BOB'S BITS

[Tripps]

The charm of this thread is that it points you in the direction of some remarkable and fascinating people of whom you've never even heard until now - and I've had to look up the meaning of exegesis (yet again).

Wiki tells that -
"After some years of professional activity, Linacre received priest's orders as the rector of Wigan in 1520,[3] though he had for some years previously held several clerical benefices, including the Precentorship of York Minster."

The travelling that such people did at that time cannot have been easy? Did they go to Italy by ship, or horse drawn coach? Actually it occurs that London to Wigan must have been quite a trek.

[Stanley]

Sea travel and then horseback or walking David. British bishops were attending synods on the continent in the third century.......

[Stanley]

I write poetry for no other reason than to relieve depression or to improve my English. Alfred Nobel.

The news that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for literature was variously celebrated or ridiculed, but I failed to find any speculation on what Alfred Nobel might have thought. One guesses he would have approved, if for no other reason than that he too was an odd bird, a loner, full of strange fears, and a sometime poet. Even his decision to establish the Nobel awards was a deliberately eccentric act. Alfred Nobel’s life began in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 31, 1833, when he was born into poverty, his father being a usually unemployed inventor. But when Alfred was only four, his father got a paying job with the Czar of all the Russias. Prosperity suited Alfred, and it was then that he received his only formal schooling, a whole 18 months in a posh Stockholm academy. Otherwise Nobel learned by experience, in St. Petersburg, Paris, the USA, and elsewhere, picking up six languages (counting American) and from his father a very particular phobia (being buried alive) and a life-long interest in explosives, either inventing them (gelignite and dynamite) or making them stable enough to use (nitroglycerin, detonators, blasting caps). He invented less destructive things, too (his first of over 350 patents came in 1857 for a gas meter), and he became quite seriously rich, partly from his own inventions and partly from investing in his brothers’ oilfield operations in southern Russia. He never married but had affairs, the longest with a Viennese flower girl, the shortest with Bertha von Suttner (who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905, nine years after Alfred’s death). And Nobel developed a fascination with the Renaissance heroine Beatrice Cenci, about whom he wrote an blasphemous but otherwise forgettable tragedy (in four acts). Nobel’s decision to establish the prizes came as a disappointment to his surviving siblings, his nieces and nephews, and may even have disappointed Bob Dylan, fellow eccentric. ©

[Stanley]

Life is short . . . and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. Sarah Bernhardt.

Sarah Bernhardt lived long enough to record her voice (at Edison’s New Jersey studio, no less) and to appear in silent films, so still today she can be seen and heard. But not well enough, unfortunately, for us to form a clear judgment of her contemporaries’ belief that she was the world’s greatest actress (and a more than passable sculptor and painter). At about the time her acting career began Bernhardt bought a coffin. Sleeping in it, she thought, might improve her understanding of tragic roles. She did not sleep there every night (she couldn’t take it on her many tours), but she did become a great tragedienne, acting in both contemporary plays (e.g. by Hugo) and the classics (e.g. Shakespeare). Sarah Bernhardt was born in Paris on October 22, 1844, and given the hard circumstances of her childhood and youth we may doubt whether the coffin was needed. Her father is unknown. Her Jewish mother became a moderately successful courtesan, a profession into which Sarah (her name then was Rosine) easily drifted and which climaxed with her two-year affair with a Belgian prince (a liaison that produced her only child, Maurice). But as that affair fizzled, Bernhardt embarked on her long acting career, beginning in 1862 as a student-actress at the Comédie Française. She went on from strength to strength, making many classic roles her own but always also willing to risk the theatre of the avante garde. This included outraging Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (in successive weeks, on her 8th American tour, in 1910) with her title role as “Judas” in a play judged offensive by the authorities. She was also the foundress and long-time impresario of the Bernhardt Theatre, in Paris, which the Nazis renamed in 1940 (17 years after Bernhardt’s death) because (murderous saps) they couldn’t think of “the Divine Sarah” as anything but a Jew. ©

[Stanley]

Great teams are made up of a variety of players, each having their own strengths. Pele.

