BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

When a wise man points at the moon, only a fool looks at the finger. Let us all be fools if just for a moment. Carl Woese.

A liberal education, seriously entered upon, can be confusing. Finding out what makes the world tick, in all its parts, is by turns serious, enlightening, liberating, and overwhelming. Carl Woese, born on July 14, 1928, and a student at Amherst in the late 1940s, could not decide on a major but finally settled on mathematics and physics. He was pretty sure, though, that he didn’t want to do biology, until his Amherst physics professor told him there were some interesting things going on in “biophysics”, whatever that was. Woese got his biophysics PhD at Yale in short order (under three years), then thought medicine might suit better—and pay more—so went to Rochester where he got turned off by pediatrics. Still curious about that disciplinary line between matter and life, he went back to Yale for a post-doc, then on to industry, a fellowship at the Pasteur in Paris, and finally back to the academy, at Champagne-Urbana in 1964. At Illinois he settled down to redraw the tree of life, not to upset Darwin (far from it) but rather to concentrate on the detailed mechanisms of evolution, as he put it to study “processes rather than forms.” Working at the molecular and sub-molecular levels, Woese discovered a third “domain” (often existing in extreme environments) to add to the prokaryotes (roughly, the bacteria) and the eukaryotes (roughly, plants, animals, and fungi), which he called the “Archaea.” Controversial at first, his original paper (1977) led to a vastly more complicated (and ultimately more workable) vision of life which rendered my high school biology completely out of date and is now regarded to have deepened our understanding of just about everything that ticks. ©

[Stanley]

The lesson lynching teaches is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home. Ida Bell Wells.

Aged only 16, Ida Wells was kicked out of college at about the same time she learned that she and five younger siblings had been orphaned by a yellow fever epidemic in Holly Springs, Mississippi. But she was accustomed to adversity: born a slave, of slave parents, on July 16, 1862, her master carpenter father and housemaid mother had taught her to be tough and ambitious. In 1878 Ida decided to keep her family together, secured a teaching job in a black school, and enlisted relatives to care for her sibling brood while she was teaching. As the white south invented legal segregation and night-time intimidation to replace slavery as a form of “race control,” Ida was, predictably, unbowed and unbent. Aged 22 she sued a Tennessee railway company for not honoring her first-class ticket and moving her back to a black carriage. She won, too, and $500 damages, but the decision was reversed by a higher court. Ida Bell Wells went on to a long career as a crusading journalist and public speaker in Memphis, Philadelphia, and Chicago, perhaps best known for her long campaign against so-called “lynch law,” a cause she took up when three of her friends were brutally murdered by a mob in 1889. In that case, and many others, she pointed out that the alleged crimes committed by lynch-law victims were beside the point: racial intimidation was the name of the lynch game, and Ida Wells nailed it. She did marry, in 1895, and parented four children, but (again predictably) she refused to be submerged in her husband’s name, and stayed on her chosen course but now as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, socialist reformer, race warrior, editor and publisher, author and speaker. She is honored today by a Google Doodle, sitting at a typewriter, her railway valise waiting for her next journey, on an unsegregated train. ©

[Stanley]

The radius of space began at zero. Father Georges Henri Lemaitre, 1933.

In Missouri the idea of a necessary conflict between religion and science is common. My first serious conversation with a student here was with a biologist who feared that her major and her faith were incompatible. Darwin himself thought so, and I usually do. But other possibilities were deeply examined by Georges Henri Lemaître, a man whose fascination with science and theology lasted him a lifetime. That lifetime began in Belgium (on July 17, 1894) where Lemaître enjoyed a classical education in Jesuit schools, but at university he swapped horses to become an engineer. Then after war service he switched yet again to physics and math. At the same time, he studied for the priesthood, and in 1923 he was ordained a priest and began work on his second PhD (astronomy), under the guidance of Arthur Eddington, already mentioned in these notes as he who empirically confirmed the theory of relativity. Einstein’s theory made the traditional idea (in religion and science) of a fixed universe seem anomalous, and so Lemaître (whom Eddington thought quite gifted) began work on the notion that space and time might have a history. Given the immensity of the problem, it didn’t take Lemaître too long (first paper in 1927, clinching one in 1933) to come up with the “Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation” or as we more familiarly know it the Big Bang. Lemaître remained a priest (finishing that career as President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) and was of the view that science and faith occupied two quite different realms and could not conflict. He would have thought our current spats about whether to teach evolution in schools absurd and tiny-minded. ©

[Stanley]

What an artist dies in me. The Emperor Nero, theatrically contemplating a theatrical suicide, in June 68.

