BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"There is no end to what can be accomplished if you don't care who gets the credit." Florence Luscomb.

Boston is in some ways the cradle of the progressive half of our schizoid national culture, and the next time you are there you should take in some of the city’s memorials to that role. The most remarkable one is Augustus St. Gaudens’ bronze tribute to Robert Gould Shaw and his 54th Massachusetts. Then walk across the Common to the State House, where on the second floor you will find Julia Bloom’s ‘Women’s Memorial.’ Remembered there are six women, the first of whom is Florence Luscomb, born in Lowell on February 6, 1887. What the memorial doesn’t mention is that Luscomb was a pioneer female architect, only the 10th to earn a degree in architecture from MIT. Luscomb later (circa 1916) formed an architectural partnership with the MIT program’s sixth woman graduate, Ida Annah Ryan, but that too is not mentioned, for Luscomb is most famed for her tireless radicalism, first on behalf of women’s suffrage and then for many other progressive causes. And Luscomb lived long enough (98 years) to make of her life a veritable encyclopedia of progressivism, including her charter membership of both the ACLU and the League of Women Voters. So for Florence Luscomb, architecture per se didn’t count for as much as “doing good.” Indeed, Ryan made Florence a partner to give her an office and the time she needed for her campaigns. When finally Florence came into her family inheritance (upon her mother’s death in 1933) she could spend all of her time pushing progressivism. She used it to run for office four times, once coming pretty close (within 1000 votes) to winning, but for the most part she was a marcher, a petitioner, a provider, an advisor, right down to, and through, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Luscomb was also active in progressive housing associations, which were her typical home addresses until 1980 when she moved to an eldercare hostel. There, five years later, she died. ©

[Stanley]

Bob sent this out, it corrects the Hank Aaron piece I posted first thing yesterday from Friday.

A neighbor and subscriber to my anniversary notes has pointed out an oddity or two in the note I sent about Henry (Hank) Aaron on the anniversary of his birth. The explanation is that I sent (by mistake) a copy of the note on Aaron that I did on his birthday in 2013. Appended below please find a copy of my 2021 note.
By way of explanation, I only very rarely do a repeat, and then it’s usually because something else has come up in relation to the anniversary itself. IN Aaron’s case, the obituaries I read all placed great weight on the racist threats Aaron received (and his reaction to them) as he approached and passed Babe Ruth’s record.
That evidence of our national distemper struck me as worthy of note.

Cheers,

Bob Bliss


Henry “Hank” Aaron died this year (January 22nd), Since this was in the aftermath of the January 6th “March of the Deplorables” in Washington the obituaries (I read probably six of them) stressed Aaron’s struggles with his own generation of American deplorables. These began with Aaron’s birth in Mobile, Alabama (on February 5, 1934) and climaxed with the veritable flood of hate mail Aaron received as (in 1973) he closed in on Babe Ruth’s home run record. But in both cases the ‘deplorables’ were undone by the facts, by the votes of the people in 2020-2021 and by the mountain of statistics compiled by Aaron in a major-league baseball career of 23 years. No matter how you cut into that mountain (and the obituary writers did their best), Hank Aaron stands supreme. Or, as New York Times headers put it, in follow-up articles, “Hank Aaron Was More Than His Stats. But His Stats Were Outrageous.” Or “There Are Hall of Famers, and Then There’s Hank Aaron.” Not just in home runs (755 of course, now second only to Barry Bonds), but in career hits, runs batted in, total bases, at-bats, and several more cateqories he sits among the top ten ever, and mostly in the top three. The records I particularly like were his consistent selection to the annual midsummer All-Star teams (23!!), and his percentage score (97.8%!!!) in terms of his first-choice votes for the sport’s Hall of Fame. And in 1973 the US Postal Service gave Aaron a. memorial plaque for receiving more mail than anyone else, mostly fan mail of the sort people like to get, but far too much of it from way too many “deplorables.” He kept quiet about it at the time, pretty much, but in his memoirs we hear of the toll taken by all that abuse, all those threats, on Aaron, on his wife, and on his children. Hank Aaron stands today as a monument to his sport and a memorial to patience. ©

[Stanley]

"THE SPHINX"-title of a recent biography of Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough.

