BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

This is the best point in my life, I'm livin' right now. I'm glad it came before I died. Muddy Waters, 1978.

McKinley Morganfield was born on a Mississippi farm near Rolling Fork on April 4, 1915, 101 years ago, and despite the region’s racism his prospects seemed pretty good. Ollie, his father, was a freehold farmer, a rare bird in a sharecropping society. But McKinley’s parents soon separated and the baby boy went to a sharecropper’s cabin, his grandma’s, on a Delta plantation. There his messy play habits got him the name of Muddy Waters, and there he learned to play music too, the harmonica first, at about four years old, and when he could hold one the guitar. In a region of great blues singers and players, Muddy was locally well-liked when Alan Lomax showed up with his recording machine in 1941, recorded quite a bit of Muddy Waters, and Muddy got the idea that it might work out for him. In 1943 he moved to Chicago, went electric, got a band around him, recorded first for Columbia and then for Chess Records, and became more famous still. He lived comfortably, performed when he wanted, went back to Columbia Records, moved to a modest house in the suburbs, and then in 1958 he toured England. There blues purists didn’t like his electric style, but a few youngsters were knocked out, among them Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones, who first adapted his style and then decided to name their band after Muddy’s “Rollin’ Stone,” a Chess Records hit of the 1940s. And then came Carnegie Hall (1959), Newport (1960) and real fame, as the likes of Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan appropriated small and large bits of Muddy, acknowledged their debts, and often enough invited the blues icon to play with them in concert. Indeed, Muddy Waters’ last gig was in the summer of 1982, headlined with Eric Clapton, in Miami. He sang “Blow Wind Blow,” and it was a long, long way from Rolling Fork and Highway 61. ©

[Stanley]

I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs . . .may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity. Walter Sutton, 1902.

April 5 is a big date for modern genetics, for it’s the birthday of Walter Sutton (1877, in Utica, NY) and Clarence McClung (1870, in Clayton, CA). But there were more coincidences here than a common birthday. Both men crossed disciplinary lines to see what lay beyond, for both began their professional careers in medicine rather than biological science. More than that, chance took the younger man, Sutton, to the University of Kansas (his brother played basketball there under Naismith), where he intended to study engineering, but chance took him into the laboratories of the medical school where the young dean (Clarence McClung) had developed an interest in the mechanisms of heredity. Under McClung’s guidance, Sutton wrote two pioneering papers on the subject at KU but returned to engineering for a while (in the oil industry) before taking McClung’s advice to enroll in medical research at Columbia University. Meanwhile, McClung weaned himself further away from medicine to join the Zoology department at Pennsylvania, where most of his pioneering research in genetics was done (on grasshoppers, by the way). Sutton favored the fruit fly, but between the two of them, and the German biologist Theodor Boveri, both the idea and the mechanisms of genetic inheritance were pretty well established by the 1920s (the physics and chemistry of it awaited Crick’s and Watson’s double helix). Sutton then turned his life completely over to medicine, but you can’t keep a good engineer down. As a volunteer medic in WWI, in 1915-6, Sutton discovered how to isolate shrapnel in deep wounds, and then invented the surgical instruments needed to remove it. Whether he met Ernest Hemingway and Malcolm Cowley in the American Ambulance Hospital there is not recorded. He returned to the US to become medical dean at Kansas City. ©

[Stanley]

The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Rose Schneiderman, 1912

Now that our conservative political party has been for some time pretty uniformly hostile to trades unionism, it’s important to remember that once upon several times in US history unions enjoyed significant support from across the spectrum. So it was that Andrew Carnegie got a lot of grief (for instance from Joe Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch) for the bloody and cynical suppression of a strike at his Homewood (PA) plant in 1892. Later, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) of New York City was born (in 1903) of an alliance between women of wealth and women of work who found common cause in the dreadful conditions prevailing in the garment industry. Never quite despairing of moral suasion, the League nevertheless devoted most of its energy and its money towards helping women workers unionize in order to beat the employers down on wages and working conditions. Among immigrant workers “adopted” by the WTUL was the indomitable Rose Schneiderman, born in Poland on April 6, 1882, orphaned in New York in 1892, and galvanized into activism by the capworkers’ strike in 1905. Rose’s WTUL patronesses sent her to school at the League’s expense, and indeed immigrant Rose was elected Vice President of the League in 1908. But Rose already knew how to speak for herself. After the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, Rose was the WTUL headliner at a protest meeting (held at the Metropolitan Opera!!!) where she told the well-heeled assembly “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk of good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and found you wanting.” Rose went on to help found the ACLU, and she was still going strong in the 1960s, a woman who knew she could stir up both trouble and support in the land of the free and the home of the brave. ©

[Stanley]

So Napoleon is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of man . . . become a tyrant! Ludwig von Beethoven, 1804.

