BOB'S BITS

[David Whipp]

Would have liked the 'like' button for that one.

[Stanley]

I use the grin smilie....

[Stanley]

i will write you a series of poems showing how things look/ to a cockroach. the coming of archie, by Don Marquis.

American journalism threw up quite a number of street corner philosophers who wrote wittily, sometimes wisely, about the issues of the day, human nature, or whatever struck their fancy. Several developed national followings, for instance Finley Peter Dunne, a Chicago columnist whose Irish immigrant “Mr. Dooley” issued political broadsides in brogue that lampooned (and delighted) president Theodore Roosevelt. Another Illinoisan, Don Marquis, became popular enough to have a US Navy ship named after him, the USS Don Marquis. Marquis was born in rural Illinois (Walnut), on July 29, 1878, and after an indifferent school career migrated slowly (via the Atlanta Journal) to the New York Evening Sun and then the Herald Tribune, where he was well established by the 1920s. His daily columns (“The Tower” and then “The Lantern”) were nationally syndicated and, in addition, he wrote prolifically for national middle- and high-brow magazines including The Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s. But he was best known for a cockroach and a cat, archie and mehitabel. archie, the roach, wrote free verse poetry and, only able to jump on one typewriter key at a time, always in lower case and without punctuation. Illustrated by the creator of Krazy Kat, George Herriman, the archy and mehitabel books sold like hotcakes and made Marquis a national figure. Not much read now, archie the roach was once thought a good enough poet to appear in my high school literature texts.

[Stanley]

Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. Henry Ford.

The current Republican Party’s “unease” between the ‘purists' and the ‘pragmatists' has had many expressions almost since its birth, but a fairly constant theme is Main Street versus Wall Street. Even that has been through several versions (I remember ‘Big Ten versus the Ivy League’), but it helps history students better to understand the Grand Old Party and unlock such imponderables as (for instance) how ‘Ike’ Eisenhower could possibly have been a divisive figure within the party who “stole” the nomination in 1952. Henry Ford may not help us solve the riddle but he offers another illustration of it. Born on July 30, 1863, in rural Michigan, of Anglo-Irish immigrant stock (yet another pesky foreigner), Ford was a tinkerer with an instinct for motive power, first with steam and finally the ‘infernal’ combustion engine. While working for Thomas Edison, Ford developed an ‘automobile’ (an interesting word), but then resigned from Edison and formed first one and then another company, the one we know (Ford Motor) in 1903. In both cases (and later when he needed more capital) he went with local backing, Michigan bankers, manufacturers, real estate men, even some of his own employees, but not for want of trying to get Wall Street money. But Wall Street wanted financial control right down to wage levels and Ford wanted to run the whole show (and pay his workers enough to buy his cars). The Wall Street Journal called Ford “a traitor to his class,” and thereby hangs (by a thread) our tale of why one wing of the GOP really can’t stand the other, and never has been able to.

[Stanley]

Books are like mirrors. If a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out. Our birthday person (a riddle).

Let’s do a riddle. Our birthday person (aka “it”) is a living author who was born on July 31 xxxx of Anglo-French-Scots stock. It had an unhappy childhood but went to a school founded by the abolitionist Wilberforce and led by an impressive headmaster named Alfred Dunn. Its mother was a scientist who suffered from MS and is now dead. It doesn’t speak to its father. Its best high school friend drove a battered turquoise Ford Anglia. After university, its first real job was for Amnesty International, during which time it got the basic idea for its first novel, and it then taught English as a foreign language in Portugal where it married unhappily and wrote in a desultory way. Its first marriage having collapsed, it moved to Scotland where it lived on state benefits and continued to write in a desultory way. Despite its parents’ unhappy marriage, it always remembered that they first met on a train leaving King’s Cross Station and bound for Scotland. Its first manuscript was published more or less on a whim because a publisher’s 8-year old daughter loved the typescript. Eight novels later, it is one of the richest philanthropists in the world, gives heavily to MS research among many other causes, supports the British Labour Party, notoriously opposes Scottish Independence and detests The Daily Mail (one of its fictional villains reads the Mail daily). It attends the Scottish Episcopal Church, cannot understand why its books are regarded as irreligious, and is again married, I hope happily. “It” is Joanne (J.K.) Rowling and she, bless her cotton socks, is 49 years old today.

