BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

For me, this is the end. The beginning of life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer to a fellow prisoner, April 9, 1945.

It is not always that courage runs in families, but this was the case with the Bonhoeffer family of Breslau, East Prussia. The family was connected with the Prussian nobility, highly educated and with a tradition of achievement in theology and science: and, as it would work out, bravery and humanity. The most famous of them all was the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born on February 4, 1906. I first ran across him in my father-in-law’s bookshelf as the author of The Cost of Discipleship. Discipleship, or as he would have seen it “witness,” cost Dietrich his life. Although imprisoned in 1943 for his continued opposition to Naziism, he was implicated in the June, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, sent to a concentration camp, then finally “tried” and hanged on April 9, 1945 as allied troops approached the camp. But he was not the only Bonhoeffer to resist the brutalities of the regime or to suffer for that resistance. His kid brother Klaus, a jurist before the Nazis rose to power, actually took part in the plot and was also executed. His sisters Ursula and Christel married men (Rudiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi) who joined the anti-Nazi underground and were executed (Christel Dohnanyi was imprisoned but survived). Another brother-in-law, and (for heaven’s sake) a young nephew were imprisoned by the regime. Dietrich’s twin sister Sabine married another dissenter, but they both survived the war. Only Karl Bonhoeffer, a chemist who discovered the “spin” isomers of hydrogen, kept out of trouble, but his wife (a von Dohnanyi) did not. This family tells us an unusual story.©

[Stanley]

All civil states . . . are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual. Roger Williams.

ON 5th February 1631, the good ship Lyon [sic] entered Boston Harbor. The Lyon brought supplies, which the struggling settlements (only founded the previous summer) desperately needed to avert starvation. So the ‘Puritan Experiment’ could go on, for that winter many had talked of returning to England. And the Lyon brought the Rev. Roger Williams, late chaplain to the Earl of Lincoln and soon to be the founder of the colony of Rhode Island. Williams’s presence meant that the “Puritan Experiment” would include that which Williams held most dear, the complete separation of church and state. For Williams, the civil state was of vital importance to the commonwealth, but at the same time and by the same token, the state was irremediably sinful, “of this world.” It should therefore have nothing to do with the church or with religion, which could only be kept pure by independent fellowships of believers, each gathered into a church independent. To Williams, even to speak of a “Christian Nation” was to blaspheme. This “separatist” view was common in Puritanism but not universal, and certainly did not endear Williams to the founders of Massachusetts. So, despite his ministerial gifts, he was exiled in 1636. Befriended by the Indians, Williams settled in SE New England, gathered around him other religious radicals, and soon formed the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, where from the beginning church and state were sundered from one another, to keep the former pure and the latter functional. ©

[Stanley]

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder. George Herman Ruth, Jr.

The number 42 is today the most famous in baseball, the number worn by Brooklyn’s Jackie Robinson, and now (since 1997) universally retired, save on one day, when everyone wears it. The first number to be retired was Lou Gehrig’s “4”, after what was virtually a national day of mourning, Gehrig’s retirement due to the fatal disease now named after him. Back in those days, the Yankees’ numbers signified their place in the team’s batting order, and the second number to be retired was George Herman Ruth’s “3”, taken off the roster the year before the Babe’s untimely death in 1948. Babe Ruth was indeed a national hero, perhaps icon, the bad boy made good in sports, the curse of the Red Sox, the scourge of the Cardinals, the orphan who wasn’t an orphan. He was born in Baltimore on February 6, 1895, and grew up tough. His parents, George Herman, Sr., and Katherine, ran a saloon and were perhaps not the best of parents (only two of their seven kids survived infancy). Local authorities decided George, Jr., needed both safety and discipline so, at 7, he was turned over to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys as an “incorrigible.” He learned a trade there, carpentry, and three other skills, how to throw and hit a baseball and how to confess his sins, that stayed with him the rest of his life. Babe Ruth, the Bambino, could have been a great pitcher, and he really was a great hitter, batting .375 in one season, but we remember him for his home runs and for his sins, both of which were very numerous. ©

[Stanley]

John Deere is prepared to furnish plows to all who may see fit to favor him with their orders, on reasonable notice, and at rates to suit the times. 1852 advertisement.

