BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"I can't provide anyone with inventiveness, nor can I take it away; I can simply provide the liberty to read, to listen, to see, to understand." Nadia Boulanger.

Even though there was a surplus of Russian princesses in the 19th century, not many married French composers and produced children who were famous musicians. Juliette Nadia Boulanger was born on this day, 16th September, in 1887, to just such a mother and just such a father. In 1877, composer Ernest Boulanger married his student who was also a Russian princess, Raissa Myshetskaya, and in his 72nd year and her 23rd, they produced Nadia. At first positively disinclined even to listen to music, Nadia produced her first composition at 5, and at 9 enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire. She won her first composition prize aged 10, studied with Gabriel Fauré, and won the Conservatoire’s most prestigious prizes in 1904. In the same year, convinced that she hadn’t the talent for composition herself, or for concert performance, she began teaching in the family home, and very soon her classes and her after-class salons became de rigueur. Nadia Boulanger would indeed have her own musical triumphs, in France, England, and North America, and as performer and composer, but she is most often remembered today as an inspiring teacher, magical yet exacting. The list of her students is a who’s who of 20th-century music, including Bacharach, Barenboim, Carter, Copland, Curzon, Horovitz, Menotti, and the musical children of her friends Menuhin and Stravinsky. “She knew everything there was to know about music.” [Aaron Copland].

[Stanley]

"it is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there." William Carlos Williams.


September 17, 2013 is the 130th anniversary of the 1883 birth of William Carlos Williams, in Rutherford NJ, author of one of my favorite poems (“Spring and All”) and, into the bargain, a much-loved and highly successful GP and pediatrician. He might have been bitten by the poetry bug while at school in Paris or Geneva, or at the University of Pennsylvania (where he met Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle) but he published his first book of poetry in 1909 after he had been practicing medicine for three years. He married Florence in 1912, published his second volume of poetry (1913), moved into a house near Rutherford he and Florence would share for the rest of their lives, and continued to practice medicine. He also continued to write, began to distance himself poetically from Pound and Doolittle, and became part of a New York modernist group that included Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Marcel Duchamp. “Spring and All” is the title poem of his most famous collection, published in 1923, one year after The Waste Land (by Eliot) which Williams strongly disliked for its obscurantism, its intellectualism, and its referential content. Williams, though uncompromisingly modernist, preferred colloquial poetry in the everyday tongue, and wanted to “write American.” He succeeded, and remains one of our most approachable modern poets, writing about life as we know it.

[Stanley]

"You are invited to come to see the Earth turn, tomorrow, from three to five in the afternoon." Leon Foucault, Paris, February 1851.
No doubt many would say that one Foucault was quite enough, and they would be speaking about Michel Foucault, whose (I think sensible) cautions about the influence of power (variously defined) on ideas and argument, even on “facts”, have been taken too far by post-modernists, post-structuralists, and doubtless others. But those naysayers would (by the same token) like to hear about the other Foucault, Jean-Bernard-Léon by name, a physicist who was more concerned with the underlying realities of the universe. Léon Foucault was born on 18th September 1819 and died young, in 1868, with (however) a long list of accomplishments behind his name. Born in Paris, he began in medicine, but his distaste for blood put him into physics and there he stayed. Using a large (and beautifully balanced) pendulum suspended from (of all places) the Panthéon, he demonstrated (1851) experimentally that the earth did indeed rotate on an axis. This made him famous and put Foucault Pendulums in many museums and city halls. But even before he had, using primitive equipment and sophisticated thinking, demonstrated some important truths about the speed of light (including getting the actual measurement almost right) and, later, conducted pioneering experiments in electricity and optics. If Léon Foucault thought the speed of light or the earth’s rotation was swayed by the power of the French state or of the Paris Bourse he neglected to tell us. ©

I have a story for you. In 1987, when we were building a new head on the 220ft chimney at Ellenroad engine my steeplejack Peter Tatham had a young apprentice called Jason Yeomans working with him. Jason told me one morning that the stack was haunted and when I asked him why he said that the two hundred foot fall on the hoist we had installed inside the chimney wouldn't stay still. No matter what you did, it started to swing as soon as you left it alone. I had to tell him about Foucault's pendulum. We had unwittingly created one of the biggest in the world.



