BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

No science is immune from the infection of politics and the corruption of power. Jacob Bronowski.
Jacob Bronowski, 1908-1974
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[Students] are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. Jacob Bronowski, 1973.

Once upon a time knowledge and “knowing” were thought valuable properties, properties which should be widely shared. Such odd thoughts crystallized in several forms, notably the creation (1964) of BBC2, which was to be the thinking person’s TV channel. So it was that BBC2’s second director, David Attenborough, conceived of a special type of TV series, long presentations concerning the origins, history, and current state of this or that branch of knowledge. Attenborough himself would go on to create his own distinctive line of documentaries on the sciences of nature, becoming Sir David in the process, but while he was ‘Mr. BBC2’ he commissioned three such series, the first two being Kenneth Clark’s Civilization (on art and culture) and Alasdair Cooke’s America (on the USA). Each had its own flaws (which many were happy to point out), but the third series won (nearly) universal acclaim, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. It was liked for its optimism, for its linking together varied branches of knowledge, and for Bronowski’s argument that they were all linked to human progress. Jacob Bronowski was born in Poland, then a western province of the Russian Empire, on January 18, 1908. He and his family arrived in Britain in 1920 where, at Cambridge, despite (or because of?) his difficulties with English, he graduated Senior Wrangler (top of his class) in mathematics, already eager to demonstrate how mathematics linked with enlightenment in several disciplines, not least chess but also poetry and the fine arts. Bronowski stuck with mathematics (analytic geometry) for his PhD, but spent his down time on chess while making friends with the literary likes of Robert Graves. He spent some time as lecturer in mathematics at Hull (sadly before Philip Larkin’s tenure there as University Librarian, for they might have made quite a pair). He then used mathematics to serve violence, notably RAF bombing strategy in WWII, but his study of the impact of “The” bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned him in other directions. Despite Hiroshima, Dresden, and Auschwitz, Bronowski remained hopeful about the human prospect, and this made him a perfect choice to create and present The Ascent of Man, which ran for 13 (!!!) episodes in 1973. Bronowski died in 1974, leaving one to wonder what he might have thought about the descent of knowledge in today’s world. ©

[Tripps]

Good as always.

I noted the curious words words Senior Wrangler with interest. I knew what it was but checked it out. I was mildly surprised to find that Lee Hsien Loong had been such in 1973.

I knew who he was too. Current PM of Singapore and son of the founding father, the lawyer Lee Kuan Yew. He was no slouch in the brains department either, but stood in awe of the intellect of his wife. One hell of a pedigree.

I skimmed through Hsien Loong's CV and briefly compared it to that of a few British politicians. Take your pick. It didn't take long to identify a possible reason that Singapore is doing so well these days.

[Stanley]

I've heard the phrase before but never knew exactly what it was until I read Bob's note.

[Stanley]

Pierre Chouteau the Younger
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Celui qui ne connaît qu’une seule langue ne vit qu’une seule fois. Those who know only one language live only once. (Anon.).

St. Louis has been our home for 25 years, and its peculiarities have become familiarities. Among those, it’s a great place to learn how to mispronounce French, although in almost all cases Saint “Lewis” retains French spellings (minus accents): of family names, of buildings, streets, rivers, and suburbs. So, I board the metrolink at Debaliviere (“deboliver”) station, dine at a restaurant in Creve Coeur (“creeve core”), and the city’s founder, back in 1764, when it was a frontier outpost of the Bourbons—Pierre Laclède—has left his name (now “lacleed”) to a number of places, notably an honors college and a gas company. Of course some old habits die hard, and there’s amusement in the fact that some of our city’s oldest (French) families still snipe at each other. They may mispronounce their surnames, but they remember their snubs. One of these is the Chouteau family. Whenever the family lost its proper pronunciation, it achieved and maintained aristocratic status for several generations. For instance, Pierre Chouteau, Jr., born on January 19, 1789, paterfamilias of the family’s second generation, was the grandson of Pierre Laclède, and then to keep it all in the family he married his cousin, Emilie Gratiôt, and brought his brother-in-law (an Italian named Bartholomew, or possibly Bartholomeo) into the family businesses. There were several such enterprises, most of which Pierre ran with his elder brother Auguste, and of course Bartholomew. In good French, Pierre’s nickname was Cadet (pronounced “Cadette” in St. “Lewis”), short for second son, but the businesses were part of the Chouteau family’s Americanization, first bringing the brothers Chouteau into correspondence with Thomas Jefferson (they supplied Lewis and Clark in 1803-4) and then with John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. When Pierre bought Astor out, in 1834, he became the company’s leading spirit, negotiating trade deals (and various peace treaties) with Indian nation partners and Euro-American trappers, founding trading posts along the upper Missouri and opening the river to steamboats (at least in Spring and Summer) almost all the way to Montana. He left his name (not to mention his native children) scattered across the landscape, too, most notably at Fort Pierre, Dakota Country, which is now appropriately mispronounced as “peer,” the capital city of South Dakota. In St. Louis itself, the name Chouteau is attached to several streets and places, notably a principal boulevard and a luxury condo. But my advice is, when you come to St. Louis, don’t ask where to find a Chouteau anything. “Show-Tow” is what you’re looking for. ©

[Stanley]

"The King can do no Wrong." Carolus Rex, 1649.
King Charles is put on trial, January 20, 1649.
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I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority. Charles Stuart, speaking before the court, January 20, 1649.

The Supreme Court’s decision, yesterday, denying Donald J. Trump’s claim to several immunities of ‘executive privilege,’ has a long constitutional and ideological history, a history which Associate Justice Thomas, dissenting, seems not to understand. Not the first but a very early step in that history was taken on January 20, 1649, the day that the trial of King Charles I began, in London. The trial’s beginning was not, of course, as dramatic as the end, January 30, when the king was beheaded, but it had its high points. The charge read (by John Cook, the Solicitor General) against the king was that he had committed treason by waging war (and doing various other wrongs) “against the present Parliament and the people therein represented.” Charles, incensed by what he regarded as an oxymoronic jumble, hit Cook with his cane, hard enough that the cane’s silver tip flew off and rattled around on the floor. The king waited for someone to pick it up; when no one did, Charles had to stoop down, himself, to retrieve the ornament. It was a moment of high theater, telling in every respect, and Solicitor General Cook, uninterrupted, droned on. The king, outgunned in the wars and now unmanned in the dock, claimed the highest of executive privileges. He was the state, the realm’s very embodiment, anointed by God to rule by right—divine right—and by inheritance. In logic he could commit no treason, and no court could have the power to try him for any malfeasance. No “impeachment could lie against the King,” Charles said; he was not required even to appear, let alone to plea. The court’s answer, theatrically, was to leave it to the king to decide whether to pick up his own silver ornament, or to let it roll around on the floor. Judicially, it responded that “the King of England was not a person but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern by and according to the law.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. Its democratic common sense echoed down the centuries to be celebrated in sermons (e.g. by the Rev’d Jonathan Mayhew, in a Boston pulpit), speeches (e.g. by Patrick Henry, in the Virginia Assembly), and by the state delegates in Philadelphia, in the hot summer of 1787 (in the impeachment clause, Article II, Section 4, of the US Constitution). Presidents are elected, and may also be held responsible, by a new sovereign authority, a mundane authority known as “We, the People.” I wonder if the former president’s lawyers showed up in court with silver-tipped canes. ©