Stand by any busy road and watch metal memorials to automotive pioneers whiz (or limp) by, Henry Ford, David Buick, Louis Chevrolet, Ransom Olds. Some invented their cars, others (e.g. Walter Chrysler) bought in late, but they all gained a kind of modern immortality. Down on the farm, though, it’s John Deere, hands down. And not only did Deere tractors look different, bright green and yellow, just like corn, but until they all went diesel they sounded different too, with a slightly irregular firing sequence. Today you can summon it up on You Tube. Instant nostalgia. Trouble is, old John Deere never thrilled to that sound. He was born in Vermont on February 7, 1804, apprenticed to a blacksmith and then set up for himself in 1825. But the bad years of the 1830s put him under and he fled west to avoid bankruptcy, settling in the inauspiciously named Grand Detour, IL (the town is also associated with Orson Welles!!) where he set up shop again and this time struck it rich by inventing a plow that cut and then turned prairie sod. It was the curve of it, the steel of it, and the polish of it, and by 1842 he was making and selling 100 per year. Ten years on (1852) he moved to Moline and bought out his partners, but it wasn’t until 1863 that he invented something a farmer could sit on (a horse-drawn, two-row “riding cultivator”). Under Deere, his son, and his grandson-in-law, Deere developed a reputation as a progressive employer (non-contributory pensions in 1907, for instance), but there was not a whiff or whisper of a Deere tractor until 1918, by which time old John had been underneath that prairie sod for 32 years. ©

[Stanley]

One can use one's life as material‹but these letters‹aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission‹IF you hadn't changed them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that much Bishop to Lowell, 1972.

It is the reader’s good fortune that two of the greatest American poets of the last century enjoyed a long, if sometimes tempestuous, friendship: Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop, born on February 8, 1911, survived Lowell, and you should read her memorial to him, “North Haven,” where she pretends to see the coastal islands they both loved “drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,/ a little north, a little south, or sidewise” and “free, within the blue frontiers.” Bishop was orphaned by her father’s death and her mother’s illnesses, and then fought over by her grandparents, but at length she righted her ship and went off to Vassar where, after dabbling in music, she majored in literature and, under the influence of Marianne Moore, began to write. Her writing career would eventually (1949) make her Poet Laureate and bring her the poetry Pulitzer in 1956 (for Poems: North and South) Bishop met Lowell in 1947 and then, on a lark (she had meant to circumnavigate South America) met the architect Lota de Maceto Soares in Santos, Brazil, and stayed with her through thick and thin (and depression and drink) until Soares’s suicide in 1967. Poets professionally have a knack for language, and Bishop’s poetry from this period shows a liberating influence of Portuguese and Spanish and won her a National Book Award (1969) for The Complete Poems which soon enough became incomplete with the publication of Geography III, which won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her long Brazilian sojourn has also given us an interesting movie, Reaching for the Moon, starring Mirando Otto as Bishop and Glória Pires as Soares. ©

[Stanley]

Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution. Jacques Monod.

Many scientists, faced with incompatibilities between their research and their culture’s religious traditions, keep their heads down. The result is that those that go on the warpath can appear as minority figures, the atheist scientist trotted out for this or that documentary on evolution, or the big bang, or on the theory that we (that is, homo sapiens) used to saddle up our dinosaurs and, Huck Finn—like, light out for the territories. But scientists, being scientists, don’t often make the top lists of atheists (these days you can Google things like “world’s top 50 atheists” and come up with a list.) On that particular list, the names that jumped out were Woody Allen, Philip Roth, and Martin Amis, so perhaps scientific standards of proof keep scientists quieter than Woody Allen. But one scientist who made a considerable splash with his atheism was the French microbiologist Jocques Monod, born in Paris to an American mother and a French father, on February 9, 1910, and destined to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1965, one in a chain of discoveries about ‘the genetic material,’ DNA, which appeared after Crick’s and Watson’s revolutionary discovery of its molecular structure in the early 1950s. Monod followed up his Nobel with a book-length scientific essay, Chance and Necessity (1970), arguing (taking a lead from existentialism) that science had proven “the postulate of objectivity” that the universe betrays no plan, no intention, that all creativity in the universe owes to chance rather than necessity. Monod had an interesting past, including heroic service in la Résistance, so he was not without courage, but as in the real war, in 1970 he claimed only a small band of followers. ©

[Stanley]

It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians. Bertolt Brecht.

