BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A much-preferred brunette.

Tallulah [Bankhead] never bored anyone, and I consider that humanitarianism of a very high order indeed. Anita Loos.

When in 1981 Corinne Anita Loos died in New York City speakers at her funeral included Lillian Gish and Helen Hayes, and I hope one of them said that Anita was born in the shadow of a volcano (Mt. Shasta, on April 26, 1888). She was one of the most explosive of Americans. Anita started her writing from material gathered while trolling San Francisco docklands with her alcoholic father. But she became a name by writing scenarios for the silents. Her first netted her $25 ($600 today) but soon she was doing better. By 1915 she had 100 film credits and was hobnobbing with D. W. Griffiths, Lionel Barrymore, and Douglas Fairbanks. Then it was New York, and Paris, a second unsuccessful marriage (she was looking for someone as smart as she, and never succeeded). Anita liked intelligent people, being one herself, and counted (among her friends) H. L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, and Max Beerbohm. And it was (she later said) her irritation with the sexual success of a dumb blonde (legend says one of Fairbanks’ leading ladies, whom Loos met on a Santa Fe RR sleeper) that led Anita to begin the acerbic sketches that would culminate in her most famous work, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The thing began as brief bits for Harper’s Bazaar, and by the time it issued as a book (the best-seller of 1925) Loos had a different model for her dumb blonde, a Ziegfield girl called Lillian Lorraine. Loos went on to further fame and, some say, better writing, especially her memoirs, but in 2014 the Guardian newspaper named Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as one of its 100 best novels (no. 49), a “guilty pleasure . . . that helped to define the jazz age.” But it may turn out that her more lasting claim to fame comes from her long career as a screenwriter (roughly, 1911-1942). Please note that those dates take in the transition (1929) from silents to talkies, and Ms. Loos built her reputation, first, on writing for the silents. Eh??!! But yes. This involved not only sketching out, in considerable detail, the whole plot, but of course the captions (those one-sentence wonders that were really called “intertitles”). Long scripts or intertitles, Loos was soon prominently featured in the production credits along with her second husband, John Emerson. Sadly for her, but possibly inevitably, Emerson proved yet another dud, and by the time Gentlemen Prefer Blondes hit the bookstores, newsagents, and railway platforms Emerson had to accept the fourth-fiddle role of writing a dedication. So in the longer run it was Loos, and not Emerson, who is credited for turning “intertitles” into an art form, and one has to say that if one wanted to develop a concise, punchy, pointed style that would be a good place to begin. She once said that her surname should be pronounced “Lohse” but, being a girl of low standards and pointed style she accepted “Loose”, and began to use it herself. Her long retirement was punctuated by several memoirs, notably A Girl Like I (1966), some stage plays, and biographies of special friends. On two of these later literary productions, Anta Loos collaborated with Helen Hayes. As for John Emerson, once Anita got over discovering that he’d put most of her money in his own accounts, she took care of him through his various downfalls, finally providing him with nursing accommodation until his death in 1956. He was, I think, a brunette, but no gentleman. And Loos was always a lady. ©.

[Stanley]

Alone atop the hill. Title of Alice Dunnigan's autobiography.

Judge me not by the heights to which I rise, but the depths from which I rise. Alice Dunnigan.

When you’re sculpted in bronze, it will be difficult to determine the color of your skin, but since this particular bronze stands outside the SEEK Museum in Russellville, Kentucky, let’s assume it’s of a person of color. SEEK stands for “Struggle for Emancipation and Equality in Kentucky,” and the statue (windswept and bonneted) is a likeness of Alice Allison Dunnigan, who was born near Russellville on April 27, 1906. Alice was a granddaughter of slaves, on both sides of her family, so the emancipation struggle was won. She was also descended, on both sides, from white planter families, but in Kentucky, in 1906, she was all black, so the struggle for equality was still in progress. For Alice, blackness meant (at first) that she could attend “public” school only one day a week, and then in a segregated place. But her family had some resource, including a heritage of ambition, and by the time she was 13 she was writing bits and pieces for the local newspaper. Writing continued, and after college (Kentucky Normal and Industrial Institute, now Kentucky State), working as a teacher in a black high school, Alice completed for her pupils a manuscript history “The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Tradition.” It would not be published until 1982, by which time she’d become the first black woman correspondent accredited to the Press Corps of the White House and the US Congress. It wasn’t easy to get there. At one point she was eking out her living by washing gravestones in an all-white cemetery. First came WWII, and Alice moved to Washington DC for better employment. She took writing and journalism courses at Howard, and started contributing bits and pieces to The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper with national ambitions. She had talent. She worked hard. And by 1947 she was Washington bureau chief of the Associated Negro Press and accredited to the congressional press corps. Another “first” came in 1948 when she was accredited to the White House press corps, where she covered a good part of Harry Truman’s famous whistle-stop campaign. As a journalist she won many awards, and kept at it until, in 1960, she took a job with the primary campaign of Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson. She then found jobs in the Kennedy administration (at better pay and status than in the 1940s!) and turned her attention to writing memoirs of her struggle for equality. She died in 1983. Her Russellville statue, appropriately, was executed by a black woman sculptor and cast at the ‘Prometheus Foundry.’ It’s in bronze. Just like Alice. ©.

