BOB'S BITS

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She was possessed of a nature so full of sunshine that, to her, all of life became beautiful and full of meaning. Solon Bailey, obituary of Henriatta Leavitt.

Back when women were thought incapable of voting, they were also believed to be incapable of operating telescopes. It’s no longer clear how these peculiar incapacities were related, but during that period the chief of the Harvard College Observatory, Edward Pickering, decided that his male clerical staff were incompetently expensive and hired women instead. These distaff replacements became known as “Pickering’s Harem”, probably not meant as a compliment. At least not at first: but some of them turned out to be much more than clerks. I have mentioned two of these illicit scientists before in these notes, Annie Jump Cannon and Antonia Maury; another was Henrietta Swan Leavitt, born on July 4, 1868. Henrietta attended Oberlin and then graduated from Radcliffe, and entered the Harem in 1893 as a “volunteer.” Later she was paid $10 weekly. Although deaf, she was a bargain. Pickering assigned her to record observations of variable stars, and there she made a discovery that transformed astronomy and gave us our first real sense of the immensity of the universe. It’s called the “period-lumosity relationship” and it uses variations in light to measure the distance from earth of stars too far away for parallax (triangulation) observation. She published her findings in 1908 and 1912. In 1924, a member of the Swedish Academy began the process of nominating Henrietta for the Nobel Prize only to discover that she had died of cancer in 1921. She is buried in the family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery and remembered by Asteroid 5383 Leavitt and the Leavitt Crater on the moon.©

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Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then? Monty Python's Flying Circus


A word’s coinage and coinage history can produce a very long story. Currently the champion words (for length) are “set” and “make”, whose meanings and usages occupy about 120,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. Way back in the field, but steadily creeping up, is “spam,” a word first coined to market a new canned meat product of the Hormel Corporation. Hormel introduced Spam on July 5, 1937. It is a concoction of pork fragments (shoulder, ham, and fat) held together with potato starch and aspic and laced with salt. The original meaning of the word itself is lost in the bowels (sorry) of the Hormel Corporation, home base Austin, MN, which also makes Skippy Peanut Butter and Dinty Moore stews, but rumor has it that it’s an abbreviation of ‘spiced ham.’ So Spam “means” spiced ham, and its worldwide popularity means that it now comes in over 30 varieties including Spam Teriyaki and, on various Pacific Islands, is sold in Macdonalds and Burger King restaurants. Its use as a ration meat in WWII gave it some ill-fame in the rest of the world, as in an extended skit on Spam by Monty Python’s Flying Circus or the American GI definition of Spam as ham that didn’t pass its physical. And this ill fame has led directly to its current main usage, as bulk junk e-mail, regarded by most as a nuisance and some as a plague (spam accounts for 90% of all e-mail transmissions). And spam has spawned new coinages, too, notably “phishing”, “malware”, and “botnets”, each with (no doubt) its own story, "lost in the spams of time." ©

[In 2000 my friends Martha and Roger Paas took me to the Spam Museum at Austin MN. I was delighted to see that they had the Monty Python Spam sketch running on a video loop and also a film of the Spamettes, a dance troupe recruited in the factory that toured the world for two years. I couldn't help reflecting what Flying Circus would have made of this as material for a sketch. LINK]

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The need for understanding [the past] makes it necessary to be alive in the present, to experience and participate in the world. Marc Bloch

I don’t often mention historians but I will make an exception for Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch, born on July 6, 1886, in Lyon, France, where his pa was a professor of ancient history. His extensive schooling, in Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig, was interrupted by WWI. A captain in the French army, Bloch fought heroically enough to be awarded the Legion of Honor. Came the peace, he finished his education at Strasbourg and would, eventually, be appointed to the chair of economic history at the Sorbonne. Meanwhile, and more importantly, he and Lucien Febvre founded the Annales School of history in 1929. Their objective was (jointly with others) to construct—that’s the right word—a monumental, long term, narrative and analysis of medieval and early modern social history, “la longue durée”. And that’s what we got. Besides the masterworks of Bloch and Febvre, we thank the Annales for classic studies by (inter alia) Le Roy Ladurie, Fernand Braudel, and Philippe Ariès. In our time, the Annales shifted to cultural history, but it had quite a run and (with its faith in narrative and method) is a standing reproach to postmodernism. Bloch himself was by no means finished when WWII started, refusing to leave La France and taking up his captaincy in the reserves. Code name Narbonne, he joined La Résistance and engaged in covert operations while writing his final works, Strange Defeat and The Historian’s Craft. Captured by the Gestapo in Lyon, Bloch experienced Klaus Barbie’s version of “enhanced interrogation” and was executed on June 20, 1944. But his longue durée has survived. ©

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Amid the pandemonium of my . . . . sewing machines and the jingle of gold they pour into my lap, I feel the deadly silence of solitude. David Levinsky.