Among the least creditable blacklistings of Hollywood’s anti-communist era was that of Bertolt Brecht, a German pioneer of avant-garde theatre, satiric scourge of the Nazis, and today most famous for his collaboration with Kurt Weill which produced The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). The latter play caused a riot at its opening in Leipzig where it offended Nazi thugs in the audience. It was a measure of the deep divisions of the Weimar period that the play enjoyed a triumphal run in Berlin. Soon enough, with the Nazi Machtübergrabe of 1933, Brecht was forced to flee, first to Denmark, then Sweden, and then the USA where he produced his most famous anti-Nazi works, the play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui and the film “Hangmen Also Die” (about the assassination of the ‘hangman of Prague,’ Reinhard Heydrich. Brecht was born on February 10, 1898, into a mixed (Protestant-Catholic) marriage, safely in the middle class (though he would later claim otherwise) and infused with his mother’s Bible lessons (which echo through much of his work). He nearly evaded military service in WWI and, forsaking medical school, fell in with theatre collectives in Munich and Berlin and began to attract the attentions of the nascent Nazis. By the mid-1920s he was famous, a prizewinner, and increasingly known for his innovative approach to theatre in much more than scripts: lighting, intervention by ‘outsiders,’ and the use of placards and music to advance the action. But Bertolt Brecht would meet his theatrical match in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. ©

[Stanley]

We would not want Robben Island to be a monument of our suffering. We would want it to be a triumph of the human spirit. Ahmed Kathrada.

One of the ways Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, and other African National Congress (ANC) leaders ‘negotiated’ their lives at the notorious Robben Island prison was to develop human relationships with their guards. One of those guards was a deep-dyed Afrikaaner ironically (it seems to me) named Jack Swart (‘swart’ = black in Afrikaans), and so when it was decided to move Mandela to the mainland so that negotiations might commence, Jack Swart moved with him, first to Polsmoor and then to Verster. At Verster, Mandela was given a house to be imprisoned in, and Swart became his general aide-de-camp and cook (and apparently quite a good cook) by the time Mandela left Verster a free man, 25 years ago today, 11th February 1990. This development of close relationships between ANC terrorists and their warders (Swart came to view Mandela “as a brother”) is a remarkable enough story, but even more remarkable was the ability of ANC leaders to keep faith among themselves despite the challenges—more often, the impossibilities—of direct communication. This all came flooding out, live, on worldwide TV, 25 years ago, and in England we watched in tears. Then, for those at the UMSL Honors College, both themes were brilliantly fleshed out for students and faculty by Ahmed Kathrada during his two visits (the second one in 2004 for his honorary doctor of laws). Those visits celebrated another close relationship, between the University of Missouri system and the University of the Western Cape, begun specifically to benefit “colored” and “black” South Africans but now expanded to cover more institutions and all races. ©

[Stanley]

The object of business is to make money in an honorable manner . . . the object of life is to do good. Peter Cooper.

Our Victorian age was one of excess, as old money and nouveaux competed in orgies of tastelessness at their New York mansions and Newport “cottages.” In 1881, Mrs. Astor spent $2 million (about $40 million in today's cash) "renovating" her "cottage" so it could hold her Summer Ball. More tasteful plutocrats like J. P. Morgan sent agents to scour Europe for “art, his drug of choice." Meanwhile, they cultivated the myth of the self-made man and preached hard work and low wages to their workmen. There were exceptions, and (in our age of Donald Trump) we should do more to celebrate them. One of these was Peter Cooper, born on February 12, 1791, a plutocrat who was actually "self-made" (his father was a hatmaker). Peter made a lot of other things, but became rich, oddly, as the Glue King of the eastern seaboard. He invented enough sorts of glue to diversity into gelatin (he and Mrs. Cooper are ultimately responsible for Jell-O), isinglass, and paints, before moving into railways, steam engines, and cables and telegraphs. Meanwhile, he was an abolitionist, an advocate of free public education (and the land-grant system of higher education), a pioneer defender of native Americans' rights, and (unusually among his class) a devout enemy of the Gold Standard, which he viewed as a wicked scheme to keep rich people rich. Cooper was also a philanthropist. Among his finer gifts was New York’s Cooper Union Institute, to provide free tuition in science. The Institute was finished in time for Abraham Lincoln to give his Cooper Union Speech of February 27, 1860, a famous speech of fire and sense that delivered to us our best president. Cooper, by the way, remained tuition free until this year. Perhaps Don Trump could shore it up. ©

[Stanley]

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy. Georges Simenon.