Jason in 1986.

[Stanley]

"Your [support] is taken by the world [to show] that the United States are resolved not to allow the despots of the world to trample on oppressed humanity." Lajos Kossuth.
Littering our American landscape are Kossuth parks and Kossuth statues (two in New York City; one in our nation’s capital). There’s a Kossuth, Mississippi, a Kossuth, Ohio, and a Kossuth County, Iowa. Superficially they remember Lajos Kossuth, born on 19th September 1802, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and, briefly, President of the Hungarian Republic (before the Hapsburgs marched back). In a deeper sense they remind us of a time when the USA was seen as a revolutionary régime by most of the civilized world and when we favored revolutions. In a famous series of lectures, 50 years ago (America and the World Revolution), historian Arnold Toynbee noted the sadness of our epochal shift from revolutionaries into reactionaries, but did not give a date for it. Sometime after Kossuth would be a good guess. Meanwhile, Kossuth himself was a classic haute bourgeois (a lawyer whose lawyer father had bought his minor noble status) who embodied the national aspirations of bourgeois Hungary. Lajos became a leader of the 1848 Revolution and, after his exile, a hero of progressive forces in western Europe and the USA. His triumphal American tour took place in the early 1850s. He was only the second foreigner (after Lafayette) to address congress. And it’s worth noting that another bourgeois revolutionary, if not quite so haute, the rising lawyer Abe Lincoln, organized the Kossuth reception in Springfield, Illinois. ©

[Stanley]

"There could be nothing so important as a book can be". Maxwell Perkins.

Every year a few of my business majors consider switching to economics, and there might be more, but “what can I do with an economics major?” The answer is obvious. You emulate Maxwell Perkins, the most famous book editor of the 20th century and, more to the point, an economics major. Born on 20th September 1884, in New York City, Perkins went to Harvard, where (as I say) he majored in economics. Luckily, however, Harvard had already instituted Charles Eliot Norton’s liberal education requirements, and so Perkins took plenty of literature and philosophy courses, where he developed a critical flair and a taste for new stuff. So when (in 1910) he went to work for Scribners he lobbied his bosses to spice up their list (which then featured Henry James and Edith Wharton). Perkins’ first big success was a whippersnapper from St. Paul named Scott Fitzgerald, and he went on from there to nab Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, Ring Lardner, James Jones, Marjorie Rawlings, Alan Paton, Vance Bourjaily and, oh yes, Ernest Hemingway. Maxwell Perkins was noted for his courtesy, which helped him convince “his” writers to make big changes in their manuscripts, and for his “infallible” criticisms, which helped them move from good to brilliant. He improved them all, and it would be fair to say that he "made" Fitzgerald and Wolfe. And, just maybe, the economics major also had a good sense of the market. ©

[Stanley]

"We believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price and staked everything on it." Allen Lane.

September 21, 2013 is the 111th anniversary of the birth of Sir Allen Lane. As a lad, Lane was taken in as an apprentice by his uncle at Bodley Head, a successful, daringpublisher (their list included Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley). Lane took readily to publishing and was chairman by 1930. A (successful) fight with his board over publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses convinced Lane to create a new house willing to cater to the avant garde and to a growing mass market of intelligent, literate, middle brow readers. Thus was born Penguin Books (1936), whose first list (of ten books) included popular authors like Agatha Christie and more serious writers like Ernest Hemingway, all in cheap, well designed, paperbacks. The list sold like hotcakes. Soon Lane added Pelican Books (serious, non-fiction work, generally by academics), Penguin Specials (cheap paperbacks on controversial issues of the day), and at length Penguin Classics (out of copyright books by such as Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Darwin). In 1942, he launched the Armed Forces Book Club, making the whole line available to British and Commonwealth soldiers at a loss to Penguin. He was knighted in 1952. In later life (1959), he published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, and won what has become a famous legal case.

Meanwhile, Lane enjoyed an apparently idyllic private life with his wife Lettice Lucy Orr, a social worker, and their three daughters. He died in 1968.

"The gloom of the world is but a shadow." Girolamo Savonarola.

