BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others. Erik Erikson.

The more we learn of the brain’s structure and chemistry, the less weight and credence we give to therapy. Or so it seems in intellectual circles. And yet counseling, in all its multitudinous forms, is what most of us seek when depressed or despairing or just feeling a bit out of balance and that it would be nicer to be happier. Not that chemicals and counsel are mutually exclusive, but obviously many people find it somehow more satisfying to talk to another human being—minister, doctor, priest, teacher, or professional counselor—than to pop a pill and get on with it. The essential humanity of that kind of linkage was always at the center of Erik Erikson’s work and made him one of the most important psychologists or psychoanalysts of the 20th century. Born illegitimately in Frankfurt on June 15, 1902, and never knowing his biological father—a Danish gentile—Erik grew up Jewish and was in due course Erik Homberger, adopted stepson of his pediatrician. His mother and her husband kept from him the details of his birth, and perhaps he never really settled. His whole youth was a time, he himself said, of “identity confusion.” But in Vienna he got tied up with a couple of women who changed his life. One was his wife Joan Serson, a Canadian dancer he met and married in 1930 (they did not part until his death, 64 years later), and the other was Anna Freud, who gave him a profession and a mission. Clearly a gifted counselor (especially of children) and a brilliant student of counseling, Naziism drove Erikson to the USA where he held (without a bachelor’s degree) a series of distinguished academic posts, wrote incisive academic studies and popular best sellers, and (for better and for worse) gave us the phrases “identity crisis” and “emerging adulthood.” They were, it is thought, autobiographical. ©

[Stanley]

I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. Geronimo.

Old obituaries are excellent historical sources, although perhaps we should not always use them for accurate information about the dead. But the language used by obituarists to praise and/or blame, and then bury, those who died does offer us valuable insight into past values. Take for instance the New York Times obituary (February 18, 1909) of the Chiricahua war chief Geronimo. We don’t even learn the man’s birthdate (June 16, 1829), and neither had The Times obit writer, who thought he was “nearly 90” when he died. But there was no doubt that Geronimo was “the terror of the country,” that he left a “trail of bloodshed” wherever he went, and other descriptors fit the picture: “terrible . . . wily . . . cunning . . . cruel . . . [and, of course] savage.” There is no mention at all of what Geronimo might have been trying to do, even no curiosity shown as to why a human being might have sunk so low as to become so frightful, unless it was that Geronimo inherited his cruelties from his father’s “career of murder and devastation.” General Miles, Geronimo’s old adversary, is quoted that the warrior “had the clearest, sharpest, dark eye I have ever seen, unless it was that of General Sherman. So perhaps the vanquished foe must be very brave, so that his captors can shine the brighter. Otherwise Geronimo had no redeeming virtues and (apparently) no rationale. By the 1950s, things had changed enough to allow grade school boys in Des Moines, Iowa, to shout “Geronimo!” when charging onto the soccer field, and by now we have access to a whole range of native American history that offers us excellent guidance on why Geronimo (and his murderous old dad) were so very, very, very pissed off. We might do well to use such perspective on the language we use, at present, to describe our enemies. ©

[Stanley]

It's no disgrace to be black, but it's often very inconvenient. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

The nature versus nurture debate seems to have quietened, but in the case of James Weldon Johnson we could subsume both nature and nurture under the heading “family background.” Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on June 17, 1871, into a family that already had freedom and achievement in its bones. His maternal ancestors had escaped from Santo Domingo and established themselves as free persons in the Bahamas where, in 1833, James’s grandfather became the first person of color to win election to the legislature. His father, free during the slavery era, put his life together after the Civil War and during James’s youth became head waiter at Jacksonville’s premier luxury hotel. His mother taught at Jacksonville’s black high school and taught her two sons to love (and know) music and literature. After college, the two young men moved to New York where John Rosamond became a noted composer while James Weldon became a poet and a leader (in an elder statesman sort of way) of the Harlem Renaissance. But James Weldon Johnson is best known for his civil rights activism, another element deep in his nature that had been nurtured by his family. Impatient of racial barriers, he was an active supporter of Teddy Roosevelt and, as a reward, was appointed US Consul first in Venezuela and then Nicaragua. When he “retired” from diplomacy (Woodrow Wilson’s Democrats were hostile to black civil rights), he joined up with the fledgling NAACP and soon (1920) became its General Secretary. After ten years of that, Johnson returned to literature as the first black professor (of English) at New York University and to an endowed chair at Fisk. James Weldon Johnson, like most of us made by nature and nurture, was killed in a car accident while vacationing in Maine, in 1938. ©

[Stanley]

The most influential British naturalist of his generation . . . The Daily Telegraph, Derek Ratcliffe obituary, 27 May 2005.