“Minas Gerais” should surely be a place name on Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth, but in prosaic fact it is the second most populous state in Brazil. In Brazil’s own national mythology, however Minas Gerais became, on October 23, 1940, the birthplace of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, a mouthful of a baby boy whose parents named him after Thomas Edison, the American inventor. Very soon, the boy took after his footballing father rather than his electric namesake, and today—on his 76th birthday—the world knows him as Pelé, the greatest soccer player yet seen. His professional career spanned 24 years (1956-1980), mostly with Santos FC but latterly with the New York Cosmos. He led Santos to every cup title a western hemisphere club could win, but his career reached its apogee in two World Cups, the first when he was 18 (1958) and the second (1970) at 30 when most football careers are on the downhill slope. (Pelé played in the 1962 and 1966 World Cups, too, but an injury took him out in 1962, won by Brazil anyway, and savage marking early knocked him, and Brazil, out of the 1966 tournament). His superlative performances in 1958 put him atop the world transfer market, but the Brazil government declared him a “national treasure,” thus serving notice that he would be kept at home. Indeed he was a treasure, and some of the most memorable of sporting quotes are about this small (5’8”) giant of physical coordination and mental agility. “How do you spell Pelé? G-O-D.” “The greatest player was di Stefano. I refuse to classify Pelé as a player. He was above that.” Di Stefano himself has waxed eloquent about Pelé, but let’s give the final word to Nelson Mandela, who played his football on Robben Island. “To watch Pelé play was to watch the delight of a child combined with the extraordinary grace of a man in full.” Happy Birthday, then, to Brazil’s immortal number 10. ©

[Stanley]

Can YOU tell the difference between our margarine and our hair tonic? WE can’t. George Mikes.

France may be our oldest ally, but Americans have been eager to blame the French for many things. Their great cooking has grieved us, especially when they concoct something dèlicieux or de bon goût of some unappealing animal like the snail. Americans have historically been more unforgiving than les français of sexual shenanigans among our political class, which may be why we have heretofore found out about our presidents’ extramural sex only ex post facto (e.g. Harding, FDR, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. But today I have found something new to blame the French for, the invention of margarine. The guilty party was a French scientist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, born in Paris on October 24, 1817. It is unlikely that his schoolteacher parents knew what a monster they’d made, for the danger signals only began to multiply after he’d left home when Mège-Mouriès, by then a pharmacist, began in the 1840s to experiment with various chemicals and organic materials, perfecting what was then the only effective syphilis treatment (typically French, one might note), moving on to invent tablets for making water effervescent, for extracting sugar from beets, and (in a very modern turn) a “health diet” chocolate drink. Not satisfied with these triumphs (and quite a number of other patents) Mège-Mourièz went on to register French patent #86489 for margarine, for which he received (from Napoléon III) a military contract and a cash award. Margarine may well explain the collapse of the French army in the Franco-Prussian War, the emperor having quite forgot his uncle Bonaparte’s dictum that an army marches on its stomach. So margarine certainly is something for which the French can justly and forever be blamed, even though Mège-Mourièz then sold his patent to the Dutch firm Jurgens, now Unilever, who improved the unimprovable and foisted it on the rest of humanity. ©

[Tizer]

After reading Bob's brief note about margarine OG readers should enjoy reading this Wikipedia page on margarine's history. Anyone for striped margarine? LINK

[Stanley]

I recommended Bob to read Wilson's 'History of Unilever' which I read as part of my research into lipids. Fascinating story.....

[Stanley]

[W]e cultivate our women to the highest pitch that can make them fascinating, with a careful abstinence from that which would make them wise. Maria Jane Jewsbury, 1832.