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was born into an immoderately devout and mildly superstitious Belgian family on February 13, 1903. The superstition accounts for their registering his birthdate as February 12, the devotion may account for Georges’ irreligion, or his youthful rebelliousness. He also developed a fascination with crime, criminals, and the various low-lifes we often associate with criminality. Just when he picked up this peculiarity is a little unclear, but it was probably during his brief career as a cub reporter on the Gazette de Liège. Today we might call him a human interest journalist but he proved especially drawn to reporting on the rougher side of life in Liège. He also took time off to attend lectures by the pioneer criminologist Edmond Locard (“The Sherlock Holmes of France”) on the science and art of police procedures. Eventually, these interests would take mature shape in George Simenon’s most brilliant creation, Commissaire Jules Maigret, the grey-eminence hero (or anti-hero) of 75 novels and 30 short stories published by Simenon between 1931 and 1972. If you’re interested in crime fiction or the history of the noir genre, pick up a few. They’ve all been translated. What may be more astonishing is that this flood of Maigret fiction was accompanied by many other books, including 125 novels, 150 novellas, several memoirs, and other writings. Mostly they sold well, at 550,000,000 and counting. And still he had time to have an affair with Josephine Baker. I knew there had to be a St. Louis connection. ©

[Stanley]

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man. Frederick Douglass.

As he himself would be careful to explain, it was an artifact of slavery that we do not have a birth-date for Frederick Douglass. Uncertainty about birth details was yet another way of placing slaves in the plantation hierarchy, rendering them something less than human. So let’s say (arbitrarily) that “Freddie Bailey,” as he then was, was born Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1818, to a particular slave dam, and to a sire who may have been her owner. It was an inauspicious beginning fof what would be a very long life, in the course of which Freddie Bailey would escape to freedom and become Frederick Douglass, his own person by his own volition. Under that preferred persona he was first a free laborer, then a speaker on abolition, then the author of two famous memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, (1845), then My Bondage and My Freedom, (1865), a goad in Lincoln’s side during the great war to end slavery, and then a crusader for rights for the freed slaves (and for women). Indeed, Douglass died after addressing a women’s suffrage conference. The 1845 Narrative remains a classic, well worth a read. It is an instructive insight (into the minds of slaveholders, at least) that the first response of the south to the Narrative was that it was a forgery. No African person could possibly have written it. But an African person did, and it is an artful, intelligent autobiography, an American classic on a par with other 19th-century classics, and one which struck unerringly at the hearts and minds of its intended audience. ©

[Stanley]

Hire men, buy machinery, and keep the wheels moving and everybody busy. Robert Wood Johnson.

It is difficult to comprehend an era “before the germ,” perhaps even harder to understand how the idea (that many diseases are caused by microorganisms) took so long to be accepted after the detective work of Holmes, Semmelweis, and Lister, et al, proved (at a minimum) that if you kept things clean your patients were more likely to survive. But many needed a smoking pistol, fingerprints, and a gaping wound before they accepted that the twitching corpse on the carpet had (indeed) been shot. Louis Pasteur gave them that. One who leaped to a premature conclusion was Robert Wood Johnson, born on February 15, 1845, in Carbondale, PA. Evading the Civil War draft through a pharmacy apprenticeship, Johnson became convinced of the new theories. He began a life-long quest for making sterile dressings, first in a partnership with an apothecary, George Seabury, and later (after a passage of years dictated by a no-competition agreement) in partnership with his brothers. The technical challenges of sterilization only end with actual product use, and Johnson & Johnson’s research lab (an early innovation), run by Dr. F. B. Kilmer, addressed and solved many of these challenges. Many other issues were addressed by the marketing department, and the firm’s history can be profitably studied from that angle, too. And one can find ambiguities about the germ theory itself, as Johnson & Johnson was also a pioneer in the development of (sterile) homeopathic dressings, with “band-aids” and gauzes incorporating belladonna, canthos, and arnica, among other homeopathic remedies. ©

[Stanley]

