BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A democracy is bound in the end to be obscene. D. H. Lawrence.

Modernization, in the form of industrial capitalism, brought us great wealth. But with typical ingratitude a host of critics catalogued its ills, its inhumanities, its mechanistic brutalities. Some concentrated on the dirt, grime, and noise of industrial life. Others found its emergent inequalities—in health, wealth, and life—to be most troubling. The machine, as fact and as metaphor, came in for a good deal of stick, too, unforgettably in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), but most who took on this theme didn’t find quite so many laughs in it. As a species, these critics of industrialization were generally on the political left, but not universally so. And it’s oddly ironic that one of the most eloquent and conservative critics of the industrial age was a miner’s son, David Herbert Lawrence, born in industrial Nottinghamshire on September 11, 1885, and destined to follow his schoolteacher mother in his love of words and writing. Lawrence’s conservatism was concealed by his apparently faultless skill of outraging bourgeois moralities with his use of eroticism in fiction and his real-life affair with his beloved Frieda. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) itself caused three decades of litigation, and was not even freely available at my undergraduate university library in the early 1960s. But despite that novel’s dipiction of love across class barriers, Lawrence was a full-throated elitist for whom the worst trait of the modern age was its dalliance with such ills as universal suffrage, the political working class, and the ‘three-fanged serpent’ of liberty, equality, and fraternity. ©

[Stanley]

If Krushchev had banned Dr. Zhivago for dullness instead of its political implications, he might have been in the clear. Alfred A. Knopf.

In what I like to think of as the heyday of modern American literature, circa 1910-1945, great editors cast very long shadows. Maxwell Perkins, for instance, undoubtedly improved the work of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, and not content with that triumvirate went on to give us Erskine Caldwell and James Jones. So we often forget that great publishers also had something to do with this extraordinary flowering. And one stands out for his personal imprint, Alfred A. Knopf, born on September 12, 1892, and destined to publish a fantastic list that would include (among “his” American authors) Willa Cather, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, Theodore Dreiser, and (on the belles lettres side) H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. For good measure he gave us (in translation) a host of Russians, the likes of Gide, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre, and several Englishmen to boot. Ironically, Knopf didn’t like editors at all, and always claimed to publish only authors who could already write and did not need the Perkins treatment (Perkins was a Scribners editor). Born to a prosperous Manhattan family, Knopf aimed for a career in the law, but after graduating from Columbia in 1912 was pointed in a literary direction by John Galsworthy. Using family money, he started up Knopf in 1915, and he and his wife Blanche (another interesting character) kept control until 1960. Alfred grew pretty eccentric in his old age, after Blanche died, but he got away with it. People make allowances for those who put them on to a good read.©

[Stanley]

so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, . . . Nothing quite like it has ever been done in America. Mencken's review of Winesburg, Ohio.

American popular literature in the late 19th and early 20th century overflowed with success stories, their popularity feeding from and in turn further nourishing the myth of the self-made man. The myth was also cultivated by the “true life” stories of richer sons of rich fathers like J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller. In such a culture, failure was difficult to manage, especially so when it followed after a period of success. This may be why Irwin Anderson went off the rails when his Ohio business success turned rotten. But before Irwin succumbed to alcohol and depression and abandoned his wife and family, he fathered Sherwood Anderson, born September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio. Oddly, young Sherwood had a similar career, significant business success and a happy marriage turning to total breakdown in 1912, but in his case a move to Chicago and friendships with Carl Sandburg, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser encouraged him to write it all out and to become, for many, a prophet of the modern American novel. His finest work, an experimental collection of linked stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), employed plain language and modern psychology to bring ordinary folk to vivid life. Anderson continued to write but is now best remembered for the generous help he gave new writers, notably William Faulkner (who spent some time with him in New Orleans), Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Sherwood Anderson died in 1941 of a martini toothpick wound, one of the more ironic ends of an American literary life. ©

[Stanley]

While we maintain the unity of the human species, we . . . repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races . . . . All are in like degree designed for freedom. Alexander von Humboldt.