For many authors, the American ‘innocent abroad’ became a model subject, often a rich young woman brought there by yankee parents whose definition of a “good marriage” for their daughter included a pedigree and, preferably, a dukedom. For the novelist Henry James, innocence was usually the thing, and in this quality the two American heiresses who nailed the ninth duke of Marlborough were deficient. These were Consuelo Vanderbilt and Gladys Marie Deacon. Gladys, the duke’s second wife, was born in the Hotel Brighton, Paris, on February 7, 1881 and thus was only 14 when Consuelo and the duke announced their engagement. Even so, the news seems to have challenged her: “I am too young though mature in the arts of woman’s witchcraft and what is the use of the one without the other?” That was 1895, and only an idle (if provocative) speculation, but in 1897 Gladys met the duke, and may be said to have pursued him for 24 years—off and on, between other romances, for instance with the Crown Prince of Prussia. Finally, the fields of Blenheim fell open when Consuelo and the duke divorced, Consuelo to marry a French aviator and he (Richard John Spencer-Churchill, to give him a name) to succumb to the (by now) seasoned charms of Gladys Deacon. They married on June 25, 1921, and then lived unhappily ever after. Gladys contributed nothing to the Churchill line, although she tried (with three miscarriages, 1922-1925), Meanwhile, her previous dalliance with King George’s younger brother and the duke’s divorce made the Marlboroughs unwelcome at court. She did contribute something to the profile of the Blenheim estate—notably the water gardens—but otherwise made little impress. The duke died in 1934 before he could divorce her, and she was left to fill out her time with idle chatter and premature aging (her last 15 years were spent in protective custody). Gladys the dowager duchess died in 1977 having never, as far as I know, made even a minor appearance in the novels of Henry James. ©

[Stanley]

"Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy?" Elizabeth Bishop, "The Moose."

If the aim of poetry is perfection, then Elizabeth Bishop was one of the last century’s most perfect poets. It certainly took her time to be one. At heart and thanks to her maternal grandparents Elizabeth Bishop was a Newfoundland person, born on February 8, 1911, early orphaned by her father’s death and her mother’s insanity, she was a fine fisherwoman before she got to Vassar, where she met Marianne Moore and Mary McCarthy and became a poet. Even then it took her nearly forever. Her first book of poetry didn’t appear until she was 35; she revised it nine years later. (The revision won her a Pulitzer.) Once Bishop boasted, or confessed, that it took her over 20 years to craft “The Moose,” which is not more (nor anything less) than a 28-stanza 168-line (short lines) journal of a bus journey. The bus rolls slowly, picking up passengers and viewing their partings, and it’s not until the 23rd stanza, in the evening dark, that the journey and the passengers’ reveries are interrupted by the poem’s eponymous moose, a magnificent cow, standing athwart the road. The driver stops. The moose, “high as a church, homely as a house,” sniffs at the bus’s “blue, beat-up enamel” while the passengers (one of them going as far as Boston) wake, look, and deem the moose a sort of miracle. “It’s awful plain.” After a bit, the driver shifts gears and the bus travels on. It leaves behind it (only?) “a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline” and it leaves the reader with a vivid sense of what life was for those who lived in, and she who left behind, the “narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides.” ©

[If you want the poem HERE it is}

[Stanley]

"One can only say that the truth will be pursued, whatever the ultimate result may be." Howard Taylor Ricketts, 1871-1910.

I sometimes think of the 18th and 19th centuries as the heroic era of the sciences. After the so-called “scientific revolution” of the 17th century, but working still in primitive labs, scientists often used their own bodies as test tubes, injecting or ingesting (or even bathing in) substances in their quest for discovery. They didn’t do badly (collectively, they discovered almost 50 elements) but their methods had recklessness about them. Several died of their experiments; others’ lives were materially shortened. I had thought (with exceptions like the Curies) that these primitive methods were abandoned in the 20th century. But along comes Howard Ricketts, born in Ohio on February 9, 1871, who didn’t begin his research career until the new century’s dawn (as a medical doctor at the University of Chicago), the discoverer of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and epidemic typhus (or, rather, of their biological vectors), who used his body just so, certainly to locate the source of epidemic typhus in a microorganism attendant on the body louse. In order to nail the connection down he had injected himself with the sera of infected animals. After all, the matter was urgent. Epidemic typhus was killing thousands in Mexico City, and Howard Ricketts died there, of self-injected typhus, on May 3, 1910. His memorials are the Howard Taylor Ricketts Prize (for medical research) at the University of Chicago and Rickettsia, the scientific name of the bacterial genus that, insect-borne or water-borne, brings disease and death to humans. It was not until the 1930s, at Vanderbilt University, that William Goodpasture (1886-1960) and his students discovered that a better way to make these discoveries was to inject suspect sera into fetal chickens. And no, Howard Ricketts was not (as far as I know) related to Ed Ricketts (1897-1948), the mild, eccentric marine biologist who inspired John Steinbeck’s “Doc” in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954).©.

