BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

³Philanthropy must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the . . . injustice which make philanthropy necessary." Martin Luther King, Jr.

In some cultures, some families, names matter. In many Algonkian tribes, for instance, males and females changed their names at puberty, and were thought thus to become different persons. So it may have been with the Reverend Michael King, of Atlanta, Georgia, when he visited Germany in 1934 to attend a Baptist World Conference. So struck was he with the example of the great German reformer, Martin Luther, that he changed his name to Martin Luther King. So his son, Michael, Jr., born on January 15, 1929, became Martin Luther King, Jr., a name the world would have to reckon with. Martin Jr. began his spiritual life doubting the truth of the Christian gospels, but he became surer of them especially when he learned of modern theologies like Paul Tillich’s and Reinhold Niebuhr’s. The tradition of forgiveness, he thought, was a fit weapon for an oppressed people to wrong-foot their oppressors, and his reading of history provided him also with examples, e.g. Gandhi, of the potential of non-violence to embolden the weak and enable them to speak to power. These weapons—for in his hands such they were—he carried into battle in the American South, then throughout the nation. His finest hour was, perhaps, the 1963 March on Washington and his “I Have a Dream” speech, a classic of American oratory. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis to defend the rights of garbage collectors, was martyred in April 1968, leaving the rest of us (including Martin, Sr.) to grow old and think about his life.

[Stanley]

³Our breath is brief, and being so/Let's make our heaven here below/And lavish kindness as we go.² Robert W. Service.

Some writers are described as poets, like T. S. Eliot or Adrienne Rich, while others write “verse,” for instance Ogden Nash, or (apparently worse) “doggerel.” So what’s the difference? One who clearly understood that there was a difference was Robert William Service, born in Preston, Lancashire, January 16, 1874. Service (and generations of schoolchildren who would recite his classic works, by heart, at school fairs and village gatherings in three countries) always understood that he wrote verse, not poetry, and critics agree. He came to it late in life, emigrating to the Yukon a little too late to strike it rich in the rush, but in time to make a good living as a cub reporter and man about town rather in the manner of Mark Twain in Carson City. On a whim, almost, Service wrote his most famous verses, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” for the local Whitehorse paper, and sent the mss. off to his dad to be printed as giveaways for family friends, along with money to pay for the printing. Instead, dad took them to a Toronto printer who saw their potential, and within two years Service had copped $2.5 million (in today’s coinage) for Songs of the Sourdough. And so perhaps we have one way to distinguish between “poetry” and “verse” (or doggerel). Poetry doesn’t clear $2.5 million in royalties. Service “retired” to France, continued to write, and later won fame for lampooning Adolf Hitler in “verse.” I am glad to report that in 1940 Robert Service left France in time to avoid paying the piper. ©

[Stanley]

"We do not draw conclusions with our eyes, but with our reasoning powers." August Weismann.

We have such great faith in technology that we easily assume that it drives all great discoveries, like DNA. And there’s no doubt that the right guesses of Crick and Watson were made possible by the development of X-ray diffraction imaging, which provided them with a (reverse) picture of the structure of the “genetic material.” But that there must be a “genetic material,” and that it might be shared by every living thing, was a truth arrived at 70 years earlier mainly through sophisticated brainwork. Several people worked this field, but pride of place belongs to F. L. August Weismann, born in Frankfurt into a schoolteacher’s family, on January 17, 1834. Destined for medicine because there wasn’t enough money in natural science, Weismann was (willingly) sidetracked into work on species and speciation. He pondered the mechanisms of evolution and natural selection, as per Darwin’s brilliant theory. It clearly happened. But how? Did individuals inherit the acquired traits of their parents, as Lamarck had said, or was something more basic involved? Weismann experimented, considered new research in cell division, and argued (in 1883, before X-ray diffraction had been even dreamed of) that a fundamental material, a “germ plasma” he called it, passed from parent to offspring and carried with it either an exact copy or, more likely, a nearly exact one, of the parent plasma, and that the difference(s) drove evolutionary change. It took only 70 years to demonstrate what a very excellent idea that was.©

