BOB'S BITS

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"Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes . . . must accept the economic consequences of slave labor." Norbert Wiener.

An interesting feature of almost all American immigrant groups is that first comers did not much like later ones. In the Jews’ case, the Germans (already settled) did not like their rude, often rural, more orthodox eastern European brethren, who arrived after 1880. In some midwestern cities bad memories still rankle. However, some fell in love across this particular divide. Norbert Wiener’s parents (Polish father and German mother) did this, and in due course produced Norbert on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, MO, where pop taught German and Slavic languages at the university. Very traditionally, they would arrange a marriage for him, which lasted, and a deep commitment to Judaism, which didn’t. Norbert would change his life, change ours, and define the change. He also became the most famously absent-minded of all absent-minded professors, once forgetting where his house was in Cambridge, MA, where he had fetched up as Professor of Mathematics at MIT. He took a while to get there, despite a PhD (in philosophy) at 17, and a sojourn with Bertrand Russell in England. He tried the army, journalism, and free-lance writing before landing at MIT in 1919. MIT was not then a top U, but Norbert helped make it one. His ASTONISHINGLY interdisciplinary intellect produced, among a great many other things, his 1948 book on Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. He coined the word and the concept, and as he foretold the computer processor has done the rest. Norbert also wrote on cybernetics and religion, but that is another story for another day. ©

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"And since every possibility human life holds, or may be deprived of . . . depends all but entirely upon circumstances, the circumstances are proportionately worthy of the serious attention of anyone who dares to think of himself as a civilized human b...

Authors whose masterpieces don’t sell well at first are fairly thick on the ground. Think William Faulkner, but at least he lived to get a Nobel for his slow sellers. Jane Austen’s didn’t sell at all (she couldn’t find a publisher) but she lived just long enough to see her best novels recognized. James Agee doesn’t match either Austen or Faulkner, but his masterpiece wasn’t recognized as such until after he died. Born in Knoxville, TN, on 27 November 1909, Agee was (one could say) brought up by the Episcopal Church, expecially Fr. And Mrs. James Flye and by his stepfather, Fr. Erskind Wright. Educated at Harvard, he showed talent as a writer and worked for Fortune and Time magazines, for the latter as a film critic. During his short lifetime, he was best known (indeed influential) as a film critic (at Time, The Nation, and as a freelance). He also worked on screenplays, the best of which included The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. He even got a Pulitzer (albeit posthumously) for a novel, A Death in the Family (1957). But the masterpiece? That was the reportage result of an eight-week stint – for Fortune – with photographer Walker Evans documenting the lives of poor white trash, sharecroppers, in rural Alabama. Fortune refused the story. In book form, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sold only 600 copies when it was published in 1941. It is now considered one of the great literary works of the 20th century, Read it to understand why.

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³It all goes back to Adam and Eve‹a story which shows . . . that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.² Carol Gilligan.

November 28, 2013 is the 77th birthday of Carol Gilligan, who in 1997 became Harvard’s first Professor of Gender Studies. She’d been there a while, 30 years, indeed had taken her PhD at Harvard in social psychology after a BA in English literature from Swarthmore. Further evidence of her interdisciplinarity can be gathered from the fact that, from 1992 to 1994, she held a prestigious visiting chair as Pitt Professor of American History andInstitutions at Cambridge University. Gilligan is interesting for other reasons, too. Unlike many feminists she has consistently argued that women are fundamentally different from men, and if different in some ways only these differences are critical and must be heeded. Her first major book, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), broke with tradition and with her postgraduate mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg, to conclude that women think of morality not in terms of justice or right or wrong but in terms of relationships. Women’s moral universes, then, are complex, personal-historical constructions in which evaluations are arrived at through an understanding of causes and consequences, not according to a “code”. Women, indeed, “hesitate to judge.” This may make them better students in seminars and more thoughtful Supreme Courtjustices. Another response to Gilligan might be to think about how our culture socializes boys.

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³In an era of breadlines, depressions, and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery.² Busby Berkeley.