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Ernst Haecke

Today we know Thomas Huxley as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” the biologist who (upon hearing Darwin) felt the shock of recognition: “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” But Darwin had a German bulldog, too, Ernst Heinrich Phillipp August Haeckel, born on February 16, 1834, who would meet Darwin, at Down House, in the 1860s and become his most earnest but at the same time most troublesome European disciple. Haeckel was born in Potsdam acquired three doctorates and became an enthusiast for collecting specimens, rendering them through beautiful drawings, and pondering their interrelationships and their evolutionary development. In the process, he enriched the vocabulary of evolutionary biology with his own coinages, including “stem cell,” “ecology,” and “phylum.” In tracing the complicated life cycles of invertebrates he became a leading advocate of the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” a clever notion that species’ characters can be traced (“recapitulated”) through their embryological stages. It had enough plausibility to enable Haeckel to reject “natural selection” and maintain a kind of Lamarckian idealism, the environment acting on some inherent ‘genius’ of each species to produce evolutionary change. Haeckel’s “Darwinism,” then, proved peculiarly well adapted to the racial theories of the Nazis. It also underlay his belief, contra Darwin, that human “races” (he counted ten) had distinctive, separate evolutionary pasts. Ironically, modern embryology has isolated far more links with evolution that Haeckel dreamed possible, all of them discrediting his race theories. ©

[Stanley]

My Gorgeous Life. The Memoirs of Dame Edna Everage.

On February 17 one is compelled by coincidence to consider (in pity and terror) the Australian national character, for it’s the birthdate of Barry Humphries (1934, Melbourne) and Andrew Barton Peterson (1864, New South Wales). “Banjo” Peterson, as he became known, concocted the oddest of unofficial national anthems, “Waltzing Matilda.” Its lilting melodies and use of vernacular lyrics (what in the world is a “billabong”?) have never failed to bring real tears to the eyes of the most cynical of Aussies, the acceptable grimace of antipodean patriotism. That’s a bit odd, since Banjo’s ballad celebrates a violent sheep shearers’ strike, but then the official American anthem is an old drinking song so we shouldn’t complain. The questions of Aussie pride and patriotism would be raised in spades by the comedic career of John Barry “Bazza” Humphries, whose quiet life as a prosperous and promising law student was totally disrupted by the 1950s arrival (Australia is always a bit behind the times) of Dada, which swept Barry off his feet and (by a complicated series of well-documented steps) right into the arms of Edna Everage and Les Patterson. These unforgettable caricatures (soon enough they were Dame Edna and Sir Les, if you please) became Humphries’ on-stage personas, his trademarks, and very nearly his fate. But they never completely concealed his considerable talents as a comedic actor, writer and essayist. It is said that Humphries has given his farewell tour (2012). If so, Australia can never again be the same. ©

[Stanley]

What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature, which is to say it heaves, manifests, and lasts. Morrison on Huckleberry Finn.

Joining the first Great Migration northwards to opportunity, and away from Jim Crow, the Wolford family settled in Lorain, Ohio where they produced four children, including Chloe Ardelia, born on February 18, 1931. Dad was a welder, a marketable skill even for a black man, and mom went into domestic service. Life was a bit tough, but to keep spirits up that maid of all work told her young children folk tales from their past. Rarely has the power of narrative so transformed a life as those stories transformed that of young Chloe Ardelia. “With that skin,” she later wrote, “there was no point in being tough or sassy, even when you were right,” but you could learn to be a story-teller, eloquent, compelling, liberating for yourself and others. It took Chloe a while, a religious conversion, a new baptismal name (Anthony or “Toni”), a brief marriage, two kids of her own, a couple of degrees and a spell editing other stories, but eventually she, and we, got for all our pains Toni Morrison, whose fiction burst on the scene in the 1970s and won growing critical acclaim (a Pulitzer for Beloved) in the 1980s and a Nobel Prize in 1993. I first really gauged her power second-hand, by reading American Studies students’ finals as external examiner at the University of Derby, in England. Good, bad, or indifferent as students, these young English people clearly felt transformed by Morrison’s fiction: as, perhaps, she had been by her mother’s stories. If that won’t suffice, then Ms. Morrison’s provocative reading (1996) of Huckleberry Finn, “this amazing, troubling book,” may help us to understand her own writing. ©

[Stanley]

During long cycles . . . whole races of animals--each adapted to the physical conditions in which they lived--were successively created and exterminated. Roderick Murchison, 1854.

