BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

what's an accessory food factor?
Frederick Gowland Hopkins, 1861-1947

The animal body is adjusted to live upon plant tissues or the tissues of other animals, and these contain countless other substances than proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Frederick Gowland Hopkins, 1906.

No matter what the food on my plate looked like, smelled like, or even tasted like, my father was there to tell me (reassuringly?) that it was “dancing with vitamins.” It was an incantation he’d learned from his mother, and it’s become generational in my extended family, but it can’t be called ‘traditional.’ For one thing, the word “vitamin” is itself a modern coinage, a blending of “vital” and “amine” first proposed (in 1912) by a Polish-American scientist, Casimir Funk. For another, “vitamins” represented a radical, modern, “scientific” departure from what had been a traditional ideal of a “balanced” diet. That balance notion was where Frederick Gowland Hopkins started his researches. Hopkins was born in London on June 20, 1861, and after an education best described as balanced (his father was a bookseller whose wide interests were taken up by young Frederick), even accidental, settled down at Cambridge in 1898 to work in an area we call biochemistry but then did not have a name. Hopkins was interested in the actual mechanics of nutrition (how cells and multicellular organisms turn their intakes into outputs). These are subtle processes but Hopkins began with relatively crude experiments, feeding animals (usually rodents) more or less even mixes of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and (of course) water. But these balanced intakes didn’t necessarily produce good outputs. Tinkering at the edges, Hopkins discovered that some ‘balanced’ diets produced weakness, wasting away, even death, while others, equally balanced, worked well. These tinkerings involved the addition or subtraction of what we now call vitamins, but which Hopkins called “accessory substances” or, even more literally, “accessory food factors.” Clearly Hopkins was no wordsmith, but he was a brilliant biochemist and so set about trying to figure out exactly how these ‘accessories’ worked (or didn’t) within cellular structures. His early experiments helped explain such oddities as muscle contraction and bone growth and did not always include what we now call vitamins. Specific minerals were involved, too, and a few amino acids. My grandmother Ethel Bliss, who’d graduated in home economics at Iowa State, was entranced, and with perfect timing (Casimir Funk supplied the word in 1912; her first live birth came in 1916) made sure that her three sons’ dinner plates were dancing with “vitamins.” And so it is today that our local drug stores (now really supermarkets of this and that) have whole aisles dancing with vitamins, minerals, and other dietary supplements. Or, if you prefer, accessory food factors.©

[Stanley]

Blonde but not dumb.
Judy Holliday wins an Oscar and Beats Pat McCarren

I am not blonde, and I am not dumb. Dolly Parton, widely quoted.

As an illustration of genetic stereotyping, blonde hair has had a chequered history. Leni Riefenstahl and Adolf Hitler made it into a visual symbol of ‘Nordic’ racial superiority, an odd choice for a couple of brunettes. For better reasons that one hasn’t stuck. Meanwhile, a discordant theme arose in the USA, best encapsulated in the expression “dumb blonde.” Its roots (pun intended) are several and difficult to trace. Some may lie in the late Scandinavian immigration to the Upper Midwest of the USA. This led to a raft of jokes about slow Swedes or numbskull Norwegians, some of which (the jokes) still survive. But there’s little doubt that the strongest streams of dumb blonde talk and dumb blonde action came out of Hollywood. Along with dumb blondes we had blonde bombshells and ice-cold blondes. These were not mutually exclusive categories (there were some ice-cold bombshells, for instance), but all of them were women. So a Nordic trope became sexist. One or two of these blondes might have appealed to Adolf, but the quintessential dumb blonde was a Jewish girl, Judith Tuvim, born in New York City on June 21, 1921. You will know her better as Judy Holliday (“Tuvim” can be translated as “Holiday”). Her parents were both second-generation immigrants, and successful, her dad a lawyer of left-wing tendencies and her mom a music teacher. Whatever their aims for her (they got her into a good girls’ school), she wanted to act, and when she first failed at that ambition she took a secretarial job at the Mercury Theatre, then run by Orson Welles and John Houseman. Still stage-struck, Judy began with small parts in sketch comedies, not unlike Saturday Night Live. Sometimes she sang, accompanied by a music conservatory student called Leonard Bernstein, but she enjoyed only modest success until, playing bit parts in Hollywood, she went back to New York to play the dumb blonde (“Billie Dawn”) part in Born Yesterday. She hadn’t been the first choice, but was backed into it by influential friends (notably Katherine Hepburn), and Holliday made such a great success that when Born Yesterday was translated to the silver screen she went with it, to Hollywood. It’s a classic, but Holliday had been named a Communist and was investigated by the McCarren Committee. There she did not plead the fifth, but rather played the dumb blonde. But nor did she name any names, and she got away with it. And nor was she dumb. But she was blonde, funny, and brilliant, and were it not for a throat cancer that killed her in 1965 we would know much more about her. ©

[Stanley]

The shining example of Huck Finn
Harriet Mulford Lothrop, 1844-1924

Don’t join the book burners. Dwight David Eisenhower.

Culture wars have now assumed a sinister character, used as a pathway to power by our more objectionable politicians. It might be better to ridicule or pity these warriors, reeking (as they do) of shallow intellects and pathetic uncertainties. Ridicule was the preferred tactic when, in 1885, the Concord Public Library banned Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Twain welcomed the decision, confident that it would be good for business, and this was the stance taken by editorial writers of the more progressive sort. I’m curious about it because Concord can also be seen as the cradle-place of American liberty. It’s not only where ‘embattled farmers’ took a few potshots at British redcoats, thus starting the American Revolution, but it also had become famous for cultural experiment, the hamlet where Emerson worked his outrageous theologies, Hawthorne his strange fantasies, and where Bronson Alcott arrested his daughters’ development with his educational obsessions and his housekeeping rotas. In these contexts, the banning of Huckleberry Finn seems a surprise. Perhaps the library’s cultural aggression owed to a new literary temper, exemplified in the writings of the woman who had become, by 1885, the town’s leading author, Harriet Mulford Lothrop. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 22, 1844, into the very genteel home of one of New England’s leading architects, educated genteelly in female academies and indulgently in her father’s private library. She was descended from immigrants of the better sort, Mayflower passengers for instance, and proud to bursting of Yankee culture. And she wanted to write about these things. Under the pen-name Margaret Sidney, she explored her cultural heritage and its present, too, and made much of it. But she became famous through her children’s books, a saga of the Five Little Peppers. They were the impossibly good children of a desperately poor family rescued from its grim privations by an impossibly generous New England aristocrat. Instead of being spoliated by their impossibly good fortune, for instance by becoming idle snobs, they all accepted that their duty lay in remaining impossibly good and benefiting, by their superior example, the poorer children of their town. I’ve read a couple Pepper stories and find them insufferable. I wouldn’t ban them, myself, but I like to think that Ms. Lothrop/Sidney was on the Concord library board when it banned poor Huckleberry for his bad grammar, his idleness, and his willingness to go to hell. It would make a good joke, anyway. After all, Ms. Lothrop was the foundress of the Concord chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and, when she birthed a girl, of the Daughters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Now that’s really funny. ©.