[David Whipp]

Blast!

I was going to puzzle that out, but the answer's in the last sentence.

[Stanley]

The only time I have ever been to college was to deliver a commencement address. C. C. Spaulding

The Civil War brought freedom to slaves, but ill-educated and without compensation for their past labors the freedmen were a ready-made underclass, and as post-war southern politics became virulently racist, southern state governments treated them that way. Still, the slavery period had created a black bourgeoisie made up of ex-house servants, overseers, and craftsmen. And in several states there were significant pockets of free blacks, notably in North Carolina’s hill country where Quakerism among whites and a persistent Native American population created a buffer zone within which free blacks could prosper. Charles Clinton Spaulding came from just such a community. Born on August 1, 1874, to parents who were third-generation ‘free Negroes,’ Spaulding graduated from high school in Durham, NC, and by 1898 (a very bad year for NC blacks) managed a grocery cooperative. Soon he and two partners took over an ailing mutual insurance company (North Carolina Mutual) and by 1910 it had become “the largest Negro business” in the world. Durham was an unusual southern city, and in it Spaulding was able to support black suffrage and advocate for black education while still appearing (to whites) to accept second-class status. He was no Uncle Tom, but had he survived into the 1960s he could not but have appeared so. He died in 1952, on his 78th birthday. As his hero Booker T. Washington had urged, Spaulding cast down his bucket where he was, minded his business, became a major benefactor of black colleges and universities, and (on the side) won advances for Durham blacks as concessions rather than as rights. ©

[Stanley]

Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant? How about a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase? Myrna Loy, circa 1935.

Of the facts I could find about Myrna Loy, the four that strike my fancy are (1) she was named after a Nebraska whistle stop on the Burlington railroad; (2) her big breakthrough came as a result of being pushed into a swimming pool; (3) her leftish politics got her on Hitler’s hit list; and (4) a statue made of her when (1922) she was a high school senior in Venice, CA, features in an early scene of Grease (1978). If she knew about it, it must have given her some pleasurable amusement; and as a star pleasurable amusement became her trademark. Myrna Adele Williams was born in Helena, Montana, on August 2, 1905, to a rancher couple, David and Adelle Mae Williams. Despite the distance, the family acquired some Hollywood connections (David sold some LA real estate to Charlie Chaplin in 1915) and after David’s death in 1918 Myrna and Adelle moved permanently to southern California. Myrna’s first real job was at Grauman’s Theatre and she played “showy” parts in silents, 1925-29. She managed the transition to talkies but her career languished until director W. S. van Dyke pushed her into a swimming pool to test his instinct that she would make a perfect Nora Charles in his upcoming film adaptation of Hammett’s The Thin Man. Her good humored, if damp, aplomb got her the role and made her a star. Myrna would appear with co-star William Powell in 15 films, not all of them Thin Man sequels, and she starred in many other famous films including her favorite, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Myrna Loy was a breast cancer survivor; she died of old age; and her ashes are buried under a simple granite marker in Helena, inscribed ‘Myrna Loy, 1905-1993'. ©

[Stanley]

The ups and many downs of Elisha Graves Otis.