The fact of Jane Austen’s gender was of great interest to her first female critic, Maria Jane Jewsbury, who felt that femininity defined Austen’s claim to greatness. In an appreciation printed (in 1831) in the influential Athenaeum, Jewsbury put it succinctly enough. Austen could get away with skewering “folly, selfishness, and absurdity” because she “had too much wit to lay herself open to the charge of being too witty; and [she] discriminated too well to attract notice to her discrimination.” This perceptive comment, it seems to me, also notes some of limitations imposed on women writers. This was a core theme of a series of Jewsbury essays in the Athenaeum, critical pieces on (inter alia), Felicia Hemans and Joanna Bailey. In this case, the critic knew whereof she spoke. Born on October 25, 1800, Maria Jane Jewsbury began to write at an early age. She first published at 21, and by 1825 was well enough known to have her works collected in two volumes that she dedicated to William Wordsworth. The great man was touched, but also impressed by the critical essays in the collection, and in 1825 Jewsbury began an intimate relationship with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, staying with them, corresponding with them, and indeed making appearances in the Wordsworths’ letters and in several of William’s poems. Jewsbury developed a similar but closer relationship with Felicia Hemans, drawn in perhaps by Hemans’ religious intensity. But Maria Jane was in truth her own woman, very conscious of her own womanhood, and a most promising writer whose unfinished projects included bringing Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women up to date. Alas, she died of cholera, aged only 33, after accompanying her new husband to his Anglican mission in India. ©

[Stanley]

When we get to the end of the story, you will know more than you do now. Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen.

If you are one of those (apparently many) who have recurring dreams about wretched moments in your youth, then you have much in common with Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish tale-spinner who gave us the ugly duckling (who became a swan) and the dullard Jack (who won a princess and a kingdom all in one day). Some of his biographers would say it all started on October 26, 1822, the day that Andersen started back to school. Andersen was born poor, in Odense, in 1805, and his poverty guaranteed that his schooling was superficial, very occasional, and (it seemed) quite finished when, aged 11, he went out to Copenhagen to make his living. There he impressed his employer (director of the Royal Theatre) who sponsored Andersen’s return to the classroom in Elsinore. His schooling, which lasted until 1827, was a great success and an utterly miserable experience, the unhappiest time of his life and, he always said, the fountain of his nightmares. Andersen didn’t enjoy being a poor, ungainly, and rather slow youth, 17 years old, in a classroom full of bright 10- and 11-year olds drawn mainly from bourgeois households. He didn’t like the headmaster (with whom he lodged and for whom he cleaned) whose mood swings puzzled and terrified his boarder-pupil. Andersen’s very first story (only rediscovered in 2012) was about a lonely tallow candle who (until lit, in a better place) was undervalued and unappreciated. He wrote it just as he left school, eager for acceptance, hoping for friends, and gave the manuscript to a local family that had befriended the ugly duckling while he was still in that headmaster’s thrall. Hans Christian Andersen would go on from school to a lifetime of writing, and his stories still give children the freedom to imagine their fears and then to undress their emperors. ©

[Stanley]

Catherine, queen of England, daughter of King Charles of France, mother of the king of England, and lady of Ireland. Queen Catherine's signature, circa 1425.

The list of medieval England’s queens includes several remarkable people, but the most consequential of them was Catherine of Valois, born in Paris on October 27, 1401, at the midpoint of the “100 Years’ War.” That was a war between “England” and “France,” but the pedigrees of the various royal houses (not to mention their dynastic fiefs) were so intermixed that it might better be seen as a dynastic squabble between a bunch of Frenchmen. Catherine, daughter of the French king (Charles VI), thus became a hot property at her birth, and very soon (certainly by 1413) she had caught the eye of England’s Henry IV, who thought that peace (and some valuable dynastic properties) might be purchased by marrying his son (the future Henry V) to this French princess. Offstage, the battle of Agincourt and other entertainments delayed their meeting until 1419 and their match until 1420, but according to Shakespeare it all came off very nicely. A generous dowry helped, for the King of France was down on his luck (and indeed Princess Catherine had grown up in some poverty), and the marriage was celebrated (in France) on Trinity Sunday 1420. It did not purchase peace, for Henry V died at Vincennes while on campaign, but the marriage did produce a child, Henry VI, who at 9 months inherited both the English and (his grandfather Charles having died) French thrones. Queen Catherine was thus in an important, yet delicate, position. The ensuing dynastic complications are too complicated to retail here, but what may be most important was that the lady kept her head, in more ways than one, avoided allying with any English or French princely family, and instead made (in about 1429) a secret marriage with a young (and presumably properly humble) Welsh squire. His name was Owen Tudor, and (a few wars and a couple of Shakespeare plays later) the surname ‘Tudor’ would rattle resoundingly in English history through Henry VII (Owen’s and Catherine’s grandson), Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Catherine herself died in 1457, and her strangely preserved corpse would also rattle along, visibly and gruesomely (Samuel Pepys kissed it for luck in 1669), until the late 19th century. ©

