BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

I'm in a different world, a dream world, that invites oblivion. Erté.

One of the 20th century’s most prolific artists was born a Russian aristocrat, an admiral’s son, in old St. Petersburg, on November 23, 1892. He was christened Roman Petrovich Tyrtov, but for most of his century-long life he was known as Erté, after the French pronunciation of his initials RT. And in 1910 he did move to Paris, in good time to escape the rigors of Lenin’s revolution but really in order to avoid disgracing his father’s family. Paris loved him. His designs were an immediate sensation; by 1915 he had a contract with Harper’s Bazaar (he would create 200+ covers for them) and was designing costumes for Mata Hari. His magazine contracts would, in the end, include Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Vogue, and many others, but his impact was wider, and from the 1920s much of his work was American, moving on first from the Folies Bergère to the Follies Ziegfield and then to Hollywood, where in 1920 William Randolph Hearst got Erté to dress up his inamorata Marion Davies for her role in The Restless Sex. In the longer term and for better films, Louis B. Mayer snagged his designs for silents, then for talkies. Erté’s costumes for women mostly ran to black and sinuous, as in his iconic trademark “Symphony in Black,” but he “did” opera divas too, at the Met, at Glyndebourne, at Covent Garden, and their stage settings to boot. Such was Erté’s fame that when in the 1960s he put on a personal retrospective in a New York gallery (he was part owner) the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought up the entire show (170 works, painting, sculpture, graphics, fashion, furniture) and has, on occasion, shown it all as a special exhibit. Erté’s career was an almost perfect definition of eclecticism in art, and he kept at it until a couple of weeks before his death, from kidney failure, in 1997. ©

[Stanley]

The rise of market fundamentalism . . . has encouraged behavior that is at odds with pursuit of the common good. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, 2014.

Donald Trump has said that global warming science is a Chinese plot, but that’s not quite true. It’s also an Indian plot, thanks to the life’s work of Veerabhadran Ramanathan, currently holder of an endowed chair at the Spripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD. Of course this particular Indian hasn’t been plotting all his life, a life that began in Madras on November 24, 1944. His Tamil family was reasonably prosperous and, from age 11 Ramanathan attended schools where English was the language of instruction. It was at that point, he later joked, that he stopped listening and tried to figure things out for himself. That demanding curriculum carried him to the Stony Brook physics department where he had intended to study wave theory (to do with light), but his mentor had shifted to atmospheric physics, taking Ramanathan with him. The global warming plot has a long history, and then (early 1970s) there were plenty of people already working on it, but young Ramanathan made an immediate impact by proving that other than the ill-famed “greenhouse gases” were also agents of climate change. Some of his subsequent research (on the cooling effects of high clouds, natural aerosols, and methane) has been used by climate change deniers to argue that warming is not the story, but Ramanathan will have none of that. Rather, his work shows that the scientific community is not a conspiratorial monolith and that it is driven by data and theory, not politics, and assuredly not by “liberal” politics. Latterly, having won almost all the awards going and plotted with the pope (on climate change of course), Ramanathan has turned to a project designed to lessen India’s substantial contribution to global warming. His Project Surya (“Sun” in Sanskrit), aims to bring cheap solar ovens to the Indian countryside, lessening in several crucial ways the costs of cooking with fossil fuels. ©

[Stanley]

It is sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being. Joseph Wood Krutch

It is hard to imagine anyone from the American past who might have been more at odds (and in more ways) with our current president-elect than the cultural critic Joseph Wood Krutch, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on November 25, 1893. In the book that made him famous, The Modern Temper (1929), Krutch criticized us (and our civilization) for our petulance, our absurd and almost pathological self-centeredness, our belief in manipulation as a solution, in a word our childishness. Noting wryly Freud’s “quaint conceit” that we were never happier than when still in our mother’s womb, Krutch relocated our naiveté in our pre-adolescence, after literacy but before we’d become fully conscious of reality, of problems whose solutions might require that we change ourselves as, or even before, we change others. It’s a conundrum; what we see as problems, others see as solutions. Oddly enough, the book was a best seller. It was a mode of thought that Krutch had cultivated at editor of the student newspaper at the University of Tennessee, then honed in grad school (an English PhD) at Columbia, then sharpened to a needle point as editorialist (unsigned) and theater critic (signed) for The Nation magazine, the latter a position he held for over 40 years. Looking around in the grim decade of the 1930s, Krutch did not believe our solutions were to be found in Europe (just look at Hitler and Stalin, he said), and hoped to find them in an enlightened (and very American) “common sense” allied to a becoming modesty that put personal wealth and material progress further down our totem pole. Later, perhaps despairing of our ability to overcome our “pet indignations,” Krutch retreated to the Sonoran Desert and to his beautiful writings on the natural world and our proper place in it. ©

[Stanley]

Play it. Rick Blaine to Sam, in Rick's Cafe, Casablanca, North Africa, sometime in December 1941.