[Stanley]

"I am a bear of very little brain." A. A. Milne

Most people, Dorothy Parker aside, would regard 18th January as a good day for children’s literature, for it was the day A. A. Milne was born, in 1882 in north London, to a headmaster father and a teacher mother. At Westminster School and Cambridge, Milne distinguished himself as a young writer, and during WW I he wrote a play, Mr Pim Passes By, which proved a hit in 1919 and provided his new family (he married in 1913) with some financial security. He also wrote an anti-War tract, Peace with Honour (1934) and dialog and continuity for the nascent British film industry, but he is best known as the father of his son, Christopher Robin Milne (b. 1920), to whom (ca. 1924) he gave a stuffed bear (“Edward”) that would later be known to the world as Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne had written a collection of children’s poems, When We Were Very Young, in 1924, and now he wrote (in quick succession) Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Now We are Six (1927), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), all four books famously illustrated by E. H. Shepard. In his later life, Milne felt frustrated by his identification as a writer of children’s books. He continued to write “for adults” (poetry, drama, fiction, and essays), but reviewers constantly referred back to Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, and the rest of the Pooh Corner crew. None wrote so devastatingly as Dorothy Parker, as “Constant Reader” in the New Yorker : “. . . and it is that word ‘hummy’, my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.” ©

[Stanley]

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,/ Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore² E. A. Poe

ON THIS DAY, 19TH JANUARY, we remember some signal birthdays, first that of James Watt, inventor of the (first practical) steam engine, in Greenock, Scotland, in 1736. Watt’s father was a prosperous ships chandler, but not a gentleman. For this reason, or some others, Watt did not attend university but went to London to learn to be a "mathematical and philosophical instrument maker." This calls to mind another chandler’s son’s Philosophical Society, in Philadelphia, founded at about the same time Watt arrived in London and with a membership also made up of craftsmen and tradesmen. These people thought there was much learning to be had in practical matters like thunderstorms and stoves. Watt’s great notion was to condense the steam without slowing down the engine, and he effected this in 1765. Watt shares his birthday with some fittingly energetic figures. Janis Joplin, born in Texas on this day in 1943, could certainly get up a head of steam, as Dolly Parton still can (today is her 68th). Given that the steam engine is what we call “progress”, it is good that the positivist philosopher August Comte was born today in Montpellier, France, in 1798. But progress raised dissents, too, e.g. from the gothic mind of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe first drew breath on this day, in Boston of all places, in 1809. Finally, although I do not know what Robert E. Lee thought of the steam engine, I guess he did not much like them (most planters did not), and we could say that a reason Lee lost the Civil War was that the North had the steam engines. Lee was born January 19, 1807. ©

[Stanley]

"Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-lovin light on me." Huddie William Ledbetter.

MLK Day is a good day to ponder (among many things) how long it took black artists to break into the music market. And as it happens January 20, 2014 is the 126th anniversary of the birth, near Mooringsport, LA, of Huddie William Ledbetter. In the depression of the 1890s, the family moved to Texas for work. There Huddie learned to play the guitar, then the accordian, to sing for children’s birthday parties, and to get into trouble. He began to be known as a gifted musician, and something of his character can be deduced from the first song he is clearly identified with, a blues ballad celebrating the irony that Jack Johnson had been denied passage on the Titanic because he was black. He was also in and out of prison, for murder and attempted murder. In 1933 his fame was assured when—an inmate at notorious Angola prison—he was recorded by John and Alan Lomax. He was released in 1934 and drove for the elder Lomax, did college gigs, was noticed by the press, and became known as “Lead Belly”. In 1937 he was featured in Life magazine (the lead was “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel”!!), but still recorded on “race label” records. Finally, in the late 40s, just before he died, he was recorded by Capitol Records, finally a black player in the national market.

[Stanley]

"Study is not worth much if it is not busy about the roots of things." Early advice remembered by Sophia Jex-Blake.