21st September is the birthdate of Girolamo Savonarola, preacher, moralist, and martyr, who was born into a wealthy family in Ferrara, Italy, in 1452. Savonarola joined the Dominican order in 1475 and by 1481 was established in Firenze (Florence). He was soon famous for his sermons attacking sin, worldliness, and political corruption. Most notably, he attacked the dominant family in Firenze, the Medici, and helped to secure the exile of the family’s patriarch, Lorenzo d’Medici, in 1494. In 1494 Savonarola supported the French invasion of Italy, hoping that it would end corruption in Florence and in the papacy. This did not endear him to Pope Alexander VI, and when the Florentines grew weary of Savonarola’s rigid morality and spiritual shenanigans, Alexander struck, excommunicating the preacher in 1497. Local Franciscans were also not reluctant to see the end of Savonarola, and to make a long story short he was in 1498 arrested, tortured and hanged. There are four morals to this moral tale. (1) If you make friends with a French king, make sure he sticks around. (2) Don’t irritate the Medici family unnecessarily. (3) If you are going to preach a stern and unbending morality, give the people an occasional break. (4) Making your name a byword is not always good for your health.

[Stanley]

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Francis Bacon.

Perhaps study of natural communities leads one to, or naturally follows on from, an understanding of the interdependencies of human communities, both among themselves and in relation to their “natural” settings. So we could classify as merely coincidental that two pioneer ecologists shared the same birthday, September 22. They were George Stapledon (born in 1882, in Devonshire, England) and Victor Ernest Shelford (born in 1877, in upstate New York). Both began their studies at minor league institutions but became major league scientists. Their ecological research focused on areas they lived in, and areas where ecological cycles, and ecological degradation, affected human communities. Stapledon turned to grassland succession partly because he was concerned with how mid- and north-Wales communities could recover from the ravages of mineral and slatemining. Shelford began with the Indiana Dunes, downwind from the polluting steel plants of Gary. Both branched out, of course (ecology has a way of branching one out), and it’s also notable that both had significant impact on institutions. Stapledon, a rural conservative, put British capitalism to the test (it only deserved to survive if it protected nature), while Victor Shelford, also rather conservative in his politics, is better known today as the first president of the Ecological Society of America (1916) and the founder of our Nature Conservancy (1946). Both remind us that ecology is not new and need not be political. Take note, Senator Imhofe.

[Stanley]

"Affluence separates people. Poverty knits 'em together." Ray Charles.


Ray Charles Robinson was born in Albany, GA, on September 23, 1930. His mother, a sharecropper, and father, a railroad man, moved to Florida soon after, where young Ray witnessed his brother’s drowning, went blind, and was orphaned at 15. This hard life was ameliorated by his attendance at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind where he learned classical music and, increasingly, played popular. He formed two bands while at the school, and played gigs outside. Before long, still in his teens, he was on the road, first to Seattle and then, at 20, to Miami. Along the way, he met, played with, befriended, and was befriended by quite a few talented people who recognized something special in the young, blind piano player with the distinctive voice, now called Ray Charles (to make sure people knew he wasn’t the prize fighter). Among these friends were Cannonball Adderley and Quincy Jones. Ray recorded his first big hits in 1949-1951 and signed with Atlantic Records in 1952. “I Got a Woman” (1954) brought him real fame and by the late 50s Ray was recognized as a remarkably creative performer-composer, mixing genres between and even within songs: R&B, rock n roll, blues, soul, jazz, country (“Georgia on My Mind”) and indefinable (“What’d I Say?”) The artists who joined him for what became his farewell album (2004) ranged from Willie Nelson to Gladys Knight to Diana Krall to Van Morrison to B B King and was appropriately titled “Genius Loves Company.” In his case, it did. ©

[Stanley]

"A highbrow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso." A. P. Herbert.


