BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"When the judges shall be obliged to go armed, it will be time for the courts to be closed. " Stephen J. Field.


Stephen Johnson Field was born on November 4, 1816 into a rock-ribbed Yankee-Congregationalist family, graduated from Williams College in 1837, practiced law in New York City, and then followed Greeley’s advice and went west to grow up with America. He chose California, but to practice law rather than pan for gold, and he was extraordinarily successful. By 1857 he was on the state supreme court, notorious as he went everywhere armed, but it was a violent time (Field replaced a judge who had killed California’s senior senator in a duel and then tried to kill Field but was killed himself by Field’s bodyguard). Whatever his other virtues, or demerits, Field was a Unionist Democrat, and that wasenough for Abraham Lincoln to nominate Field to the US Supreme Court, where he would indeed “make history.” Those who think only “liberal” judges are “activist” would do well to study Field’s career, notably his patently perverse reading of the 14th amendment, which, Field held, did not protect freed slaves but which did protect private corporations from state (and some federal) regulations. And predictably Field joined the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the so-called “separate but equal” rule of American racial segregation. Of more lasting importance was Field’s view that corporations are in most respects persons, NB the recent Citizens United decision and the view that a corporation has all the rights to free speech that you and I thought we had as individual citizens.

[Stanley]

"John D Rockefeller . . . points to his church-going and charities as proof of his righteousness. This is supreme wrong-doing cloaked by religion. " Ida Minerva Tarbell.

Parents who name a daughter Minerva will want her to get a good education, and so it was with Ida Minerva Tarbell, born on 5 November 1857 in a Pennsylvania log cabin. Her dad prospered in the state’s new oil industry, and until he was broken by the Rockefeller combine provided a good education for Ida Minerva, who got her AB and MA at Allegheny College. After college Ida became the editor of the Chautauquan, the crusading journal of the Chautauqua movement. Then she went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where she biographed Madame de Stael and Madame Roland, leading “literary salon” women of the French Revolution. Ida also freelanced for American newspapers, which is probably how she met S. S. McClure, who first commissioned her to write (for his magazine) a biography of Napoléon Bonaparte. Ida worked for McClure from 1894 to 1906, when she became associate editor of The American Magazine. It was a successful career for a woman when women’s careers weren’t plentiful, but Ida’s lasting claim to fame, and wisdom, is based on her McClure’s exposé on John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Monopoly, serialized in 1902-04 and published in two volumes in the next year. Her work, along with that of other “muckrakers”, strengthened the campaign against industrial and financial monopolies, but it’s important to note that she saw potential for good in the big companies, as well as a proven capacity for evil. In short, she was much like Teddy Roosevelt, a “progressive Republican”. Will we see them ever again?

[Stanley]

The cool jazz man

A culture that lurches delightedly from Facebook © to Linked In © to Twitter © could be accused of faddism and will immediately dance to the story of Adolphe Sax, whose ingenious inventions revolutionized music and took Europe by storm. Sax was born (in Wallonia, Belgium) Antoine-Joseph Sax on November 7, 1814, 199 years ago. His father was an instrument designer and maker, an encouraged the boy to try things out. By the time he was 15 he had already entered two flutes and a clarinet, of his own design and making, in European competitions, and shortly thereafter he entered the Royal Conservatory, in Brussels. But he was more interested in manufacture and design than performance, and in his 20s changed his name toAdolphe and relocated to Paris, where he patented an improved bass clarinet. He then moved to the new valved horns, and by the 40s had invented and marketed a range of seven saxhorns, among them the direct ancestors of the flugelhorn and euphonium, which popularized the brass band in (among other places) Germany and Britain. But of course our birthday boy is most famous for the saxophone, again in several varieties, intended for classical music but today a mainstay of popular andjazz. His valves explain it all, and their design is, today, virtually unchanged. I think the man deserves a bicentenary. He died poor, and if you are in Paris, you can put a flower on his grave in Montmartre.