Among the glories of St. Louis, and not much known outside eastern Missouri, is Tower Grove Park, Henry Shaw’s “other” gift to the city (the main one being the Missouri Botanical Garden). It’s not huge (about 350 acres), but it stretches a long way and contains many wonders, notably its spectacular Victorian shelters. But it also has statues, including Ferdinand von Miller’s 1878 rendition of Baron Alexander von Humboldt, a famed naturalist who was born on September 14, 1769 and died in the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Humboldt’s eminent family helped him get started, but his abilities (honed first by a childhood penchant for collecting insects) kept him going until he became his century’s most famous naturalist. His expeditions to all parts, but notably the Americas, made him, in Darwin’s words, the “greatest scientific traveler who ever lived.” He enthusiastically sampled the intellectual trends of his time, notably romanticism (he was early befriended by Goethe and Schiller and Napoléon), but plighted his troth to science. His fame spread far, including in those parts of the Americas where he traveled or where Germans settled, where you will find Humboldt streets, boulevards, parks, mountains, counties, schools, rivers, colleges, and forests. Dozens of species (animal and plant) bear his name, discovered by him or in tribute. And of course our very own Humboldt statue, in Tower Grove, both given to St. Louis by an amateur naturalist. ©

[Stanley]

There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands. Agatha Christie.

Lovers of crime fiction will celebrate or mourn this day as the 124th anniversary of the birth (to an Anglo-American couple) of Agatha-Mary Clarissa Miller, in Torquay, Devonshire, 15th September 1890. In due course Miss Agatha-Mary would become Agatha Christie, for some the queen of detective fiction, for others a formula writer whose popularity was only explicable by reference to the declining sensibilities of a reading public that bought 4 billion of her books. Agatha got her surname from her unhappy marriage to Col. Archibald Christie, whom she shed in the late 1920s (an affair that included Agatha’s well-publicized disappearance). By then she had already written two of her more famous novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,the former of which introduced her dapper, vain Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Poirot was a kind of Holmes character, solving his crimes via the “little grey cells” and complete with a bumbling friend, Captain Hastings. Christie’s other stock character, Jane Marple, lived in a quaint village (St. Mary Mead) with a suspiciously high murder rate. Miss Marple’s fortés were intuition and her knowledge that human nature did not stop disappointing us at the city limits. Agatha Christie wrote a total of 86 novels, 30 short story collections, and 15 plays, one of them the longest-running play in English theatre history, The Mousetrap. Agatha Christie Mallowan (Agatha married secondly the noted Egyptologist Sir Max Mallowan) died in 1976, beloved by many but not by all. ©

[Stanley]

Why is it so unutterably beneficial, the thought that someone besides myself knows me? Karen Horney.

Sigmund Freud and his ism have long been with us: certainly since he coined the term “psychoanalysis” in the 1890s. His ideas have attracted much criticism but have shown great resilience and retain strong holds in both creativity and criticism in the humanities. In my most cynical moods, though, I think of the whole structure as one serving an economically secure bourgeoisie with not much more on its mind than its childhood traumas, and under no great existential threat outside of its father figures. But Karen Danielsen Horney proved that one can have just such doubts and still maintain a basic loyalty to Freud and to psychoanalysis. Born on September 16. 1885, to a tyrannical ship’s captain and his free spirited wife (talk about Freudian roots!!!), Karen studied medicine at Freiburg, Gottingen, and Berlin, married, and eventually moved to the USA where she became an eminent therapist, but with a difference. She doubted that early sexual trauma indelibly shaped the psyche, and thought that problems of the here and now (for instance absolute poverty or a serious economic reverse, a recent failure in love or life, conflicted adult roles between men and women, and especially the acculturated, learned roles of western women) had much more serious—and more directly treatable—implications for mental health. She also, heresy of heresies, argued that men and women could be their own therapists, effect their own escapes from neuroses and into freedom. This made her popular and made orthodox Freudians worry about her father complex. ©

[Stanley]

The sun seemed to go backwards and the night was set aside. A Georgia soldier describing the Battle of Sharpsburg/Antietam

