OneGuyFromBarlick

My only experience of jazz was at the Hollywood Bowl. Dave Brubeck and a bloke called George Shearing..... Loved it! (Just remembered, the new Duke Ellington band in Montreal. Not impressed)

'I hate writing. I love having written.' Dorothy Parker
Today we celebrate good writing and the birth anniversary of Dorothy Parker, who was born on 22nd August 1893 as Dorothy Rothschild in her parents’ summer cottage on the Jersey shore. A precocious writer, she contributed to Vanity Fair (starting at age 14), McCall’s, and the New Republic, but most enduringly for The New Yorker, whose editorial board she joined even before the first issue was printed in 1925. She wrote short stories, including the prize-winning “Big Blonde” (1929). She was also a poet of note, of comic verse but there were some dark and serious poems, too. And she was a brilliant, often coruscatingly funny, critic. She was closely associated with other famous writers, notably Franklin Pierce Adams, Alexander Wolcott, P. G. Wodehouse, and especially the comic writer Robert Benchley. They and others formed the “Algonquin Circle”, which met weekly (sometimes nightly) in the bar of the Algonquin Hotel and was famed for its witty, erudite conversation. Generally unhappy in love, Parker crusaded for human rights and in the 1950s was named as a communist fellow traveler by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Times change, though, and in 1992, on her 99th birth anniversary, the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her honor. Parker, who died in 1967, left her entire estate to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Foundation and the NAACP.

'You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams' Gene Kelly
Having done Fred Astaire earlier, we’ll have to give August 23 to Gene Kelly, whose birthday it was, in Pittsburgh, in 1912. Another dance man, probably a better choreographer, and undeniably a better singer, Kelly would become Astaire’s friendly rival when his career finally caught up with that of the older man in the mid 1940s. Indeed, they collaborated (as stars) in Ziegfield Follies (1946), most famously in the extended dance routine “The Babbitt and the Bromide,” with lyrics and music by Ira and George Gershwin. Imagine that for a constellation of immortals!! Gene Kelly came to the dance by a long road, partly because he was a good enough student to get an economics degree and start in law school, and partly because (as a teenager) he decided that dancing was “sissy.” But his talents were recognized, and an odd (and lengthy) assignment as dance instructor and choreographer in a Pittsburgh synagogue proved to be his route to Broadway, fame, and fortune. His first Broadway dance was opposite Mary Martin in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me! (1938), then Pal Joey (1940), and then MGM, Hollywood, and, of course, Anchors Aweigh (1945), An American In Paris (1951), and (his masterpiece as both dancer and choreographer), Singin’ In the Rain (1952). On the side, he was also suspected of being a Communist, by HUAC of course, but he was only a liberal Irishman, an odd bird but a graceful one.

The Falklands [War] was a fight between two bald men over a comb.' --Jorge Luis Borges.
The two Spanish language writers that I should read are Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Màrquez, each separately and both together credited with creating a new form of fiction, variously named but frequently “magical realism.” Borges was born in Buenos Aires on this day, 24th August, in 1899. His father blessed him with a huge library (over 1000 works in English alone), a yen for writing, and an hereditary eye problem that led to Jorge’s own blindness in the 1950s. His mother blessed him by becoming his reader until she died, aged 99, in 1976. Borges’ first published writing was a translation of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, when he was nine years old. The family moved to Europe in 1914, where the young Borges became interested in, and expert at, philosophy, and returned to Argentina in 1923. Jorge’s first fiction was fairly conventional, but by the 1930s he had become a ‘philosophical novelist’, experimenting with time, plot, history, and identity, even with authorship itself, in works with titles such as ‘the garden of forking paths’ and the ‘book of imaginary beings.’ Politically, Borges was a militant classical liberal, which put him at odds with both right and left in Argentine politics and kept him in trouble for much of his life. He referred to the Perons as “a humbug and a common prostitute.” Still, he enjoyed being made Director of the National Library at about the time he became completely blind. It was the sort of plot he liked to live.