It’s been 49 years this autumn since I read Abraham Cahan’s great immigrant novel, The Rise of David Levinsky. Still, I remember its plot pretty well. It was a classic assimilationist novel, published in 1917: poor Jewish boy comes to New York and makes good. But the author, we PhD students knew, was a radical, a member of the Revoutionary Socialist Party in Russia, born on July 7, 1860, who skipped out in 1883 with the Tsarist police hot on his heels and who spent most of his writing time in the USA urging his readers (in Yiddish) to assimilate and organize, to absorb both Americanism and socialism. Only as a group or a class could their culture survive. So for Cahan, Levinsky’s rise to the apex of the clothing industry (and a couple of million in the bank) was making bad, not good. Levinsky breaks a strike, climbs to wealth and power on the backs of others, and at the end of the novel he regrets it, pities himself as “a victim of circumstances” and says “if I had my life to live over again I should never think of a business career.” He loses the girl, too, I think. Art or music or architecture or science (or love) would have been, he concludes, truer to his roots. It’s a complicated plot. Levinsky turns his back on the Talmud as much as on the Jewish working class, but it was a whale of a surprise to go online and find that Levinsky—and his creator—are being made into early heroes of Republican neoconservatism. Cahan spent his long working life as a socialist journalist (Jewish Daily Forward) and died in 1951 blissfully unaware of this ultimate fate. As David Levinsky might well have said, nothing is sacred, not even the past. ©

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Competition is a sin. John D. Rockefeller.

The 19th century was the era of “the self-made man.” It’s a misunderstood phrase, as several scholars (e.g. Thomas Augst and Daniel Howe) have argued. Its first meaning was the idea that each of us has a moral duty to improve our character, our particular combination of skills and backbone, to become a better person. Later the phrase was applied exclusively to the new plutocrats of our industrial age, and these men generally did their bit to improve upon the theme, sometimes hiring journalists to write up their very own rags to riches story. The myth has been pretty much exploded, starting with a collective biography of industrial leaders in Cochrane and Millers The Age of Enterprise, but there were exceptions, there were “real” self-made men. One such was John D. Rockefeller, born on July 8, 1839 to a devout Baptist mother and a ne’er do well confidence artist father and becoming, in due course, possibly the richest man in the world. He inherited some traits from each parent, prospering through hard work, moral certainty, sharp practice and political bullying. As to the latter, he was said to have done everything to the Pennsylvania state legislature except refine it, a nice joke given that the oil industry was the basis of his wealth. But the Baptist element never died out. He tithed 10% of his income to the Northern Baptist Convention and gave even more to its mission to help freed slaves, and before he died he’d given away a third of his fortune, the bulk of it to the United Negro College Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation. J. D. Rockefeller was our grand designer of both monopoly capitalism and targeted philanthropy. ©

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The growth of human culture manifests itself in the growth of each special culture. Franz Boas.

The belief that humans stood at the pinnacle or center of creation, well-nigh universal, translated easily into a view that one’s own class or gender or nation was innately superior to all others. One fears (just read the news) that such beliefs are not yet entirely discredited, but one of the great accomplishments of modern scholarship was to render them ridiculous. Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler did it for the universe, Charles Darwin for the human species, and Franz Boas did it for cultures and classes. Indeed, Boas (born in Minden, Germany on July 9, 1858) modeled his study of cultures on Darwin’s approach to species. He studied sciences at three German universities before settling on Geography (PhD Kiel, 1881), but on an expedition to the arctic he became fascinated with the native peoples and their cultures’ evolutionary relationships with their environment. And so he became an anthropologist. His insistence on empiricism, observation, data, and his liberal open-mindedness led him to reject easy assumptions about Western superiority and judgments based on parochial definitions of “human nature.” He moved to the USA, became professor at Clark and then Columbia, and for all practical pusposes spawned a discipline. Nor was Boas a moral relativist. He took his scientifically based beliefs about equality and diversity into politics, crusading against bigotry of many sorts, from the banning of Bach (during WW I) to lynch law in the American south. Franz Boas collapsed and died, aged 84, speaking at a luncheon rally for refugees from the Nazis. ©

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Ach! Dot schlop? Adolphus Busch on the subject of Budweiser beer.