[Stanley]

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." Albert Camus.
As everyone in French departments around the world will know, today is the centenary of Albert Camus, born to a French family (pied-noir) in Mondovi (now Dréan), Algeria on November 7, 1913 and eventually to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1957), to become the voice of a humane existentialism (the “soft Sartre”, I called him in an undergraduate essay), and to symbolize a generation. Before then, though, he had a tough childhood, father dead in the first world war,mother half-deaf, and himself coming down with TB at 17 (which did not stop him smoking, of course, but did abort a promising soccer career). Instead, he became an étudiant, University of Algiers, carrying through to his master’s degree with a thesis on Neo-Platonism and Christian thought. He was also quite political, now a communist, then an anarchist, dabbling in pacifism before (now in Paris) joining the Résistance against the German occupation. But he had already written two of the three works that would make him famous, L’étranger and Le mythe de Sisyphe. The third, La peste, would come after the war, in 1947. As literature, the three are hard to beat; as philosophy, they define a position that, as the Nobel citation so well put it, “illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” As for Camus, a car crash in 1960 guaranteed that he would remain forever young. It was somehow poetic that he had planned that night to travel by train.

[Stanley]

"In . . . 1456 a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun. . . I venture to predict that it will return again in the year 1758." Edmond Halley, 1705.

Today we celebrate the birth (8 November 1656) of Edmond Halley. Halley’s father, a Puritan, had become a wealthy soapmaker in London. Puritans were improvers, and young Edmond was improved by sending him to Oxford and then off to St. Helena (with a huge telescope) to examine the southern sky. Then, at only 23, the precocious Edmond was chosen to adjudicate an astronomical dispute between Robert Hooke and the German Johannes Helvelius. Halley found in the German’s favor and was immediately elected to the Royal Society, England’s new—path-breaking—science society. Having decided that some mathematical problems associated with planetary motion could be solved by Isaac Newton, Halley traveled to Cambridge only to find that Newton had already figured it out—hence the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687. Probably an atheist, Halley was refused the premier astronomy chair at Oxford in 1691 but was still made Savilian Professor of Geometry in 1703. He produced the first working actuarial tables, giving a big boost to England’s fledgling insurance industry, calculated the longitudinal variations in compass measurement, measured the distance to the sun using the transit of Venus, and finally, his atheism forgotten, was made Astronomer Royal in 1721. And, oh yes, he calculated that the comet sightings of 1456, 1531, 1607, and 1682 were of the same comet and (correctly) calculated its return in 1758. When after Halley’s death the comet turned up right on schedule, it was named for him. An interplanetary memorial monument of stone and ice.

[Tripps]

" Savilian Professor of Geometry"
That sounds a bit ominous.

[Stanley]

"I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded." Epitaph on Gail Borden's gravestone in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Born on 9 November 1801, Gail Borden’s life almost emulated that of Emerson’s hero, the “sturdy lad . . . who in turn tries all the professions. . . and always, like a cat, lands on his feet.” Born in New York, he farmed in Indiana and Mississippi, surveyed for a while, ran a newspaper and then held office in revolutionary Texas, sold real estate, and invented a sailing wagon (it didn’t sail or sell) before he turned to preserving food. He got into this game because his first wife died of yellow fever, and he thought a cause was rotten meat. He was wrong, but he did figure out how to preserve meat (he called it “meat biscuit pemmican” and won a prize for it at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London). He hoped he could sell the meat biscuits to settlers crossing the prairies, but the company failed and almost bankrupted him. Luckily for Borden, he had also been working on preserving milk, and even more luckily he neared success in that endeavor just as the Civil War broke out. Bingo. Borden quite forgot owning slaves in Texas. The Union Army was a growing market for his condensed milk, his dried meat biscuits, his condensed fruit juice, his reduced coffee syrup, and his pemmicanized (that’s my coinage) apples. It’s not quite clear how rich Borden became (“very” is a great guess) but he flowed with enough milk and honey to afford a big memorial in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery, where he rested from his labors in 1874. ©

[Stanley]

