BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors."

Winslow Homer was born in Boston on February 24, 1836. Over his lifetime he would become America’s favorite painter, a man whose ability to see (and paint for) his best market eventually fetched him fame and a financially comfortable old age. Homer worked in a variety of media, etchings for magazines, oils for the quality trade, and above all watercolors. The St. Louis Art Museum owns one work from each. Winslow was homeschooled, so to speak, by his mother Henrietta, who was herself a good amateur watercolorist and who early spotted his talent. His father Charles Savage Homer was a man drawn to “Gilded Age” specifications and, in hopes that Winslow might actually make some money, arranged for an apprenticeship to a commercial lithographer. This led to a 20-year career supplying illustrations for the burgeoning magazine market, including many sketches of the Civil War. At the same time, his mother’s family arranged for some instruction in oils, in New York, which Homer picked up well enough to enjoy some commercial success and membership (1865) in New York’s National Academy. Critical success was to come, however, in watercolors, from the early 1880s Homer’s best, most sophisticated work. A first he was supported mainly by his mother’s family (he lived near the sea on the family estate) but by 1890 his landscapes and seascapes were selling very well, thank you, as befit a man who by then was probably America’s favorite artist. He influenced several 20th-century painters, notably N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s father. Homer’s St. Louis Art Museum work, “The Country School” (oil on canvas, 1871) has a sort of Normal Rockwell air to it, which may explain part of his popularity. I like it for that “down home” reason (both my grandmothers taught in one-room country schools), and I am glad to note that it is currently on display. When SLAM fully opens I will make time for it. ©

[Tripps]

Finally - someone of whom I've heard.
Here's a taste of what he painted. I'd buy one if I had enough spare cash.

Winslow Homer

[Stanley]

"Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter.// Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here. // Here comes he sun." George Harrison, 1968.

The idea that one is not only aging but aged gains currency when reminded that Ringo Starr (Sir Richard Starkey to his friends) will be 81 in July. He is (or was) the oldest of the Beatles, the last to join the group, and despite a childhood marked by serious illness, poverty, poor schooling, and parental abandonment (his confectioner father skipped in about 1950) he wrote the group’s happiest (go-luckiest) songs, notably “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’s Garden.” The Beatles’ real writers were John Lennon (1940-1980) and Paul McCartney (1942 and still going, now Sir Paul). Leaving out the drummer that Ringo replaced (Pete Best) that leaves only George Harrison, born in working-class Liverpool on February 25, 1943, who thus was the youngest Beatle and to me the most interesting as lead guitar and the one also (perhaps) most open to experiment with ‘other’ musical styles (notably Indian and American ‘soul’). You can see this in various ways; for instance the Indian influence on Harrison shows in both the cover and the content of the famed 1968 LP, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” But Harrison was open to all sorts, and to many figured as the fly in the ointment who contributed most to the group’s prolonged break-up (which we followed as a kind of episodic ‘soap,’ circa 1968-71). Harrison continued to work with The Four and contributed his best Beatles songs to the still lovely Abbey Road album: “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something.” His serious commitment to Asian music and philosophy also helped him break away, as did his creative relationship with Eric Clapton and (to a lesser extent) Bob Dylan. His last recording session with the group came in January 1970. Some read into his 1970s recordings (solo and with other musicians) the notion that Harrison was the loser, and I certainly lost track of him then, but he pursued an interesting career in pop music, personal philanthropy, and significant touring and recording partnerships with the likes of Clapton, Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Neil Young. George Harrison, out on his own, perhaps never would have become “Sir George,” but his death in 2001 made sure of that. ©.