My dad’s classical collection extended to Beethoven and Mozart and not much further, and his favorite symphony among the several he owned was Beethoven’s Third, “The Eroica,” recorded by Bruno Walter and the “Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.” It was on six 78 rpm disks, heavy enough to cause a clatter on his fine Magnavox record changer, and all housed in a hard-bound album, bright red, with a striking rendition of Napoléon’s campaign cap and Beethoven’s dedication page, with “Napoleon Bonaparte” heavily crossed out with red X’s. The symphony was first performed in public, in Vienna, on April 7, 1805. A well-attested story (the sources are Beethoven himself and his secretary, not to mention the original manuscript’s cover page) that the composer had dedicated the piece to First Consul “Buonaparte,” but then—on hearing that Napoléon had proclaimed himself emperor (in 1804) tore the title page in half and threw it on the floor in disgust. Beethoven then rededicated the symphony to his royal patron, a different “hero,” a prince of the Austrian ruling house. Later, on hearing of Napoléon’s death in exile, Beethoven commented (referring to the Third’s funeral movement) that he had written “the music for this sad event seventeen years ago.” It’s probably a true story, and as true as any told about Beethoven, but the symphony itself in all its revolutionary newness, its shifting moods and themes, its sheer length, can still stand the test of time as a symbol or measure of the impact of the French Revolution and its armies, and be it said its emperor, on all of Europe’s ancien régimes. Dad’s often expressed curiosity, however, was how a single culture could produce a Mozart, a Beethoven, and a Hitler. ©

[plaques]

This posting should probably belong in the 'Good Read department'. The Fall of Napoleon, the Final Betrayal. (David Hamilton-Williams) puts an entirely different light on the politics and intrigue behind the rise and fall of Napoleon. I would suspect we, the British, may have been better off if Wellington hadn't beaten Napoleon.

[Stanley]

Alexandros son of Menides citizen of Antioch made this , , , , Inscription on the missing plinth of the Venus de Milo.

The world’s most famous statue (unless she’s beaten out by Michelangelo’s David), the Venus de Milo, was rediscovered on April 8, 1820. She had resided for centuries, possibly whole but certainly in two halves, in a hiding place, a small cave, on the island of Melos, in the Aegean Sea. When she was created by a Greek sculptor (apparently not Praxiteles) in about 130 BCE, she was Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and it’s possible that she was still Aphrodite when—some time later—she first found shelter in that cave, especially if she was hidden from the conquering Romans. By the time she was found, however, Melos/Milos had undergone many political changes, and was just about to undergo another (via Greek independence). Her discoverer was a Greek peasant but he was in 1820 still a subject of the Ottoman empire. The French naval officers who bought her and the French consul in Istanbul who arranged her trip to Paris (Olivier Voulier, Jules d’Urville, and Charles-François de Riffardeau, duc de Rivière) thought of her as “Venus” and so she has remained. Her voyage to Paris and the Louvre is a story worthy of a Gilbert and Sullivan treatment, oriental despots, corrupt judges, and all the trimmings. It also spawned several legends (for instance a struggle with pirates during which her arms and a pedestal column were broken off and abandoned) all more or less untrue (she was armless when found). In Paris, before the two halves were reunited and presented to King Louis XVIII in 1822, it is quite certain that an inscribed plinth was separated from the statue and has not been seen since, although the inscription on it was recorded. Despite all that, the Venus de Milo now stands serenely in her castle-museum, bathed in soft light and safe at last from pirates and peasants and French naval captains. ©

[Stanley]

It is intended to be Negroid in character and in expression. Florence Price, program notes for her Symphony in E Minor, 1933.