[Stanley]

The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

“Madeleine”, “Louise”, and “Lise”. The World War II code names of Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Odette Hallowes, women volunteers in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

One of the odder British charities is the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, founded in 1907. Although established by a man, it was and has remained an all-female organization, originally intended to be a mounted nursing corps. A trained woman on horseback, it was reasoned in 1907, could save more battlefield casualties than any number of wagon-borne stretcher bearers. Increasing motorization of the British army soon put the women on motorcycles, but when WWI started the top brass, still of a male cast of mind, thought the idea too unladylike for words. So in 1914 the FANYs went to war in the service of the Belgian army. By 1916, their bravery (not to mention the appalling bloodshed of the war) had turned many heads, and they entered service with both French and British units. Come the peace, FANY retreated to become a private charity, and was still privately funded, though the War ministry consented to have it on the army list. So in 1939, there it was, and in World War II FANY became the unlikely source of female recruits into the hazardous business of gathering intelligence and supporting resistance movements in occupied Europe. Of course, FANY operatives did many other things (one of them taught the then Princess Elizabeth how to drive London ambulances), but an early decision to train FANY volunteers as messengers and techs for a British resistance (should the Germans invade) led to a decision to use them for service in Holland, Belgium, and France. Only 39 (out of a total of 50 women agents) were FANY recruits. Of those who survived the war (13 did not), Odette Hallowes became the best known. She was born Odette Marie Céline Brailly in Amiens, France, on April 28, 1912. She was a sickly child, a polio victim, but she recovered, married an Englishman, and in 1931 moved to London where she birthed three girls. Come the war, she misheard a radio appeal for photos of France and ended up a FANY volunteer. She reached southern France via a Free Pole sailboat, fell in love with her British commander, Peter Churchill, and was arrested at Annecy, in the Alps, in April 1943. She was tortured “terribly,” but never betrayed her fellow agents. Odette became a popular figure after the war, married Churchill and then, much more happily, another Special Operations Officer, Geoffrey Hallowes. Her courage, and that of other FANY women (notably Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan, both executed at Ravensbrück in early 1945) is remembered each Armistice Day, November 11, by a bouquet of violets laid at the Cenotaph in London. ©

[PanBiker]

Noor was a pacifist accorded by her religion and she joined and served as a non arms bearing radio operator until her capture, (betrayed by another), tortured and then executed.

[Stanley]

I prefer Offenbach to Bach often.

Most people really don't like music - they just like the way it sounds. Sir Thomas Beecham.

P. G. Wodehouse’s comic fiction is overloaded with worthless young men, many of them heirs (or dependent nephews) of self-made millionaires whose fortunes come from patent medicines or (in one case) pickled onions. These wastrels lounge about in the “Drones Club,” organize sweepstakes on who has the fattest uncle, and bet their allowances on horses that lose. I’ve always thought it a subtheme reflecting some kind of Edwardian reality. Now I learn that one of the greatest patent medicine fortunes of Edwardian Britain arose from a cure-all known as Beecham’s Pills. It was said, by its proprietor, to cure anything, but it really worked for constipation. And why not? A combination of oil of aloe, soap, and ginger was likely to straighten out one’s GI tract, and (better yet), these pills inspired a jingle by the worst poet in English literary history, William McGonagall, including this rhyming (but not scanning) couplet:
No matter what may be your bodily ills
The safest and quickest cure is Beecham's Pills.
If you follow its corporate history, Beechams would eventually become big pharma’s Glaxo Smith Kline (who only stopped making the pills in 1998), but meanwhile the pills built a fortune, a Victorian baronetcy, and perhaps sustained the idle lives of any number of Edwardian layabouts. But there was one exception, the incredibly energetic and resourceful second baronet, Sir Thomas Beecham, born on April 29, 1879, in St. Helens, Lancashire, not very far from where his grandfather concocted the first Beecham’s Pills in 1842. No Drones Club for him. His family was too eager for real gentrification, and sent the boy off to a good public school, then Wadham College, Oxford. Thomas, however, had developed a taste for music, and eventually wore down his father’s disapproval, dropping out of Oxford to study privately with leading musicians. His first conducting was done in the family mansion, but his real talents could not be so constrained. Then a dispute with his father led to disinheritance, and on his merits Beecham migrated to a prestigious podium in London. Later, from 1909, his father restored to him the patent pills fortune and a foundation upon which Beecham built a lasting reputation as opera impresario and conductor, and as a promoter of the new music of his era. At one point, Sir Thomas Beecham owned not only the laxative business but Covent Garden’s opera house, and there was in it nary a hint of the Drones Club, or anything like it. To top it all, Beecham was the founder of the London Philharmonic, then of the Royal Philharmonic. Those pills helped, but Thomas Beecham’s was an energy differently sourced. ©.

[Stanley]

[ never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. From Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck.

On my 14th birthday, April 30, 1957, our neighbor Jean Lodwick asked me how old I was. Of course she knew the answer, but I gave it to her anyway. “Then you are old enough for this,” she said, and gave me John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945). Reading it was a liberation. Indeed I devoured its short stories about the nobility, kindness, and honesty (or lies well-meant) of the downs and outs who sheltered on Cannery Row and lived their lives in the fish stink of Monterey Bay’s pilchard industry. The industrial slum they inhabited included the Palace Flophouse, where Mack and ‘the boys’ dreamed of better times and nobler deeds than they could manage in their present realities. It took in the Bear Flag, a whorehouse thinly disguised as a restaurant, where (in honest transactions) money bought exactly what men paid for and where Dora Flood and her girls kept the cops at bay with their charitableness. There was also the Heavenly Flower Grocery where Lee Chong translated everything into dollars and cents, kept very close watch on his whiskeys, and only occasionally let slip the fact that he had a heart of gold. At the Western Biological Laboratories, “Doc” collected octopi and allowed his loneliness to be the focus of almost everyone’s dreams of a good deed well done. A few years later I read Steinbeck’s sequel, Sweet Thursday (1954), wherein a slightly altered cast of characters (no one lives forever) finally consummate a good deed for Doc, and send him off specimen-hunting with Suzy, a good-hearted girl who never really fit in at the Bear Flag. The sequel’s more obvious sentimentalism, to say nothing of its happier ending (Suzy driving Doc off into the sunset), finally exposed the naiveté of Cannery Row and thus moved me (as a reader) on from Steinbeck to William Faulkner who, whatever his failings, could never be accused of any romantic notions about the nobility of poverty. At least, that’s how I told the story for many years—dined out on it indeed. But earlier this month I reread my old Steinbecks (I could never leave them behind) and remembered with perfect clarity that the book Jean Lodwick gave me all those years ago was Sweet Thursday, and not Cannery Row. So my old story about my coming of age as a reader must be recast, retold, and I’m not at all sure how to go about it, nor what its moral (if any) might be. But Jean Lodwick, who back then taught 9th-grade English, was perhaps exactly correct about what young people should read, and when they should read it. At 14, I was ‘old enough’ for Sweet Thursday, but not yet ready for Cannery Row. ©

[Stanley]

My Cannery Row pic done in 1979 when Susi drove me up El Camino Real.
(LINK)

[Stanley]

Only the rich can get justice. Only the poor cannot escape it.

