OneGuyFromBarlick

To live is to war with trolls. Henrik Ibsen.

In 1857, then a student at McKendree College in Lebanon, Illinois, my great-grandfather Daniel Kerr attended a talk (in Collinsville) on women’s rights by “a lady of St. Louis.” He didn’t buy all her arguments then, but he did agree with her “that woman possessing the same powers the same qualities as man longed for individuality.” In the 19th century this was an idea whose time was coming, and it would achieve one of its fullest expressions at about the time that Daniel (by then an Iowa gentleman farmer, lawyer, and politician) wholly embraced woman’s civic rights as well as her individuality. But Daniel knew nothing of this, for it was in Copenhagen, Denmark, on December 21, 1879, that Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House had its premiere. In the drama, Nora Helmer, wife of Torvald and mother of three, ponders her own (and others’) place and fate, discerns the emptinesses and illusions of her marriage, and—at the play’s dramatic climax—leaves husband, children, and her wedding icons (a ring and a house key) and walks out, (probably) never to return. A German version of the play has her stick around for her children’s sake, which infuriated Ibsen (“a barbaric outrage”) but reminds us of his play’s radicalism. It is interesting that Ibsen in 1879 came to his position not for political propaganda but simply in order to achieve a “description of humanity.” Or as Daniel Kerr put it in that 1857 letter to his father, women “are as desirous of great achievements as men . . . “ In the 19th-century west, in Copenhagen and Collinsville, women were not just becoming “equal." They were becoming human. ©

Acting is a mysterious business, so complicated, so tender a subject, there are no rules. Peggy Ashcroft.

One of her very first roles was Desdemona in 1930, opposite Paul Robeson’s Othello (she had an affair with Robeson: “how could one not fall in love in such a situation with such a man?”; one of her last was in David Lean’s rendition of Forster’s A Passage to India. She was one of those British actresses who go on and on and on and seem to get better as they go (think Judi Dench, Julie Walters, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith). She preferred stage to screen and yet prospered well enough in the latter, finally winning an Oscar for India where she played a doubting Thomasina missionary, Miss Moore, in many ways a perfect role. She once said (admittedly well after the fact) that her favorite stage role (the “Everest” of women’s parts, “the greatest ever written,” she said) was as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1960), where she was buried up to her waist for the first act and up to her neck for the second. She was Edith Margaret Emily Ashcroft, born on December 22, 1907, in South London. She did Shakespeare, of course (the English have a thing about Will), tragedies, histories, and comedies, but also Ibsen, Brecht, Wilde, Beckett, Pinter, and Peter Hall and John Schlesinger. She played television too, from 1937 (!!!!) to 1989, and in that last role (her very last, I think), she won three best actress awards at the Venice festival. We know her as Dame Peggy Ashcroft, but not very well, for though a spectacular performer she preferred her privacy. It fit her character, Peter Hall once said, “English containment and decency, contrasted with a wild passion.”©

Champollion deciphered wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every being's face. Melville, Moby-Dick.

It has always been a mystery that conservative educators get the vapors when they hear the idea of “multiple intelligences,” the common sense notion that each student needs and deserves an education that will bring out her individual and sometimes idiosyncratic “Genius” (as Emerson would have called it). But consider those whose genius is for languages, and the case is made. Stories are legion and excite wonder in those of us for whom foreign tongues are, indeed, “foreign.” Think of J. S. Mill reading Greek at 3. But one who lived languages all his too-short life was Jean-François Champollion, born on December 23, 1790. I am not sure what he could read by 1793, but before he left school he had a baker’s dozen (including Coptic, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Amharic) and at 29 he joined the Grenoble University faculty (in History, oddly enough). His linguistic genius had already brought him fame, and it soon brought him to Paris and the task of deciphering the Rosetta Stone, discovered in Egypt during Napoléon’s 1799 expedition. Champollion cracked it in two years, and laid the mystery open to the world with his Précis du système hiéroglyphique (1824). That brought him a chair (of Egyptology, a field he is credited with founding) in Paris at the Collège de France, a famous expedition to the Nile (1828-1830) during which he made more discoveries and more translations, and an early death (from exhaustion, it is said) in 1832. His work may be found in museums in London, Paris, Florence, and Berlin. His monument—fittingly, an obelisk—is in Père Lachaise. ©