Busby Berkeley William Enos [sic] was born on 29 November 1895, probably in a touring suitcase and certainly to an actor mother and a director father who christened him after two actor friends, his godparents Amy Busby and William Gilette, so it was fate that eventually led him to Hollywood. Along the way he was educated in a military academy and served in WWI as an artillery lieutenant, and some say that hisdance routines were inspired by watching soldiers square bashing around parade grounds. Certainly the man could not dance, never took dancing lessons, and went to some trouble to conceal those facts. That being said, he became really very famous for his dance numbers, many shot from overhead for kaleidoscopic effect. Sometimes they didn’t have much to do with the movie’s plot, either, but audiences sat back and enjoyed them anyway, perhaps as a sort of intermezzo to the plot or, perhaps, their lives. His most famous movies were those he choreographed: e.g. Gold Diggers of 1933, 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and Fashions of 1934. It is less well known that he directed The Wizard of Oz. His films were (as their titles suggest) not much to do with what was going on in the world, and their escapism was deliberate. His most famous single number was “I Got Rhythm,” from Girl Crazy (1943) and, indeed, he probably did. He also was one of only a few Hollywood directors to be tried for murder (three people, in a car accident). He was acquitted on the third trial, after two hung juries.

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³René, why don't you marry, get yourself a wife of your own, and leave me alone?² Merle Oberon, as Baroness Cassini, in "Folies Bergére de Paris" (1935)

On 30th November we reflect on the ancient Australian proverb that sex sells better than boxing kangaroos, for it was on this day in 1886 that the Folies Bergère changed from a sort of louche vaudeville to a stage show that featured beautiful girls in daring costumes. Founded in 1869, the Folies Bergère had tried everything, circus acts, snake charmers, operettas, a tattooed Greek prince, the world’s tallest quelques choses, and, yes,boxing kangaroos. These delights did not sell, and so to make ends meet the Folies opened its gardens to the public as a kind of outdoor café, but this attracted a dubious crowd, including Toulouse Lautrec et ses amis, who did not spend enough francs. But new management came on board (as they say in France), in 1886, and on 30th November the new team unveiled, and that is exactly the right word, at the “Place aux Jeunes,” the chorus line that would make the Folies Bergère a household name even in Dubuque, IA. By the 1890s, the daring costumes of 1886 had become even more daring, and the association of the Folies with la strip tease was made. But the Folies supports other acts, too, usually fully clothed, such as Frank Sinatra, Charlie Chaplin, Edith Piaf, Marcel Marceau, Ginger Rogers, W. C. Fields, and (fairly bare) St. Louis’s own Josephine Baker, whose sensational début took place in 1926. Vive les folies, as they say, still doing business près de la rue Bergère, in gay Paree.

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³And Paul hits this chord [E minor] and I turn to him and say, 'That's it!' I said, 'Do that again!'² John Lennon, on the writing of "the" song.


Oh yeah, I'll tell you something
I think you'll understand
When I'll say that something
I wanna hold your hand!

“I want to hold your hand”, by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, was the Beatles’ first American release, and it hit the market for which it was written on December 1, 1963, 50 years ago today. McCartney was living with Jane Asher’s parents. The Ashers had a piano. John Lennon came over. And in the Ashers' house, music history was made. This “hurricane of fresh air” would become the biggest-selling single of all time.

And when I touch you I feel happy
Inside
It's such a feeling that my love
I can't hide

They say that popular music hits “our lowest common denominator,” and if that is so then there is a special kind of genius to it. To this fresh-faced undergraduate, living in a substandard Philadelphia slum in the 3900 block of Sansom Street, it seemed so. And now that I know the Ashers’ house was only a door or two away from the house Elizabeth Barrett grew up in, it seems even more so. The Ashers were at #57. The Barretts lived at #50. It was Wimpole Street that did it. Just ask Robert Browning!!

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"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science." Georges Seurat.