A surprising number of people who are ignorant of ancient history know that the Emperor Nero started the Great Fire of Rome (on July 18, 64 CE), or enjoyed the spectacle, or both. “Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned.” I first learned that this might not be entirely true at Callanan Junior High, watching “lunchtime serial” reels of Mervyn Leroy’s epic Quo Vadis, wherein a youngish Peter Ustinov (as Nero) played a lyre, not a fiddle, during the conflagration. Only much later did I find out that the whole story, lyre and all, might have been trumped up by Nero’s detractors. To be sure, Nero attracted detractors. But he started with a handicap (he was Caligula’s nephew and adopted son, while his biological father was no one to write home about) and then the literally poisonous politics of the imperial household and the whole Julio-Claudian dynasty did not provide the kind of nurturing, supportive environment every child needs. The whole episode of Nero’s short life ought to have given monarchy a bad name, but after Rome Europe chose monarchy anyway. Still, Nero succeeded to the divinity and power of emperor, aged 17, with high hopes, and had some solid accomplishments to his credit. But there is considerable evidence, too, of imperial insanity and arbitrary tyranny and so Nero’s record was, and still is, a matter of dispute. Nero was a man who might well have fiddled while Rome burned, had he a fiddle. What we do know is that the Great Fire burned for six days, destroyed most of the wooden city that was Rome and required its rebuilding in the very image of a pretty odd empire. Four years later, facing the usual fate of his forebears, Nero botched his own suicide. ©

[Stanley]

I did the work of one, and I tried to do it well. Mary Ann Bickerdyke.

Among the undersung results of our Civil War was the Sanitary Commission, created in 1861. Its effects rippled along through our history to include the rise of the nursing profession, of the very idea of social welfare, of the women’s rights movement, and (yes) of public sanitation. Headed up by men, it also found places—prominent and humble—for thousands of women, e.g. Louisa May Alcott, who served as managers, as battlefield nurses, as hospital cooks, who wrote letters home for wounded or illiterate soldiers, and (yes) fought for adequate sanitation in military encampments. Back on the home front, women raised stupendous sums of money to support the Commission and helped our great Civil War to acquire in the North its strong sense of mission. The Commission had its origins in the British Sanitary Commission of the Crimean War, and just as that Commission had its Florence Nightingale, so ours had its Mary Ann Bickerdyke, born in Ohio on July 19, 1817, who acquired her sense of mission at that hotbed of trouble, Oberlin College, and then reaped its whirlwind as western field agent for the Sanitary Commission, nurse, creator of scores of field hospitals, tormentor of Union generals, and crusader for the rights of “contraband” slaves. At the Grand Review in May 1865, victory won, General Sherman saw to it that his “Brigadeer Commanding, Hospitals” rode at the head of his army corps. She didn’t slow down after the war, either, advocating for public welfare and veterans’ rights until finally, aged 72, she herself was granted a government pension, at $25 a month. Today “Mother” Mary Ann, rendered in granite, still caresses a wounded Union soldier in the cemetery at Galesburg, Illinois. ©

[Stanley]

My ambition for my own children was that they should be free. Marista Reith Leishman, 2006.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is/ To have a thankless child.” King Lear got it right in the end, for his “thankless” Goneril was indeed serpent-like, but it often takes more time for thankless children to utter their amazed, deeply hurt disdain for dad. One such was Marista, only daughter and second child of Lord Reith. John Reith, born on July 20, 1889, of Presbyterian clerical stock in the Scots village of Stonehaven, took some of its granite south to a hugely distinguished career, notably as the BBC’s first Director-General. He built Broadcasting House in a modernist image and, by God, “his” BBC was, too, a great radio empire designed to enlighten, inform, and amuse the masses (and their betters), but not to encourage anyone to kick over the traces or to build a new Jerusalem. There is no taking away Reith’s magnificent accomplishment, a publicly owned, tax supported giant that remained, “almost near as dammit,” an independent voice in politics and journalism, news and otherwise. But after Lord Reith’s death (in 1971) we began to find in him some Lear-ish qualities, his fascination with fascism, Hitler, and Mussolini, his contempt for Churchill and the ‘war party,’ his pathological bitterness at being kicked upstairs in 1938. Still you can’t keep a mountainous competence down and he did good war service, once war came. It was left to his daughter and reverend son-in-law (when in their 70s) to insert the dagger and then twist it, exposing his cruelties to his wife and children in her memoirs and their joint interviews, circa 2005-2010. Marista Leishman might have been Reith’s Cordelia, but perhaps he deserved a Goneril. ©

[Stanley]

Humour is vague, runaway stuff that hisses around the fissures and crevices of the mind, like some sort of loose gas. Jonathan Miller.