We can save the rights we have inherited . . . only by winning new ones to bequeath to our children. Henry Demarest Lloyd.

Throughout US history, beginning with the ‘Newburgh Conspiracy’ of 1783, the most serious threats to American democracy have come from the Right. But our political culture has most feared subversion from the Left, notably from socialism or (after the Russian Revolution of 1917) communism. Our first ‘Red Scare” arose directly from that event, and besides driving Woodrow Wilson’s government out of its mind it excited the ambitions of Chicago police and prosecutors to bring (in 1920) a score of locals into court and to charge them with conspiracy to overthrow the government (of the USA, not Cook County or the city of Chicago). It was an odd group of malcontents, including William B. Lloyd, described (by the New York Times, no less) as a “millionaire of Winnetka.” That he indeed was. It was a puzzle to have a millionaire communist, and oxymoronic to think of Winnetka as a hotbed of seditious conspiracy—left-wing conspiracy, anyway. The puzzle’s solution is to be found in William’s father, Henry Demarest Lloyd, born in New York City on May 1, 1847. Lloyd cut his political teeth on the Bible, as translated for him by his father, an eminent Dutch Reformed minister, and then from the preaching of Henry Ward Beecher. Both were anti-slavery reformers, concerned about social ills and their soul effects, and so Lloyd was a Sermon-on-the-Mount Christian, a Good Samaritan. He was also a well-educated and ambitious young man who married well (Jessie Bross, a millionaire’s daughter) and who began his journalistic career close to the top, as an editorial writer and essayist for the Chicago Tribune. Even then, the “Trib” was no left-wing rag, but from his lofty vantage point Lloyd espied the villains of American history as those who sat atop the great fortunes of America’s industrial revolution. Examining them carefully, Lloyd decided that they were ‘robber barons,’ not ‘captains of industry,’ and that their fortunes were built on muck. So he became a “muckraker,” arguably the first of them, and devoted the rest of his life to exposing how ill-gotten the robbers’ gains really were. Lloyd’s 1881 essay, “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” centered on John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and grew into his most famous work, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), a title that gave away its plot. Along the way, Lloyd progressed politically from Republican to Populist, then to Socialist, all the while building his pleasant, spacious lakeside mansion in Winnetka. There William Bross Lloyd grew up and continued his father’s leftwards drift, a natural progression he thought necessary to save the Republic from those who owned it. ©

[Stanley]

Dunham Massey and the Art of Marriage

. . . let us no more contend, nor blame
Each other, blam'd enough elsewhere, but strive
In offices of Love, how we may light'n
Each others burden
From John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)

Dunham Massey is one of the English National Trust’s finest properties. In north Cheshire, it’s outside the usual tour geometry (London-Cambridge-Oxford-Stratford) but, lying near Liverpool and Manchester, still manages a half-million visitors annually. Its main attraction is its fine hall, truly a stately home. Although it underwent significant remodeling in the early 20th century, the Trust calls it “Georgian,” an accurate compliment to the man who made it so, George Booth, the second earl of Warrington. He was born nearby, at the much less grand Mere Hall, on May 2, 1675. In 1694, Booth inherited the earldom, the Dunham Massey estate, its derelict hall, and its debts. His father, the first earl, had been financially improvident and politically incautious (imprisoned for his part in Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685). So the young earl set himself the tasks of rehabilitating his father’s reputation and restoring the estate. It was hard work for an aristocrat, but by the 1730s he was pulling in enough rents and fees to publish a pamphlet defending dad and to succeed magnificently at Dunham Massey, building a new hall and stocking it with the appurtenances of nobility, including a fine library and a magnificent collection of contemporary silver and silver plate. As if that were not enough, he succeeded in ensuring that the whole lot would pass on, intact, to his only child, his daughter Mary (1704-1772). Although she married into the Grey family (the earls of Stamford) She carried on with his work at Dunham Massey, tinkering with the hall, continuing to nurture its ancient woodlands, and adding a fine garden, believed by some to have been the work of Britain’s most famed gardener, Capability Brown (1716-1783). Besides all that, the second earl of Warrington is noted for reviving the old Puritan idea (on this, see the poet John Milton) that marriage was best conceived as a civil union, a common law contract between consenting adults who hoped for mutual benefit. When such hopes were blighted by incompatibility or cruelty, Warrington thought, the contract (and the marriage) should be dissolved. His Considerations upon the Institution of Marriage (1739) might not, however, be seen as predictive of future liberalization of marriage laws and customs, an early chapter in female liberation. It was, more likely, reflective of Warrington’s own unhappy marriage which, though it brought him a dowry sufficient to start the work at Dunham Massey, had caused him only misery, from which he never escaped. But his new hall was big enough to hold two lonely households. ©

[Stanley]

Traveling May 3, so sending May 2

We have two minds. One thinks, the other knows. The mind that knows goes back many lifetimes. Traditional Mayan proverb about tradition.