Science and art come together in Georges Seurat, which makes him a perfect subject for the Honors College bulletin board. Born on December 2, 1859, he was interested in theories of art and vision from a very early age, which was odd in a young man intending to be a sculptor. But his drawings led him to new theory of contrasts, and after military service he returned to Paris to set up his own painting studio and to read up on how people saw—perceived—color. Seurat was especially interested in the theory of contrasts (two points of color, seen from a distance, look like one different color) and read at least two books on the idea, dabbling at canvases the while. Then, in 1884, well armed with theory and practice, he set to work on a large canvas (7’ by 10’), working in a park and in his studio, which would eventually see the light of day (pun intended) as “Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte – 1884”. The thing—which now hangs in the Chciago Art Institute—took him two years to complete, and seen up close it is nothing but a myriad of small colored dots. As one moves away from the surface of the canvas, the dots merge and blend to create new colors but also to shape for us the figures of Parisians—and their pets—enjoying themselves in the lights and shadows of a summer afternoon. It was a revelation and a revolution. Next time you are in Chicago, take a close look at it, and then move away. You will be pleased by the sensation.

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"Out of poetic imagination and ordinary compassion [Williams] has spun a poignant and luminous story." Brooks Atkinson¹s review, New York Times, December 4, 1947.

On 3rd December 1947, sixty-six years ago today, Tennessee Williams’”A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway, introducing Marlon Brando, who played Stanley Kowalski to Jessica Tandy’s BlancheDuBois. The play stunned the opening night audience with its depiction of brutality, but theatre goers recovered to give it a 30-minute standing ovation. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Williams and a Tony for Tandy. Elia Kazan directed, and Kim Hunter (as Stella Kowalski, Stanley’s wife) and Karl Malden (Blanche’s beau) filled out the main cast. So it was a starry night at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Brando was 23 when he played Stanley, whose encounter with Blanche is at the tragic center of the play. Blanche’s dark past, obscured only partly by her tender, false nostalgia, clashes with Stanley’s winning personality to raise violent passions, and in the play’s climactic scene Stanley rapes Blanche, which finally severs her fragile hold on reality. The play ends with Blanche being led away in a straitjacket. When “Streetcar” was filmed, the Catholic Legion of Decency tried to censor it, and was successful to the extent that, in the movie, Stanley is punished for his misdeeds by losing his Stella (played in the movie, again, by Kim Hunter). Vivien Leigh replaced Jessica Tandy in the London production (directed by Olivier) and then in the movie version. Which, by the way, is still well worth seeing. ©

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"if she had met with any such accident or casualty I should have been able to discover Š traces thereof but I was not able to discover and did not discover any." Testimony of Ricardo Portunato, Diver, in the Gibraltar Vice-Admiralty


On this day (4th December) in 1872, the Canadian brig Dei Gratia boarded the sailing vessel Mary Celeste at mid-Atlantic. The Mary Celeste had sailed from New York on 7th November, bound for Genoa, Italy. Besides Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their child of two, named Sarah, and a crew of eight, the Mary Celeste carried mainly crude alcohol (1,701 barrels, to be exact). But when the Dei Gratia’s crew boarded the American ship, they found no sign of life. The lifeboats were missing, and the navigational instruments were gone, but there was plenty of food and water on board the mother ship, the cargo was intact, and there was little untoward evidence of damage or stress, although the ship had almost certainly been drifting for 11 days with no crew on board. The last entry in the ship’s log was for 23 November, and put her 500 miles west of the Azores, still bound for Genoa. The captain, his family, and the crew were never found, and the reason for abandonment has never been determined. Speculation abounds, of course, and can be entertainingly followed, now, on the Web. Meanwhile, the Mary Celeste, now usually rendered “Marie Céleste” thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle’s eponymous short story, has become part of our language, a metaphor for unexplained losses and unsolved mysteries, a symbolic apex of our culture’s collective Bermuda Triangle, a waterborne UFO. ©

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"I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings. " Hector Berlioz.


December 5, 2013, is the 183rd anniversary of the premier performance, in Paris (1830), of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. The piece is well-titled: to give it in English, Fantastic Symphony: An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts. No false advertising (or false modesty) here. It was, and is, fantastic. One fantastical feature is that it was written for the largest symphony orchestra ever (then) assembled, over 90 instruments, including nofewer than 60 in the string sections. And when the last part of the story, or movement of the symphony, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” takes off, the strings make the witches whirl like dervishes and will jelly your bones. Once heard, you will hear it again and again in your mind’s ear. It was also unusual, if not quite “fantastic,” in that it was written to tell a story, one of “hopeless love,” storm-tossed passion, and opium-induced dreams, and thus is sometimes accorded the title of the first symphony of the Romantic era. A couple of Beethoven’s symphonies might contest for that title, and in fact Berlioz was inspired not only by the “artist’s” (his) love for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson but by hearing—for the first time—Beethoven’s Third and Fifth symphonies. Berlioz had also got into Goethe and Shakespeare, as it were in preparation for this dizzying act of musical creation. If you haven’t heard the Fantastique yet, its 183rd anniversary would be a good day to repair the gap.