[Stanley]

"How sweet it is." Jackie Gleason, in "The Honeymooners"

Ours was the first (of seven) houses on our block to get a tv set (a 16” Magnavox in 1949). We didn’t watch a lot of TV but one show we tried not to miss was “The Honeymooners,” in which the ex-vaudevillian Jackie Gleason played the character of Ralph Kramden, a bus driver of large ambitions and smaller brain. Or so I remember it today. “The Honeymooners” was in fact presented as a separate skit within a larger Sunday night variety show, on CBS, emceed by Gleason. But we turned it on for “The Honeymooners” which also starred Jayne Meadows (as Kramden’s long-suffering wife Alice); Art Carney (as sewer-worker Ed Norton often taken in by Kramden’s schemes) and Joyce Randolph as “her upstairs,” Norton’s wife Trixie. Jackie Gleason was the one cast member who knew what it was like to be working-class poor, born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on February 26, 1916. Gleason’s father Herb was a kind of Arthur Miller character, a not-very-successful insurance salesman who abandoned his roles as breadwinner, husband, and father when Gleason was 9, after which Jackie grew up (mainly in Brooklyn and Queens) learning how to play pool and talk tough, which helped him make his slumming roles seem so true-to-life, not only as Ralph Kramden but, in 1971, as Minnesota Fats to Paul Newman’s “Fast” Eddie Felson in The Hustler, which won Gleason an Academy Award and allowed him to show some real talent: both in drama and in pool, for Gleason played ‘live’ his own trick pool shots in that film. After that his career tailed off (other than repeated roles in the “Smokey and the Bandit” films), which was really rather sad. That tough kid from Brooklyn had real talent which arose out of a genuine life story. Perhaps Ralph Kramden was its highest expression, but we will never know that for sure. He died in 1987, aged 71, before he could win his best role in his best film. ©

[Stanley]

“I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart”― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Last night I attended the ‘Zoom’ launch party for Bellerive, the annual literary magazine of the Honors College. Despite being an apparent contradiction in terms, the “Zoom Party” worked out nicely, notably in breakout sessions where contributors discussed their writing (or photos, or art works). I was heartened that so many of these authors, mostly undergraduates, already thought of themselves as writers and saw their writing (mainly poetry and short fiction) as a life’s pursuit. It’s a brash thing for youth to say, but no brasher than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who at 19 (in his senior year at Bowdoin College) told his father that literature would be his life’s work: “my whole soul burns ardently after it, and every earthly thought centres on it.” As far as I know, no parents were listening in last night, but if they were one can imagine their responses: “be sure you get a day job first.” Longfellow, born on February 27, 1807, did indeed get day jobs, first at Bowdoin (1829-1835) and then Harvard (1837-1854). But by 1854 no day job was necessary, and not just because of his and his second wife’s (Fanny Appleton’s) inheritances. By then, Longfellow was making more from his writing than from his teaching. Indeed he was paid $3,000 for a single poem in 1854, and by 1868 his writing income was close to $50,000 per annum. These were stupendous sums, equal to $90,000 and $1 million in today’s $$. Of course cash money would not, I hope, figure highly if at all on the value scales of last night’s young authors, who would be more impressed by Longfellow’s wondrous circle of literary friends (in Cambridge and Boston: they called themselves the Dante Club) or by Longfellow’s still-useful translations of Dante. But as (probably) the oldest contributor to this year’s Bellerive I will use my poetic license to wish at least one of two of them something of Longfellow’s material success, gained from mere scribbling and with no day job holding him back. ©

[Stanley]

"The Great Blondin."

Among the most difficult physical therapies I practiced after my October accident was to walk a straight line with my eyes closed. Granted, it was only for 15 feet, but I found it extremely disorienting and dizzying, and thus I stand (or stagger) in awe at the exploits of Charles Blondin, tight-rope walker extraordinaire, whose tight-rope crossings of the Niagara Falls included at least one while blindfolded—and with a large black bag draped over his head and shoulders. Blondin was born into a family of acrobats in Normandy, on February 28. 1824, his birth-name being Jean-François Emile Gravelet. He was taught to walk the tightrope at about the same time he learned to walk, and (from age 5) was further trained at the Ecole de Gymnase in Lyons. While still at Lyons, he performed professionally (as the “Little Wonder”); so, when he was orphaned (at age 10) he already had a career, and one he pursued with great purpose, first as a member of the “Ravel Family” (where he picked up his professional name of Charles Blondin). And when the troupe toured America (as part of P.T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth”) he picked up the idea of a tightrope walk across the Niagara gorge, just below the famous falls. It took considerable investment (for instance for a 3” diameter manila rope 1100 feet long), planning, and advertising, but on June 30, 1859 Blondin did the deed, watched by about 100.000 people, and made his name. During the rest of that summer, and then again in the next year, 1860, Blondin repeated the performance 16 times, with variations (once blindfolded and once cooking an omelet at the mid- or low-point of his journey). He returned to Europe famous, and established himself in London (at a residence he called “Niagara Villa”), where he performed various tightrope stunts (each new one more spectacular, or at least odder, than the last) and hobnobbed with the Prince of Wales. “The Great Blondin” died at home, in Ealing, from complications of diabetes, on February 19. 1897. In Ealing his villa is long gone, but very near to the Northfields station on the Piccadilly Line, you can walk up Blondin Avenue and then down Niagara Avenue, and still get back to the station in time to catch your Heathrow flight. ©