[Stanley]

"Your doing something today will get you into tomorrow."
Richie Havens, 1941-2013
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I really sing songs that move me. I’m not in show business. I’m in the communications business. Richie Havens.

Richie Havens, born in Brooklyn on January 21. 1941, was an enigmatic figure who moved around the fringes—occasionally right through the center—of the pop-folk-jazz music world. He hit the limelight at Woodstock in 1969, where on short notice he was called on to open the marathon. He made a legend of it, and like all legends it’s differently remembered by different participants and onlookers, but all agree that Havens finished his stand with a bang, a largely improvised piece made up of bits of an old spiritual (“Like a Motherless Child”) and pieces Havens added in on the spot (“Freedom”). At Woodstock he was also visually striking: big, 6½ feet tall and playing what (thus) looked like a toy guitar in an unusual way. He had a West Indian mother and those bits of Havens that weren’t Black were Blackfoot which, in the shape of his grandfather, had fetched up in New York courtesy of Wild Bill Hickock’s Wild West Show. When the show folded (Bill choked on a chicken bone) grandpa moved into Long Island’s Indian reservation, but Haven’s dad settled down in Brooklyn in time for Havens to be born the eldest of nine siblings. It was a polyglot neighborhood, full of “breeds,” everyone half this and half that, all the adults working and all the kids accustomed to being shouted at by everyone’s grandmas. So Havens never felt “strange” until he moved into Greenwich Village as a street artist, sketching and music, whereupon he grew a huge beard so that (he later speculated) he would never know what he ‘really’ looked like. The guitar came on quite late, the other reason (along with his huge hands) for his odd technique, and he came to be known, around the clubs, as a native talent, singing his own songs or others’, and happy to display his own self-absorbed erudition (in his off hours he was to be found in public libraries). Well-liked, Havens was talented enough to come under Bob Dylan’s agent, which was how he came to Woodstock where he was to have been #5 on the play list but (as above) was pressed into the #1 spot. Appropriately, one of his first albums was called “Mixed Up,” and his later career reflected that too. Havens probably made as much money from his advertising jingles (among others, for McDonalds, Amtrak, and Maxwell House) as from his folk gigs and albums. There were, however, stable centers to his life, havens we might say, not least his wife Jane and their four daughters but also civil rights and ecology: his Black and Blackfoot bits. Richie Havens, part African, part Blackfoot, and 100% American, kept on singing, composing, and giving interesting interviews until 2013, when his kidneys gave out. ©.

[Stanley]

"When the last curtain falls, I am a rag. But contented." Ponselle.
Rosa Ponselle, 1897-1981.
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That big, pure colorful golden voice would rise effortlessly, hitting the stunned listener in the face, rolling over the body, sliding down the shoulder-blades, making one wiggle with sheer physiological pleasure. Harold Schonberg, writing in 1972 of Rosa Ponselle.

Among my abiding memories of my years at Lancaster University, one came very early on, perhaps even on the night he hired me, when my first boss, Austin Woolrych, boasted to me that he had just acquired a new (remastered) recording of Rosa Ponselle. Unwilling to admit that I knew even less of Ponselle than I knew of opera, I went along with it, just as one might laugh at a too subtle joke. So I looked her up, in the library of course, to find that she’d been long retired but, in her prime, had been one of the great sopranos in opera history. Not only that, but her career had been itself a Cindarella story. Rosa Ponselle was born Rosa Ponzillo on January 22, 1897, a name Italian enough for a Verdi heroine but in the decidedly un-Italian town of Meriden, Connecticut. Her musical talents emerged at the keyboard, but she switched to voice to follow her elder sister, Carmela, into singing for pay, in Rosa’s case during between-reels intervals at a New Haven cinema. By 1915 Rosa and
Carmela were a leading vaudeville act, their repertoire a cultural stew (traditional American ballads, popular songs, operatic duets). Both sisters then studied with a voice teacher who thought Carmela the better prospect until Rosa was heard by Victor Maurel, Verdi’s choice to create the role of Iago (in Otello). And so it was that Rosa Ponselle had her Met debut at the very top, singing Leonora opposite Enrico Caruso in Verdi’s La forza del destino on November 15, 1918. It was an astounding success, a wonderful story made flesh by a golden voice and in the attractive persona of an immigrant girl made good. In the 1920s and into the 1930s, Rosa’s career flourished in the USA and in leading roles in London and Florence. She expanded her repertoire but always, it seemed, returned to Leonora and the aria “Pace, pace, mio Dio” as her signature piece. In the late 1930s, physically exhausted and her voice—in the highest registers—beginning to break, she married into Baltimore high
society. Outside the city, her husband (Carle Jackson) built her a new house which she called “Villa Pace” and decorated (even the front doors) with operatic themes and memorabilia. There she held soirees and performed, privately, singing softly in high soprano and more heartily in contralto, until, in 1980, the house burned. In a kind of reprise of her Leonora role, Rosa Ponselle took refuge in a religious community across the road, and died in the next year, to be mourned by those, including Austin Woolrych, who loved a fine voice and a great story. ©

[Stanley]

It was Austin Woolrych who said at a party at Steve Constantine's; "Life begins at 80!"
He was my personal tutor and once gave me a sherry and said 'Of course dear boy, you realise that you are in danger of being tarred with the brush of academic brilliance. You're heading for a First."
I took notice and avoided that dreadful fate....

[Stanley]

United States patent No. 183,626, 1957,
The Frisbee: A Saga.
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That got the wheels turning, because you could buy a cake pan for five cents, and if people on the beach were willing to pay a quarter for it, well—there was a business. Fred Morrison, on the success of the original Flyin’ Cake Pan, Santa Monica, CA.