Casablanca, starring Bergman, Bogart, Henreid, Lorre, Greenstreet, Rains, et al, the al including Dooley Wilson, premiered at the Hollywood Theatre, New York City, on November 26, 1942. It was an auspicious time for it, Operation Torch, the allied invasion of North Africa, having only begun on November 8 (the premiere was rushed forward for that reason). It interested my father, trained for desert warfare, and my mother, and thousands of others for whom warfare had or would become an intimate experience. And it had a great cast. But no one expected this film to make them greater. The original screenplay (“Everybody Comes to Rick’s”) had been rejected by several producers, and once Wallis (and Warner Bros) got underway with it production was interrupted as actors and the director, Michael Curtiz, went off to work on other projects like Why We Fight (1942) whose patriotism was upfront, heart-on-sleeve, and, well, heroic. But Casablanca was well reviewed and did win three Academy Awards (best picture, best director, best screenplay), and it has since become the most iconic of American films. It’s an odd fate for a film with only three American actors, none of them heroic in any obvious sense, its “action” set largely in a sleazy bar and a sleazier hotel, its only noble characters a hopelessly idealistic Ilsa Lund and a hopelessly priggish Victor Laszlo (who, clearly, doesn’t deserve her). Even its villains were mere cynics, not monsters, and cynicism was Rick Blaine’s forté, too. But Casablanca has stuck in the heart, and that seems to me the most hopeful thing about this really rather hopeful film that, at its full trial screening (at Warner Bros) left everyone in the room (writers, editors, all hard-bitten Hollywooders) crying like babies and daring anyone to change even one single thing. If you haven’t seen it, or if you have, watch it tonight, and weep with them. ©

[Stanley]

Scorn, derision, insult, menace . . . the labor of the body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart--these are the realities that form the rule, rather than the exception, in the slave's experience. Fanny Kemble.

American slavery remains—for our students and to their credit—a mystery, opaque to a generation that so treasures its personal freedom and so easily professes its egalitarian values. Documents help, slave narratives of course but also diaries and journals from the master class. One of the most famous of these was Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1836-1839, not published until 1863, during the Civil War, as her contribution to abolition. Frances Anne Kemble was born in London, on November 27, 1809. Hers was a theatrical family and she became an actor herself. When on an American tour, Fanny swept a young Pierce Butler off his feet, married him, and thus became mistress of several large plantations in coastal Georgia, and along with the land, hundreds of slaves. She didn’t spend much time there, for Butler managed the family’s trading interests from Philadelphia, but what she saw was enough. Slaves were brutally yet dismissively treated. Their living quarters ranged from primitive to appalling. Slave women were sexual properties of masters and overseers. Fanny’s efforts to ameliorate conditions put her at odds with her husband and his family, and her anger over slavery was a complicating factor in the dissolution of her marriage (in 1849). As the Butlers went bankrupt in the 1850s (a process marked by the largest single slave auction in US history), Fanny returned to the American stage and then (in 1877) to London, where her literary life included several more memoirs (mostly of happier times and travels), translations of Alexandre Dumas and Friedrich Schiller, essays on acting Shakespeare and a long friendship with the American expatriate Henry James. Theirs was a mutually rewarding relationship that enlivened Fanny’s last years (she died in 1893) and furnished the inspiration for Henry’s Washington Square (1880). ©

[Stanley]

We have made at Florence a revolution with rose water. Theodosia Trollope, reporting on the Italian risorgimento, in her Social Aspects of the Italian Rvolution, 1861.

The anglophone (mainly English) expatriates in Italy have fascinated our culture for quite a while, most recently in the fine Smith-Dench-Plowright-Tomlin film Tea with Mussolini (1999). Although never large, it’s an ancient community that began to produce its own literature in the 16th century (Munday’s The Englishe Romayne Life, 1582). And there have been several American variants (e.g. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ambitious 1860 novel The Marble Faun, a product of his and Sophia’s residence there). Its cultural apogee came in the 19th century with the knot of English folk settled around Florence. The most famous of these, and the nucleus of the community, were Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived there from their marriage in 1846 to Elizabeth’s death in 1861. But the Trollopes were there, too, not the novelist Anthony but his mother Fanny (a novelist before him), his brother Thomas (also a novelist) and Thomas’s very literary wife Theodosia Trollope. Born Theodosia Garrow in Torquay, England, on November 28, 1816, Theodosia and Thomas met in Florence and were married there, at the British legation, in the social event of the 1848 season. Theodosia was already an established poet, essayist, and translator who had moved with her Anglo-Indian father and English mother to Italy for her health and their comfort. How these two invalids (Theodosia and her poetess-rival Elizabeth Barrett) got on with each other is an interesting tale, but poetically Elizabeth got the better of it. The American tourist (and St. Louisan) Kate Field, visiting both, noted that Theodosia, though “promiscuously talented,” never “got very far in any one thing.” In 1865, Theodosia’s tuberculosis finally triumphed over the good air of Tuscany. She is buried, near Elizabeth Browning, in the English cemetery in Florence. ©