If you aim for a legal career, you will want first to develop the talent to be amused by the law. If you’ve already succumbed to the desire, you’ll know John Mortimer’s series, Rumpole of the Bailey, stories about a doughty defender, the barrister Horace Rumpole, the shenanigans of his colleagues, the depredations of his ambitious wife (“she who must be obeyed”) and his triumphs at defending those charged with high crimes and low misdemeanors. Rumpole was made into a television series and you can still pick up the DVDs. But to really laugh at the law, you need to dig deeper and come up with A. P. Herbert, Alan Patrick to his mother, who was born on September 24, 1890, earned a first in law at Oxford, was admitted to the bar, and then (unlike Mortimer) never practiced law. He did transform it though, by successfully pushing (as Member of Parliament, 1935-1950) for the reform of some of its sillier provisions, notably in divorce and obscenity law, but his more important work was to highlight its absurdities with his Misleading Cases, law reports which appeared regularly in Punch from 1910 and then were collected in various volumes (some still in print), and which were so realistic that on more than one occasion legal scholars and journalists took them as the real thing. And in a sense they were. Many of them set the law reform agenda which A. P. Herbert, MP, faithfully followed. Art often imitates life. The best humor sometimes anticipates it. ©

[Bob followed up with an apology for saying that the books were still in print, they aren't but they are so expensive second-hand that they will almost certainly be printed again.]

[Stanley]

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor. It was full of stars. . . . I hushed." The Sound and the Fury (1929).
There are many claimants for the title of “greatest American novelist,” but I would give it to William Faulkner, born on this day, September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. He had several bad habits. For instance, while working in his grandfather’s bank he “learned the medicinal value of whiskey”, a lesson which marked his character. Another vice which had a better outcome was sitting around with friends, trading narratives about their particular neck of the woods. More than most regions, the South lived with its myths, so the stories were retold, then told again, and improved upon with each telling. Young Bill, anyway, was a bit of a dreamer, the scion of a once-proud but since declining family, who never amounted to much in school or at the University of Mississippi and learned also to tell stories about himself, some of which were definitely “untrue.” Out of this mélange of tales heard and tales told came, between 1929 and 1942, the most astonishing series of fictions yet produced on these shores. During this “matchless time” (as Faulkner called it) he produced eight novels which brilliantly explored new realms of fiction and language and, into the bargain, produced an imaginative history of the South that is without equal. Read them all this month!! But if you haven’t that much time to spare, start with Go Down, Moses (1942) and then you will be ready for his absolute masterpiece, Absalom! Absalom! (1938). William Faulkner won the Nobel in 1949 and died in 1962. ©

[Stanley]

"Home is where one starts from." T. S. Eliot

Today is poetry day in St. Louis: the 125th birthday of Thomas Stearns Eliot, born here on September 26,1888. Eliot said that St. Louis shaped his literary vision more than any other place. Whether that’s a compliment is an open question, but certainly Tom left as soon as he could, returning to his family’s New England roots for his Harvard education, and then to Merton College, Oxford where he put off his Harvard PhD viva. He became a British citizen in 1927 and joined the Church of England about then. His loyalty to a particular vision of the C of E defines much of his poetry, more clearly his play Murder in the Cathedral. He was a modernist in poetry, however, believing that poetry must portray the complexity of modern life. His poetry is indeed complex, but it’s often hard to convince students of its modernism. This is partly because of its pessimism (e.g. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” or “The Hollow Men,” but students can take that; more often they are put off by Eliot’s frequent, obscure allusions to classical texts. In this he’s not as bad as Ezra Pound, which may comfort those who love him. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1948) and stayed in England, where he had a famously unhappy marriage, taught in private and state schools, founded a leading literary journal, and became a director of a famous publishing house, Faber& Faber. Which all proves that even great poets need a day job. ©

[Stanley]

"It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, ‹ to oppress . . . all who are poorer or weaker than themselves." Sam Adams.
Humility comes with learning that history can play tricks on us, making dead people into icons that they weren’t. A good example of this is Sam Adams, Inc., a successful challenger in the “real beer” market and, I am told, especially popular with conservative upper class quaffers. Adams ales are named after Samuel Adams, born on September 27, 1722, who failed at almost everything except becoming a radical, left-wing politician, at which he was a whiz. His first splash, fresh out of Harvard College (BA and MA), was as a supporter of an inflationary paper currency. He had a strong affinity to debtors (usually being one himself) which endeared him to poor farmers and the Boston riff-raff. His dad then got Sam a good job as a Boston tax collector but in a time when tax collectors were personally responsible for taxes they failed to collect Sam was soon in bankruptcy. It was at that point that pop set him up as a brewer but his product was not called Adams anything and it didn’t sell well. Luckily for Sam, the American Revolution came along with riot, rebellion, and general mayhem, which suited his leveling instincts and strengthened his support among the poor and inconsiderable. His last act was to “stumble at the threshold” of the Constitution of 1787, which he strenuously and unsuccessfully opposed as a machine for wealthy speculators. He was, I accept, a leader of the original Tea Party (1774). Whether he would join the current version I leave to you to judge.

