OneGuyFromBarlick

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four letter words writing prose--Anything Goes. Porter.

Most people who rebel against their families take aim at their parents, but Cole Porter took on his grandpapa, J. O. Cole, a fabulously wealthy Indiana coal (pardon the pun) baron who wanted this clever boy to be a lawyer and sent him to the Worcester Academy and Yale to kick start the process. And he did start at Harvard law. But instead of lawyering, Cole Porter became our most famous, most prolific, and most inventive composer of middle-brow popular songs, originally written for Porter musicals but now out there on their own as witty, entrancing, melodic, and memorable songs. Cole Porter was born in Peru (Indiana) on June 9, 1891. He took after his mother, a gifted amateur musician, and his druggist father, who wrote lyric poetry in his spare time, and at Worcester and especially Yale distinguished himself as a brilliant student and a brilliant party-giver, parties enlivened by his own music and lyrics. Indeed his whole span would be marked by his willingness to spend his talent and his wealth on being sociable. He also (probably) served in the French Foreign Legion, but that’s another story. Another another story was his homosexuality, in an era that did not come out. Yet another was his marriage. And his riding accident. But instead of telling them, let’s list a few Porter songs as sufficient memorials. “Let’s Fall in Love”, “Love for Sale”, “Anything Goes”, “Don’t Fence Me In”, “It’s Delovely”, “Begin the Beguine”, “So in Love”, “Too Darn Hot”, “Let’s Misbehave”, “In the Still of the Night”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, “Night and Day”, “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”. . . . . (the list, I can assure you, goes on and on and on. And on.). ©

Imagination is a force of nature . . . It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! Bellow, Henderson the Rain King.

I haven’t read Saul Bellow in years, perhaps put off by his descent (as I must see it) into cultural conservatism and his dalliance with anthroposophy (vide Rudolf Steiner). My last encounter with him was a short piece I required my students to read, in 2004 I think, about the decline and fall of American educational standards, à la his friend and boon companion Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Since my students were part of his evidence, they did not like it much. But still I remember Bellow’s early novels that I read as an undergraduate (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953, Seize the Day, 1956, Henderson the Rain King, 1959, and Herzog, 1964) and in grad school (Dangling Man, 1944), and the excitement I felt in reading them. They were great reads. The only one of those actually assigned for a course was Dangling Man, which fit my grad school mood pretty well, as indeed did the others fit a young man’s mood (the gender, I now think, was very deliberate), with their exuberance of character and their exuberance in knowledge. I particularly liked Henderson, which may be why I never took up criticism as a profession, for it is now among the least well regarded of his works. Bellow, born in Québec on June 10 1915 but an American citizen from 1941, was among the greatest of 20th-century novelists, winner of three National Book Awards (1954, 1965, 1971), one Pulitzer (1976), and, of course, the Nobel Prize for Literature (1976). No doubt I should now read The Dean’s December (1982)!!! ©

I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. T S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Some people give their lives to science, sometimes literally (quite a few early scientists poisoned themselves with their work), more often figuratively, and then there was Mary Jane Rathbun, who for over 28 years (1887-1915) was sole proprietor of THE Department of Marine Invertebrates at the Smithsonian Institution. And then, when it was agreed that the department needed an assistant, but no money was made available for it (where have we heard that before?), Ms. Rathbun resigned her position and used her salary to hire an assistant, while she continued to work without pay as “Honorary Research Associate,” still running the “department.” Mary Jane Rathbun was born in Buffalo on June 11, 1860, the youngest (and possibly the shortest) of five children, graduated from high school, and went off for her first view of the Atlantic in 1881, the unpaid assistant to her brother Richard at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Perhaps because someone noticed she was doing most of the work, the Smithsonian hired her in 1886 as a “copyist.” (Other women at the time, as we have seen, were clerks and copyists in museums and observatories). In a while, the value and sheer weight of her work did begin to be recognized. George Washington University translated her high school diploma to a PhD in 1917, and her amazing labors (which ceased the day she died, in 1942) produced 168 scientific papers and several books. She herself described 1,147 new species or subspecies and 63 new genera. Other scientists have named 28 Crustacean species in her honor (most recently in 2003). ©

in the heart of a mathematician seemingly detached from active life there glowed the purest emotions of affection and self-denial. Funeral notice for Zygmunt Janiszewski.