[Stanley]

The risk of developing carcinoma of the lung increases steadily as the amount smoked increases. Richard Doll, 1950.

Science progresses by making mistakes, perhaps the root cause of skepticism about many scientific theories. Another is that in some root sense, many scientific findings are statistical. So we hear the warnings “correlation is not proof” and/or “a specific causal linkage is not proven beyond reasonable doubt.” These arguments are being deployed, today, in the global warming debate, arguments strengthened (in our current state of political hysteria) by theories that range from the stupidly eccentric (it’s a Chinese plot) to the pathologically paranoid (it’s a worldwide conspiracy of scientists—aka the “herding cats” thesis). But we’ve been there before. Dr. Richard Shaboe Doll knew all about it, for he was one of the first to “prove” that smoking causes lung cancer. Shaboe was born in London on October 28, 1912, and pursued an interesting career which included proving connections between poverty and childbirth mortality; pacifism then distinguished battle station service in WWII; a (successful) campaign to enable adoption by non-believer parents; and an influential role in shaping Labour’s commitment to socialized medicine. And in 1950, Richard Doll published (in the British Medical Journal) his first longitudinal study of the connections between smoking and lung cancer. Four American studies, also published in 1950, came to the same conclusion. 1950!!! Doll and others continued to pile on the evidence, and yet still the tobacco companies, their political shills, and their lawyers resisted. It was only a correlation. Or it was a conspiracy. Or there had to be some other “real” cause. In court, they successfully used the “beyond reasonable doubt” gambit. So, we have been there before, and when Miami Beach sinks beneath the waves, we may finally conclude that our addiction to smoking fossil fuels might have had something to do with it. Statistically. ©

[Stanley]

Assuredly we must cut our coat to suit our cloth - and the cloth is the tartan Wendy Wood.

The Great Tapestry of Scotland is an ongoing project illustrating the whole cloth of Scots history. Finished parts of it hung for a time in the new National Parliament but it is now in safe storage while enthusiasts (here and there) take on the production of new or replacement panels. The point of it is that Scotland is indeed a tapestry, a rich, varied, warp and woof of many human skeins. That was driven home by one of the originators of the tapestry, Alastair Moffat (as his name implies a man of the Southern Highlands), who has since (2012) written The Scots: A Genetic Journey, which offers cast iron proof that the Scots are a mongrel breed. Perhaps because it is so far north, one of Europe’s many lands ends, its gene pool is a rich stew: Scots obviously, Celtic obviously, but then also Viking, Irish, and (horrors) Anglo-Saxon (the lowland Scots are Sassenachs). Into the bargain there are (inter alia) measurable strains of Berber, Slavic, and (yes) West African. There are even genes from the Balkans, brought to Scotland (the unkindredest cut of all) by the same people who brought porridge. What a shock all this would have been to Wendy Wood, the grandmamma of 20th-century Scottish cultural nationalism, the lady who laid a Union Jack under her stair carpet so she could tread on it every day. Wendy herself was half English (whatever that means), born in Maidstone, Kent, as Gwendoline Emily Meacham on October 29, 1892. But she moved “back” to Scotland soon enough, put on her culture like an all-enveloping kilt, and spent her long lifetime (89 years) crusading for a free Scotland that in language, music, dance, dress, and poetry was truly, really, purely, and wholly Scots. Speaking of which, in his genetic mapping Alastair Moffat discovered himself, also, to be half English. Like the rest of the world, and Wendy Wood herself, the Scots appear to be all mixed up. ©

[Stanley]

Action anthropology has two coordinate goals . . . to help a group of people to solve a problem, and . . . to learn something in the process. Dr. Sol Tax, 1950.