[Stanley]

"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." William Shakespeare.
“What’s in a name?” Juliet asked, and we ask it on September 28, the anniversary of the birth (1836) of Thomas Crapper, in Yorkshire. Tom’s father was a sailor but instead of taking to the sea Thomas took to the water, big time, and would become well known as a sanitary engineer, a profession he almost invented. At first flush, 17, he moved to Chelsea, London, where he apprenticed to his plumber brother George. At 21 he was a master plumber, and in 1861 he set up as a “sanitary engineer” with foundry and workshops in Marlborough Road. It was a timely investment by an entrepreneurial character. Discoveries in the previous generation about water-borne illnesses, notablycholera, had made British cities hyper conscious about mains plumbing, and some of the great temples of Victorian civic pride (not to mention public investment) are British sewer and waterworks, so long-available things like the flush toilet (1778) suddenly came to be essential features of genteel domesticity. Tom Crapper hopped on the market, and his “Venerable Crapper” (I am not kidding) became famous after it was installed at Sandringham (in the 1880s) by Edward, Prince of Wales. Other plumbing inventions were quickly adopted by the Crapper Company and by the time Tom retired (1912) it was a big player in a rapidly growing market. But his main business was municipal sewage fixtures, and Crapper manholecovers can still be spotted in London streets. But the word “crap” itself originated in Chaucer’s English and Norman French. No roses today for Thomas Crapper. ©

[Stanley]

"Byron . . . describes what he sees. I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task." John Keats.

Four centuries ago today, on 29th September 1513, a party led by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa “discovered” the ocean which we now call the Pacific. Whether or not Balboa and his men were astounded, John Keats said so in one of the great Romantic era poems, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, wherein Keats dramatizes the passionate excitement of first coming upon a great work of art, in this case a new translation of Homer. Keats used “Cortez” rather than “Balboa,” I think for the sake of the poetry:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

[Stanley]

[She is] a woman of mentality and calculating ambition . . . [who wants] to fill man's place, and surpass him in his own sphere." Lee De Forest.

Of course, if grandma was a troublemaker, it’s no guarantee that grand-daughter will do likewise, but here we have Elizabeth Cady Stanton (about whom you know) and Nora Stanton Blatch Barney, Elizabeth’s grand-daughter, about whom you will learn. Nora was born on this day in England, September 30, 1883, 130 years ago. Nora quickly returned to grandma’s native soil (her family took their summers in England), studied Latin and maths at the Horace Mann School in New York (a nest of troublemakers), and then became the first woman in US history to graduate with a degree in engineering (from Cornell University, in civil engineering, in 1905). Her first husband (one De Forest) wanted her to be a housewife and mother. She managed the latter (Harriet Stanton deForest) but couldn’t stomach the former, and divorced Mr. De Forest after one year. She became an engineer for New York City for many years, during which she might have met Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Hopkins, or both, and in the New Deal was architect and civil engineer for the Public Works Administration in Connecticut and Rhode Island. And, I almost forgot to mention, she was a leading suffragist and in 1915 became president of the national Women’s Political Union, succeeding her mom, also a Harriet, who was another chip off the old block. Nora lived long enough (88 years) to support the Equal Rights Amendment, no surprise to those who knew her grandmother. ©

[Stanley]

Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to take in the vastness of the universe." Maria Mitchell.