'We have met the enemy, and he is us.' --Walt Kelly.
August 25, 2013 is the 100th anniversary of the birth, in Philadelphia, of Walter Crawford Kelly, whose parents (Irish to the core) moved immediately to Bridgeport in order to give Walt his education in diversity, to which he would often refer. His first real job was as crime reporter for the Bridgeport Post, but he had shown a yen for drawing and also illustrated a biography of P. T. Barnum (a Bridgeport native). A little later he moved entirely to drawing, for Disney, where he worked (1936-1941) at about $100 weekly ($1600 in today’s $$$). Not terrible pay but he left Disney as a result of a labor dispute (though he had much affection for Disney himself), and knocked around for a bit before becoming chief cook and bottle washer (and cartoonist) for the ill-fated New York Star where he invented an alter ego, Pogo O’Possum (my invention, that surname, not Walt’s), and a host of other sparkling habitants of Okefenokee Swamp including Albert Alligator, Churchy LaFemme (a turtle who sometimes snapped), Howland Owl, Deacon Mushrat, Miss Mam’selle Hepzibah (a skunk), and P. T. Bridgeport, a circus bear who spoke in advertising hoardings. Kelly also lampooned Sen. Joe McCarthy & Co. with a bobcat called Simple J. Malarkey and an unpleasant vulture, Sarcophagus J. Macabre. There was also a fellow traveler, Miss Siss Boom Bah, a Rhode Island Red (hen). For that Kelly was banned by several papers, including the Providence Journal, but he lived on to provide me with a good education before he died of several vices in 1973.

'In the beginning it was not possible to teach the principles of aeronautical engineering because none of us knew them.' Jerome Hunsaker.
In a democracy, the Ministry of Talents must always be open, and the career of Jerome Hunsaker, whose birth-day was August 26, 1886, seems to demonstrate the truth of that assertion. Born in Creston, Iowa, about as far away from oceans as you can get, Jerome was accepted to the US Naval Academy. Annapolis recognized his talents and seconded him to MIT to learn ships’ architecture. Instead he and his new wife translated Gustav Eiffel’s Resistance of the Air and Jerome shifted to aeronautics and astronautics. This “Einstein of the Navy” (as he was already beginning to be known) got MIT’s first-ever PhD in aeronautical engineering in 1916, partly for designing the world’s first wind tunnel and partly for filing “Technical Report No. 1” for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a report which can be genetically traced to the creation of NASA (moon landings and all) in 1958. Among other fantastics, Hunsaker helped design the flying boat that crossed the Atlantic in 1919, perfected the concept of the aircraft carrier, coordinated naval R&D in World War II, and, as a sideline, was on the mysterious “Majestic 12” commission that may or may not have been charged by President Truman in 1947 to find out what those Roswell UFOs were really all about and may or may not have filed a report. Hunsaker was productive in science almost to the end of his life, which occurred only in 1984, aged 98. He left an endowed chair for MIT and, for us, an incredible story.

'There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.' Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Lyndon Baines Johnson gets our gong today. He’s the only US President my parents ever had dinner with (in 1960, in Des Moines, when he was still Senate majority leader). In his accomplishments and his failures he is several eons away most of his successors. It is also the 105th anniversary of his birth-day, August 27, 1908, in a small farmhouse on the banks of the Padernales River. President by accident, Johnson came close to enacting his whole legislative program, which he dubbed “The Great Society.” It was an extension and culmination of FDR’s New Deal, and Johnson, cynic though he was, believed deeply in the moral rightness of his program. Whether or not he knew poverty as a youth, he encountered it as a young teacher, and for him it was the blight that (in housing, schooling, medical care, and jobs) denied the promise of democratic capitalism to a large minority of US citizens, of all colors. The Viet Nam War killed the Great Society and, with it, Johnson’s reputation. However, the long-time BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler understood that Johnson’s greatness lay in his belief that a democratic government was, should be, and could be mobilized to be a positive agent of change for “the people” and famously said (from the postmodern perspective provided by Reagan and Clinton) “Come back, Lyndon Johnson; all is forgiven.” To which I would add, “almost all.” © robertbliss

³This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must." Robertson Davies

August 27, 2013 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robertson Davies, with whom we would be familiar had he not been Canadian by birth and preference. The problem is Canada’s reputation for being a ‘desert of the beaux arts,’ a reputation which Davies’s own career amply proves a calumny. Born to newspapering, Davies caught the culture bug while studying, and acting, in England in the 1930s. He returned to Canada to try to settle down to journalism, got entangled in the academy as Master of Massey College, University of Toronto, where he wrote some wonderfully witty ghost stories (as after-dinner speeches: see High Spirits, 1982) and humorous (mostly) essays on literature, gave two or three great boosts to Canadian drama, and all the while collected factoids and characters for his great trilogies, The Salterton Trilogy (1951-1958), The Deptford Trilogy (1970-1975), and his masterpiece, The Cornish Trilogy (1981-1987), whose hypnotic plot turns on an art forgery, a trio of slightly frayed academics, a monstrous birth, and an astonishing Gypsy girl who might have become a brilliant scholar but marries a millionaire instead. Davies was working on a fourth trilogy when death caught him, probably unawares, in 1995. He left a host of friends including J. K. Galbraith and John Irving (who wrote him into A Prayer for Owen Meany) and a world that should now know that Canada can, indeed, produce great art. ©