Our culture is full to surfeit of mottoes and sayings in praise of innovation and ingenuity, but we’ve been less open to the satiric possibilities of these surface virtues. Take for instance “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” an all-American truism wrongly credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson actually issued his dictum in favor of better corn, chairs, knives, and pigs, each of them indubitably of more use than mousetraps, and who, pray tell, has really and truly benefited from the well over 4,000 US patents associated (so far) with “better” mousetraps? 4000??!!! One suspects that those better traps are today more often
found in landfills than employed in executing mice. Not a few of our innovations produce nothing more than fads whose chief tendency is to fade away. But exceptions must be made, and here I refer to one of the great fads of my late youth, the frisbee. I still have a frisbee, a red one, which I occasionally employ for the entertainment of our granddaughter and my own (light) exercise, and should I ever lose it (or suddenly develop a yen for a new color) I could easily buy a replacement. The Frisbee® still lives, the brainchild of Walter Frederick (“Fred”) Morrison, born an optometrist’s son in rural Utah (Richfield) on January 23, 1920. In 1940, he and his new wife “Lu” (short for Lucile) were playing catch with a pie tin on a Santa Monica beach, and were offered 25 cents for the tin. This struck Fred as a good idea, which he and Lu immediately turned into “Flyin’ Cake Pans.” WWII intervened, however, and after piloting a P-47 in the European campaign (he was shot down over Italy) Fred returned to it, making it of molded plastic and calling it a “Flyin’ Saucer.” After further improvements (and name changes, and a patent) Fred and Lu went on the market with the “Pluto Platter.” It sold so well as a beach toy that Fred and Lu sold out to Wham-O, of Carson, CA, a company whose two owners—Richard Knerr and ‘Spud’ Melin—were true believers in the better mousetrap trope. When the Pluto Platter spread eastwards (with viral speed), Yale students rechristened it “Frisbee” (after, ironically, a New Haven pie company). Ever alive to re-innovation, Richard and Spud ingeniously adopted the new name, and so now the world is littered with Frisbees. Wham O is also famous for Hula-Hoops ®, Boogie ® Body Boards, and Slip-N-Slides ®, and claims in its publicity to be a successful corporation which is “synonymous with fun.” One can only wonder as to what old Emerson might have said. ©.

[Stanley]

"Great guns are the most respectable arguments for the right of kings."
Frederick the Great, 1712-1786
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My people and I have come to an agreement . . . They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please. Frederick II The Great.

During the ‘Enlightenment,’ European philosophers—when they thought about government at all—seemed more interested in ‘balance’ than in anything else. Given the bloodshed of previous centuries, the religious wars, the rise of absolutism, the almost endless struggle to bind the ambitions of Louis XIV, it seemed sensible to allow the human mind, the mind enlightened by science, art, music, and literature, to make all the noise, and to let politics rest quietly, somewhere in the background. Before the ‘age of democratic revolutions’—ushered in by the North Americans in 1776—upset the applecart with thoughts of democracy and equality, Enlightened thinkers found their ideal in two contrasting models, ‘constitutional monarchy’ and ‘enlightened despotism’. After the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89, Great Britain supplied the only working model of the former. But, concentrated in middle Europe, there were several princely states governed by ‘enlightened despots,’ hereditary princes who chose to rule sensibly and tolerantly, and who allowed the chattering classes to chatter. Among these the most famed was Frederick II of Prussia, who would be styled ‘Frederick the Great’ by a hopeful generation. Frederick II was born in the Hohenzollern Palace of Berlin on January 24, 1712. With his father’s death he became Crown Prince to Frederick I, his grandfather, who had raised the dukedom of Prussia into a monarchy and made Prussia itself into a powerful, militaristic state. Grandpa was in almost every way a despot over his people, over his family, and—with particular, gruesome cruelty—over his grandson. Those experiences may have inclined Frederick II to a more restrained model of kingship, as did his French education (overseen by his mother, and in Enlightenment style), his close friendship with his elder sister the Princess Wilhelmina, and—perhaps—his barely closeted homosexuality. Frederick II ascended to the throne in 1740, determined to do right where his grandfather had done wrong, and he excited the hopes of many European intellectuals—notably Voltaire himself—with an Enlightened reputation burnished by his youthful writings. Besides Voltaire’s admiration, Frederick II enjoyed other Enlightenment successes, notably through religious toleration and patronship of the arts, but in the end he proved as militaristic as grandpa. Later, his memory would be particularly honored by the Emperor Napoleon and the Fuhrer Hitler, which should caution to anyone tempted by the inherently oxymoronic idea of enlightened despotism. ©

[Stanley]

When is a Bowler a Coke?
William Bowler and His Helmet-Hat
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To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily Telegraph. John Mortimer.

Humans, being among mammals relatively hairless and relatively intelligent, have been hatted for at least 30,000 years. Our Neanderthal cousins probably started the trend even earlier. In his old age, my dad became a hat fancier, citing warmth as the main hat function, as it probably was for the Neanderthals. Dad backed that up with science, citing (inter alia) how much blood flowed through the brain, but there’s no doubt that culture and style have played hat roles, too. Think of bishops’ mitres, nurses’ caps, and chefs’ toques. Way before the irritating MAGA cap, freed Roman slaves wore the “Phrygian helmet”, later adopted as a badge of political identity by American, French, and Haitian revolutionaries. Even countries have hats, for instance the American Stetson and the English Bowler, and these may tell us something about national identities. But in their beginnings, Bowler and Stetson were family names. John B. Stetson came from a New Jersey hatter’s family, then went
west to cure his TB but instead (circa1865) re-hatted the whole western tradition (try to imagine a Texas Ranger in a beavertail cap) with “The” Stetson (while, back in his Philadelphia factories, he paid his hatters high wages, educated their children, and provided health care and housing for their families). But the Bowlers make Stetson look like a johnny-come-lately. Documents show that Bowlers have been making hats since the 14thcentury when a man named Bowler opened a hattery in Manchester. Who knows? Perhaps the first barber was a Barber. But we owe “The” Bowler Hat to one William Bowler, born into a hatter’s family (of course) in Manchester (of course) on January 25, 1808. A little later, William and his nephew Thomas left Manchester (perhaps breaking Thomas’s indenture with his aunt Dinah, William’s sister and a hatter in her own right) where they joined the hat firm of James Lock & Co. (est. 1667). Lock & Co., by the way, still do business at the same address, but the business itself was revolutionized by the invention of the Bowler hat, by William and/or Thomas Bowler, in 1849. Lock & Co. still call the Bowler a “Coke hat,” for the first person to order one seems to have been a stylish gent called Edward Coke, who liked the hat because it could be worn as a helmet in the hunting field and as a business-casual in London clubs and offices. It’s made of fur felt, crown and brim rendered hard enough by a secret recipe (implausibly, a French recipe) to take your head off when thrown at you by an enemy spy. The Bowler is iconic in comedy, too, thanks to Charlie Chaplin and John Cleese. If you order one at Lock & Co., it’s still a Coke, but everywhere else it’s a Bowler, has been since about 1861, and it’s as English as apple pie. ©

[Stanley]

The monument sticks like a wishbone in the city's throat.
Col. Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts.
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The country of freemen which was worth dying for a generation ago is worth living for now and hereafter. Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy, speaking at the dedication of the 54thMassachusetts Memorial, May 31, 1897.