Pierre Lorillard, a Frenchman, landed in New York City in 1760. He was naturalized a Briton (as “Peter”) in 1762. He took up the tobacco trade, reverted to “Pierre”, and during the Revolution was killed by a Hessian mercenary. His progeny continued to sell tobacco, adopted ‘the moral pursuit of wealth’ as a family motto, perhaps to justify their move into banking. But tobacco remained the main source of Lorillard wealth, and by the time they’d reached their fourth generation, they were pursuing wealth for its pleasures: both getting and spending. Pierre Lorillard IV (1833-1901) got a lot and spent a lot, including on “The Breakers,” the Newport RI ‘cottage’ that he sold to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Lorillard wanted his pleasures closer to home, and so began his Tuxedo Park project (in Orange County, NY) in the 1880s. Yes, that’s where we got the name for the evening wear, but Tuxedo also became a hotbed of ‘picturesque’ architectural experiment and is today (besides still being a partly private pleasure preserve) a must-see on the National Register of Historic Places. Pierre IV was also a pioneer in making horse-racing (and breeding) a pleasure pursuit of American plutocrats. He and his brother George named some steeds after vanishing or vanished ethnicities. The Lorillards’ “Iroquois” won the Belmont Stakes and their “Saxon,” took the English Derby. “Tuxedo” itself was a corruption of a native American (Lenape-Munsee) word meaning ‘Crooked River’, which probably refers to the Delaware River to the west and not the Hudson to the east. Pierre Lorillard IV was more than curious about native Americans. Besides horseflesh, he financed important early investigations of Mayan sites in present-day Chiapas, Mexico. The most successful of these was an extensive settlement and sacrificial site that, in honor of their sponsor, the archaeologists called ‘Lorillard City.’ Today, however, the carved stones they brought back have been translated, and we now know that they trace five centuries (ca.350-900 CE) of the history of imperial Yaxchilan, a culture that flourished while my Saxon ancestors were worshipping tree gods and burying their sacrificial victims in peat bogs. They record Yaxchilan’s military history, its vassal states and its kings, too. One of the most powerful kings of Yaxchilan’s ‘late classic’ period was Yaxun B’ahlam IV, who translates as “Bird Jaguar” and is not to be confused with Pierre Lorillard IV. Yaxun was crowned on May 3, 752, coming to power by combination of dynastic succession and palace coup. He ruled for 16 years, during which, given his place and time, Yaxun smoked many ceremonial pipes of tobacco, although almost certainly not a Lorillard brand. His son succeeded him, peacefully. ©

[Stanley]

Elizabeth Cochran reborn.

Nonsense! If you want to do it, you can do it. The question is, do you want to do it. Nellie Bly

The song “Nelly Bly” (1850) isn’t sung now. Stephen Foster composed it as minstrel music, and its racism inheres in its lyrics. But racism was unlikely to have been why it was used as a nom de plume by an ambitious young journalist in 1880s Pittsburgh, PA. Pugnacity is more likely, for as “Nellie Bly” she would be identified as a crusader, a muckraker, and a tireless self-promoter. Nellie Bly was, in fact, Elizabeth Jane Cochran (later “Cochrane”), born on May 4, 1864, in Cochran’s Mills, PA, where her father, a self-made man if ever there was one, ran the only show in town and was also mayor, judge, and perhaps also juryman. But when she began to write, he’d died and she and her mother had moved into the big city, Pittsburgh, where she helped make ends meet by writing for a local paper, first as “Lonely Orphan Girl.” That was accurate in a way, but if she was lonely she concealed it in a whirlwind of articles concentrating on the poor and excluded. “Lonely Orphan Girl” began with women in general, noting that to treat them all as mothers-in-waiting was to exclude them from the life choices of being, or becoming, something else. As “Nellie Bly” she widened her scope to include women workers in Pittsburgh’s factories. Her editor, or more likely her editor’s advertisers, moved her back to the women’s pages of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, but she didn’t stay there long. Indeed, for a long time, Nellie Bly became famous for not staying anywhere. She’d already (very briefly, aged only 21) made herself into a correspondent in Mexico, writing on unrest and civil war under the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Expelled from Mexico and self-exiling from the Pittsburgh women’s pages, she turned up next in New York City, where she got herself admitted into a women’s insane asylum to report (for Joseph Pulitzer’s World) on hysteria and the men who diagnosed and treated hysterics. The scandals Nellie uncovered led to red faces and reforms. But Nellie’s concern for others couldn’t repress her concern for her self-promotion, and of course she’s most famed for her next exploit, her voyage (by any available means of transport) around the world in fewer than 80 days. 72 days, in fact, and of course her route took in a visit with Jules Verne himself, in Amiens, France, along with all the rest of it. She traveled alone, too, an accomplishment in itself. Later, married and settled down, she followed her father’s self-made path to become an employer-entrepreneur, but as a self-made woman she was not so successful. Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman’s main fault seems to have been to treat her workers like human beings, but then Nellie Bly had been like that, too. ©

[Tripps]

I thought this was the real Nellie Bly. . . .

Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts
Oh, what a couple in love
Frankie was loyal to Johnny
Just as true as the stars above
He was her man
But he done her wrong
Frankie went down to the drugstore
Some ice cream she wanted to buy
The soda jerk told her that Johnny
Was making love to Nellie Bly
He was her man
But he was doing her wrong

[Stanley]

I put that to Bob David. Here's his response.

NO DOUBT, BUT THE ORIGINAL IS A FOSTER SONG. IF YOU EVER DOUBTED THE RACISM OF MINSTRELSY, TRY THIS FOR SIZE!!! Cheers. Bob

Nelly Bly! Nelly Bly!
Bring de broom along,
We’ll sweep de kitchen clean, my dear,
And hab a little song.
Poke de wood, my lady lub,
And make de fire burn,
And while I take de banjo down,
Just gib de mush a turn.

Chorus:
Heigh! Nelly, Ho! Nelly,
listen lub to me,
I’ll sing for you, play for you,
a dulcem melody.

Nelly Bly hab a voice
like de turtle dove,
I hears it in de meadow
and I hears it in de grove.
Nelly Bly hab a heart
warm as cup of tea,
And bigger dan de sweet potato
down in Tennessee.