My educated guess is that few people can say that their youthful passions became their lifelong profession. One who could was the ecologist, conservationist, ornithologist and general all-around gadfly Derek Ratcliffe, known to some as the British Rachel Carson for his work on the impact of pesticides and herbicides on bird populations. Born in London on June 18, 1929, Ratcliffe have learned his willfulness as an only child, but he learned to love nature on his grandfather’s smallholding in Norfolk and then more especially after his small family moved to Carlisle, in 1938. Right away the boy joined the local natural history society and took part in their outings in the northern Pennines and the Lake District hills. Wanting to learn more, he pursued a largely science curriculum at Carlisle Grammar School, where his sixth-form essay on peregrines and ravens won the school prize. A half-century on, his general works on The Peregrine Falcon (1993) and The Raven (1997) would win wider acclaim (and wide readerships), but by then Derek Ratcliffe was about as famous as a nature-loving troublemaker can get. Along the way, he copped a first-class degree in botany (Sheffield, 1950) and a PhD at Bangor with a thesis on upland vegetation. He worked for pay, of course, usually with the Nature Conservancy, but he also published often and widely, and his scientific studies that showed exactly how DDT and other pesticides decimated bird populations may be credited with saving the British peregrine from extinction. Later in his career, Derek Ratcliffe was honored by the active dislike of the Conservative environment minister Nicholas Ridley and by an honorary doctorate (1991) from Lancaster University. Both thought Dr. Ratcliffe was using his knowledge to save nature from those who would claim to own it. ©

[Stanley]

. . . misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

Time was, mountains were something to stay away from, but by the opening of the 19th century alpine Switzerland had become an established waystation for Britons on the European tour, a goal for Britons climbing peaks (the Jungfrau in 1811, Finsteraarhorn in 1812), and a place to stop and rest for Britons who believed that mountains should be grand-inspiring rather than grand-terrifying. Subject to what might be called Napoleonic interruptions, there was by 1800 already a “season;” there were already exclusive hotels, and the more prosperous, snobbish, or eccentric could rent large villas for themselves or for intimate private parties. So it was that on June 19, 1816, a very exclusive entourage settled itself at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. From their leading members, we can assume they were looking for inspiration. Mine host (and footing the rental) was George Gordon, Lord Byron, the great Romantic poet, and his party included his very young and very pregnant companion, Clara Clairmont, his eccentric physician John Polidori, Clara’s step-sister Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary’s soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and several lesser lights of the Romantic explosion (but not, of course, the Wordsworths). And it was here, in this rather wonderful, square-built 1708 mansion, right on the lake, looking across at the high Alps, that Percy and Mary Shelley were indeed inspired to write their ‘ghost’ stories. Percy’s “Ghost Stories” are now the less well-known, but Mary Shelley hit a vein (pun intended) with her long epistolary novel about a young physician and his failed effort to create (mainly out of spare parts) a beautiful artificial being. Instead, as we all know even if we haven’t read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, he got a monster. It just shows what mountains can do for you. ©

[Stanley]

His poor, unrecognizable face, those lips that never let fall a word of betrayal . . . on that last day [June 21, 1943] his was the face of France. Andre Malraux, 1964, speaking of Jean Moulin.

One of the least remarkable things about Jean Moulin’s career in the French Résistance was that he got to Britain twice during the occupation. On the first visit (Fall 1941), he met with Charles de Gaulle and agreed to work to unify the Resistance under de Gaulle’s presumed leadership. This might give some pause to those who stress the ideological divisions in Free French and Resistance ranks, for Jean Moulin was a dyed-in-the-wool leftie. Born in Béziers on June 20, 1899, he worked his way up in socialist ranks as a local office-holder in Brittany, Rhones-Alpes, and Loiret, meanwhile becoming known as a satirical cartoonist and essayist for various Paris publications. Promoted to chef de bureau of the air ministry in the Popular Front government of 1936, he was instrumental in moving munitions and even planes and pilots to Spain to assist the Republican forces there. Moulin was préfet of Eure-et-Loir when the Germans occupied, ran foul of them, was imprisoned, and attempted suicide. Released, he was dismissed from his post by the Vichy government and joined the Resistance where, besides various individual exploits, he worked to unify the three main resistance movements under the Conseil national de la Résistance. His code name was “Max”. On the day after his 44th birthday, “Max” was arrested in Lyon, along with “Avricourt,” “Raymond,” “Xavier,” “Lombard,” “Blumstein,” and “Didot.” All seven were tortured, five died, and the two that survived have, since the war, been accused of collaboration. Max did not break under torture, and it is believed that he was beaten to death by Klaus Barbie. After the war, and although quite dead, Max was attacked for being a Communist. Perhaps he was. Ce n’est rien, as they say in Paris, where Jean Moulin’s ashes now rest undisturbed in the Panthéon. ©

[Stanley]

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. Mary McCarthy.