The idea of “academic objectivity” is under severe strain these days as politicians from all sides, but now especially from the right, argue that it requires neutrality, seeing both sides of the argument, or (to offer a short translation) “balance.” To which one might well reply (if one wanted to take a cheap shot), it would be a good idea (for our public health) if those very same politicians would practice what they preach. It’s a knotty problem, and one that affects different academic disciplines in differing ways. How should climatologists “balance” their findings about global warming? How can one “balance” biological evolution against biblical creationism? Anthropologists often face a rather different sort of problem, especially those who study human cultures that are under severe pressure, literally “endangered.” Dr. Sol Tax spent nearly a lifetime studying Native Americans in Iowa and Wisconsin, and concluded that to adopt a “balanced” approach would be, in effect, to endorse the decline and eventual disappearance of their cultures. Born in Chicago on October 30, 1907, Tax grew up (as a newsboy) among the infamous newspaper wars of Milwaukee, thus learning the hard way about cultures. So it was easy for him, at the universities of Wisconsin and Chicago, to take up Anthropology. Working first with Iowa’s Tama reservation Indians (he was director of the Fox Indian Project for 24 years), he worked to understand their problems and thought it quite natural (and not at all improper) to turn right around and advocate some solutions. Indeed, it seemed to him a moral imperative. In his discipline, Tax called it “Action Anthropology.” Looking at the wreckage strewn about our political landscape today, we might use some “action political science.” Failing that, we may need in future to write some “action history.” ©

[Stanley]

That can’t be true, I thought. Light must be bent sometimes. Narinder Singh Kapany.

We are a nation of immigrants and we can collectively count ourselves fortunate that we did not all come here as “wretched refuse.” Among those of us upon whom Dame Fortune had already smiled was Narinder Singh Kapany, born in the Punjab on October 31, 1926. His wealthy family was long noted for its philanthropy in India, and in the USA, where he has lived since the mid-1950s, Narinder Singh Kapany has continued that philanthropic tradition. In doing that, he’s been generous with his own money. When Kapany was just a precocious undergraduate, in India, he was told that (save for the special conditions posited by Einstein, another immigrant) light traveled only in straight lines. In trying to show that light might deviate, Kapany proved that if he could achieve “total reflection” he could move light very quickly, for great distances and for particular purposes. He completed his basic research on this while a student at Imperial College, London (where he earned his PhD), and first published his findings in Nature in 1954 (at about the same time that Crick and Watson announced their DNA discovery), and Kapany went on to coin the term “fiber optics” in a Scientific American article in 1960. Others were involved, and indeed the Nobel for fiber optics went in 2009 to Charles Kao (yet another immigrant), but it was Kapany who has pride of place, and then it was he who through his scientific genius and business acumen made it all work. Some 250 patents later, Kapany has broadened his family’s philanthropic tradition with generous endowments for art, religious studies, and science in several major California institutions including UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and UC Santa Barbara. In 1999, Fortune magazine featured Kapany as one of the “seven unsung heroes” of the century’s scientific revolution, and as far as I know he is still going strong. ©

[Stanley]

MEMORY IS THE TREASURER AND GUARDIAN OF ALL THINGS Cicero, De Oratore, inscription on the west wall of the Library of Congress.