Modern societies readily celebrate their military heroes but are a bit slow to recognize heroism in (for instance) scholars. So when we find a person who was heroic in both war and learning, we had better seize the chance. Such a one was the Polish mathematics genius, Zygmunt Janiszewski, born when there was no Poland on June 12, 1888. A young man of considerable wealth and precocious talent, Janiszewski studied abroad (there were no Polish language universities in Poland) at Zurich, Gottingen, and Paris. At a very early age, he joined the mathematics faculty at Lwow and then moved back to Warsaw. WWI gave him the chance to exercise his nationalist sympathies, and he left scholarship to join Pilsudski’s Polish Legion, fighting (as opportunity presented itself) against first the Tsar and then the Austrian Emperor to gain independence. These efforts proved successful, and Janiszewski returned to the mathematics faculty at Warsaw. There he continued his habit of spending his considerable energy, all of his mathematics prize money, and most of his substantial inheritance on education, on scholarships for students, on building up the mathematics faculty, and on founding one of the leading journals of the time, Fundamentica Mathematica. Janiszewski felt that in mathematics, which did not require expensive labs, Poland could quickly establish itself as a respected center. This indeed happened. He would have died poor had he lived long enough, but his genius was cut short by the post-war influenza pandemic. As if to compensate, he willed his remaining wealth to Polish social and educational charities. ©

A controlled disrespect for authority is essential to a scientist. Luis Alvarez.

Sometimes a brilliant, indeed meteoric, career in one field can be eclipsed, at least in the popular mind, by a single intervention in another. This would seem to be the case with Luis Alvarez, the man who told us why it was that the dinosaurs went extinct, en masse, about 65,000,000 years ago. And, poetically, it was because a meteor intervened in the immensely successful career of the dinosaurs. Or so said Alvarez, his son Walter (a geologist) and two colleagues who were nuclear chemists. Together, they discovered and explained an odd, narrow geologic “layer” that occurred almost wherever they looked, a layer of minerals and metallic rock that could only be caused by high pressure and heat. Moreover, the layer occurred right at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, when (fossil distribution suggested) dinosaurs suddenly, mysteriously disappeared from the face of planet Earth. So in 1980 they posited that an immense meteorite collision with the earth caused a worldwide catastrophe that claimed terrestrial and marine dinosaurs (avians survived) and several other genera. The idea caused controversy, to say the least of it, but in 2011, well after Luis’s death in 1988, a large scientific panel concluded that his story had indeed been “just so” and they had found the crater to prove it. Meanwhile, Alvarez, born in San Francisco on June 13, 1911, had had a brilliant career in nuclear physics, including the Physics Nobel of 1968 for critical technical, theoretical, and experimental advances in particle physics. ©

[I mailed Bob yesterday to let him know that Bob's Bits had topped 25,000 page views. He says it will doubtless go to his head!]

[The Beechers] were the affectionate children of loving parents, and became such masters of laughter and tears as men and women seldom are. NY Times obit of HB Stowe.

Not often can one say that a nation’s cultural life can be studied through one family, but in 19th-century America—the North, anyway—the Beecher family comes close. Lyman Beecher, the patriarch, a student of Timothy Dwight’s at Yale, virtually defined respectably militant evangelical Protestantism. Nearly every one of his children became famous or, as a kind of penance, married someone famous, or (in the case of his daughter Harriet) did both. Harriet Beecher was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, CT, where Lyman was Congregational minister. But many of the Beechers moved west, to Ohio, following Lyman and intent on keeping migrating New Englanders Congregationalist. In Ohio, young Harriet married Calvin Stowe, who would himself become an eminent Evangelical, was already Professor at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, and on the cutting edge of Ohio antislavery. How many fugitive slaves fled through the Stowes in Cincinnati will not be known, but enough to give Harriet vivid insight into their plight, their flight, and above all their humanity. This she would (after her family moved back to New England) turn into the most famous American book of the 19th century (Huckleberry Finn stand aside!!), the magnificent anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Abraham Lincoln may not have said, “is this the little woman who brought us this great war?” but the apocryphal story is a measure of the novel’s impact. Long dismissed as overly sentimental, Mrs. Stowe’s great novel is now appreciated for its dramatic power, intelligence, and historic impact. Read it tomorrow. ©

A man has just cause for regret [only] when he sows and no one reaps. Charles Goodyear.