[Stanley]

To help you to live until you die.
Cicely Saunders, 1918-2005

It took 19 years to build a home around that window. Dr. Cicely Saunders, concerning the 1967 dedication of St. Christopher’s Hospice, London.

Hospices as such have a long history, dating back at least to the Crusades (crusading was an unhealthy profession), but the ‘hospice movement’ is of modern origin. The American ‘Medicare’ system defines hospice as medical care for the dying and supports it (if spottily) in a variety of institutional settings, even home care. In Europe generally and in Britain specifically it’s associated with a separate facility, a building wherein the mortally ill receive treatment for their pains and compassion for their sufferings. Its origins lie in Victorian concerns for the desperate condition of the dying poor, as expressed in London’s Friedenheim (“home of peace”), founded in the 1880s. But its later successes owe more to Dr. Cicely Saunders, born into middle class comfort in Barnet, Hertfordshire (now part of Greater London), on June 23, 1918. She was sent off to Roedean School and then to St. Anne’s, Oxford. There she was to major in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, an appropriate degree for the modern woman her parents wanted her to be, but the war released her into nursing. Nursing was what she’d always wanted, but she was sidetracked again, this time by spinal problems which rendered her unfit for such an on-your-feet profession. So, instead, Cicely qualified as a hospital social worker (‘almoner’, to use its traditional name). It was in that guise that Cicely cared for David Tasma, a dying man who had survived the Warsaw ghetto. In their discussions about life and death, they identified a special need for those who were crossing the line, a home where the dying could receive the best care that medicine could offer and something more. Tasma left her £500 “to be a window in your home,” an injunction Cicely obeyed. But she couldn’t do it as a ‘mere’ almoner. She needed to know the science and to change doctors’ traditional view of dying as a ‘failure’ of medicine. “It’s the doctors who desert the dying,” a surgeon friend told her, and so Cicely went back to college, qualified as a doctor in 1957, and went out in the world to make care for the dying an integral part of medical practice. What we now call “pain management” was an essential element, but to Dr. Saunders that meant more than an opioid prescription. To her dying was a matter of “total pain,” and its care required a new formula, drugs plus devotion. Her ideas, developed in a research article in 1958, soon caught on and are now widely accepted. They were further clarified by the name Saunders gave to her first “hospice,” St. Christophers. He was the patron saint of travelers, and she would be their guide. ©.

[Stanley]

Gloom, doom, and empire.
Brooks Adams, 1848-1927

Religions are preached and are forgotten, empires rise and fall, philosophies are born and die, art and poetry bloom and fade, as societies pass from the disintegration wherein imagination kindles to the consolidation whose pressure ends in death. Brooks Adams, 1896

In its fourth generation, spanning the latter half of the 19thcentury, the Adams family dynasty produced two of its brightest sparks, the brothers Henry and Brooks Adams. Given their family’s eminence—to say nothing of its wealth—one might have expected them to have been boosters of the American dream. Instead both are known for their pessimism, Henry especially in his self-indulgent autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, wherein he explored the unhappinesses of being born too late, in the wrong century, at the wrong time and out of place. Both of them, oddly, shared “Brooks” as a middle name, in tribute to the source of most of their monetary wealth, their mother Abigail Brooks’s family. And although much of that wealth was lost in the great depression of the 1890s, both were able to live out their lives in comfort and to write on the past greatness, present gloom, and future decline of American civilization. The brother known as “Brooks Adams” was born Peter Chardon Brooks Adams on June 24, 1848, the year of his father Charles’s first (of two) unsuccessful presidential campaigns. Brooks’s life ran behind Henry’s of course, but along similar, parallel lines. He duly graduated from Harvard (1870), accompanied his father on an important diplomatic mission (negotiating the Alabama claims that arose from the Civil War), and then after a short but successful career as a lay professional (he was a lawyer where Henry had been an historian) Brooks Adams settled down to a life of leisure as a cultural commentator. His works, notably The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896) shared Henry’s view that great nations wax and wane, rise and fall, and that the USA was entering its downwards curve. But (unlike his elder brother) Brooks Adams insisted that America could play its fated part bravely, nobly, and courageously by taking on the task of becoming a Great Power. Luckily, he thought, the USA could prolong that stage by joining with the world’s previous Great Power, Britain, in an Anglo-Saxon alliance that could extend its rule by the use of sea power and the material profits (and heroic exploits) of territorial empire. Of course Brooks Adams’s America was becoming less Anglo-Saxon by the day, with the arrival of each immigrant ship from eastern and southern Europe. So there was in his work more than a whiff of resentful racism, and in that sense he can be seen as a precursor, perhaps predictor, of Donald Trump’s white nationalism. And it is in that precise sense that Brooks Adams is best forgotten. Henry’s autobiographical perspective is saner, and it smells better. ©

[Stanley]

One woman's pursuit of equality
Elena Piscopia, Padua, June 25, 1678.

We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. Maya Angelou, in The Paris Review, 1980.

Because of my lifelong interest in the idea of human equality, many of these anniversary notes have focused on individuals who were the first (or among the first) to gain ‘equal’ status in this or that field. Considering all these people as a group helps us to see that equality is seldom smoothly won. Equality requires struggle. It’s often born of (or birthing) revolution, it can be explosive, partly because those who enjoy equality like to think that it's an earned status, theirs to keep; they rarely rush to give it away and often it's achieved by extraordinary individuals, super-equals so to speak. One such hero was Elena Cornaro Piscopia, who on June 25, 1678 became the first woman to receive a university doctoral degree. Of course she had some advantages, not least that she was a daughter of a Venetian noble. Indeed her father was second in precedence to the Doge himself. But her mother was a peasant and Elena (born in 1646) was illegitimate. The stain of bastardy stuck with Elena even after her parents were married (1654) and despite her father’s efforts to make her into a hot marriage prospect. But the evidence suggests that she was doted upon from birth, not only by her parents but by a string of tutors. She first broke barriers by gaining mastery of Latin and Greek (widely thought to be beyond the grasp of the female mind), then the modern languages of French, Spanish, and Arabic. These, along with Hebrew and her native Italian, made her into a child prodigy, known as Venice’s “Seven-Language Oracle.” Along the way she became adept at geometry, of course, but was chiefly known for her expertise in philosophy and theology, the latter very emphatically a male preserve, and for her translations of contemporary theological and devotional tracts. All that, and her father’s exalted position in the Venetian republic, made it possible for her tutors (academicians at the University of Padua) to petition that she be accorded a laurea (in effect, a doctorate) in theology. For the Bishop of Padua and the Pope in Rome, that proved too big a pill to swallow, but as a second best—and with all due ceremony, in Padua’s cathedral church—she received her laurea in philosophy a month after her 32nd birthday. In order to tie up all the loose ends, Padua changed its statutes ex post facto, but it was to take more than three centuries before any North American university could bring itself to such a step, thought contrary to “nature.” We are thus reminded that equality often involves long-term struggle, in women’s case now made longer and harder by yesterday’s US Supreme Court decision. So let’s get on with it. ©.