[Stanley]

"If this is dying, then I don't think much of it." Said to be Lytton Strachey's last words, January 1932.

Modern biographies are too long, making what should be a marvelous teaching tool into a burden too onerous to foist (as textbooks) on otherwise blameless undergraduates. This tendency has many causes but I lay it down mainly to our love of gossip. We like to (re)discover those odd tidbits, anecdotes about the famous (or powerful) that cut them down to a more manageable size, a more human shape. But gossip piled upon gossip, for instance about Eisenhower’s mistress or Churchill’s ‘black dog’ depressions, makes lives into serials or soap operas and biographies into books read in bits, at bedtime, because they cannot be read in whole, in a day or over a weekend. It was just such thinking that led Lytton Strachey to advocate a new biographical style, one marked by brevity. Born into an eminent English family on March 1, 1880, Strachey spent most of his childhood and youth in being made into an artist, because that’s what his mother, Lady Jane Strachey, thought he should be. Meanwhile his father, Sir Richard Strachey, thought he should be a man, and sent him off to elite schools to be bullied into it. Neither plan worked, and it looked like Lytton himself was going to be a kind of foppish dilletante, brashly homosexual in an era that didn’t want its homosexuals to be brash. Instead, especially at Cambridge, Strachey became serious, at least about some things, and found himself a moving spirit behind the formation of the Bloomsbury Group, or circle. There, inspired perhaps by the failure of his own 400-page biography of Warren Hastings, he developed a new biographical style marked by paradox, insight, wit, and brevity, as shown in his Eminent Victorians (1918: four biographies in one) and, wonder of wonders, Queen Victoria (1921). In an age that wanted it fast, they sold like hotcakes, and Strachey became the Someone that he’d always wanted to be, that is to say himself. Sadly, Lytton Strachey died (of stomach cancer) before he could enjoy too much of that. Ironically, the best biography of Strachey is the two-volume wonder (1971) by Michael Holroyd, a blockbuster stock-full of anecdote. ©

[Stanley]

"The Martha Washington Hotel, //Where estimable ladies dwell, //Spells out its name against the night //In naughty, red electric lights." Arthur Gutterman, "Moral Reflections", in The New Yorker, 1932.

As more than half of you should know, March is Women’s History Month. I don’t know why this month was chosen, but March 2 makes a good claim. It’s the birth-date, for instance, of Susanna Salter (March 2, 1860) who in 1887, aged only 27, became the first American woman to be elected to political office, as mayor of Argonia, Kansas, then a thriving railway junction (the Santa Fe and the Missouri Pacific) of about 800 residents. To vote (in Kansas, women gained the vote in 1867) and to hold office were important marks of women’s lib. Another, less noted perhaps, was the ability, by oneself, to reserve a hotel room and, even better, to stay in it. “Unaccompanied women” had for some time been the pariahs of travel, dining out, and of course drinking in a bar, until in New York some investors decided that they constituted a market and built quite a large hotel for them, which (soon) they called the Martha Washington Hotel. It opened its doors on March 2, 1903 and for many years did rather well for itself. “Accompanied” men were welcome as long as they stayed on the ground floor (lobby, one of the restaurants, and bar), and the idea proved popular, the “Martha” catering to women only until 1998, including some rather interesting ones. The St. Louis poet Sara Teasdale used the Martha on her New York visits, both before and after she married in 1914 (one does wonder where Sara’s husband, Mr. Ernst Filsinger, stayed). Some Martha guests were rather notorious than famous, notably Louise Brooks, the bobbed-hair girl and international movie star. The management asked Brooks to leave when she was spotted on the rooftop exercising in “flimsy” pajamas. The hotel itself became respectably famous, and was a place to visit for those curious to see what an all-female hotel with an all-female staff and other feminine trimmings (an elegant little coal stove in every room, for instance—and a telephone) looked like. Since 1998 the (integrated) hotel has traded under various names (currently as The Redbury). It looks acceptable and is located at 29 E. 29th Street, an address which even the dullest traveler, male or female, should be able to remember. ©