"Farewell great painter of mankind . . ." Part of David Garrick's epitaph engraved on William Hogarth's memorial in Chiswick, London.
We call “Dickensian” those characters whose names reflect (or predict) their moral values, for instance Thomas Gradgrind. But we might as well call them “Hogarthian”, for a century before Dickens William Hogarth had perfected the idea with such cartoonish folk as Counselor Silvertongue and Viscount Squanderfield (of whom I need tell you only their surnames). William Hogarth, born in London on November 10, 1697, gave his own name to a whole genre of art, itself stretching from comics and cartoons through engravings to pretty fair oils and large canvases. We call “Hogarthian” that art which satirizes our hypocrisies, lampoons our pomposities, and caricatures our characters. Born to a poor Latin teacher father ingenious enough to start a Latin-speaking coffee house, William Hogarth determined to avoid debtors’ prison by sketching, painting, and engraving, and in his 20s was already pretty well known. But in 1731 he became famous with a series of paintings entitled The Harlot’s Progress wherein, in six canvases, a young innocent falls into the moral mire of London. This “cartoon strip” was followed by The Rake’s Progress (1735), Marriage à la mode (1745), and Industry and Idleness (1747). But Hogarth is most famous for Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751) wherein some wax healthy on good English beer and others fall very foul of bad English gin. William Hogarth and his wife Jane Thornhill had no children but left their estate to a hospital for orphans when William died greatly mourned, in 1764. ©

[Stanley]

³Hope is generally a wrong guide, although it is good company.² George Savile, Marquess of Halifax.

Our constitutional government is 226 years old, and one wishes that, by now, we might have learned that in a democracy one generally votes for the lesser of two evils. While that doesn’t sound like much, it is rather a noble dream, even perversely utopian. Its perfection lies in its concession that there is no perfection. 226 years ago (in Federalist #10) James Madison advised us that (being more or less human) we would (generally) seek our own interest in politics, and concluded that this was OK because (given good structures) we would then have to come together with other humans, also seeking their own interest, and all would have to sit down andreason together. Winston Churchill put it pithily after he lost (badly) the 1945 election. “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Politically speaking, our system thrives best when daubed in the glorious stink of compromise. An early practitioner of politics as the art of the possible was the pre-democratic George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, born on this day, November 11, in 1633, to play a moderating and ultimately triumphant role in successive crises in England’s “century of revolution,” almost always landing on his feet and never losing his head (which was the fate of several who neglected his advice). Some of our more strident politicos might profit from reading Halifax’s great paean to practicality, The Character of the Trimmer (ca. 1685). Then again, they might not. ©

[Stanley]

³Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.²François-Auguste-René Rodin.


Auguste Rodin’s sculptures are icons of the modern age, but he served a long apprenticeship before people took him seriously, and then some took him so seriously that he had to spend almost his whole life fighting for artistic recognition. Born into poverty on November 12, 1840, he made his first (failed) attack on the art establishment in 1857. He became an apprentice stonecarver, met his lifelong lover Rose Beuret, and made another failed attempt with his The Man with the Broken Nose (1864), another Salon rejection. A trip to Italy and exposure to Michelangelo gave Rodin new inspiration, and finally a piece (The Age of Bronze) was accepted in the Salon of 1877. Its realism provoked both admiration and outrage, and by 1880 Rodin was recognized as a force. He accepted prestigious commissions from (among others) the cities of Paris and Brussels and Paris’s new Musée des Arts décoratifs. Sculpting their great bronze doors began in 1884 and was not completed during his lifetime, but did spin off two individual studies, The Kiss and The Thinker that, for many, define his work. But he kept on outraging, notably with his nude statue of Victor Hugo (he obtained bodymeasurements from Hugo’s tailor) and his stormy affair with Camille Claudel. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 made him famous (exhibiting no fewer than 150 Rodin sculptures) and transformed his atelier into a factory. The Musée Rodin, in Paris, now houses much of his work (it is his bequest to la République française) and is a must-see the next time you are there.