[Stanley]

Descend down into thine own heart and there read what thou art and what thou shalt be. Jemima Wilkinson.

At the core of Protestantism was the view, stated by Luther and Calvin in different ways, that salvation came by faith alone. Leaving this up to each individual conscience was like throwing sparks at gunpowder, and many Protestant conservatives could see no safe way to keep “the church” from exploding into “churches” and then into smithereens. When in the 1650s the first Quakers arrived in Puritan Boston, each proclaiming their own version of the “inner light,” the Rev’d John Norton coined a word for it, “attoxie.” He meant “formlessness,” but if he’d waited a century for Jemima Wilkinson he would have needed a whole thesaurus of new words. Wilkinson was born into Rhode Island Quakerism on November 29, 1752, the eighth of a dozen surviving children. First she watched her mother die of exhaustion (in 1764), perhaps a cause of Jemima’s principled celibacy. This was a radical position for a colonial girl, and she looked for backing first from her Quaker meeting at Smithfield, then from New Light Baptists, and then, aged 24 and still unmarried, she found what she needed in her own heart. Coming out of a near coma (typhoid), Jemima Wilkinson became incarnate as “The Publick Universal Friend,” a status conferred upon her by the Spirit and a name by which she insisted on being known and addressed. Her fellow Quakers and her erstwhile fellow Baptists disowned her, but Jemima’s light within attracted quite a flock of folk who, if they didn’t fully embrace her celibacy, happily accepted her extreme views on abstinence from most vices, including greed and alcohol. Finally, in 1790, 260 of them moved to a wilderness area of western New York where the Seneca nation, ever tolerant, accepted them as peaceful if crankily odd neighbors. The community, first “Jerusalem” and later “Penn Yan,” survived for quite a long while, although not very much longer than Jemima herself, who finally found serenity in 1819. ©

[Stanley]

True enjoyment does not consist in showing off, but in being our simple, natural selves, if people would only believe it. Angela Brazil, A Terrible Tom-Boy, 1904.

It is one of J. K. Rowling’s gifts to us that she has re-imagined school as a place where both girls and boys can together experience wonder and terror, make and wreck friendships, be wondrously brave, cleverly mischievous, and yet temper their boiling adolescent hormones with tender compassion, not only for one another but for their teachers (those, anyway, who deserve it). Hogwarts it is, that turreted sky-school, where the nerdiest boy, Neville Longbottom, can summon up the backbone to defy his friends (in vol. I) and then (in vol. V) the towering courage (not to mention the physical prowess) to behead the monster snake Nagini, the Seventh Horcrux. And behind it all there’s that brave and beautiful girl Hermione Granger, sharp as a tack, whose loyalties are fast and whose judgments are just. Seen against previous school adventures, Ms. Rowling’s suffer from gender confusions. Take one of the grandmothers of the genre, Angela Brazil, also English (born in Preston, Lancs., November 30, 1868). Her 50 “school” books (from A Terrible Tomboy, 1904 to The School on the Loch, 1946) gave us growing-up girls who were mischievous, brave, funny, cruel, kind, and clever. And they had names to match, Winona and Avelyn for instance, and no fewer than three Lesbias. But they were all girls in girls’ schools. Even so, they could inspire boys. The poet Philip Larkin wrote an erotic parody of them when he was a randy Oxford undergrad. A better result came in 1940, when the humorist Arthur Marshall got through and out of Dunkirk’s hell by remembering Brazil’s stories, her brave, insouciant heroines, her dashing school mistresses, and one of her schools’ parody mottoes: “Don’t Look Back or You Might See Something Nasty.” Brazil’s books were occasionally banned from schools. Rowling’s stories have been, too. Despite their gender gulf, they disturb the peace, liberate the kids, and thus have much in common. ©

[Tripps]

"when the humorist Arthur Marshall got through and out of Dunkirk’s hell by remembering Brazil’s stories,"

What a strange memory I have. When I saw the name Angela Brazil - I immediately thought of Arthur Marshall, who's name I could barely remember, who mentioned her on the TV panel show 'Call My Bluff'. He, rather affectedly I thought, pronounced it as Brazzle rather than as in 'nut'. A bit like posh people calling Ralph - Rafe?