[Stanley]

When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own
As if in response to my anniversary note today on the opening of New York’s first women-only hotel (The Martha Washington, on March 2, 1903) The New Yorker today reviewed a book on the Barbizon, one of three hotels that followed the Martha Washington’s lead (and its market success). The copycat is no longer with us. It still survives as a condo, but some old guests linger on. Women, of course.
Cheers, Bob

[Stanley]

"We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in Pullman schools, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die we will go to the Pullman Hell. An alternate view of what life had to offer to a Pullman employee.

George Pullman, famed for his luxury sleepers and diners and ill-famed for his ‘company town’, was born in Brocton, New York, on March 3, 1831. His father James was a carpenter who figured out how to use screw jacks to move large buildings (to enable the widening of the Erie Canal), and when his dad died (in 1855) George took over the company. Starting in 1857, George moved to Chicago where he helped lift much of the city high enough to install a sewer system. Perhaps inspired by the Erie Canal’s more salubrious packet boats, Pullman next (1864-65) turned to creating the means by which railways could offer luxury travel to America’s rising financial and industrial elite, the Pullman cars. First it was sleepers and lounge cars only but in 1867 Pullman added dining cars with fully equipped kitchens and table service. It was a brilliant idea, made more so by Pullman’s business acumen. Thus he saw to it that Pullmans were attached to the train which, in 1865, took Abraham Lincoln’s body back to Springfield. Thus he used his growing capital to bail out railway companies, find his way on to their boards, and expand the reach of his “Pullman Palace” equipages. For service aboard, Pullman hired only African-Americans as “pullman porters.” This created a whole new class of employment for freedmen and also helped make Pullman’s reputation as a successful capitalist who aimed not only for profit but for a better, fuller social vision. The same sort of thinking led Pullman to create Pullman, Illinois, a model “company town.” It was designed for other reasons, too, for instance to keep at bay the rising tide of working-class radicalism. It all came to a head in the famous Pullman strike of 1894, which made Pullman and his company—and his company town—into bones of contention. Which is where they stay today. ©

[Stanley]

"The sphere of ordinary womanhood was felt to be narrower than her development required." Miles Coverdale on Zenobia in "The Bithedale Romance".

The original Zenobia was de facto empress of the Palmyrene empire on Rome’s wild eastern fringes, legendary for her military exploits and her cultured, intellectual court. Finally conquered by the Romans, circa 267 CE, she spent the last years of her short life in exile, in Rome itself, in a kind of house arrest. So it was that Nathaniel Hawthorne picked ‘Zenobia’ for the name of his second-most interesting female character (after Hester Prynne), the dynamo that makes The Blithedale Romance move. Hawthorne’s Zenobia was drawn from Margaret Fuller, the tempestuous feminist-transcendentalist. Now I find another fictional Zenobia, another strong female character in (although not the center of) Benjamin Disraeli’s last novel, Endymion, published in 1880 after Disraeili’s retirement from parliamentary politics. It was a novel about the mid-century Whig supremacy, written by the century’s most successful Tory, and this Zenobia figures positively, a queen of fashion and a sponsor of young men (like Disraeli?) on their way up in politics. Some think that this Zenobia was modeled after Sarah Sophia Child-Villiers, Countess of Jersey, born into the Child banking fortune on March 4, 1785. Other than the fact that Countess Sarah was at first a Whig, the connection makes sense, and in any case the countess had become a Tory in the 1830s. Whig or Tory, she was a whirlwind of energy, bearing nine children (eight survived to adulthood) and still finding time to be at the center of London’s social life and to play active roles in the management of Child’s bank and of her three main properties (two in London and one in Oxfordshire). She was also quite a romantic, and one can almost imagine her serving as one of Jane Austen’s heroines: “almost”, but for the power she wielded and for the marriages she arranged for her daughters, including for her eldest daughter, who became Princess Esterhazy of the Austrian nobility. In that role she would have made a better Mrs. Bennett than a Lizzie. We will have to leave her, then, with Benjamin Disraeli. ©