[Stanley]

"You can't go wrong with fish and chips." Michael Sandel, Harvard philosopher.

Having lived in England for 28 years, we became amateur connoisseurs of fish & chips; call it
local color plus self-protection. We can still remember the worst serving we ever had (at Bala, in North Wales). And were it still there, I could take you blindfolded to the best one in Lancaster town, just down from the Scotforth Road, and at Lancaster University there was a more than passable attempt deep in the bowels of Furness College, to which I still owe at least some of my excess weight. But we never supped the most famed fish & chips, Harry Ramsden’s, where the traditional was served up untraditionally in a proper restaurant (chandeliers, carpets, and all) just off the A1/M1 somewhere in the vicinity of Leeds. By the time we got to England, Harry Ramsden himself was six years dead, but he lives on today in the form of a fish & chips chain, going strong since 1988, when it was floated in one of the most over-subscribed stock issues in British history. Harry was born (the sixth of seven children) in nearby Bradford on February 10, 1888. His father had tried several trades, but started the first Ramsden fish and chips when Harry was still in nappies. Harry himself followed only slowly in his father’s footsteps, trying several professions (including lather boy in a local barber’s shop) but finally opened his own corner “chippy” during WWI. Its reputation grew (thanks to a good part of Harry’s trade, vaudeville performers on the circuit, who made it part of their patter) and he opened “THE” Harry Ramsden’s in 1931 and, although that was in the depths of the Depression, the business flew high, wide, and handsome. People liked good fish & chips served with mushie peas and if they came with china plates, carpets, piano music, and chandeliers, so much the better. Harry sold the business to his nephew in the 1950s, but the nephew was clever enough to retain the name and the good will that Uncle Harry had built up over a long slog at the frier. It’s a good story because it’s about virtue rewarded and about quality counting for at least something. And I am told that Harry’s fish & chips were out of this world. ©

[Tripps]

I knew this would come in handy one day. This is from the main branch at Guisley. As far as I can calculate it was from 1996, on a visit to my son who was at Bradford University at the time

It was a 'destination' for my parents in the 1950's when they first got a car, and 'went for a run' at the weekend. I had to make a visit - there and Saltaire.

I'm not a big fan of fish and chips as it lies heavy in my stomach, and the portions are always far too big for me. I do like the occasional piece of battered fish though, but I wouldn't say Ramsden's were anything special. Morrison's in store cafe takes some beating for quality and value

PS. Just noticed that VAT was 17.5% and "left handed fish knives were available on request"

Harry Ramsdens 1996 menu.jpeg

[Stanley]

Nice one David. My Harry Ramsden story is being there one evening with Mary and some of her colleagues from YTV. the fish and chips arrived, Mary shook the ketchup and the top came off, I think three of them got baptised. The manageress came and apologised because staff were instructed to make sure the cap was screwed down when they bussed the table. Harry Ramsden's paid the dry cleaning bill.

[PanBiker]

The fish and chips at Wetwang take some beating.