The regiment known as the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers was formed on January 26, 1863. A “colored” unit, it reflected realities of the day, from the Union Army’s desperate need for soldiery to the insistence that its officer corps) should be white. It reflected other realities by filling fast, its white officers and black enlistees volunteering to serve a cause (causes?) greater than themselves—or so they said or wrote, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. Their courage was attested in several bloody engagements, most famously in their suicidal charge at Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863. About a year later, reporting home to Illinois on a Union rout in Mississippi, my great-grandfather noted similar courage in the two black regiments (“the only two in the expedition”) that were ordered to cover the retreat and presented “some of the brightest examples of heroism recorded in history.” Lieutenant Kerr gave examples and noted with great satisfaction that “for once the voice of prejudice was silenced by the logic of facts.” Similar satisfactions later (1897) moved the state of Massachusetts to erect, at the Boston Common, a magnificent memorial to the 54th Volunteers, a bronze, mainly in bas relief. The statue itself has recently caused controversy, because it reflects American racism. The only figures that stand out from the bas relief are the regiment’s colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, and his horse. The black soldiery, armed and weighed down by their packs, file behind him and sink into the statue. Augustus St. Gaudens’ bronze was itself, for many years, called the ‘Shaw Memorial,’ as if Col. Shaw’s (white?) bravery and sacrifice were somehow special. But it the memorial is “racist” it’s other things, too, for Shaw was a son of the New England aristocracy, his men were (according to their enlistment papers) laborers, stevedores, seamen, farmworkers. If St. Gaudens’ imagination was clouded by race, it was hamstrung by class. And it’s better to think of the statue itself, as Robert Lowell put it in “For the Union Dead,” as one vibrantly alive (like the 54th itself) with all its disappointed hopes. At its dedication, in 1897, William James “could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.” Perhaps James knew that some of the soldiers wanted their regiment called “the Toussaint”, as some of them certainly did, after the Haitian revolutionary. This is a statue that “sticks like a wishbone in the city’s throat.” It should stand. Indeed it is in process of restoration, and will be rededicated, warts and all, this coming spring (Covid permitting). ©

[Stanley]

In union there is strength.
Samuel Gompers, 1850-1924.
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The labor of a human being is not a commodity or an article of commerce. Samuel Gompers.

If you want to document American poverty in our industrial age the online photo archives of the Library of Congress are a good place to start. Among the most eloquent of these are pictures of cigarette rollers or cigar makers, often whole families from toddlers to grandparents, in their tenement flats. The pictures show them pinched for space and pinched by poverty, and they comprised a whole industrial process in their own cramped quarters. There they absorbed (or, rather, did not absorb) the costs of production and were paid by the piece. For many of them it was killing work. For the survivors it was mind-boggling routine which made self-help and self-improvement—the mottoes of the age—seem like cruel jokes. And then there was Samuel Gompers. He was born in Spitalfields, East London, on January 27, 1850, into a migrating family that would fetch up, in Manhattan’s lower east side, in 1863, where they (the name was originally Gompertz) were all engaged in cigar-making. But Samuel found in the repetitive routines what he called the “mind-freedom . . . to think, talk, listen or sing.” Skilled in the minutiae of making cigars, Gompers improved himself, and his English, by founding a debate club and joining a craft union. Then, at the top of his trade, he won a place at a cigar shop run by David Hirsch, a German socialist and—as an employer—the very picture of self-improvement. So Samuel Gompers set himself to learn German, to read about socialism, and to form his own set of ideas about how mere workers might carve out for themselves the freedom one needed to think, talk, and sing. Or, as he put it in some organizing literature he produced for the Cigar Makers Union, to “secure for every person in the trade an existence worthy of human beings.” The depredations of capitalism, with its absurd maldistributions of wealth and power, made socialism a world-wide phenomenon, but Samuel Gompers’ life experience focused his brand of socialism on the workplace and on the idea of a skilled-labor aristocracy, somewhat analogous to W. E. B. DuBois’s ‘talented tenth’ in the struggle to advance black civil rights. Both as a cigar maker and then as cofounder and president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers rejected political socialism and industrial unionism in almost the same breath. Gompers was a man of contract negotiations and the use of the strike weapon for specific goals, a leader who formulated tactics appropriate to particular situations. Viewed in retrospect, Samuel Gompers, cigar-maker, was not a threat to the system, for he worked within it. ©

[Stanley]

"res publica" and party politics
William 'One-Speech' Hamilton, 1729-1796.
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Party knows . . . no prize but victory. It seeks to justify error by perseverance, and denies to its own mind the operation of its own judgment. Thomas Paine, 1787.

The party system has served this democracy well enough to survive and, sometimes, to win grudging praise even from scholars. President Biden loved it well enough to believe that he could make it work again. But one of our ‘great’ parties has decided that normal democratic (constitutional) rules apply only when it wins, so “party” (idea or reality) once again begins to stink, like bad fish or the “day old” meat that West Philadelphia supermarkets used to discount to poor people when I was a student there in the early 1960s. Really that bad meat was much older, and so, too, was the idea that party politics might be bad for the health of the republic. How could mere politicians, once they plighted their troth to a mere “faction,” possibly presume to speak for the res publica, the ‘public good?’ By the time of the American Revolution, and the orgy of constitution making that came with it, our founding fathers had decided that party politics and republicanism were mutually exclusive. And they had recent political history on their side, especially when they looked at the mother country, Britain, where parliamentary politics had become, truly, a market place for day old meat and rotten fish, where young men sold their souls and bartered their beliefs for little more than filthy lucre, for the “honor” of becoming a patron’s client. One such was William Gerard Hamilton, born of good family (barristers and landowners) on January 28, 1729. William started out well, Harrow School then Oriel College, Oxford, and then law at Lincoln’s Inn, but once his lawyer father was safely dead William took up the politics of clientage, first as MP for Petersfield, one of the rottenest boroughs of Britain’s unreformed parliament. But he made a good maiden speech, virtuously attacking the corruptions of the age of Walpole, and excited some hopes from his friends (which first included such shining lights as Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson). Sadly, Hamilton fell quickly from grace, became expert in the bad meat game, and spent his political life jumping from sinecure to sinecure (often in absentia in Irish offices at £2,000 per annum). He lost Burke’s friendship, and his fall was so complete that he became known as “One-speech Hamilton.” He did speak again in the Commons, sometimes to effect, but he could never again parade as an advocate for res publica. He was judge in his own cause only, and if our founding fathers knew of him (they might have) he served as Exhibit A in their case against party politics. ©.