[Stanley]

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction to one's training.
Bernard Berenson, 1865-1958

Consistency, generally thought to be a good quality, requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. Bernard Berenson.

Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) was a principal architect of the ‘general’ education still required today by most U.S. colleges. His ‘core curriculum’ was an elitist notion, but also integrationist. There was a higher culture to which all should aspire, physicists or poets, and Norton (an historian of art) would initiate all into it. In a parallel way, Norton urged his institution, Harvard, not only to raise its standards but also to widen its doors, to admit students from among the new immigrants who were forever altering Norton’s New England. Here again Norton was both elitist and integrationist, and in young Bernard Berenson Norton found almost an ideal type. Born as Bernhard Valvrojenski into the family of a high-minded tin peddler on June 26, 1865, in Tsarist Lithuania, Bernhard came to Boston a Jewish toddler (in 1868). His parents, strong advocates of assimilation, changed their surname and urged their children to excel as Americans. So Bernard attended an elite school (Boston Latin!!!), converted to Christianity (Episcopalian!!!) at 15, and went on to Harvard where he learned about art from Charles Eliot Norton. Norton was impressed but not overwhelmed. “Berenson has more ambition than ability,” Norton wrote, when Berenson upon graduating (in 1888) applied for a Harvard fellowship to study art in Italy. It might have killed a lesser man, and Berenson did not get that fellowship, but he was indeed ambitious and he had enough ability to find other sponsors (from among Norton’s fellow Boston aristocrats). So Berenson went to Italy anyway, and into a career that made him America’s premier authority on European art. He also married well, Mary Smith, a Boston divorcée of impeccable pedigree, remarkable connections, and great talent, herself, as a connoisseur and scholar. It would not be a happy marriage but it lasted, and it brought the couple a star-studded galaxy of friends and correspondents. Berenson himself became a much-published scholar and the preeminent advisor of leading American collectors and museums. In this latter role he was involved in several famous art history controversies. He generally won these, but a later discovery of his financial arrangements with an important American collector have cast doubt on Berenson’s triumphs. Berenson converted to Catholicism (perhaps to please Mary), but in Mussolini’s Italy his “Jewishness” got him into some trouble. He survived. He also prospered, and today his Italian estate, I Tatti, is the home of Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. One wonders whether a bust of Charles Eliot Norton is found there, in the entry hall. Probably not. Anyway, one should always be careful about whom to ask for a reference. ©.

[Stanley]

"It takes judgment, brains, and maturity to score in a balkline game." From The Music Man (1957).
Willie Mosconi, 1913-1993

Nobody was better than me, especially not that fat guy. He was from New York. He never saw Minnesota in his life. Willie Mosconi.

In The Music Man (1957), ‘Professor’ Harold Hill warns the squeaky-clean folk of River City, Iowa, that “Ya Got Trouble,” to wit, a Pool Hall, which will surely bring their boys and girls down into a world of “Libertine men and Scarlet women/ And Rag-time, shameless music” and, worse, into “the arms of a jungle animal instinct.” He promises them all a different kind of music, martial, and with a marching band. As musicals must, The Music Man turns out OK, but the distinction made between billiards (which Harold admits to) and pool was, to me, a mystery. It was understood by William Joseph Mosconi, born above his dad’s billiards hall in Philadelphia on June 27, 1913. In a long life, Willie Mosconi was the consummate gentleman of the green cushion, nattily dressed, studiously polite, courtly in his manners. In 1993, after his death, his wife Flora remembered him for his grace and motion, moving around the table like a ballet dancer. But at the table he was a killer whose accuracy with cue and balls often didn’t allow his opponents even a courtesy shot. But his wasn’t an instinctive talent. Indeed his father had wanted for Willie the status of a vaudeville star, and Willie had to practice upstairs from the hall with a broomstick from his mother’s cupboard and small potatoes from her larder. With those as starting handicaps, it is little wonder that he became a billiards champion, world champion indeed, and many times. Right from the first, for Willie, it was a gentleman’s game, and he would have understood perfectly the sharp distinction Harold Hill made between billiards and pool. Not only that but Willie did his best to clean up billiards, dress it up, move it out of the cellar and into the drawing room. He would bring in a stylish audience of gentlemen (and ladies), and rid the game of its hustlers: those louche lowlifes who would lured tyros into a betting match and emptied their pockets. From early on, Willie’s nemesis was Rudolf Wanderone, king of the hustlers and then known as “Broadway Fats.” They knew each other and were not friends. When they finally met in a match, in 1978, Mosconi demolished Wanderone, who by then called himself “Minnesota Fats”. That was thanks to the 1961 film The Hustler, which Wanderone always claimed was about him. But again Willie had all the shots. He’d served as the film’s technical director and tutored Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman in the finer arts of bank shots and stymies. Willie’s obituaries, however, do not say whether he ever played in Mason City (which was the ‘real’ River City). Mosconi’s record run of 526 balls (!!!) was made in Springfield, Ohio. ©

[Stanley]

never the duke, but always the aristocrat.
Philip Howard, 1557-1596

Any small number of persons . . . separated from the general stock . . . and intermarrying constantly with each other . . . become in time the opposite of what is noble in man. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791.