College friendships and what happens to them following graduation have fascinated writers perhaps too much and too often. One result has been the strengthening of the notion that something called “the real world” waits out there, balefully, just waiting to teach those smart young whippersnappers a thing or two. It’s become an integral element of our anti-intellectualism. Hackneyed as it may have become, however, the plot line has merit, and you could do much worse than to explore it through Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel, The Group. Written right at the start of the modern feminist movement, the novel takes nine young women at Vassar, graduates them, and runs them through the wringer of Depression America and their apparently fated gender roles. Only seven years later it leaves one of them dead, maybe killed by her husband, and the others in various states of undress, mental or otherwise, as they await what the reader knows will be American entry into a world war. Mary McCarthy herself graduated from Vassar in 1933, and one can just about imagine her living all nine of these lives and then, like a cat, landing on her feet. And some do say that too much of her fiction is autobiographical. If so, it reflects an interesting, thoughtful life that began in Seattle on June 21, 1912 and included the early loss of both parents, a very unhappy adoption by relations of her parents’ generation, and then a rescue by her Jewish grandma and Presbyterian grandpa who made sure she got a great education and that she thought about it. After her Vassar Phi Beta Kappa, Mary McCarthy was ready to roll, and roll she did, through some fascinating marriages (I think four, including Edmund Wilson), some good fiction, and quite a few cool jobs. Whatever differences Mary McCarthy found in the “real” world after graduation, she had learned enough to negotiate them with something more than competence. ©

[Stanley]

Prohibition is in the groin of the beholder. Charles Rembar, one of the lawyers in the Tropic of Cancer case.

My father often said that “the censor is always an ass.” It’s quite a complex statement, but one of its truths is clear. Any rule of censorship can be tested to destruction (and to utter absurdity), as long as you know how to write. And yet the ass dares to tell the rest of us that he, or she, knows better. So victories against censorship belong to “us,” the democratic “we” and not, for instance, the totalitarian “we” that lurks in our darker hearts. Let’s celebrate, then, June 22, 1964, the day that the US Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s decision that Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was “obscene” and that, therefore, “we” should not be able to buy it, leave it in the bookstore, read it, reject it, like it, regard it as trash or treasure, even (perhaps) recommend it to our older children. Or not. In making its judgment, the court did not overturn the obscenity laws but limited their application. And their third criterion for “obscenity” was critical. To be “obscene,” a prurient, objectionably awful book must also be without “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific merit”. Lawyers, a notoriously waggish lot, have since dubbed this the SLAPS test. Dad was particularly interested in this decision not because he liked pornography but because it was nearly contemporary with another Supreme Court judgment (1965), in Times v. Sullivan, that opened up to all of us, in this democracy, the formerly only parliamentary privilege of fair comment on the activities, character, intentions, and temperament of public figures. In this sense, the threat of a presidential candidate to “open up” our libel laws threatens all of us as adult members of a democratic polity, fully able to make our own judgments about what we read, hear, believe or disbelieve, like or dislike, and about whom we might wish not to vote for. ©

[Stanley]

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. Alan Turing, 1947.

A beneficial result of gay liberation has been the “re-valuation”—sometimes amounting to an outing—of important historical figures in politics, literature, art, science, religion: indeed in all the things that we like to think make us human. Reading through these lists can be liberating in itself, and a sobering reminder of the harm that gender intolerance visits on all of us. Among the posthumous ‘liberations’ has been that of Alan Turing, the English mathematician, scientist and homosexual who broke the German ‘Enigma’ and ‘Lorenz’ codes during World War II. This act of intellectual heroism is now celebrated, as is Turing’s life, and to an extent that would have mortified Turing himself. Born on June 23, 1912, Turing discovered his sexuality at school, but his headmaster was more concerned by the boy’s obsession with science. At Cambridge (BA) and then at Princeton (PhD), Turing moved in circles more tolerant of his brilliance and his sexuality. But Manchester, where he moved after the war, was less safe, and when as a result of a burglary Turing told police of a homosexual relationship, he was prosecuted for ‘indecency,’ confessed his guilt, was sentenced to ‘therapy,’ and (on June 7, 1954) ate an apple injected with cyanide. In the next decade, his posthumous rehabilitation—as a gay man—began in earnest, first with an academic prize named after him (at Cambridge, in 1966) and since about 1990 there has been a veritable flood of Turing memorials: postage stamps, plays, movies, even buildings and, in 2012, a royal pardon. Most moving, I think, is the complex bust of the man at Bletchley, the site of his greatest triumph. Like his codebreaking, this small statue is made of a half million separate pieces. There’s a lovelier, sadder one at Manchester, of Alan Turing sitting on a park bench, holding an apple. If that were not enough, Princeton University recently named Turing its second most important graduate (after James Madison). ©

[PanBiker]

Bletchley Park memorial



Bletchley Park - Home of the WWII Code Breakers

[Stanley]