My study is a portion of that little-known borderland where social anthropology, psychology, and genetics meet in common biological kinship. C. G. Seligman

From about 1870 to 1920, the west was a-bubble with startling new ideas and newer knowledge, an era of intellectual excitement nicely captured years ago by H. Stuart Hughes in Consciousness and Society (1958) and more recently in a lively volume, The First Moderns (1998), by the schoolteacher William Everdell. There was in this era much excitement about getting things right in social thought, art, and science and a strong tendency to disrespect disciplinary boundaries even as these were being drawn up by the academy’s new professional societies. One whose work exemplified both the excitement and the interdisciplinarity was the British physician-ethnologist-anthropologist-psychoanalyst Charles Gabriel Seligman, born on December 24, 1873. He might have led a pretty ordinary life (as a medic) but for the intellectual excitements of his era and his decision to volunteer (as expedition doctor) for the 1898 Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait. It was led by another polymath, the anthropologist William Rivers, later modestly famous for treating Siegfried Sassoon for shell shock. Rivers’ combination of anthropology, psychiatry, and medicine fascinated Seligman and changed his life. Seligman led many later expeditions, wrote foundational works on the peoples and cultures of Indonesia, Ceylon, and Africa, and (just like Rivers) would marry anthropology with psychology partly as a result of treating the demoralized, disoriented victims of the bloody trench warfare of 1914-1918. “Sligs” (as his colleagues knew him) then lived out his active life as Professor of Anthropology at the LSE and (briefly) at Yale University. ©

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:/God said, Let Newton Be. And all was light. Alexander Pope.

One of the more interesting statistics about American higher education is that the majority of undergraduates change their major field of study, some say as many as 75%. That seems to me an encouraging datum, students finding their strengths and abandoning their frailties; in any case it marks the American system out as unusual. But way back when, in the plague years of 1665-1666, before anyone thought in terms of majors (or minors, or certificates), young Isaac Newton suddenly stopped taking notes on Aristotle and Plato, which is what almost everyone at Cambridge did, headed a new blank page in his notebook “Quaestiones quaedam”, and set off on a new path. “Some questions,” indeed!!! Newton had guides, of course, (he read Descartes, Galileo, Boyle, and Hobbes), but it was his own genius that took him to invent the calculus, to draw out the nature of light, to unpack the mysteries of gravity, trace the paths of the planets, and invent a physics of force, mass, and motion. He called this period his “Anni mirabiles,” and we can only endorse that. Born a yeoman farmer’s son on Christmas Day, December 25 1642, nearly orphaned, reared by relations he didn’t much like, and altogether an odd character, someone noticed Isaac Newton was smart. He went off to Cambridge as a sub-sizar (doing menial work for others to earn his keep and pay his tuition, now a familiar model), found little interest and many loopholes in the established curriculum, changed his major (to put it anachronistically) and launched us all into modernity. ©

Faites simples does not mean faites slapdash. Elizabeth David.

Growing up in the American Midwest at mid-century, one’s view of good cooking was, well, “provincial.” Moving to England was, culinarily speaking, going from the frying pan to the fire. Or would have been, had it not been for the ministrations of the chef at Linacre College, who showed that miracles could rise out of institutional menus, and the writings of Elizabeth David, who taught English households how to use that frying pan, that fire, a whisk, a garlic press, a spice mill, and a few little items from Moulinex to create cuisine. So while Julia Child was civilizing the American palate, Elizabeth David laid siege to England and made “taste” about something more than soft furnishings, Turner landscapes, and the compositions of Edward Elgar. Even in the north, where we lived, greengrocers suddenly heard demands for gaily colored capsicums, aubergines, and little tiny peas, while café coffee changed from instant powder to all sorts of roasts served in all sorts of styles. David, born to the purple (she was kin to the Sackvilles and the Ridleys) on December 26, 1913, learned how to cook in France, Greece, Egypt, and India (lessons disrupted by the war, a spell as a refugee, and an unsuccessful marriage), wrote four very promising cooking books in the 1950s (a reviewer of Italian Food listed her “among the benefactors of humanity,”) and then effected her revolution with French Provincial Cooking(1960), dedicated mysteriously to “P.H.”, which sold like crèpes chauds and went down as smoothly as ragoût d’huîtres. “Provincial” would never again be the same. ©

Tote that barge, Lift that bale, Git a little drunk An you lands in jail. Ol Man River, from Show Boat.