I note from Wiki - that Marshall replaced Patrick Campbell on the panel after he died. I met him once when we were both being measured for a suit at Abe Sacks in Spring Gardens.
Abe (jr) told me that he got all his suits there when he was in Manchester, to do the recordings for Call My Bluff. 'A lot cheaper than London, and just as good' he said.

I recommend his short stories.

[Stanley]

I was always fascinated by Arthur Marshall. I can still here that funny high pitched voice.....

[Stanley]

From the Titans, the first sons of the earth. I . . . call this metallic genus TITANIUM. Martin Heinrich Klaproth, 1791.

The idea of an element as an irreducible, unique “atom” of matter is at least as old as Democritus, but up to the middle of the 18th century only about 15 elements had actually been isolated, including Iron (Fe), Gold (Au), Copper (Cu) and Silver (Ag). The next century, during which we might say modern chemistry was born, saw the ‘discovery’ of 50 more. Early chemists, using quite primitive equipment, employed their brains to develop truly ingenious ways (including ‘mere’ logic) of paring ores and compounds down to their basics. Often—too often, one should say—they also used taste or smell, even ingesting lab material to discover its true, elemental, nature. Not a few poisoned themselves. One of the most productive of them all, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, was born right at the start of this age of miracles, on December 1, 1743, in Saxony. He began as an apprentice apothecary, which may be why he refused to use the taste test in his researches. He soon turned to analytical chemistry and, inspired by Lavoisier’s success in isolating gaseous elements, began to work on various metal ores when he was lecturer in chemistry to the Prussian royal artillery (!!). The three elements Klaproth is most often credited with are Titanium (Ti), Uranium (U), and Zirconium (Zr), but he was (so to speak) midwife to several others including Cerium (Ce), Chromium (Cr), Strontium (Sr), and Tellurium (Te). He was unable to isolate any of these in their pure state, but his method and his logic told him where they were and what their qualities might be when finally purified. His own qualities (of mind and industry) were recognized by his membership in several scientific academies, and not only in Prussia (also Britain, France, and Sweden), in the name of the Klaproth crater on the moon, and in his appointment as the foundation professor of chemistry at the new University of Berlin (1811), itself a recognition that chemistry had come of age. ©

[Tizer]

Klaproth's work was possible because a Cornish vicar and amateur mineralogist William Gregor had discovered the mineral ilmenite (iron titanium oxide) near his home in Manacaan on the Lizard in 1791. He was able to identify the mineral as an oxide containing iron but with a large proportion of a third, previously unknown element. He couldn't pursue it further but published his work and it was followed up by Klaproth. LINK

[Stanley]

Si monumentum requiris circumspice. (If you seek his monument, look around) Inscription on Wren's tomb, St. Paul's, London, 1718.

On December 2, let’s celebrate architects who, when they get it right, create buildings which lift us when we see them, inspire us when we enter them, and sustain us when we work or live in them. Some of the most inspiring architecture can be seen in the old churches of Europe, e.g. the cathedrals at York or Chartres. My favorite is King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, a lab piece of Perpendicular Gothic and the lightest, airiest stone building in the world. Often these took so long to build (or were built so long ago) that it’s difficult to credit one architect. However, that’s not the case with St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. There have been five cathedrals on the site. The fourth one burned beyond repair in the Great Fire of London, 1666, and we actually know who designed the fifth St. Paul’s. Already at work on a number of lesser churches destroyed in the Fire, Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to design the new cathedral on 30 July 1669. Mathematician, astronomer, translator, charter member of the Royal Society, and a pretty good politician, Wren’s designed the Sheldonian at Oxford and in 1669 (as Master of the King’s Works) was a natural choice for the new St. Paul’s. Still, he clearly wanted the job (one of his scale models, still extant, cost £32,000 in today’s money to build), and he performed his task rather well. The work went slowly enough, but Wren was still alive and active when his magnificent cathedral was rededicated on 2 December, 1697, 319 years ago today. On that day, the text for the sermon dedicatory was “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord” (Psalm 122, KJV). Even today, one does not need to be of a particularly religious temper to be gladdened when entering Christopher Wren’s great ‘house of the Lord’ on Ludgate Hill, London. ©

[Tripps]

" My favorite is King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, a lab piece of Perpendicular Gothic and the lightest, airiest stone building in the world. "

I've recently got my residents' pass for King's College. It is available to anyone who lives within twelve miles. Kings College
Haven't used it yet, and they've tightened up since I last had one. It has a photo on now, so you can't lend it to visitors. (I never actually did ). Cost me £7 (senior rate), for three years, but since it's £9 per visit without it - seems a bargain to me.