Mark Twain more than once called this country “The United States of Lyncherdom,” and although lynchings occurred everywhere and had both black and white victims, most lynchings happened in the South and most of those were of black people. The public aim was usually vengeance. The other aim was a symbolic, brutal reassertion of white supremacy. Such threats drove Florence Smith Price out of the south twice, once in 1901 when she was a little girl whose talents, her musician mother thought, could not be realized in Little Rock, and then once again (in 1927) when Florence and her husband (a lawyer, Thomas Price) left Little Rock because of a lynching (one of “only” 16, that year, way below the 105 recorded in 1901 but too close to the Price home for comfort). Before, in between and after her exoduses, Florence (born on April 9, 1887) developed a prodigious talent, first under her mother’s tutelage, then at Little Rock’s Capitol High School, and then at the New England Conservatory (where, it is sobering to note, she felt she had to pass as Mexican). Everywhere Florence struggled to make her musical mark, at one point composing advertising jingles and silent film accompaniments, but in 1932 she won the Wanamaker Prize for her romantic Symphony in E Minor, had her work performed by the Chicago Symphony, became friends with the likes of Langston Hughes and Marian Anderson, performed in public (both solo and in concert), and in 1940 Florence Smith Price was the first black woman to be inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. ©

[Stanley]

I love crystals, the beauty of their forms and formation; liquids, dormant, distilling, sloshing! The fumes, the odors—good or bad, the rainbow of colors; the gleaming vessels . . . Robert Burns Woodward.

If you are one of those dissipated characters who, of a summer evening, likes a gin and tonic, you’ll want to toast Robert Burns Woodward. For, unless you buy a very expensive tonic, you’ll be sipping synthetic quinine, one of a very great many natural compounds that Woodward learned how to make in the lab and then helped through to industrial process. Woodward was born in Boston (on April 10, 1917) to an immigrant mom and a native-born dad, and was educated in Quincy public schools and then at MIT. He was not easy to educate. In school, he became his own chemist, rather obsessively really, and continued this self-directed tendency into MIT. At one point the Institute lost patience and expelled him for inattention, but they let him back in after a year spent cooling his heels. Before two years were out, he had copped both the BS and the PhD. This kind of frenetic work level persisted through a career that included a post-doc at Illinois and a professional lifetime at Harvard. He was turned on to synthesis by wartime necessity (imperial Japan controlled the main sources for natural quinine), but his method of doing so opened the door to rational, scientific ways of “constructing” incredibly complicated compounds. Evolutionary products that had taken eons to materialize became for Woodward puzzles open to solution in real time and small spaces. Besides quinine, his triumphs included strychnine, terramycin, aureomycin, colchicine, and even chlorophyll, the magic ingredient of the Kingdom of Plants. Woodward got the Nobel (in 1973) for the apparently even more difficult process of reconstructing an organic molecule of iron, ferrocene. His is a tale of amazing industry guided by intuitive genius. ©

[Stanley]

Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate. From Dido's Lament, an aria in Purcell's opera, 1689.

No one who lived through the 1960s can doubt that music can be highly political. Then it was mainly pop (a category that then briefly included the folk genre), symbolized for many by the goings-on at Woodstock in 1969. I remember one magical week in the summer of 1965 when (in Des Moines of all places) not only was I very young but Bob Dylan had five songs in the “Top 40”. But classical music can be political, too, for instance Peter Maxwell Davies’ hauntingly tuneful anti-nuclear piece, “Farewell to Stromness” (which did not stop him getting a knighthood or becoming Master of the Queen’s Music) or Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, actually written and performed in a German concentration camp. Another very political composition, the opera Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell, may have been first performed in London on this day, April 11, 1689, coronation day for King William and Queen Mary. Their accession was part of the revolutionary settlement that officially deposed Mary’s father (James II) and led to the rise of parliamentary sovereignty. Or maybe not. Certainly Purcell (and 38 other scarlet-robed musicians) performed at the coronation itself, but music historians are a bit uncertain about the actual première date of Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, which may have been part of the coronation festivities or an April 30th birthday present for the new queen. Whichever, the opera was certainly political, not only celebrating the new régime and its Protestant monarchs but also allegorically linking Catholic James’s treacherous desertion of the Church of England and his flight from London (after throwing his Great Seal into the tidal mud of the Thames) to Aeneas’s abandonment of Queen Dido of Carthage and his flight to Rome. ©

[Stanley]

Lord, what fools these mortals be. William Shakespeare--probably.