[Tizer]

If you're ever near Glastonbury don't miss Knight's fish & chips shop. Knight's

[Stanley]

"I will be mistress of myself.”― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) tells the story of four marriages, two for love, one for security, and one for money. The story turns on the love match between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, and on the ways in which they surprise each other—in the end, happily. Elizabeth’s elder sister Jane also makes a good match with Darcy’s friend Charles Bingley. The two other marriages don’t work out, one of them starting very badly when Elizabeth’s frivolous, silly youngest sister, Lydia, runs off with George Wickham who is eventually bribed (by Darcy!!) to make an honest woman of her. It’s the George and Lydia story that strikes me today, for it’s the birth anniversary of Ellen Turner, born just two years before publication of Pride and Prejudice, on February 12, 1811, the only daughter of a rich industrialist, William Turner, who was making his way up the Cheshire social ladder by buying a lavish country estate. Ellen was not a Lydia Bennett character, but she found her George Wickham in the shape of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862). In 1826 Wakefield (having buried his first wife, the very young heiress Eliza Pattle, after receiving a marriage settlement of £70,000) abducted Ellen Turner, only 15, and took her to Gretna Green where they married under the false pretense that marriage, to him, was the only way Ellen could save her father from bankruptcy. They were caught (in France), and Wakefield was arrested, sued, then tried in criminal court. He got off the lawsuit principally because, in English ecclesiastical law, his “wife” (Ellen Turner was still unavoidably married to her kidnapper) could not testify against her husband. The marriage was annulled by the House of Lords, allowing Ellen to marry again (sensationally, to one of the magistrates who had heard the abduction case against Wakefield), whereupon she (like Eliza Prattle before her) died in childbirth at age 20. Wakefield himself (who makes George Wickham seem saintly) went to prison for just three years, then emerged to play an important role in the colonization of New Zealand. One wonders what Jane Austen might have made of that marriage match, but Austen (who never married) died when Ellen Turner was only three. Spousal immunity, by the way, still exists in many American states’ courts, which gives special weight to the title of a recent audio documentary on Ellen Turner’s trials: “To Stop Her Mouth”. ©

[Stanley]

"Every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life." Arthur Miller.

In 1669. Alice Thornton sat down to write “my own book of my life, the collection of God’s dealings and mercies to me and all mine until my widowed condition.” By the time she’d finished it was more than that, carrying the narrative on to include much of her widowhood (she lived a widow until 1707) and producing three manuscript “books,” 800+ pages, in her own hand. At some point, the books got separated. In 1875, some of her descendants published a transcription of books one and two, and then in 2019 two historians at the University of Edinburgh, Suzanne Trill and Cordelia Beattie, (re)discovered book the third, which had been hiding, possibly for centuries, in the library of Durham Cathedral. Trill and Beattie aim to edit and publish the whole thing, in book form and on-line, thus reminding us that history (as a discipline) is more than the retelling or reinterpretation of ‘old’ facts but can actually be new. Alice Thornton, the originator of all this, was born Alice Wandesford on February 13, 1626, in North Yorkshire. The privileged child of a family with connections, she was well educated (at Dublin Castle, with the daughters of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford), and when all that came to an end (with the Irish Rising of 1641, Strafford’s execution, and the English Civil Wars), Alice moved back to Yorkshire, made what seems to have been a good, affectionate marriage. But it was not a rich one, and then it was made poorer when Alice was cheated out of her share in her father’s estate by her own brother. She began to write her autobiography to set that sadness straight, but as she wrote she gained the authorial power to explain much more, to make her life significant. The result appears to be (I have yet to read it) a classic of Protestant literature. In the act of writing, Alice Thornton saw her life in whole, and satisfied herself that in its good and in its bad fortune it illustrated God’s providential conditioning of her very own soul. ©

[Stanley]