The ‘Restoration’ of King Charles II in 1660 could not be complete. After all, his father’s head had been cut off (1649) for ruling by divine right. But the reactionary heart of the new regime was bared it christened 1660 as the 12th year of Charles II’s reign, who ruled (it was declared) by right of inheritance. Among the minor (and less ghoulish) expressions of this reactionism was the ‘resurrection’ of the dukedom of Norfolk, vacant since the beheading of Thomas Howard, the 4th duke, in 1572. So Thomas Howard’s great-great grandson became the 5th duke, a sleight of hand that didn’t weigh much in 1660, for the 5th duke was mentally negligible and without issue. But when he died in 1677 the title went to his brother Henry, who did produce a son, and so today the dukedom of Norfolk is held to be England’s most ancient; so the current duke, the 18th, Edward Fitzalan-Howard, is Earl Marshal and Hereditary Marshal. The Norfolks, as we might call them, have held it all together by primogeniture and by clever marriages with other magnate families, as had been the case with Thomas, the 4th duke, who wed Lady Mary Fitzalan, co-heiress of the 12th earl of Arundel. Arundel was not clever enough to produce a boy, but thanks to Lady Mary most of the Norfolks have, ever since, been Fitzalan-Howards. Her father, the 12th earl of Arundel, survived (as a closeted Catholic) the religious earthquakes that led to the Protestant and monarchical Church of England. The same cannot be said of Arundel’s grandson, the only child of that first Fitzalan-Howard marriage. That was Philip Howard, born on June 28, 1557, at Arundel House in London, during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary. Little Philip was baptized a Catholic in the Chapel Royal and named after Mary’s consort, Philip II of Spain. But when Mary died and her Protestant sister Elizabeth became queen, in 1559, that was not clever. While Philip’s father remained Catholic (and was executed for treason in 1572), he was put under Protestant care. Had he stayed there (or kept quiet) might eventually have recovered the dukedom, but he did inherit most of the Howard lands, and Howard House in London. He also in due course became earl of Arundel, married cleverly, and spent lavishly to win Elizabeth’s favor. Soon, however, he followed his wife back into the Catholic fold. Philip attempted to escape England but was captured and sent to the Tower in 1585. And there he died, in 1596, after a decade of reflection and study. But all is well, aristocratically speaking, for Philip is now a Catholic saint, and the Fitzalan-Howards are still dukes of Norfolk. ©

[Stanley]

A lesson in CIVIL engineering.
George Washington Goethals, 1858-1928

Faith in the ability of a leader is of slight service unless it be united with faith in his justice. General George Washington Goethals.

Name-changing was a common experience for immigrants. It often arose accidentally, transliterations of tin-eared immigration clerks at Ellis Island or other ports of entry. Or it might be imposed, as with Paulette’s Swedish great-grandfather, who became a “Brown” because his line boss (on the Rock Island Railroad), had too many Carlsens. It could also signal the immigrant’s own desire to become “American.” So Johannes Baptiste Goethals, a Belgian immigrant, became Joseph Louis Goethals. The surname “Goethals” remained (after all, it translates as from the Flemish as “good ales”), but when his son was born (in Brooklyn, on June 29, 1858) he was christened George Washington Goethals. What could be more American than that? It also embodied ambition, and young George proved enough of a whiz at school to enter New York’s city college at only 14, in engineering. There he learned of another engineering school, at West Point, and transferred there to graduate second in his class in 1880. Thereafter he held a number of posts in the US army, including as engineer in the government project to make the Tennessee River navigable even in dry months. Goethal’s radical design for traversing Muscle Shoals (1891), got him promoted to Captain. The single lock’s huge 26-foot lift (at the time, a world’s record) was inundated 50 years later by an even bigger government project, but before that happened George Washington Goethals would become famous as the chief engineer of the Panama Canal, where 26-foot lifts for river craft were the least of his problems. Goethals had to move mountains, employ the flow of a raging subtropical river, and build a canal for ocean-going ships that could carry two-way traffic between two oceans. He had to mobilize and maintain the health of a huge labor force in a hostile, tropical environment. And, even more challenging in some ways, he had to keep his supply lines humming with raw steel, other construction materials, and purpose-built machinery. And it all had to arrive ‘just in time,’ when and where it was needed. So Teddy Roosevelt appointed Colonel George Washington Goethals chief engineer in 1907, and in 1916 Woodrow Wilson congratulated General George Washington Goethals for a job well done (and finished two years ahead of schedule). “Good Ale” indeed. Admired by his workforce for his eccentricities and for his care, Goethals pioneered not only in engineering and labor relations but also in logistics. His public service (and innovative work in supply chain management) continued through WWI, and marks George Washington Goethals as one of assimilation’s signal successes. By now we should be better at it. ©

[Tripps]

who became a “Brown” because his line boss (on the Rock Island Railroad),

Wonderful reference - six degrees of separation strikes again - and only sixty years apart.



Rock Island Line

[Stanley]

I think I remember Bob telling me that the railroad that ran through Northfield was originally part of the Rock Island Line. Up until then I thought Lonnie Donegan had made it up!

[Stanley]

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. Emerson.
Stanley Spencer, 1891-1968

To forgive is wisdom. To forget is genius. And easier. Because it’s true. Gulley Jimson, in The Horse’s Mouth (1944) by Joyce Cary.

I read Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth in 1969-70, my first year in England. Its anti-hero, the artist Gulley Jimson, was rendered so vividly that I thought Jimson must have been modeled on an actual person. Jimson had once sold paintings, and readily, but had been so down on his luck for such a long time that he’d become thoroughly disreputable, a dirty bum kept alive by his mycological capacity for sucking sustenance (never to be repaid) out of others. They furnish him with life’s bare necessities, but also enable him to pursue (or fertilize) his vision of creating a grand, true painting, a moral mural large enough to consume any wall on which it’s painted. Cary’s Jimson was real enough, I thought, to be based on an actual artist, and I thought I’d found the model in Stanley Spencer. Stanley Spencer, painter, was born in Berkshire on June 30, 1891. His family was not rich enough to give full vent to its eccentricities, so satisfied itself by educating Stanley (and his siblings) at home in an odd variety of subjects, including painting. Unfit for ordinary pursuits, and physically weak, he became an ambulance man in WWI, both on battlefields and, in England, in a disused lunatic asylum. Come the peace, he went home to continue painting. He found ordinary themes unsatisfying, and (a bit like Gulley Jimson) envisaged larger themes, some based on his wartime experiences. But beside the carnage, Stanley the ambulance man saw redemption too, and gained fame, money, and a place in the Tate gallery for one of his larger war-related works, entitled The Resurrection (1927). He got some commissions, too, notably for murals in a WWI memorial chapel, but for a time his eccentricities triumphed, and an unconventional marriage (including a period of ménage a trois) was among the factors which made him look a bit like Gulley Jimson. Others have thought the same thing (I claim for it no originality), including Penguin, who chose a detail from a large Spencer mural to grace the cover of its 1985 “Classics” edition of The Horse’s Mouth. It shows a small man hovering (expectantly?) around a large woman, and thus offers another insight into the lives of both Spencer and Jimson, but great art (fiction or painting) is not derivative in that surface sense. Gulley Jimson died miserably poor but laughing, at the end of The Horse’s Mouth. Stanley Spencer’s longevity, his talent, and his (heterodox) religiosity, won him still more commissions (several of them for wall-swallowing murals) and, finally, a knighthood. I recommend reading The Horse’s Mouth, but when you do think only of Gully Jimson. Leave Spencer hanging at the Tate. ©

[Stanley]

'Faith seems to be an occupational hazard for physicists.' Norman Pirie, 1954.
Norman Pirie, 1907-1997

Whenever I am exposed to orthodoxy, I automatically consider an alternative. Norman Pirie.