Good to see the skillful use of apostrophes as in residents' and King's - but then one wouldn't expect anything less.

[Stanley]

Nullius in verba. Motto of the Royal Society, 1663 ("take no one's word for it)".

To be adept at languages, linguistics and mathematics gave one entry into the world of cyphers, whether as code maker or code breaker, and it was as the latter that the Rev’d John Wallis gained notoriety during the English Interregnum, although we do not know whether he was guilty (as charged) of decoding royal correspondence for Oliver Cromwell. At the Restoration in 1660, Charles II forgave Wallis his political sins (if any), made him a royal chaplain and commissioned him (and others) to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer. Thus royal favor recognized Wallis’s religious temper, but Charles II was also interested in Wallis as a scientist. And so it was that in 1663 the Rev’d Mr. Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry and University Archivist at Oxford, fellow of Queen’s, Cambridge, royal chaplain to Charles II, and codebreaker, became one of the charter members of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. John Wallis was born exactly 400 years ago, December 3, 1616. His father, a clergyman too, had the good graces to take as his second wife an heiress, and her 1643 bequest to her stepson John set him up for life. His intellectual brilliance defined that life and by 1642 had brought him into a group of divines and “divers worthy persons” interested in natural philosophy (“Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Staticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks”) and, more importantly, how to improve it all through observation and experiment. By 1660, this group had become “the invisible college” meeting in London and Greenwich, and then in 1663 it was the Royal Society and, we might say, midwife to the modern world. Wallis ranks among its founders and submitted over 40 papers (mainly on mathematics) to its early deliberations. He kept to himself the secrets of cypher until, later in life (he died in 1703), he imparted them to his grandson William. ©

[Stanley]

If women are not invested in national life, how can they impart to their children a sense of true citizenship? Selina Cooper, presenting a 30000 signature petition to Parliament, 1901.

Among the many remarkable folk who have lived in Barnoldswick, Lancs., was Selina Coombe Cooper, who spent 13 years there before moving on to nearby Nelson and a lifetime of radical action for socialism, trades union rights, women’s suffrage, planned parenthood, peace, and other causes. Selina was born into the working class on December 4, 1864. Her railway laborer father’s early death created a family of migrant poor. Selena’s mother found work in a Barnoldswick cotton mill and Selina, aged 11, was also taken on part-time and then, in 1880, full time. Her mother’s long illness brought a move to nearby Nelson in 1889 where Selina again found work in a cotton mill and in 1896 marriage to Robert Cooper, a weaver and union activist. Selina joined Robert in every way and, after the pain and joys of parenting (they lost their first son, John Ruskin Cooper, in infancy), far surpassed him in radical reform. Selina flowered as a leader of the cooperative movement, as a trade union organizer, as a militant advocate of women’s suffrage, as a member of the Independent Labour Party (before women could vote, she campaigned for George Bernard Shaw and Fenner Brockway), and in local office (first in 1901 as a Poor Law Guardian). In the 1930s Selina led anti-Nazi movements, joined a Communist group, and was expelled from the Labour Party (to her great sadness). An eloquent speaker on local and national platforms, a faithful and indefatigable local government official, Selina Cooper mixed kindness and fire, compassion and commitment. Her funeral (she died on Armistice Day in 1946) was attended by 100s, including many from the Labour Party. They might expel her, but they loved her too. And yet, if her daughter Mary had not saved Selina’s papers (and given them to Lancashire Archives in 1976) we might never have known her. She was first, foremost, and always a foot soldier in the reform army. ©

[Stanley]

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,// Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. Christina Rossetti, circa 1870.

Christmas is here, early as usual, and there will be no escape from “Rudolph” and his red nose. But “In the Bleak Midwinter” provides a nearly perfect antidote. Christina Rossetti’s poem was written in the late 1860s and published in 1904. It has been set to music by several composers, beginning with Gustav Holst and Harold Darke. The Darke version is heard in the King’s College “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” because its haunting yet serene melodies better fit the poem and because Darke would become Director of Music at King’s. Christina Rossetti was born in London on December 5, 1830, the youngest child in a remarkable family. Christina and her brother Dante Gabriel would become leading lights of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English arts, and Christina herself (who sat for Dante and several other painters of that ilk), with her large, sadly cast eyes and ethereal expressions, became a (arguably “the”) visual icon of the Pre-Raphaelites. She was a much better poet than that role suggests, second (if to anyone) only to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and an inspiration to many later writers, including (it is said) the oddly paired Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin. Christina’s beauty and serenity would be lost in the physical sufferings of her several ailments, starting in the 1850s, that left her genuinely melancholic and, at times, morbidly unattractive. But Dante went on painting her as she had been in 1848-49, so Christina’s usual picture and her poetry don’t really belong together. And “In the Bleak Midwinter” reminds us that the Pre-Raphaelite Christina Rossetti was also deeply religious, a strain showing not just in her poetry but also her volunteer work among London’s “fallen” women, where her duties included long stretches of actual residence in the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. Indeed it is penance that literally shines through that “bleak midwinter [when the] earth stood hard as stone,” unready as ever it is for the gift of birth. ©

[Stanley]

I was brought up in a home devoid of affection and consideration. Libbie Hyman, autobiographical notes, circa 1968.