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³You see, I am the only one of the family not to have won a Nobel Prize.² Eve Curie in a television interview, 1972.


Genius may or may not run in families. But Ève Curie’s life shows that in families genius can certainly run in different channels. Ève was born in Paris on December 6, 1904, to Marie and Pierre Curie, already the most famous scientists of their generation, Ève would accomplish much in her lifebut—other than a science degree (1925) and a prize-winning biography of her beloved mother (1937)—her achievements had little to do with science. First, until a radium-induced illness finally killed Marie in 1934, Ève cared lovingly for her mother. Secondly, and in the same years, she developed a sterling reputation as a concert pianist, usually solo. Thirdly, during the German occupation, she traveled the world on behalf of Free France and the allies, then became a battlefield nurse for Free French brigades in the European campaigns. Her experiences in writing, war, and diplomacy widened her views on life, and (having married a UN diplomat) Ève Curie became the “First Lady of UNICEF” (the United Nations Children’s Fund). In 1965 (with her husband) she traveled to Stockholm when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for UNICEF. She referred to this as her failure, for her parents had won two Nobels, her elder sister one, all for science. Ève Curie’s lively, luminous mind marched to another rhythm and was stilled only by her death in 2007, aged 102. ©

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"Charles Broley: The Eagle Man" Dedicatory plaque on the eagle viewing platform at Lower Beverley Lake, Florida.

In our pluralistic society, it’s risky to assume that one’s profession or, say, income will dictate one’s politics or one’s view on the environment. Charles Lavelle Broley, successful enough as a banker to retire to Florida at 59, demonstrates thisnicely. Born in Gorrie, Ontario on December 7, 1879, Broley’s banking career played out mainly in western Canada, where he finished up as the head of a Winnipeg branch of the Bank of Montreal. In Winnipeg Broley developed tastes for warm weather and large raptors (neither of them surprising traits for Manitobans), and when he retired to Florida in1939 he became “the eagle man,” particularly bald eagles but goldens would do, and he banded them to follow their fates. Well into his 70s he was climbing tall trees to band eaglets in their nests (he banded >1200), and there are some lovely pics of him doing so on the Florida state library website. In the process, Broley proved that many Florida eagles were migratory, moving north with the warm weather and then back south in winter (just as he did). More importantly, he produced much evidence to show that DDT spraying was destroying the raptor species (not to mention Florida seagulls who were dining on DDT’d grasshoppers). Our Great Valley populations of eagles, ospreys, and hawks owes much to this Manitoba banker, who died three years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) used Broley’s data to nail the point about DDT.

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"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself." James Thurber.

Let’s laugh (and wince once or twice) today to honor James Thurber, humorist, born on 8 December 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, to a minor politician (father) and a major cut-up (mother) of somewhat higher social standing. An indifferent student, Thurber had very poor eyesight (myopia worsened by a childhood accident) and never graduated from college. But he landed a job writing for a Columbus daily, then bummed around in Chicago and Paris before making landfall in New York, in 1925, where he made the acquaintance of another small-town wit, E. B. (Andy) White, who was on the staff ot the infant New Yorker magazine. White got the editor, Harold Ross, to hire Thurber, who immediately became a legend for his varied humor repertoire (from noir to slapstick, with much in between) and his surreal cartoons (increasingly blind, he concentrated on line and on captions). Thurber was part of my diet, but he’s not so well known today, and it’s a great pity. Anyone who’s ever had academic difficulty could gain perspective from Thurber’s recounting of his own short college career in “University Days”, especially the biology bits. Other famous stories shed new light on family life and marriage, such as “The Night the Bed Fell,” “The Dog that Bit People,” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” And as for therapy, one could do worse than read the book he co-authored with White, Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why Do You Feel the Way You Do? (1929). Thurber: a good writer to read. Try him today. ©

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"Inventing is only one of my lines. I am also a bank director, a president of companies, a fisherman, an author, an engineer, a cook, a naturalist, a stockholder, a consultant, and a dock-walloper." Clarence Birdseye.