One of the great episodes of American literature occurs when Huck Finn and Jim run across the Duke and the Dauphin, con men who travel the river pretending to nobility and providing rural audiences with a taste of garbled Shakespeare. Twain set it sometime in the 1830s, but after the Civil War riverine theater became common, a paddle wheeler or other large vessel carrying a stage, a musicians’ pit, and a whole cast of characters. But in 1925, when novelist-journalist-playwright Edna Ferber visited the James Adams Floating Theatre in Bath, North Carolina, the trade was dying. Ferber knew that and she knew that she wanted to make a novel of it. And a fiction is what we got, the novel Show Boat (1926). It was a pretty good story (she would win the Pulitzer Prize with her next one), and she was pretty well connected in New York, member in good standing of the famed Algonquin Circle, and to make a long story short Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and Florenz Ziegfield thought they could do something with it. Moreover, they assured Ferber that their ‘something’ would be new, worthwhile, not a musical review nor a girlie show, but a new entertainment. Ferber consented, and so, on December 27, 1927, an 1880s “Show Boat”, the Cotton Blossom, arrived on stage in the brand new Ziegfield Theatre, a con man called Gaylord Ravenal (shades of Twain’s Duke?) spied the lovely Magnolia Hawks, and the modern American musical was born. ©

Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere. Last public lecture (1974) given by Arthur Hallowell

The Ojibwe, or Chippewa, were—pre-Conquest—one of the most powerful of the North American first nations, strong enough in the 1700s to defeat the Lakota and send them westwards to learn how to ride horseback. Their first extended contact was with the French voyageurs, who (in that arrogant, conquest way) gave them a new name, Saulteurs, because they dominated the scene around Lake Superior and Sault Ste. Marie. The Ojibwe indeed inhabited the northern part of the Great Lakes basin, encircling Superior, a territory they prized for, among other things, its copper (they were early metallurgists and their arrowheads were of copper) and its birch trees (the Ojibwe were those who plied the waters in birch bark canoes). Today, for the most part pushed off their ancestral lands, they remain quite numerous, especially in Canada where first nation peoples retain valuable rights (my only Ojibwe acquaintance, Mike Dechamps, worked a trapline territory all his own in the Quetico). We know a lot about the Ojibwe partly because they survived, but more especially because of the lifelong labors of Arthur Irving Hallowell, born on December 28, 1892, and an anthropological legend because of his single-minded ‘pursuit’ of the Ojibwe. He was, oddly, particularly interested in their psyches, and administered psychiatric tests to probably thousands of Ojibwe, but they are a tolerant people and appreciated his deep interest in all aspects of their culture. A professor at Penn all his career, Hallowell left his Ojibwe field notes to the American Philosophical Society, where they (and his correspondence) occupy 21 shelf feet!! Prolific indeed. ©

One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel. Madame de Pompadour.

In business and politics (and for that matter in academe) one of the most tempting and least stable forms of government may be broadly defined as a patronage or courtier system. However, “system” it is not. It depends far too heavily on favor, patronage, and clientage, notoriously fickle in operation, and it is by the same token far too prone to ignore the broader environment, aka “reality,” which in the long run requires only fitness for survival. A classic example is France’s “ancient régime,” its very soubriquet embodying a predicted démise. Of course it produced great wits, even great minds (Voltaire springs to mind as an example of both), but they had to watch their step, and at court wit wore disguises, just as insults sufficed because analysis was hazardous. Just so, at the court of Louis XV, a class of witticisms evolved known as poissonades, an untranslatable term but “fishy slander” would do, a pun on the family name of the king’s official mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, better known as Madame de Pompadour. Poissonades were, in a sense, a backhanded compliment, for Jeanne Antoinette Poisson was in reality a most accomplished person, wise as well as witty, a patron of arts and philosophy, and a real power at the king’s court. Born on December 29, 1721, and probably trained to be someone’s mistress, she did her job well, and we should credit her for that. But perhaps she knew better than anyone the serious frailties of her courtier world: “après nous, le déluge.” ©

Global warming is the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state. Senator Inhofe.