[Stanley]

"Goodbye to All That."
Robin Morgan, Child Actor and Feminist.
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Place your foot just so, mind how you turn:
too swift a swivel can bring you down. Take your time
ushering the audience out, saying goodbye
to the actors. The ghost light
is what they call the single bulb hanging
above the bare stage in an empty theater.
---Robin Morgan, “Ghost Light.”

Child actors have always been a suspect group. Not all of them, of course; but those who were “too good to be true” on screen were particularly disliked. When off screen or in adult (‘real’) life they turned out to be “too bad to be believed” they suffered ridicule or, in some ways worse, became living texts for moralistic sermons. For me, as a child, the often mischievous and sometimes even mean kids of Hal Roach’s Our Gang shorts (circa 1922-1944) offered something more than comic relief. One child actor who went on to establish a different self as an adult was—and still is—Robin Morgan, born right at the end of the child actor heyday on January 29, 1941. Robin had one of those legendary over-ambitious mothers but added to her problems with an over-ambitious aunt, both of whom wanted their dear little girl to be another too-good-to-be-true public personality. Robin was at first successful, first on radio then, cute enough to kill, in TV (on CBS as ‘Dagmar’ in the situation comedy series Mama) but she jumped ship in her teens (at 14, to be exact) and started to construct her own life. Robin Morgan still circulates around the showbiz world, and indeed sometimes as an actor, but now more often in skits, and she really entered on her adult life as a writer and editor. She learned some of the needed skills as an occasional student at Columbia University, some by marrying a poet, and some on the job as a publisher’s assistant. Whatever she’s done, she’s done it with “attitude,” as we might gather from the title of her first poetry volume, Monster (1962). She reentered public life, in a small way, as a speaker against American involvement in the Vietnam War, but then found her groove as a feminist, rebelling as much against the male leadership of the peace and civil rights movements as against militarism and racism. That transition she summed up in what remains her most famous publication, an essay entitled “Goodbye to All That” (1972). There is in her work more than a hint of bitterness, perhaps a trace of her escape from the perils of being too good to be true, but with Morgan humor persists. Some surfaced in her organization WITCH (the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), but you can still watch her, acting away, albeit very adult indeed, in streaming TV or podcasts, most recently in skits from the BBC. Happy 81st!!!

[Stanley]

Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth// But it takes a hero to get out of one.
Jack Spicer, poet and diver.
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Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
. . . Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear.
--Jack Spicer, “Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”

“Words Matter!” As a political slogan, that makes sense, for it carries the idea that (particularly in a democracy?) political words should convey truths. But words have whole ranges of utilities. Advertisers like words for their associations, the saleable images a word or a phrase might summon up. Philosophers plumb our words to find meanings; whole paragraphs—nay, whole books—parsing the differences between would and could and should. Where philosophers fail they offer a meta-language, one in which logic or symbols replace words. But besides meanings, truths, and images words have sounds, syllables, syncopations. So poets, especially, are people who are immersed in words, oceans of them. One way to think of a poet is to imagine a drowning person, struggling to to deliver a diver’s bag of treasures, arrange them (sometimes, anyway) into rhythms or rhymes, take a desperate breath, then dive back into the deep for another go. That image helps us to understand the agonies of a Plath or a Lowell, and it’s called to mind by the title of a collection (a prizewinner of 2010) entitled My Vocabulary Did This to Me. It’s the very posthumous (he died in 1965, in a San Francisco poverty ward) work of Jack Spicer, born in LA on January 30, 1925 and, oddly enough, it has poems about drowning, diving and emerging from the depths. When Spicer fell victim to words is not known exactly, not by me anyway, but maybe it happened when he decided on an undergraduate major in linguistics. This was at Berkeley, where he continued in his reckless course by starting his PhD in Old Icelandic. Spicer never finished his doctorate, becoming a poet instead (or inevitably?), a leading light of the San Francisco Renaissance. Even in that setting, he was controversial. Spicer roused personal rivalries with the likes of Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, mere publicity hounds he called them. Mystical to a fault, Spicer decided his words came to him unbidden, from somewhere else, and he vowed (therefore) never to copyright his works. Poetry is not really a day job, anyway, but gradually Spicer’s other behaviors (drunkenness, notably) reduced him to penury and stole his life. But his poetry survived. His open workshops became legendary among the young poets who attended them, and some of those lived long enough to resurrect (resuscitate?) and publish Jack Spicer. To great acclaim, one might add, from language lovers for whom words matter. ©.

[Stanley]

If I had to live my life over, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead
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The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. Tallulah Bankhead, 1952.

I heard recently that—by some indices—Alabama is now the 2nd poorest state in the union. One could say that the state has only its past to thank for that, a nasty sentiment but one expressed, in several ways, by one of Alabama’s most famous products, Tallulah Bankhead, born near Huntsville on January 31, 1902. This was before Huntsville became a laboratory city for the atomic bomb project and, later, the space age; for Tallulah it was an especially backwards place. She spent her life rebelling against it in as many ways as she could find. She was born into the state’s political aristocracy, her family tree littered with ornamental senators and congressmen, but there was a bit of southern Gothic there, too. Tallulah’s mother died after birthing her—sepsis—thus reprising the dramatic exit of Tallulah’s maternal grandmama. She grew up fat and spoiled in a plantation house on a hill, called ‘Sunset,’ a little girl who didn’t know what she wanted but knew she could get it by throwing tantrums or, on her good days, by reciting poetry or Shakespearian soliloquys. The tantrums, sometimes surprisingly violent, may have given Tallulah her husky voice, but it was the recitals that helped her find her groove as one of the most successful stage actresses of her time, first in London, then in New York and (later) on tour. Bankhead did pretty well in the movies, too, starting with silents filmed in New York, circa 1920, and then better after she’d made a name for herself in London. She played with the best, whether co-stars like Gary Cooper and Cary Grant or directors like George Cukor, Noel Coward, and Alfred Hitchcock. Legend has it that David Selznick had Bankhead tabbed to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, and that would have been a real irony, for Tallulah had already done almost everything she could to avoid being identified as a southern belle. Her rebellion was partly political, supporting black civil rights for instance, and partly moral (some would say immoral), particularly in her lively, public, and varied sex life. But in 1939 she was already too old to be a convincing Scarlet, so the part went, instead, to Vivien Leigh whose origins, however interesting, had nothing to do with the Old South. Tallulah Bankhead died of her life’s ravages in 1968, her last role being a cameo villain in TV’s first Batman series. My only clear memory of her was as a panelist in the odd TV quiz What’s My Line?, but this morning I discovered she was on only once, and then as ‘mystery guest.’ You can still see it on YouTube. Tallulah was smashing. ©.