Today we celebrate the birth anniversary (born on April 12, 1550) of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, courtier, playwright, poet, and a man who raises that odd question, did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? And those plays are wise, profound, and with an astonishing range of cultural reference. Could they have been written by a minor actor of (at best) modest origins? Come on, pull the other one. There is, clearly, a certain measure of class snobbery implicit in the question, and it may have been intensified by our modern inclination to see Shakespeare as high culture only, forgetting the roustabout nature of theatre performance in Shakespeare’s time (and later). My great-grandfather, country lawyer, gentleman farmer, politician, and editor, saw Francis Bacon as the most likely Shakespeare. He had small alabaster busts of both men on his desk, to help him think about it. (Only the Shakespeare bust survives, incidentally). But though Bacon certainly was a writer, de Vere is a better candidate, and is probably the current favorite in the Shakespeare stakes. Heir to one of England’s oldest titles, tutored by the best brains of Tudor England and educated at Oxford, he was a bit of a rake, caroused a lot, killed a cook, and kept on reading history and the classics. He also dabbled in writing, songs and poetry mainly, but enough decent stuff to make the Shakespeare manqué idea plausible, made even more likely by Oxford’s patronage of several dramatic troupes. So I give you Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and possibly the ‘real’ Bard of Avon. Or not, as Stephen Greenblatt and a host of other modern scholars have (often humorously) argued. I think it’s time to let de Vere lie quiet. Will Shakespeare was, after all, Will Shakespeare. And he wrote plays. ©

[Stanley]

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration, 1776.

It’s Thomas Jefferson’s birth anniversary today, for he was born on April 13, 1743, on his father’s plantation in Virginia. He died shortly after his 83rd birthday (and more to the point of his life) on July 4, 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. John Adams of Massachusetts, in their youth his revolutionary ally, in their maturity his political foe, and in their old age his affectionate, perceptive correspondent, died on the very same day (saying, legend has it, “Thomas Jefferson still lives.”) As the news traveled north and south by courier many Americans thought they had lived to witness a miracle. These two great heroes of the Revolution, called to heaven on the same day, and on such a day!! The fact that each of them, and particularly Jefferson, had doubts about heaven was ignored, and why not? It was, at the very least, an extraordinary coincidence, and North and South and middle it called forth a rash of joyful celebrations and a raft of solemn sermons. Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary governor of Virginia, minister to France, Secretary of State, and President, wanted to be remembered instead as the author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia. And so his gravestone has it. I think we owe him that. These embodiments of his ability to utter great principles in powerful language challenge us still and are therefore worth remembering in this election year, which is by Thomas Jefferson’s count the 240th year of the republic. ©

[Stanley]

Equal liberty was originally the Portion, & is still the Birthright of all men. Benjamin Franklin, petition to Congress, 1790.

Jefferson’s birthday yesterday, slavery today. Dr. Johnson’s famous judgement (1775) comes to mind: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from among the drivers of Negroes?” It’s a good question, never satisfactorily answered by Jefferson, although he clearly understood the dreadful hypocrisy of it. But as Jefferson himself helped to make clear equality and freedom were immanent in the revolutionary moment, and about when those farmer-militiamen of Lexington and Concord (one of them my great-great-great grandfather Estabrook, who also owned a slave) were getting ready to fire the shot heard round the world, on April 14, 1775, a group of 24 men got together in revolutionary Philadelphia to found the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. It was America’s first abolition society. Several of Jefferson’s new (and closest) friends were among the 24, notably Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, and Anthony Benezet, and an older codger that he hadn’t yet met, Ben Franklin, would be elected its president in 1785. Acting as its president, old Ben would lay the first anti-slavery petition before congress in 1790. And it is at once pleasing and disturbing to note that the society still exists today. Given the statistics of American life, American death, and especially American imprisonment, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society believes that it still has work to do. History is full of ironies, of course, and it must be pointed out that Benezet and 16 other of the 24 founders were Quakers, for most of whom the Peace Testimony would rule out their participation in the American Revolution. But perhaps we could say that Mr. Paine and Dr. Rush made up for that deficit. ©

[Stanley]

A good and godly monument for the maytenance of good learning. From the will of Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, 1588.

A quarter-century ago, I was external examiner for a PhD thesis at Cambridge. The viva voce was to be at Churchill College, but I was put up in Sidney Sussex by Tony Badger (who had just moved to Cambridge but was not yet Master of Clare). I spent a couple of pleasant evenings there, conducted the viva, and went away still totally unaware that Sidney Sussex College was named for a woman. When I found this out I determined to make amends, and today will work, for Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, was buried (in Westminster Abbey, no less) on April 15, 1589. (We do not know her birthdate). The Countess’s will, dated the previous December, a marvel of partible inheritance, showered substantial pieces of her personal and real estate on over 100 individuals, including named “poore preachers” of London (one assumes their poverty was material), and, very Puritan-like, she endowed a lectureship at the Abbey. And the Countess left the amazing sum of £5,000 which, along with “other things” of hers, including a store of silver plate, was to endow a new college at Cambridge. And by 1596 the college was up and running on the site of an old Grey Friars (Franciscan) establishment (the abbey’s vaults are today the college’s wine cellars). It was to have been called Lady Sidney Sussex College, but along the way that changed. The Countess led a tempestuous and often unhappy life (indeed she changed her motto to Dieu me garde de calomnie), but she kept her head in more ways than one, invested her own estate wisely, and was finally buried with due honors. As for the PhD thesis, incidentally one by a female candidate, it was on William Penn, and after the internal and I agreed that it needed a rewrite, it passed handsomely. ©

[Stanley]

The only one that could ever reach me, was the son of a preacher man. Dusty Springfield.