The virus, it is now generally agreed, has a very long life history, coeval with or somewhat older than cellular life. In some ways we may even depend upon viruses. But it took us a very long time to discover them. Viruses are so very small that we guessed their existence before we were able to ‘see’ them. Their discovery, in the 1890s, required naming them, and instead of coining a new word (as, for instance, was done for the “prion” forty years ago) we recycled an old one, virus, a Latin word for ‘poison.’ That choice made sense, for the virus then in question was the one that caused leaf mold in tobacco plants. Guilt by association being a human enthusiasm, we now define all viruses as “submicroscopic infectious agents” even though common sense suggests that a few (and there are uncounted zillions) must be neutral or even beneficial. But we’re obsessed with the infectious ones, and that brings us to a scientist identified with unpacking the virus, its elements and its structures, Norman Wingate Pirie, born in southern England on July 1, 1907, while his Scottish parents were on tour. His dad was a painter (wildlife and domestic animals) of some note, but his grandfather had been a leading physician, and Norman and his siblings were allowed to develop their own interests at their own pace. Norman stuttered, for which he may have found a kind of “cure” in mathematics and chemistry. At any rate, he acquired a wide range of avocations, adopted the nickname of “Bill,” and went back south to Cambridge where science won out. His special talents were noted, and upon graduation he became a productive member of a lab team studying, among other things, tobacco mosaic virus. First discovered in the 1890s by a Dutch scientist, the “virus” was believed to be an errant concatenation of proteins (rather like we think of the “prion” today). Bill thought there must be more to it and, focusing on its ability to reproduce. discovered (through logic and experiment) that viruses possessed RNA, ribonucleic acid, their very own ‘genetic material.’ So a virus could reproduce and evolve. And, as we know to our cost, they do both. For this, “Bill” Pirie would win several prizes, though never the Nobel. Pirie pursued his broad range of interests as a campaigning socialist, a nuclear disarmer, and as a researcher in other scientific fields (notably better, more efficient nutrition). An atheist, he was interested in the problems of religious faith in the cause-and-effect world of science. As an etymologist and a frequent contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, he was obsessed by the history of scientific terminology to which, of course, he also contributed in other ways. ©

[Stanley]

An essay on geological parenthood--or midwifery.
Marcel-Alexandre Bertrand, 1847-1907

If the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. James Hutton, 1788.

James Ussher (1581-1656), the Protestant archbishop of Armagh, is most famed for his exact calculation of the earth’s age. Creation began, he wrote, early on the evening (~6 PM) of October 22, 4004 BC. His main source was the not-quite-endless strings of “begats” in the Old Testament. At about the same time, the Danish scholar Nicolas Steno (or Steensen) struggled with an old puzzle, the fossilized seashells found at high altitudes in the Apennines and Alps of Italy. Steno thought the easy answer (that the Noachian flood really had inundated the whole earth) insufficient, and instead focused on the facts that (a) the fossils were fossils and (b) that they occurred only in certain strata. For this many credit Steno as the father of modern geology, but if he was, the birth was a long time in coming. Steno himself became more famous (indeed he’s recently been beatified) for converting the Roman church and leading the counter-reformation in Nordic Europe. A more important figure on the winding road that leads us from Steno’s strata to the modern theory of plate tectonics was Marcel-Alexandre Bertrand, born in Paris, France, on July 2, 1847. Bertrand’s father was a leading mathematician (numbers theory), and he married a physicist’s daughter, but he was drawn to more earthbound studies at Paris’s Ecole des Mines. By then geology was fully committed to stratigraphy and to the idea of an ancient earth formed gradually, but some puzzles remained, including those Alpine seashells. Exactly how did they get there? And why was it that their strata were so misshapen, were sometimes interrupted by other strata, and not least why were these layers sometimes topsy-turvy, with older strata above younger? Bertrand studied the problem first in the French Jura, then in the fantastically jumbled southern (Italian) Alps, and decided that something was at work that was more fundamental than the constant laying down of new strata, sedimentary or volcanic. Unable to grasp the notion that the earth’s surface consisted of vast crustal “plates” floating slowly above a sea of magma, which as plate tectonics has become scientific orthodoxy in our own time, Bertrand developed his “wave” theory. Owing something perhaps to contemporary work on sound and light waves, Bertrand guessed that nappes de charriage ("thrust sheets") arose in waves to create and define the earth’s very irregular regularities. It wasn’t such a bad idea, but he rarely published and has only recently been recognized as a “pioneer.” The science of geology, like the earth itself, staggers along slowly and in interrupted steps. ©.

[Stanley]

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard

A healthy attitude is contagious but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier. Tom Stoppard.

For a city of its size (about 73,000) and remote location (at the far eastern end of the Czech republic), Zlín has an outsize reputation. Today that owes mainly to its biggest commercial enterprise, for it’s the home site of Bata Shoes, but therein lies much of the city’s singular character. Bata’s founder, Tomáš B’ata, thought to celebrate his country’s new birth (out of WWI’s carnage and the Versailles mess) by making cheap footwear that was (nevertheless) durable and stylish. But more: B’ata was a Moravian disciple of the Garden City movement, an efficiency fanatic, an enthusiast of modern architecture, and a modest sort of utopian who thought that his neighbors and his workforce should benefit from his efficiencies and his enthusiasms. So interwar Zlín became a showplace town, its new buildings and its master plan developed according to the ideas of Le Corbusier, Bata’s showplace home factory humming efficiently along amongst the town’s traditional (and traditionally-organized) crafts. Bata provided medical care, too, and one of the company physicians was Eugen Straüssler, whose wife Marta may have been his nursing assistant. Their son, Tomáš, was born there on July 3, 1938. Luckily, we know him better as Tom Stoppard, genius playwright of the English stage and master of the English language. I say ‘luckily’ because the Straüsslers were Jews, and 1938 was not an auspicious birth year for a Czech Jew. It was good luck, then, that Bata, Schindler-like, offered the Straüsslers a way out of the fire. Some bad luck intervened when they chose the Bata factory in Singapore, which fell to the Japanese in early 1942. Eugen died there or nearby, but Marta and her two boys escaped yet again, to British India where she met, and in 1946 married, Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British Army. So we got Tom Stoppard, who learned English as his fourth (some would say, best) language, got a good education, became a cricket fanatic (his riff on the creation and function of a cricket bat is worth a read), and broke through into the big time with his 1966 Edinburgh Festival play, now known to the world as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. This creation might be called a play within a play within a play, but however it’s layered it is also an existentialist comedy about death, and given the subject the comedy depends on the dialogue, on the words. Stoppard is 84 today, and for all that time success has followed success. Along with his way with words and plots Stoppard’s idiosyncratic politics allow us to think that, along the way, he has carried with him some of the oddities of Zlīn, according to its own declaration a cultural monument (and, as it happens, a town that has changed its name). ©

[Stanley]

Cancel Culture: An American Tradition
Edward Bannister wins a prize, July 4, 1876

In times like these, there is NO substitute for courage. Florida Governor Ron Desantis on his campaign website.