In St. Louis, what other birthday could we celebrate on July 10 than that of Colonel Adolphus Busch, born on July 10, 1839 in Kastel, Hesse (where my dad would in 1945-6 lead the fight against the potato beetle), and destined to be the founder of an American industrial dynasty. Adolphus’ parents had a large family, and he became the youngest of 21 children (another sibling came along soon). The family did beer, so to speak, and in 1857 four brothers (all expert in beer making) emigrated to St. Louis. The other three went elsewhere, but Adolphus stayed put, first as a clerk, then as an employee and son-in-law of Eberhard Anheuser, a brewer. After duty in the Union Army (hence “Colonel” Busch), Adolphus went into the family businesses (beer and children) in big ways. Immigrants (just ask Governor Palin) tend to be more fecund than natives, and Lily Anheuser and Adolphus Busch made thirteen children. Meanwhile, at work, Adolphus made an empire on beer (and real estate). He never liked beer much, preferring wine at home, but by paying attention to brewing techniques (notably pasteurization), distribution, and marketing he made Anheuser (after 1880, Anheuser-Busch) a corporate giant and Budweiser (he bought the trademark in 1891) a household name. Later, he built a mansion in Germany and died there. I am not sure what Adolphus thought about the Belgians and he probably never even contemplated Brazilians, but less than a century after his death, his progeny sold up to In-Bev to make Budweiser a Belgian-Brazilian Brew. ©

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The censor is always an ass. Robert M. Bliss, Sr., circa 1955.

In two of her non-fiction works, but especially Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups (1990), novelist Alison Lurie argues that children’s books can be pretty tough, real-world stuff, fully fit for a “child’s unjaded, penetrating eye.” It’s a fun read for adults. But its truths are not universally accepted, witness the life and work of Thomas Bowdler and his sisters Jane and Henrietta Maria. Born to wealth on July 11, 1754, near the spa town of Bath, Bowdler trained to be a physician but became deathly ill while attending a sick friend (in Lisbon!!) and decided to devote himself, instead, to philanthropy (prison reform), chess, and (aged 52) to marriage. That latter thing didn’t work out too well for him and he and his wife separated. Meanwhile, Bowdler and his sisters had become interested in making great literature fitter for children and women, basically by removing all the nasty bits, sex and irreligion in particular but also rough or uncouth language and gratuitous descriptions of violence. There wasn’t much of that in the literature of their day so they turned first to Shakespeare’s spice and gutted the plays to produce The Family Shakespeare (1807) which parents might “place without fear” in their children’s hands. It struck a chord and went through many editions, and the Bowdlers next turned to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a classic which described the roles of “barbarism and religion” in bringing about the end of the empire. A little too frankly, apparently, and so it, too, was “Bowdlerized.” Thus did the Bowdlers lend their surname to censorship, forever. ©

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He was a writer, is what he was. E. B. White on Thoreau, in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town, ca. 1939.

Not everyone approved of Henry David Thoreau, who was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord: radical, poet, critic, jailbird (very briefly), proto-hippie, pencil maker, idler, hermit. Whittier called him a woodchuck and did not mean it as a compliment. His home town, Concord, was shortly to become a famous place, home (or refuge) to a galaxy of literary stars. Emerson, Hawthorne, and most of the Alcotts are buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, as is the colonial scientist John Winthrop (who built the Alcotts’ house). Thoreau, too, is buried in Sleepy Hollow, but when he died (at only 45, in 1862, of TB), he wasn’t yet famous. Emerson himself penned a eulogy in The Atlantic that summer, that began “the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.” Brave words about a pacifist in the midst of a bloody war, but they’ve proved right. E. B. White was one who accepted Thoreau’s “invitation to life’s dance.” Thanks partly to White’s perceptive essays (several, over the years, but most famously on the 100th anniversary of Walden), Thoreau has become a staple of undergraduate reading, mainly Walden. Or, Life in the Woods (1854), Resistance to Civil Government (1849), and several fine examples of nature writing. Henry Thoreau, woodchuck, wrote well about many things, but most memorably about how “Nature” had “taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of its children” and had, with genius and generosity, produced for us “the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings.” ©

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Who does not understand should either learn, or be silent. John Dee.