Intellectual property is a big issue today, but it has been for years. Charles Dickens was not the first British author to travel to the USA to try to get upstart publishers to stop pirating his works, nor was he the last. And American industrial history is littered with the bodies of inventors who were not quite fast enough to the patent office and/or a lawyer, saw others profit from their genius, and died poor. Charles Goodyear comes somewhere in between. You will know him by his name, the probable inventor of the vulcanization process for rubber, which (before we made our tires out of whatever we now make them out of) was vital to our getting around the place in wheeled vehicles. Goodyear was born in 1800, to an old and prosperous Connecticut family, married a Beecher, and then went into business. He was an inventive, ambitious sort but nothing clicked, and his story was one of modest failure alternating with modest success, and included one or two spells in debtor’s prison. He became interested (some would say obsessed) with making rubber more commercially useful, and in 1844 he finally hit on vulcanization, The patent was taken out on June 15, 1844, 170 years ago today. Goodyear and his family did set up a company and make some profits, but difficulties over patent and (British) piracy kept them from striking it rich. Goodyear died (relatively) unrewarded in 1860, although the company lived on and would in due course be a going concern.

If anyone at my funeral has a long face, I will never speak to him again. Stan Laurel.

Some folk are too funny for words, and among that select group Arthur Stanley Jefferson stands out, sore thumb and all. Born in Ulverston, Lancashire (now Cumbria) on June 16, 1890, Stan would (before he finished) be involved in 190 films, most of them highly comic. He came to the USA with Charlie Chaplin (as Chaplin’s understudy) but soon struck out on his own in Hollywood. On his own he was successful enough, but became a phenomenon when he found a partner as a perfectly fat foil to his thin. Now you may begin to sense that we aren’t talking about A. Stanley Jefferson but Stan Laurel, a name he chose for himself in 1921, a bit before he stumbled across Oliver Hardy when both worked for Hal Roach. Having watched them work in the very mortal Love and Hisses, Roach had the genius to make them top billing artists and build a series around them. Laurel and Hardy would start silent, successfully change to talkies, and then (after a contract dispute) make another transition from Hal Roach to 20th-Century Fox. By 1947 the pair were world famous, and toured England. When they reached Ulverston they were mobbed by more people than lived there, and indeed Ulverston had been kind to Stan Laurel (a fact that Hardy made some good jokes about). When Hardy died (1957), Laurel was disconsolate and never acted again. He remained in touch with his fans, though, and with his admirers in the industry (e.g. Jerry Lewis) until his death in 1965. His last recorded comment was that he would rather go skiing. Had he done so, we can be sure that he would have made another fine mess of it. ©

Anything I can do, Ray can do better. Charles Eames.

Despite the seriousness we tend to attach to it, failure in one’s college education is not always the end of things. St. Louis’s own Charles Eames seems to prove the case. Eames was born here on June 17, 1907, became interested in architecture through his uncle William, and enrolled in Wash U’s architecture program. It’s not entirely clear why Charles was expelled from Washington University’s architecture program, possibly his precocious advocacy of the modern in architecture and design, but in any case he left after two years. Without a formal qualification, he would establish his own architecture and design firm, become involved with Elliel and Eero Saarinen at Cranbrook (where he taught for a time), and then move to California where he and his second wife, Alexandra (Ray) Kaiser Eames, worked from a disused car repair shop to revolutionize the design of just about everything, play an important role in the dawn of the computer age, train a generation of leading designers, and mess around with mathematics. They put up houses and churches, wove new designs in new fabrics, and discovered new techniques in the fabrication of wood and metal. They are now perhaps most famous for the Eames chairs, strikingly modern and strikingly comfy. I like to think there is more than coincidence in the collaboration between Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen at Cranbrook, where Eames singled out the St. Louis riverfront as a proper site for modern redevelopment. Eero would later make a minor mark in the same place. So maybe our iconic arch owed something to a failed university degree. ©

He did very little harm. Paul Eddington¹s preferred epitaph.