[Stanley]

"If your morals make you dreary, depend on it; they are wrong. . . . conceal them, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people." R. L. Stevenson.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born into a prospering Edinburgh family on 13 November 1850, his father’s side being lighthouse engineers and his mother’s Church of Scotland clergy. He did not inherit much science or theology from them, indeed decided on atheism by his early 20s, but he did inherit a weak chest and (I thought when I was a child) tuberculosis. It appears now to have been something else, but it kept him and in due course his wife in search of a healthy climate, which finally they found in Samoa,where Stevenson died in 1894:

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Well before then, he’d established himself as an author (fiction, essays, and poetry) and become (and still is) one of the most translated writers in history. Devastated by his atheism, his parents nevertheless supported him through several serious illnesses until he found a wife (the American divorcée Fanny Osborne) and a profession, and then loved all three of them. Stevenson’s own affection for home, family and stability showed in his most famous works, all discovered by me on my grandmother’s shelves, Treasure Island (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1886), and Kidnapped (1886), although not perhaps in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), which I found much later and still gives me goosebumps. RLS’s reputation took a turn for the worse in the mid-20th century but has recovered as critics rediscovered his intelligence, his political sophistication, and his rather good tales.

[Stanley]

'He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." Melville.

November 14, 2013, is the 162nd anniversary of the first publication, in New York, 1851, of Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale, by Herman Melville. With the possible exception of Huckleberry Finn, this is the most famous of all American novels, and certainly has the most famous opening line: “Call me Ishmael.” Moby-Dick was Melville’s sixth book, and was first published in London (a month earlier than its New York debut) as a three-volume work entitled The Whale. And, after all, besides plot the novel does have a hell of a lot of information about whales, something many reviewers (then and since) have animadverted about. Melville never prospered greatly, in his life, from his literary work, and Moby-Dick was not an unalloyed success. In 1865, Melville the author retired to his day job as customs inspector in New York. He died in 1891, by that time largely forgotten. His final novel, Billy Budd, was not published until thirty years after his death. Melville and his work, but especially Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, and his long short story “Bartleby the Scrivener”were rediscovered by the scholarly community in the 1920s, and then in the 30s became staple items in the rising American Studies movement, which found in Ahab and the great whale, the pretty boy, and the deathly stubborn clerk much food for thought about the connections between American literature, history, and identity. ©

[Stanley]

³Nobody sees a flower really.² Georgia O¹Keeffe.

15th November 2013 is the 126th anniversary of the birth of Georgia O’Keeffe, born in 1887 and died, aged 98, in 1986. She painted in obscurity for years, , but lived long enough to be acknowledged as a leading 20th-century artist. She is also identified with the desert around Taos, New Mexico, where she moved in1929 to find inspiration in landscapes, desert flowers, and cultural icons. Her flower “portraits” are unforgettable. She began as a farm girl with an Irish father and a Hungarian mother (daughter of one of the revolutionaries of 1848) outside of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She attended Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, then the Art Institute of Chicago, the first of a series of apparently failed attempts to learn how to paint. In 1916, however, some of her work came to the attention of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz who exhibited them in his New York gallery and commenced a life-long affair with O’Keeffe (they married in 1924) making her the erotic subject of some of his most famous portraits. By the time of Stieglitz’s death (1946), O’Keeffe was an established artist, and indeed had sold some of her paintings for what were then the highest prices paid for any American art. She lived so frugally and productively, however, that much of her work is still held by the Georgia O’Keeffe Trust and can be seen in her museum in Santa Fe. Unusually, she also has an archosaur named after her, Effigea okeefeae (“O’Keeffe’s ghost”), one of many Triassic fossils found on her “Ghost Ranch” in the high country.

[Stanley]

"Nature was my kindergarten." William Christopher Handy.