Given the nonsense that today swirls around public debates about (e.g.) global warming and evolution, it won’t do for us moderns to be complacent about the primacy of science in shaping our understanding of how the natural and physical worlds work. It recalls a time, too, when science, magic, and astrology were closely linked, often in the same person. One such was John Dee, born in London to Welsh parents on July 13, 1527. Dee was educated at Cambridge, Louvain, and Paris, where he acquired fame as a mathematician, magician, and astrologer. Astrology got him in trouble in the 1550s, for he made the mistake of casting the horoscopes of Queen Mary and the Princess Elizabeth, which brought him to trial for treason. He got off that hook, but also came to Elizabeth’s attention, and he set the date for her coronation. For the next fifty years (he died in 1608) Dee circulated in and out of Elizabeth’s court, trading on his expertises in algebra and geometry, navigation and astronomy, math and magic, modern and ancient languages, and on his conversations with angels. From time to time, he promised to find buried treasure and recover lost manuscripts, engaged in continental diplomacy for Elizabeth, and wrote influential tracts on mathematics and navigation. It seems likely that Dee sincerely believed he had access to supernatural powers, but he associated with dubious characters, including the Irish fraud Edward Kelley who, among other brilliant ideas, convinced Dee that they should share Dee’s wife. The angel Uriel told him so. And, after all, if you talk to the angels, you have no need for editors.©

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When you call me that, smile. The Virginian to Trampas, 1902.

One of the more interesting passages in American cultural history is the vogue for the west that swept through our upper classes in the late 19th century. It was a long time coming, perhaps begun by Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1847), but it was well enough developed by the 1880s to send the wealthy young widower Teddy Roosevelt west to become a cowboy, and perhaps to rid himself of the last traces of asthma. Another unlikely cowboy (and one of TR’s most avid supporters) was Owen Wister, born into an aristocratic Philadelphia family on July 14, 1860. Like Teddy, Owen went to Harvard (after a finishing school in Switzerland) where he messed about in the Hasty Pudding Club and dabbled in music enough to earn his father’s displeasure. Young Owen returned to Philly to apprentice in the law, but got the vapors and, on a doctor’s advice, was sent west to grow up and act like a man. He spent the next sixteen summers being a dude on Wyoming ranches. The west supplied Wister with good health, but as importantly with many good stories, which he turned into magazine articles and, in 1902, into his only famous book, The Virginian. ­It would not do to call it a masterpiece, but it was a runaway best seller, became a hit Broadway play, and in 1914 Cecil B. DeMille made it into our template horse opera. Evidence suggests that Wister, apparently a more fastidious sort, may have been distressed by its fame. His idea of a novelist was his friend Henry James, and whatever its virtues most critics would agree that The Virginian is not a Henry James novel. ?

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You can actually do very well out of not getting a Nobel Prixe. Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Does anyone know why whimsy lurks in the minds of physicists and astronomers? Recently there was the “Higgs Boson.” Before that, a Joyce novel was raided to name “quarks.” Now we have “charm,” “big bang” (one only, so far), “dark matter” (move over, Spielberg), and “strange” and “strangeness.” Another good one is LGM, or “Little Green Men.” This “charming” term we owe to a then-young astronomer, Jocelyn Bell, who in 1967, aged 24, after helping build what was then the world’s largest radio telescope, poring over the results (a daunting task), had the vision to see something odd in a few results, a “bit of scruff” as she put it in her first notes, strange signals issuing at exact intervals of 1.337 secs. Over the next few months Ms. Bell discovered three more, thus eliminating Little Green Men as a source, and in a comparative flash of time the astronomical community knew she’d made a huge discovery, “the greatest . . . of the 20th century,” according to the Russian Josif Shklovsky. She found pulsars (in a word) and thus a stage in star evolution. However, Bell was not awarded the Nobel Prize for this, which in 1974 went instead to her thesis advisor, Anthony Hewish, and the chief astronomer at Cambridge, Martin Ryell, for the discovery of pulsars. A lot of hell was raised about this at the time, but to no avail. Jocelyn herself didn’t think PhD students should get Nobels. Born to a Quaker family in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on July 15, 1943, Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell has since become (or was already?) one of Britain’s leading astronomical persons. Is there a feminine for that? ©

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The most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports. Stephen Jay Gould.