One reason that British TV comedy is better than American is that there is better acting, and it comes from a broader base. Even today, despite the drying up of government support, local repertory theatres are still found in many provincial towns. Repertory is an old tradition, older than Shakespeare, and it’s based on the interesting notion that if you act together over a season, or just a brace of plays, you and your fellow actors will get better at “being” in character. Or perhaps, actors being historically a low-paid lot of louts, it’s just that misery loves company. So it is, anyway, that quite well-known British actors go back to the provinces to join a team, perhaps to refresh their skills, or relax in bombast by playing the dame in a Christmas Pantomime. Such a one was Paul Eddington, born on June 18, 1927, in London. A conscientious objector, he joined the Army in an acting capacity (so to speak) in ENSA and then played out a 25-year career in repertory, occasionally making a splash in London (and once in New York), but only in the mid 1970s hitting it big on TV as the straight neighbor of neohippy environmentalists in The Good Life and then in the 1980s with Yes, Minister and then Yes, Prime Minister as the straight man to Nigel Hawthorne’s wily civil “servant”, Sir Humphrey Appleby. There followed many major roles in London and New York, but even at the height of his fame Eddington returned to his favorite Reps, at Bristol, for occasional work—until, that is, he discovered that a big financial backer was a tobacco company. The smoke stuck in Eddington’s Quaker craw and, as in wartime, he sought other assignments. ©

How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance . . . and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience? Kael, review of A Clockwork Orange.

Few intellectuals can have had an odd a start as Pauline Kael, born on a California chicken farm on June 19, 1919. Luckily for the future of American film criticism, Pauline’s parents went bankrupt in 1928, sold what was left of the chickens, and the farm, and moved to San Francisco to make do. For Pauline, “making do” included attending the University of California, falling in with an artists’ commune in New York City, three marriages (and an exactly equal number of divorces), a seriously ill daughter, a failed career as a short order cook, and a good deal of sewing, until in 1953 someone heard her talking about films and asked her to write a review. Her ascent to fame (as a movie critic) after that wasn’t exactly free of bumps, but in 1965 she published a collection of reviews, I Lost It at the Movies, which sold well and brought her successive appointments at McCall’s, The New Republic, and finally the job that identified her, film critic at The New Yorker. Her reviews were brash, personal, sometimes crude and often controversial. She also had a sharp political sense, nailing Dirty Harry (1971) as “a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values” and Straw Dogs (also 1971) as “a fascist work of art.” She could defend violence in films, and did, but A Clockwork Orange went too far, descending into brutality. Always controversial, perhaps her finest role was to inspire young directors like Wes Anderson, whose 1999 story of “My Private Screening with Pauline Kael” (of Rushmore) may well be worth a read. ©

Lightly lie the turf upon him! From the funeral tribute to Offenbach in the British magazine Punch.

Some people just don’t like to be taken seriously. One such was Jacques Offenbach, who eventually became the world’s most serious composer of comic operas. Born on June 20, 1819, into a cantor’s family in Cologne, “Jakob” (as he then was) showed precocious musical talent (violin and then cello), and when he was 14 his father took him (and his brother Julius) to Paris where both were accepted at the Paris Conservatoire. There Julius prospered but Jacques found the discipline intolerable and left within the year. There followed a difficult time, as his great talent warred with his propensity for hi-jinks, but at length he chose to be serious enough to become a well-known soloist, with even a private performance for Queen Victoria (1844) to his credit. His reputation, and his income, as a soloist enabled him to marry and to convert to Catholicism in religion and to composition in music. Offenbach also became quite an impresario. Taking all these talents together, his first and greatest success was Orpheus in the Underworld (1858), now regarded as a classic (it includes the famous can-can) but first causing outrage as a veiled satire on the Emperor Napoléon. However, the Emperor liked it, and Offenbach was made. Despite the tragedies and confusions of war and politics, Offenbach remained popular in France but also spread his influence to Britain where W. S. Gilbert listened carefully. The United States was not so impressed by Offenbach’s “Centennial” tour in 1876 despite his efforts to sanitize his stuff for the prudish audiences of Philadelphia. Perhaps we were still too young to take life lightly. ©

Let them no more say, God must do all. Mather. Man is condemned to be free. Sartre. Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems. Niebuhr.