Growing up in Des Moines, I learned that the local Jewish community was quite diverse, with an especially important fault line running between the older German immigrants and the newer (post-1880) Polish and Russian migrations. Perhaps that’s why Joseph Hyman, recently arrived from Poland in 1880, experienced some difficulties. Hyman’s clothing business never prospered, and the family had to move several times, fetching up finally in Fort Dodge. His was an unhappy life, but his daughter Libbie Henrietta Hyman (born in Des Moines on December 6, 1888) found relief in reading the complete Dickens and guidance from her (Fort Dodge) high school German and English teacher, a Radcliffe graduate. Never overcoming her parents’ objections to her ambitions for higher education, Libbie worked first in a Fort Dodge factory, and then (after a freshman year scholarship) worked all the way through the University of Chicago—for room, board, books, and tuition—achieving her PhD in Zoology in 1915. For Libbie, it was a personal triumph. Her indefatigable labors were soon recognized by the U of Chicago press, and her invertebrate and vertebrate anatomy lab manuals (first editions 1919, 1925, and 1929, and thereafter several revisions) brought her a considerable income (for life) and a move to New York, where she became a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History (at first unpaid, for female scientists were still rara avis). The museum repented of its sexism, and Libbie Hyman became a living legend, her six-volume The Invertebrates (publication dates 1940 through 1967!!) a classic of comparative anatomy, and her 160+ scientific papers offering positive proof that the historical/comparative approach remained capable of startling discoveries in biology and evolutionary theory. ©

[Stanley]

Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian. Heywood Broun on the Munich Agreement.

One of his students once (affectionately) said that my father dressed like “an unmade bed.” I now find that the phrase may first have been used in respect of the generally disheveled appearance of Heywood Broun, which makes it triply appropriate, for Broun, my father, and the student were all journalists, professionals whose dishevelments are legendary. Heywood Broun was born in Brooklyn on December 7, 1888. He was clever enough to attend Harvard but not disciplined enough to graduate, and he drifted into journalism, first covering baseball for the New York Tribune. But his real talents lay elsewhere, and soon Broun was drama critic, a role in which he starred partly because of a famous law case where he was sued by Geoffrey Steyne whom Broun had somewhat gratuitously characterized as “the worst actor in the world.” The judge, anticipating Times v. Sullivan, threw the case out. The next time Steyne acted on Broadway, Broun commented that his “performance was not up to its usual standard.” In the 1920s and 30s, Broun assumed his maturity as a political columnist for the Scripps-Howard chain and The Nation magazine, where he generally crusaded against American injustices, dropped hundreds of quotable aphorisms, and became a charter member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, along with his first wife, Ruth Hale, a crusading feminist. Of that marriage, Broun’s fellow columnist Franklin Pierce Adams (aka “FPA”) wrote it was a case of the clinging oak and the sturdy vine. Nevertheless the clinging oak was a stout reformer (a founder of the Newspaper Guild), a pioneer socialist, and a witty companion who made many friends, including FPA. Heywood Broun’s early death (in 1939) brought them all out (and 3,000 more including Republican Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) to Broun’s high mass funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Fifth Avenue, New York City. ©

[Stanley]

In the jewelry, I did all the designing and Arthur did all the enamel. Georgie France Gaskin, 1929.