Americans are not good at statistics. Some say it’s because we’re not good at math in general, but with stats there is a cultural problem, our visceral belief in individualism. Take our discomfort with the concept of class. This has some beneficial aspects to it, but we have debilitating trouble with understanding the statistical realities behind the persistence of poverty—and wealth—in families of different classes. Since much of modern science deals in probabilities, it’s difficult for us to get our heads around something as simple as the causal connections between (say) tobacco and cancer or greenhouse gases and climate change. Why all this on July 16? Because it’s on this day, July 16, 1941, that Joe Dimaggio set the most improbable record in all of baseball. It began on May 15 with Joe’s single against the White Sox, and then in the next 55 games Joe hit safely at least once, getting his last hit (of the streak) against Cleveland on July 16. Of course nothing “statistical” is “impossible”, but hitting safely in 56 straight games comes close. Scientists Ed Purcell (a Nobelist) and Stephen Jay Gould have studied the thing exhaustively and written about it eloquently. It is, Purcell concluded, the only impossible thing that’s happened in baseball. “Nothing ever happened in baseball above and beyond the frequency predicted by coin tossing models.” Except Dimaggio’s streak. By the way, the statistically extremely probable failure to hit in 57 straight games cost the Yankee Clipper $10,000 in advertising from, of course, the Heinz Corporation. Now there’s reality for you. ©

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Made it, Ma. Top of the world. Jimmy Cagney in White Heat (1949).

A good simile for brevity might be “as a Hollywood marriage,” but it wouldn’t fit the 64 years’ marriage of James Francis Cagney and Frances Willard (“Billie”) Vernon, 1922-1986. But theirs was a New York wedding, when both were in the chorus line of a Broadway show (Pitter Patter) and James was working himself to death, daytimes, as a dancing teacher. But he grew up to hard work. Jimmy Cagney was born, somewhere in Manhattan’s low rent districts, on July 17, 1899, and despite his poverty and frailties (he was a sickly child) went to one of NYC’s top public high schools, Stuyvesant, and then to Columbia’s evening college, but his father’s death (1918) intervened and he went to work (to help his family) as a library custodian, a bellhop, a night watchman, and in his spare time he played semi-pro baseball and boxed, both rather well. But his mom didn’t approve of boxing, and one of the library patrons, theatre director Florence James, thought he had acting potential. And thereby hangs his, and Billie’s, tale. After an up-and-down career on Broadway, Jimmy and Billie moved to Hollywood and to his fame as “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera” (Orson Welles). Late nights, these days, he’s remembered mainly as a criminal type (see his breakthrough 1931 film, The Public Enemy), but remember that dancing: he was a remarkably versatile actor. In 1961, he and Billie retired to farm (seriously) in upstate New York, but his acting career jump-started again in the early 1980s, when Milos Forman brought Cagney back to play in Ragtime (1981). Jimmy Cagney died in 1986; Billie Vernon in 1994. ©

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I am prepared to die. Nelson Mandela, at the conclusion of the Rivonia Treason Trial, April 1964.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born into Xhosa aristocracy on July 18, 1918 in Cape Province, South Africa. The colloquial sense of ‘Rolihlahla’ is “troublemaker,” and I guess he lived up to it, becoming (after a personal pilgrimage and a long political and military struggle) the first black president of a multiracial Republic of South Africa in 1994. His triumph was a people’s triumph, and one of the political miracles of the modern age, crowned not just by his election but by his brilliant conduct of his office (for example see Playing the Enemy, by American journalist John Carlin, wherein we learn how he “nationalized” a ‘white’ sport: “One Country, One Team,” climaxing with victory in the 1995 World Cup) But I have my own Mandela story. In the mid 1980s, with Mandela still in prison, the Students’ Union at Lancaster University proposed to name the library coffee bar “The Nelson Mandela Coffee Bar.” I argued that it was inappropriate to name a (fairly dingy and small) coffee bar after one of the great persons of the century. Others argued against it for other reasons, and the motion was withdrawn. But not for long. The Students’ Union got a message to Mandela, via the ANC office in London, and got a reply. At the next relevant Senate, the ANC response was read: “Mr. Nelson Mandela would be honored to have a coffee bar named for him.” Stout parties collapsed, and Lancaster University had its Nelson Mandela Coffee Bar well before South Africa had its President Nelson Mandela. The coffee tasted better, though, in 1994. ©

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Care has always been taken [in] employment of numbers of inexpensive assistants whose work is in great measure mechanical. Edward C. Pickering, Annual Report, 1895.

Previous blogs have noted the inventor of astronomical spectrometry, Henry Draper, and three women who made much of his invention, Antonia Maury, Annie Cannon, and Henrietta Leavitt. Now to their employer, and the puzzle—by no means unusual—of those who open up opportunity to people they consider inferior. This was Edward C. Pickering, born July 19, 1846, in Boston, educated (with other boys and young men, of course) at Boston Latin and Harvard and destined to be the longest-serving head ((so far, 1877-1919) of the Harvard College Observatory. There Pickering improved Draper’s invention, but understood that its technical limitations could only be overcome by taking, recording, and comparing the maximum possible number of “shots” of the night sky. Such intensive yet skilled labor was expensive, and what better solution than to hire cheaply? Plus, while teaching at MIT, Pickering had already opened his astronomy classes to women (as occasional students, for too much scientific study was thought to compromise their reproductive capacities). So he hired, over the years, 80 “computers” (including Maury, Cannon, and Leavitt), paid them about half wages, and (to be fair) made many discoveries of his own. However, when one of his “computers” made her own discovery, Pickering proved reluctant to recognize the fact, and either drove her off (Maury) or simply believed her work “must be mistaken” (as in his response to a European who wrote him to congratulate him on one of his “computer’s” findings). Great astronomer, but an unwitting (and unwilling) equal opportunity reformer. ©