An Anglo-Irish couple, the O’Briens, who named their daughter Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette might be pigeonholed as ultra-Catholic, but they had already named their eldest son Dionysius, so perhaps we shouldn’t play the name game with them. Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette, anyway, was born in West London on April 16, 1939, into a somewhat odd household enlivened by her housewife-mother’s frustrated ambitions and her accountant-father’s stern perfectionism. Food fights were a frequent accompaniment of family meals, and perhaps as a rebellion, Isobel took up football and became good enough at it to acquire the neighborhood nickname of Dusty. But it was also a very musical family, and soon Dusty and Dionysius (aka “Dion”) were known locally as good singers. Dusty recorded an Irving Berlin song for a local record shop, and soon Dion had become “Tom” and together with the wholly unlikely Richard Feild they’d formed a trio called The Springfields, a folkish group that enjoyed considerable success in the early 60s. Soon enough they split up. Feild became a leading Sufi mystic, a strange fate for an Eton lad. Tom Springfield went on to compose such hits as “I’ll Never Find Another You” and “Georgy Girl.” And Dusty Springfield went on to become, well, Dusty Springfield, the platinum blond with the amazingly variable and vital voice that has been compared to a whole range of pop, folk, blues, and jazz artistes but is best thought of as Dusty Springfield’s. Her career peaked in the late 60s but she splashed famous with several later albums, in varied genres and with varied personas, and was still going pretty strong when she became fatally ill in the mid 90s. Her last recording (1995) was “Someone to Watch Over Me.” ©

[Stanley]

There is no single model for the form of church government in scripture . . . it is a matter of liberty. Edward Stillingfleet, ca. 1670.

The Restoration of monarchy in 1660 imposed on England what was a profoundly reactionary settlement in the area of religion. Even though many who called Charles II back were in favor of a comprehensive church settlement (and even a few were for toleration), hot-blooded “Cavaliers” aimed for a narrow Anglicanism, and their legislation created disabilities for Protestant dissenters (let alone for Catholics) that would be carried into the 19th century. But there were those even among Anglicans who stood against the tide of persecution. A notable leader amongst them was Edward Stillingfleet, born in Dorset on April 17, 1635 and educated at Cambridge. During the Puritan Interregnum Stillingfleet showed his true colors by being clandestinely ordained into the Anglican ministry, and at the Restoration this, plus his family connections, brought him excellent clerical posts in London. There we know from Pepys and Evelyn that Stillingfleet was a great sermonizer, preaching at least twice to the Merry Monarch himself on the special dangers of sin in high places. It also took courage to argue for a more inclusive church settlement, which Stillingfleet did in several tracts. He acted on that notion, too, helping several excluded ministers and in the 1670s negotiating with leading non-conformists like Richard Baxter. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688-89, Stillingfleet’s reward was the Bishop’s Palace at Worcester, where he continued his work for inclusion. Personally tolerant though he was, Stillingfleet should better be seen as an evangelical supporter of a broad, comprehensive, and national church. Not a prophet of toleration and separation, Edward Stillingfleet was perhaps the best the old church had to offer to a new age. ©

[Stanley]

Here the whole world . . . like cast off clothes was left behind in ashes, yet in hopes . . . From the epitaph on Joy Davidman Lewis’s gravestone.

That there were a few Reds under our Beds in the 40s and 50s seems likely. We’d been through a crushing industrial depression and a World War in which Soviet Russia was an ally, and each encouraged some citizens to join, or “travel” with, the Communist Party. Whether communists were taking over Hollywood (Walt Disney) or the State Department (Whitaker Chambers) or the Army (Joe McCarthy) may be doubted. The hysteria served some people well, but it scared Helen Joy Davidman right out of the country. Davidman, born on April 18, 1915 to immigrant parents in New York City, a child prodigy in everything she tried (music performance, languages, and science), had her Columbia MA (English) by 1935 and in 1938 joined the CPUSA. She then infiltrated Hollywood (for 6 months) as a scriptwriter, moved back to New York to write patriotic war poetry and marry a Lincoln Brigade veteran, also CP, who encouraged her to write fiction but treated her badly. Perhaps their rocky marriage led them to Christianity, but both had joined the Presbyterian Church by 1947, in Joy’s case influenced by the Christian apologetics of C. S. Lewis. In 1952, her first marriage over and writing a book on the Ten Commandments, she traveled to England with her two sons and took up with Lewis as an editorial assistant. When her visa ran out, Lewis married Joy for mercy’s sake, in a civil ceremony, and then fell utterly in love with her just as her fatal cancer was discovered. A Christian wedding and several remissions followed, giving rise to one of the century’s more famous love stories (“Shadowlands”, 1985 et seq), before this dangerous Communist was finally laid to rest in Holy Trinity Churchyard, Headington, Oxford, in 1960.©