One of our more symbolic July 4 celebrations was the great Centennial Exposition, July 4, 1876, staged as a ‘world’s fair’ event in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, only a couple of miles away from Independence Hall. Officially entitled the “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine,” it allowed the young democracy to preen itself as the financial and industrial powerhouse it was to become. Among the soon-to-be transformative exhibits were Mr. Bell’s telephone and the Wallace-Farmer dynamo. American art was on show, too, ‘refinement’ being part of the package, and one of the art show winners was a melancholy landscape, Under the Oaks, by Edward Mitchell Bannister of Providence, Rhode Island, where he was the leading spirit of a small group of artists and, indeed, one of the founders of the Rhode Island School of Design. I don’t know how much the jury knew about Mr. Bannister, but when it was discovered that he was of African descent, the jury chair tried to rescind the prize. But the jury stood firm, and so Under the Oaks entered the nation’s art history, just as Bannister (born free in Canada in 1828) had entered as an immigrant seaman in the late 1840s. Not very black, he had chosen to pass as such. He became active in a local (black) Baptist church, and sought to make his fortune, first as a cobbler, then as a barber, then a pioneer photographer. In tinting his pictures, he discovered a talent in painting and pursued it to the best of his considerable ability, but at first found no traction for no art academy would admit him. He also threw himself into abolitionist agitation and married into one of Boston’s most eminent black families, wedding Christiana Carteaux at her Beacon Hill home in 1858. Bravely, the young couple became station masters at one of Boston’s “Underground Railroad” termini. Christiana became one of his models and her family his first patrons, and in these ways Bannister became known as a portraitist and a man of some substance. As such he gathered friends of like mind, such as the painter John LaFarge, and Edward and Christiana moved to Providence to make a promising beginning in the art world. The Centennial prize was a triumph, but the jury chairman’s prejudice would win out before Mitchell died in 1901, and he and his art were “disappeared” from our art history until “rediscovered” during the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century. That sad history of Edward Mitchell Bannister’s cultural canceling is one of our self-evident truths, and in the 246th year of our Republic we are old enough to understand it, to grasp it, and to teach it to our children, whatever their skin shade. ©

[Stanley]

Mind's-eye travels.
George Henry Borrow, 1803-1881

Not all those who wander are lost. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Victorians, British or American, are often passed off as stodgy, self-satisfied folk, but their thirst for travel suggests an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. Fantasy too. In Grundy Center, Iowa, every summer, my grandmother Lillian (1875-1950) and her young women friends gathered to tour Europe, to talk not only of the things one must see or do when in Berlin or Bruges, London or Edinburgh, but also about how to get there, right down to details about the best steamship cabins and the most comfortable trains. Theirs was mind’s-eye travel, in my grandmother’s case fueled by travelogues in her father’s library, notably Stoddard’s Lectures (1897-1899), its ten volumes all Morocco-bound and (by the time I read them) well-thumbed. Indeed the travel writer was a Victorian fixture. Stoddard’s lectures (in print and in person) made him a millionaire. Stoddard (1850-1931) was an American. Among his English precursors was George Henry Borrow, born in East Anglia on July 5, 1803. It’s possible that Stoddard picked up his yen for travel from his sea-captain father, but more likely from adolescent fantasies encouraged by his visits to nearby Gypsy encampments. These were, literally, “travelers,” and in listening to their stories young Borrow learned their language, an English dialect of Romani, and began his career, which was (at first) translating these stories. Borrow augmented his Romani and his grammar-school Latin and Greek by learning other languages (from the local and disreputable radical William Taylor) and then publishing his translations, for instance his Danish Ballads (1826). So Borrow’s travels began (like my grandmother’s) in fantasy. It was only later that he began actually to travel, and when he did it was as an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society as, of course, a translator, rendering the traditional King James Bible, or parts of it, into Polish or Portuguese (or even into Basque and Spanish Romani). These actual travels gave him the materials he needed to begin a new career as a travel writer, recounting his translation experiences as adventures in strange places among strange sights and strange peoples. Borrow never joined the ranks of travelogue millionaires but he did make a living out of it, writing not only about exotic places like Constantinople but about the wilder (or Welsher) parts of Wales in his Wild Wales (1863). His taste for the fantastic surfaces in many of these books, but they sold well enough. Borrow married a prosperous widow, continued his mind’s eye travels, and settled down to a rather stodgy Victorian life near his East Anglian birthplace. Ironically, I suppose. ©

[Stanley]

History as a universal story.
Marc Bloch, 1886-1944

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (1949)

Historians tend to insularity. This owes to their worshipful attitudes to evidence, itself born of the hard labor it takes to find and evaluate the ‘facts.’ Traditionally, this bound historians to “their own” and to tell their stories about—or from the perspective of—their own nationality, their own class, or their own gender. One historian who railed against this insularity (or these insularities) was Marc Bloch, born in Lyon, France, on July 6, 1886. Bloch’s father Gustave was an eminent historian of ancient Rome, soon to be translated to an influential chair at the Sorbonne. Other factors that encouraged young Marc to look beyond boundaries included his family’s history as assimilationist Jews from the disputed territories of Alsace-Lorraine, their self-conscious radicalism inherited from the universalist claims of the French Revolution, and his own childhood experience of watching the antisemitic Dreyfus Affair explode. Thoroughly bourgeois and thus of the “officer class,” Bloch learned to respect the ‘common herd’ when he served, with distinction, in the trenches in WWI—first as a corporal then as a sergeant. Come the peace, Bloch returned to his promising academic career (as a medievalist) but with a burning desire to preach history as a discipline obliged to tell the whole story of a whole past. The subject was transnational, and where it wasn’t it must still involve the pasts of all people, not just the powerful or the literate. And if the poor and illiterate were ‘silent’ (in the sense of leaving few “documents”) their lives and minds could be reconstructed contextually by using their artifacts but also, and as importantly, by enlisting the tools fashioned by the modern social sciences (economics, sociology, psychology). Bloch had partners, of course, and it was in particular with his older colleague Lucien Febvre that Bloch founded the “Annales” school of history. It still had great influence when I was in graduate school, made more compelling by knowledge of Bloch’s heroic resistance to the Nazi occupation of Vichy France after 1942. Back in his birthplace, Lyon, and to all appearances an older gentleman of quiet habits, he served as courier and code master against the occupiers. The Gestapo captured him in March 1944. Brutally tortured, Marc Bloch was shot (hurriedly, in an open field) during the Nazi retreat on June 16, 1944. At his wishes, no prayers were read at his interment. His epitaph was delexi veritatem (I have loved the truth). One of his most influential publications, The Historian’s Craft (required reading at Madison, Wisconsin), was thus posthumous. ©

[Stanley]

From gloom to glory.
Gustav Mahler, 1860-1911.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. Gustav Mahler.