In some rags to riches stories the rags stick in the memory, and that was pretty much the case with Elisha Graves Otis, whose path to the upper floors was littered with failure and heartbreak and who then didn’t live long enough to enjoy the view. But it started happily enough, on a Vermont farm, on August 3, 1811. He was a skillful boy who enjoyed tinkering, and moved away from home in 1831 to earn enough money to marry, set up a gristmill, which failed, and then a sawmill, which also failed. Then his wife died, leaving him with two toddlers, and he became a piece-worker in Troy, NY, making dolls. There he invented a new process, which quadrupled doll output, and used his bonus (a princely $500) to set up as an inventor. Two promising inventions later, the city of Albany cut off his water supply and the business failed. We next find Otis managing a Yonkers bedstead factory, puzzling how he could safely move heavy stuff to an upper floor. In 1851 he installed a safety brake on the lift. He had done something similar before and neither patented the device nor requested a bonus, but three years later P. T. Barnum, seeking to cash in on the vogue for Crystal Palace exhibitions, announced a World’s Fair, and our Otis thought he might usefully demonstrate his “safety elevator.” He did so, quite spectacularly (“death defying”, Barnum would have called it), and the orders flooded in, first (1858) for the 5-story Hogwarts (sorry, I meant “Haughwout”) Department Store in New York City. Otis almost immediately died of diphtheria, aged 50, leaving his surviving son and company to profit from his perseverance.

[Stanley]

Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right. Mark Twain.

“Real” and particularly vintage Champagne has become quite expensive, so when on August 2 I attended a party to celebrate two (!!!) 2014 PhDs—in Pharmacology at SLU and Chemistry at UMSL—earned by former Honors College students whom I taught in 2004 (when they were freshmen), I satisfied myself by buying each a bottle of sparkling “méthode champenoise” (not the ‘real’ stuff, but certainly potable). So what pleasure to find, by coincidence, that August 4, 1693 is the date traditionally given for the invention of champagne by a Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon, at the Abbey of Hautvilliers in (of course) France. And then how disappointing to read that the tradition is just a load of old cobblers, or oversweet grapes. Dom Pierre Pérignon was indeed a gifted winemaker who effected critical improvements in the fermentation, aging, and bottling of Champagne’s (then) vin de pays, but his talent was in discovering how to avoid the post bottling fermentation that, in his day, was likely to make bottles explode, one after another, in an expensive alcoholic chain reaction. Dom Pérignon made red wine, and figured out how to keep it still. The truth of champagne is difficult to uncork, but (quelle horreur!!), la méthode may have been discovered by an Englishman, a London doctor, in about 1662 and who in the same year became a founding member of the Royal Society. So you see, méthode champenoise wine is really quite an appropriate gift for science PhDs. Congratulations, Dr. Carroll and Dr. Pope!!! (By the way, the French finally got around to champagne, the blanc, brut bubbly, but a good deal later). ©

[Stanley]

I petition to your Honors not for my own life . . . but . . . that if it be possible, no more innocent blood may be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. Petition of Mary Easty, condemned for witchcraft.

Truly literary giants walked the earth in 19th-century New England, but almost to a man (and to a woman, for they included Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, and Sophia Ripley) they were discomfited by their Puritan ancestors, and they returned often in fiction, poetry and philosophy to puzzle out their mixed heritage. To name just three, Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne, they wrote brilliantly about the good, bad, and pug ugly characteristics of their forebears. No one was better at it than Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels and short stories can get you up to scratch on the Puritans without ever cracking a history book. Try “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Gentle Boy,” “The Grey Champion,” and “Endicott and the Red Cross” among the short stories and, of course, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables among the novels. And of them all, Hawthorne was the most troubled by the past, his own family past, for his great-great grandfather, John Hathorne [sic], was one of the most implacable judges at the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693. And it is not merely a modern sensibility that regards Salem as a travesty. John Hathorne disregarded Puritan legal principles and Puritan theology to rush to judgment and thus to shed (in the eloquent words of observer Thomas Brattle) “the innocentest blood imaginable.” Judge John Hathorne (who, legend has it, was “given blood to drink” by a victim’s curse) was born in Salem on August 5, 1641, died there in 1717, and forever haunted the imagination of his great-great grandson. ©
[When I saw this mail just after I had got up I almost deleted it. I thought it was Nigerian Spam!]