'I hate paying taxes, but I love the civilization they give me.' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Today is the 204th anniversary of the birth of Oliver Wendell Holmes, not the jurist but his father the doctor, born in Cambridge, MA, on August 29, 1809, to the Puritan purple. And he never let it down. Born in the house where revolutionaries planned the Battle of Bunker Hill, his father minister of Cambridge’s Congregational Church and his mother descended from Anne Bradstreet, Holmes graduated Harvard Class of 1829 having acquired a reputation for studying a lot of subjects well but none of them very well. He would be, indeed, a polymath, but after medical training in Paris and then back at Harvard he became a good doctor, particularly interested in the causes of disease and finding many of them in bad hygiene (in and out of the hospitals). In 1843, he published an analysis of childbirth fever, arguing it was caused by patient-to-patient transmission via medical staff. He was right but it was not at first well received, and he returned to the fray in 1855, writing “I beg to be heard in behalf of the women whose lives are at stake, until some stronger voice shall plead for them.” He made other medical advances too, but is probably best remembered today for his literary talents, as “the autocrat of the breakfast table.” Poet, essayist, story-teller, philosopher, co-founder of the Atlantic Monthly, and member of the Dante Circle, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., left an indelible mark on our literary culture.

'I do not wish for women to have power over men, but over themselves.' Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley


Yesterday a famous father, so today let’s do a famous mother, Mary Wollstonecroft, who gave birth, on August 30, 1797, to her namesake daughter, Mary Wollstonecroft. Both are remarkable women whose works, now and again, appear in the Honors College’s Cultural Traditions seminars. Mary the elder was born in London, in 1759, but the family fortunes declined and she became a governess. Influenced by three women friends, Mary mused on female-ness and its fates, and given it was an age of revolution it was perhaps inevitable that she would turn her attention to women’s rights. This led to her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), but only after she had written Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Drawn to Paris by the revolutionary excitements there, she birthed her first child (Fanny Imlay) there, and then returned to England where, after an unhappy time, she met and married the anarchist William Godwin. That union also produced a pregnancy, and a child, Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin, born on this day 216 years ago. In an age where puerpueral fever was not yet understood (see yesterday’s famous father, Dr. Holmes), complications attending the birth gave rise to infection, and Mary, Sr. died on September 10. Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin went on to meet Percy Bysshe Shelley, have a child by him when aged 18, and later marry him. But younger Mary is more famous for giving literary birth to Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). ©

"'til you feed us, good sirs, right and wrong can wait,' Macheath in "The Three-Penny Opera."

On 31st August 1928 Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht’sThe Three-penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) was first staged at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin. The opening was chaotic; the famous “The Ballad of Mackie Messer” (you know it as “Mack the Knife”), was composed only to keep the star actor from walking out. But it caught on, had a good first run, and appealed to the Weimar tastes of late 1920s Berlin. Certainly decadent, with its themes of murder, cannibalism, and the criminality of most classes (including criminals, it must be said), it would not appeal to the Nazi Party, nor would Weill or Brecht. But the “Opera” developed a life of its own outside Germany with successes in London’s West End (1933 and 1956) and a bowdlerized version in New York, also in 1956, starring the great Lotte Lenya. Even so, the softened theme song “Mack the Knife” was barred from many American radio stations (for instance, KSO in Des Moines) on grounds it would corrupt youth, lead them to violence, and, who could know, encourage them to boil their landlords in with the vegetable soup. Now regarded as delightfully corrupt and wonderfully witty, the musical has been translated into 18 languages and performed on every continent save Antarctica. “Mack the Knife” in several versions has been made famous by many artists, e.g. Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong. Set in Victorian London, the “Opera” now symbolizes Weimar Berlin in the dangerous decade before Hitler.