The 19th is called “Darwin’s Century” for many reasons, not least that insights gained earlier in the century made Charles Darwin’s great work likely (if neither easy nor inevitable). Geologists were among the more important pioneers, including Darwin’s mentor Charles Lyell, but also a legion of eccentrics who for this reason and that subjected the landscape to scrutiny and decided that it could not be very young, nor could a Noachian flood account for its peculiarities. More likely, they reckoned, uniformitarian forces had patiently and purposelessly shaped our plastic planet over eons of time. Among the unlikelier of these rockhounds was Roderick Murchison, born wealthy in Ross-shire on February 19, 1792, just in time for officer training and the closing stages of the Napoleonic wars. Come the peace, he married a general’s daughter and retired to his estates (he’d bought in County Durham) and a life of huntin’ and fishin’ and ridin’, but he became friends with the chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, who urged him to do something useful instead. Murchison took to it easily, with enough leisure time to be incredibly busy in, and plenty of money for travel and study, with fellow geologists or without, the south of England, Cornwall, the Alps, Russia, and not least Scotland into which to bore his gimlet eye. We owe him much, not least his use of fossils to name and sequence various geologic strata, and his rather brilliant names for the geological eras, including the oil-rich “Permian.” The Murchison Medal of the Royal Geological Society remembers him annually. ©

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I am the me I choose to be. Sidney Poitier.

I must confess it came as a surprise to learn, late on, that Sidney Poitier is a Bahamian citizen, and a pretty eminent one too. But then I have never taken a whole lot of interest in film star biography. Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, he is if you please Sir Sidney Poitier, and he has been since 1997 the Bahamian ambassador to Japan and, for good measure, to the United Nations. So, happy birthday, Sir Sidney!! He was indeed born Sidney Poitier, February 20, 1927, to a couple of truck farmers on Cat Island, Evelyn and Reginald, but born prematurely, during one of their normal trips to Miami to sell their tomatoes. His unexpected arrival and ill health delayed the family’s return to Cat Island and gave Sidney all the protections of the 14th amendment including citizenship and the protection of the federal government for his various civil rights, all of which make Sidney an object lesson for our current civil strife over immigration (in which moves to modify or repeal the grand 14th play a sinister part). Poitier’s filmography is better known. He was by no means the first black male actor to be taken seriously, but his early roles (No Way Out, 1950; Blackboard Jungle, 1955; The Defiant Ones, 1958) were seriously taken. Perhaps a bit too seriously, for he got his Oscar for the much safer role he played in Lilies of the Field (1963). There followed three roles which today help to define the 1960s, notably In the Heat of the Night (1967) brilliantly played by Poitier and Rod Steiger as they dance dangerously towards friendship and respect, which is where, by now, we all ought to be. ©

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First, to redeem my guitar from the Flamenco . . . Andres Segovia, summarizing his life's goals, 1968.

The number of parents who successfully frustrate their child’s ambitions must be very great. Parents tend to be bigger than children and they often have all the money. The parents of Andrés Segovia certainly had plenty of cash, and Andrés’ father (a lawyer in Linares, Spain) was big enough to seize and pulverize two of the boy’s guitars, but still Andrés would became the most famous guitarist of the 20th century and, some would say, the performer who rescued the classical instrument from obscurity. Segovia was born February 21, 1893 and, as was common among his class, was sent to live with his uncle Eduardo, who arranged for music lessons. To everyone’s distress, Andrés fell for the guitar, by then fairly obscure as a classical instrument and in bourgeois Spain tarnished by its association with flamenco and other low-life tendencies. Where Andrés couldn’t find classical guitar music, he made his own (he started by transcribing Bach), and at age 16 he gave his first public concert, in Granada, and by 1920 he had toured Europe and South America, to great acclaim, all thoughts of his becoming a lawyer were dead, and thanks partly to him the guitar (classical) was again coming into its own. Among his disciples were Julian Bream and John Williams and jazzman Charlie Byrd (a delicious genre coincidence: Byrd often used a guitar given to him by Segovia). Andrés Segovia continued to perform until a week before his death, at 94. When people asked him why, he replied “I will have an eternity to rest.” He suffered a coronary in New York and was flown home to Spain, where he rested on June 3, 1987. ©

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To be knocked down by a smaller man could only imprison Hemingway further into the dread he was always trying to avoid. Norman Mailer, review of Callaghan, 1963.