[Stanley]

All the labors of his followers only added to his power and elevation. From the Ehrenberg obituary, Journal of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, 1877.

The 19th was “Darwin’s Century” in part because of those precursors whose work in varied fields anticipated or made possible his own momentous discovery. And Darwin was aware of most of them. Once he’d figured out the basics of his theory (perhaps as early as 1837), Darwin read libraries of scientific works and corresponded with legions of scientists, testing his views, asking advice, establishing many lasting friendships. Among his more important correspondents was Christian Gottfried Ehrenburg, born in Delitzsch, rural Saxony, on April 19, 1795. Delitzsch is one of Germany’s best preserved old towns, and its high school is named after Ehrenberg, who (when Darwin started writing to him in the early 1840s) was already famed for his six (!!!) volumes (and many articles) on fossil microorganisms, then known collectively as the infusoria. Himself the beneficiary of developments elsewhere in the sciences, notably in microscopy, and a colleague and friend of the great Alexander von Humboldt, Ehrenberg traveled widely in Europe and the Arab lands (often with Humboldt), collecting specimens, hewing them out of their rock matrices, drawing them (he was his own illustrator), classifying them and thus making conclusions about their relationships both biological and historical. It was this, of course, that Charles Darwin found most interesting, and while Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was mainly concerned with larger organisms, Ehrenberg’s tireless labors with the smaller worlds enabled the younger scientist to see evolution as a process that involved all life forms. And back in that idyllic Saxon town, the Gymnasium’s top academic prize, still given annually, is the Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg award. ©

[Tizer]

Observation, and recording what you observed by drawing where always major aspects of studying biology and geology. It's much less so now because of the shift towards molecular sciences and the convenience of digital cameras, but it's good to see that geology students are often still taught to draw the rock formations and fossils that they see.

[Stanley]

The ability to observe rather than just look is fading fast under the influence of screen culture.....

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. Joan Miro.

The deep hostility between many Spanish artists and the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco is documented by their works (notably Picasso’s Guernica), by their exiles (Picasso again, Luis Buñuel), but most eloquently by the silenced cello of Pablo Casals, in 1946 protesting the peacetime toleration of Franco’s régime by the community of nations. Casals resumed concerts in 1950, but would not perform publicly in a country that supported Franco’s Spain until he was invited to the Kennedy White House in 1961. But for some the choices were more difficult, and in 1940 the painter Joan Miró decided that Franco’s Palma was preferable to Hitler’s Paris. Nor did he lay away his brushes. Indeed, one of his most mystical works, the 23 large gouaches collectively entitled Constellations, was completed during Miró’s WWII residence in his native land. Born on April 20, 1893, in Barcelona, and preferring always to be known as Catalan, Joan Miró i Ferrà lived long enough to revolutionize painting (he preferred to think he had “assassinated” art) through magical realism, then surrealism, to move into other artistic expressions (notably symbolism) and genres (sculpture), to campaign for the Spanish Republic, to see Franco off the planet, and finally to enjoy public recognition by the constitutional monarchy of Juan Carlos. Indeed, Barcelona hardly waited until El caudillo was cold to hold a Miró retrospective, while the national museum in Madrid paused only a couple of years longer to host a huge exhibition of his varied output, opened by the artist himself. Joan Miró died in his 91st year, in Palma. During his centenary, in 1993, major exhibitions in Barcelona, New York, Madrid, Paris, and London celebrated Miró’s impact on the art of our modern age. ©

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I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women. Eve Arnold.