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country. Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The late 19th-century dispute (between Twain, Harte, and Bierce) over who should be crowned ‘greatest American humorist’ produced some terribly unfunny and monumentally ungenerous rhetoric, and did not show Mark Twain (the eventual winner) at his best. But on his birth date, let’s give Ambrose Bierce credit for being in the final three. Ambrose Bierce was born on June 24, 1842, to parents whose poverty sat oddly with their large library and their ancestral pride. He was the 10th of 13 children, all of whose names began with “A”, but he did not excel in school. Rather he dropped out, devoured his parents’ library, and took a literary sensibility into the Civil War, in which he exceled in bravery and of which he remembered only the terror and the blood. His fine war stories deserve a larger readership, as do (apparently) his horror stories. But he’s most famous for his fleeting attempts at frontier humor, notably the immortal “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890), for his similarly flavored, sardonic journalism, and for his satiric (or if you prefer misanthropic) Devil’s Dictionary (1911), very possibly the most quoted production in American literary history. Among Bierce’s most noteworthy journalistic triumphs was his exposé of the stock fraudster, railroad promoter, and philanthropist Collis Huntington. Bierce did nothing more than to publicize Huntington’s effort—through private legislation—to defraud the US government of $130 million dollars ($4 billion in today’s money) . But it was enough, and to Huntington’s fury his embarrassed sponsors withdrew the bill. It was perhaps typical of Bierce’s persona that he disappeared, presumed dead, while covering the Mexican revolutionary (or bandit, as you wish) Pancho Villa. It was a dramatic exit that Ambrose Bierce might have wished to write up. ©

[A very appropriate quotation for today!] SCG

[Stanley]

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. Baudelaire.

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was first published, in Paris, on June 25, 1857. It was not much liked by the Pecksniffs of the second empire, who took its title seriously and decided its poems to be subversive of morality, religion, and of the finer sensibilities of Napoléon III. It then lay undisturbed and unread (as far as I was concerned) until the fall of 1963, when one of my most brilliant teachers, Vicky Creed, brought it to the attention of her French II class as a vehicle for learning about symbolism, French style. Ms. Creed was an interesting sort, a coal miner’s daughter who’d won a scholarship to Smith and then gone to Europe for her Junior Year and stayed there for years, “attending” the Sorbonne, the LSE, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Milan before hooking up with a Penn anthropologist. Back in Philadelphia, Penn had the good sense to hire her to teach French language and literature to resistant sophomores and juniors, and I had the good luck to sign up for her 8 AM classes, for two years running. So under her guidance we explicated quite a few of Baudelaire’s poems and came to think of them as really rather good. Later, in about 1980, in a very remarkable used book store in the north of England (Ewan Kerr’s ungainly pile in Kendal, since defunct), I found a wartime edition of Les Fleurs, printed (Paris, 1943) on very cheap rationed paper and profusely illustrated with appropriate images that stressed the high significance Baudelaire gave to certain colors (mostly the colors of decay, according to Vicky Creed). Despite its clearly decadent nature, it got published right under the noses of the occupying Nazi Pecksniffs. It was indeed a collector’s item. Sadly, in our various moves since 1980, I seem to have misplaced it.©

[Stanley]

This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover. Dorothy Fuldheim.

These latter days, when it seems to be required of women TV journalists that they be young, glamorous, and possessed of a flashing smile and an appropriately obsequious manner when interviewing certain politicians, let us remember that the first woman news anchor was in her mid 50s when she started, had a crooked smile with imperfect teeth, and typically wore lace over her shoulders. Dorothy Fuldheim, born poor in New Jersey on June 26, 1893, went to work for Cleveland’s Channel Five in 1947. This was before WEWS was actually broadcasting. When it did graduate beyond its test pattern, it was the only station between New York and Chicago, and “network news” was not yet born. So Dorothy, already an established newspaperwoman and radio news announcer with some experience in stage acting, moved easily and with reasonable grace into the new medium, first as a writer but quickly (1948) as news anchor and her own, nightly newscast. She wasn’t polite, either, once surprising the rude radical Jerry Rubin by rudely throwing him off the interview set, live, and known for delivering her middle-road liberalism on air, as for instance when she interrupted her newscast on the Kent State killings by asking, “What’s wrong with our country? We are killing our own children.” As a former primary school teacher, Dorothy felt that one deeply, and rode out the infantile protests with some panache. She was still at it in her 80s, no longer anchor but doing thrice-weekly specials, traveling to the UK in 1981 to interview the family of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and the glamorous new-minted Princess of Wales. Shortly thereafter, aged 91, she suffered a stroke shortly after completing an interview with Ronald Reagan and never again graced Cleveland screens. Dorothy Fuldheim, “first lady” of TV news, died five years later, widely mourned. ©

[Stanley]

Once upon a time and a very good time it was . . . this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . James Joyce, 1916.