[Stanley]

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. Sir Alexander Fleming.

My experience of science labs is limited, but the working research labs I have been in have seemed fairly chaotic places, a confusion of containers and fume cupboards, now further cluttered by metering devices of varied pedigree and finite purpose. Looking on as a trespasser, I wonder at the apparent contrast between this jumble and the “scientific method.” It more easily calls to mind my high school physics teacher, Herman Kirkpatrick’s, veneration for “the fudge factor” in science. But not to worry. Accidents and alarms are part of science, too, never more famously than when in September 1928 Alexander Fleming returned to his London lab after a long weekend and noticed something odd (“that’s funny,” he is alleged to have said) about some petri dishes he’d left stacked in a corner. One of them had gone mouldy and it looked as if the mould had (so to speak) executed the staphyloccocus colony in the dish. Alert to the potential of accident (he had made a previous discovery in the same way), Fleming cultured the mould, extracted “mould juice” from it, and found it an effective destroyer of several harmful bacteria, most of them “Gram-positive,” including those that caused pneumonia, meningitis, and scarlet fever. And thereby hangs our tale. Fleming, born in Scotland on August 6, 1881, was always properly modest about his discovery and gave full credit to the scientists who, no doubt in more orderly ways and cleaner labs, figured out how to purify the stuff (penicillin) and produce it in quantity. He gladly shared the 1945 Nobel with Drs. Ernst Chain and Howard Florey who made Fleming’s happy accident into a modern medical miracle and saved thousands of lives including, in 1948, my own. ©

[Stanley]

In the distant future . . . light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. Charles Darwin, 1859.

Evolution is an endlessly fascinating field whether we are discussing annelid worms or bluebirds, but as Stephen Jay Gould used to tease, we are self-centeredly obsessed with human evolution. And the field itself has thrown up some interesting characters, among them Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, born in Kenya on August 7, 1903, to missionary parents. Leakey grew up among the local people, played their games, learned Swahili, and was adopted into the Kikuyu tribe. This may have made him, by English standards, a bit wild, and indeed his education in England was not uniformly successful and his first marriage ended in scandal. With his new wife, Mary Nicols Leakey, he returned to Africa where he, and then eventually Mary, and even later a couple of their sons, became famous for their discoveries of human remains: fossil bones, tools, camp detritus, and perhaps most dramatically footprints in fossilized volcanic ash, that proved to the Leakeys that hominids were an ancient and varied genus and had first evolved in Africa. Louis’s most famous fieldwork took place in the Olduvai Gorge, which he began with his first wife, Frida, in the late 1920s, then Mary in the 1930s and 1950s. An odd bird, Louis’s religious faith and strong identification with Kenya made him an often unwilling participant on the liberation struggles and established him and his family as pivotal characters in Kenyan politics as well as in paleoanthropology. Those associations continue in the person of Richard Leakey, the second son of Louis and Mary, and Louise, their grand-daughter. The family’s story is the subject of a brilliant biography, Ancestral Passions, by Virginia Morell.

[Stanley]

That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. Francis Hutchison.

The vogue for Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) on the right and generally among “free market” advocates obscures the role that Smith’s moral philosophy played in shaping the political economy of America’s founding generation. To understand the point, first refer to Smith’s “other” work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and then to Smith’s teacher, Francis Hutcheson, whose life task was to apply Lockean philosophy to issues of private and public ethics. Hutcheson was born in County Down, Ireland, on August 8, 1694, took his theology degree at Glasgow and was ordained in the Church of Scotland in 1716. His association with “New Light” evangelicals caused him to leave the ministry, and a good marriage enabled him to devote the rest of his life to philosophy as (from 1729) the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. His writings dominated Scottish “Common Sense” philosophy and exercised great influence not only on Smith but, partly as a required text in all the colonial colleges, on a whole generation of American political leaders, notably John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Wilson. His leading principles (including “the moral sense” and the “public sense”) held as a main value the “determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery.” For Hutcheson and for his many disciples the “pursuit of happiness” was a common as well as an individual imperative. It is good, too, that Hutchison listed as another of his six senses a “sense of the ridiculous.” Every once in a while, it has been observed, one has to laugh, if only to stop from crying. ©

[Stanley]

It must ... be admitted that very simple relations ... exist between the volumes of gaseous substances and the numbers of simple or compound molecules which form them. Count Avogadro.