One of the best photographers of the 20th century was also one of the least famous, and it was no accident that she was a she. So thought Eve Arnold, born in Philadelphia to an immigrant Russian rabbi and his wife on April 21, 1912. In 1932, a boyfriend gave her a Rolleicord; Eve dropped the boyfriend but kept the camera. Over the next decade Arnold taught herself photography, was taught by others, and at the age of 31 began to refashion her life as a documentary photographer. She worked as a stringer for Magnum and then took commission work all over the place, among others from Ladies Home Journal, Life, Look, and in Europe from Stern, Paris Match, and the London Picture Post. Arnold’s big breakthroughs came with photo essays on Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, but she was by no stretch a woman’s photographer, which she proved when in 1961 she moved to England, with her son, and for the next 30 years worked a wide range of assignments, mainly for the London Times, on subjects from South African apartheid to harem life in Dubai. Her last official assignment came when, aged 80, she documented a day in the life of John Major, who may have bored her to tears although, as a subject, she liked him better than Margaret Thatcher (who would not follow directions). Eve Arnold finally laid down her camera when, as she told her friend Angelica Huston, she could no longer hold it steady. She spent her last two decades reading (she preferred Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, and Mann), collecting an OBE from Queen Elizabeth, and being the life of the party at a Pimlico old peoples’ home. Arnold died just short of 100 in early 2012. She left behind her a series of classic works, in prose and pictures, all published after she turned 50. ©

[I met her by chance in the NY offices of Magnum in about 1982. I knelt, kissed her hand and thanked her for her pics..... I think she liked it.... S]

[Stanley]

I'd rather be an amateur. Yehudi Menuhin.

In its origins modern Zionism was strongly secular, and Yehudi Menuhin’s parents (Russian émigrés who met in Palestine before moving to the USA and marrying there) were of this faction. Born in the Bronx on April 22, 1916, exactly a century past, Menuhin never entered a synagogue until well into his adulthood, preferred ham for his breakfast meat, and once (inadvertently, be it said) scheduled a concert for Yom Kippur. Instead, Yehudi (which means “Jew”) converted to music. Aged 3, he was so entranced by the violin that his parents thought it best to provide lessons (as they did, later, for his two younger sisters). All three studied at what would become the Juilliard School. Despite a marred bowing technique (some would say), Menuhin became a master violinist at a startlingly young age, and when he was 12 the banker Henry Goldman (of Goldman Sachs) bought him a Stradivarius. Before he was 25 he had played to great acclaim in New York, Paris, and London, and despite doctors’ orders (not to mention deafness) he was still concerting in 1999 (in Berlin) when he collapsed and died of a heart attack. Yehudi Menuhin loved music as a “healing art,” and was ever ready to play for a cause, for instance against apartheid, for the United Nations Children’s Fund, and in Israel for Palestinian rights. Menuhin’s wartime concerts for the Allies are legendary (to British troops under shellfire, again on a stormy night for the Royal Navy at Scapa Flow, and finally, memorably, at Bergen-Belsen). He suffered severely from Anglophilism, which he thought not a disease, and became a British citizen in the 1970s. Baron Menuhin of Stoke d’Abernon is buried in the village of Stoke d’Abernon in the Surrey countryside, on the site of the Menuhin School of Music. ©

[Stanley]

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory.

The Tsarist empire, where “ancient” was a fashion, retained the Julian or “Old Style” calendar up to the Revolution, leading to endless trouble about birthdates, for instance that of Vladimir Nabokov, April 10, 1899, O.S., probably April 22 N.S. But Nabokov’s gift was to see opportunity in confusion, so he always insisted he shared William Shakespeare’s birth date. Fair enough. Vladimir Nabokov was born in Imperial St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899 because he said so. His family was rich, and inclined to cultural attainment (he had some remarkable siblings), and spoke different foreign languages at home and at table. The legend is that Vladimir could speak English before he could speak Russian, and (exiled by the October Revolution) his Cambridge degree (1922) was certainly in Romance Languages. Nevertheless, Nabokov’s first nine novels were in Russian, and he always insisted that only a Russian could pronounce his name properly. But his novels were widely admired, and so when war fetched him up in the USA (1941) he soon found paid work as a literature professor (at Wellesley College, then at Cornell) and volunteer work at Harvard (as a lepidopterist). Meanwhile, he had begun (also 1941) to write in English with considerable mastery, his prose floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. Lolita (1955), a runaway best-seller though by no means his masterpiece, enabled him to quit Cornell and, with his faithful wife-translator-fellow synesthete Vera flee yet again, this time to Montreux, Switzerland. There, at the Montreux Palace Hotel, Nabokov continued to write, to collect butterflies, to see colors in letters, numbers, and words, and to explore the complexities of chess, for him a metaphor of his art. He did not, however, manage to die on Shakespeare’s death day, also April 23. ©

[Stanley]

All I want is answers to my questions. Robert Porter Allen.