I often think of occasions when I would have wished to be the proverbial fly on the wall, just to listen, watch, remember exactly what transpired, at the Putney debates during the English Civil Wars, for instance, or at the first formal meeting of the Continental Congress. But here’s one from literature, a dinner party, in Paris, at the home of Sylvia Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Co., the famous left bank bookstore, and daring publisher of banned books. It was June 27, 1928, and Sylvia’s guests included Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and James and Nora Joyce. We know quite a lot about it, thanks to diaries and letters. Fitzgerald had asked Beach to set it up so he could meet his hero, Joyce, and he made a bit of a fool of himself, kneeling to kiss Joyce’s hand when the Irishman arrived, grandiloquently confessing himself a disciple, and, later, probably drunk, leaping into a window and threatening to jump unless Nora declared her love for him. Fitzgerald always seems the much younger man, no matter whom he’s with, because he died so tragically and so young, but it’s sobering to remember that he was only 14 years younger than Joyce, and that both men died quite young, in the first years of the century’s second great war. They’ve worn well despite passing so soon from the scene. The Modern Library places Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at number 1, 2, and 3 in its list of the 100 greatest novels. At the time of that dinner party, however, only Ulysses (a Beach publication, in 1922) had clearly established itself as a work of genius, and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby (1925) was still a relatively unrecognized if promising “first novel.” So Fitzgerald’s fawning behavior makes some sense, although it did not impress Nora or Zelda. Sylvia Beach, by the way, outlived them all. ©

[Stanley]

I am a quantum engineer, but on Sundays I have principles. John Stewart Bell.

Among the universe’s odder street names is “Bell’s Theorem Crescent,” in Belfast, Northern Ireland. And then there’s “La Route Bell” in Meyrin, Switzerland, the site of CERN, the European Council’s particle physics research institution. John Stewart Bell was born in Belfast on June 28, 1928, took his first degree at Queen’s University, and after an excursion to England, during which he found a wife (also a physicist) and a PhD, returned to Queen’s where he worked for the rest of his life. He often took short term fellowships elsewhere, for people were glad to work with a pleasant bird who liked to translate his physics genius into words. Russian words, too, for he led a team that translated a multi-volume classic by the Soviet scientists Landau and Lifshitz into English. If you want to catch up on your theoretical physics, it is still in print. If not, Bell left some of his own prose behind him, in English, a lot of it focused on his search for what he called “a homogenous account of the world.” For Bell believed that, when we figured it all out, we would find that there was “no boundary” between modern theoretical physics and Einstein’s classical model. There was a hidden variable that would explain the whole business, and he wasn’t sure it would be (when found) very precise. Indeed Bell proclaimed that one of the most accursed words in science was “measurement.” Taking pleasure in this idea, Bell called one of his discoveries “the paradox of the socks,” taking his inspiration from the fact that one of his CERN colleagues, Reinhold Bertlmann, always wore different colored socks. This essay is included in Bell’s collected short pieces, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, which you will want to include in your summer list. Bell himself died unexpectedly on site and on task at CERN, in 1990, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize, posthumously. Had he received it, it would have pleased him as yet another paradox, for it is never awarded posthumously. ©

[Stanley]

The name shore fit cause you didn't make a dime doin rodeos them days. Slim Pickens.

Louis Bert Lindley, Jr., was born on June 29, 1919, and was given a pony for his fourth birthday. Louis, Sr., a California dairy farmer, was soon dismayed to find his son more interested in horses than in Holsteins, and furious when Louis, Jr., dropped out of school to take up as a rodeo artiste, ropin’ and ridin’ for not much pay and way too much risk. Family disapproval did not dissuade the boy, nor did the advice of the rodeo manager that the life he was choosing would be one of “slim pickin’s”. Louis rejected the counsel but became known as Slim Pickens, winning a big purse ($400) on his first outing. He got pretty good at rodeo, especially bronc busting and stunt riding, but a dairy farmer is not a cowboy, so Slim learned to play the part too, and played it to the hilt, wore sloppy jeans and fancy boots and shed his California speak for an exaggerated southwestern drawl. He was a pretty good rider and roper, but it was his stagey presence that brought Slim to the notice of Hollywood, a screen test, and his first minor role (in 1950). Pickens was happy with the pay and conditions. Hollywood was happy with a cowboy who acted like one and could do his own stunts. Pickens appeared in so many movies and TV episodes that he lost count, most often as a comic character, the irrepressible sidekick with that idiot drawl. But then (1964) along came Stanley Kubrick and Doctor Strangelove, and Slim Pickens became famous as another kind of idiot, the fanatic Major T. J. King Kong, riding a bomb like a bronco right out of the plane’s bay, whooping with delight, swinging his ten-gallon hat, on his way to oblivion. Slim didn’t much care for Kubrick, but after Strangelove he enjoyed 20 years of being called “Mr. Pickens” and his choice of better roles, including, most memorably, in Blazing Saddles, playing himself. ©

[Stanley]

. . . the more we exercise, and by exercising improve our intellectual faculties . . . the better we shall be fitted to come nearer to our God. President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, introducing the evolution debate, Ju...