Some names (think “Hershey” or “Heinz”) become so identified with a product that it’s hard to remember that it they are also used to take attendance in kindergartens. But “Birdseye” is in a class by itself, sounding more like a logo than either a product or a name. Hiding behind it are not only frozen mountains of petit pois and haddock but also the life of an interesting character, Clarence Frank Birdseye II, born on December 9, 1886, in Brooklyn, NY. His family had enough cash to send him to Amherst but not keep him there, and (like many underemployed youth) he got a US government job as an “assistant naturalist”, first killing off coyotes in Arizona but then (in Montana) helping to isolate a tick as a vector of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Next Birdseye moved further north, to the arctic, where (still on the US government payroll) he noticed that fish caught by the Inuit (and quick-frozen on the pack ice) kept their flavor and, when thawed and cooked, tasted sea-fresh. He returned to New York, got a job with Clothel Refrigeration, experimented with quick freezing, and in 1924 formed his own Birdseye Seafoods Inc., then “General Seafoods”. Within five years he sold the whole shebang to Goldman Sachs for $22 million (over $300 million today) who reorganized it as General Foods. Clarence continued to innovate until his death in 1956, bringing into his patented quick-freeze process almost everything we eat and, inter alia, inventing a new way to make paper. ©

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³Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.² Emily Dickinson.


In her one authenticated “grown-up” portrait, a daguerreotype taken during her brief stay, aged 17, at Mount Holyoke, Emily Dickinson (born on December 10, 1830) looks out pleasantly if pensively, hair drawn back and parted at the middle, a ribbon at her throat and a book at her elbow. While all daguerreotypes appear gloomy, there is nothing in this picture to suggest that Emily would become legendary in her own town as an eccentric recluse, far less to suggest her poetic genius. Back at home, in Amherst, she dressed only in white and lived behind closed doors. She kept a lush garden and greenhouse, and baked beautifully. She used biscuits and blossoms to communicate (silently) with friends, and left the rest of Amherst to its own devices. She was well known only to children, to her nieces, nephews, and small neighbors. She feared death and knew it too well. She must have been melancholy. She had to be lonely. And yet this Emily D. wrote wildly innovative, oddly melodic, poetry. Her verses are almost always surprising in what she says and how she says it, in the associations she makes (and then naturalizes), and the rhythms and rhymes she strikes. And almost no one knew. Those who did—notably Thomas Wentworth Higginson—tried to tame her poetry, to domesticate it, to keep it (so to speak) indoors. Luckily, her manuscripts survived to be published as she left them, to open her doors, to share her warmth, wealth, and company.©

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"It makes no difference if I burn my bridges behind me ‹ I never retreat." Fiorello LaGuardia

Fiorello Enrico La Guardia was born into an immigrant family (Italian dad, Jewish mom) in New York on December 11, 1882. In his youth he learned five languages (three from his parents), reported for the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, served as American Consul (aged 20!!!) in Fiume, interpreted at Ellis Island, and became an Episcopalian. He aimed for law as a profession, but chose politics as a career, and represented Lower Manhattan in Congress where he bridled at the House’s obstructionist rules and voted for war in 1917. Not content with voting for war, he joined the US Army Air Corps and was a decorated flier in the Italian campaign. Back home he got back into politics, back into the House, and back into battle as a staunch opponent of Prohibition and child labor and a supporter of women’s and trades union rights. He was elected Mayor of New York City in 1934 and served three terms in that office. He hired professionals to run the city’s hospitals, parks (Robert Moses), police, and transportation, radically expanded public housing and public welfare, raised taxes, fought big gangsters and street-corner gamblers, backed labor unions, and bought out and consolidated the private subway systems of the city. He fought for immigration reform, for a quick route to citizenship, and for a national health service. In the last two years of his life he worked for the United Nations. And, oh yes, Fiorello (the “little flower”) was a Republican. How’s that for a punchline? ©

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³Why don¹t we have a little game? Let¹s pretend that we¹re human beings, and that we¹re actually alive.² John Osborne, Look Back in Anger.