As one who often repeats the old saw that the best works of art protest against death, I generally attend classical concerts for their promise of uplift. So I’ve found the orchestral works of Gustav Mahler a bit of a downer, even though I’ve been told (recently, often) that there is in them much defiance or, at least, resolution. But there was in Mahler’s life much to be gloomy about. Gustav Mahler was born an outsider on July 7, 1860: Austrian (thus German-speaking) and Jewish in a rural Bohemian village in which his father was a brewer and innkeeper. There and in his next village several of his siblings died young. But Gustav’s talents took him, starting at age 15, to the political and cultural seat of the Hapsburg empire, Vienna, where he was again a double outsider, of Jewish parentage and a provincial into the bargain. Going home at vacation time offered relief, but reminded him of his father’s mistreatment of his mother. Gustav’s pronounced limp may have ‘developed’ unconsciously in empathy for her plight. On top of all that came his marriage (in 1902) to the much younger Alma Schindler, not a great success story. Her spectacular (occasionally ecstatic) love life came after Gustav’s early death (1911, aged 50), and her own unhappinesses with Gustav’s dominating personality have made his life seem even darker, especially in his repression of her musical talents. Her revenge, if such it was, was to live much longer (she died in Los Angeles in 1964), to leave an obituary that was the “juiciest” one the humorist Tom Lehrer ever read (or sange about) and to serve as the first source for all Gustav’s biographers. But out of all this came Gustav Mahler’s amazing music. During his lifetime he was recognized mainly because of his successes as a conductor and then (from 1897) the artistic director of the Vienna State Opera. He also enjoyed a brief vogue as visiting conductor elsewhere in Europe and on tour in the USA. But his real genius, the world discovered decades after his death, lay in composition. Mahler composed ‘on the side,’ during vacations for instance, and never even heard his last works. Those pieces performed before he died were not generally successful. But he thought of himself as Beethoven’s heir (even to the nine-symphony cycle), at least the coequal of Wagner and Liszt, and his judgments are now generally accepted. He’s seen, also, as a progenitor of several themes central to modern classical music. Against the gloomy background of his life story, that is itself a protest against death and an uplift. And it’s Mahler’s more affirmative works that the St. Louis Symphony chooses to perform. So I’m becoming a convert. ©.

[Stanley]

Addiction and invention
John Stith Pemberton, 1831-1888

Valuable brain tonic. . . delicious, refreshing, pure joy, exhilarating . . . Early ad slogans for John Stith Pemberton’s various medicinal drinks.

On my longer walks (mainly in St. Louis’s magnificent Forest Park) I take pictures. I concentrate on plants (depending on season, of their first blooms, autumn or drought colors, skeletal features, etc.) and send the photos back to Paulette, who can’t do long walks but has a lifelong interest in botanicals, notably in medicinal herbs. The park’s a cornucopia, acres of forest, savannah, wetlands, and prairie, and I’m building up a data base. You’ll want to know that every June sees the blooming of Cephalanthus occidentalis, a Rubiaceae variously known as buttonbush, honeybells, honey balls, or button willows. Their bunched flowers look more like miniature pincushions than blossoms, and are noticeably near white against the darker green of their willow-like (and poisonous) leaves. Perhaps because of this toxicity, the buttonbush played a role in the invention of Coca-Cola by John Stith Pemberton. Pemberton was born in Knoxville, Georgia, on July 8, 1831. No ‘cavalier’ he, at least no cavalier as per southern romance, but originally of Lancashire Quaker stock, he was not a plantation owner either, but just gentlemanly enough to attend college, to qualify as a pharmacist, then (probably) as a physician, marry well, and (come the Civil War) defend slavery and secession as a dashing, black-bearded colonel in the Georgia cavalry. He was a bitter ender, and received his signal war wound in a cavalry charge that took place outside his hometown of Columbus, Georgia, one week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. If we call it a gallantry it wasn’t a successful one, and Pemberton walked away from this final defeat with a painful saber wound across his chest. It took almost forever to heal and by the time it did he was addicted to his painkillers, notably morphine. It was to try to cure this addiction that Pemberton the pharmacist concocted several non- or less addictive painkillers. His task was complicated by Georgia’s brief (mid-1880s) experiment with prohibition, so alcohol was out. Pemberton eventually came up with a nonalcoholic mix of cocaine and other druggish herbs, the formula for which he sold for about $250 to a fellow pharmacist, Asa Candler, but his first attempt was called “Dr. Tuggle’s Compound Syrup of Globe Flower,” a witches’ stew made of buttonballs (‘globe flower’ is another folk name of Cephalanthus occidentalis) laced with alcohol. It was when buttonballs didn’t work that John Pemberton turned to, first, “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca,” and then to his non-alcoholic “Coca Cola.” But that (as we all know) is another story. Still addicted to morphine, John Stith Pemberton died in 1888. ©.

[Stanley]

Henry's Flanders Mare
Annulment, July 9, 1540

She is nothing so fair as hath been reported. Henry VIII, comment on Anne of Cleves, January 1640.