"To have one great idea, have a lot of them." Thomas Edison

Goldsworthy Gurney was born in Cornwall on February 14, 1793; he got his unusual baptismal name a few days later from his godmother; since she had been Maid of Honour to Queen Charlotte, we can assume that Gurney’s family was well-connected. One such connection was with Richard Trevithick (1771-1833), an engineer who applied steam power to Cornish tin-mining. They met while Gurney was still a student at Truro Grammar School, and it may have been from Trevithick that Gurney caught the inventing bug. Whatever bug’s origin, it made Gurney into one of the most prolific patent-gatherers of the 19th century: multitalented, and an inveterate tinkerer. Gurney trained as a surgeon and practiced for a time in London, but soon tinkering overtook his life. Much of it centered on steam power, and he enjoyed some success with a series of “horseless carriages” which were exactly that, carriages hooked to a steam engine. In the late 1820s this attracted investors, and included steam carriage services on several popular routes, but it offended conventional carriage operators and landowners who, in their localities and then in parliament, taxed Gurney’s carriages out of existence. He successfully sought a “restraint of trade” remedy from the House of Commons, but a bill to that effect was lost in the Lords, and he ‘retired,’ nearly but not quite bankrupt, to Bude in Cornwall where, soon, he was involved in building “Gurney’s Castle”, a technical marvel in itself for it sat on sand, but also on Gurney’s “floating foundations.” Other Gurney inventions or entrepreneurial breakthroughs included a blowpipe for laboratory work, and on this he based his amazing “Bude Light” which, in its time, gave brilliant, white, and nearly odorless light to the House of Commons, Trafalgar Square, and a number of lighthouses. Gurney also invented and installed ventilation systems which rendered (not quite) odorless both Lords and Commons in the new parliament building. Another invention, the Gurney Stove, still heats Durham, Hereford, and Ely cathedrals. Having visited these places in cold weather, I can say that Gurney’s Stoves were ‘not quite’, but they stand testimony to the multi-colored and multi-coursed career of one of England’s most prolific “improvers” in an improving age. Queen Victoria thought so, and she knighted Goldsworthy Gurney in 1863. Happy Valentine’s Day!!! ©

[Stanley]

“Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe”― Galileo Galilei

It’s now widely accepted that Galileo Galilei did not say “And yet it moves” (Eppur si muove), but it remains easy to imagine that he might (must?) have said something similar, sotto voce, as he walked away from the Inquisition’s judgment against his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632). His settled view was that the sun and not the earth was the still center of creation, and for nigh on to 20 years it had brought him trouble aplenty, mainly with the church and other upholders of classical or Biblical tradition. Thus forewarned, Galileo had rewritten his argument in the form of a conversation amongst three men, which might have made him safe (indeed, it was recommended to him by the then sitting pope). But in his dialogue he named the man representing Aristotelian and Ptolemaic tradition ”Simplicio” and for that and other reasons he fooled no one. Galileo, already a noted man of science, mathematics, and engineering, was a convinced Copernican and thus became a convicted one. And he accepted the judgment. Galileo, born in Pisa on February 15, 1564, had throughout his life won patrons through his brilliance in several fields; through his patrons he had won preferment, so he was well aware that in his world it was better to defer than to be correct. But if Galileo did not himself say “and yet, it moves,” his work did say just that, and it would be his work that prevailed. The ‘language’ of the universe was not to be found in the Bible nor in the writings of Aristotle but in observation (through Galileo’s improved telescopes) and in mathematical and geometric calculations. Over the next centuries that argument would be accepted and improved upon, and now we can aim a satellite at Mars, at Venus, at a comet, or at any other moving target. And, when we miss, we can recalculate and, the next time, come much closer. ©

[Stanley]

"Just so soon as a party loses sight of the good of the whole and works for 'party' right or wrong, it becomes a menace to the community." Leonora O'Reilly.

Leonora O’Reilly was born to Irish immigrant parents in New York City on February 16, 1870. Her parents, John and Winifred, were refugees from the Irish Potato Famine and politically aware. John, a member of the Knights of Labor, died in 1871. Poverty forced Leonora out of school and into full-time work (as a seamstress) in 1881, but she did not stop learning. Work itself was a hard school, and she learned much also from the Cooper Union lectures her mother took her to hear. By the 1890s, Leonora was a prominent trades union leader in New York’s garment district, but one with a broad perspective and goals to match: she demanded not only shorter hours and better pay, but also the vote, and she advocated for a network of alliances that included other exploited or excluded groups, for instance the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which she joined shortly after its foundation in 1909. Making her cause common was the name of Leonora’s game, and she found inspiration where she could, for instance from the French positivist August Comte, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, a radical priest (Fr. Edward MacGlynn), and the Socialist Party of America. She polished off some other of her rough edges by taking evening classes in art and adopting a daughter, Alice, in 1907. All this paid off. Leonora gained the friendship (and financial backing) of well-to-do radical feminists like Josephine Lowell and Louise Perkins, and when the US Senate bestirred itself to set up an investigative committee on female suffrage, they invited Leonora O’Reilly to testify. Typically, Leonora began by speaking and only then took questions. You can find that speech and much more about O’Reilly in the Carrie Chapman Catt archive (on-line) at Iowa State University and in a recent “Overlooked No More” obituary (in the New York Times, August 21, 2020.) Worn out by her labors, Leonora O’Reilly, citizen of the United States of America, succumbed to heart failure in New York, on April 3, 1927. She was only 57 years of age. ©.