Chorus

Nelly Bly shuts her eye
when she goes to sleep,
When she wakens up again
her eyeballs gin to peep.
De way she walks, she lifts her foot,
and den she brings it down,
And when it lights der’s music dah
in dat part of de town.

Chorus

Nellly Bly! Nelly Bly!
Nebber, nebber sigh,
Nebber bring de teardrop to
de corner ob your eye,
For de pie is made ob punkins
and de mush is made ob corn,
And der’s corn and punkins plenty lub
a lyin in de barn.

[Tripps]

Very interesting. Thanks to Uncle Bob for continuing to inform us all.

I had never heard the word 'minstrelsy' so looked into it and found this Carry me back to Old Virginnie

My radio listening of choice is 'American Roots' which can easily be found on the Interweb thingy. The station oddly comes from Canada. I also like WDVX from Tennessee.

That song above predates the stuff that they broadcast. I'll have another look at the LIbrary of Congress site, looks like a good site.

Is this really the same country that elected Presidents Trump and Biden. Hard to reconcile it all.

[Stanley]

Mere coincidence.

. . . all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. . . . the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Karl Marx, in “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852.

It is Cinco de Mayo, and all North Americans should celebrate the victory of Benito Juarez’s army over that of “Maximilian I” in the Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862, not least as it was a significant factor in the eventual victory of the North in the USA’s very own Civil War. But let’s give a thought, too, to one of the most insightful chroniclers of the American Civil War, Karl Marx, who was born on May 5, 1818 in Prussia. Born to a wealthy family, Karl Marx was influenced by the dialectical theories of Georg Hegel, then wrenched them a bit to develop a theory of history now usually known as historical materialism or, briefly, as Marxism. This theory was formulated in The Communist Manifesto (itself called forth by the “bourgeois revolutions” of 1848), and then more fully developed in Das Kapital (1867 et seq). In the meanwhile, Marx met, and married, Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a liberal-minded Prussian noble and one of the more remarkable (and the most patient) women of 19th-century Europe. The two, and their children, lived a life of some poverty, in London and Paris among other places, but it was in London that Marx penned his insightful piece on Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, an essay all Americans (anyway, those living in the USA) should read. Marx says nothing of the piecemeal nature of Lincoln’s emancipation (which, notoriously, left enslaved all persons of that status in Union-controlled areas). Instead, casting Lincoln as a bourgeois hero, Marx eloquently realized emancipation’s truly epochal significance and precisely noted its ideological provenance by likening it to a legal brief sent by one country lawyer to another. And the Marx connection provides a neat coincidence. Another of Karl Marx’s intellectual insights was his famous post-mortem on the French Revolution of 1848. It was, he thought, a failure so abject as to be worthy of comedy and satire, which he employed fully in his really rather funny essay on “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Louis Bonaparte was the ‘real’ (original) Emperor Napoleon’s nephew, who would eventually make his own “second empire” with the glamorous Eugénie as empress, a pale Josephine if ever there was one. Empress Eugénie, herself born Cinco de Mayo 1826, was as romantic a Spaniard as one could find. She filled her husband’s head with notions of an American empire, a dream which took shape in Mexico’s ersatz “emperor” Maximilian, who was defeated at Puebla on Eugenie’s 36th birthday by Benito Juarez’s peasant army. So Cinco de Mayo is a very great day in (north) American history. And please note that the Mexican brigades of Maximilian’s army at Puebla were led by a native of Texas. The Rio Grande was, and remains, a porous border. ©

[Stanley]

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. Orson Welles.

Orson Welles, a man whose self-proclaimed genius cannot be denied, was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on May 6, 1915. As if recognizing the awful enormity of their offspring, his parents promptly divorced, then sank into drink (father) or died (mother). These tragedies might have killed a tenderer shoot, but in Welles they seem to have created a demon ambition. It began to show itself when, aged 10, the boy ran off with the daughter of his foster family (they were both only 10 years old). They were found, singing for pennies, on the streets of Milwaukee. His foster parents gave up on him, understandably, but young Welles was made of stern stuff. It found an outlet in acting (in Chicago, mainly) and during the Great Depression it’s just possible that Welles might have made just enough on stage to carry on his act. But on Welles’s 20th birthday, in faraway Washington, DC, President Franklin D. Roosevelt threw Orson a lifeline in the form of Executive Order 7034, wherein FDR improved on some previous New Deal legislation by creating the Federal Writers Project. Never one to let an opportunity pass, Welles boarded the New Deal train and began what became one of his lifelong projects, to improve upon the works of William Shakespeare (who had been, once, an obscure playwright-actor from the provinces). Among Orson’s early efforts there was the “Voodoo Macbeth” (Welles wrote and directed, and also acted in it as Banquo), and then aJulius Caesar set in Mussolini’s Italy. That, I must say, was rather imaginative, coming as it did at about the same time that Chicago’s city papas named a major street “Balbo” after Italo Balbo, the leader of Il Duce’s blackshirts (the Proud Boys of their day and age). The multitalented Welles, still only in his 20s, then moved over to radio drama, in 1938 writing and directing what is probably the most famous radio drama of all time, his War of the Worlds. Famous not for its brilliance but for its effects, for (taking the shape of a headline broadcast) it convinced many that planet earth was being invaded by, well, other beings. But it was only Orson Welles, aged 23, playing with fate and, perhaps, making a play on the surname of the original author, H. G, Wells. Young Welles apologized for the outrage (no fool likes to be made a fool) and then, overloaded with vinegar, moved on to Hollywood. It being a place where tinsel dreams become real silver, Welles wangled a contract with RKO and produced the film many think his greatest masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941, Welles being then 25). The film is not so loosely based on the life of another megalomaniac, William Randolph Hearst, then still alive and well (pardon the pun) up at San Simeon, a never-never land estate where he collected toy wagons and real newspapers. Citizen Kane is still widely regarded as the best American film ever, and if you haven’t yet seen it, drop all previous engagements to repair the omission. There’s much else of Orson Welles to see, too, notably his Harry Lime (his role in The Third Man, 1949) and especially his rollicking Falstaff (in Chimes at Midnight, 1965), another (enjoyable) stab at improving upon Shakespeare. Welles would produce much brilliance, and act well enough, in a wild up and down career that lasted until 1985. Welles’ huge accomplishments were probably outweighed by his immense potential. Would that Welles had lived long enough to ‘do’ a. film on Donald J. Trump. It might have been a perfect match, assuming that Orson himself could have played the title role. ©

[Stanley]

The weather in Dogger.

Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger. Southeast veering southwest 5 or 6, occasionally 7 later. Occasional rain. Fog patches at first in Forties. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor at first in Forties. From the BBC shipping forecast for October 31, 2014.

Among my fond memories of Britain, and near the top, was the “shipping forecast.” It was, and still is, broadcast four times daily, on BBC Radio 4, but the one I remember was delivered, without fail, at 12:01 AM, GMT. It’s very brief, even terse, naming all of the sea quarters bordering the British Isles (and some, like “Finisterre,” a bit more distant. One really needed a map to follow it, clockwise, from “Viking” (in the north North Sea) all the way round to “Southeast Iceland”, but its inherent poetry was always there, clearly enunciated. “Viking” . . . “Dogger” . . . “Fisher” . . . “Dover” . . . “Sole” . . . “Fastnet” . . . “Shannon” and so on, along with windforce and, where relevant, visibility. It’s over in a flash, under 60 seconds as I recall, but it’s almost as old as the hills, having started by wire over 150 years ago. Famous names are associated with it, including its instigator, Captain Robert FitzRoy, Charles Darwin’s CO and companion during his round-the-world collecting tour aboard the Beagle. And there’s another, too, for the windforce is always given by Beaufort Scale number, one (1) through twelve (12), beginning with light breeze and moderate and, perhaps, change direction. The Beaufort Scale is named after its inventor, Francis Beaufort, born in Ireland on May 7, 1774. Beaufort’s father was a Church of Ireland (Protestant) vicar, pretty well connected, and his clever son became cleverer through a good education, first at home (dad was, like many vicars, an amateur scientist) and then at a series of schools in Wales and Ireland. But the sea beckoned, first the East India fleet and then the Royal Navy. A mere midshipman, he was distinguished first by his courage under fire (it was the era of the French wars) and then by an indefatigable curiosity about the sea around him, its skies, its winds, its currents, its tides. And of course the stars above. Along the way, Beaufort’s science made him friends with all sorts of landlubbers, at home and abroad. He recommended Darwin to FitzRoy. He was elected fellow to various nations’ scientific societies (including an American one). He worked constantly at his trade, and in peacetime rose to the rank of admiral and, finally, a knighthood. His secret diaries, decoded, have become interesting to scholars who probe the sexual hangups of eminent Victorians, but more lastingly he did devise the “Beaufort Scale.” So Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort is remembered, four times every day, on Long Wave and Short Wave (long wave will reach the weakest ship radio), as BBC 4 reckons the weather, clockwise, around the sea approaches to the British Isles. ©

[Tripps]

four times every day, on Long Wave and Short Wave

Not sure about 'short wave' ?

Shipping Forecast

[Stanley]

Neither am I David but I shall not raise the matter.....

[Stanley]

A self-made woman

I am praying through my fingers when I play. Mary Lou Williams, ca. 1956.

In a long musical career that began when she was 12, Mary Lou Williams played for, composed for, and/or arranged for just about every big-name band and combo you can think of. Her name and her works (in recordings and live performances) dot the repertoires of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey, Tommy Dorsey, Thelonious Monk, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, and that’s only scratching the surface. Several big names tried to pin her down to a contract, including Goodman and Ellington, but on the whole she chose to freelance, and to get credit for it, which added to her mystique. This go it alone strategy perhaps arose out of her first marriage (at age 16, in 1926) to the saxophonist and band leader John Williams, who proved vulnerable to the temptations of taking credit for his wife’s brilliance. That marriage lasted only until 1942, by which time she’d already had some satisfaction (and pay) for working on her own time and for her own dime. Afterwards, though she did remarry, she was pretty much on her own as a force in big band and small combo music, moving along from swing to be-bop and then taking a dive into jazz orchestra classics for (e.g.) ballets, orchestral suites, and, latterly, masses. Mary Lou Williams was born Mary Scruggs in Atlanta, GA, on May 8, 1910. Shortly thereafter, her mother and stepfather moved their large (and growing) family to Pittsburgh, where Mary Lou’s mother taught her piano and then stood aside as the child’s genius (and perfect pitch) took control. Mary Lou was playing her own music before she went to school, and playing for money (as “Little Piano Girl”) before she was in her teens. Once married and traveling with Williams and his band, Mary Lou developed a special talent for arranging music to fit the peculiar strengths of the 12-man ensemble, and began to pass this gift on to even bigger bands, notably Ellington’s and Goodman’s. She composed too, still played a mean keyboard, and performed internationally. Meanwhile, Mary Lou got religion, Catholicism specifically, and under the tutelage of a priest and then a priest-turned-bishop-turned-cardinal, began to compose and arrange for the mother church. These more complex and larger-scale pieces led to a string of fellowships and some notable premieres, not to mention a ballet choreographed by Katherine Dunham, and appointments to music faculties at Rutgers and then Duke. Mary Lou Williams, one of relatively few people whose biographies can be narrated in a variety of musical forms and genres, died in Durham, North Carolina, in 1981, a victim of bladder cancer. ©

[Stanley]

It was a sight surpassing all precedent . .

At last we have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations. Telegram from Howard Carter (Thebes, Egypt) to George Herbert, 5th earl of Carnarvon, November 1922.