Much of what we teach in universities is, an UMSL philosopher once suggested to me, nothing more nor less than vocabulary. It’s a thought that should make us more interested (than we usually are?) in the origins and histories of words. Some words, for instance “atom”, are quite ancient and have changed their meaning as history (in this case science) has developed around them. Other words are of recent origin and carry the sniff of discovery. One such word is “molecule”, which denotes a usually stable combination of two or more atoms, from quite simple ones such as atmospheric oxygen (O2) to impossibly complex polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (which, in general, we should not inhale or ingest). “Molecule” is of relatively recent origin, coined by the great Italian chemist Count Amedeo Avogadro, born August 9, 1776, in Turin. In about 1811, in the process of discovering (and naming) molecules, Count Avogadro also made his own surname into a vocabulary item, critical in chemistry and useful in other branches of science, Avogadro’s Number (or Constant = NA), an impossibly large (but finite) digit, 6.022 x 1023, the number of molecules contained in one “mole” (a word coined later by a German chemist, in 1894) of a molecular or atomic substance. Thus we can (for instance) derive the relative molecular weight (mass) of different gases from samples of known volume (and other constants). I think I have that right. Anyway, Avogadro’s findings were not fully accepted during his lifetime (he died in 1856), but that came with experiments conducted in 1860. Thus the Count's words became, so to speak, law. ©

[chinatyke]

.... Avogadro’s Number (or Constant = NA), an impossibly large (but finite) digit, 6.022 x 1023, the number of molecules contained in one “mole” ....

My chemistry and maths teachers would turn in their graves, I can hear them now "pay attention to detail, young man" : NA = 6.022 x 10²³

[Stanley]

It's a transcription error in the mail programme China. I don't edit Bob's Bits....

What strong music from such a little girl. A (male) director of music, on turning down an application from Marilyn Ziffrin, circa 1960.

Some people live long and productive lives but never do more than hover on the brink of fame. One hears their names occasionally, but only if one listens in the right places. In the case of classical music, one such person is composer and teacher Marilyn Jane Ziffrin who is happily (one hopes) celebrating her 88th birthday today in Chicago. She was born (August 10, 1926) in an immigrant neighborhood in Moline, Illinois, and grew up in a family home filled with music. Each (of four) children were required a period of piano study, and each exceeded that, so each played at least one instrument. Marilyn ‘did’ piano, clarinet, and saxophone, organized a band in Junior High (they’d moved across the river to Davenport), and composed for her band. None of her early works survive, and at university (Wisconsin, BM 1948), she studied only Music History. It was not until her MA (Columbia, 1949) that she succumbed to the advice (and the temptation) to compose seriously, and after a decade or so of struggle she gained an anonymous patron who subsidized her summers for 15 years. This has produced a long lifetime of successful music crafting in several genres (mainly classical) and music instruction (mainly composition) at several universities, most recently Northeastern Illinois in Chicago. Ziffrin has published over 60 compositions, many recorded and including a few prizewinners. Critics have likened her work to Bartok’s, noted its neo-Romantic character, and praised it as “peculiarly American.” That suggests a varied output, but she always begins her compositions with “just a line,” for which Ms. Ziffrin credits Bach. Not such a bad pedigree, shall we say?

[Stanley]

Either you deal with the reality, or you can be sure the reality is going to deal with you. Alex Haley.