Sometime in the 1950s, my father and a colleague were seized with enthusiasm when they read the revised edition of H. L. Mencken’sThe American Language. With Mencken and other sources as guides they boasted that they could place an American (by accent and vocabulary) within a few (I think it was 50) miles. I can only remember a conversation on the locational importance of words for a small stream: among them “run,”“bayou,” brook,”“runnel,” and “creek” and its variant pronunciation “crick”. I thought of those Menckenesque conversations when I realized that today, September 17, 2014, is the 152nd anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, where Union and Rebel forces fought a battle that led to Lincoln’s “preliminary” Emancipation Proclamation. It’s named for Antietam Creek, but in the South it’s known as the Battle of Sharpsburg. That brings us to a whole set of regional variations, names for civil war battles, starting with the first and second Bull Run (southern “Manassas”), Balls Bluff (southern “Leesburg”), The Wilderness (southern “Spotsylvania”), Pittsburg Landing (southern “Shiloh”), the names of the main army groups (northern armies named after major rivers, southern after states), and indeed the war itself, where the north favored the War of the Rebellion or (later) Civil War while the south liked the sound of the War for Southern Independence or the War between the States. Whatever significance these words and names have, Antietam was the bloodiest single day in American military history. Choose your signifier and speak softly Call it what you will, casualties at Sharpsburg totaled nearly 23,000, a day’s work indeed. ©

[Stanley]

I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke. Rush Limbaugh.

Paeans to the free press are plentiful in American history. The founding fathers sometimes took editors to court in hopes of taking them to jail, or to bankruptcy, or both, but generally concluded that press freedom was essential to political freedom and gave us the First Amendment to say so. Latterly, the free press has been threatened by monopoly, by the costs of production, and (identifying “press” with physical newspapers) by the advent of the internet. So it is encouraging to reflect on the age and prosperity of an important American newspaper, the New York Times, a paper that first hit the streets of its home city on September 18, 1851, and has been published continuously since then. It’s been through fewer owners than most, which may help, and after a long dalliance with the Republican Party it has generally claimed political “independence,” another aid to longevity. But it may owe much more to its considerable (though hardly unassailable) reputation for excellence, objectivity, and in-depth reporting. It now boasts no fewer than 112 Pulitzer Prizes, easily the leader in that category, and (as a paper) plunks down daily on a million doorsteps across the country. Its digital subscriber list grows faster, and in its last quarter the Times netted $55 million on revenues of $389 million, which reminds me that the largest stockholder, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, has a bigger chunk of press freedom than I do. The “Grey Lady” costs me $2.50 a day.©

[Stanley]

The best way to improve a man's circumstances is to raise his ideals. But it is not enough to talk . . . ideals when his home is a slum. George Cadbury.

On 19th September, we cautiously celebrate those occasional coincidences between entrepreneurship and social reform which characterized some early capitalists in both Britain and America. George Cadbury, Quaker and chocolate manufacturer, was born in Birmingham, England, on this day in 1839. Exactly 12 years later William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, the soap king, was born in Bolton, England. Both men diversified and expanded the family businesses they inherited. They also spread their wealth directly through philanthropy and social reform projects, both particularly well known for building new “greenfield” factories and surrounding them with model towns for the workers, Lever at Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, and Cadbury at Bournville, near Birmingham. Similar American models are to be found in George Pullman’s town of Pullman, now part of Chicago, the “mill girl” dormitories of early 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts, and yet another chocolate utopia in Hershey, PA. These entrepreneurial efforts to ameliorate the worst excesses of industrialism are noteworthy, but the working inhabitants of these model places more than once accused their benefactors of favoring low wages and lots of piety. Still, we can see in them, in both Britain and America, that interesting phenomenon of a “class-conscious upper class” (as opposed to a piratical one). For more on this concept, see the works of my undergraduate mentor E. Digby Baltzell, particularly The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America and Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. ©

[Stanley]

I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. Upton Sinclair, writing about The Jungle.

On 20th September we celebrate the birth of Upton Sinclair, in 1878, to an alcoholic father (a liquor salesman) and a pecksniffian mother (of a wealthy family). This conflicted upbringing explains much. During his youth, Sinclair moved between his father’s desperate conditions (in New York) and his grandparents’ opulence (in Baltimore), extremes which (he would later say) turned him into a socialist. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that his youthful heroes were Jesus Christ and Percy Bysshe Shelley. At any rate, he turned to writing and sold his first fiction at age 15. He is best known for his novel The Jungle (Doubleday, 1906), a searing (and sickening) exposé of conditions in America’s meat industry. Macmillan had refused to publish it because of its “gloom and horror unrelieved [and its] hatred of the rich.” Ironically, the book made Sinclair rich, and did Doubleday no harm, either. Later in his life, Sinclair became a leading socialist politician, standing for office in New Jersey, New York, and most successfully in California, during the Great Depression, where he helped to push Roosevelt’s New Deal leftward, even though I do not think he actually ever won an election. Sinclair’s hostility to fascism soon made him more popular, or at least more useful, and his wartime anti-fascist novel, The Dragon’s Teeth, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942. Sinclair was a prolific writer. By the time of his death in 1968 he had published more than 90 books and many, many more articles and essays. ©