Birthdate coincidences are just that: coincidences and nothing more, but it strikes me as odd that Increase Mather (1639), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905) all managed to get themselves born dear as dammit on the summer solstice, June 21 in each case. Of course one (Sartre) was a thoroughgoing atheist, while Mather and Niebuhr were Christian theologians. Let’s also ignore the likelihood that the Rev. Mr. Mather would have enthusiastically hanged the other two—had he got hold of them—but really their ideas have much in common. It was I think Robert Middlekauff who first penned the intriguing notion that early Calvinists like Mather were really existentialists in disguise. Minus the disguise (for neither Niebuhr nor Sartre would hide his light under any bushel), “existentialist” is a good way to classify all three of these original and profound thinkers. But they were also actors, and they had to act (by their lights) because their reading of the human dilemma was that we really have only a very limited power even to define the right way to go about our lives, let alone to accomplish that. And then, with huge and happily admitted inconsistency, they energetically and bravely set about doing the right thing. By their lights, of course. To me it is a delicious bonus, but only that, that Reinhold Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri, but the evidence is that doing the “wright” thing came no more naturally to him than to Sartre (born in Paris) or Mather (Lancashire) or, indeed, to the rest of us. And I do apologize for the dreadful pun. ©

If you are going to tell people the truth, be funny or they will kill you. Billy Wilder.

Naziism gave the USA some productive exiles, mainly Jews and socialists, including one of the nicest deans I’ve ever known, Otto Springer, an Austrian socialist who happened also to be a specialist in Icelandic runes and gave wine parties for undergraduates (not in Missouri!!). But runic inscriptions don’t appeal much to the masses, and among our most influential German exiles were a pod of film directors, men who knew tragedy and comedy first hand and were brilliant at translating both into film. Among them perhaps the best known was Samuel Wilder, born to a Jewish baker’s family in a Polish province of the Austro-Hungarian empire on June 22, 1906. His mom gave him the nickname Billie, which stuck. Billie Wilder got involved in the Berlin art scene as a journalist and then a screenwriter, but Adolf Hitler interrupted that career and Wilder left for Paris and then (as Billy) for Hollywood, leaving behind him a trail of classic films that if you haven’t yet seen you should make amends, soon. There were comedies (Ninotchka, 1939; The Seven-Year Itch, 1955; The Apartment, 1960) and dramas (Double Indemnity, 1944; The Lost Weekend, 1945; Sunset Boulevard, 1950), but for my money the Wilder you need to see (or see again), is Some Like It Hot (1959), with Monroe, Lemmon, and Curtis doing their very, very best to make us laugh at life and its little surprises. Not to mention Joe E. Brown, back from the dead to do wonders as an aging roué and to deliver the closer: “Well, nobody’s perfect.” Indeed not. But Billy Wilder came close enough. ©

As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication . . .it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity. Kinsey.

Research scholars are lucky in that they can change their career focus, sometimes radically. And yet there’s often a continuity. So it was with Alfred C. Kinsey, born on June 23, 1894, to a father who wanted the boy to be an engineer. Instead, Kinsey became a scientist who took a deep interest in the biology of the gall wasp, Cynips, a small insect with some odd behaviors, including complex parasitical relations with trees and (indeed) with other wasps. Kinsey published (in 1930 and 1936) then definitive studies of the common gall wasp and some evolved varieties. He then made one of those great career leaps, from gall wasps to Homo sapiens (that’s us), with particular focus on our sexual behaviors. Kinsey went about his new studies in the same methodical, exhaustive way he had with his wasps and with a particular interest in variations. Not variations from “normal”, but rather variations within normal. His research first saw the light of day in a phenomenally popular course on marriage and the family, at Indiana University, and then in two massive books on on male (1948) and female (1953) sexual behavior. In careful, clinical studies he concluded that “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality.” This finding has, scientifically, stood the test of time, and works historically, too, but politically and culturally is still controversial. From Cynips to Homo sapiens is indeed a leap, but Alfred Kinsey was consistently a Darwinist and consistently a rebel against his repressive father. ©

Well married, a man is winged, ill-matched, he is shackled. Henry Ward Beecher.