On 1st October 2013 let’s note Maria Mitchell, who on this day in 1847 (aged 29) discovered “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” (now prosaically known as C/1847 T1). Maria Mitchell’s Quaker family (on Nantucket) thought girls needed education as badly as boys, and so she attended a dame school and then a grammar school on the island (her father was principal). Already helping dad with his astronomy, Maria founded her own school aged 17 and also became Librarian at the Nantucket Athenaeum. In 1847 she discovered the comet that would bear her name, and after a brouhaha over who saw it first (the other claimant was an Italian, Francisco de Vico) Maria was given the prize established by the Danish crown to award first discoverers of comets. In 1848, she became the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1850 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She went on to become the first female professor (astronomy, of course) at the new Vassar College, where she successfully campaigned for equal pay for women faculty. She was a friend of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne (she traveled in Europe with them, making observation of tidal intervals), a leading campaigner against slavery and for women’s suffrage, and a chief contributor to the navigational tables of the US Nautical Almanac. One of the larger craters of the moon is named after her, and on planet earth she is remembered by the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket. Hats off to Miss Mitchell and her comet.
Robert M. Bliss

[Stanley]

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the law of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." Charles Darwin.
On 2 October 1836, Charles Darwinstepped ashore from HMS Beagle, ending a five-year voyage of exploration. In hindsight, Darwin had most of the data he needed to construct his theory of evolution, notably the specimens he shot in the Galapagos, the fossils he unearthed in Brazil and Argentina, and his observations of diverse human behavior in such diverse places as Tierra del Fuego and Madagascar (not to mention in England). Moreover, geologists such as Charles Lyell and naturalists like Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had started to construct a time scale, and a conceptual framework, for a compelling theory of how species came to be. But Darwin wasn’t ready. Indeed it seems that the theory had scarcely dawned on him in 1836, and when it did just a few years later he was reluctant to put it forth. Twenty-three years of further study and observation intervened, while Darwin pondered (for instance) the stunning success of breeding programs for domestic pigeons, the new geology of Lyell, and his own Beagle specimens. Finally, having figured out (among other things) that those diverse little birds from the Galapagos were, indeed, all finches, urged to utter by his friends, and understanding that Alfred R. Wallace was ready to publish his own, very similar ideas, Darwin produced (1859) his literary and scientific masterpiece The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. As he may have sensed in 1836, the world would never be the same again.

[Stanley]

[Vidal] is learned, funny, and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating.² Martin Amis.

A prolific American writer of the last century was born Eugene Louis Vidal on October 3, 1925, christened as Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in 1939, and then (aspiring to either a literary or political career) took the name Gore Vidal. This was not so much playing name games as experimenting with identity, a major theme of his creative writing. One of these identities was his grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, whom he loved, and another was his mother, Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss, a social girl who would, among other things, become Jackie Kennedy’s stepmother. Vidal’s own fascinating life included a childhood in high society, a schoolboy affair with Jimmy Trimble (who was killed on Iwo Jima and therefore could never confirm Vidal’s story), WWII service in the navy, and a string of early literary successes which also outraged some for their play with gender (“same-sex” and “other-sex” to Vidal, who was a switch-hitter). His best work (in my view) came in his six American history novels (1973-2000) collectively “Narratives of Empire” (Burr and Lincoln are masterpieces) and in his political and cultural essays, for he was a supremely gifted critic. If you seek an understanding of late 20th-century American politics and culture, start with his United States: Essays 1952-1992,a Menckenesque collection which won the National Book Award. Deservedly. We could use him today. Or Mencken. Or both.

[Stanley]

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that¹s how the smart money bets.² Damon Runyon.

ON 4th October 1880, Damon Runyon was born, to become a newspaperman and chronicler of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Damon was born in the other Manhattan, in Kansas, and grew up in Pueblo, Colorado, where just about every art center and coffee house is named after him. But he didn’t stay, and he fetched up in the “real” Manhattan in 1910. He began as a sportswriter, and many of his memorable characters are sportspeople and their hangers on, and not least those who bet on sports. He was also a political journalist and for a time lead reporter for the United Press. His writing style was his own (he bequeathed it to many lesser imitators) and is best called tough-sentimental. He was slangy, and invented (or adopted) some memorable slang expressions, such as “shiv”. Among his more or less fictional characters were Nathan Detroit, Big Jule, and Dave the Dude, and indeed his “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” did become the musical Guys and Dolls. A prolific writer, he married twice, secondly a Mexican girl he met while covering Pancho Villa (and paid for her education). The friend of mobsters, low lifes, drama queens, sports icons, and war heroes, Damon Runyon died of one of his habits (smoking). His ashes were scattered over Broadway from a plane piloted by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, December 18, 1946. Damon Runyon left us his books, his style (“runyonesque”), and his aphorisms.