By the time we are labeled adult, we are familiar with advice that urges prudence, patience, and propriety. Be respectful. Use the right fork. Blow your nose—if you must—discreetly and never at the dinner table. Pass the port to the left and don’t empty the decanter. And so on. On the whole it’s good advice and is meant well. But if John Osborne had followed such advice, he would have lived and died an actor on the English provincial circuit, facing dreary opening audiences in one rainy seaside town after another. Instead, metaphorically for sure, Osborne picked his nose, farted loudly, chewed with his mouth open, slurped his soup, and didn’t brush afterwards. John Osborne, born in London on December 12, 1929 to a draftsman father he loved and a barmaid mother he hated, was the most successful of the “angry young men” who came virtually to dominate the London cultural scene in the late 50s and 60s. He began a defiant youth who got kicked out of school and fired from his jobs. Then he became an actor and, playing in Morecambe, aged 27, he wrote Look Back in Anger, an unlovely play about unlovely people unable to rise above their anger or to solace one other but full of good lines in Swiftian sarcasm. And they knew whom and what to blame for their unhappinesses. Most reviewers thought it was “self-pitying snivel” but two influential critics—including Kenneth Tynan—and, better yet, playwright Arthur Miller, thought it special and brilliant. And a revolution was made.©

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"When a pitcher is throwing spitballs . . . don¹t complain. Just hit the dry side.² Stan Musial.


On December 13th, 2013, let’s get with the holiday spirit to celebrate fair play in sports. And why? Because it was on this day in 1949 that AmericanLeague owners agreed NOT to reinstate the Spitball Pitch. For those of you who’ve never tried it the Spitball is a baseball pitch in the ball’s flight is rendered wholly unpredictable by applying saliva, vaseline, or some other “foreign” substance to the ball. It was, literally, a killer pitch. A tobacco-juice spitball (thrown by a Yankee, of course) killed Indians’ shortstop Ray Chapman on August 17, 1920, and led to the ban in the first place. But just as today sports idiots (a plentiful species) oppose penalties for late hits in the NFL (the “kill the quarterback” strategy), so there were moral defectives in baseball who insisted that existing spitballers had the “right” to continue using the pitch. Not until 1933 were the last of the spitballers (and their pitch) retired when Red Faber and Jack Quinn quit the game. Then, on 12/13/49, a revanchiste movement in the American League failed by a whisker, and in 1955 the National League actually thought about reinstatement, but so far the spitball remains illegal, dangerous to human life. Some still use it, but it’s now maybe more dangerous to the pitcher than to the batter. Certainly it proved dangerous to the Detroit Tigers, whose loss to our dear Cards in the 2012 World Series was partly explained by the (wholly justified) exclusion of Kenny Rogers for trying spitballs in Game 2. Serves you right, Tigertown, is all I can say.

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"All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me . . ." Aphra Behn, 1640-1689.

I know of few women authors (in English) before Austen, so when one breaks the surface of my ignorance I expect her to be unusual in some other, additional way. It’s unfair: but Aphra Behn easily exceeds even my unfair expectations. Baptized on December 14, 1640, Aphra Behn was a playwright and poet, should be called a novelist, was a spy, a prominent courtier in the London of Charles II, and was too much else to get into a short note. But it would be very wrong not (also) to call her a feminist. Because she was that, too, and before her time. Interestingly, she had American connections, with the Willoughbies (West Indies) and Culpepers (Virginia), and she made something of them with her Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (1688), but her beginnings were mixed and aged 20 she first surfaced as a royalist spy, codename Astrea, working to shop republican plotters lurking in Amsterdam. The king didn’t pay her, and after a spell in debtors’ prison Aphra turned to the pen and made history. The gatekeeper-critic Harold Bloom doesn’t think she belongs in the canon, but if you let your reading be ruled by the gatekeepers you’ll miss a writer whose poems and plays explore sex, love, and gender in creative ways. So thumb your nose at Bloom. Aphra Behn’s work was sometimes coded, for in her era licentiousness was under male ownership, but she trespassed. Given the other known facts of her life, we must call Aphra fearless, not to be lightly missed.