In England, Birmingham is known, even notorious, as the historic center of the iron industry and of banking, anomalous partners save that both were dominated by religious dissenters (Quakers were the bankers), sober folk who believed in a hard day’s work, low wages, and serious piety. It’s a surprise, then, to learn that by 1800, if not before, Birmingham was also the engine house of the decorative arts, mere fripperies for the ego from a dissenter’s point of view. So it was that when Evelyn “Georgie” France and Arthur Gaskin got married in 1894 they had both been top students at the Birmingham Municipal School of Arts and were already engaged in becoming famous as designers and fabricators of elegant objects, notably jewelry but also book illustrations (e.g. for Kate Greenaway), small wood or silver boxes, and enamelwork. Georgie France Gaskin, born in Shrewsbury on December 8, 1866, was probably the brain behind their operations (which became quite extensive) and was certainly the firm’s stylish and expressive public persona, even dressing their two daughters to express the design ethos of the parental pair. And yet the couple often worked apart in the 1890s, coming together again as jewelry became their dominant motif. Their Birmingham workshop enthusiastically absorbed and then furthered the arts and crafts and art nouveau styles, producing pieces in which colorful stones or intricate enamel inserts whirl around on leafy vines that are themselves fabricated miraculously from silver and sometimes gold wire. On the Gaskins’ larger pendants and brooches, this signature design theme is interrupted, but gracefully, by dramatic settings for pearls, opals, or other large, colorful stones. Their designs wore well. Google ‘Gaskin jewelry’ and see how gracefully their work flows. And if you can find a large Gaskin piece in an estate jewelry sale for less than $5k, ask no questions and snap it up. ©

[Stanley]

In the great forest, a little elephant is born. His name is Babar. His mother loves him very much. She rocks him to sleep with her trunk. First lines of The Story of Babar, 1931-7.

One of the most successful creations in children’s literature is the Babar the Elephant series, now so thoroughly franchised and trademarked (and subjected to anti-imperial criticism) that it has become difficult to imagine the wonder and delight with which Babar was first received by the de Brunhoff children, in Paris, in 1930, when Mathieu was 4 and Laurent was 5. The first Babar stories were told by their mother Cécile. The little boys were bright enough to think that their father might ‘improve’ the stories, for he was both painter and publisher, and so it was that Jean de Brunhoff took the first two Babars, illustrated them with quite unforgettable line drawings, and put them on the market through the family publishing house, Le Jardin des Modes. Jean de Brunhoff was born on December 9, 1899, in Paris, into a wealthy Protestant family (with an imperialist history in Africa and Panama), and did the usual things (private Protestant school, French Army) before deciding he was an artist. At art school, he met and married Cécile, a pianist, and one might say that the rest was Babar except that Jean de Brunhoff died in 1937, of tuberculosis. But Babar lived on. Six titles had already been published to great acclaim, translated into several tongues, and had appeared as newspaper strips in Britain (in The Daily Sketch), and it might not have been possible to put the elephant back in the box had the family wished it. But in 1937 de Brunhoff’s brother Michel (then editor of Vogue) and after WWII his son Laurent took Babar over. Laurent’s story, and that of the Babar empire, has been told in another anniversary note. For now, on Jean’s birth date, let’s recognize Jean and Cécile, père et mère, for their miraculous abilities to charm and indulge their own children. After all, from the child’s point of view, that is what parents are for. ©

[Stanley]

Without concerted citizen action to uphold [these rights] close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world. Eleanor Roosevelt, Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 1948.

On December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The Declaration was regarded in 1948 as a triumph of the “West,” and indeed it was not quite “universal.” The communist bloc abstained because the Declaration did not endorse equality of outcomes or ownerships. The Saudis abstained because the Declaration violated aspects of Sharia law (e.g. it gave individuals marriage equality and the right to change their religion to another faith or none, without penalty). Apartheid South Africa abstained for patently obvious reasons. And there were interesting criticisms. The American Anthropological Association had a go at the document’s implicit westernism and its failure to apologize for imperialism and evangelicalism (on this latter point the AAA agreed with the Saudi position). Many cited Nuremberg to argue that there should be a right “to refuse to kill.” And the United States Senate didn’t like it either. Indeed, our Senate did not ratify the Declaration for another 44 years, finally coming around in 1992, and then hedging it about with the issue of US sovereignty. Even so, our Senate did finally accede. We might therefore want to add the Declaration of Human Rights to Donald Trump’s required reading list (or indeed to our own) for its prohibitions of arbitrary arrest or exile; its outlawing of torture; its universal rights of asylum; its endorsement of a universal right to medical care; its insistence on the portability of human rights; and its extending to individuals the rights to education, to safety, to move about the world, and most interestingly of all, these days, rights for a stateless person to adopt a country and for any person to enjoy (or to seek) legal protection from any state. ©

[Stanley]

Now [the world] is disturbing but more progressive, better for ordinary people - and therefore better for me also, as one who likes his fellow humans. Naguib Mahfouz, 1990.