If you would be a Jack of all trades, you had best be content with being master of none. That may be truer today than it was when (in the mists of time) the cliché was first coined. But a contemporary who has made a game effort is Jonathan Miller, born in London on July 21, 1934. Miller grew up comfortably in one of London’s leafy suburbs and looked like following his father, Emanuel, into medicine, taking his medical degree (and one in chemistry) at Cambridge in 1959. The first of many detours occurred before then, as at Cambridge Miller became involved with several sets of ne’er-do-wells, most notably the drama group Cambridge Footlights and that nursery of spies and public intellectuals, the Cambridge Apostles. I first ran across Miller not as a medic but as a comic, when my Penn roommate Paul Cohen unveiled his Hanukkah present, the LP of “Beyond the Fringe,” a cabaret act involving Miller, another polymath (Alan Bennett) and a couple of casual misfits (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) that swept the stages of Edinburgh, London, and New York. But already Miller had his eyes on more exalted roles, producer, director, and writer, of tragedies, comedies, intriguing documentaries, live and on camera, in theatres and on the streets. Nor did he forget his father’s trade. Jonathan Miller served his medical residency (in gastroenterology!!) in the 1960s and then, in the 1980s, went back to school to study neuropsychology (on which he then wrote books and produced documentaries). Along the way Miller married (Rachel Collet, in 1956), parented three kids, agitated for homosexual civil rights, and became a leading atheist. I don’t think he has slowed down yet. ©

[Stanley]

Basically, I'm a back-room girl. Pamela Harriman, grand-daughter of Mary Harriman, in a 1997 interview.

Mary Averell (Harriman) was born on July 22, 1851. 39 years on, she came to share that birthday with Rose Fitzgerald (Kennedy), and although these women shared much else in common one doubts that they ever exchanged birthday cards. Rose Kennedy is famous, so let’s look at Mary Averell Harriman. She was born wealthy, her father a banker and railway president, and her parents hoped she would marry up. Instead she married E. H. Harriman, a clergyman’s son, who needed a hand. Mary’s father obliged, and from that helping hand E. H. Harriman would fashion one of the country’s great fortunes, built on his controlling ownership of several railroads (e.g. the Union Pacific), Wells Fargo, and a bank or two. In 1909 he left it all to Mary, and she gave much of it away, starting with the family’s 21,000-acre Hudson Valley estate, which became Palisades State Park. Large gifts also went to support John Muir’s work at Yosemite, the creation of nature reserves in New York, to the Red Cross, and to Yale University, where her son Averell was educated sufficiently well to fashion a significant career. So much to the good, but a blot on Mary’s landscape was her enthusiasm for eugenics, which took shape with her founding gift to the Eugenics Record Office. This embarrassed Averell, her politician son, and Mary Rumsey, her sociologist daughter, but they made amends with Averell’s enthusiasm for New Deal politics and Mary Rumsey’s work for urban settlement houses and the agricultural cooperative movement. Mary Rumsey predeceased her mother, but Averell lived long enough to lend a helping hand to Rose Kennedy’s second son and Averell's daughter, Pamela, lent a helping hand to almost everyone except John F. Kennedy. ©

[Stanley]

Mail from Bob thios morning....

Re: CORRECTION Basically, I'm a back-room girl. Pamela Harriman, grand-daughter of Mary Harriman, in a 1997 interview.
One’s memory can go very bad, and I thank Ruth Bryant for correcting me on the matter of Pamela Harriman, who was not Mary Harriman’s granddaughter but Averell Harriman’s wife. Pamela was born to the English purple, not the American, married Randoph Churchill, and was Averell Harriman’s lover before she became his wife.
Otherwise I think I got her just about right. She was a very gifted person, took American citizenship in the 70s, and in due course was our ambassador to France.
My apologies to all, including Pamela Harriman’s shadow.

Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

The real truth of the discovery of flight is that the Wright Brothers first established a scientific basis for aeroplane design; they then invented the mechanical means for putting this scientific knowledge to practical use. Gilbert Brewer, 1922, In N...

The proper accreditation of inventions can produce ill-tempered battles, especially when national pride becomes involved. There was a time, late in the Stalinist era, when Soviet Russia felt it needed to claim precedence in all sorts of technological advances, memorably lampooned by cartoonist Walt Kelly, who had the Russians inventing baseball. A more important example was the dispute (over the invention of powered flight) between Orville and Wilbur Wright and Samuel Pierpont Langley, Harvard graduate, eminent mathematician, and latterly the director of the Smithsonian Institution. Two self-made Ohio boys versus a real scientist who was also a real gentleman. We don’t hear much about this battle anymore because of the single-minded efforts of an English aviation nut, Griffith Brewer, who was born on July 23, 1867. Brewer really liked to get airborne, first in hot air balloons (from 1891) and then (1908) aboard one of the Wright concoctions, in Paris. Brewer had already formed a fast friendship with the Wrights, particularly Wilbur, and became their most influential defender against the claims of Langley (and others). Brewer proved useful not because of his amateur enthusiasms for getting airborne, although that’s where his energy came from, but from the fact that in real life he was an eminent patent lawyer. His public advocacy of the Wrights began in 1903, and he clinched the matter in a long letter to the editor of Nature in 1922. Perhaps most importantly, he talked the British into buying a patent license from the Wrights (for £14,000) in 1914 (about $2 million in today’s money). In the same year, Brewer got his pilot’s license so he could take off whenever he wanted.©

[Stanley]

I, Henry Shaw . . . of sound and disposing mind . . . and desiring especially to provide for certain objects that have been the subject of thought, and labour, and care . . . do make my last will and testament. . . Henry Shaw's will, 1889.

Google ‘Henry Shaw’s Bench’ and you will see one of my favorite places, a wrought iron sculpture in which a kindly old gent, dressed for the afternoon, invites you to sit a while and enjoy the quiet splendors of well-tended nature. The iron gentleman is Henry Shaw. He was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, on July 24, 1800, the only surviving son (there were two sisters) of an up and coming foundry owner. Henry was educated for a time at the brand-new Mill Hill School in London, but financial hard times sent him and his father to North America to look for new markets. Henry liked what he saw, and at the tender age of 19 he set up shop in St. Louis, where he would prosper greatly selling Sheffield steel fabrications to the booming city, its farming hinterland, its steamboat men, and its covered wagon migrants heading west. Henry grew up with the city, so quickly that (like Ben Franklin) he retired at 40 and (like Ben) devoted pretty much the rest of his life to good works. Among those good works was his Tower Grove estate, and well before he died (at 89) he’d made it into a botanical institute, opened it to the public, and given it to the city. And then endowed it. It is now the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and if you come to St. Louis and don’t see it you haven’t been here. And be quite sure, during your visit, to sit on Henry’s bench. Adjoining the Gardens is Tower Grove Park, a magnificent public space that he gave to the city (by act of the state legislature) in 1868, and then helped to build the magical pavilions and shelters, now lovingly restored, that are scattered along its eastern half. Henry made other gifts to his city, too, but surely these will suffice. ©

[Stanley]

Uncle Bob with Henry Shaw in 1998.

[Stanley]

I'm done with girls on rocks . . . the commercial art game . . . tempts a man to repeat himself. Maxfield Parrish, 1931.

Art, notoriously, is not a field to recommend to any young person who wants to be rich. The millions paid, these days, for modern oils, pastels, and watercolors are almost always, it seems, paid to savvy collectors who bought them for peanuts when the painter was still alive but living on borrowed time and in borrowed premises. But there are modern era artists whose work today commands high prices partly because it commanded high prices when they created it. Maxfield Parrish, for instance, became a millionaire painter, living on his New Hampshire estate with his wife and mistress (all three lived into their 90s) and at the height of his career pulling down over $2 million a year (in today’s dollars). The son of a wealthy merchant who became a painter, Parrish was born on July 25, 1870, in Philadelphia, and educated at Haverford College, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Drexel Institute. He became most famous as an illustrator of children’s books, and several of my parents’ childhood favorites (e.g. A Wonder Book and an American edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories) bore his striking, sometimes (to me, as a child) frightening color illustrations. But Parrish was also much in demand as a painter and as an illustrator for mass circulation magazines. Parrish’s work (print and canvas) is said to have inspired important developments in 20th-century art; more tellingly he was Norman Rockwell’s “god.” But whereas I think of Rockwell’s illustrations as those of a folk artist exploiting our sentimentalities, Parrish’s bear a third look with their brash, full colors, often in unusual, almost surreal juxtaposition, their thematic inventiveness, and (in a word) their artiness. ©

[Stanley]

Nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from visiting their country and . . . becoming their historian. George Catlin.