History, Alex Haley was not first to say, often belongs to its winners. That’s especially so when today’s winners were also yesterday’s, for then they “own” the conclusion and also provide much of the evidence. Losers are in danger of being rendered rendered silent. Haley, born in Ithaca, NY, on August 11, 1921, set out to write a history of the losers, ‘voicing’ Americans of African origin, and encountered predictable problems of source material and perspective. His solution was to produce a novel that—while it offered historical narrative—used fiction to fill in gaps and provide drama, and also focused on Haley’s family ancestry. The was Roots: the Saga of an American Family (1976), and it became one of the most successful historical novels in US publishing history, not only a Pulitzer Prize winner and translated into 37 languages but also the basis for a commercial television series, which ran on ABC and found well over 130 million viewers. Haley’s own biography is fascinating, up through Coast Guard ranks to become its Chief Journalist and then successful Playboy interviewer (of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and George Lincoln Rockwell) before he took on Roots. Huge success drew huge controversy, and Haley’s accuracy has been challenged on critical points. It’s also agreed that—losers though African slaves surely were—they and their masters left enough source material to render fictions unnecessary whether your aim is truth or drama. Still, Alex Haley’s Roots helped to redraw our imagined maps of the American past and for that he is owed much.©

[Stanley]

Every time I make a picture the critic's estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent. Cecil B. DeMille.

One of the more interesting facts about Cecil B. DeMille is that it is his real name, right from his birth in western Massachusetts on August 12, 1881. Well, almost. His father may have spelled the name (of French and Dutch origin) “DeMil.” But he (a peripatetic Episcopalian minister and semi-pro actor) died when Cecil was 12, and his widow became Mrs. “DeMille” and set up an acting school for girls. Both Cecil and his brother, meanwhile, had well and truly caught the acting bug, and after a spell in military college started treading the boards full time. Soon enough, though, he was on his way to becoming the most famous, certainly the most flamboyant, movie director and producer of the 20th century, as the NY Times obituary called him “the P. T. Barnum of the movie industry.” He is best known for his blockbusters, two versions (1923 and 1956) of The Ten Commandments (to be fair, he did use the same commandments), The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Unconquered (1947), Samson and Delilah (1949), and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) (which is not, by the way, about God). He learned earlier than most that American audiences loved spectacle and they loved myth, especially those myths that they could see as patriotic. Still going strong at 77, Cecil DeMille was planning a movie on the Book of Revelation. His death spared us this experience, which would no doubt have been more searing, more enthralling, and ‘more better’ than the original. I could not, however, find out who was cast to play the role of the Lamb-Horned Beast of the Earth or the Whore of Babylon. The mind boggles. ©

[Stanley]

Make the world better. Lucy Stone¹s last words, spoken to her daughter Alice, 18 October 1893.

People who tread where none have gone before we call pioneers. Many deserve the title. But Lucy Stone blazed so many trails that the word “pioneer” seems a paltry thing. Lucy was born near Worcester, MA, on August 13, 1818, on real, genuine subsistence farm. She would remember the “opulence” of making on site everything needed, but not as clearly as she recalled her father’s utter dominance, the pure patriarchy of her farm life. (Later correspondence among siblings suggests that it was also an unusually open family. ) After Lucy left the farm, she became the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree (at Oberlin) and showed so little gratitude for it that she became the first woman to agitate successfully for equal pay for equal work (on the Oberlin faculty). She parlayed the good fortune of a strong, tuneful voice (and a classical education) into a remarkable skill at oratory in an age that condemned women who spoke in public. She was one of the first women to take to the lecture circuit, full time, for pay, oddly enough with her father’s blessing. We do not, however, know how pleased he was that she was one of the first women to wear bloomers. Later she was one of the first women to retain her maiden name when she married (1855), and the contract she drew up with her husband (Henry Blackwell) may have been the first to declare a mutual, public recognition of equality in all matters—including sex. Lucy continued to blaze her own trail after the Civil War, then in 1893 become the first person in Massachusetts to be cremated and, very possibly, the first New England woman to have over 2000 people attend her funeral, where her pall was borne equally by six men and six women. ©

[Stanley]

A bunco man, desperado, and bad-man generally, yet he . . . had many excellent qualities. Holliday¹s obituary in the Denver Republican, November, 1887.