[Stanley]

Borders, languages, and cultures. The Battle of Hemmingstedt.

2021 will see the 100th anniversary of the current border between Denmark (South Jutland or Sønderjyllands) and Germany (Schleswig-Holstein). In 2000, it was declared an open border (no immigration or customs posts) under the umbrella of the European Union, but its placement and its controls remain open issues. In 2019, at great cost, the Danes completed a border fence (shall we call it a “wall”?), allegedly to control the movement northwards of wild boar and their attendant diseases, but tightening controls over human migrants suggest another purpose and a new variant on old nationalisms. When in 1977 and 1979 we visited Paulette’s (Danish) relations on their farms near Tønder in South Jutland, these tensions were well below the surface, but we did note that as one neared the border nearly every farmstead and many urban properties flew the Danish flag, the Dannebrog. And in Jutland many families proudly participated in a program by which children from ethnically Danish families in German Schleswig could spend summers learning how to be Danish (and help with house- or farm-work). It’s been a centuries-long tale of war, language and culture, and one of its important anniversaries comes today, for on February 17, 1500 a huge Danish army met a motley “peasants’ army” at the battle of Hemmingstedt, in the Hanseatic League republic of Dithmarschen. The Danes were there to assert their King’s sovereignty over, and they brought with them 2,000 mounted knights, over 1000 artillerymen, and a large force of infantry. The Dithmarschen militia may have had one cannon, and many were armed only with farm implements, but they knew the land, and they knew where the sluice gates were in their dike system that held back the North Sea. So they flooded the whole area, rendering virtually immobile the huge Danish army. In the ensuing battle, the Danes lost nearly 8,000 men (most were drowned) and of course lost the war too. Dithmarschen retained its oddly republican sovereignty until 1559; thereafter it changed hands several times, and it remains today a part of the German Federal Republic. ©

[Stanley]

"I remember kneeing in chapel and praying like blazes that Ramsay wouldn't be killed . . . he hated water and couldn't swim." Lilian Bader in a 2000 BBC broadcast, reflecting on her reaction to hearing of the D-Day landings.

One of the costs a nation pays for racism is a loss of memory. To repair something of that loss, Queen Elizabeth dedicated the Commonwealth Memorial Gates in Hyde Park, London. One of the invited guests at the November 2002 dedication was Lilian Mary Bader, then already 84 years of age, who through her own military service (in WWII) and then through her life had worked to keep the memory alive. On February 18, 1918, she was born Lilian Mary Bailey, the third child of Marcus Bailey, a Barbadian, and Lily McGowan, a Liverpudlian of Irish descent. Marcus was a seaman whose service in WWI (aboard HMS Chester) Lilian Bader later researched and broadcast. Lilian herself, orphaned at 9, was separated from her brothers and was (well-) educated at a convent school near Liverpool. Come WWII, she volunteered first for the NAAFI, the entertainment and welfare wing of the services, but was excluded on racial grounds. Finding that the RAF was recruiting “coloureds,” Lilian volunteered and specialized in instrument panel repair of damaged warplanes. She also married Ramsay Bader, a mixed-race artilleryman; when she became pregnant she was dismissed (in 1944) from the RAF. After the war, Lilian earned a University of London BA and taught many years (history and foreign languages) in schools and colleges in SE England. Upon her retirement, in 1984, Lilian Bader turned her scholarship talents to the restoration of memory, through publication of her own memoir (Together: Wartime Memoirs of a WAAF), but also BBC broadcasts on her father’s, husband’s, and elder brother’s wartime services. She wrought finely, becoming well enough known to be invited to that 2002 memorial service at Hyde Park and then to the 2008 opening of the Imperial War Museum’s documentary exhibition “From War to Windrush.” Lilian Bader herself died, well-remembered, in 2015 at the age of 97. ©

[Stanley]

“I know it when I see it." Justice Potter Stewart, concurring in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).