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) has always struck me as the opening salvo of the 20th century, warts and all. Among its themes was a hang-up about manhood, a theme rendered major by Hemingway’s later life and suicide. If that’s right, then I should have known about Morley Callaghan, a Canadian who first met Hemingway in the early 20s at the Toronto Star and then later (in June 1929) boxed Hem in a bloody match in some long-lost Montparnasse gym. Born on February 22, 1903, Callaghan trained as a lawyer but aspired to write. Eventually he became, according to Edmund Wilson, “the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language,” an unenviable post he still occupies, but it was not for lack of effort, with many novels and more short fiction, and he lived long enough to become, along with Robertson Davies, a grand old man of Canadian literature (not an oxymoron). But this boxing match interests one greatly. Callaghan, smaller and lighter than Hemingway, was a better boxer, and with Scott Fitzgerald as referee (sober?) they squared off in That Summer in Paris (the title of Callaghan’s 1963 memoir) and Callaghan “beat the shit” out of Hemingway (the quote is from Ernest himself), partly because Fitzgerald let a round go for four minutes, leaving Hemingway in a blood-sputtering rage. It’s made more interesting by a review of Callaghan’s memoir by yet another manhood manic, Norman Mailer. Mailer didn’t like the book much, but saw in it a “fine clue to the logic of Hemingway’s mind” and then expanded the clue into a fascinating riff on Hemingway which sheds much light on Mailer himself.©

[Stanley]

Had I not been lonely, none of my works would have happened. L. S. Lowry

On 23RD FEBRUARY we memorialize two artists of the common: Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who died 50 years ago today, in 1965, in Santa Monica, CA, and Laurence Stephen Lowry, who died on this day in 1976 in Glossop, Derbyshire, England. Jefferson is better known as Stan Laurel. Lowry is not well known in the USA but remains a popular painter in the North of England. Born three years and 90 miles apart (Lowry, 1887, in Stretford, and Laurel, 1890, in Ulverston), their paths diverged quickly (if indeed they ever crossed). Laurel fetched up in Hollywood, where he and Oliver Hardy created the “Laurel and Hardy” series based on the misadventures of a plotter (Hardy) and his dizzy nemesis (Laurel). Typically, the fat Hardy’s schemes also fall foul of the thin Laurel’s decency, for besides being very dumb Stan is very kind. Just so, L. S. Lowry’s paintings elevated the lives of factory workers (and those among them who rose to become clerks, and the street scenes that were their theater) to a kind of metaphysical decency. Perhaps it was from loyalty to his models that he refused a knighthood (1968). His pictures have been called ‘primitive’, but they are richer than that (Lowry understood perspective at least well enough to fight it) and provide interesting social comment. Once seen, they are not forgotten, for Lowry’s people (and his cats and dogs), at a distance, most resemble the stick men of children’s drawings. So on 23rd February 2015, we move from a straight man to stick men, and find it was not such a long journey, after all. ©

[Stanley]

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity . . . . Jacob Bronowski, 1956.

The connections between religious dissent and Britain’s financial and industrial revolutions are many and varied. Excluded from the universities and (for the most part) politics, but made numerous and energetic by the revolutionary excitements of the 17th century, dissenters from England’s Anglican establishment created a whole universe of activity, not least in the maintenance of dissenting congregations of various stripes but also in banking, trade, and nascent manufactures. Outside the universities and grammar schools, dissenting academies taught useful subjects and became nurseries of applied knowledge. But those paths were not well established when Thomas Newcomen was born in 1663, in Dartmouth, Devon. The Newcomens’ religion is a bit difficult to locate for the baby was baptized in the local parish church on February 24, 1663, but we next hear of him as a leading member of the local Baptist congregation and then its preacher. He also took over his father’s ironmongery, and, about the same time as he became a preacher, he successfully built the world’s first practical steam engine, an astonishing accomplishment for 1710, which spread the gospels of productivity and efficiency around England, pumping water out of mine workings so that coal, lead, and tin could be extracted safely and around the clock. Newcomen’s “Proprietors of the Invention of Raising Water by Fire” was dominated by Baptists and then, later in the century, Newcomen’s design would be vastly improved by James Watt, you guessed it, yet another dissenter, albeit of the Scottish Covenanter persuasion.©

[Tripps]

Another interesting contribution.

Being curious - I checked 'Bob' Out, and I think this is he. Bob of Bob's Bits

Thanks Bob.

[Stanley]

David, you are right.... It is indeed he.

This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest. Francis Crick and James Watson, Nature, 1953.