There is something quite human in the enjoyment of scandals involving preachers. Billy James Hargis, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, these evangelists told us we were misbehaving and then misbehaved themselves, sometimes spectacularly. It’s an inversion complex. We like to see princes made into paupers and we also like to see moralizers exposed as libertines. Sinclair Lewis plumbed our taste with Elmer Gantry (1927) a novel whose plot ran close enough to the real life of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson to cause outrage among the holy and make the book itself a best-seller among sinners. The pattern was set long ago, but at no time has the nation been so transfixed by such goings-on as in the fall from grace of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Born to a famous preacher’s family 201 years ago, June 24, 1813, and apparently the least promising of his siblings, Henry Beecher developed what talents he had and by the late 1840s was called to the pulpit of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church which, for both better and worse, he would make the most famous church in the USA. The facts are still in dispute, but it seems certain that Beecher—unhappily married—had several prolonged affairs with female communicants that issued in spectacular exposés. Like most of today’s exposed exhorters, Beecher got off the hook, won forgiveness, expelled at least two disgruntled husbands from his church, and died widely admired and widely mourned. Perhaps we like to see the mighty tarnished only to polish them up later.©

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. George Orwell.

To grow up in a family that once had status and money may give one a special perspective, and so it was with Eric Arthur Blair, born on June 25, 1903, in Bihar, India, to a minor civil servant (in the Opium Department!!) and his French wife. Once upon a time the family had married into the nobility and acquired Jamaican plantations, but Eric would later identify himself as “lower-upper-middle class.” People curiously inquired about his origins because by that time he was known as George Orwell, but he got to that name by a circuitous route. There were, first, scholarships to a minor English public school, then Eton College, then Cambridge (where, delicious coincidence, he was taught by Aldous Huxley), and then the Burmese Police Service, more or less in the thrall of the Burmah Oil Company. There is some evidence that he was not an enthusiastic servant of empire, more evidence that he wanted to write, and he returned to England in 1927 with that in mind and with Jack London as his model. Some of his finest writing (e.g. Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933, A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935, and The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937) arose from his experience of “being” Jack London. Orwell retained his left-wing convictions, but his experience of the Spanish Civil War and his democratic beliefs made him an anti-Stalinist, and that is how we know him today, as the author of the fable Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian fiction Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the latter still regarded as one of the classics of anglophone literature. ©

The rich are always afraid. Pearl Buck, The Good Earth.

Our engagement with Asia is a fascinating story, and our love affair with China (apparently unrequited) its most interesting chapter. Whether the punch line came on December 7, 1941, or with the fall of the Nationalist Government in 1948-49, the affair was permeated by our assumptions of cultural and material superiority, even as we tried to protect China from European imperialisms. One who resisted our imperial temptations was Pearl S. Buck, born Pearl Sydenstricker in West Virginia on June 26, 1892. Her parents were both Presbyterian missionaries, and they took Pearl back to China when she was three months old. They taught Pearl not to regard the Chinese as heathens, and she went them one better by regarding the Chinese as her equals. After taking her degree (Phi Beta Kappa) in the USA, Pearl returned to China as a missionary. But her theological liberalism moved her outside the Presbyterian fold and led to her resignation (and her divorce from John Buck). Meanwhile, she had begun to write, in fiction and fact, about China, most famously in the novel The Good Earth (1931). In 1938, the body of her writing won her the Nobel Prize for Literature. Exiled from China by the Japanese invasion and then the Communist Revolution, Buck spent the rest of her life writing (her list is amazing) and promoting inter-racial adoption, immigration reform, and women’s rights at home and abroad. ©

Until the prejudices of the Protestant and Unionist minority are conciliated, Ireland can never enjoy perfect freedom. Parnell.

Irish nationalism has recently been so overwhelmingly Roman Catholic that it requires imagination to remember that, early on, many nationalist leaders were Protestant. We might even count Jonathan Swift among them, certainly Wolfe Tone, but the most famous and the most star-crossed Protestant nationalist was Charles Stewart Parnell, born in County Wicklow on June 27, 1846. He would not have seemed a natural nationalist, for his Protestant family had connections with English nobility and with the English monarchy (the Tudors, no less), but the clue may lie in family connections to American nationalism, indeed to the American Revolution. However, he was a landowner’s son and soon enough High Sheriff of Wicklow, so it’s a bit of a surprise to find him (by the late 1870s) leading the Home Rule movement and in close communication with prominent Fenians in Ireland, France, and the USA. Always tying Home Rule with land reform, he was dubbed “the uncrowned king of Ireland” during a speaking tour of the US and Canada, and in 1880 was elected leader of 63 Home Rule MPs, expecting to play a critical role in the Gladstone government of that year. His eloquence, intelligence, and parliamentary skills made him a widely admired man through all the vicissitudes of 1880s British politics, but a marital scandal, a clever forgery, and the intrusion of religion into nationalist politics worked together to bring him down. Parnell died in 1891 and now rests in Dublin beneath an uncut granite boulder marked “PARNELL” where he has been joined by the Catholic corpses of de Valera, Collins, and O’Connell. ©

Books are only a shadow and life the real thing. Esther Forbes, letter to her sister, 1916.