As private citizen and as long-time faculty advisor of a student newspaper, my dad always opposed censorship. He had, no doubt, many reasons, but his favorite was that (in his words) “the censor is always an ass.” Indeed. When we have (in language) an infinity of possibilities, and in our definitions (of, for instance, “obscenity”) a near infinity of standards, those who would censor are certain to fail and likely to look silly in doing so. A good example is the tangled history of the word “asshole” on US network television. It was bleeped out for decades but only part of it. So what one heard was “George is an ass[bleep],” ‘ass’ being OK and ‘hole’ unacceptable. One of the most determined efforts to rid society of obscenity took place in the state of Georgia, with legislation (passed on February 19, 1953) creating the Georgia Literature Commission, a three-member board chaired through most of its short (20 years) life by a senior Baptist minister, James Wesberry. Commissioners worked very hard, read a mountain of dicey stuff, made many decisions but could boast of few accomplishments. Part of the problem was that the commission’s decisions were often reversed by the US Supreme Court, but the bigger problem was universal. Three respectable, elderly, white Georgians found it difficult to agree on what was, or wasn’t, obscene, and also they could only read so much. In 1963, for instance, after reading and deciding on 427 texts (!!!), Atlanta was still (the commission declared) “the worse [sic] cesspool in the country” and “the capitol [sic] of pornography.” They apparently decided to address the problem by reading less, in 1964 surveying only 22 texts. And then along came Governor Jimmy Carter, no friend of pornography (in 1971 he proclaimed March 9-15 as Georgia’s “Fight Pornography Week”) but a lion on zero-based budgeting. Each state agency had to budget from scratch, justifying its every cost, and the Georgia Literature Commission found its budget cut to almost nothing, parhaps in order to match its achievements. Governor Carter cast it off, like a used Erskine Caldwell paperback, and it died quietly, a victim of its own absurdities. ©

[Stanley]

"You don't take a photograph. You make it. " Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902. A rebellious child, he had the good fortune to be born into a family of Emersonians who were attuned to the idea that genius lurks in every person. So Adams’ father yanked the boy out of school in 1914 and arranged for his home schooling, which was supervised by his Aunt Mary, herself a force of nature and a noted atheist. From that point young Adams learned what he wanted to learn. Increasingly, he focused on music and nature. Adams became (and remained) a far-more-than-adequate pianist, but we all know him as a brilliant photographer of nature, first and foremost of the Yosemite Valley and its High Sierra back country, which he first saw at age 16—and photographed it, too, on a Brownie and in black & white. B & W remained his favorite, I think exclusive, medium, but in technical terms Adams adopted far more sophisticated cameras, large format, and he also became a master of the darkroom.. In 1927 Adams mounted his first photographic show, then acquired a wealthy patron (Albert Bender) and a devoted wife (Virginia Rose Best). In 1931 an Adams show at the Smithsonian highlighted his lifelong identification with the Sierra Club and the cause of wilderness preservation. Adams’s breathaking landscapes, marked by thoughtful composition and a miraculous clarity, played a major role in 20th-century conservation, notably the designation of King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks and in the rise of the Sierra Club to a national rather than a regional mission. Ansel Adams died in 1984; he was survived by Virginia Best Adams and by his photographs. It is a mere irony that his father’s wealth had come from cutting down and milling California redwoods. ©

[Stanley]

“You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart." W. H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening."

For about a decade, and I honestly can’t remember which one it was, I told myself (and anyone who might be listening) that my favorite poet was W. H. Auden. I don’t remember why I thought this, and today I own only one Auden volume (the Faber collected verse), but I liked his mourning poems. especially the one eventually used in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral , (“Stop All the Clocks”) and the in memoriam for William Butler Yeats. It was about this time, too, that I first ran across Auden’s libretto for “Paul Bunyan,” the Benjamin Britten opera (1941), which I did and still do very much admire as an introduction to American Studies—as (I think) it was for Auden himself, sheltering in America from WWII, on the verge of becoming a citizen, and correspondingly curious about the country. At any rate, Wystan Hugh Auden was born in Yorkshire on February 21, 1907, into a family with local roots and long traditions. He had one of the best educations his father could buy, finishing up at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1928. His education continued in the heady and (in retrospect) sinister atmosphere of Weimar Berlin, a place and time where his homosexuality could be something other than secret. Intellectually and philosophically, he went through several phases, ending up (I think) where he had begun—in the high church Anglicanism of his family. His poetry changed a good deal too, from a disciplined adherence to classical forms (much of which I now think reads badly) to what were really prose poems, which was what he was writing when I first read him. ©

[Tripps]

Auden himself, sheltering in America from WWII, on the verge of becoming a citizen,

Very poetic. . . There's another word for that.