[Stanley]

"I think hell is empty and all the devils are here." Muriel Spark, 1988.
Muriel Spark.
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I have a great desire to make people smile—not laugh, but smile. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth. Muriel Spark.

In my late youth, in the 1970s, I decided that modern writers needed (to be worthwhile) to position themselves above or between whatever worlds had made them. Here I was unduly influenced by two Brit writers who’d spent enough time in sub-Saharan Africa (its apartheid-riddled sectors) to emerge with darkly comic views of human nature. These were an odd pair, the little-known playwright David Pownall and the briefly notorious comic novelist Tom Sharpe. I don’t know that they even knew each other, but if you read Pownall’s play Music to Murder By or Sharpe’s Riotous Assembly you may see what I mean. I now believe I had been prepared for them by the writings of Muriel Spark, whose wit was subtler than theirs, sharper too, perhaps because she’d had to free herself from many more worlds than just Britain and southern Africa. Muriel Spark was born a Jewish lass (Muriel Camberg) in Presbyterian Edinburgh on February 1, 1918. Her childhood—she was educated at the James Gillespie School
for Girls—enabled her to look into that world from somewhere outside of it, and gave us her most enduring character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961): a spinster school mistress with a not-well-enough concealed taste for the erotic and an all-too-apparent admiration for Fascism, both comic in an eerily sinister way. It was Spark’s sixth novel, but she had waited to write her first until she was 39, and thereafter she poured forth, as if she had only been waiting to speak. I liked it a lot, and then enjoyed her 13th novel,The Abbess of Crewe (1974), an odd title for an anti-Nixon fiction. Muriel had begun to write way before that, driven to it by her life’s turnings from one world to another: marriage to a wife-beater school-teacher named Spark, a few unhappy years at the empire’s receding edge, in Uganda, a constrained life ‘back home’ as a secretary, and then liberation as an intelligence officer in wartime London. She recorded it all, in journals and check stubs, and it would serve as her treasury when she began to utter. There were also poems, critical works, one (arguably, two) autobiographies, and a spiritual odyssey that took her into the bosom of the Catholic Church and a new domesticity in Italy. An obituary (in 2008) described her writing as “waspish” but surely that’s insufficient for a writer who, working for British intelligence in 1944, made up a story that the famous (and failed) plot against Adolph Hitler had resulted “only” in Das Führer’s getting his pants burned off. It was broadcast, and one hopes it raised a few subtle smirks in occupied Europe. ©

[Stanley]

People could put up with being bitten by a wolf, but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. James Joyce, Ulysses.
Ulysses is published, February 2, 1922.
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Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922.

Today is the centenary, the 100th birthday, of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in Paris on February 2, 1922. It’s an expatriate’s book, literally and in many other ways. Joyce himself was expatriated from Ireland, and it is indubitably an Irish book. Indeed it’s a Dublin book, for it follows the meanderings around town of several Dubliners, tells us what they saw, what they did, and far more exhaustively what they were thinking about, on a single and unremarkable day (June 16, 1904). That’s about the time when Joyce and his not-yet-wife, Nora Barnacle, began their own odyssey around continental Europe, living in various places learning about various things (in Joyce’s case, classical Greek and the modern unconscious), and writing Ulysses, which was pre-published in bits and pieces before Sylvia Beach took it in hand and put it out as a whole book. Beach was herself an expatriate, an American whose background was not unlike that of Woodrow Wilson’s (a longish line of Presbyterian clerics and a Princeton interlude) but who turned out to be ever so different. Not only did she publish Joyce’s novel, but she ran an unconventional ménage with her lover Adrienne Monnier and an even more unconventional bookshop called Shakespeare and Company. That’s where Beach met a lot of literary folk and sometimes sheltered them, expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and natives like André Gide. It’s also where, in 1920, Beach and Joyce first met in person (although they already knew of each other), where Beach learned of the trouble Joyce was having in publishing Ulysses, and where Beach’s offer to help was accepted. And so came Ulysses, recounting the Dublin odysseys of Leopold Bloom (Ulysses?), his unfaithful wife Molly (Penelope?), and Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus?). The novel (or saga) was made illegal in a number of places, which helped to increase its sales. But it’s the novel’s qualities that have made it the touchstone of literary modernism. Ireland’s wish to regain an imagined “good old day” of Celtic and Catholic purity meant that Dublin took a while to acknowledge its debt to its most famous exile, but now it does so with some style. Today the city will see some 100th birthday parties, and those who wish will be able to follow Leopold Bloom’s odyssey as he walked along Dublin streets and dove into his own unconscious stream. Let’s hope that none of them fall into the Liffey. ©

[Stanley]

Hudson Maxim and his elder brother.
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Whatever the subject may be, whether poetry, biology, ethics, or torpedo warfare, the same scientific method of procedure must be used. Hudson Maxim, 1910.