One of the enduring bastions of maleness was surely the medical profession, and still the number of men whose principal physicians are women is, I would guess, very small. (It was thought “natural” for me to change to a male doctor after I reached puberty, for instance). Some reformers themselves contributed to the persistence of this particular hangover by stressing that medicine needed to be opened to women solely for the sake of women patients. So it was with the extraordinarily persistent Sophia Jex-Blake, born in Brighton on January 21, 1840. At that time no British medical program admitted women, so after obtaining her maths BA at London Sophia traveled to the US where she was inspired by Dr. Lucy Sewall to apply (unsuccessfully) to Harvard. Then back to Britain where, in 1869, she battered down the door of the medical program at Edinburgh, but only part way (Edinburgh insisted on single-sex lectures). In the 1870s Sophia finally obtained her personal goal with a Swiss medical degree (from Berne: her thesis was on puerperal fever) and her political goal with “enabling” (not compulsory) legislation in Britain, always articulating her view that women physicians were needed “for those of their own sex.” Sophia’s wealth and drive led also to the creation of medical programs for women in London (1874) and Edinburgh (1886), and may have contributed to the later success of her nieces, Katherine and Henrietta, who would head women’s colleges at Cambridge (Girton College) and Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall), but it did not clear the way for female doctors to treat male patients.

[Stanley]

"Who questions much, shall learn much." Francis Bacon.

It would be a gross overstatement, though not an absurdity, to say that the scientific revolution began with the birth of Francis Bacon on January 22, 1561. Born into a well-connected family, educated at Cambridge, and tutored by a future Archbishop of Canterbury, it was not particularly suprising that Francis Bacon would become Lord Chancellor, Baron Verulam, and finally Viscount St. Albans. It’s perhaps a bit odd, though, that he also became a leading scientist and, as importantly, an advocate of the scientific method. Bacon started out by studying just about everything, divinity, the law, ancient and modern languages, at home and abroad, and became known as a leading parliamentarian as well as a precocious intellect. Along the way he became convinced that we could, so to speak, do things better. This was not a difficult conclusion to come by in Elizabethan England, but Bacon put a spin on it by urging more (as we would say today) science and technology. We should study the way things work, think empirically, and get to the roots of matters through observation and experiment, and then use what we learned. This would encourage invention (and thus bring widespread prosperity in place of poverty) and it would bring us closer to truths about nature (and thus make us wiser than the ancients). Bacon is with some justice cast by historians as the father of several things (law, medicine, modern industry, and varied occultisms as well as science), but (sorry folks) he did not write those plays and sonnets. That was Shakespeare.

[Stanley]

"I hadn¹t been aware that there were doors closed to me until I started knocking on them.² Gertrude Elion.

Few new immigrants succeed spectacularly, of course; there are too many challenges of culture and language for people who find themselves in a new country. But immigrants’ children often acquire strong motivations to fit in to the new culture and to stand out from their parents. That’s a major theme of immigrant fiction like Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934). And it may also be a theme in the life of Gertrude Elion, born on January 23, 1918, in New York City, to immigrant parents. But she says it was watching her grandpa die of stomach cancer, when she was just a kid, that set her off on a quest to do something about disease and suffering. She majored in biochemistry, with a BA from Hunter (1937) and an MSc. from NYU (1941), but despite her brilliant record was unable to land a research place and did not earn a doctorate until Harvard gave her an honorary ScD. People did not want women in laboratories, she said, but she did land a job at Wellcome Pharmaceuticals and there she and her boss, George Hitchings, set about making designer drugs for cancer and other illnesses. They were “designer drugs,” so called, because their molecular structure and chemical nature made them “fit” their intended pathogens (or cancer cells), fit them in order to weaken or destroy them. They did good work. By 1967, she was head of a major lab at Wellcome, and (aged 70) Ms. Gertrude Elion shared the chemistry Nobel with Hitchings. Ten years on, she got her doctorate.