A man of many talents, Henry VIII of England (1491-1547) might be regarded today as a Renaissance king. Reports of his good points must be taken with caution, for many came from his courtiers who learned, usually quickly enough, that the king was to be pleased. Henry is now better known as a man who did not get on well with his wives, six of them: “Divorced, Beheaded, Died: Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” as the school history mnemonic had it. But by Henry’s lights, those two “Divorced” were not right. He remained Catholic enough to insist on “annulments,” and by English law (in which Henry had a hand) they were annulments, albeit on critically different grounds. It’s the second annulment we are concerned with, for it was finalized on July 9, 1540, when Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves (1515-1557) was annulled because it had never been consummated. This was likely true, for several reasons. The marriage had only taken place in January, and if that gave time enough for consummation we must remember that by 1540 Henry himself was no Adonis, but well on his way to becoming the fattest king in English history. Nor was he well. His jousting injuries were getting him down, as were his diseases, one (or more) of which may have been sexually transmitted. If Anne of Cleves had a male ideal in mind, Henry probably did not mirror it. But historians don’t usually think of her feelings, rather Henry’s. He found her unattractive!! He called her a “Flanders mare” and, employing his kingly talents of art critic, connoisseur, and collector, accused his court painter of inaccuracy. That was Hans Holbein the Younger, whom Henry had sent to the duchy of Cleves to take Anne’s picture (he also took one of her sister, another candidate). At this distance, it’s impossible to comment on Henry’s art criticism, but to me Holbein’s surviving women tend towards anonymity. His male portraits (even of the toddler prince who would be King Edward VI) all have character, spark, individuality. Look, for instance, at his Erasmus. His Anne of Cleves looks much like her sister and most of Holbein’s other women subjects, anonymously female. Henry was looking for a not-very-Protestant person of the female persuasion, and that’s what he got, on canvas and then in person. Anne came out of it all pretty well, called King Henry’s “Sister” and showered with valuable properties. Holbein also survived. Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, lost his head, but picking Anne of Cleves as Queen may have been the least of his failings. Henry VIII was no art critic (nor anyone’s beau ideal), but he was an exacting master. ©

[Stanley]

The characterization of women in fiction.
Alice Munro, b. July 10, 1921

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1972.

Prose fiction is a miraculous art. Great novels create worlds wherein real lives are led, worlds which readers enter, think about, even experience. In novels, free will makes sense, seems to operate, and not only for the writer. For my new course on the ‘characterization of women’ I’ve chosen American fiction circa 1850-1925 as students’ field of operation; it’s the lifespan of our ‘first feminism’ when women became public persons in ‘real’ life and female characters in fiction were more freely developed. Heroes even. In Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), ours had become a world where the young Alexandra Bergson could walk (into the teeth of a winter gale) “as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she would do next.” And that’s only on the first page. I’ve picked novels, but more recently I’ve delved into short fiction, stories in which—because they are short—the miracle of creation is even more wondrous, which may be why I’ve never felt comfortable in it. Today, in Ontario, Canada, the master of the anglophone short story will (I hope) be celebrating her 101st birthday. She’s Alice Munro, born Alice Laidlaw on July 10, 1921 in rural Huron County, scrub timber country then transitioning to farmland. Although she began writing as a teenager, she first set her sights on journalism which she thought a more promising road for a young woman, and she studied it (and English) at the University of Western Ontario. Marriage, motherhood, and domesticity intervened, pleasantly enough, maybe, but she didn’t publish a whole book until she was 47, a collection of short stories called Dance of the Happy Shades. By then, she’d lived in British Columbia for a long time, but most of her stories were set ‘at home,’ in Ontario, and that first volume was so successful that she moved back and settled in Clinton, Huron’s ‘county town,’ where she lived until recently. That collection won attention and awards, and since then Munro has done a lot more, including a Man Booker Prize and, in 2013, the literature Nobel. Hers are all short fictions, which made her a unique Nobelist. So I stand in awe and am ashamed to admit that I have never read a Munro story. But I may have to start. One of her best is said to be Lives of Girls and Women (1972), its themes obviously right down my current alley. I’m not sure I want to extend my course’s historical or geographical scope to include modern Canada, but maybe this one will be easier. Some critics now claim that these short texts are ‘really’ a novel, and Huron County was in some ways behind its time. ©.

[Stanley]

Fleck and the 'denkollectiv'
Ludwik Fleck, 1896-1961

What we do think and how we do see depends on the thought-collective to which we belong. Ludwik Fleck, 1935.

In the land of the free, these days, ‘truth’ has hard time, for instance the scientific truths that (a) the world is getting warmer and (b) because of human activity. In this our former president can be held culpable, but Trump’s claim that it’s all a Chinese plot is merely superficial. He was and seeks to return as our liar-in-chief, and his lies are self-interested (often shallow, spur of the moment) inventions. But there is a more fundamental problem, not peculiarly American, which asks us to delve deeply into how scientific truths emerge and then take on the characteristics of an orthodoxy. A pioneer in this field was Ludwik Fleck, born in what was Lemberg, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) on July 11, 1896. Well-educated, Fleck became a medical doctor and a laboratory scientist, and in both characters he began to ponder the nature of scientific truths, how they arise, how they become accepted as ‘fact’. In this he was helped by being an outsider himself, a Jew in an antisemitic society, and by his consuming interest in epidemiology, itself a relatively new science whose progress was marked by the frequent upsetting of applecarts. Epidemics, by definition, have a social setting, a geography, and (like taxation) produce a variation (an incidence) in their victims. An epidemic is both a social and a scientific fact, and that is how we should identify it. Although Fleck’s main interest was in typhus and its prevention, these social factors made him particularly interested in syphilis. Syphilis was an old problem well on its way to solution, or solutions plural, but the whole process (of identification, prevention, treatment, and cure) was made longer, more problematic, and indeed more painful by the social facts of its transmission. In thinking about it, Fleck hit upon an idea that he called (in German) the denkkollectiv, a social cast of mind within which, and from which, medical scientists operated. Science (devoted as it was to observation and experiment) held the potential to change the denkkollectiv, but at the same time scientists were human and were, necessarily, social products. Later, deported to Buchenwald, Fleck would make use of this idea by making good typhus vaccine for his fellow prisoners but “fake” vaccine for his Nazi oppressors—and the German doctors, imprisoned in their own denkkollectiv, could never figure it out. Fleck himself survived Buchenwald and died in Israel. His idea that science was, somehow, socially determined has long survived him and produced truly exciting scholarship on the nature of scientific revolutions. And, at a shallower level, potentially fatal confusions over climate change. ©

[Tripps]

Later, deported to Buchenwald, Fleck would make use of this idea by making good typhus vaccine for his fellow prisoners but “fake” vaccine for his Nazi oppressors—and the German doctors, imprisoned in their own denkkollectiv, could never figure it out. Fleck himself survived Buchenwald and died in Israel.

Really? That's a bit outside my "denkkollectiv" . Does a word aquire more gravitas by being in German? It means 'thinking collective'

Good idea to browse through this Buchenwald if you can stomach it. Vaccine research is mentioned, but the above sounds fanciful to me.

Sobering to think this all happened in an almost neighbouring country and (just about) in living memory. I'm afraid it still slightly colours my perceptions of Germany and Germans even up to the present day. The happenings of 1930 - 1945 are still in the back of my mind.


I was once stationed down the road from Belsen Bergen and visited the place one Sunday afternoon. Little to see then - just enormous mass graves.

No smilies here - quite inappropriate.