2023 marks the centenary of the final opening (February 16 to April 5, 1923, in the presence of the earl of Carnarvon) of the tomb of King Tut.ankh.Amen. That was Howard Carter’s preferred spelling, and we owe to Carter the discovery, careful preservation, and meticulous sketches and watercolors of the tomb and its contents. To most, these days, it’s “Tutankhamun” or, even easier, “King Tut.” That dismissive shorthand for one of the greatest archaeological treasures may reflect the awful truth that Howard Carter was an outsider, a loner, a man of little patience and shorter temper who was, in any formal ‘paper trail’ sense, unqualified for his work, outside of the crucial fact that he had found favor with the fifth earl of Carnarvon (1890-1923), a horse-racing peer who was also an enthusiastic, if amateur, Egyptologist. Carnarvon, incidentally, died just four days after the final opening of the tomb, of an infected mosquito bite or, if you prefer it, the ‘curse of King Tut.’ As for Howard Carter, Carnarvon’s working partner, he was born in London on May 9, 1874, the youngest child of an artist’s large family. Howard was brought up to be an artist, and not much else, privately educated (apparently by maiden aunts) in the family’s extremely modest country cottage at Swaffham, Norfolk. It's said that Howard thus missed the rough and tumble of most middle-class boys’ schooling, and he never did learn how to swallow disappointment. But luckily for him (and certainly for us) he practiced his artwork at the nearby country seat of the Amherst family. That stately home contained one of the best private collections of Egyptian artefacts, and young Carter’s ability to get his drawings just right led to his becoming part of a major and very long excavation in the Valley of the Kings. Aged only 17 at the start, Carter’s illustrations became the backbone of a major publication (6 volumes, 1894-1908) on the temple of Queen Hatsheput. This, rather than any professional training or academic degree, became his calling card, and until Carter’s association with Carnarvon it was not sufficient to win him many friends or much influence. By all accounts he was a difficult man to know, and maybe impossible to like. But he was a superb artist and a meticulous excavator, and it’s to him we owe the treasures (and, perhaps, the curses) of King Tut. Carter did receive awards from other countries (including an honorary doctorate from Yale), but in his own country he remained a prophet without honor and with few friends. Carter died, apparently embittered and certainly stricken by cancer, in 1939. ©.

[Stanley]

Women's work.

There is nothing ‘personal’ in the thunderclap of understanding. Celia Payne.

It is possible that Harvard was able to delay appointing female professors because it had shoved the whole gender off into Radcliffe College, its “sister” institution. Whatever the cause, it was only one of the barriers faced, then surmounted, by Celia Payne-Gaposchkin, who in 1958 became Harvard’s first tenured female professor. By then she’d been around Cambridge, MA, for quite a while, having completed her PhD in astrophysics in 1925. As a Radcliffe student, of course. Between her Radcliffe PhD and her tenured Harvard professorship, she’d circulated around the institution knocking on this door, then another, before (in 1938) her supporters had come up with the ‘solution’ of making her the Harvard College astronomer. It was not a professorship, and it was not tenured, but by the terms of its endowment the “Phillips Astronomer” was always to be an officer of Harvard University. For Celia Payne, this female problem was nothing new. Born in England on May 10, 1900, she’d excelled in music at her girls’ school, where Gustav Holst thought he might make a composer out of her, but she was bowled over by hearing of Arthur Eddington’s experimental confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and so majored in Physics and Astronomy at Newnham College, Cambridge. There she was embarrassed by her lab professor’s insistence that she removed her corsets (the steel stays screwed up his magnetics experiments). Ernest Rutherford, in his lectures, also made much of her gender. But she was brilliant, and she was noticed. Frustrated by Cambridge’s refusal to grant women any degrees Cantabriensis, Celia went west, to the other Cambridge. There, her Radcliffe PhD was first regarded as a brilliant enough heresy (it’s now astronomical orthodoxy) to keep her in occasional employment, studying the stars (thousands of them) in various ways which lay the groundwork for our current understanding of how stars are born, mature, and die. Along the way she married another astronomer, the Russian Sergei Gaposchkin, birthed and reared three children, developed interesting ideas about religion, and mentored a large clutch of future astrophysicists. But her temporary positions made her vulnerable, and her 1958 Harvard chair was, in part, a defensive maneuver by her friends to keep her from being dismissed from her Phillips endowment by a chauvinistic rival. Throughout, Celia Payne kept her powder dry, her wits sharp, and her sense of humor intact. No doubt she remembered the pleasure she felt, in 1927, of being included in the 4th edition of American Men of Science. As for the English Cambridge, it didn’t grant degrees to women until 1948. Some habits die hard. ©.

[Stanley]

Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks.

Everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their life. Irving Berlin.

My parents had the first TV on our street (it was a short street, 7 houses), and that Magnavox often drew my gang in after school. We’d arrive just as the Kate Smith Hour was winding down. Smith was the portliest contralto ever to grace the American “pops” scene, and her ‘hour’ always closed with her favorite, a treacly-sweet number called “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” It was agony for a gaggle of 8-year-old boys eager to see what the wooden “Howdy Doody” and his human sidekick (“Buffalo Bob”) had up their sleeves. We were aware that Kate Smith was also famous for her renditions of “God Bless America.” That song has now had a longer history than Kate Smith or Howdy Doody, having become a favorite anthem of the American Right, sometimes sung in defiance, a musical way to “own the liberals.” That’s a little ironic, for it was composed to celebrate the USA’s diversity, worded to “own the Nazis” by a Jewish immigrant who often insisted that he had been welcomed with open arms by Lady Liberty, and was intent on responding to that embrace. That composer was Irving Berlin, born Israel Beilin in Imperial Russia on May 11, 1888. His 1893 welcome at Ellis Island was in fact a little brusque, but after being penned up to ensure that they weren’t importing any diseases, he and his family were allowed ashore. They experienced years of struggle, his dad unable to resume his work as a cantor, his mother a slum midwife, and he and his siblings scraping for pennies. As “Israel” became “Irving,” he learned that singing produced more pennies than selling newspapers, 33 cents (some say 37) for his first composition, and he never looked back. One result was that it took Irving forever to learn how to read and write music. Instead, he composed by doing it, at the piano or as a singing waiter at an Irish bar. At such places he fell in with other song & dance people, learned from them, and had his first big hit (“Alexander’s Rag Time Band”) in 1911. He still remembered those years of struggle when (1938) he composed “God Bless America”, and there are those that say its tune emerged from a Yiddish comic song that Berlin must have heard, and probably performed, in lower Manhattan’s lower reaches: “When Mose with his Nose Leads the Band.” Not plagiarism per se but, from a certain perspective, a reworked American heritage. And to tie my story up, Kate Smith was the first to sing “God Bless . . .”, some two years before she sang for King George VI and his queen at the White House, a prelude to the Anglo-American alliance in WWII. In 1938, Kate Smith had her own radio hour, and she was a great fit. And Berlin’s song fueled US patriots in their war against Nazism, which was his intention. ©