[Stanley]

http://www.cassandre-france.com/posters/ for a selection of Cassandra posters

“What is Art?” is a question often raised when an “artist” kicks over the traces, for instance with Andy Warhol’s soup cans, 32 flavors I think, which surely, surely, could not be art. Time and again, it is art. A more constant undercurrent has to do with design matters such as furniture, jewelry, and “graphics.” Graphics (for the sake of argument, “graphic art”) occupies us now, for it is the birth anniversary of Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, born (in the Ukraine) on January 23, 1901, and destined to become the most famous graphic artist of the interwar years. He would be known, personally and professionally, as Cassandra, but he had first to move to Paris, study at the École des beaux arts, and break into the game with a prize winning poster (of a woodcutter) in the 1925 Paris Exposition of decorative and industrial art. Cassandra went on from there to fame and fortune, with iconic posters incorporating the style and sometimes “quotes” of modern art, a number of new typefaces (to fit his style, so to speak), teaching appointments at the Écoles of decorative and graphic arts, and latterly prestigious and profitable American commissions. His most famous posters are still recognizable. The passenger liner Normandie looms massively out of a flat sea, filling the eye of the beholder and promising to take him wherever he wants to go, right now, and in style. A Dubonnet is poured by a derby-hatted drinker, in profile. See them on line, and ask yourself, is this art? Surely, surely, surely, it is. ©

[Stanley]

"I read the Book of Job last night, and I don't think God comes out well in it." Virginia Woolf.

Robert Burns has done January 25 for three years, so let’s do a very different person, Adeline Virginia Stephen, aka Virginia Woolf, who was born on the same day, different year (1882) and into different circumstances, not the Victorian era’s purple but certainly its high middle class. Step-granddaughter to William Makepeace Thackeray, related to the Darwins and the Stracheys, and with James Russell Lowell as her godfather, Virginia could not escape the intellectual life. Educated at home by her father, an eminent critic, and her mother, a pre-Raphaelite, and a parade of intellectual guests (some of whom stayed for a while), she took to it easily. Her father’s death in 1904 provoked the first signs of serious depression, but she married—very happily—Leonard Woolf, and he and the “Bloomsbury Group” that gathered around them provided emotional and from time to time sexual sustenance. Meanwhile, she had begun to write (first published at 18), and that, too, kept her going. Virginia Woolf would become one of the 20th-century’s leading novelists, experimental in plot and prose, a thoroughgoing modernist. She’s most famous for Mrs. Dalloway (1926), To the Lighthouse (1927),A Room of One’s Own (1929) and perhaps Orlando (1928) which taken together provide a kind of (auto) biography, too. Virginia Woolf’s depression finally got the worst of her in 1941, when she died a suicide. The New York Times called her “one of the most subtle, original and modern of moderns.” And so she remains.

[Stanley]

"Then I discovered jazz and my vocation and I kissed Amadeus goodbye." Stephane Grappelli.

Popular culture, broadly defined, has assuredly been the USA’s most successful export, far outstripping (for instance) our politics and our automobiles. The French, no great admirers of (American) cooking or philosophy, took our American jazz to heart almost as soon as they heard it. They played Scott Joplin, for instance, and Igor Stravinsky may also have paved the way with his jazzy Le sacre du printemps (1913), but a bigger jump in the Parisian popularity of jazz came in 1918 with the arrival of the all-black regimental band of the all-black 369th American infantry. The 369th band played a lot in Paris that year and the next, and it’s pleasant to think that they were heard by a young Parisian, Stéphane Grappelli, who was old enough (born on January 26, 1908) and already interested in music, and possiby modern music (his father Ernesto had written about Isadora Duncan), but all we know is that Stéphane started playing the violin in 1920 and started using it to play jazz in about 1925, with various groups and in varied venues. He toyed with the piano, too, until in 1931 he met Django Reinhart, a Belgian guitarist enamored of jazz. By 1935 they’d formed Le quintette du Hot Club de France (translate it yourselves) and were famous in France and Britain (they headlined at Claridge’s). Grappelli went on to appear and record with virtually all the jazz greats of the 20th century, not to mention Pink Floyd and Paul Simon. He played a long time, until 1997, but is now resident in Père Lachaise, in Paris.