[Stanley]

He's a lumberjack and he's OK." The Mounties Choir in "The Lumberjack Sketch," Monty Python's Flying Circus.

5th October is a good day for a laugh if you like silly walks, Gumbys, dead parrots, lumberjack songs, and Spanish Inquisitions, for it was on this day in 1969 that Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on BBC TV. The Pythons were all honors college types, with three from Cambridge (Eric Idle, John Cleese, and Graham Chapman), two from Oxford (Terry Jones and Michael Palin), one from Occidental (Terry Gilliam, who started as the show’s animator but finished as Cardinal Fang in the famous Spanish Inquisition sketch). Only the two unofficial Pythons, Connie Booth and Carol Cleveland, had not attended top universities, because neither attended a bottom university. How the group came up with “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” is shrouded in mystery, invective, and several lawsuits, but owes mainly to BBC exec Michael Mills (“Circus”), BBC comedian Barry Took (“Flying”), Eric Idle (“Monty”) and John Cleese (“Python”). Other names considered, and fortunately rejected, included “Whither Canada.” Taking their inspiration from the partially insane but entirely humane SpikeMilligan (whose autobiography is entitled Hitler: My Part in His Downfall) and from John Philip Sousa (who wrote the theme song a bit before their time), the Pythons alternately puzzled, confused, enraged, and convulsed their various audiences, and became so famous that the word “pythonesque” is now enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary. ©

[Stanley]

"Every crowd has a silver lining." P. T. Barnum.

In Highbrow, Lowbrow (1988), Lawrence Levine argued that for most of the 19th century, Americans enjoyed “culture” en masse whatever their social class or educational attainment. Seating charts aside, evenings at the theatre were enjoyed in common. Mark Twain knew his audience knew Shakespeare, and readers of Huckleberry Finn laughed knowingly at the adulterations (e.g. of Hamlet’s soliloquy) by the con artists “duke and dauphin.” A perfect illustration of how miscible the American audience was came with the national tour by Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, in 1850. Born on October 6, 1820, in Stockholm, Lind’s extraordinary soprano was “discovered” before she was 10. By 30 she had toured all of Europe, drawn huge crowds everywhere, and was the darling of several leading composers. Over here, circus impresario P. T. Barnum noticed the news, sailed to Europe, and landed her for an American tour. Jenny netted $350,000 ($10 million today) and gave it all to American and Swedish charities, for instance $1500 for a Lutheran Church in Andover, Illinois. Barnum made more, and it is believed that he kept it. The masses that greeted Lind in the streets, the wild demand for tickets at every performance (in some cities, the best seats were auctioned), her mixed audiences across the land, north, south, and mid-west (she netted $4,000 in Emily Dickinson’s home town, Emily attending), all together illustrated Lind’s great talents, Barnum’s market genius, and Professor Levine’s point.

[Stanley]

There is no paradise for cowards." Don John of Austria to his galley slaves, October 7, 1571.

While I was a junior, a card error put me in a PhD history seminar, “The Late Medieval Levant.” Professor L. H. Butler invited me to stay and he assigned my research paper topic on “Venice in the Levant, 1204-1571.” 1571 was chosen because it was the year (October 7, 1571, to be precise) of the Battle of Lepanto, a battle now little heard of because control of the Mediterranean is no longer seen as critical to “world power” and because the great powers that engaged at Lepanto (in the Gulf of Corinth, off present-day Nafpatkos) are no longer powers (Austria, Spain and the Ottomans) or no longer sovereign states (the Republics of Venice and Genoa and the Kingdom of Naples). But in 1571, despite the discoveries of Columbus, Dias, Cortez, and Pizarro, a rationalist could still argue that world power derived from control of the Eastern Mediterranean (the Levant) and its knot of trade routes connecting all of Europe with all of known Asia. Not, of course, that rationality was the issue, for in 1571 we are still in Crusade Country. The Turks had massacred the Venetian garrison at Cyprus (unusually, despite a safe conduct promise), revenge was in the air, and a “Holy League” aimed to exact retribution (not to mention booty, slaves, territory, and trade). Lepanto was the last major sea battle involving galleys (about 400 in all) and it resulted in a Holy League victory. It did not, however, halt the spread of Turkish power in the Levant, nor did it shift western Europe away from its new idol of Atlantic Empire.