[Stanley]

It ain't over til it's over.

It’s like déjà vu all over again. Lawrence Peter ‘Yogi’ Berra.

American nativism existed before Donald Trump and will outlast him, a stain on our history but a constant, especially virulent when new immigrants seem different from “us” (whoever “we” are). So it’s interesting that on the “Find a Grave” website the most recent memorial for Pietro Berra (1886-1961) is a figurative flower from a man called Muhammad. That’s probably one “new” immigrant honoring another, for when Pietro arrived at Ellis Island (in 1909) he was among the horde of ‘new’ immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, people who looked, prayed, and sounded “different” from the then “us”. Pietro came to find a place (and prosperity) for his young wife Paolina, and when Pietro had established himself in St. Louis she came, too. They settled in some of the friendliest territory they could find, the Italian neighborhood still called “the Hill.” There they birthed four more kids (immigrants are often like that), the second of whom was Lorenzo Pietro Berra, born on May 11, 1925. Eager for assimilation (the infamous Immigration Act of 1924 had just been passed), they called him “Lawrence Peter” Berra, and despite the fact that Paolina had trouble pronouncing “Lawrence” that’s the name that stuck with him through school and sandlot baseball, until (playing in local leagues) a teammate called him “Yogi” because he looked like an Indian holy man—foreign, anyway—especially when seated cross-legged on the bench, ready to take the field. Take the field he did, to became one of the most storied practitioners of our national game, and emphatically one of “us,” and not only as a machine-gunner at the Normandy landings. As a catcher for the Yankees, he dominated the game for nearly two decades, setting all sorts of records (10 World Series championship rings, 18 All-Star games, etc.), and becoming a storied figure for another reason, too, for Yogi Berra had a way with words. His sayings probably fill a book, nonsense on their face but acquiring distinctly Zen qualities if you think about them for a minute. So he was a ‘Yogi’ indeed. And why didn’t he play for the St. Louis Cardinals? It’s a long story, and a disputed one, but we can probably blame it on Branch Rickey, who schemed to sign the boy for the Dodgers but was pipped at the post by the Yankees. Yogi’s other distinction was to win an apology from George Steinbrenner, a man of German immigrant roots, and thus of an older “us” than the new “us” that Yogi Berra did so much to create. It’s fitting, then, that one of the regular activities of the Yogi Berra Museum (in New Jersey!!!) is to publicize the dramas of American immigration and to celebrate “us” as a nation. ©.

[Stanley]

Onward Christian Soldiers.

After all, we have each of us only eight notes to work upon. Sir Arthur Sullivan.

Sir Arthur Sullivan was born (not knighted) on May 13, 1842, not very far from the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a couple of stones’ throws (and a challenging swim) from the Palace of Westminster. He wasn’t exactly born poor, but his family circumstances made an issue of his ambition to become a composer. His father disapproved, telling him it was no way to make a living, and dad knew whereof he spoke. Though a respected military bandmaster, Thomas Sullivan had had to take part time work of various sorts to keep his family in comfort and to send his two sons to private school. Even so, and perhaps unavoidably, young Arthur learned to play several marching band instruments (horns and woodwinds) and to think about them, too. His voice, before it changed, anyway, was another instrument he mastered, as a boy chorister at the Chapel Royal. And there he found someone—the Rev’d Thomas Helmore, the choir director—who was willing to encourage, or indulge, Arthur’s talents at composition. Arthur published his first work, a hymn, at age 13, and went on from there to scholarships at the Royal Academy and then at the Leipzig Conservatory. Sullivan’s early works were pretty much sacred and/or classical, with a couple of very popular hymns (“Onward Christian Solders” and “Nearer My God to Thee” were his), and he returned to England as a recognized talent, embodying (it was hoped, by some) the future of English classical music. He composed quite a bit, some of it reasonably successful, but found (like his father) that as hard as he might work, there was never enough money. And so, thank goodness, he took to writing lighter stuff, in collaboration with William Schwenk Gilbert (1836-1911: who, as a sometime music critic, had written nice things about some of Arthur’s compositions). And so it is that we know Sir Arthur Sullivan as the melodic half of the Gilbert & Sullivan ‘franchise,’ marvelous comic operas bursting with stirring band music, tuneful ballads, gentle satire, and exceedingly unlikely plots, for instance HMS Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Iolanthe (1882), and The Mikado (1885). Thanks to their inherent virtues and the genius of impresario Richard D’Oyley Carte (1844-1901), Gilbert and Sullivan took England by storm and their classics, today, are still performed just about everywhere. It’s sad that it all fell apart with a dispute about expenses, but appropriately comic that (apparently) the row began over a carpet. “Pulling the rug out from under”: just like a Gilbert & Sullivan plot, except without the happy ending. ©.