As Emerson might have said (but, as far as I know, did not), one’s genius is where one finds it. William Christopher Handy found his genius, he later wrote, from the rhythmic crunch of workers’ shovels in the local foundry, from “roustabouts singing on the steamboats,” and from the night serenades of “whippoorwills, bats, and hoot owls.” All that “hung in my ears”, he said, and was strengthened by his deeply religious sensibilities, but before he gave it voice with his trumpet, his band, and his sheet music, he had to shed his minister father’s view that all musical instruments (other than church organs) were tools of Satan. W. C. Handy was born on 16th November,1873, in Florence, Alabama. Once he hurdled his dad’s objections, he would become the “Father of the Blues,” trumpeter, composer, and successful music publisher in an era when most black musicians, however talented, suffered from racialdivisions in the music business. His music career took off in the unlikely setting of Evansville, Indiana, in about 1896. Then Handy taught music, toured Cuba, and directed a black band in Mississippi before settling for a time in Beale Street, where his “Memphis Blues” introduced twelve-bar blues and three-chord harmonic structures to the repertoire. His most famous work, the St. Louis Blues, came in 1914, just before his move to New York. Though blinded in a train accident in 1943, Handy remained a performer nearly to the end of his days, in 1958. W. C. Handy’s Harlem funeral was witnessed by 175,000 mourners and his passing was lamented by the New York Times.

[Stanley]

³Success represents the 1% of your work which results from the 99% that is called failure.² Soichiro Honda.

People magazine is not famous for getting things right, but when in 1980 it dubbed Soichiro Honda “The Japanese Henry Ford” it was getting close. Honda’s story is eerily like that of many American carmakers, although he came along later, born only in 1906 (November 17). Compare Ransom Olds (1864), Henry Ford himself (1862), David Buick(1854), Walker Chrysler (1875), James Packard (1863), and Clement Studebaker (1831). (Not to mention British pioneers William Morris and Charles Rolls, both 1877,) But then Japanese industry was slow off the mark and started over in 1945. Otherwise, parallels abound. Honda’s dad was a village blacksmith. He was not a good student but a great tinkerer. He apprenticed as a mechanic. He started first as a parts supplier (piston rings to be exact) for Toyota. After WWII, he sold his bombed-out plant and began again (in 1948) with a motorized bicycle, moving on quickly (in 12 months!!) to a true motorcycle with several unique features (not least, it was easy to start). Soon he was outselling Triumph in Europe and Harley in the USA, and thought that he might do OK with cars, too. The rest is automotive history. But People didn’t have it quite right. Henry Ford famously said his customers could have any color car they wanted as long as it was black. Soichiro Honda sold his stuff like hotcakes because he produced theextras that customers wanted, and did not charge them extra for it. Brilliant.

[Stanley]

³Time is a created thing.² Lao Tzu. "Time is an illusion." Albert Einstein. "It's High Noon and the train's on time". Gary Cooper.
On November 18, 2013, set your watches for 130th anniversary of the end of God’s time, for it was on this day in 1883 that the USA and Canada “converted” to standard time zones. At 12:00 "high noon" in the new “eastern” time zone, the US Naval Observatory transmitted by telegraph Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). And telegraphists across the two countries set their station clocks and pocket watches to Atlantic (GMT -4) Eastern (GMT -5), Central (GMT -6), Mountain (GMT -7), and Pacific (GMT -8) time. These telegraph operators were not Western Union, but sat in railway depots, for it had been the railways (some of which did, I confess, think themselves to be God) that had pressed for standard time. Since ocean navigation depended utterly on exact timekeeping, ships had long since (1830) converted to GMT, but landlubbers took longer. First the US railways established 100 local time zones but that proved even more confusing than sun times, and it was finally agreed that there should be four zones for the continental US, as above. Only one year later an international conference agreed on 24 time zones around the world, and the signal again went out, this time directly from the British Naval Observatory at Greenwich, which (of course) is on the prime (0o) meridian of longitude. Now we have daylight time, double daylight time (a French invention, lovely in summer), and other variations like Indiana time, where God still rules.©

[God's time in Indiana. Carol Sholy has asked for an explanation of my last sentence in this morning's note, which I am glad to provide for it's a good story. The proper time has been a bone of contention in Indiana since 1883, and it was by no means cleared up when an Act of Congress (1918) gave force of national law to the railroads' time zones (although states were simply invited to adhere to it, there being some constitutional niceties involved in setting one's clocks). There have been several problems, the main ones practical. Counties within Chicago's orbit want to be Central, for instance. Counties down the Ohio side prefer Eastern. Farmers, especially perhaps dairy farmers, like not to mess with the clock and tended to oppose "daylight" time no matter what time zone they thought they were in.