In the context of our culture’s “love and death” gun fixations, we might reconsider episodes of western history romanticized by Hollywood like the Gunfight at the OK Corral, the Earps (representing law’n’order) versus the Clantons (representing something else). And the romance sinks to banality when we inquire into some of the principal characters, such as John Henry Holliday. He was no westerner, born in Georgia on August 14, 1851 and (like many southern gents) educated in classics and honor before going north to get a profession. In Philadelphia he got dentistry, then went back to Georgia. There he was diagnosed with TB, and went west for the dry air, whereat his story tended away from false teeth and towards psychopathy. Soon “Doc" started shooting people, African-Americans at first (and periodically thereafter), beat a fellow gambler almost to death in Breckenridge, TX, and was usually, not always, a step or two ahead of the law. But having met the Earps Doc decided it might be a better wrinkle to be the law, so he became a deputy before having to retire temporarily for shooting up several low-life acquaintances. This first dalliance with the Earps took place in Dodge City, KS, whence they all moved to Tombstone where Doc got mad at Ike Clanton (for getting “Big-Nose” Kate, Doc’s girlfriend, drunk), the immediate stimulus for the OK Gunfight, less a bang than a very bloody whimper. The TB finally got Doc in 1887. Doc may have died a Presbyterian, some say a Catholic, others believe he became a Methodist. Perhaps now we could all agree that it was not soon enough. ©

[Stanley]

And then comes Sir Walter Scott with . . . his . . . sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. Mark Twain.

The best undergraduate essay I have ever read? It might have been one of the very first, for I still remember Charlie Pottins’ overlong (75 pages plus) handwritten screed on the origins of the American Civil War, which he wrote in 1970 for my History of the USA tutorial. A thoroughgoing Marxist, Charlie gave culture its due, and he delighted to begin his essay with Mark Twain’s famous analysis (in Life on the Mississippi, 1883) that blamed southern nationalism (and southern secession) on the planters’ vogue for Sir Walter Scott. Walter Scott, born in Edinburgh on August 15, 1771, became the first truly famous Anglophone novelist, and one of the difficulties of Charlie’s intro was that—in the ante bellum United States—Scott was just about as popular in the North as in the South. A sickly child (polio), Scott recovered well to become a fine scholar, an accomplished lawyer and a high court judge. Before that, though, he wrote some popular poetry, in which important themes for his Scottish novels were established, notably the romanticization of the highland past, clans, kilts, sporrans and all (which, in Ivanhoe, 1819, he extended into the English past). If we lay our own Civil War to him, another of the ironies of Scott’s life that he, legal pillar of the Anglo establishment in Edinburgh, in his fictions reversed the cruel deracination of Scottish highland culture followed by the English after their victory over the clans at Culloden (1745). But Sir Walter’s time was the Romantic era, after all, and Mark Twain had even less time for Romance than he had for the southern plantocracy. So too Charlie Pottins. ©

[Stanley]

Incompetent, pedantic, graceless, incredible, and boring. From a review of Hugo Gernsback's second sci fi novel.