[Tripps]

Anyone who can write - or even do the research to produce that - must have a brain that operates at at totally superior level to my own; and he does it on a daily basis ! I think my inferiority complex is fighting its way to the surface again.

[Stanley]

I often think that when reading the books he recommends to me David. Try Wallace Stegner; 'Angle of Repose'. I got half way into it and had to give up. Courage mon brave, you are not alone!

[plaques]

Richard Feynman the Nobel prizewinner used to say that science is not totally unique in that sooner or later someone will eventually come up with the same idea, whereas with artists. poets and writers what they produce will always be unique.

[Stanley]

How to brew up a revolution.

Lots of folk say we live in the “computer age,” and that may be true, but there will be arguments about when the age began. Lately it’s been argued that Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) conceived the first computer. Or, three centuries later, you could try Ada Lovelace (1815-1852). Better contenders are the institutions and organizations that claim to be the birthplace(s) of the first “modern” (functioning) computers, those electronic monsters that used enough energy to overheat whole buildings. But surely the best runner is the so-called “personal computer.” Its birthdate and birthplace are still contested, but a strong runner would be the decidedly un-institutional Homebrew Computer Club, that held its first meeting in a private garage in Menlo Park, California, on March 5, 1975. It was attended by 32 people, a few of whom (notably Steve Wozniak) later became very rich and very famous. But even in March 1975 it was big enough to outgrow a garage, and its second meeting was in a preschool. Soon it became very large indeed, its 1500+ members invited to various venues and (if they couldn’t attend) enabled to keep up with developments by bimonthly newsletters. These offer up iconic individuals and “true” stories of how to become rich and famous in the modern USA, but the rabbit hole down which one plunges by doing a Google search for the “Homebrew Club” (1975-1986) demonstrate several other things. These nerds needed each other and, for many of them, the lead motivation was not wealth, nor fame, but rather to meet, to talk, to overcome conceptual (and mechanical-binary) problems through discussion and by example. Meetings were show and tell sessions interspersed with ask and answer discussions. Some brought their small (often tiny) inventions to the club to give to others: “here’s something you might find useful.” And when they thought about their contributions in larger (social, economic, historical) terms, they were more often than not utopian in their thinking. Looking back, 46 years on, it didn’t quite work out that way. But, considered as a rabbit hole, the Homebrew Club has a touch of wonderland about it. ©

[Stanley]

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." Ring Lardner.

One of age’s temptations is that which whimpers into my hearing aids that “it ain’t as good as it used to be.” “It” can be almost anything, for instance genetically emasculated tomatoes, but since today is Ring Lardner’s birth anniversary, I will lowlight sports journalism, once an art form but today a parched and barren thing. Not everywhere nor in all sports, of course: in England, the Guardian continues to write well about cricket. But here . . . Ugh!! Sports itself (particularly baseball and football) has become over-full of hormone-altered behaviors and bodies, and those who write about it lack bottom. Their desire to celebrate themselves and/or today’s winners leaves them with no critical consistency whether they pontificate on morals or tactics or skills. Besides hormones (and monopoly capitalism), I blame TV commentators and their compulsion to talk loudly through the action whether or not they have anything to say. Usually it’s “not.” A good antidote to this (although it can send me into my “decline and fall” syndrome) is to read Ring Lardner, who in a short life (48 years) wrote more memorable, artful, funny, angry, satirical, and inventive sports journalism than we’ve seen since Howard Cosell got the vapors over those black power salutes in Mexico City. Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, born rich on March 6, 1885, in Niles, Michigan and named after two war heroes (the brothers Ringgold) of his granparents’ generation, never went to college. Instead he took his instruction from newsrooms and tough city editors, first at the South Bend Tribune and then on through the leading papers of Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, and New York, littering the landscape with brilliant, pithy stuff that has so well stood time’s test that you can still today, on Amazon, buy a large number of titles, still in print, by Lardner, on baseball, football, boxing, racing, theatre and, tellingly, on writing itself. And you could do worse than sample a sports journalist whose writing impressed both Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. Should you tire of Lardner’s sports writing, you can start on his short fiction, and reflect that we have not lately seen his like. ©

[Tripps]

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." Ring Lardner.

