of Tilsit returned the duchy to them it was learly at the sufferance of Napoleon, Emperor of France. Leopold was offered a place in Napoleon’s court, but the offer offended Leopold’s devotion to legitimacy; he refused and rejoined the Russian Army in time for the resumption of hostilities. He missed the battle of Waterloo but he may already have hit upon dynasty building through an accidental meeting with the then heir apparent to the British throne, Princess Charlotte, whose father was Prince Regent. Their marriage, which finally took place in 1816, may have been a love match, but it lasted only 18 months and was without issue. It left Leopold a British prince, with a civil list pension of £50,000 (a huge sum), a Surrey estate, and soon enough (1819) an avuncular connection with the next British heir apparent, Alexandrina Victoria. In due course Victoria became Queen, and as she reached maturity her “Uncle Leopold” became matchmaker, making his nephew Albert Prince Consort. In the meanwhile Leopold himself had become King of all the Belgians, a new minted state and (of course) a constitutional monarchy. Thus it was from a relatively secure status that Leopold I continued his career as matchmaker to European royal houses, placing his own children, nephews and nieces, in the lines of succession of royal houses from Lisbon to St. Petersburg. And he was not, by the way, the Belgian Leopold who raped the Congo. That was Leopold II, who made his father’s vices seem innocent and his accomplishments heroic. ©.

[Stanley]

"The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures." Sir Humphry Davy

Humphry Davy was born (in Penzance, Cornwall) on December 17, 1778. He spent an idyllic childhood, mainly in and around his parents’ estate, collecting animal and mineral specimens, fishing, hunting, making fireworks, and writing about it all. Indeed he had some thoughts of becoming a poet, but in or about his 19th year he began to study science and experienced what was almost a conversion, writing later that his youthful literary visions “fled before the voice of truth.” He would be a disciple or evangelizer of that new vision for the rest of his life, and among his many accomplishments we must include his success at making science a profession, an employment with its own rules and objectives. He’s better known for his experimental triumphs, bursting on the scene with his publication (in 1800, at age 22) of Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, and continuing throughout his life to champion the “scientific method” as the best way to make sense of the natural world. That being said, he shared with others the predilection to experiment by using one’s own senses, for instance taste and smell, and he almost killed himself studying the properties of carbon monoxide by breathing it in.

His first name for nitrous oxide was “laughing gas” for breathing it in made him laugh. In 1801 he moved to the newly established Royal Institution, first as lecturer but very soon as professor of chemistry. It was at the Royal Institution where he developed marginally safer methods of studying the properties of compounds (eg. electrolysis), and thus added sodium and potassium to the growing list of known elements. Other inventions and discoveries followed, and Davy became quite famous, in Britain and Europe. There’s no doubt that this success owed mainly to his discoveries, but we should also credit the social skills and love of nature that he’d first cultivated as a Cornish schoolboy. Humphry Davy was not only one of the first people we can actually call a “scientist;” he was also very good company. ©.

[Stanley]

Audiences will not be drawn to the technology; they'll be drawn to the story." Steven Spielberg

My attitude to the modern cinema is generally negative, and I’ve often told students (or anyone else who will listen) that I’d rather see a mediocre play than an excellent movie. One result is that I don’t often go to the movies, which must cast some doubt on my critical judgments about this film or that director. All that modesty aside, I think Steven Spielberg is a genius. Every film of his that I have seen (admittedly, only eight of his 33, for as I say I don’t often go to the movies) has engaged me thoroughly, to the point where I cannot say “this is only a film.” My suspension of disbelief is total and comes with five minutes or so of the opening credits, and that includes even some of Spielberg’s fantasies. But I’ve most enjoyed his Schindler’s List (1993) and Lincoln (2012), both of which breathe real life into real history brilliantly enough to justify his directorial use of poetic license to charge his narrative with moral points, for instance about courage in Schindler’s List. Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati on December 17, 1946, into an orthodox Jewish family. Owing to his father’s profession, the family moved often, and young Spielberg suffered much from schoolmates who thought him new, odd, an exotic. Instead of succumbing to the temptation of conforming, Spielberg adopted a kind of nerd identity, expressed in several ways but especially in film making, including a train wreck film shot with his Lionel train set. His grades suffered, however, and sent him to Long Beach State College (instead of the University of Southern California) for film studies. His detour into ‘real’ film making came from a short called Amblin’ which was seen by a studio executive who offered Spielberg a 7-year contract. So he dropped out. But not forever. Another thing I like about Steven Spielberg is that, four decades later, he returned to Long Beach to finish his baccalaureate degree (in 2002). ©.

[Stanley]

"Above the titles of wife and mother, which, although dear, are transitory and accidental, there is the title of human being, which precedes and outranks every other." Mary Livermore

In 1893 there appeared a new book, for sale by subscription only, entitled A Woman of the Century. This somewhat aggressive title is backed up by its contents, 1,470 biographical sketches, arranged alphabetically, of women “in all walks of life.” Its editors, Frances Willard and Mary Livermore, asserted that “the nineteenth century is woman’s century.” And without apology, in a most unladylike way, their own biographies were among the book’s longest. Of the two, Willard is better known today, but Mary Livermore’s life better reflects the variety and scope of the ways in which women made their presence felt in the century. She was born Mary Ashton Rice in Boston on December 19, 1820 and was educated in Boston’s public schools. Thirsting for more of the same, but female, meant that there could be no college years, but she substituted Charlestown’s female academy, where she did well enough to stay on as a teacher. In 1838 she went south as tutor to a plantation family, and learned to be an abolitionist, the first of her three great causes. Returning to Massachusetts (in 1842, as a teacher in a female academy at Duxbury) to discover a second great cause, temperance, and to begin her life as a public person. After marriage (to a universalist clergyman of similar views) and a move west (to Chicago) Livermore became a journalist and, after 1858, a Republican, a supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1860 the only female journalist at that year’s Republican convention. Southern secession and the Civil War gave her a more public platform in her work for the United States Sanitary Commission and her third great cause, female suffrage. Livermore was one suffragette who remained committed to a full range of civil rights for freed slaves, which determined her alliances within the suffrage movement, notably always including black female suffragettes. Mary Livermore died in 1905, little more than a decade before her goals would be realized nationally, in the form of the 18th and 19th amendments to the Constitution. ©