[When I was in Berlin after the war the night life still had definite traces of the pre-war, edgy, culture]

He taught the Bachs . . . . and wrote one of our best-known compositions.
The further back in time or down the social order you go, the more likely birth (and death) dates are to be conjectural. Take the organ composer Johann Pachelbel, for instance. We know he was baptized in Nuremburg’s St. Sebastian Church on September 1, 1653, but his actual birth date is not known. In an age of high infant mortality, many parents waited until baptism to record a birth. Born into a prosperous family, Pachelbel had a good education and responded well to it, at school and later at university, but his musical talents were particularly noticed everywhere he went, and aged 21 he became the deputy organist at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, then moved to Eisenach where he tutored the Bach children (though apparently not Johann Sebastian) in music and was godfather to one of the Bach girls. The relationship with the Bachs continued after Pachelbel moved to Erfurt to take up a church organist position there. He married in Erfurt, and one of his sons (also an organ composer) would move to South Carolina in 1734. We know Johann Pachelbel mainly as the composer of the wonderfully melodious Canon in D, originally scored for three violins and basso continuo, the latter role being played by any one of a number of instruments. It is now most often heard as an organ piece, fitting the main interest of its composer. Johann Pachelbel died some time before March 9, 1706, the date of his burial in Nuremberg.

He gave Olympia to the moderns.

In the 19th century, young Americans who wanted to do what today wecall “graduate work” looked towards the German universities, and indeed our doctoral programs especially still bear marks of their German origin, most notably in the graduate seminar. German leadership spread across the disciplines, but was clearest perhaps in philology and archaeology. Indeed, it might be said that Germans unearthedancient Greece, most famously with Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of Troy but most enduringly with the painstaking and scholarly excavations of Olympia, led by Ernst Curtius. Born on September 2, 1814, in what was then the free city of Lübeck, Curtius early showed great talent in language study, but unlike his brother (who became a linguist) Ernst became fascinated with classical Greece. Selected at age 21 to accompany the then leading archaeologist on a survey of the Peloponnese, he did well enough to land a chair at Berlin (1844) and a post as tutor to the Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick William. He published a multi-volume History of Greece in the 1850s, but then embarked on his greatest dig, at Olympia, starting in 1874. Famous for its discoveries (not least of the sole surviving complete statue by Praxiteles), its more lasting effect was the establishment of careful, stratigraphic mapping as the gold standard of classical archaeology.

Louis Sullivan, who would grow up to litter the Midwest with his beautiful buildings, and then compound the sin by tutoring Frank Lloyd Wright, was born on September 3, in 1856, in Boston, the son of Irish immigrants. He was educated in the “English School” (our first public high school) whose purpose was to educate working class boys for useful careers in practical fields, e.g. as bank clerks. But one of his teachers, named Moses, inspired Louis to study hard for greater things, so hard that he entered MIT two years too early and then left two years too early, running off (like B. Franklin) to Philadelphia where (like B. Franklin) he talked himself into a sweet apprenticeship (with the architect Frank Furness). From there Sullivan went to an architecture firm in Chicago, (swimming with architects after the Great Fire) then to the École des beaux arts, where he learned about the Renaissance, and then back to Chicago as a lowly draftsman. He made a big splash with some frescoes and got into a partnership with Dankmar Adler, and the rest is history. Sullivan did not invent the skyscraper but he made it beautiful. You can see a classic example in downtown St. Louis, 709 Chestnut, The Wainright Building. Note the proportions!! But travel across the region to see smaller masterpieces, notably a scattering of beautiful little banks in such metropolises as Columbus, WI, Owatonna, MN, and Grinnell, IA. The bank clerk done good.©



Interior of the Sullivan Bank at Owatona, MN

'[thus] the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.' Henry David Thoreau.

Shall we study arts or commerce? Shall we be pragmatists or aesthetes? I don’t think it’s an either/or question, but those who do point to Boston’s Tudor brothers. William Tudor, b. 1779, was the quintessential Brahmin man of letters. Educated (brilliantly) at Phillips and Harvard, he went on the Grand Tour and (from Paris) sent mom 100 manuscripts of Hayden, Mozart, etc.. Then it was back to Boston to mind the family capital and improve the city’s brain, which latter he did as a founding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and as co-founder of the North American Review. In William’s spare time he dined with Emerson, Ticknor, and Everett, and wrote biographies of James Otis and Sam Adams. William’s brother Frederic, born on September 4, 1783, refused to go to Phillips, spurned Harvard, went to sea at 13, bankrupted himself twice before he was 35, and bounced back each time because he had an idea: to become the Ice King of the Atlantic trade. He cut, shipped, and sold pond ice, not to Eskimos of course but to Cubans, Barbadians, and Brazilians. Eventually, he figured out how to ship ice to India where it cooled the fevered brow of the British Raj. Indeed, Calcutta became the most profitable market for Frederic Tudor’s ice, which (ironically) he cut from Walden Pond right under the observant—and tilted upwards—nose of Henry David Thoreau. They were the horns of our dilemma. Which bro is your bro?©