The brothers Hudson and Hiram Maxim are remembered today for their contributions to our arts of killing each other. Hiram improved on Gatling with a machine gun of his own, the ‘Maxim’ of course. Hiram was born on February 5, 1840. Hudson Maxim, the less famous of the two, was a younger brother (there were 8 Maxim siblings in total), born on February 3, 1853. Both were Maine men, offspring of long lines of Puritan and Huguenot pioneers (‘Maxim’ is French in origin) who grew up to look surprisingly alike, a resemblance they may have cultivated. But what really marked them out and offers insight into their century was neither their bloodlines nor their bloodletting, but the fact that both were inveterate dabblers and near-perfect images of ‘self-made’ men, clever Yankees whose better mousetraps brought them attention and wealth. Among Hiram’s other inventions was, in fact, a better mousetrap, but his first one was an inhaler (he suffered asthmatic attacks) and he also invented an automatic sprinkler system (after his furniture factory burned down). Hiram made a claim, too, on the incandescent electric light, which is probably why Thomas Edison favored Hudson Maxim, whom he called “the most versatile man in America.” Hudson was certainly versatile, for his career included publishing on self-help (penmanship), literature (poetry), and nuclear science (notably a good guess as to the divisible nature of the atom). Hudson was also one of the first to see that money could be made (by men) from beauty contests (among women), and he was a life-long crusader against smoking tobacco and its evil effects on morality and health. But like Hiram, Hudson turned most of his dabbling energy to war, in his case not weapons per se, but the chemicals that improved their killing power. He's perhaps best known for smokeless gunpowder but owned several diabolical inventions in that general line. Indeed his powders improved on Alfred Nobel’s inventions, giving more bang for
fewer bucks. Hudson made a living by selling his patents and then working for the buyer, notably DuPont and then Union Carbide, but his was not a safe life for a dabbler, especially one who had enough traffic in his brain to make him careless with his hands. Among several famous explosions, Hudson Maxim in 1894 blew his left hand clean off with one of his inventions, which he called “fulminate.” It must have been a pun. Handless, Hudson kept on dabbling in gunpowders, beauty contests, and poetic theory until the day he died, in 1927. ©.

[Stanley]

It's nothing to be proud of, y'all, It really ain't.
Lila Valentine, 1865-1921.
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Not only did we fight a war for slavery, but we got our asses whupped. Until we can all agree to accept this and act accordingly, we’re never going to be able to move on. It’s nothing to be proud of, y’all—it really ain’t. Trae Crowder, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto, 2016.

Throughout US history the ‘color line’ has been an effective barrier against lasting social reform, especially in the South. The more successful black reformers became, the more they feared for their lives. White reformers constantly found reason to lower their demands or mute their tactics for fear of white “backlash.” In a region where white poverty was endemic it was made virtually permanent by the desire to keep black people ill-housed, ill-clothed, badly educated, and politically isolated. When in 1964 Senator J. William Fulbright spoke at Penn, a student in the audience asked why he—a liberal reformer on many issues—opposed Civil Rights legislation. “Because,” Fulbright answered, “I want to continue to represent Arkansas in the Senate.” Because his was an honest answer, we need to give full credit to southern reformers who tried to break or even bend the color line in their efforts to address their region’s problems. One such was Lila Meade Valentine, born in Richmond,
VA, on February 4, 1865, just months before the fall of the Confederacy. Grown to adulthood in one of Virginia’s “First Families” she married into another, and with her husband Benjamin Valentine spent most of her life raising hell about the devastating effects of poverty on her state’s poor, white and black. Lila’s focus was on education, which she argued must be made freely available to white and black children if the state was to roll back its pernicious heritage of poverty and racism. Much admired by her husband, a planter’s son, Lila spoke on the subject early and often, and in public. So she broke one barrier, but even here she had to accept the reality of racially segregated schools. The race problem became more apparent when a trip to Britain converted Lila and Benjamin to the cause of women’s suffrage. Even though she kept quiet, in public, her belief that race should bar no woman from the polls, she had to pay lip service to the ‘ideal’ of white solidarity. When in 1915 Virginia’s (white, male) voters defeated a suffrage referendum, Lila shifted focus to the national stage and took great satisfaction from the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Worn out by her illnesses and her indefatigable campaigning (she fought also for a public health system in Virginia, for the poor of any color), Lila was too ill to vote in 1920 and died in 1921. Had the issue come up during her lifetime, she surely would have supported teaching all about the history of slavery and race in Virginia schools. Lila was strong enough to take it, even though it did hurt her finer feelings. ©

[Stanley]

Minnie Cox, Postmistress of Indianola.
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In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro.... When that device fails, we will resort to something else. James K. Vardaman. ‘The Great White Chief’ of Mississippi politics.

Today’s Republican party is arming itself for battle against President Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. Historically, it’s an odd (comic?) position to take, since for generations to be white and male were the only prerequisites, often outweighing actual experience. But besides comedy there is irony. Once upon a time, the GOP’s patronage machine had sought out blacks to fill public offices, especially in the southern states. There were several reasons for this, some of them admirable, as became apparent in the case of Minnie Cox, President Theodore Roosevelt, and the “Indianola Affair” of 1902-1904. Born Minnie Geddings on February 5, 1869 (some sources say March 5), Minnie’s parents prospered enough to send her to Fisk University. There she found herself a husband (Wayne Cox), and returned with him to the Mississippi Delta—Indianola, near her birthplace—to found a school, teach, and establish themselves as prosperous landowners. They bought from,
sold to, and rented out their farms to all sorts, became Republican Party stalwarts, and built themselves a nice, Victorian two-story home on the white side of town. In due course President William Henry Harrison made Minnie Indianola’s postmistress. Minnie performed well, upgrading the premises (using her own money) and doing small favors for all comers, white and black. She was removed, of course, when the Democrat Grover Cleveland became president, but reappointed, of course, when the Republican William McKinley entered the White House in 1897. But the rise of Jim Crow and the imposition of apartheid changed things in Mississippi, and a race-baiting politician, James K. Vardaman, decided to make an issue out of Minnie Cox, a black woman whose public office should be held by a white man. This was a rising issue throughout the South, including the lynching of two black postmasters in other southern states, and Minnie Cox, fearing for herself and for her family, submitted her
resignation to take place on January 1, 1903. President Roosevelt refused to accept the resignation, on obvious grounds (including that Minnie was good at her job). So for two years Indianola went without a postmistress and without a post office, and a local issue became national in scope and ugly in content. Mr. and Mrs. Cox settled it by moving away to pursue their ambitions in other businesses (e.g. insurance) and in safer territory (eventually, Illinois), Jake Vardaman became one of the most unattractive faces of white supremacy, and the ground was manured for the rise of a lily-white Republican Party. But that’s another story, playing out now, sadly, in judicial politics. ©

[Stanley]

dot dot dot--dash dash dash--dot dot dot.
Sir Charles Wheatstone, 1802-1875.
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Through many an Ohm the Weber flew,
And clicked the answer back to me,
‘I am thy Farad, staunch and true,
Charged to a volt with love for thee.’
--James Clerk Maxwell, ‘Valentine from a telegraph clerk to a telegraph clerk,’ undated.