Esther Louise Forbes became a distinguished historian at a time when it was unusual to find women even in the social sciences, and as befits her pioneering status she reached eminence by odd and indirect pathways, writing much historical fiction and gaining distinction too as a writer for children. Born on June 28, 1891, Forbes was clever enough but, unlike her sisters Cornelia and Catherine, never graduated from college. She moved with them to Madison where her first real job was as an editor for the Wisconsin Literary Magazine. She then returned to New England as an editor for Houghton Mifflin. In the process she became fascinated with history, and her first books were historical novels, well received. A Mirror for Witches (1928), still in print, remains worth reading for an understanding of colonial witchcraft. Meanwhile Forbes had married, and divorced, and in 1933 returned to Worcester, MA, where she and her mother busied themselves in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society. Her main output remained historical fiction, but in 1942 she produced a Pulitzer prize history, a biography of Paul Revere, and then followed that up with the Newbery award children’s history, Johnny Tremain (1944) which I read as a child and am gratified to find remains 16th on the bestseller list of “young adult” books. Forbes continued to write history and historical fiction, and in 1960 was elected fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. Today it seems amazing that she was the very first woman so honored. Sometimes things change so completely that we forget how different they once were. ©

The only thing that retards aging is calorie restriction. Roy Walford.

As most people one knows can testify, life (a “vale of tears” in a traditional Lutheran hymn) has its troubles; yet the majority of us make some effort to extend it. Few have been more single-minded in this pursuit than Roy Lee Walford, born in San Diego, CA, on June 29, 1924, who spent nearly a lifetime examining the statistics and the pathologies of aging. His research gained him fame and a string of scientific awards, but it began at the roulette tables at Las Vegas. In 1949, Walford and a mathematician friend, on holiday from graduate school, observed and recorded the irregular behaviors of roulette wheels and (until the casinos realized what was happening, and threw them out) cleared something like a half million dollars (in today’s $$$). More lastingly, research he did (in and outside of his professorship at UCLA) on the relationship between diet and longevity (first, apparently, by lowering calorific intake in lab rats) made Walford into a dietary crusader. He also cashed in on it, as founder (1981) and chief scientist in a dietary supplement manufacturer, Gerontix, which researched and marketed several products aimed, Walford always insisted, not only at extending your life but improving it during your “vital years” (apparently an indeterminate span somewhere in the middle). After retiring from UCLA, Walford joined Biosphere 2 for a two-year stint as resident physician, and there (by further personal experimentation with severe caloric restriction) may have increased his vulnerability to ALS, Gehrig’s disease, from which he died in 2004.

Always be smarter than the people who hire you. Lena Horne.

My first memory of Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was a clear red plastic LP on which she had recorded some jazz and blues classics. She was then already famous as a singer, civil rights activist, and suspected communist. Lena had style and confidence and talent, so she survived blacklisting and became a staple on network radio and, when the time came, television. She also appeared, as a singer, in a couple of Hollywood movies (in stand alone scenes that could be edited out for distribution in the South). Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, her father a professional gambler and her mother the daughter of the inventor Samuel Scottron. Both sides of the family claimed descent from the South Carolina senator and slaveowner John C. Calhoun, an interesting irony of American history. Lena was raised by her maternal grandmother, learned some of her music from Billy Eckstine (in Pittsburgh), and got her first introduction to show business as a girl in the chorus line of Harlem’s famous Cotton Club. Her talent quickly brought notice, and by 1940 she was on NBC Radio’s jazz program. She then moved to LA, where she spent 15 years recording, performing in clubs, and in films, before reverting to (mainly) recording her own albums. Long a civil rights activist, she was awarded the Springarn Medal by the NAACP in 1983. Lena Horne died in 2010, leaving a passel of grandchildren including the scriptwriter Jenny Lumet, the daughter of Sidney Lumet and Lena’s oldest child, Gail, who was also a writer.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences as time is an order of successions. Leibniz.