[Bodger]

During one of their engagments in a large chateau, they wre asked to perform in the nude as all the guests were members of a naturrist society and would all be au naturale, came the night the curtain was drawn, and yes the band were the only naturists there, it was a joke, but they played the gig and were rewarded handsomely for their sporting manner

[Stanley]

" . . . a man of superior talent (which i cannot deny myself to be without being impious) will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place." Mozart,

“There will never be another” is often said, and it is (strictly speaking) always true, but it seems especially so in the case of Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, born on January 27, 1756, who would drop his first two (christening) names and become, as Wolfgang Amadeus, a prodigy of the ages. The younger of two surviving children in the family, Mozart took an unusual (for a 3-year old) interest in his sister’s clavier lessons when, presto, it became evident he had been learning her pieces. By five he composed his own. Papa Mozart, with two prodigies (elder sister Nannerl was no slouch) on his hands, took them on tour in 1762 (!!) pretty much all over Europe. These tours took a toll, illnesses all around and his mother’s death in 1778, but one result was that, still in his teens, Wolfgang was accepted as a genius by the leading composers of his time (and an astonishingly good transcriber of heard music, too). Another result was tension with his father, which climaxed in 1781. For the last decade of his too brief life, Mozart married (Constanza Weber), wrote and toured as an independent person. High concert fees did not compensate for the huge expenses of the travelling entourage, but these problems were on their way to resolution when death took him, on December 5, 1791. He left behind over 600 complete compositions ranging across the whole spectrum of classical music, and remains today the most popular of classical composers.

[Stanley]

"To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly." Colette.

The recent flap over the French president’s dalliance(s) reminds us that other cultures, not demonstrably less “moral” than ours, have different moralities. France may be exhibit “A” in this argument, and if so then the career of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is a contender for pride of place in the proof. Born on January 28, 1873, “Colette” (as she would be known) lived an unconventional life, had many amours with men and women to whom she was not otherwise related, not to mention a stepson, and wrote about some of them in her novels and memoirs. Perhaps the most famous of her fictions are Chéri (1920), Sido (1930), and Gigi (1944), but there were forty others, so she qualifies as “prolific.” Chéri (the name is that of the central, and rather dissolute, male figure) is like many though by no means all of them in its concentration on the demi-monde and its fairly explicit language. Yet, after all, this was France. And all this while, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette met and married or bedded or both eminent men from the worlds of politics, journalism, literature, and art. And she was an eminence in her own right, something of a hero in both Wars (she ran a hospital in WWI and hid Jews in her Paris house during the Nazi occupation) a member of the Belgian Academy, the first female member (and then president!!) of the Académie Goncourt, a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and the first woman to be given a French state funeral. And she “discovered” Audrey Hepburn, her cinematic Gigi. ©

[Stanley]

³I never was that crazy about acting . . . so I worked as an actor until I could afford to retire.² Victor Mature.

Hollywood gave us Rock (Hudson) in lieu of Roy Scherer, Jr., and Marilyn (Monroe) in lieu of Norma Jeanne Mortenson, and I always assumed that Victor Mature was yet another name dreamed up by some studio mogul to appeal to the many-headed. But “Victor” was the real McCoy. Name-changing had gone on, but in Louisville, not Hollywood, and by his father, not a mogul. Marcello Gelindo Maturi decided to Americanize to George Mature (a common immigrant experience) and so his son was born on January 29, 1913, starring (so to speak) as Victor Mature. Young Victor was adequately schooled and was selling candy when he transplanted to Hollywood and the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where he was spotted by Hal Roach [sic] and contracted as caveman in Roach’s One Million B.C. Then came the war, and unlike some Hollywood he-men Mature actually tried to enlist, but color blindness kept him in the Coast Guard. After the war Victor’s big break came as Doc Holliday in John Ford’s iconic My Darling Clementine. For those who remember only the muscle-bound Mature in such classics as Samson and Delilah, the Doc role might seem to have been his only good one, but he did some passable noir films and really ended his career with casting disputes at 20th-Century Fox and an unmemorable co-starring role with Esther Williams (who was, by the way, really Esther Williams) in Million-Dollar Mermaid. So the real Victor Mature was really Victor Mature.