A great “Evolution Debate” took place in the Oxford University Museum on June 30, 1860. It has produced good stories, some quite funny, especially about the exchange over our apish origins between Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley, soon to enjoy his title of “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Our understanding of it is clouded (much evidence comes from hurried notes and later recollections), but it is a mistake to see it as a battle between religion and science. The occasion for the debate was the publication in late 1859 of tracts on evolution by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, but the controversy had been bubbling along for decades and had complex origins not only in scientific discoveries but in biblical scholarship. On the science side, fossils and their underlying geology raised serious questions about the timing and completeness of “creation,” while many theologians—particularly linguists—waxed confident that the Bible itself was an evolved document, and there were others who felt that the Old Testament’s legalisms sat ill with Christianity’s dependence on faith. In short, the ideas animating both sides of the argument had themselves long histories, and these insured that the scientists and religionists (not to mention religious scientists and scientific clerics) who attended at Oxford were to be found on both sides and in the middle. Soapy Sam, in opposition, did not have to stand alone. Biologist Richard Owen was only one of the scientists who took his part, while on the other side a number of churchmen welcomed Darwin’s revolutionary ideas for their scientific cogency and for their potential to free Christianity from the intellectual prison of Genesis. Having already plenty of practice, then, in studying the matters at hand, the participants “enjoyed themselves immensely and all went cheerfully off to dinner together afterward.” It seems we have since become more bad tempered about it. ©

[Stanley]

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them. Oscar Wilde.

Does military birth and breeding beget conservative behavior? It is perhaps so, but as a prediction it did not work with the sisters Georgina and Marie Brackenbury. We’ll concentrate on Georgina, born on July 1, 1865 actually within the walls of the Woolwich Arsenal, but both became notable portraitists, militant suffragists, and crusading feminists. Had their father lived he might have set them right, but he died soon after becoming director of the Royal Artillery College. Once he was underground, Hilda Brackenbury took her daughters into the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and then (1907) into the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), where the three ladies all made big splashes. Mother Hilda was imprisoned at least twice, the last time, aged 79, for breaking windows in Whitehall, after which she set up the family’s London home as “Mouse Castle” where suffragists released from prison on their good behavior could behave badly (and be safe from the government’s “Cat and Mouse Act”). The sisters did the same with their country cottage in Surrey. Meanwhile, the sisters’ first (but not last) arrests were in 1908, after which “Ina” Brackenbury became a regional and then national organizer for WSPU and then the even more militant Women’s Tax Resistance League whose members (among other outrages) refused to be counted in the 1911 Census, hoping to become non-persons in taxation terms. After the vote was won (1918 et seq), Ina and Marie settled down somewhat, but remained tied to feminist causes, notably the activist charity Housing for Women, to which (in the late 1940s) they bequeathed their London and Surrey properties. Ina also painted a remarkable portrait (1927) of Emmeline Pankhurst, yet another woman of strongly held opinions, which came in time to grace a Royal Mail postage stamp (first class, to be sure) and hangs permanently in the National Portrait Gallery. ©

[Stanley]

Music begins where the possibilities of language end. Jan Sibelius.

Jan Sibelius’s “Finlandia” was one of my father’s favorites and when I was a boy he played it often on the old Magnavox console, where it whirled around so fast that (though short) it occupied a whole side. “Finlandia” is now, among other things, a boutique vodka and the new name of a small private university on Michigan’s northern peninsula. That campus, founded by immigrant Finns, was originally Suomi College, as it were Finland-in-America, and so its new name is quite appropriate. “Finlandia” (the music, not the booze) was indeed a patriotic piece, a musical expression of Finn nationalism, so patriotic that at its first full performance (in Helsinki, on July 2, 1900), it had to be dressed up as something else. For, back in the good old days of Tsarist rule, Finland was part of the Russian Empire, and the Tsar’s bureaucrats in Helsinki were quite alive to the threat presented by Finnish nationalism. So to escape the censors’ attention, the music was given various titles, including (most amusingly) “Happy Feelings at the Awakening of a Finnish Spring.” But on July 2, 1900, the audience knew what was going on and the short piece (9 minutes, about) was rapturously received even though it wasn’t springtime. The last section, “Finland Awakes”, was later orchestrated (by Sibelius) as a national hymn, which it has been since about 1940. It remains a beautiful piece of music, melodic and stately rather than stirring, a serene antidote to parochial nationalism. Which may be why Joan Baez chose it as her contribution to an Amnesty International album of protest songs, in 2005. It also now supplies the tune for the irenic old (circa 1730) Lutheran hymn, “Be Still My Soul.” And no one would choose that for a vodka tradename. ©

[Stanley]

I can write better plays than any living dancer and dance better than any living playwright. George Michael Cohan.