'Schoenberg . . . said "you'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through." So I said, "I'll beat my head against that wall."' John Cage.
If you want to test your capacity to enjoy modern classical music, there is no better composer to start with than John Cage, born 101 years ago today on September 5, 1912, in (where else?) Los Angeles, CA, then quite consciously the city of the future. Cage didn’t interest himself in music until relatively late, but his valedictorian’s speech (he was first in his class at the city’s central high school) urged people to listen to the sounds of silence, which anticipated his most notorious composition, 4’33” (1952), wherein the musicians sit on stage playing nothing at all for four minutes and 33 seconds. But Cage was a slow starter to end all slow starts. As a college student he more than dabbled in various art forms, mainly writing, but on a trip to Europe he began to compose music of a very avant-garde sort, trying (as he said) to duplicate “the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together . . . and producing enjoyment.” Now only 21, he began to study composition with Arnold Schoenberg, who later summed up his star pupil as one among several: “. . . of course he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor—of genius.” Perhaps Schoenberg was not exactly right. Immersed in philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and modern life, John Cage sought to render—translate—what he learned into music. He won’t be everyone’s favorite, indeed he still excites controversy, but of his modernity there can be no doubt.

'Why does not water admit its bulk of every kind of gas alike? This question I have duly considered, and . . . I am nearly persuaded that the circumstance depends on the weight and number of the ultimate particles of the several gases.' John Dalton.

There are many ways to restrict access to education, the quietest, most efficient way being cost (relative to income), but in a pinch religion will do, and so it was in England when John Dalton was born on September 6, 1766. John was a Quaker, and the schools and England’s universities were for Anglicans only. And so Dalton went to “dissenting academies” in Cockermouth and Kendal where he proved a brilliant student, being especially adept at math and natural philosophy, and in due course he was appointed to teach these things at the “New College,” a dissenting academy in the city of Manchester, in 1793. There he published on the weather, studied color-blindness, from which he suffered, tinkered with steam and its powers (then beginning to transform Manchester), and became interested in the gases. Experiments with the miscibility of various gases and liquids convinced him that, at what we would now call the molecular level, there were significant differences between the gases, and on his 37th birthday, September 6, 1803, he entered into his lab book his theory of the relative “weights” of several gases (and water) and began to work his way towards what we know today as the periodic table of the elements and the atomic theory. Had he gone to Oxford, who knows? Instead, excluded by prejudice, John Dalton leaves us a record of discovery, a score of institutions named after him, some important science awards, and the French word for color-blindness, ‘daltonien.’ Vive la France!!!

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.' Don McLean.


The history of pop music is littered with fallen stars and awash with meteoric careers. Not one of the many, however, can be more poignant, or more productive of a deep, innocent nostalgia, than the rise and fall of Buddy Holly, born on September 7, 1936, in Lubbock, TX. Charles Hardin Holley [sic] was the youngest of three siblings and immediately gained the nickname “Buddy”. He won a singing contest aged 5, sang in school and church choirs, and from an early age aimed at greater things. By 1955 he had opened for Presley (Elvis to you) and Haley (Bill) in Lubbock, and he and his group (‘The Crickets’) had a recording contract and a Nashville session. Their first efforts were not particularly memorable, but in early 1957 they released “That’ll Be the Day” and then “Peggy Sue,” and by December they were on Ed Sullivan, having already done the Apollo (in Harlem), and in January ‘58 they were on their way to Australia and England (where they inspired a couple of kids called Lennon and McCartney). Meanwhile, Buddy gave a rose to Maria Elena Santiago. He then recorded “True Love Ways” as a gift to her, and the couple married, back in Lubbock. He’d also drawn many established performers to him, the Everlys, Ritchie Valens, Waylon Jennings, the Big Bopper, Chuck Berry, and it was with some of these that Buddy left Marie Elena for a national tour and his death, in an Iowa plane crash, on February 3, 1959. It was “The Day the Music Died” except, of course, that we still play it.