A government without a memory would be an unsettling thing, depending on its mood useless or frightening. So, once ours settled in the new Federal City, there was always a Congressional Reading Room, save for a few years when the British burned the place down. To repair the damage, Congress purchased Tom Jefferson’s personal library (over 6,000 volumes) for the (then) stupendous price of $24,000. But by the end of the 19th century, and feeling its imperial oats, Congress decided that its dignity, and the nation’s, deserved more, and so was born (on November 1, 1897) the Library of Congress, and its new home (appropriately) was the Thomas Jefferson Building. At first the exclusive preserve of congresspeople, civil servants and stray scholars, the “LoC” has in the past 40 years thrown its doors open to the great American public. I’ve even had dinner there, at (of all things) an Oxford University reunion (there was some mention of the fire). With the internet, the open door policy has become digital, and many wonderful collections are available to you at your very own home computer.

Curious about “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic”? Try

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel05.html and take a side trip to the Virginia State Library for http://www.virginiamemory.com/collections/petitions Visually eloquent depression-era photos from the Farm Security Administration? http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html or brilliant propaganda posters from the Works Progress Administration? http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaposters/wpahome.html

Even better, pick your own favorites from http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListAll.php

And in 1904, Congress gathered its courage into its hands and printed thousands of copies of “The Jefferson Bible”. I’ve got one from that printing, signed by “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, but Jefferson’s original is in the Library of Congress, which is, of course, exactly where it should be. All these things restore your (and the nation’s) memory. Indeed, “ammem” stands for “American Memory.” It’s good for what ails you. ©

[Stanley]

God keep me from false friends. Prince Edward to Gloucester in Shakespeare's Richard III.

Edward V, by succession King of England and Lord of Ireland, was born in dicey circumstances but a good place (in Westminister Abbey’s surrounds) on November 2, 1470. In his short life, the dicey circumstances won out, and he would become the tragic victim of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Most likely, in this case, art imitated real life. Edward was the son of a king (Edward IV) but his father was in exile and the throne occupied by Henry VI. Edward IV very soon came back, restored his princely infant to his hereditary titles (including Prince of Wales) and set the baby up at Ludlow with a court all his own and the incomes necessary to support it. But the kingdom was not at peace, neither within itself nor in France, and so dynastic matters loomed large as Europe was scoured for eligible and preferably rich princesses for Prince Edward to wed. Anne of Brittany was settled upon, but shortly after the marriage treaty was signed Edward IV died and, aged only 13, his son the boy prince left Ludlow to travel to London where he would be crowned King Edward V. Along the way his party was intercepted by Richard, Duke of Gloucester who (claiming that the prince needed protection from evil folk, which was true enough) sent Edward to the Tower of London, postponed the coronation, and set himself (Richard) up as Lord Protector. Thus things stood at the end of April, 1483. By the end of June, Richard of Gloucester was Richard III, King of England, and Edward (and his younger brother York, who had also been sent to the Tower for his “safety”) were not to be found. The likeliest explanation is that the boys were murdered, on Richard’s orders, and so ‘the princes in the Tower’ became the stuff of romantic legend and William Shakespeare would have one of his most convincing villains. ©

[Stanley]

There surely exists between us so beautiful & delicate a relation, accepted by both of us with joy. Walt Whitman to Anne Gilchrist, November 3, 1871.

Now hear you about a passionate love affair, initially poetic but ultimately platonic. The protagonists were the English critic Anne Gilchrist and the American poet Walt Whitman, both interesting characters in their own right. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was the catalyst, probably the 1867 edition. This was the fourth of nine editions (the first in 1855, the last “deathbed edition” in 1892) of what was really an obsession, his “special and entire self-chosen poetic utterance.” Apparently undisciplined, occasionally egomaniacal, it transformed democracy into an extremist credo and would thus seem unlikely to excite the admiration of a high-falutin’ English critic, but Anne Gilchrist was one in a million, a friend and neighbor of Thomas Carlyle, closely associated with the pre-Raphaelites, and perhaps more to the point the biographer (with her husband Alexander) of England’s very own poetic oddity, William Blake. After Alexander’s death (1861) Gilchrist continued and extended her criticism, and (intending a short review) first read Leaves of Grass in 1869. It turned into a book (A Woman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman) and a correspondence in which Gilchrist told Whitman she had (in Leaves) heard “the voice of my mate,” consented to be his bride if only he asked, and promised (though aged 42) that she was “young enough to bear thee children, my darling.” At this point (this was her third letter to the poet), Whitman decided to turn things off and (on November 3, 1871) to send by transatlantic packet a firm nolle prosequi, a refusal for sure yet itself so passionately phrased that Gilchrist was encouraged to visit Whitman in America. Perhaps needless to say, no physical consummation resulted, but a long friendship ensued between this wild American boy and that ardent English girl. It is a tale that needs a tribute: a play or, better yet, an epistolary novel. ©