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³I am so browned off with the whole madhouse I don¹t really care much what happens.² Maurice Wilkins to Francis Crick, 1953.


The ‘discovery’ of DNA shows how science is both cooperative and competitive, and Maurice Wilkins was at the center of this particular paradox. Born in New Zealand on 15 December 1916, Wilkins took his degrees from Cambridge and by 1950 had a research position at King’s, London. By 1950, “everybody” knew something about DNA, the “genetic material”, thanks to work done all over the world by many scientists. But no one knew enough, not what it was made of, and certainly not how it was constructed. Wilkins himself was working on bovine DNA sent him by a Swiss colleague. Since the potential to learn more about its structure might lie with X-ray diffraction, Wilkins at first welcomed into his lab (from Paris) Rosalind Franklin, an expert in this technique, and shared some of his and her knowledge with James Watson and Francis Crick, both then at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratories. What happened next is a long, complex, hugely exciting, and still controversial story, in which Wilkins is forever identified as the one who called Franklin the “dark lady” of his lab, and was glad to see her leave. In this contested story, it may be best to say that of all those many scientists who worked together (and apart) on DNA, Franklin, Wilkins, Crick, and Watson made the important, clinching discoveries. It may also be that all four should have shared the Nobel Prize, but Franklin’s death in 1958 means we will never know whether they would have. Nobels are never posthumous; the prize went to the other three, the survivors, in 1962.

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"What a man hears, he may doubt; what he sees, he may possibly doubt; but what he does himself, he cannot doubt." Seaman Knapp.

The miracle of midwestern agriculture owes much to the glaciers that scraped Canada and deposited the detritus in the “corn belt.” Human innovations brought other advances, most importantly the Morrill Act (1862) that established land grant colleges and directed them to improve things. Within that framework Seaman Asahel Knapp stands out. Born in New York on December 16, 1833, Knapp was Phi Beta Kappa at Union College and led an Emersonian life, taught at a girls’ school, edited a newspaper, farmed, and then, moving to Iowa in 1866, preached Methodism, farmed again, and headed up the Iowa School for the Blind before becoming Professor of Agriculture and then President of the Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts. Soon enough he moved on to Texas where, at Terrell, he established a “demonstration farm,” the first in the country, where he rigorously employed scientific methods to get the best out of the land (animals and crops and people) and spread the word about scientific agriculture. He preached the gospel of farm improvement and drafted the federal legislation that (in 1914, three years after his death) completed the promise of Justin Morrill by establishing the state extension services. The gospel seems to have been in the blood; his son Herman served as president of Iowa State and his son Bradford founded Auburn University before moving on to lead Texas Tech. The Knapps’ continuing connections with Iowa State are memorialized at Seaman’s grave in the College Cemetery at Ames.©

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³In nature, we [women] have as clear an understanding as men, if we were bred in schools to mature our brains.²Émilie du Châtelet.

Since we did Voltaire in November we do Émilie du Châtelet in December. She was the love of Voltaire’s life, but it would do her no credit to stop there. Born on 17 December 1706, her good fortune was to have parents—certainly her father—who saw and encouraged her brilliance and then a husband who saw and tolerated her free spirit. Her father, a minor noble who held one of Paris’s more notable salons, noticed Émilie’s precocity and arranged to have her tutored in astronomy (whence she got interested in Newton), mathematics, literature, and natural science. Along the way she became fluent in English, Latin, Italian, Greek, and German. But she was to be a French lady so she learned also to dance, sing, play, act, and gamble. Playing it safe, she married (at 19) the Marquis du Chastellet and bore him three children, in the midst of which she met Voltaire. It wasn’t love at first sight but it became love for sure, a partnership of equals despite Voltaire’s famous comment that her “only fault was being a woman.” If we are to make a game out of it (they often played at games), he had her on literature and philosophy; she had him on science and mathematics, and they both enjoyed a good laugh. Her greatest accomplishments were to translate and comment on Newton’s Principia (1749) and make experimental advances in the fledgling science of kinetic energy, but I like it that she also wrote Discours sur le bonheur (1748). Her own happiness was cut short by death in 1749, after childbirth, the proper context of Voltaire’s remark. ©