[Stanley]

"It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach." FDR.

Probably the only president that could rival Abraham Lincoln in our continuing obsession with naming the “greatest” (any category will do but in this case) US president, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was born on January 30, 1882. One thing they did not have in common was origin: Roosevelt was born to the American purple, his family as close as we can come to a genuine, class-conscious aristocracy (not only rich but fully committed to the social order that made them so). It was also a family that practiced a certain amount of inbreeding. His parents were sixth cousins and he married a fifth cousin (Eleanor, the niece of yet another Roosevelt, President Theodore) and, in Franklin’s case, a domineering mother, Sara, who might not have wanted him to marry anybody but certainly not at the age of 23. Roosevelt’s bout with polio, which we can say he nobly lost while never surrendering, might parallel Lincoln’s poverty as an obstacle, but what made it possible for both men to become “great” presidents was that, in office, they both faced great, indeed utterly stupendous challenges. Roosevelt’s were the Great Depression (1929-xxxx) and the Second World War. Whether he truly “succeeded” with either is still disputed (though not by me), but nearly everyone happily concedes that FDR carried himself brilliantly, indeed jauntily, with enough courage to see things through even though he must have known it would kill him. Which, of course, it did. ©

[Stanley]

³If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.² Abraham Lincoln.

Today we remember the abolition of slavery, for it was on January 31, 1865, that congress gave its final approval to what would become the XIII Amendment to the Constitution. A New York Times reporter was on hand to catch the drama: “. . . when the presiding officer announced that the resolution was agreed to by yeas 119, nays 56, the enthusiasm of all present, save a few disappointed politicians, knew no bounds, and for several moments the scene was grand and impressive beyond description. No attempt was made to suppress the applause which came from all sides, every one feeling that the occasion justified the fullest expression of approbation and joy.” And so say all of us, although it is sobering to remember President Lincoln’s editorial comment, five weeks later, in his Second Inaugural, that it took a “terrible war” to accomplish the abolition of the terrible institution, an institution for which both North and South shared a terrible responsibility. That war still raged on March 4, 1865, and Lincoln hoped that “this mighty scourge . . . may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” ©

[Stanley]

"Dictionary: the universe in alphabetical order." Anatole France.

Today, 1st February 2014, is the 130th birthday of the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. For on this day in 1884, the first “fascicle” (portion) of the OED was published. Today it is the comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Students interested in plumbing its depths may find it whole, hard copy, (20 vols., 500,000+ definitions) in the Honors College Library. Or if you belong to the right public library, you have free access to it ON LINE: for the idle, a wonderfully easy route to industry and erudition. Plans for the monster first arose in London’s Philological Society, in 1857. It was to be comprehensive and historical, covering current meanings and their development from the Anglo-Saxon period. It was to be a four-volume work and take ten years to finish. So much for plans. It was not until 1925 that the last fascicle was published, the completed first edition coming to ten volumes and 400,000 words. Since then there have been annual supplements and several entirely new editions. Meaning + usages + etymologies. Find out when and how the word “hubbub” arose. Or take time to read the entry for “set” (over 60,000 words with 430 different usages). If you want to know what “wonderful” meant to Shakespeare or Austen or Sontag, go to the OED. And while you are occupied with improving your mind, entertain it also with two entrancing books about the OED, by Simon Winchester: The Professor and the Madman(2005) and The Meaning of Everything (2003). And let your motto be, “Look It Up.” ©

[Sue]

Had a laugh at the title of this forum, I know it is not the right topic but quote 'bob's bits are bruised' after a complicated double hernia operation.