[Tripps]

I've been through a poetry period recently. Her next door is a published poet, and coincidentally like Uncle Bob, and SCG, ex Lancaster University. They took me to a poetry evening recently. Dinner and then poems. Strangely - I quite enjoyed it.

File under 'don't knock it till you've tried it.

I love 'egomaniacal' . Fits the bill for quite a few. DonaldTrump, Keith Vaz. . . .etc etc. .


Leaves of Grass

PS.
I've just been on Abebooks, bought the 'death bed edition' for £2.99.

[Stanley]

Corporations may not commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls, neither can they appear in person. Sir Edward Coke's opinion in Sutton's Hospital case, 1612.

Corporation law is a difficult subject. One root of the problem is that, while corporations are only legal things, they behave rather like human beings. They buy and sell, own and divest, cheat and steal, kill and maim. So in some ways they must be treated as persons. And yet one of their chief raisons d’etre is that they limit personal legal liability. So are they persons, really? That odd question was recently answered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which held that corporations (et al) share my right of free speech. It was one of the worst decisions in American legal history. But as with so many things legal, we have been there before. In the long court tenure (1863-1897) of Associate Justice Stephen J. Field, the personhood of corporations was radically extended and the constitution radically rewritten by “judicial legislation.” Field, born in Connecticut on November 4, 1816, won his legal reputation in Gold Rush California where as Alciade, then J.P., and finally state supreme court justice he tried (often literally) to whip the frontier into shape. On the Supreme Court, his minority and then majority opinions (notably in the ‘Slaughterhouse Cases,’ Munn v. Illinois, and Mugler v. Kansas) Field extended the “personal” rights and immunities of corporations, especially against state regulation. In doing so, he used (and thus utterly subverted) the 14th amendment, ratified in 1868 to protect freed slaves from state governments. And just to ice the cake, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Field held that the 14th amendment did not protect the rights of African Americans (as long as their segregated facilities were “equal” to those of whites). Plessy led to widespread apartheid in the USA. Field’s other decisions led to Citizens United. We know some justices’ reputations by the damage they do. ©

[Stanley]

The Patagonian Giant. Early circular (ca. 1805) advertising Giovanni Belzoni in London.

Among unusual lives Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s might take pride of place, first a novice monk, then a peddler of religious relics, and then in fairly rapid succession a strongman in a circus, a magician, and (fatefully it would turn out) a designer of water-driven stage props. Mix it all together and you get a pioneer Egyptologist (or, if you prefer, grave-robber and vandal). This strangest of careers began in Padua, Italy, on November 5, 1778. This poor, handsome, and hugely strong boy (in his prime he topped six and a half feet) was his family’s tithe to the mother church, and in 1794 he fetched up in Rome to study religion (and, he later claimed, hydraulics). The Napoleonic invasion jarred him loose and put him on the road with a bag of religious relics, which he sold at high enough prices to get him to England, in 1802. Whereupon he married the courageous Sarah, became a circus and theater performer (playing Jack the Giant Killer to the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi), and toured Europe in style. 1815 found Giovanni and Sarah in Malta where he convinced an agent of the Pasha of Egypt that he was a hydraulics engineer. This new wrinkle did not work out well but it placed Giovanni where he could help John Lewis Burkhardt excavate the giant head of Ramses II and ship it to the British Museum. Giovanni went on to excavate Abu Simbel, Thebes, to discover several tombs in the Valley of the Kings and uncover the entrance to the Great Pyramid at Giza. Now lionized by London society, “The Great Belzoni” discovered new talents of self-publicizing, and at some expense got together a West African expedition to discover the headwaters of the Niger, a popular quest at the time. There the dysentery got him. Belzoni’s archeological trophies litter London. His own grave (in present-day Nigeria) can no longer be found. ©

[Tripps]

That name rang a very faint bell - I remembered a TV series about Egyptian adventures with Mathew Kelly playing such a character. Quick research showed it was indeed him.