Not Damon Runyon then?

[Stanley]

Mail Bob and ask him David..... (rmbliss@umsl.edu)

[Stanley]

"Wearing a camera trumped my shyness. I wasn't threatening and I wore saddle shoes and bobby sox." Ida Wyman, 2014.

In the Summer of 2019, Ida Wyman died at 93 (in a hospice at Fitchburg, Wisconsin), so she’d lived long enough (beyond the emergence of second-wave feminism) to emerge from obscurity. She’d collected a string of dealers glad to exhibit (and sell) her pictures, and she’d put on personal shows in art galleries here and there (New York, New Mexico, LA, and Madison, WI). She’d become a person of interest, and thus also left behind her a collection of interviews. From some of them (and a New York Times obituary) we learn that she’d been a photographer for quite a while, starting in her high school days in the Bronx (wielding a Brownie box camera) and that she’d become good enough at it to land assignments from national magazines (e.g. Look and Life) and regular commission work from, not least, Hollywood studios (where she captured in characteristic poses a young Elizabeth Taylor and a not-quite-so-young Jimmy Cagney). Ida Wyman was born in Malden, MA, on March 7, 1926, whence her parents (immigrants from Latvia) moved to the big city. Ida became a camera owner on her 14th birthday, learned more about photography in her high school camera club, and landed a wartime job in a print room. By then she had a Graphlex camera and a more professional eye, so she found something to do—taking pictures for money—when she lost her job to a returning soldier. She kept at it for most of the rest of her life, including a stint at medical photography at Columbia University, but her wonder years were 1945-1951, when she worked, freelance and/or on commission, to record the ordinary lives of ordinary people in often striking images. It was that task which, she later said, gave her a “special kind of happiness.” And she respected her subjects, too, asking permission to study them through pictures. To judge by the Wyman photos one can find on-line, they responded well and did not “pose” for the shot. ©

[Stanley]

"O woeful fate! The one who can give me life, alas, gives me death!" From one of Carlo Gesualdo's madrigals.

In our own lifetimes. Carlo Gesualdo has become regarded as a fine composer of early classical music, indeed an innovative pioneer, but Paulette and I remember him as one who inspired a brilliant play about music, David Pownall’s Music to Murder By (1976). Carlo Gesualdo was born in Venosa, Italy, on March 8, 1566. The boy was entranced by music from an early age, and since his noble family could afford the best tuition, he was first known for virtuoso playing of various instruments, including the lute, an early harpsichord, and the guitar. What may have inspired him to compose music was also the incident that inspired Pownall to write the play: a double murder. Gesualdo married his first cousin, Maria d’Avalos, in 1586. He was suspicious of her, and had reason, for Maria almost immediately began an affair with a neighboring noble, the Duke of Andria. This went on for a couple of years when Gesualdo, surprising them in flagrante delicto on October 15, 1590, brutally murdered them and hung their bodies in front of his castle. There they rotted, then dried. This murderous vengeance was celebrated in poetry at the time (one is reminded that morals today are not what they used to be). Gesualdo married again (not much more happily) and then set up shop as a composer. Some say his music helped him deal with his guilt (the chromatic scale is capable of sinister sounds and the lyrics of some of his madrigals suggest deep-rooted guilt—or still-simmering fury). However that may have been, in Pownall’s play Gesualdo’s ghost murders yet again, this time a rather unlikeable American PhD who is researching Gesualdo’s significance in music history and will let nothing stand in her way. To shorten a most engaging story, she thus wakens a wrong ghost, and pays the piper by becoming the ghost’s (third?) murder victim. Pownall’s play requires its principal actors to be accomplished musicians (using, of course, early modern instruments), and is not often performed. That is a sadness, for besides being a rather fine mystery Music To Murder By concerns itself with the problem of how, and why, fine art is created. ©

[Stanley]

"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke." Ornette Coleman, 2010 interview.