[Stanley]

You should see what they can look like after an operation for a varicocele! The nurse at the surgery who dealt with my barbed wire stitches was most sympathetic!

"No [botanist] who has worked in America has excelled [Engelmann] in patience and judgment." Professor Asa Gray.

February 2, 1809 was the birthdate of George Engelmann, one of St. Louis’s favorite sons, although he was really one of those pesky immigrants we hear so much about. It took him a while to get here, too, born into a Frankfurt-am-Main family whose traditions (for its men) usually involved ministry in the German Reformed Church. Indeed, George got a church scholarship to Heidelburg, but there he strengthened his interest in science and quite forgot the ministry. His studies were disrupted by his enthusiasm for the abortive revolutions of 1830, but he did escape with a medical degree wherein his thesis, typically, tied botany to medicine. He also became acquainted with the elderly Goethe and the young Agassiz, who admired his talents. Then came a brief interruption that defined his life; he traveled to the USA to investigate buying farmland (for his uncle), settled briefly in Belleville, IL, and pawned his horse and gun to begin a medical practice in St. Louis. He proved a top doc, prosperous enough to finance the far-flung botanical expeditions which were his true calling and for which he is famed. Engelmann published monographs and field reports on many (mainly) western plants, established fruitful friendships with Asa Gray and Henry Shaw, founded the St. Louis Academy of Sciences and (later) helped found the National Academy of Sciences. His collections still thrive at Shaw’s Botanical Garden, his German name graces several native American species, and his vines we know well enough.

[Stanley]

³All you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.² Gertrude Stein.

Ancien régime Paris was famed for its literary salons, often led by women, some of them courtesans, more of them of aristocratic families, stylish and intelligent. Jurgen Habermas sees the salons as critrical in forming French culture well into the 19th century. In early 20th-century Paris, the most important literary salon was run by an American woman, by no means stylish (at least in dress), certainly not everyone’s definition of beauty, and bourgeois (OK, very haute bourgeoisie) to the core. She was Gertrude Stein, born on February 3, 1874 into a wealthy immigrant family who lived in Pittsburgh, then Oakland, and then—wanting their five children to be exposed to European culture and currents—Vienna and Paris. Gertrude did come back to the US to study at Radcliffe, impress William James (he called her his “most brilliant woman student”), and begin medical studies at Johns Hopkins, but Paris beckoned and she set up house with her brother Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus in 1903. There she began to collect art of the most modern sort and, in due course, the artists themselves, and the house at rue de Fleurus became the place to be if you were Matisse or Dos Passos or Picasso or Cézanne or Hemingway or Apollinaire or Rousseau or Fitzgerald or Cummings or Crane (you name them; they were at No. 27). And Gertrude wrote, too, in her own right, poems and fiction now recognized as formative of modernism and a memoir, somewhat misleadingly entitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which, some day, I must read. ©

[Stanley]

"We focus on the serious issues." French Embassy statement, March 12, 2003.

Americans with unslaked thirst for embarrassment will want to recall the “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” episodes in Capitol cafeterias, 2003, when Reps. Bob Ney (R.Ohio) and Wally Jones (R., N.C.) seized on a wimpy idea out of a Carolina diner (“Cubbies”) to remove foreign influences from the menus. (The French did not like “Operation Iraqi Freedom” so we renamed their toast.) Ney later served a 30-month term for corruption (before becoming a security contractor in Saudi Arabia) but what is the jail sentence for pig ignorance? Our very birthing as a nation was attended by friendly foreign midwives, the Marquis de Lafayette and the Marquis de Grasse from French frites-land to name but two. But today I am thinking Polish sausage, and hope it’s still on Congressional Café plats du jour, for it’s the birthday anniversary of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, born February 4, 1746, a Polish-Lithuanian of radical enlightenment beliefs who, in 1776, after causing trouble in his native land, decided he could cause yet more by going to America where he became a Colonel in charge of fortifications and encampments for George Washington’s embattled continentals. He did West Point, for instance, and became close friends with his ideological soul-mate Tom Jefferson. He returned to Poland to fight for national independence, and when that failed escaped with his life to America, where he willed his estate to the task of freeing American slaves. As if to spite Bob Ney, Kosciuszko is survived by place names in several states, including Missouri, and by our smallest national monument.©