[Stanley]

Normality is a paved road. It's comfortable . . . but no flowers grow on it. Vincent van Gogh.

What do davy lamps, sandwiches, dolby systems, bloomers, jacuzzis, macintoshes (the raincoat), diesel engines, saxaphones, bunsen burners, and tarmac have in common? Like the Franklin stove and the mason jar, they are all common, everyday things, still among the impedimenta of modern life, but especially each is named after its inventor. Today we will go with tarmac, originally “tarmacadam", named after John Loudon McAdam, a well-connected Scotsman (pater was a banker and the Baron of Waterhead) born in Ayrshire on September 21, 1756. When he was only 14, he emigrated to America where, in New York, he first worked for his uncle, a merchant, then on his own as a prize agent in the American Revolution (since he was in New York he must have been selling British captures, so he was no Tom Paine). He made a fortune at it, found an American wife, and returned to Britain at the peace of 1783, aged 27, to become an entrepreneur of the industrial revolution, first in coal, then in turnpikes. Tarmac (first “tarmacadam”) was the tar solution that, rather late in his life, he concocted to seal and smooth turnpike surfaces. But he was truly famous for what used to be called mcadamisation and now just seems common sense, building roads from the bottom up. For that little bit of everyday genius, or possibly plagiarism of the Romans, McAdam got a tidy £5000 from parliament (about $750,000 in today’s US cash). Tarmac was, to coin a phrase, just the icing on the cake. McAdam died, aged 80, in the loveliest town in the Southern Highlands, Moffat, where you can still see his fine gravestone. It’s marked “J.L.McA.” ©

[Stanley]

The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. James Hutton

The idea that our planet, circling its small star in a corner of a smallish galaxy, might be unimaginably ancient is one with many midwives, or nursing fathers. Anglophone scholars tend to credit James Hutton (1726-97), whose “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” is much quoted. If they are looking for a more unambiguously modern figure they will plump for Charles Lyell (1797-1875) who inspired Darwin (1809-82) to think there might have been enough time for evolution by natural selection. Science writer Simon Winchester plumped for William Smith (1769-1839), the humbly-born maker of The Map That Changed the World. It’s a marvelous book, but it overlooks Jean-Étienne Guettard who made a similar (geological) map of France before Smith was born. Guettard, born at Étampes on September 22, 1715, was inspired to botany by his apothecary grandfather, and soon noticed a relationship between soil types and plant distribution. He built on this idea as he found stratigraphic distributions of fossils and studied the odd geology of the Auvergne region (he figured out it had, long ago, been volcanic), and in 1746 informed the Académie des Sciences of his intention to create a geological map of France. This first saw the light of day in 1751 and then had a full scholarly treatment in his 1780 Atlas et description minéralogique de la France. It was not as detailed as Smith’s works (of 1815-1816), but it deserves pioneer status as arguing that our landforms (and what lies beneath) arose from uniformitarian, explicable processes. ©

[Stanley]

Great treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven/ from whence to man strange dooms be given. The Chorus, at the close of the Medea.

23rd September 2014 is a notable anniversary for on this day in 480 BCE, the temporarily united Greeks defeated the Persians at the naval Battle of Salamis, thus maybe saving western culture from a fate it might not have deserved, and also on this day, also in Salamis, also in 480BCE, Euripides was born. Many think such ancient dates err on the side of poetry, so let’s just say that this greatest of all Greek playwrights was born about the time and around the place of the Battle of Salamis. What we do know is that he then moved to Athens and that more of his plays survive than of any other Greek playwright, some 18 (or maybe 19) of them. Was he the best? Well, over a long lifetime (82 years) his fellow Greeks thought not, for he only won Athens’ annual drama “contest” four times, and the circumstances of his plays’ survival means that we do not necessarily have his best, because the manuscript volume that did survive (in a cave of all places) constitute an alphabetical accident (we have only his plays whose titles begin with Epsilon through Kappa). But modern commentators like his bold view of human nature and his belief that women (and slaves) had profound tragic potential, not to mention intelligence. Perhaps the most often read of his surviving plays is The Medea, about a woman of interest, intelligence, and implacable hatred. I once used it as the first text in a freshman seminar on freedom and slavery in western culture, and it went down well. So a birthday bouquet to Euripides of Salamis.©