There's a lot on Youtube about him too. Try this Belzoni

[Tizer]

This mention of Egypt reminds me that I should seek out some more of Michael Pearce's novels about the Mamur Zapt, the British administrator in Egypt in the years before WW1. I enjoyed the ones I read about 10 years ago.

[Stanley]

Freedom . . . cemented with the mingled blood of Protestant and Catholic fellow-citizens, should be equally enjoyed by all. John Carroll.

American independence forced reorganization of the colonial Church of England. So “Anglicans” became “Episcopalians” and got their first truly American bishop, Samuel Seabury of Connecticut. This was a blunder, for Seabury had been a notorious Loyalist in the American Revolution; but he didn’t last long, dying in 1796. He was then replaced by the genuinely patriotic Samuel Provoost of New York. The episcopal Church of Rome had to make similar adjustments, a task made more sensitive by the fact that several of the new American states retained various political disabilities for Catholics, an inheritance of English anti-popery and evidence that many still saw Catholicism as inherently anti-republican. So who else would the pope ask for advice than that old freethinker Ben Franklin, still (1784) American minister to France? Franklin (a strong believer in separation of church and state) noted that it was a question upon which an American public official could not have an opinion, but still succumbed to the temptations of patronage and named the Jesuit priest John Carroll of Maryland as very acceptable. It was a politic nomination, John’s cousin Charles and his brother Daniel being leading patriots in the Revolution, signatories of its foundation documents, and close friends with George Washington; so in 1784 Pius VI made Father John Carroll SJ the Superior of all Catholic missions in the USA and then on November 6, 1789, followed that up by making Carroll the first bishop of the American church. For the next 26 years Carroll conducted himself with great energy, republican rectitude and perfect tact. He founded Georgetown University; he plumped for the higher education of women; he urged abandoning the Latin mass. And not incidentally he laid the groundwork for the full acceptance of the Roman church in the new republic. ©

[Stanley]

Experimental Philosophy being founded in Nature and Truth is obtained no way, but by Time and Diligence. Jared Eliot, 1748.

David Lovejoy’s colonial history seminar at Wisconsin sources much of what I know and more of what I have forgotten, but one memory persists: the Reverend Jared Eliot. Eliot was the subject of a fellow student’s research, and I was taken in by this agricultural pioneer, America’s answer to Jethro Tull. Eliot was born (on November 7, 1685) into a famous New England family (besides the Eliots he was related to the Dudleys and the Brentons). Orphaned in his youth, he was taken in by a founder of the new college at New Haven; upon graduating from Yale Eliot returned to take up his father’s ministry at Killingworth. His one lack, a wife, was supplied when his flock promised him 60 loads of firewood each winter should he find one. He found Hannah Smithson and in 1708 the couple settled down to a long lifetime together. Besides ministering to the faithful, Eliot also took up his father’s role as physician to the sick, and it was this interest in science that led him on to farming. New Englanders’ extensive farming methods and their large families were at the root of the problem. Exhausted soils, depleted timber lots, and barren pastures seemed to be leading to what would later be called a Malthusian crisis but looked to Jared Eliot like undeserved poverty. For him it was also a religious matter. People should flourish in nature, not ruin it, and “the fulfillment of the kingdom” required careful husbandry, rotation of crops, replenishment of the soil, the restoration of pastureland, and experimentation with new grains and new breeds. He even preached about it. And then he wrote his six Essays Upon Field Husbandry (1748-1759), each on different subjects. Eliot’s good ideas and easy, informal style (honed by decades of preaching) won him many friends and disciples, including those infamous freethinkers John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. He should be more widely known today. ©