America’s favorite Yankee Doodle Dandy was born on the 4th of July, as we all know, but it just ain’t so. In truth, the baptismal certificate tells us that George Michael Cohan was born in Providence, RI, on July 3, 1878. But we give George M. Cohan the Fourth, metaphorically, as fair specie payment for “The Yankee Doodle Boy” (written 1904, for Little Johnny Jones), “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (written 1906, for George Washington, Jr. ), and “Over There” (written for itself, 1917, as the USA entered World War I). Cohan’s career was longer and deeper than those three songs, however famous they are. Like Eugene O’Neill, George Cohan was born in the theater (well, in a theatrical hotel), and his Irish parents put him to work, aged 8, doing what they did, a vaudeville act that with George’s addition became “The Four Cohans.” (“Cohan” spelt easier but in Irish brogue sounds like “Keohane”, his dad’s real name.) Touring was hard work but summers were normal, at Grandma’s place in Massachusetts, with bicycles and baseball, and George kept going there after he became rich to rest, recuperate, and write. The family made its Broadway debut in 1893 and in 1901 starred in a revue written by George, The Governor’s Son. His first big hit came in 1904, with Little Johnny Jones (its other famed song was “Give My Regards to Broadway”) and there followed over 300 published songs, innovative musical comedies with book plots starring “average Joes and Janes”, and a distinguished acting career, too. He was working on another patriotic song when he died in 1942, deeply mourned by his good friends Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill and by the (very) many recipients of his personal philanthropy. He was the softest touch on Tin Pan Alley. His son, Private George Cohan, Jr., was at his bedside, in uniform. ©

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Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. Nathaniel Hawthorne.

An interesting sub-theme of our early history is the cultural battle over which past best represented the new nation’s identity. Were our (best) progenitors Virginia Cavaliers or New England Puritans? Thomas Jefferson had a go at the comparisons and contrasts in a justly famous 1785 letter to the Marquis de Chastellux, but things really heated up with the creation of the northern state historical societies, first in Massachusetts in 1791. By 1825, every New England state had one (Maine in 1822, just one year after statehood). The South lagged behind (Virginia was first in 1831, and North Carolina never managed) but there the cultural battle was taken up by fire-eating journals, most importantly Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger. Among those who stood aside from the fray was the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took ironic pleasure in his birthdate (July 4, it was, in 1804) but early, perhaps as a student at Bowdoin College, began to distance himself from his own Puritan ancestors. One of them, John Hathorne, the only unrepentant judge of the Salem witches, “inspired” young Nathaniel to change the spelling of his surname, but more importantly Hawthorne created a body of sensitive historical fiction about “his” Puritans. They were “shrouded in blackness, ten times black,” according to his friend Herman Melville (a New Yorker, by the way), but in truth Hawthorne’s picture of his forbears was a warts and all effort. His Puritans were complex characters, mysteriously human in their vices and their virtues (and they possessed both, for even the hypocrite Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter finds some redemption). Granted, it is fiction, but read as New England history Hawthorne’s work is revelatory, insightful, and honest. It was thus not red enough meat in a nation preparing for a Civil War. ©

[Stanley]

I have a buoyant, optimistic nature and a certain tenacity that leads me to believe that, ultimately, I shall win. Mary Louise Hancock.

Should Hillary Clinton become our first woman president, she will not appoint to office one of her oldest allies, Mary Louise Hancock of New Hampshire. It is not because Mary Louise is handicapped (she is a polio victim). She is possibly too old, 96 today (born on July 5, 1920), but she’s still a force to be reckoned with in her state, and the importance of the New Hampshire primary in American presidential politics makes her small, white cottage house in Concord a ritual stop on the campaign trail. For Democrats only. Mary Louise came from a Republican family, and a very political one, too, but was converted to ‘the Democracy’ by Franklin Roosevelt, voted for him as soon as she could (in 1944), and herself became a leading Democrat in state politics, a state senator, trustee of the state university (her alma mater), a vital force in the N.H. Council for the Humanities, and for sixteen years the State Planning Director. Among her accomplishments in that office, she extended protections for the state’s wilderness areas and nature reserves, as befitted a trustee of the Audubon Society. Along the way, she brought a citizen’s suit against a sitting governor (for arbitrary use of state power). The state has apparently recovered from that shock, enough so that today, July 5, is in New Hampshire “Mary Louise Hancock Day,” as it has been since her 80th birthday, in 2000. So it is not surprising that as Hillary Clinton began her 2016 campaign, she again (as she had in 2008) visited Mary Louise Hancock’s house, had tea in her parlor, gladly accepted her endorsement, and listened to her advice. Chief of which was, “take care of yourself.” Clearly, Mary Louise Hancock has followed that rule herself. Happy Birthday to a grand old dame. ©

[Stanley]

See you later,, Alligator. Bill Haley.