[Stanley]

One of the things that has impressed me‹rank or status cuts no ice‹whoever is best at job has charge. Friedman, Diary, 1943, about the British code breakers at Bletchley Park.

The field of cryptography strikes me as almost incomprehensible, so I am awed by successful encoders (or code breakers). But when I hear that one of them was drawn to the craft by reading Poe’s “The Gold Bug” I think that perhaps he might, after all, have been a normal chap and even fun to talk to. His Bletchley Park diary (1943) shows him to have been such a one. He was Wolf Friedman, born on September 24, 1891 in Tsarist Russia and destined to become (first, in Pittsburgh) one of those pesky immigrant babies we hear so much about but (secondly) the “legendary” William Friedman, who broke the Japanese “Purple” code in 1940, which gave the USA some vital strategic advantages in WWII, but did not get a warning to Pearl Harbor in time. That has led to a good deal of controversy, not to be resolved here, but what I like was Friedman’s unorthdox route to cryptography, starting with Poe, continuing through some pioneer work in genetics and a fascination with the question of whether codes were embedded in Shakespeare’s plays (this didn’t pan out but it got him a wife, herself a cryptologist). The fact that his dad was a linguist and translator may also have helped, and Friedman himself was fluent in several languages. After WWII, Friedman continued in US government service but also spent a good deal of time trying to break the code of the “Voynich Manuscript”, a 15th-century codex (still unbroken). Today, thanks to the computers and the internet (resources denied to Friedman, of course) you can try your luck on the Voynich through the Yale University Library website. ©

[Stanley]

A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against any government. Thomas Jefferson.

September 25, 2014 marks the 225th anniversary of the congressional vote (1789) for the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, the ten that we know collectively as the Bill of Rights. It took a while for the necessary number of state legislatures to confirm these amendments, so it was not until December 15 1791 that the Bill of Rights was incorporated into our fundamental law. It is well known that these amendments, which generally preserve the rights of citizens against the federal government, were added as a kind of implied bargain to blunt opposition to the Constitution itself in several state ratification conventions, 1788-1789. By the time the new government took power, James Madison thought these political promises had become important enough to be fully incorporated into the original Constitution, but as separate amendments they remain. Since the ten only limit the power of the national government, they at first played little part in our politics, but in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment potentially extended most of these protections into state government and politics. The direct purpose of the 14th was to protect freed slaves from the exactions of southern state governments (and the southern states were required to ratify in order to re-enter the union), but its more general phrasing has since made it the most important of all our amendments and has, in effect, nationalized the Bill of Rights, although its precise usage has sharply varied according to the political composition of the Supreme Court. ©

[Stanley]

George Gershwin died on July 11, but I don¹t have to believe it if I don¹t want to. Novelist John O¹Hara, 1937.

The Americanization of immigrants often commences with a name change. Paulette’s Swedish great-grandfather Carlsen became just another Mr. Brown because a section boss for the Rock Island Railroad had too damn many Carlsens on his payroll. In New York City, at about the same time, Moishe Gershowitz became Morris Gershwine--maybe by choice--and then his son Jakob (born on September 26, 1898) became George Gershwin, certainly by choice, dragging his older brother Ira (Israel) along. George, not a musical child, was captivated by a friend's violin and was soon on his way to musical fame and fortune at $15 per week as a pianist advertising sheet music. It wasn't bad pay ($20,000 annually at today's prices) for a 15-year old, but when he got $5 ($120) for writing a single piano piece he decided composition was more to his liking, studied it intensively, and in 1919 enjoyed a national hit with "Swanee." In the next 20 years, George Gershwin rocketed into our collective cultural memory by himself ("Rhapsody in Blue," "An American in Paris", "Concerto in F") in collaboration with Ira, P. G. Wodehouse, and Buddy DeSylva ("Blue Monday," "Oh, Kay!", "Show Girl"), and with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ("Shall We Dance?"). His long affair with songwriter Kay Swift (of "Oh, Kay!") was never fully consummated because of his early death, in 1937, of a brain tumor. Today, most would agree that his finest work was an extension of an idea first tried in "Blue Monday," the opera (as it is now accepted to be), the very American "Porgy and Bess." ©

[Stanley]

What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great? Sam Ervin on the Nixon aides.