[Stanley]

I had the same thought David.....

[Tripps]

Baronness Shirley Williams did something similar. . .

Wiki.
"During the Second World War, she was evacuated to Minnesota in the United States for three years"

[Stanley]

" . . . relax now & go with this poem move & roll on to this poem do not resist this poem." Ishmael Reed, "Beware: Do Not Read This Poem." 1970.

Most educated, literate folk today, asked to name a leading African-American writer, would probably name a woman: Toni Morrison (1931-2019), perhaps Maya Angelou (1928-2014), maybe Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) or, among the living, Alice Walker (1944- ). In a 2018 essay, another living black female writer, Ayana Mathis (1973- ) noted this discrepancy, or quirk, and suggested that it owed in part to the universally acknowledged role that black women have played in holding together their neighborhoods and their families. Mathis herself explored this idea—ironically—in her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2013) and then, in that 2018 essay, brought together 38 living, breathing, and (mainly) young black male writers to call it a myth. Among the leading black male writers Mathis did NOT name in 2018 is Ishmael Scott Reed who is today happily (I hope) celebrating his 83rd birthday. Ishmael, if you know your Bible (and/or your Melville), is a good name for a migrant, and this particular Ishmael was born in Chattanooga on February 22, 1938, and then—still in swaddling clothes—joined his parents in the Great Migration northwards, in his case to Buffalo. There he was educated, graduated from college, and began to write all sorts of things, journalism, essays, poems, and fiction, for all sorts of publications, several of which Reed founded. He’s worth a look. His fiction and poetry veer towards magical realism, slaves escaping to Canada in planes and buses for instance or a black cowpoke whose feet are cloven hooves, but it is mostly concerned with the disillusionments of living a ‘colored’ life in white America. Reed had other moods, though. If you are a young person you might well have read in high school Reed’s much-anthologized poem “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem.” It’s a wonderfully liberating verse, rather funny and I think also a little scary, that urges the reader to know himself (or, I suppose, herself) through writing. So Happy Birthday, Ishmael Reed!! You wrought well. ©.

[Stanley]

"We, too, are primary existences . . . the companions, not the satellites, of men." Emma Willard.

In recent years my teaching on the American Revolution has focused on the question of “equality,” the startling yet “self-evident” truth proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence. Such a focus raises many questions, most obviously about race and wealth, but there’s also gender. Did our founding fathers mean to free their wives, sisters, and daughters from “the bonds of womanhood”? Many circumstances suggest not, and yet the revolutionary generation spawned quite a few men and women who seemed to think that their daughters were or ought to be “equal” in at least some respects. This showed most clearly in education, most notably in the northern states, where an increasing number of girls were taught that they could not only learn, but master, disciplines and subjects once thought to be beyond their grasp. They included the Peabody sisters of Salem , Elizabeth (1804-94), Mary (1806-89), and Sophia (1809-71); Margaret Fuller (1810-50), and the Hart sisters Emma (1787-1870) and Almira (1793-1884). Perhaps the most radical of them all was Emma Hart Willard, born in Connecticut on February 23, 1887, the 16th of 17 children of Samuel and Lydia Hart. Emma was first liberated by her father, a farmer, who treated all his children as equally educable and included all in household discussions and projects concerning (inter alia) politics, mathematics, geography, and natural philosophy. Emma went to a local school already well-educated, and was hired to teach there at age 16. She went on to teach in female academies at Westfield, MA, and Middlebury, VT, and by 1819 she’d moved on to New York to present the legislature with a plan for publicly funded women’s schools. The legislature didn’t listen, but Governor DeWitt Clinton did, and he helped Emma Hart Willard (she’d married in 1809) establish what became the Troy Female Academy, now the Emma Willard School. Throughout her long life she maintained a radical view of women’s education as equal to men’s in every respect, and independent, too: most definitely not a preparation for marriage and motherhood. Women’s sphere, for Emma Willard, was an independent realm. ©