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The older you get, I have to say, the funnier you find life. Diana Rigg.

One of the odder things about getting older (or, if you prefer, “old”) is the familiarity dichotomy. That is, it has been (so far) easy to become old, and to watch one’s nearest family and friends get that way, too, but the more distant the relationship the harder it is to absorb “aging.” One’s faraway cousins, for sure, should be forever young, and one’s students too, and when you run into a greybeard you once taught, or a cousin you once played Monopoly© with, who’s “getting on,” it can be quite a turn. So I find it really problematic to understand, accept, get my head around the fact that, today, actor Diana Rigg is 76 years old. But I guess she must be. The math works out. She was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire on July 20, 1938, and spent her early years in India. Rigg was first called to my attention by my PhD advisor, David Lovejoy, as an example of superior English TV acting, in about 1966 or so when she brought her Royal Shakespeare Company talents to star (beautifully) as Emma Peel on The Avengers, a semi-serious send-up of the espionage genre (I remember the M.E.O.W. episode especially well). By then she’d already played Shakespeare (of course) and she would go on to do Molière, Stoppard, Colette, Sondheim, Williams (Tennessee), Albee, Chekhov, Euripedes (she must have been a terrifying Medea), Brecht, and just to drive home the point of her acting breadth, Noel Coward, Lerner & Loewe, James Bond, and Doctor Who. Right now she’s in Game of Thrones, about which I know nowt. But she’s got a 2014 Emmy nomination for it. It would seem that Ms. Rigg has grown old gracefully. It must have been the kedgeree. ©

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Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hart Crane, Inge Š oh, the debris! The wreckage! Tennessee Williams.

Everyone who takes reading seriously remembers, or at least I hope so, a novel or two that first lifted him or her above the ordinary to see great distances, to contemplate new places and people and undreamed of lives. For me it was two, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, a 14th-birthday gift from a junior high English teacher who lived next door, and then The Sun Also Rises, assigned reading in Phyllis Rackin’s sophomore fiction class at Penn. Since it’s Hemingway’s birthday today, let’s stick with the latter. Ernest Hemingway was born into a prosperous Chicago family (Oak Park, actually) on July 21, 1899 and, after quite a bit of experience, fashioned his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1928), in a style Archibald MacLeish thought as hard and spare and sharp as a whittled stick of walnut. Nearly poetic. Under Prof. Rackin’s guidance we came to see the thing as a prose wonder, conveying worlds of emotion and loss and hurt (and occasionally manic celebration) in short sentences and words of one syllable (or fewer, it sometimes seemed). His style (and to an extent his life) became old, sometimes trite, and would be mercilessly parodied by E. B. White, but in The Sun Also Rises it was indeed a miracle, and as a bonus the book is crucial to understanding the explosion of creativity which enveloped those Paris exiles, Hemingway of course, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane (also born on 7/21/99), Isadora Duncan, Malcolm Cowley and others, all presided over by patron saints Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein. If you haven’t yet read The Sun Also Rises, do so with all deliberate speed.©

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If tombstones were still in style, I would want to have the words renaissance hack chiseled right under my name. Dennis Flanagan.

Given the appalling scientific illiteracy of much of our adult population, including half the House of Representatives, it’s not yet time to memorialize a popularizer of science. But just so, we badly need a lot more of what Dennis Flanagan gave us in his long (1947-1984) editorship of Scientific American. Flanagan was born in Manhattan on July 22, 1919. His family moved to Bucks County, PA, whence he attended college at the University of Michigan. By then he was stone deaf, from a serious ear infection, but had taught himself to lip read with great facility. Perhaps that act of translation predisposed him to make sense of science for us, but it took him a while to get there, including a period with Life magazine’s reference room where he provided captions for Robert Capa’s famous pictures of the D-Day invasions. Flanagan also acquired an interest in science and, coming from a prosperous family, he was able to get partners and money together to take over the then-moribund Scientific American in 1947. He quickly got himself into trouble with an article he wrote on how to make an H-Bomb (he was threatened with a treason charge and 3000 copies of the magazine were impounded and burned) but recovered his balance, and moved the venerable magazine’s (it was founded in 1845) circulation from 40,000 to nearly 700,000 when he finally retired. Over his door was the motto “Science is what scientists do. It is not what non-scientists think they ought to be doing.” He set himself the task of explaining that motto to an intelligent lay public, and enjoyed much, but obviously not quite enough, success.©

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In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. Raymond Chandler.