During the years of the “Solid South,” circa 1877-1977, the Democratic party ruled all the states of the Old Confederacy and the border states, too. Its touchstones were white supremacy, the stars and bars, and southern fried chicken. But in some respects the unity was not much more than skin deep, for some southern Democrats were quite liberal. If you want to picture them, think of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a genuine southern type. Well-educated, well-spoken but capable of “down-home Southron”, moderate on race (at least in private), understanding the dilemma of poverty, white and black. Among these “closeted” folk perhaps the best known were Claude Pepper (FL), Lister Hill (AL), Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Yarborough (TX), Estes Kefauver (TN), and J. William Fulbright (AK). And they were responsible for some liberal innovations (e.g. Lister Hill for the first attempt at “socialized” medicine). Today’s honors, however, go to Senator Sam Ervin (North Carolina), born on September 27, 1896, educated at Harvard Law, and destined to become a liberal hero for his front-line role in the impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon. Before that, however, he had already made a name for himself as a staunch defender of civil liberties and an early opponent of Senator Joe McCarthy. Equally, and well within the traditions of southern white liberalism, Sam Ervin stoutly opposed national civil rights legislation on behalf of African-Americans, thus personating the tragic flaw of our national politics. ©

[Stanley]

I was as indignant as hell about that leg. Al Capp.

Bridgeport (CT) High School no longer exists (it’s been renamed as “Central” High School), but I hope Central has somewhere on its roll of honor that it produced two of the greatest cartoonists of the 20th century, Walt Kelly and Al Capp. Both were of immigrant stock but, possibly for some reason deep in the bowels of Bridgeport, chose to house their cartoon creations in the American South, beginning with Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, set in the hamlet of Dogpatch, which first saw the day’s light in 1934. Capp was born on September 28, 1909, to “dirt poor” Jewish immigrants, and added to the problems of poverty by losing half a leg in a trolley accident at the age of 9. There followed a childhood of voracious reading and occasional drawing (taught by his father), a young adulthood of being thrown out of art schools (for non-payment of tuition), and a tough decade (the 1930s) during which he found a wife (Catherine Cameron) and a character, a muscle-bound, good-natured hillbilly named Abner Yokum. Li’l Abner lasted for 43 years, gave us a galaxy of great characters, e.g. the crotchety Mammy Yokum, the voluptuous (yet virtuous) Daisy Mae Scragg, and the doom-laden Joe Btfsplk, and developed a liberal political stance. Capp also had a fine line in parody (of other comic strips, notably Dick Tracy) and popular culture figures (Elvis was Hogg McCawl, for instance). In the 60s, Capp went conservative and bitter, but remained friends with the other boy from Bridgeport, Walt Kelly, who stayed liberal. Capp’s last, unhappy years ended with his death in 1979. ©

[Stanley]

I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity. Michael Servetus.

One of the interesting features of early modern (ca. 1500-1750) history is the extent to which people of intellect moved across intellectual boundaries now regarded as impermeable. Thus Michael Servetus’s most famous publication, in which he described the circulation of blood through the lungs, was entitled Christianismi Restitutio (Christianity’s Reinstatement, 1533). And why not? Servetus, born in Aragon, Spain, on 29 September 1511, was by 1533 already well known as a theologian and physician, not to mention astrologer and linguist (the list goes on). Servetus studied at Toulouse and Paris, where he translated Ptolemy’s geography into French, and then moved on to Montpelier to complete his medical studies (in 1539). His genius was widely recognized and, though young, he had become one of the leading Renaissance humanists. Yet his deep study of the Bible—remember, he was a gifted linguist—had convinced him of several heretical views. He had already bruited these in two tracts (1531 and 1532) on the errors of trinitarianism, and then went on to condemn infant baptism as unscriptural. These were dangerous—fatal—ideas in both Protestant and Catholic Europe. Servetus was sensible enough to adopt an alias (Michel de Villeneuve) and travel incognito, but after his escape from a Catholic prison in Lyon went to Geneva where he was identified, imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to death. John Calvin urged decapitation but was criticized for lenience, and so Michael Servetus was burned at the stake, with his books, on October 27, 1653. ©

[Stanley]

I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks. Dill Harris in To Kill Mockingbird.