[I know it takes some believing but on a Laker Skytrain flight to NY, in I think 1980, 'The Buddy Holly Story' was the in flight movie...]

Dr. Marthe Vogt, 1903-2003. Read her biography in the Royal Society "Memoirs", http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... 9.full.pdf

Marthe Vogt (September 8, 1903-September 9, 2003) came from a scientific family to become a leading scientist herself. Her French mother (Cécile) and her German-Danish father (Oskar) were both gifted anatomists, Oskar with a particular interest in the brain (he autopsied Lenin’s brain in 1924). Marthe was more into chemistry, gaining a PhD from Berlin in the 1920s, and more particularly the chemistry of the brain. As a researcher at the Institute of Pharmacology at Berlin, she became convinced that both positive brain functions and psychological disorders originated or were expressed chemically, and was named head of her section in 1931. However, politics intervened. Marthe detested Naziism. So it was off to Britain where she pioneered in her field at Cambridge, London, and Edinburgh, won numerous awards, several honorary doctorates, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. She showed how various chemical compounds triggered brain activity and physiological functions, studied the compounds, and suggested their pharmacological use in psychiatric therapies. Her classic papers on these subjects appeared in 1936 and 1954, but she had a long andproductive career, heading up the Babraham Institute at Cambridge until 1968 and actively researching there until 1990, when she moved to La Jolla, CA, to be with her sister Marguérite, a leading biologist and geneticist at the Salk Institute. ©

Happy birthday to us.

On 9th September 2013 we celebrate the 237th anniversary of the “United States of America”. Or, rather, we should, noting the quotation marks. Some might say that the land of the free and the home of the brave was born on July 4, 1776, with the approval of the Declaration of Independence Others find its roots in the 1774 meeting of the First Continental Congress, or 1781, with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, or 1789, when the (current) US Constitution was ratified, albeit without its Bill of Rights. Other dates have been proposed, too, for instance 1812 and 1865. Gary Wills says it was born—or re-born—when on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. But the truly curious will suspend the vote until hearing why 9th September 1776 might qualify as the birth date of “The United States of America”. So let it be known that September day was when the Second Continental Congress, then sitting uneasily in Philadelphia (for the British were coming), decided that the new republics (note the plural) declared to exist in July should thenceforth beknown as “The United States of America.” That confusion between the plural “states” and the collective nation has bedeviled us ever since, but we may forgive the christeners for they were confused, too.

"The line is immaterial." Lady Augusta Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest." (1895)

On 11th September 2013 we celebrate (or mourn) the birth of modern rail commuting, for on this day in 1841 began the first regular “commuter rail” service, between London and Brighton, on the English Channel coast. Authorized by Parliament in 1837, the “Brighton Line” was built quickly, including tunnels and a one-third mile viaduct, for the industrial revolution was already well underway in Great Britain. The 50-mile line became first a regular commuter run, later a favorite for day trippers wanting (inexplicably if you ask me) to endure the south coast’s pebble beaches and cold waters, and in 1895 the very point of two sharp lines in Oscar Wilde’s witty comedy The Importance of Being Earnest.

“Commuter rail” is in quotations because the word “commuter” was not in use in 1841, and indeed would be an American coinage (of 1865), in the Atlantic Monthly, in conjunction with “commuter” roads leading north out of New York City. Its base word, “commute”, has a far longer history, beginning its life in the early 17th century as a word meaning “to exchange”. Thus, still today, our non-resident students, faculty, and staff “exchange” their private lives as family members, house and apartment dwellers, for their public lives as university members by becoming daily “commuters.” Thus also a commuted sentence is NOT properly speaking a pardon, but that’s yet another word story, and who speaks properly these days, anyway? ©

"For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken.