E-mail, then Twitter, may be held responsible for several travesties on language, not least what is now called Twitter writing, as in “IC4U.” But, sad to say, the crime is not so new. One early perpetrator wrote a novel (in 1911) entitled Ralph 124C41+, which (in case you’re wondering) was held to mean Ralph: One to Foresee for Many. The author was Hugo Gernsback (né Gernsbacher, in Luxembourg, on August 16, 1884) who had emigrated to the USA in 1904. He brought with him an enthusiasm for the new (he would hold over 80 patents). His enthusiasms (soon enough) transferred to radio, and he really started up amateur radio. He was also, in more ways than one, a serial publisher, and published/edited over 50 magazines. Some of them were of dubious character, but one of his catalogue-magazines, published to help him sell electronics bits and pieces to his 10,000-member Wireless Association of America, began in the 1910s to carry what he first called “scientifiction.” Hugo Gernsback was not a particularly nice chap, a “scientific” racist and a publisher careless of writers’ rights (notably copyright), stingy and late (when he was at his best) with payment. H. P. Lovecraft called him “Hugo the Rat.” Another SF writer summed Hugo up as “pretty much a crook.” But apparently time heals all things. Hugo waltzed off to some other galaxy in 1967, but before he passed the most prestigious awards in the science fiction genre were called “Hugos” (they still are) and in 1960 the World Science Fiction Convention named the elderly scoundrel “The Father of Magazine Science Fiction.” ©

[Stanley]

The world Naipaul sees is dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive . . .[and] in fact charged with . . . an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact . . . Joan Didion on Naipaul, 1980.

Since few actually face the tests imposed by fame, perhaps it ill becomes the many who have said that V. S. Naipaul has not worn fame well. Certainly, fame exposed his flaws. But Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul remains for me a literary genius, creator of brilliant depictions of how “imperialism” (broadly conceived) affects the human condition. And his life in outline is incredible. He celebrates (one hopes) his 81st birthday today, having been born on the island of Trinidad on August 17, 1932. His grandparents were Indian peasants shipped to the island to work the sugar plantations. Their contrasting, comic self-image as Brahmins created the tensions that defined Naipaul’s father’s life and birthed his own fictional vision, most wonderfully expressed in his early masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Mohun Biswas, alter ego for Naipaul (and modeled on Naipaul’s father) was born “in the wrong way,” a Hindu pandit’s description of his breech birth that becomes an overwhelmingly powerful metaphor for a man who constantly strives to get things right and (tragically, comically, dramatically, inevitably) almost but never quite manages. Naipaul has managed, famously, ascending through powerful fiction and incisive non-fiction to the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. He found fame with the help of J. R. R. Tolkien (who noted his brilliance at Oxford), of his first wife, Patricia Ann Hale (to whom he dedicated Biswas), and of his brilliant comprehension of the historicity of his own life narrative. V. S. Naipaul understood that private lives have public meaning, and ably put that into prose. Read Biswas today!! ©

[Stanley]

Give the lady what she wants. Marshall Field's sales dictum.

Six Degrees of Separation began as premise, became a play (1990), then a film (1993) and a fad, setting us to follow our acquaintances to six “separations” where we would find Mata Hari or, failing her, Dwight Eisenhower. It can be fun, as when we follow the “separations” of Marshall Field, the Chicago retail entrepreneur, market reformer, and hidebound reactionary. These lead us to Admiral Beatty, Winston Churchill, John Huston, and (most deliciously) Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic candidate of 1952 and 1956. Marshall Field was born in New England of “old stock” on August 18, 1834, emigrated to Chicago, and there set up the most famous department store in the world. Field invented the money back guarantee, enjoined passive sales techniques on his staff, and is credited with the mantra “the customer is always right.” His son (boringly) carried on the tradition. Daughter Ethel, however, married (twice) into the British aristocracy, first diplomat Arthur Tree, then Lord Beatty. The Trees’ bisexual son David Tree gave over his Ditchley estate to Churchill’s use during WWII, and married Marietta Endicott Peabody (of very old New England stock), who had first married a Fitzgerald and produced historian Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in the Lake) before she (Marietta) went off with Tree (and Clementine and Winston) at Ditchley and then came back to the USA where Marietta (a liberal) had affairs (David Tree approved) with John Huston and Adlai Stevenson before becoming our delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights. Marietta was with Adlai, in London, when he suffered his fatal heart attack. My apologies for not getting to Mata Hari, or Eisenhower, but we came close at the third and sixth separations. On the other hand, who’s counting? ©