Not all great writers are rebels. Indeed, not all rank even as dissenters from the orthodox values of their peers and parents. But it does seem to run in the blood, a kind of transferable professional bacillus. It’s rooted in the writer’s ability to imagine different lives in altered worlds, and then actually to bring those visions to life. Among the masters of those dark arts we ought to include the Egyptian Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz, born in Cairo on December 11, 1911. Naguib imagined himself right out of a conventional Cairo upbringing, an illiterate mother and a strict father who wanted Naguib to follow in his footsteps as a civil servant for whoever ruled (the Ottomans, then the British, and then the Wafd republic). And indeed Naguib became a civil servant after his graduation from Cairo University (1934) and remained one until his retirement in 1971. But that was his day job, for he had already decided to write fiction. Mountains of it, including 34 novels. And Naguib thought of fiction as liberation, partly from his workaday world but also in terms of the liberation of his people. One of his unfinished projects was a series of historical novels that would give Egypt sustaining national myths of a different sort than those he grew up with, and he did write a few of these, notably Children of the Alley (1959), a modern, intergenerational family saga that managed to get itself banned throughout the Arab world and earned a Fatwa from (among others) Omar Abdul-Rahman. But it would be a bad mistake to see Naguib Mahfouz as anti-Islam. Indeed, he attacked Fatwas against writers (including his own) as “blasphemies” against Islam, and his critical vision of the modern world cannot be called pro-Western. Naguib Mahfouz outlived the Fatwas, won the Nobel aged 77 and died at peace, in Cairo, aged 94. ©

[Stanley]

Indignation boils my blood at the thought that, with few exceptions, the fight for freedom is left to the poor, forlorn, and defenseless. Arthur Garfield Hays.

Since Bill of Rights Day falls later this week, it is especially appropriate to remember Arthur Garfield Hays, a lawyer whose defense work did much to give the Bill of Rights its modern legal force. Hays was born on December 12, 1881, in Rochester, NY, and named after the assassinated James Garfield and his replacement, Chester Arthur. Those names fulfilled the assimilationist aims of Hays’s German-Jewish grandfather who had changed the family name from Haas to Hays. Like many civil rights lawyers, Hays led a double life, making a fortune (two fortunes, actually) from representing the wealthy in their suits and torts while undertaking pro bono work for the victims—or would-be victims—of laws and customs Hays regarded as oppressive, racist, or just plain wrong. Hays came to regard Clarence Darrow as the greatest living American, but shared Darrow’s defense burden in several famous cases, notably the Scopes and Sacco-Vanzetti cases. And Hays struck out on his own, too, even retained to represent Georgi Dmitrov for his alleged role in the Reichstag fire, 1933. Because he was a Jew, he was not allowed to appear in court for his client, but that never held him back in the USA where, inter alia, Hays defended the Scottsboro boys, blacks unjustly condemned to die, H. L. Mencken and The American Mercury (for publishing a prostitute’s biography), and a veritable legion of trades union organizers and pickets. His work for unions, indeed, got Hays “exiled” from Jersey City by its dictatorial Democratic mayor, Frank Hague. Politically, Hays had begun life as a Republican (with those names, what else could he do?) but as the party began its rightward drift with its rejection of his hero Teddy Roosevelt, Hays moved to “independent Democrat.” On one thing, though, he was utterly constant. A co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (in 1908), Arthur Garfield Hays was ACLU General Counsel from 1912 to his death in 1954. ©

[Stanley]

Those who have endeavoured to teach us to die well, have taught few to die willingly. Samuel Johnson, 1761.

I don’t often do deaths in these notes, but in Samuel Johnson’s case an exception is called for. The great Doctor Johnson he was, according to Harold Bloom “as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree.” For all that, he was a man, and he died on December 13, 1784, at home as it happened, overweight, suffering so severely from dropsy that he would lance his legs with knives and scissors to drain the liquid and (he thought) relieve the pressure. But the good doctor wore his last years as well as they could be worn, and to the very last refused the comforting opium he was prescribed. “I will be conquered. I will not capitulate,” as James Boswell, his faithful biographer and (almost always) friend, has him saying. Mostly the old man had a good time. His capacious London house was so full of eccentrics and eccentricities that he found refuge (for fifteen years) at the country estate of his friend and patron, the brewer Henry Thrale. There Johnson maintained sanity (avoiding his greatest fear, madness) and found an abiding interest and inspiration in Hester Thrale, whose twelve children charmed Johnson and had left her still vigorous, witty, and attractive. It was a platonic relationship but it’s by no means clear that Johnson wanted it that way. As his health declined and his age advanced (he was born in 1709), he loosed memorable cannonades about death, faithfully recorded by Boswell. But these years were even more memorably recreated by the novelist Beryl Bainbridge in According to Queeney (2001), a fiction of the master’s last years narrated by the Thrales’ eldest daughter (also Hester but nicknamed Queeney). Bainbridge’s Queeney pulls no punches but leaves us pleasing picture of the last years of the man who captured the English language, succumbed to Mrs. Thrale, and was at the end conquered by death. ©