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³I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.² The reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

17th December 2013 marks the 170th anniversary of the London publication of Charles Dickens’ story of Tiny Tim, Ebenezer Scrooge, a trio of ghosts, and a happy ending. A Christmas Carol (for that was the title), sold out within days. So successful was it that Dickens would write five other Christmas tales, The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), The Haunted Man (1847) and The Ghost’s Bargain (1848), but none appealed like the story of Scrooge’s sins of greed and his redemption in generosity. Dickens wrote it at a speed that suggests forethought, and indeed the author’s experience with poverty informs much of his writing and explains his insistence that virtues do not inhere only in those who can afford them. While he was writing A Christmas Carol, he was working on a pamphlet appealing “to the people of England, on behalf of the poor man’s child.” And it was his October speech in Manchester, also on poverty, that inspired him to begin A Christmas Carol. Besides growing awareness of poverty, the success of Dickens’s tale owed to the new-found popularity of Christmas itself, rolling back traditional Protestant disapproval of the holiday. This was furthered by Prince Albert’s introduction of the German Christmas tree and the popularity in England of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, which although American included much nostalgic material on “the English Christmas.” Thus A Christmas Carol was a story whose time had come. ©

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"Every damn fool thing you do in this life, you pay for." Last words of Édith Piaf, 1963.


Sometimes a famed life is so shrouded in legend, indeed legendary, that it may be wiser to see the legend as the point and the rest as nihil ad rem (not at issue). Where the person has done much to create the legends, and may have believed them, what is legendary assumes explanatory function. And so we come to Édith Piaf, and we’ll read “probably” or “perhaps” into much of this entry. Édith was certainly Édith, named after a British army nurse, and she was born on 19 December 1915 in Paris’s 20th arondissement, on the street or in a street barrow or in a hospital. Her dad was a street performer whose mother ran a brothel. Her street performer mom was of Berber descent and abandoned her. After a spell in grandma’s brothel, Édith became a street performer, was “discovered,” and became La môme piaf, the little sparrow. She sang wonderfully, was implicated in her lover’s murder, became famous, acted on stage, and during the war probably did not join the Résistance but did discover Yves Montand. Whatever her role during the occupation, the French forgave her afterwards and she became La fameuse. Her songs make strong men weep and it must be said that women like them too. The most famous (look them up please) are “La vie en rose,” “Milord,” “Hymne à l’amour,” and forever famous and indeed legendary “Non, je ne regrette rien.” But we are not sure even of her name. Her monument, in Père Lachaise, calls her “Madame Lamboukas dite Édith Piaf.”

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"It is piracy, not overt on-line music stores, which is our chief competitor." Steve Jobs.

History often plays Jekyll and Hyde tricks on us, witness our current role as the champion of intellectual property, copyright, and patents. We are particularly impatient with the Chinese tendency to be casual about “our” CDs or silicon chips. We certainly didn’t start out that way, as Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens would be glad to tell us, could we dig them up for a séance. Both undertook their famous trips (especially Dickens in 1868) to the US partly to take action against American publishers (e.g. Harpers) that were gaily pirating their works, and making money at it. The jaundiced view they took of our ancestors, their alcoholism, their spitoons and their “chaws” that missed the spitoons, their awful diet and the way they wolfed it, arose partly from the galling thought of all those lost royalties. Historically more significant than literary theft was our skill at stealing industrial processes, for instance in the steel industry where we found it a whole lot easier to copy than to invent. As of course it would be easier. And European countries, notably Britain, who didn’t like us anyway for our republican democracy, made it illegal for any industrial operative, especially in textiles, to leave for greener, westernpastures. One such was Samuel Slater, who maybe read the law but broke it, sailed to the USA and in Pawtucket, RI, on December 20, 1790 a cotton mill he had put together with Richard Arkwright’s (English) designs began operations—and kick-started our industrial revolution. Piracy. You can’t beat piracy.