30th September offers a cornucopia of anniversaries, from the first anaesthetized tooth extraction (1846) to the Bambino’s 60th home run (1927), but on 30th September let’s feature a gifted oddball, Truman Streckfus Persons, born this day in 1924, in New Orleans. Never heard of Truman S. Persons? But if you think “gifted oddball, Truman, writer, gay guy” you may click on Truman Capote, the surname picked up from his stepfather, a Cuban entrepreneur of loose financial morality. Truman had an adventurous childhood, alienated occasionally from his parents, who sent him for a long spell of years, and then more summers, in rural Alabama, where Truman met another precocious child, Harper Lee. Eventually, Truman would become Dill, the visiting six-year old sophisticate of Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). By 1960 ‘Dill’ was famous as ‘Capote’, having practiced his craft here and there, had an embarrassing encounter atThe New Yorker with James Thurber, and then broken through in short fiction and with the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote went on to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and a “faction” about a Kansas murder, In Cold Blood (1965), an innovation picked up on by several writers, including Norman Mailer. Meanwhile his camp life attracted great attention (he was even satirized by Mad Magazine), and this contributed to his decline through alcohol, drugs, and bouts of insanity. Capote died at 59 (1984) to many a tragic figure, to others a moral tale. Thus Gore Vidal called his death “a good career move,” surely an unkind cut. ©

[Stanley]

Hard work can lick what appear to be insurmountable difficulties. William Boeing.

If you are a second-generation immigrant, one good strategy is to be born into a wealthy first-generation family. This was the fate of Wilhelm Edvard Böng, born in Detroit on October 1, 1881, whose father, Wilhelm Böng, Sr., was a mining engineer and timber king. After attending finishing school in Switzerland and anglicizing his name (another common strategy), William Boeing attended Yale, and then found enough capital to set up as the Greenwood Timber Company, based mainly on the Pacific side of the Olympia peninsula. But as we all know William Boeing didn’t stay in timber. While attending a commercial exposition in 1909, he saw a plane and, rather like Toad of Toad Hall although with more persistance, he had to have one. First he bought one, then (Toad-like?) cracked it up, and then (impatient with the delays in his replacement order) decided to build his own. He then (another good strategy) married a widow, Bertha Paschal, who was descended from two fortunes (merchant banking and flour milling) and set off to be an airplane tycoon. He did pretty well at that, although in the early 1930s the feds sued him for restraint of trade and forced the break-up of the airplane business, at which point he and Bertha went into real estate, big time, developing all Seattle’s northern suburbs and, as sidelines, breeding race horses and yachting. The Boeing Company itself, now divested of family management, waited for World War Two to—so to speak—take off. Bill Boeing died aboard his yacht in 1956. ©

[Stanley]

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office. Wallace Stevens.

It’s often said that poets (and a few other bohemian types like painters and printmakers) have to have a day job. Or to put it another way, dedicating one’s whole life to art has been known to lead to a shortish life. Those day jobs are legion but a normal pattern is to teach. One who broke the mould was Wallace Stevens, poet extraordinaire and successful insurance executive, born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, PA, and educated in Dutch Reformed church schools. It was apparently not a stifling tutelage, and his father (a successful lawyer) taught him the classics at home. Stevens attended Harvard (as a non-degree student), then law school, but then broke with his family when he married (his parents thought) beneath him, the beautiful Elsie “Moll” Kachel (whose visage later graced the “Mercury” dime). Stevens first worked as a lawyer, then shifted to insurance, and from 1916 was with “The Hartford” and, indeed, lived in Hartford, CT. He had written some poetry as a student and published a few poems in and after 1914, but his major output began in the mid-1920s. Stevens was alive to the intellectual and artistic currents of his time, probably an atheist, an admirer of Klee, Picasso and Cézanne, and (like them but in words) a master of inventive imagery, symbol, and metaphor. He was also an insurance executive and a conservative (“Taft”) Republican, although I am not sure what he would make of Sarah Palin or Louie Gohmert. Possibly a comic poem? But his were very subtle. ©

[Stanley]

They were going to look at war, the red animal--war, the blood-swollen god. The Red Badge of Courage.