And which time zone was that? Indiana was by the RRs' decision and the 1918 law all in the central zone, but passions ran so high that, rather similarly to teetotalism, local option ruled, sometimes chaotically. The problem became especially difficult during the 1949-66 period, and tempers ran high and hot when the time zone issue became intimately involved with the daylight savings time (then called "fast time" in the state) issue. It was during this period that some claimed to be defending God's time, to the amusement of some and the bemusement of others (including, no doubt, Albert Einstein, who knew that time only slowed down as one approached the speed of light, which probably wasn't happening in Indiana). Some in favor of the change (to daylight time) were happy to accuse their enemies of the ridiculous notion that God had set the time, which further muddied the water (but justified my last line, I think).

Peace did not break out when the national congress (1967) made standardization into a positive law, but that in itself is a long story. As for Gary Cooper, he did not say what I credited him with in the movie high noon. I thought of writing "It's High Noon and I sure as hell hope that train is late", but I decided against it on the ground that it was Monday morning and who wants to start the week with a bad joke?

I hope this somewhat clarifies the roiled water of Indiana politics. Bob

[PanBiker]

Time for a brew I think!

[Stanley]

"All our lives before and after [Quentin's death] have just been bookends for the heroic, tragic volume of the Great War." Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

There is a possibility that the idyllic childhood and early death of Quentin Roosevelt left traces in our culture. Born November 19, 1897, when father Theodore was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Quentin grew up in the White House. It was an active family, young parents (Teddy at 43 when he became president, Edith 42) and six children (from Alice to Quentin), and it warmed the cockles of the nation’s heart. Its adventures, joys, and sadnesses were news. Quentin, “a fine bad little boy” (!!) according to his mom, was the favorite who led a miscible “White House Gang” made up of his older brothers and sisters, Charlie Taft, and (scandalously to some) a couple of black kids whose parents were on the domestic staff, including Rosewell Pinckney. It made news when Quentin’s gang carved a baseball diamond in the White House lawn and took a pony up to a brother’s sickroom to make him “feel better.” Were these “fine bad kids” models for the (integrated) “Our Gang” and “Little Rascals” comedies of Hal Roach, which started playing in 1922? Inevitably, Quentin went to Harvard and, inevitably, went to war in 1917 as a pilot. His “reckless” behavior in the Air Corps inevitably ended in his battle death in 1918. Could it be also that the RCAF trainee pilot William Faulkner, who faked his own war career, meaningfully chose “Quentin” as the name for the doomed son of Jefferson’s leading Compson family, placed him at Harvard in Absalom! Absalom! and made him a suicide in The Sound and the Fury? Odder theories have been advanced. ©

[Stanley]

"I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods . . . in front . . . coming down with twice his ordinary speed . . . and with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect." Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex.

Since I did Moby-Dick last week, it is right to turn now to the sinking of the Essex, the dramatic, horrifying event—on November 20, 1820—that inspired Melville. The Essex’s last voyage had ill-omened beginnings, severely damaged by storms on the way south, its crew laying waste (by fire) to one of the Galapagos Islands, and then a long spell of ill success at whaling in the vast eastern Pacific. Captain and crew were at daggers drawn when, on 20th November, they spied a sperm whale pod and set boats to make chase. One harpooned whale had already damaged one of the boats when another, much larger whale, 85 feet long, not harpooned, attacked the mother ship itself. After badly damaging the Essex, the monster swam off a third of a mile, turned, and attacked again at high speed, splintering the ship’s whole bow, sinking it, and swimming off. Nowadays our sympathies might be with the whale, but the Essex’s crew were 2000 miles at sea with only two undamaged boats. Their real troubles (including starvation and cannibalism in all three boats} were only beginning. Most gruesome, probably, was the “black spot” execution of the captain’s nephew, Owen Coffin, who was then eaten by his boat’s crew. Two of the three boats were found, with only eight survivors, in February, three months after the whale had wreaked his awful vengeance. Several survivors wrote memoirs, all of which vary on important details, and it was left to Herman Melville to tell us the true story of Captain Ahab, his daemonic quest, and the Great White Whale. ©

[See this LINK]

[Stanley]

"If God made us in His image, we have returned the favor." Voltaire.