Let’s all wear a wry grin today, for it’s the 133rd anniversary of the birth of H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore and Scourge of Everything, born 12 September 1880. He was newspaper columnist, literary critic, magazine entrepreneur, and the bad boy of Baltimore, but he’s remembered best as a satirist. His calling began with his reading of Huckleberry Finn, “the most stupendous event in my life.” He moved on to Addison and Steele, Swift, Pope, and Johnson, and by then (aged 18) the die was cast. At 25 he moved to the Baltimore Sun where he stayed for 43 years. His favorite sport was lampooning the “booboisie” (the American middle class), but he also punctured politicians and promoted new talent. Among the former his favorite targets were Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The latter are too many to mention, but included Theodore Dreiser, Scott Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, Sinclair Lewis, and George Bernard Shaw. Most needed Mencken’s advocacy. Mencken may be best known today for his savaging of “creationism” (his pieces on the Scopes Trial are classics), but we should remember him also for his early warnings about Nazi anti-Semitism and his lampooning of the segregationist policies of his beloved home town, Baltimore. He was irascible, in his way intolerant, hidebound politically, human, funny, passionate, and a consummate stylist. RIP Henry Louis Mencken. ©

My hero. . .

Irascible, in his way intolerant, hidebound politically, human, funny, passionate, and a consummate stylist. RIP Henry Louis Mencken. ©

New light on an old war.

I will bet you’ve never heard of Oliver Evans, a man whose major invention had as much to do with the origins of the Civil War as Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Evans, who was born (in Delaware) on September 13, 1755, also beat Whitney to the fledgling US Patent Office. His automated, steam-driven flour mill was US patent #3 (1790). Whitney’s gin (patent #90) didn’t cross the finish line until 1794. The cotton gin made profitable the growth of long-staple cotton, a labor-intensive crop, which in turn encouraged the spread of plantation slavery into the southern uplands and across the Old Southwest. Evans’s automated mill couldn’t have been more different; in his own words his machine “perform(s) every necessary movement of the grain . . . from one part of the mill to another . . . through all the various operations, from the time the grain is emptied from the [wagon] . . . until completely manufactured into flour . . . without the aid of manual labor.” [my emphasis] And, Evans might have added, it also packed the flour into barrels. With a little help from Tom Jefferson’s Northwest Ordinance (1785) and the Erie Canal (1825), Evans’s automated mills made profitable the march of freehold family farming across the Appalachians and into the Old Northwest. Thus the cotton gin and the flour mill built two different social systems and made a great war possible.

"It is apparent that nothing short of contraception can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide." Margaret Higgins Sanger.


14th September 2013 is the 134th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Sanger, an American socialist and union activist, butbetter known as a crusader for women’s rights in sex, childbirth, andmarriage. Some quotations may give a better sense (than a narrative would) of her life’s work. “A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.” “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.” “The submission of her body without love or desire is degrading to the woman’s finer sensibility.” “When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.” She flirted with white supremacy and eugenics, which has been emphasized in some recent writings about her, but her tireless work bringing free family planning to black communities won her the forgiveness, during her life, of W. E. B. DuBois and of M. L. King, among others. As she herself put it, “Negro participation in planned parenthood means democratic participation in a democratic idea.” Born on 14th September 1879 to an Irish immigrant mother who went through 18 pregnancies (seven of them stillbirths) before dying of TB and cervical cancer, Margaret Higgins Sanger began her crusade in 1912. After a lifetime’s work, which included founding Planned Parenthood, Margaret died in 1966, a landmark year for (married) Americans’ sexual freedom as it saw the court case Griswold v. Connecticut. Look it up.

"How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal rules of nature?" Murray Gell-Mann.

Perhaps polymaths are no more; possibly the age of “Renaissance men” and “Renaissance women” has passed. But still, other things being equal, breadth of knowledge is a Good Thing. It keeps one honest, and can improve one’s sense of humor (or at least of proportion). It’s also the fundamental notion behind honors colleges. We are reminded of its virtues when we think of the name coined, by Professor Murray Gell-Mann, for a particularly odd feature of the odd readings he(and others) found in quantum physics. At the time (late 1940s, 50s) these seemed inexplicable, but Gell-Mann and others “saw” them in their experiments and calculations, so they had to have names. Gell-Mann’s name stuck, and he took it from his reading of Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce, Book 2, “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” And so we have “Quarks.” The other name proposed, “Aces”, doesn’t quite have the ring, and anyway aces are not always wild cards. Murray Gell-Mann was born on this day, September 15, 1929, taught himself calculus at age 7, and is still a vigorous old coot. He’s not quite so widely learned as, say, Lord Bacon was, but when Bacon flourished there was less to know. Gell-Mann studies birds, natural history, archaeology, linguistics, psychology (the psychology of creative thinking), biological and cultural evolution, and, oh yes, Irish Literature and Experimental Physics, for which latter he won the Nobel Prize in 1969. ©