[I like Bob's story about an error putting him in the wrong seminar. At Lancaster in 1979 I had the opposite experience. Large lecture hall full of first year history students expecting to be enlightened about modern British history. Stranger hurries in, climbs on to podium and launches into an incredibly complicate lecture on what I think was cold temperature physics. After a few minutes he faltered, looked at us all and in a plaintive voice said "I'm in the wrong lecture aren't I" Gathers up notes and dashes out to applause all round. Half way out he met our correct lecturer who thought we were applauding him. Nice memory. (PS. It wasn't Bob that was late!)]

[Tripps]

Don John of Austria is going to the war.

Strangely the media have given this anniversary no air time today. It puts the current problems in the middle East into some sort of perspective. This was 1571.

Google Lepanto and GK Chesterton for the full version - it's a bit long to copy here. This is an extract which gives the flavour.

Other examples of poems with onomatopoeia:

"Lepanto" by Chesterton (excerpts)

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,

In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,

For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,

Interesting that on the day when it is revealed that British young people 16 - 24 are behind the rest of the industrialised world in literacy, and numeracy - I am aware of this poem from my favourite auntie, who never had more than a basic primary school education. I doubt it would even be allowed to be mentioned today.

[Stanley]

They taught us to memorise poetry in those days.... (And mental arithmetic! Let's hear it for times tables!)

CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN." Morning after editorial in the Chicago Tribune, circa October 11, 1871.
Of the (many) reasons that have been given for Chicago’s displacement of St. Louis as the leading city of mid-America, a few cite the “Great Fire,” which broke out on this day, 8th October, in 1871. Started (legend has it, incorrectly) by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a kerosene lantern, it burned for two days, killed almost 300 people, destroyed 17,000 buildings, and left 100,000 homeless (one-third of the population). The path of destruction covered four square miles, including the whole of the city’s business district. Then what happened? First, poor Mrs. O’Leary became a recluse, afraid to be seen in public. Second, there was a investment boom. By 1880, Chicago had tripled in size, built the world’s first skyscrapers, and secured its claim to be meatpacker to the world (to quote one of its lesser poets). The city’s dynamism made it the “natural” choice to host the Columbian World Exposition, the World’s Fair of 1893, although St. Louis, the traditional Gateway City, would have been the better “historical” choice. The opportunities generated by the city’s rebuilding help to explain why, in everything but baseball, Chicago vaulted ahead of our dear burgh. And Mrs. O’Leary? She was exonerated by the Chicago City Council in 1997, a little late you might say, but it might have been better justice to have declared her guilty and erected a memorial to her, her cow, and her lantern. She’s owed a lot. Perhaps the Cubbies should burn Wrigley Field. Precedent suggests it might be their only hope.

[Stanley]

"They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next." Lauren Willig.


From “Archimedes screw” to the “Bunsen” burner, the “Bowler” hat, the “Heimlich” maneuver and beyond, the list of ‘inventions’ that took the inventors’ name reminds us of how simple ideas can change our lives and become commonplace. Not always for the better, for we could also cite the Tommy Gun and the Guillotine. But we do not talk of the “Friedman” Flexible Straw, and that’s a pity because it brought so much quiet pleasure to so many lives. Its inventor, Joseph Friedman, was born in Cleveland on October 9, 1900, to immigrant parents (those pesky immigrants again), and almost as soon as he could walk he began to tinker. Joe’s first invention (1914) was the pencillite, but he didn’t get a patent for it. After that, besides selling real estate and setting up as an optometrist, he wisely patented his notions. One day in the 1930s, at a fountain shop in San Francisco, he saw his little girl (Judith Friedman) struggling to drink from a tall glass with a straight straw. Zap!!! Joe took the straw, inserted a wood screw in it, wrapped it tightly with dental floss to create corrugations, et voila!!! the Flexible Straw. Joe patented the thing (#2094268) in 1937 and by the late 40s it was a fixture in children’s wards, where I came out of a near coma, aged 5, still flat on my back, to associate my recovery with O-So Grape pop and the Flexible Straw, which on that day seemed to me to be (to quote Joe’s nephew, Michael Fabricant, MP) “the most significant technological achievement of the 20th century.” But it’s not the “Friedman” Straw. ©