November 21, 2013 is the 319th birthday of François-Marie d’Arouet, better known then and now as Voltaire. Born (1694) into a bureaucrat’s family, with a father who wanted him to be a bureaucrat, he was forced to study law, then into a law office, and finally into the diplomatic service. Voltaire nevertheless successfully cultivated his ‘real’ persona as a dramatist, essayist, poet, and (yes) libertine. A brief period in England strengthened his philosophical bent and transformed him also into a serious man of science, particularly Newtonian science. “Polymath” would almost cover it but leave out the plain fact that the man liked to have fun, to enjoy himself, to “be” Voltaire. And since he’d made some good investments and picked a charming, rich, intelligent, creative mistress, Émilie du Châtelet, he was able to enjoy himself in some nice country chateaux and in a decidedly intellectual manner. Among other things, the couple worked on her translation of Newton’s Principia and his Lettres philosophiques, both of which had something to do with landing him in the Bastille and (later) infuriating the King of Prussia. So he became a hero for liberty as well as for everything else, and after Émilie’s early death turned his talents to writing a universal history and then cooperated on Diderot’s famous Encyclopédie. Enlightenment France had better writers, more accomplished scientists, deeper thinkers, and very possibly finer lovers, but it had only one Voltaire.

[Stanley]

"The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping." Benjamin Britten

22 November 2013 is the centenary of Benjamin Britten, and will be celebrated in the UK, midnight to midnight, and rightly, for this dentist’s son became one of Europe’s leading 20th-century composers. Not only is his music compelling but he composed in every genre, for opera, for orchestra, for chamber ensemble, forsolo instrument and accompanied single voice, the latter often for the tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s life partner and arguably his muse. Most know Britten through his operas Peter Grimes (1945) and The Turn of the Screw (1954), but I’d like to use the centenary to introduce you to his Paul Bunyan (1941), generally classed as an operetta, with libretto by the poet Wystan Hugh (W. H.) Auden. It was not well received in the USA and is now not often performed anywhere, but it’s a brilliant piece of cultural representation. No doubt influenced by Britten’s new friendship with Aaron Copland, it’s folksy in the best sense, funny in parts, with fine tenor roles for Johnny Inkslinger, the “Narrator,” and a good and bad cook, brilliant women’s parts for a trio of logging camp pets, and a story line that renders the myth perfectly. I think it represents two young British intellectuals’ fascination (by no means horrible) with the USA, a country that had survived war and depression bruised and battered, but with its soul more or less intact and (they hoped) now trading in its innocence for wisdom. It would be too far a stretch to say that the operetta predicted the USA’s coming role as the “arsenal of democracy” but it’s absolutely right to call Britten’s (and Auden’s) Bunyan a wonderful, thoughtful piece. Hear it when you can.

[Stanley]

"EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" A favorite Dalek expression.