So-called ‘free jazz’ burst onto the scene with Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” That title proved prophetic, for Coleman and several of his early disciples, notably John Coltrane, made ‘free jazz’ into a recognized genre. Music critics concede, however, that it’s not to everyone’s taste. Perhaps that will excuse Paulette and me for walking out of a Coltrane concert, circa 1967, because it sounded to us like mere noise, atonal, arhythmic, and loud. Be that as it may about Coltrane, Ornette Coleman’s lifetime contribution to music has been widely recognized and widely celebrated. Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born in Ft. Worth, TX, on March 9, 1930. He was early drawn to music, an expert player who was kicked out of his high school marching band for extemporaneous innovations to Souza’s “Washington Post March.” One can just about imagine that; and then, having decided that music was his life, Coleman moved from place to place and band to band, often proving disruptive, often therefore dismissed. One gets the impression that by “free” jazz Coleman meant his own music by his own rules. But his skills couldn’t be denied, and by the late 50s he’d put together enough friends and followers to make possible the recording of “The Shape” album. And Coleman’s jazz wasn’t quite so free as all that, for he was also a composer, and a gifted one at that, expecting others to play his notes. Indeed he was commissioned to write (and perform and record) Skies of America, a suite for sax and orchestra, Coleman accompanying (or being accompanied by) the London Symphony Orchestra (1972). He won much recognition and many awards, including the 2007 Pulitzer for his album Sound Grammar; until his death in 2015 Coleman’s live concerts in Europe, Japan, and America were headliners. So perhaps Paulette and I should think again about free jazz. ©.

[Stanley]

"The branches of the trees, the plants' stems, sometimes straight, sometimes undulating, aren’t they architectural models?" Hector Guimard.

Among the most distinctive structures in Paris are the Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard. There remain quite a few of them—over 60—their chances of survival improved by being classed as historical monuments. Most are mere street-level enclosures for downwards staircases, but a few, notably Abbesses in Montmartre and Porte Dauphine in the 18me Arrondissement are more elaborate, glass-roofed affairs. Paulette and I once stayed at a (very) small hotel in Montmartre and have at least a dozen photos of the Abbesses entrance, taken from several perspectives and in all weathers. So perfect do they seem, and so—well—Parisienne, that it’s a surprise to learn that they were all the results of a failed design contest. The new Paris underground wanted to dress itself up for the 1900 Exposition Universalle and announced a design contest which would produce winners “as elegant as possible but above all light [and] prioritizing iron, glass and ceramic.” Hector Guimard was born in Lyon on March 10, 1867, and proved a good enough student to qualify for entrance into the National School for the Decorative Arts in 1882. While there, and especially on scholarship trips to Scotland and Belgium, he became a devotee of art nouveau and scored some early successes especially in the Expositions of 1889 and 1896 and with buildings in the fashionable 16th Arrondissement. Being now a successful and fashionable architect, Guimard did not enter the Metro design contest, but when none of the 21 entries pleased any of the judges (indeed the designs were ridiculed), Guimard was ready to go when asked. When he was asked, he responded with his unforgettable, and indeed romantic, designs for the Paris Métro. ©

[Stanley]

"Let us first render ourselves popular by mighty deeds, and afterwards we will speak of peace." Moshoshoe, paramount chief of the Sotho nation.