Charles Darwin’s great and brilliant work, On the Origin of Species (1859), now seems so right as to have about it an air of inevitability, but like all scientific hypotheses it is falsifiable, and in fact it had to travel a long road to acceptance. Among other problems, it lacked a mechanism, and so generations of scientists were left to close in on the truth of it, working in the field and in the lab. Many important advances were made, and then finally, on 25th February 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson announced to their colleagues at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratories that they had decoded the structure and chemistry of deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA. Crick and Watson profited much from x-ray crystallography of ‘the genetic material’ by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, research scientists at the University of London. The “double helix” of DNA, a rather beautiful protein that bears our inheritance and governs the ways our bodies develop, has existed from time out of mind (though not quite since the beginning of life itself). The ability to manipulate DNA (and thus to change phenotypes) has given us great power, at once promising and frightening. For their discovery, Crick, Watson, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962. One likes to think that Dr. Franklin would have shared in the prize, but that puzzle remains open because the Nobel is never awarded posthumously. Rosalind Elsie Franklin, the ‘dark lady’ of Maurice Wilkins’ London lab, died of ovarian cancer in April 1958. ©

Bob issued a correction: "A biologist colleague corrects DNA from a protein to a nucleic acid, but accepts that it is (indeed) a beautiful structure. My apologies for a silly error. I knew better. "

[Stanley]

It is an unsettled troublesome occupation Mining, and it is a very few that makes any thing at it. William Galt to his nephew Daniel Kerr, Placerville, 1854.

My great-great-great “Uncle Galt” (William by name) settled in Madison County Illinois with other Scots immigrants (including two sisters and a brother), but he didn’t take to farming too well. In 1850, hearing of gold in California, Galt lit out for the territories. Family legend has it that he opened a dry goods store in Placerville, but in any case he did very well. Galt came back to Madison County to become a gentleman farmer, a land speculator, an inveterate tourist (two trips to Paris), and (oddly) the aged husband of his nephew’s sister-in-law. Another California-bound European immigrant did even better in the gold rush, and certainly opened up a dry goods store. His name was Levi Strauss, and he was born in Bavaria on 26 February 1828 (about the same time as William Galt was born in Ayrshire). He also migrated with his brothers and sisters to the USA. The Strausses settled in Louisville and St. Louis, but Levi was impatient with that and lit out for California, also in 1850. There seems to be some doubt, too, about whether Levi went to find gold or open a dry goods shop, but as we know he ultimately chose the latter. Trained as a tailor, he looked at the prospectors, a rough bunch, and decided they needed tough trouserings, good strong cloth and (later) copper rivets at the seam joins. To make two long stories short, Uncle Galt died rich, leaving a few thousand acres in Illinois and at Galt, Iowa to his young wife and his aged sister. Levi Strauss died even richer, leaving a cotton cloth empire and about $114 million (in today’s dollars) to a foundation and to his four nephews. All that glitters is not gold. ©

[Stanley]

Mother could blaze out over tales of police brutality, the lynching of Negroes, child labor, cruelty to prisoners. She made us feel that whatever was wrong with our society was our personal concern. Alice Hamilton.

Once upon a time, Virginia, the Republican Party believed that industry should be regulated. Among its aims, oddly enough, was the protection of workers and of the environment. It came to this belief the hard way, by listening to those who studied workers’ diseases and public health, and one of the chief movers (in both studies and remedies) was a rock-ribbed Indiana Republican named Alice Hamilton. The sister of humanist Edith Hamilton, Alice was born in New York City on February 27, 1869, and educated (in medicine) at the universities of Michigan, Minnesota, Munich and Leipzig. She fetched up in Chicago in 1897 as Professor at Northwestern’s medical college for women. There she also lived and worked in Hull House, where she became convinced that too many working class diseases were caused by workplace dangers or by living downwind from factories. Governor Deneen (Republican) agreed, and appointed Hamilton to the Illinois Occupational Disease Commission. There followed a career that brought Dr. Hamilton to a Harvard medical school chair (the first woman to occupy it), appointments to national and international commissions on occupational health and safety, pioneering work on the addition of lead to gasoline (she denounced its dangers in the 1920s!!!), and still, nearly every year, she took her “vacations” by returning to work at Hull House. In 1944, she was awarded the ultimate accolade of being named to the list "Men in Science". Dr. Alice Hamilton lived almost long enough to see lead removed from gasoline, dying in 1971, and maybe long enough to become a Democrat. ©