As the 19th century progressed, efforts to depict American Indians and their cultures gathered momentum. Such efforts had disparate roots and aims and thus a multitude of expressions ranging from imperialism to sentimentalism, but among them were pioneering attempts to tell the story truly. Some origins of American anthropology lie here. Linguistic studies, too, got a big boost. But the best-known depictions were, literally, pictures, and among the artists who really tried to get it right pride of place belongs to George Catlin. Catlin was born in Wilkes-Barre, PA, on July 26, 1796, along the permeable frontier, and Indians were still his neighbors. Perhaps more to the point, his mother, Polly, had been captured by the Iroquois (during the American Revolution), and told George her stories—which, as with many captives, were not horror stories. Trained as a lawyer and married to the devoted (and wealthy) Clara Gregory, George Catlin parlayed his childhood fascinations with the Iroquois and with drawing into extended expeditions to capture vivid images of individuals and of the landscapes of their lives. Most of his paintings from life were done in the 1830s and involved him in travels from St. Louis to the far reaches of the original Louisiana Purchase. Catlin generated controversy during his life because of his admiration for his indigene subjects, and now because some regard his later career as an extended effort to exploit them. Others say he was not a particularly good painter. Having seen some of his works, in Washington and on tour, I would say that, as George Catlin intended, these paintings do convey to us the presence, force, and depth of his subjects. ©

[Stanley]

Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite. Elizabeth Hardwick.

Not all born-agains are conservatives, witness the Hardwicks of Lexington, KY, a plumber and his “ineffably feminine” wife who brought up their eleven children to share their left-leaning outlooks. On the other hand, one of their brood recalled, one outcome was that all had “singularly low birth rates” as adults. That witty writer was Elizabeth Hardwick, born July 27, 1916, and destined to become one of our leading pubic intellectuals. First there was an English MA at the University of Kentucky and a precocious engagement with journals like The Nation and The Partisan Review, both of which she would later write for as a critic. From her “down home” Kentucky background she also distilled the ambition “to be a New York Jewish intellectual,” and off she went to do a Columbia PhD in English literature. The doctorate never came off, but she published an odd novel (in 1945) that interested a New York Jewish intellectual enough that he invited Elizabeth to write for The Partisan Review. During these years, Elizabeth also met, and married, Robert Lowell. It was, to say the least, a tempestuous marriage, producing in Lowell’s The Dolphin (1973) “one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry” (Adrienne Rich). Despite all that, the relationship was, Hardwick much later reflected, “the best thing that ever happened to me.” It also produced a daughter, Harriet, born in 1957, and in 1963 The New York Review of Books, the brainchild of Hardwick, Lowell, and their New York Jewish intellectual friends, Jason and Barbara Epstein. Elizabeth Hardwick died in 2007, aged 91, leaving us a mountain of perceptive criticism, some of it still in print, and some very good fiction. ©

[Stanley]

If a theory appears to you as the only possible one . . . you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve. Karl Popper.

In the spring semester of my Junior year, learning about the philosophy of history from William Fontaine, I read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, a 2-volume wonder that I vowed to read again. It still sits on my shelves, heavy with yellow highlighting, beckoning me for another go. My good intentions have been strengthened by learning—mainly from colleagues—much more about Popper, who was not (as I thought back in 1964) a philosopher of history but of science, and indeed a supremely important philosopher of science. Karl Popper was born in Vienna, at the start of the century (July 28, 1902), in what should have been the secure surroundings of an upper-class home, indulged and encouraged by his parents for his “bookish” tendencies. His wide interests took him to music and science (he qualified to teach both in school) but he finally settled on philosophy, and upon a view of thought that made him an inveterate enemy of all dogmatisms but his own, which was to be relentlessly, dogmatically empirical. In a century that was to hold little security for Viennese Jewish converts, no matter how well off or well educated, Popper also had more than his fill of totalitarianisms (the main impetus of The Open Society, published in 1945, Plato as its Satan, Hitler and Stalin his acolytes). After a time in New Zealand, Popper and his wife Hennie settled down at the University of London, to produce The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) and to enjoy—and defend—his reputation as the world’s leading philosopher of science. His reign was disturbed only by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Hennie’s death in 1985. Papper remained active, and combative, until his death in 1994.©

[Tripps]

Good - now I know who Karl Popper was. I came across him earlier this year, and put this on my occasional blog - trippssnipps. 'Things that have interested or amused me.'
If it's all like this, I'm not surprised you've put off re-reading him.