One of my weaknesses as a teacher of early American history has been my tendency to treat the European invaders’ destruction of native American cultures as inevitable and, therefore, of marginal interest. But a new generation of historians has proven this view to be (at best) a severe distortion. Whole lifetimes were lived within the frontierlands, not a place but rather a state of being from within which no outcome could be seen as certain. Within that state of being, Euro- and native Americans lived and died as neighbors, as trading partners, as diplomatic, economic, or military allies, and sometimes as warmakers. Much the same can be said of the southern African frontier where native nations and European invaders presided over shifting scenes whose ultimate outcomes were not often apparent. One African leader who left his own mark on this landscape was Moshoeshoe, paramount chief and in some senses the founder of the Sotho nation, now called Lesotho. His long lifetime, from circa 1786 to his death on March 11, 1870, was indeed a period with uncertain outcomes, within which different “tribes” (Xhosa, Tembu, British, Dutch, Portuguese, and Basuto), struggled to achieve dominance, security, or simply modus vivendi. The chief ‘movement’ in this period was perhaps the trek northwards of the Dutch Africans, the “Boers,” in their quest to escape British domination, but in response another movement was Moshoeshoe’s creation of a Basuto or Sotho nation. He began as a cattle rustler, his chief victims being Xhosa farmers, but his great success was to form a territorial state (Basutoland, now Lesotho) from a military base high in the Maloti Mountains at Thaba Bosiu (Night Mountain), a state which drew its population and its strength from African peoples who wanted some different outcome than to be ‘colonized’ by this or that European tribe. Moshoeshoe won some great military and diplomatic successes. especially over the Boers in the period 1835 to 1864, at least some of which can be seen as a period of African expansion into European territory. He is today seen as the father of his country, although at his death he was de facto a client of the British tribe. ©.

[Stanley]

"To be is to be perceived." George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.

The “Yale Band,” so-called, were missionaries, mainly Yale graduates, who were sent west in the 1830s and 1840s to help migrating New Englanders stay loyal to Calvinist theology and Congregationalist ecclesiology. One of them was my great-great grandfather Philip Eveleth, whose surviving letters show that he enjoyed little success in central Illinois. Other Yale Band zealots got further west, to San Francisco Bay, where they converted few sinners but led the unionist cause in 1860-61, founded the University of California in 1868, and named its city “Berkeley.” Thereby hangs a tale, a poem, and a couple of famous paintings, for Berkeley, CA, was named for George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne in the (Protestant) Church of Ireland, an idealist philosopher who was (in his youth) a westwards-bound missionary and a prophet of (anglophone) empire. In New England, Berkeley (born in Ireland on March 12, 1685) converted few souls to Anglicanism but impressed all with his learning and left his library behind as a gift for Yale College. He also pondered English America’s history and its future, and in 1728 wrote a famous poem (“On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America”) whose last stanza begins with the line “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” By a long chain of highly unlikely links (‘mere coincidences’ which the idealist Berkeley would have enjoyed) his library gift and his poem would inspire the Yale Band, make him the obvious namesake of a western university town, and place the magnificent Emanuel Luetze mural “Westward Ho” in the American capitol building over the “western” staircase that leads to the main chamber of the House of Representatives. Ever the idealist, Berkeley had hoped that his utopian western university would be placed in Bermuda (which island he saw as the logical center of an English empire). But I imagine he’d be pleased enough with the current location. ©

[Stanley]

"In the emptiness I disassembled a letter from one of the ancient alphabets and I leaned on absence. So who am I?" Mahmoud Darwish, "In her absence I created her image."

Considered as an inhabited place, the Palestinian village of al-Birwah no longer exists, its families scattered to the winds and its buildings razed to the ground in 1948. But it is still venerated as the birthplace of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, born there on March 13, 1941. Before the diaspora, he was taught to read and write Arabic by his grandfather. That remained his language of use, certainly the language of his published works, but writing poetry is a great way to learn translation as, in his 20s, back in Israel, he mastered several more tongues. Increasingly regarded as the Palestinian national poet, living and writing in Ramallah, Darwish could not love Israel, and didn’t, but insisted that anti-Zionism did not translate into anti-Semitism. “Homeland” or “a homeland” is a frequent theme of his poetry, and it is undeniably a poetry of return. But to what sort of Palestine? In his 20s, Darwish lived in Israel and, as an active member of the Israeli communist party, wrote expressly political poetry in classic Arabic format, but increasingly veered towards free verse, and moral (as opposed to political) imagery and symbolism. He maintained dialogues with a number of Israeli (Hebrew) poets and much of his own verse has been translated into Hebrew, which Darwish called “a language of love.” Despite his long-term membership of the PLO, serious proposals have been made to include Darwish’s poetry in the Israeli national curriculum but there remain Darwish’s questions “who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?” Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008 while undergoing heart surgery in the USA, leaving behind those unanswered questions. ©