The Soviets went through a phase when all transformative inventions had to be Russian in origin. This overreach was satirized by Walt Kelly, who brought the characters ‘Krushy’ and ‘Bulgie’ into his Pogocomic strip (during a 1950s World Series!!) with their claims to have invented “beisbuhl.” But the Soviets were not the only offenders. I was once secure in the belief that the telegraph was American,invented by Samuel Morse and universally run on his “Morse Code.” It’s a better claim than “beisbuhl” but complicated. Even the ”International Morse Code” might be called the GerkeCode, or the “Hamburg Alphabet,” thanks to the improvements (1848) made in Morse by the German Friedrich Gerke (Samuel Morse’s code had conceded the French acute “é” but had left no room for any German accents). Even the word ‘telegraph’ was constructed elsewhere, being Greek for “writing from a distance,” and as for wired telegraphy there were a host of predecessors, mainly German and English. Among them Charles Wheatstone stands out. He was born on February 6, 1802, a shoemaker’s son. At 14, he was apprenticed to his uncle, who made musical instruments, and being a dabbler rather than a cobbler Charles got into the physics of sound. When his uncle died (in 1823) Charles continued to dabble, leaving the production end to a younger brother. Also in 1823 Charles produced his first scientific paper on what made sounds sound, and then followed that up with a series of fairly useless inventions, of which my personal favorite is a harmonica with a keyboard. Wheatstone’s fascination with noise oscillations led him into light waves and another crop of discoveries and inventions, but from about 1834 he returned to sonics with a particular focus on the practical uses of electricity (and copper wires) in generating, transmitting, and receiving sounds. He began in a small way, stringing 4 miles of wire through the cellars of University of London buildings, but by 1838 he had a railway telegraph in operation and was already messing about with (sub)marine telegraphy. But in Europe and North America there was a crowd of pioneer telegraphers, and so the claims made for Wheatstone’s genius are suitably modest. The British Dictionary of National Biography calls him only a “developer” of telegraphy, and anyway the whole thing has been rendered somewhat moot (but not mute?) by wireless and digital transmissions, which make much more room for much more noise transmitted much more quickly. ©

[Stanley]

Listen to the birds and don't hate nobody
Eubie Blake, 1887-1983
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Pay the thunder no mind. Listen to the birds. And don’t hate nobody. Eubie Blake.

Of the many children born to the Blakes in Baltimore, only one survived to adulthood. This was fairly common bad luck for working-class Americans, black or white, in the industrial era, but James Hubert (Eubie) Blake made up partly for it by living to be 96. For reasons now obscure, Eubie Blake always claimed to have been born in 1883, but his own passport applications (and Baltimore census records) show his birthdate as February 7, 1887. By the time he died (1983), he was as famous as Scott Joplin and had lived long enough (unlike Joplin) to become famous as a genius composer of ragtime, and had learned enough to take advantage of copyright, so he was well off into the bargain—and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. To claim copyright in music, it’s good to know how to write music, and that skill eluded Blake for quite a long while, but he was already reasonably well known (especially for his “Charleston Rag”) for his ‘played’ compositions by the time he burst on the New York scene in 1921 with his Broadway musical Shuffle Along. Merely getting it on stage as his own creation was quite an accomplishment for a (then) 44-year-old black man, so we’ll have to give him some street smarts, too, and he picked those up as a kid, before he learned to write music, playing first for an AME church, and then on the street, and then in a brothel, all in Baltimore. He then made a hit playing for black troops and white civilians in France, during World War I, became well known around the music circuit, and returned to the USA with a music partner, singer and lyricist Noble Sissle, and then a wife, Avis, whom he’d known since their Baltimore school days. After the success of Shuffle Along, things settled down while Eubie Blake played the black circuit and black radio, not making a big bang elsewhere even though his “I’m Just Wild About Harry” (1921) enjoyed a reprise during President Truman’s successful reelection campaign in 1948. But as I’ve already said, Eubie Blake lived a long time, long enough to be among those black musicians who were (re)discovered in the 1960s. For Eubie Blake that was in 1969, in a TV documentary and the issue of a Eubie Blake album in which he again claimed an 1883 birthdate. He’d rediscovered himself, too, with a new wife (Avis had died in 1938) who served as his business manager and a university course (at NYU) in music composition. Of all things. He was ready to go when (re)discovered, and he made the most of it. Indeed we could say that all of his life, he made the most of it. Eubie is a good man to remember, whatever his birth year. ©

[Stanley]

"Never touch a butterfly's wings with your finger." Sidonie Gabrielle Colette.
H. W. Bates, 1825-1892.
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On these expanded membranes, Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species. H. W. Bates, writing on butterfly wings, 1864.

One of my first lessons in natural history, from my father, was never to touch a butterfly’s wings. You would rub their ‘powder’ off and the butterfly would be grounded, robbing it of life and us of its magical fluttering flight. Dad’s lesson still seems true enough, even though I have since learned that many species are tough enough to fly thousands of miles, their apparent aimlessness concealing an unerring sense of direction and purpose. The butterfly’s wings have entranced children and poets, but their intricacies led H. W. Bates to make an important discovery concerning evolution by natural selection. Henry Walter Bates, born in Leicester, England, on February 8. 1825, was indeed a Darwinian, or became one on reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, for it helped Bates to frame and narrate an observed fact about butterflies and their capacity for mimicry. Other than his proclivity for collecting beetles, Bates had a normal middle-class childhood. He was well educated enough to become interested in natural history by reading works which encouraged speculation on how his world had come to be (Malthus on population, Lyell on geology, and various works on natural history including Darwin’s own journal on the Beagle voyage). These interests brought Bates into contact with another bug person, Alfred Russell Wallace, and in the late 1840s these two young men hit upon the bizarre idea of exploring the Amazon basin in order to send specimens back, for sale, to other collectors. Bates stayed in the Amazon while Wallace went on to Indonesia and his role in anticipating (or precipitating) Darwin’s revolutionary publication. There Bates became well known especially for his journal on his South American adventures and, among fellow naturalists, for his 1861 essay on the butterfly Heliconidae, a wide-ranging family, the 60+ separate species of which had all “learned” the advantages of tasting (to predators) noxious through parallel adaptations of wing coloring and patterning. But whether each species was in fact noxious was not the issue. Looking noxious was what mattered. Bates’s 1861 paper made him an early and important supporter of Charles Darwin’s Origin, and he was quickly recognized as such. Bates went on collecting and writing until he died—probably of his Amazonian travels but officially of bronchitis—in 1892. He's buried in a cemetery that is now a recognized nature preserve. One hopes that in summer butterflies may be seen there, fluttering aimlessly amongst the monuments. ©