Its all a question of tolerance and the philosopher Karl Popper addressed it. Although Popper was an advocate of toleration, he said that intolerance should not be tolerated, for if tolerance allowed intolerance to succeed completely, tolerance would be threatened. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, he argued:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. – In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

[Stanley]

David, I copied the above to Uncle Bob.....

[Stanley]

Junk is the ideal product . . . the ultimate merchandise. William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (1959).

The 20th century did not invent the throwaway society. Cast off clay tobacco pipes (originally good for only one or two smokes) litter London middens and can still be found at low tide in the Thames. But, let’s face it, we buy, use, and dispose of more junk than our forebears. One man who had more than most to do with creating our junk was Baron Marcel Bich (unforgettably christened “Byron Beach Marseilles” in what appears to be a plagiarized undergraduate essay on entrepreneurship, now preserved on line), born in Turin on July 29, 1914. Bich moved to Paris to study law and took out French citizenship just in time for WWII, during which he served briefly in the French Air Force. Next time he was luckier. With a friend, he took over (1945) an empty factory outside of Paris, thinking to manufacture a variety of products that might sell in war-torn Europe, e,g, fountain pens and shoes, and did OK but in 1950 got the brighter idea of buying a patent (for ball points) from a Hungarian, Laszlo Biro, and went into production BIG time. “Bic” pens are so cheap that people leave them everywhere and lend them promiscuously, and by now the “Bic” Company has sold well over 125 billion pens and Marcel, before he died in 1994, had grabbed an old title from an ancestor, becoming Baron Bich, fathered eleven children, built a mansion in Neuilly, branched out into throwaway Bic razors and Bic lighters (billions upon billions more junk items for tomorrow’s middens), and diversified into fashion (Guy Laroche, Dim, and Rosy are Bich companies), motor racing and competitive sailing. Bich almost copped the America’s Cup for France in the 1970s, though presumably not with throwaway boats. ©

[Tripps]

Thanks for that - the morning kickstart to the brain. . .

I remember Biro pens coming into use in the late 1940's. The nuns, of course, immediately forbade them, and made us continue with the 'dip in' pens and ink. I'm a big fan of the BIC disposable razors, but they go in the recycling bin when they are blunt.

[Stanley]

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom. C. Northcote Parkinson

Raffles Hotel, Singapore, is the sort of place one would like to see, and be seen in. If not the most famous hotel in the world, it’s in the top ten. The 1887 brainchild of four Armenian brothers, none of them named Trump, it’s been through several ownerships, including briefly the Japanese Empire, and its Long Bar is the birthplace of the Singapore Sling, an alcoholic drink of a certain authority. That would be notoriety enough, but in 1950 the owners endowed the Raffles Chair of History at the University of Malaya, and the first holder of the chair was C. Northcote Parkinson, who added another jewel to the Raffles crown with Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson was born in the north of England on July 30, 1909. He graduated from Cambridge in History, but for a while avoided universities, taught school, and produced a string of distinguished naval histories and biographies. Eventually this brought him to Singapore and the Raffles Chair, and in 1955 to a comic essay in The Economist on bureaucracies and their perversities, their tendency towards infinite expansion, their confusion of busy-ness with productivity, and their facility at placing people in positions above their level of competence. Soon it was a modern management classic, illustrations by Osbert Lancaster, one that brought Parkinson lasting fame, with which he was not entirely comfortable (some residual admiration for his law, perhaps?), and a later life on the lecture circuit and as a visiting professor in prestigious American universities. Parkinson’s Law, infinitely expandable, states simply that in an inefficient organization “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” I expect we have all seen it in operation.©

[Stanley]

Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversitie and chaunge of language. William Caxton, 1490.