The Honors College’s many seminars on “popular culture” mean either that the rot has truly set in or that the phrase is no longer an oxymoron. With that last thought firmly in mind, let’s celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, first aired by the BBC on November 23, 1963 and now (according to Guinness), the longest-running science fiction TV show in the known history of our known universe. I add qualifications because in the infinite depths of the TARDIS (“Time And Relative Dimension In Space”: the Dr.’s speedy but rickety Model T) there could be an infinitely long science fiction series running in some alternate universe and called, perhaps, Dr. Why. Since 50 years is a long time, it shouldn’t surprise us earth-boundlings that (if appearances matter) there have been several Dr. Whos. I remember Jon Pertwee (#3) and Tom Baker (#4). Currently it’s Matt Smith (#11). But next month Matt will “regenerate” (as the BBC charmingly puts it) as Peter Capaldi, who will make it an even dozen. Whatever his visage, Dr. Who has always been a guy, which has provoked protests. The laws of chance, not to mention those of dark holes and time warps, suggest at least the possibility of a female as Time Lord, and not just unbearably cute female sidekicks. Perhaps next time. It’s a great series, with terrifying (to my children when they were little) theme music, ingenious plots, good physics both Newtonian and Quantum, and a string of awards that even Steven Spielberg envies. And of course the Daleks. And if you don’t yet know what a Dalek is, get into the TARDIS and take a trip. You are by definition behind time.
Robert M. Bliss

[PanBiker]

Anyone who watched the Dr Who special last night will know that they now have a workaround for the 12th regeneration problem. Expertly written into the plot line at the "reveal" of the special. I can't work out though why none of the current 11 doctors have not been able to fix the chameleon circuitry of the Tardis, broken since the first episode.

[Stanley]

"It was surprising to see a coiffure so neat on a noggin so stormy." Ben Hecht on Margaret Caroline Anderson.


Editors come and go, while authors linger on. But some editors make literary history, and one such was Margaret Anderson, born on 24 November 1886 in Indianapolis. Aged 20, she moved to Chicago to become a pianist but instead worked as a book reviewer for a religious weekly. That there was something about her became evident when she joined the staff of The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal by then eking out its own existence in Chicago. And then, boom, Margaret founded her own mag, in 1914, The Little Review, and devoted it to “Life for Art’s Sake.” Its hand-to-mouth existence took it first to San Francisco and then to Greenwich Village, where it became famous, a “magazine of legendary quality,” its contributors (who were not paid) a literary who’s who running from Sherwood Anderson to William Butler Yeats. Margaret and her partner Jane Heap were crusaders, too, and began to serialize JamesJoyce’s Ulysses. For that and some sexually explicit poetry they were arrested, jailed, tried, fined, and released. They moved the mag to Paris and continued to publish an astonishing list, befriend young writers like Hemingway, and be the life of the literary party. But the party was short. Heap and Anderson parted, and the magazine folded, in 1929. Margaret Anderson went on to a full literary life, published novels and memoirs, including My Thirty Years’ War (1971) and died in 1973. She is buried with her last partner, Georgette Leblanc, in Notre Dame des Anges cemetery near Cannes on the French Riviera. ©

[Stanley]

"His intellectual diffidence and almost shrinking modesty were as notable as were his boldness of invention, ingenuity of device and persistence in following up his ideas." Professor B. A. Gould¹s obituary notice for Lewis Rutherford, 1892.


Lewis Morris Rutherford was born in Morrisania, New York, on November 25, 1816. As his and his town’s names imply, his ancestors were at least of some note, and indeed the Morrises and the Rutherfords were important families in New York’s revolutionary and early national history. So Lewis was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, given his college education (at Williams) on a plate, and had a profession (the law) just waiting for him to join it. He was a competent enough lawyer to leave quite a bit of $$$ to Columbia University, but the world, I fear, is full of competent lawyers who give money to some other than their alma mater, and other facts make Lewis Morris Rutherford memorable. He was fascinated by the night sky, and he lived when gentlemen scientists (think Charles Darwin) were a known species. So on his estate (“Tranquility”) he built an observatory, and then, when photography came along, built himself a telescope that took pictures. Having taken the snaps, and studied them, he figured out (in 1863!!!) a way to classify stars by their spectral profile. He perhaps could not imagine the ultimate importance of this discovery, for now astronomers use spectral analysis to tell us the most unimaginably precise things about our unimaginably immense universe. But that’s another thing, that science’s heavy (and occasionally boring) tendency to classification is in fact indispensable. Lewis Rutherford left us an astronomy chair at Columbia, a crater on the moon, and a better way to see stars.