The question of whether crime fiction is, or can be, great literature is worth pondering, but some crime novelists have proven very long-lasting. One such is Dashiell Hammett; another is a writer who—once he got round to writing—modeled himself after Hammett. Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, lived for a time in Nebraska, and was educated (thanks to an Irish uncle) at one of England’s top public schools, Dulwich. That unusual childhood owed to his drunken father’s abandonment, and in good time drink would return to define much of Raymond’s life, and his death. Meanwhile, he did a variety of jobs, loyally supported his mother, moved with her back to the USA, and ended up (in 1924, after his mother’s death) marrying an older divorcée, Cissy Pascal. His best job was as an oil company executive, but drink and the Great Depression ended that, and he decided to learn to write. He may have had “serious” literature in mind (he was, after all, classically educated), but he started with crime because there was a market and, he thought, it might be easier. He sold a few short pieces and a novelette before his Philip Marlowe novels, especially the second one, Farewell, My Lovely (1940) made him marketable and got him work in Hollywood where he also wrote some famous screenplays, notably Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia, and Strangers on a Train. We can’t doubt Chandler’s talent, and the movies are worth watching, the Marlowes worth reading, still today. As with most literary puzzles, you can solve this one yourself, and learn something in the process. ©

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As Earth stirs in her winter sleep/ and puts out grass and flowers/ despite the snow,/ despite the falling snow. Robert Graves, She Tells Her Love.

Among the more gifted writers in English who didn’t establish an American reputation, one might put Robert Graves near the top of the list. Poet, memoirist, classicist, novelist, translator, critic and historian, in a long working life (that began in prosperous Wimbledon on July 24, 1895) Graves published 140 works. The release of Nobel committee papers informs us that Graves was seriously considered for the prize in literature in 1962 (it went that year to John Steinbeck), and many of his books are still in print. If you happen to have a first edition of Graves, notably I, Claudius (1934) you can really cash in, but you’d probably find your best market in Graves’s native England. His relative obscurity here may owe to the scholarly erudition he brought even to his fiction, or perhaps to his unconventional marital and sexual life, but there it is. His modestly heroic and massively unhappy experiences in the trenches of WWI were recounted in his most famous work, Goodbye to All That (1929). After the war he switched from classics to English at Oxford, but classics remained his first love and main interest. Besides the Claudius novels (the other was Claudius the God, 1935) he is most worth knowing because of his wonderful prose translations (and retellings) of The Greek Myths (2 vols, 1955), which puts the whole corpus in narrative form, seemingly chronological, and offers the lay reader the best chance of grasping the sense and significance of these stories that are so basic to our culture. I think, too, that Graves is a much more than passable poet, certainly a prolific one; his Collected Poems run to 3 vols. ©

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Eakins was that extreme rarity, an artist who refused to tell a lie even in the service of his own imagination. Robert Hughes.

Americans’ legendary impatience with abstract art is witnessed by the stories surrounding Teddy Roosevelt’s (apocryphal) reaction to Marcel Duchamps’ modernist classic, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’: “it looks like a staircase descending a nude.” But it wasn’t just politicians: an eminent art critic wrote that the painting looked “like an explosion in a shingle factory.” But we haven’t reacted very well, either, to uncompromising realism, witness the case of Thomas Eakins. Born in Philadelphia on July 25, 1844, Eakins studied in Europe and came away with a convert’s devotion to great early modern realists like Velazquez. But as a modern, Eakins had more resources to hand, not least photography, but also wider access to physiological sources like operating theaters and cadavers, and he set himself the task of rendering reality as seen, and teaching students (male and female) to do the same. He was extraordinarily prolific, a popular teacher. and so we have a large body of his students’ work. His most famous paintings (other than the sculler on the Schuylkill, 1871, which inspired me as a young oarsman) were two massive canvasses portraying actual surgeries, ‘The Gross Clinic’ (a thighbone operation, 1875), and ‘The Agnew Clinic’ (a mastectomy, 1889). But it’s his portraits that are most appealing, notably those of women, for Eakins saw his subjects so clearly that the viewer seems to know them, see them mid-conversation as it were. But more often than not, Eakins’ realism got him in trouble, and his portraits were often thought too prosaic and uncomplimentary. So perhaps we are just uncomfortable with the truths that high art can tell us, whether those truths are “realist” or “abstract”. ©

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All I had to do was to say Gracie, how's your brother, and she talked for 38 years. George Burns.