[Stanley]

"I never could bear the old saying ŒI am too old to mend¹ I could much sooner pardon the young for saying, ŒI am too young.¹ " Marie de Sevigne to Françoise de Grignan, October 7, 1671

February 5 2014 marks the 388th anniversary of the birth, in Paris, in 1626, of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, an aristocratic girl who, orphaned, made an unhappy marriage with the marquis de Sévigné. Luckily, he soon died in a duel (over his mistress’s honor), leaving Marie de Sévigné with the residue of their estates—a Brittany property she managed successfully—and a son and daughter whom she lovingly parented. She was, altogether, an exceptionally competent person. She was also a powerful writer. De Sevigne’s letters to her daughter, Françoise, over a thousand of which survive, constitute an important source for understanding ancien régime France. They also present us with a mature, loving, and intelligent relationship between two interesting people. After Françoise moved to Provence (as the marquise de Grignon) the letters became Marie de Sévigné’s lifeline. Into them she poured news, gossip, love, and philosophical reflections in about equal measure. A brief survey (they are on-line) suggests that most of the letters are “personal” and that they are no less interesting for that. But, since the news, gossip, and reflections include such figures as François de la Rouchefoucauld (a close friend), Blaise Pascal and Cardinal Mazarin, they are of interest to philosophers and historians, too. As significantly, the letters would, 250 years on, find their way into Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, there to play a suitably important role. ©

[Stanley]

I am opposed to the laying down of rules or conditions to be observed in the construction of bridges. Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

That a bridge should be a thing of beauty is an instinctively appealing idea. Still, it’s not a universally effective appeal, and a trip down almost any stretch of modern highway will expose us to the contrary view that bridges should be safe, sound, dull, efficient, durable, and cheap. Among modern engineers who have tried to marry efficiencies and aesthetics, Robert Maillart stands out. Born in Berne, Switzerland, on February 6, 1872, he attended Albert Einstein’s academy, the Federal Institute of Technology, and like Einstein was impatient with existing practices and excited about visualizing new concepts. For this and other reasons (the Russian Revolution creeps into his story), Maillart’s career didn’t take off immediately, but by the 1920s he was back in Switzerland and ready to exploit the aesthetic potential of reinforced concrete. One of his surviving bridges (1929, at Salginatobel, in Switzerland), is now recognized (by the American Society of Civil Engineers) as an International Civil Engineering Landmark. Maillart’s bridges are famed, and rightly so, for their

Text Box: beauty (see pictures), but let’s note that practical progress has also been made. There were things Maillart did NOT know about reinforced concrete, and to put them right both these bridges have had to be rebuilt in place. Meanwhile, Maillart had his own four-month show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1947, an artist-engineer indeed. File source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... 80.jpgFile source: //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schwandbachbruecke_01_09.jpg

Bob, lovely subject bridges, one of my passions. There is a little known book, 'A Span of Bridges' by Henry James Hopkins, well worth looking it out. Also McCullough's great book 'The Bridge', the story of the Brooklyn Bridge.

You've reminded me of a story.... A friend of mine, Jane Straker. is a linguist and translator. Some years ago she was approached by a publisher who was having a problem with a book he was having translated from Spanish into English. He wanted her to take over the work and do the last third of the work. The book was about a bloke called Eugene Freysinnet the French engineer who perfected the the technique of pre-stressed concrete but for some reason had been written in Spanish. Jane asked for some sample pages of work and on them she found numerous errors of syntax and some gross mis-translations. Two examples on one page were that Freysinnet was late with a design for a Swiss bridge because he was constipated (constipado = influenza) and that he designed the marquee at St Malo station (marquessa = canopy) She told the publisher she'd only take the job on if he paid her to translate the whole book. She never got the job.