I think of the phrase “the best of all possible worlds” coming from Dr. Pangloss, in Voltaire’s Candide (1759). But Voltaire was satirizing (and quoting) Gottfried Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician, to whom we owe the phrase and quite a few other things, notably the Calculus. Leibniz was born just before the end of Europe’s devastating Thirty Years’ War, on July 1, 1646, in Leipzig, where his father was Professor of Philosophy. Before Gottfried was 20, he had earned degrees (at Leipzig and Altdorf) in Philosophy and Law and had begun dabbling in matters alchemical and matters diplomatic, in the latter guise serving as ambassador for the Elector of Mainz. While on diplomatic missions (in Paris and then London) this clever young man became more deeply involved in mathematics, working first with Christian Huygens in Paris and then with John Collins in London. He also may, or may not, have met Isaac Newton (in 1675-6), and thereby hangs the tale of whether, or not, the calculus was worked out independently by Leibniz and Newton or whether one (which one?) borrowed the notion from the other (which other?). It might be better, today, to sweep the whole dispute under the carpet and reflect on what wonderful discoveries can arise from the exchange of problems, ideas, and solutions. At any rate, sometime around 1675, or 1676, Leibniz, or Newton, or both, figured out how to measure the area under an irregular curve, and to do so within an infinitesimally small distance of the absolutely correct answer. For that, we may owe one or both of them the modern world, and its uncertainties. ©

It is a duty I owe . . . to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. Harriet Brooks.

I am old enough to remember that in Iowa schools there once was a surplus of older, unmarried women among the faculty at all levels from kindergarten to grade 12. There were several reasons for this, but one was that for a long time it was illegal for a married woman to teach. My grandmother had to quit her teaching job (a one-room rural primary in Grundy County) when she married, in 1908, as did my mother-in-law in 1942. And the prohibition went up the educational ladder. Harriet Brooks, born in Ontario on July 2, 1876, studied physics at McGill under Nobelist Ernest Rutherford and in Paris with Nobelist Marie Curie. There she made some landmark discoveries, for instance various properties of Radon and Thorium, and was probably the first scientist to observe the quantum physics phenomenon of the recoil of the atomic nucleus. From McGill, Harriet Brooks took up an appointment in the physics faculty at Barnard College, the women’s division of Columbia University in New York. After a few years at Barnard, she met and married Frank Pitcher despite the known rule that Barnard’s women faculty were not allowed to wed. She refused to resign voluntarily and was fired by the Barnard dean, Laura Gill, who explained “the dignity of women’s place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.” Harriet Brooks Pitcher moved back to Canada and moved away from physics. But not far enough. She died in 1933 of cancer induced by her early exposure to radioactive materials. ©

[In design] it is not altogether necessary to exclude the whimsical and the bizarre. Robert Adam.

Dr. Johnson’s contempt for oatmeal was wittily phrased if ill-informed, but his famous dislike of the Scots who ate it may have owed as much to envy as to contempt. During his time—also the era of our republic’s birth—the Scots had eclipsed the English in many respects, industry it goes without saying but also intelligence and even style. While Oxford and Cambridge scholars had sunk in their cups, Edinburgh and Glasgow were home to distinguished thinkers, e.g. Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, whose “common sense” realism appealed strongly to Americans. When in 1765 Ben Franklin’s College of Philadelphia decided on a medical school, it looked to Edinburgh, not London, for a model (and for a faculty). And speaking of Adams, plural, and their influence on infant America, I had better mention Robert Adam, the Scottish architect and designer, who was born in Fifeshire on July 3, 1728, into an architect’s family. Robert studied in Rome and brought back with him a delicate, balanced neo-classicism, simple in his buildings and embellished in his furniture and fireplaces. A friend of Ferguson (and of David Hume), Robert Adam moved to London with his brother James and after 1760 became the architect of choice for the government and the aristocracy. His ideas traveled well, and the influence of his books and his buildings has been traced through the American “federal” school, the architects of our young republic, notably Charles Bulfinch and Benjamin Latrobe but also, very possibly, is seen today in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Pierre L’enfant’s design for our capitol.©