We are not quite sure which July 26th Gracie Allen was born on, but we know it was in San Francisco, and we know it was before “the awfully big earthquake” (as she would later describe it, explaining why she couldn’t find her birth certificate) of 1906. Best guess is 1896, but Gracie’s husband and straight man, George Allen, had July 26, 1902 inscribed on her gravestone. So let’s go with that. Born of Irish immigrant stock, Gracie Cecelia went to a classical high school and took its academic course (including Latin and Greek), so it’s a bit unlikely that she was as dense as she played it in vaudeville, on radio, and (unforgettably) on television. She began performing as a dancer (with her two sisters) but fell in with Burns in about 1922, and married him in exactly 1926. Theirs was an act that depended on chat, so they hadn’t anything to do with Hollywood until talkies started, but immediately they began doing short takes, beginning with one called “Lambchops,” which prefigured their television success. But first it was radio. There they perfected the ‘extended, repeated, running joke’, beginning with Gracie’s missing brother and including her run for President in 1940 (“I don’t know much about the lend-lease bill, but if we owe it we should pay it.”) She got over 40,000 write-in votes. So they had a following when they switched to TV, and a formula, and two adopted children (Sandra and Ronald), and were hugely successful as a couple and as comedic stars. “Burns & Allen.” Gracie died of heart disease in ’64. George visited her weekly until he died, aged 100, in 1996.

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Nice guys finish last. Leo Durocher.

The more highly competitive society becomes, the more hazard it runs in breaking the connections between sport and sportsmanship, witness the on-court shennanigans of a John McEnroe or the off-course ingestions of a Lance Armstrong (et alii, one is sorry to say). But in the case of Leo “The Lip” Durocher, those connections were only strained or attenuated, and he is fondly remembered (today, anyway) as fiercely competitive, a sparkplug, and we forget that he was actually suspended from baseball for 1947, thus (he was then boss of ‘Dem Bums’) missing a chance to manage Jackie Robinson in his rookie year. Durocher was born in West Springfield, MA, on July 27, 1905, and was fully ensconced in the major leagues as a fielding—but not batting—shortstop by 1928, starting with the Yankees (where he offended almost all his teammates, including the Bambino, never mind the umpires). When Durocher shuffled off the playing fields forever, the Times obituarist noted that he probably found his spiritual home early in his career, playing for the Cardinals in the Gashouse Gang days:the Deans, ‘Pepper’ Martin, Frisch; Durocher’s “taste for all-out combat on the field and merry hi-jinks off it blended nicely with the rough and ready style of the Cardinals.” Graduated to managerial status, that mix was a less happy one, and although as manager Leo enjoyed great success from time to time (notably with the 1951 Giants), he could not resurrect the Cubs or the Astros, proving perhaps that competitiveness cannot substitute entirely for talent. ©

[Stanley]

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Attr. to Emerson.

The American Dream can have had few more assiduous practitioners than Earl Silas Tupper, born poor on a hard scrabble farm in New Hampshire on July 28, 1907. Poverty, apparently, did not agree well with him, and early on he vowed to become a millionaire by the time he was 30. He didn’t make his million by 1937, but it was not for lack of effort. Earl thought he was an inventor, and that with the right invention, and of course a patent to protect it, he would achieve his ambition. His notebooks show a fertile, if perhaps somewhat febrile, mind, including a fish-propelled boat (1926); a non-drip ice-cream cone, complete with gutters (1936); a snake-venom sucker-outer (1937), and an absolutely diabolical women’s corset (1937). Some of these suggest a kind of Rube Goldberg mentality, but the dream was always there and often he included advertising slogans with his drawings. But his only sustained business venture was pretty humdrum (a nursery and gardening service) and it went bankrupt in the Great Depression. He then got a job with Dupont and started messing about with petroleum waste products, and hey presto we had Tupperware. He called it “wonderbowl” and it didn’t take off until a Ms. Brownie Wise wrote him about her success selling the thing at house parties. Earl got his million (about 19 of them), fired Brownie Wise, renounced his citizenship and bought his very own tax avoidance island off the coast of Costa Rica (the Rich Coast, in case you were wondering). Where, perhaps, he read Ayn Rand.