On 3rd October 1895 Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage first saw the light of day as a novel (a shorter version had been serialized). At 119, it is still striking for its realism, its portrayal of war as impersonal, its understanding of fear, its ambiguous, existential view of courage. Often used in history courses as evidence for (and expressive of) the cultural impact of industrialization and mechanization, the novel is subject to other readings, including symbolism and naturalism, which helps to explain why it has so well stood the test of time. With few exceptions, it also impressed contemporary critics, some of whom could not believe the author was not a veteran of the Civil War, so compelling were his battle descriptions (probably of the Battle of Chancellorsville). An eminent reviewer in England paid the ultimate compliment. So alive was it “that the temptation arises to deny that it is a book at all.” In truth, Stephen Crane was born in 1871, six years after the peace. He was the son and grandson of Methodist ministers. By age 15 he was a determined writer, and at 22 he published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, like the Red Badge a work whose realism both shocked and enlightened readers. Always a frail lad, with a racking cough, Stephen Crane’s tuberculosis worsened during his tours as a war correspondent. Aged only 29, Crane died in Germany while trying a spa cure. He was mourned almost universally by the finest writers of his day. ©

[Stanley]

His pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler¹s effortless, uninterested face. James Agee¹s Keaton obit, 1966.

Conduct a poll on the greatest comic film stars and you might find the top few mute on the page, for the silent era produced some very funny fellows. Charlie Chaplin of course, and Harold Lloyd, but the greatest of all was Joseph Francis Keaton, born on October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas (“of all places”), to a couple of actors in a touring tent show. Later, James Francis was renamed “Buster” when none other than Harry Houdini saw the toddler fall down a staircase and emerge unhurt. Buster Keaton would take quite a few more falls in his career, and it’s notable that he never used a double or stunt man. When Keaton took a pratfall, Keaton took a pratfall. He learned how on tour with mom and dad, who threw him about on the stage until he got too big for that and then got laughs by hitting him over the head with hard objects. Buster survived until Fatty Arbuckle talked him into a two-reeler (in 1917, before Fatty’s fall), after which Buster made his own way, with his own production company, to produce immortal classics like Sherlock, Jr. (1923), The Navigator (1924), Go West (1925), and most everyone’s favorite, The General (1927). Keaton didn’t collapse with talkies but he did with alcohol, until a happy third marriage (to Eleanor Norris) brought him out of drink and into a prosperous, productive old age during which he revived his old films (he owned them, remember), made a few new ones, played Parisian night clubs with Eleanor, and enjoyed acting a new role as a Hollywood elder statesman. He shuffled offstage at 70. ©

[Stanley]

The cinema is an invention without any future. Louis Lumiere

Although I have yet to run into anyone named “Glum” or “Glee,” readers may grasp why I grew up thinking, or hoping, that some surnames were providential. “Bliss”, after all, seemed a good start. Would that I had known of the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis. Both were October babies (and both were long-lived), but Louis was born on October 5, 1864, 150 years ago today. The Lumières would indeed bring “light" to the world, and in that (oddly enough) they followed their father Claude-Antoine, a pioneer photographer. Born in Besançon, France, the brothers moved with the family to Lyon, where Claude-Antoine established a pioneer photography factory, and both brothers helped him develop crucial technical advances in still photography. Claude’s 1892 retirement virtually coincided with the first demonstration of “moving” pictures (by Léon Bouly), and the Lumière brothers turned their attention to this medium, patenting their first (not their last) process in 1895. Their first films were 40-second wonders showing workers leaving their factory, babies eating, and children being tossed in a blanket, but they (and countless others) went on to greater things. One of their first inventions, though, reminds us that great advances sometimes need astonishingly simple helps, for it was the Lumières who invented film perforations, which (in the days before solid-state technology) were required to move physical film past the light (in French, “la lumière”) at a dependably regular rate. ©