The tangled origins of rock n’ roll lie somewhere in the early 1950s and make it difficult to credit anyone with anything more than being around at the right time and messing around with the right instruments. “Rock Around the Clock” is sometimes seen as the first ‘real’ rock n’ roll hit, and maybe it was but it first appeared as the B side of the forever obscure “Thirteen Women.” Not until Bill Haley and his Comets made a minor mint with their version of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” did they decide to resurrect “Rock Around the Clock,” this time as a side A. It made Haley famous and it had something to do with beginning the Rock n’ Roll Era. Bill Haley was born in Michigan on July 6, 1925, so he was thirty when his record topped the charts in the USA and Britain, and he’d been knocking around for a while, trying this and that. This and that included a traveling medicine show and learning how to drink, but mostly it was music, and most of that was Country and Western. No one was getting rich, but Bill landed a job with a Pennsylvania radio station and his group played on the air and in clubs around Chester and Philadelphia. They were first of all the Down Homers and then the Saddlemen, but in September 1952 they became Bill Haley and His Comets, a more than nominal change as they immediately released “Crazy Man, Crazy,” which nowadays sounds quite a bit like Rock n’ Roll. On its second release, “Rock Around the Clock” sold well enough for long enough to become iconic, a status validated when it was adopted as the theme song of the tough teen movie Blackboard Jungle (1955). After that it was Milton Berle, then Ed Sullivan, and then, ultimate accolade, three performances on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Sadly, Bill Haley drank too much to wear fame well, but that is another story. ©

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You've lived your life, and I've lived mine. Now it's time we live them together. Matthew Crawley to Lady Mary Crawley, Downton Abbey.

In Downton Abbey, the Crawley family is without an heir male, with three marriageable daughters, and laboring (not quite the right word) under financial problems. So a sub-theme and an occasional crisis have to do with the family’s ambivalence towards “trade.” The presence of the closest male heir, nephew and cousin Matthew, a mere solicitor with modern notions, reminds viewers weekly of this problem. Yet the English aristocracy was constantly recruited (by ennoblement) or revived (through judicious marriages) from the trading classes. This was especially true in the early modern period (ca. 1600-1800) as England became a mercantile power. A classic example is provided by the Hoares, three generations of successful bankers (Sir Richard, b. 1648; Henry the Elder, b. 1677; and Henry “the Magnificent”, born on July 7, 1705. All three of them married into gentry or noble families (and grafted their sons and daughters into the same stock), but it was not until Henry the Magnificent that the family moved truly into the upper crust. This 3rd-generation banker still banked (because that was where the money was), but he married (successively, to be sure) two landed heiresses and saw to it that all three of his daughters married aristocrats. More to the point, perhaps, he did the Grand Tour, became enamored of Art, lived the life of a great patron of the arts, and made his Wiltshire acreage (“Stourhead”) into the very model of a modern landed estate, laying out wonderful gardens, lining the halls with great paintings, and “improving” the rents by improving the land. And yet he himself never bought even a baronetcy and so remained a kind of triple paradox, a landed aristocrat with a bank and no title. He could have fixed Downton up just fine. ©

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A victim who specialized in revenge. Headline from a feminist website article about Artemesia Gentileschi.

An eminent woman painter of the late Renaissance is by definition a rara avis, an unusual life. She was Artemesia Gentileschi, and she was born in Rome on July 8, 1593, the daughter of Grazio Gentileschi, a painter of some repute. Artemisia developed her great talent in her father’s studio. By the time she was in her twenties she was already doing commissions for the Medici in Florence and for the Pope in Rome, and she counted among her friends the younger Michelangelo Buonarotti (for whom she “did” a ceiling) and the aged Galileo Galilei. She was the only woman elected to the Florentine Academy, and painted for various Italian royal houses and, latterly, in London, for Charles I. Today her paintings are to be found in (among other places) the royal collections in London, the Uffizi, the Prado, the Vatican, the Louvre, and (I am glad to say) in the St. Louis Art Museum. Her style is said to have been influenced by Caravaggio. What may be more interesting is her recurring subject matters and themes, which have made Artemesia Gentileschi into a latter-day feminist icon. At age 18, Artemesia was raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist who collaborated with her father. Unusually, she and her father brought suit over the matter, and she underwent the awful investigations (including torture) that accompanied rape accusations in early modern Rome. And (although Tassi was never actually imprisoned) the suit was successful. Artemesia’s most famous paintings, some in multiple versions (e.g. Susanna and the Elders, a very bloody Judith Slaying Holofernes, Jael and Cisara) must surely relate to her violation and even more to her vindication. Read her story, read the myth of Danae, then check out Artemesia’s Danae in our Forest Park museum. ©