We may—or may not—be living in the twilight of the book, the printed page, the written letter, but it has been noted that the new media we use alters our language, willy-nilly. It’s not just young people who think that e-mails—being quick—must also be brusque. So it was with the book. 530 years ago today, on July 31, 1485, William Caxton brought out the first (printed) edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le morte d’Arthur. Caxton was also England’s first printer, and with Malory’s book he again proclaimed his intention to clean up the language. After all, he was the one who set the type, brushed on the ink, and pressed the page. Why should he let slip past him the infelicities, anachronisms, ill usages, outright mistakes, and accidental spellings of some unknown scribe or, for that matter, of the author? So besides being the first English printer, Caxton cleaned up “the rude and old Englishe” that passed through his hands. By “rude” he meant unpolished and erratic: no Bowdler he. Geoffrey Chaucer’s saucy prose, written a century before, found in Caxton an editor and printer, not a censor. Caxton, born in about 1422, apprenticed into the fine woolens trade—he was a “mercer”—and ran across print on a trading trip to Cologne. Thinking this might be a better wrinkle than wool, he first set up in Bruges (ca. 1473), then moved to the City of Westminster to bring out a first (printed) edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1476. Printing was faster than scripting, but even so in his 16 years as a printer (he died in 1492) William Caxton printed “only” 108 books. And, it is at least arguable, he changed our language forever. ©

[Stanley]

What a subject for reflection for those who have the courage to enter into it! Larmarck on the subject of human evolution, 1802.

My amateur interest in evolution dates from a 1951 visit to the Field Museum, but it was given shape by Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century (1961). Eiseley’s thesis was that Darwin’s predecessors (e.g. the geologist Charles Lyell and his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin) cleared enough ground for him that he was able to build his eventually triumphant theory of evolution by natural selection. Another pioneer in the “evolution of evolution” was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, born on August 1, 1744, in northern France. After winning advancement for heroic military exploits (aged 16!!!), Lamarck became fascinated with the new science of classifying plants and gained valuable commissions from the crown. He survived the Revolution, and the Terror (he had the good sense to change the name of the Jardin du Roi to the Jardin des Plantes), and he branched out to include animals in his studies. In the process, Lamarck became convinced that animal species were interrelated and that they had evolved through environmental adaptation. Thus, famously, ancestral giraffes stretched their necks to eat leaves, and passed the longer neck on to their offspring. Lamarck’s principal work was published in 1802. In 1859, in Origin of Species, Darwin (correctly) dissented from the mechanism but praised Lamarck for appreciating that speciation was “the result of law, not miraculous interposition.” This revolutionary view was as fundamental to Darwin’s own discoveries as was Lyell’s finding that the world was unimaginably old. So meet “Darwin’s pioneer,” Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck. 1744-1829. ©

[Stanley]

I talked to Uncle Bob in St Louis yesterday. He's well (He had just been out for a 16 mile bike ride....) and yesterday was his last day as Dean of the Honors College. He will remain on the faculty as a teacher and won't be fading away in the near future! (No retirement in US academe if you have 'tenure'. You can go on until you drop!)

[Stanley]

You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. James Baldwin.

At a meeting in a family-owned apartment in Manhattan, in late May 1963, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy told a group of black leaders of his family’s rise from despised Irish to wealth and power and urged patience and fortitude. There might well be, Kennedy said, a black president in 40 years. Such pie in the sky stuff did not move the attendees. After a ringing declaration by dramatist Lorraine Hansberry that Kennedy just didn’t get it, several participants walked out, and that was that. Among the fascinating details of this encounter is this one: the meeting was initiated by James Baldwin, a young (born August 2, 1924) writer not yet famous but eloquent enough, eminent enough, to get Kennedy’s attention. Baldwin had just appeared on Time magazine’s cover and his striking The Fire Next Time had just come out in book form after serialization in The New Yorker. Earlier that Spring, he had bravely toured the South as a representative of CORE. Baldwin’s life before 1963 was in some ways a satire of Bobby Kennedy’s Irish story: born poor in Harlem with an addict father, brought up by a strict, harsh Pentecostal stepfather, beaten up by white policemen at 19. Alone, afraid, and desperate to tell of himself, Baldwin escaped to Paris in 1948 and matured there as a writer and homosexual. He became friends with other black exiles, notably Josephine Baker, and found a home, but he was drawn back by the Civil Rights crusade. The 60s were his high water mark, but back in Provence (from 1970) he lived large, continued to write, played host to visiting friends like Miles Davis and Marlon Brando. “Jimmy” Baldwin died of cancer in 1987. He chose to be buried in New York. ©