On a long weekend in the Ozarks we've sighted many raptors, including a bald eagle bathing in the North Fork, and were reminded of the huge ecological successes that followed the ban on DDT. So it is also a good time to remember Robert Porter Allen, born in Pennsylvania on April 24, 1905. Allen’s thoroughly middle-class family was deeply into Good Causes, amongst which they numbered labor unions, conservation, and education, and as a gift the young Robert got a year’s membership in the local Audubon Society. He didn’t take too well to education, however, and dropped out of two universities on his way to what seemed to be a vagabond’s life at sea. But once, ashore, he met a girl, a pianist and recent graduate of the Juilliard School named Ellen Sedgwick, who convinced him to marry, settle down a bit, and get a paying job at the Museum of Natural History. His first job was cataloguing manuscripts which did not go down too well, then he volunteered for the navy in WWII, but by degrees this young man with no degrees found his niche and became a famous conservationist, an ecologist before the term was in use. Robert Allen’s greatest triumph (of several) was to follow the last Whooping Cranes north from their Texas feeding grounds to their Canadian nesting sites, and then to badger everyone he could to institute rigorous conservation measures at both ends of the cranes’ journey, and en route. There were only 21 whoopers when he started. There are now about 300 breeding pairs. Not enough progress, Robert Allen would have said, but it’s better than extinction. Robert Allen did similar work for the Sandhill Crane, the Roseate Spoonbill, and the California Condor before he died, deeply mourned by the conservation community, at the age of 58. ©

[Stanley]

The windows in the West End were red with reflected fire, and the raindrops were like blood on the panes." Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting from London, 1940.

Among the more famous phrases in wartime journalism was “This [pause] is London,” the constant introduction to Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts on CBS. But first place probably went to his closing line, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which HRH Princess Elizabeth pointedly used in one of her own wartime broadcasts. 25 years later, on March 5, 1965, HM Queen Elizabeth would make Edward R. Murrow an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire. By then Murrow was close to death, killed at 57 by his most obvious habit, chain smoking (over three packs a day). Murrow was born an Egbert, in Polecat Creek, North Carolina, on April 25, 1908, but changed to Edward when he was in college (at Washington State). He was a brilliant student, Phi Beta Kappa, and a student politician too. That moved him to New York, where he found a wife (Janet Brewster, graduate of Mount Holyoke) and, soon enough, a calling, broadcast journalism. At only 29 (1937) he was head (and sole cook and bottlewasher) of CBS Europe and already hiring (“reporters, not announcers”) the men who would make his agency famous: William Shirer, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, et als. Murrow himself reported from bomb sites, from B-24 Liberators (he flew 25 missions), and later from battle zones. In peacetime, Murrow famously did down Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy with his sardonic, rough, growl and his gimlet-clear prose, as he put it “making sense to the truck driver without insulting the intelligence of the professor.” One of my earlier memories is my parents cheering while watching Ed Murrow shred the junior senator from Wisconsin. It made good prose, great TV and, much later, a pretty good movie, too. ©

[Stanley]

I'm and American, I'm a Jew, and I write for all men. Bernard Malamud.

Among the great novelists I haven’t yet read, Bernard Malamud ranks highest in terms of recommendations received, from my undergraduate roommates at Penn to my associate deans at UMSL. So I had better get around to him soon. His life is interesting enough, not least because his upbringing carried no hint of his later creativity. Malamud was born on April 26, 1914 in Brooklyn. His father Max and mother Bertha were both Russian Jewish immigrants whose little grocery store consumed all their time and, apparently, all their imagination. In his own telling, Bernard Malamud grew up in a cultural desert, relieved only by listening to a neighbor play her piano and watching the films of Charlie Chaplin. Even so he became interested in literature, wrote his MA thesis on Conrad (a great choice) and after a short period of unimaginably dull work (counting beans in the census office) began to teach literature and write at about the same time. He taught for the money, oddly enough (he was by this time the sole support of his aged father), but he wrote because of the European Holocaust. impelled to record life in the face of death. Mostly they were Jewish lives, and mostly they ranged from sad to tragic. “People say I write so much about misery, but you write about what you write best.” But he certainly did not write without humor, and he had an eye for the odd, the unintended, for juxtaposition, for irony and pathos. Perhaps some of that Charlie Chaplin obsession had, after all, percolated through to the writer’s fiction, just as it had relieved the dull life of the grocer’s son. And his first novel, The Natural (1952), was decidedly non-Jewish. I wanted, Malamud said of it, to be thought of as an American writer. So be it. ©