We live, essayist Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, in “a culture immune to fact.” This is a troubling thought to have on the threshold of a new year, with its promises of (or toasts to) a better future, for it’s facts we need. Against this need we can offer the bad science and worse theology of Senator James Inhofe, who argues that global warming is a liberal hoax and that God would never let Miami Beach (let alone Tulsa) sink below sea level. At the eve of this New Year we can at least be thankful that not all the godly think this way. Take as a fact John T. Houghton, born to evangelical Christian parents in Wales on December 30, 1931, educated at Jesus College, Oxford (not a Christian institution but a traditional magnet for Welsh evangelicals), and throughout his long life a crusader for values he takes to be Christian, e.g. the outlandish notion that one transcendent purpose of having brains is to observe, think, and draw reasoned conclusions. Since Houghton’s retirement he has been ruling elder of his Presbyterian church, but before that he was chair of the Nobel Peace Prize committee, Oxford Professor of Physics, and president of the John Ray Initiative to forge connections between science and religion. And, oh yes, Professor Elder Sir John Houghton was according to Inhofe the godless liberal who may be credited with getting up all this propaganda about climate change, starting in the 1960s and then with more purpose as the Chief Executive of the United Kingdom Meteorological Office, 1983-1991. Perhaps in the New Year Senator Inhofe will employ a fact-checker. I propose a toast . . . ©

Bravo! It's worth listening to Brian Cox's `Infinite Monkey Cage' Christmas Special, podcast available here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc
BBC, Thu, 25 Dec 2014, Duration: 51 mins
"Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by Astronaut Chris Hadfield, Actor Brian Blessed, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and the Reverend Richard Coles to discuss the history of the bible."
I particularly liked Stavrakopoulou's description of Christmas as `the magic baby story'.

I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations. Vesalius.

That “science” has modern origins is evident from the word’s history (look it up), and most historians date those origins from the 17th century, citing a great cast of characters, Lord Bacon, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, et al. But we’ve learned caution about single origins, and indeed modern science has older roots. One such was Andreas Vesalius, born in Brussels on December 31, 1514. His family trade (medicine) had been plied for centuries according to classical era knowledge, notably that of Marcus Aurelius’s Greek physician, Galen. Vesalius probably began to doubt Galen as a guide during his medical studies at Paris, for that is when he first dissected a human corpse, but he became more open about it on receiving his medical degree and taking up a position at Padua. Why the wait? Well, besides the traditional veneration for Galen and the ancients, there were religious prohibitions on dissecting human cadavers. Vesalius's great work, De humani corporis fabrica libri septum, published in 1543, demonstrated Galen’s anatomical errors and (arguably) set modern medicine on a ‘scientific’ course of observation and experiment, trial and error. Two other remarkable things about Vesalius. The illustrations for De humani corporis were done at the studios of Tiziani Vecelli (aka “Titian”), an early union of science and art, and Vesalius himself can be seen as a direct ancestor of the 17th-century scientific revolution, for he taught Gabriel Fallopius (the Fallopian tube), who taught Hieronymous Fabricius (embryology), who taught William Harvey (circulation of the blood). Look ‘em up. ©

It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace. Catherine Drinker Bowen.

Catherine Drinker was born on January 1, 1900, portentous date, the youngest of a tribe of eminent and over-achieving Philadelphia Quakers. Indeed, she was Quaker-born: on the Haverford College campus, in a house built for her parents by the college’s president. Two brothers became eminent Harvard University scientists (one invented the iron lung); another a prominent corporation counsel who took time off from his practice to become one of our leading musicologists. Catherine herself began her adult life in a quandary about whether to paint or fiddle, but she married instead. Finding her first marriage a bind on her talents, she wrote a novel about it (Rufus Starbuck’s Wife, 1932), divorced the man but kept his name, and as Catherine Drinker Bowen quickly became one of our leading biographers. She mastered the art of interpretative biography, deeply researched but never entirely imprisoned by the evidence, inventing conversations and bringing her chosen characters (inter alia Edward Coke, Francis Bacon, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Ben Franklin, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky) to vivid life. It is not everyone’s taste, but the books sold very well and interested many in past lives. Her Yankee from Olympus (on Holmes) was a well-thumbed volume in my parents’ bookshelves. Then, in 1973, after a life that had taken her to a great many places, including the Julliard School of Music, Bolshevik Moscow, and two Central American republics, Catherine Drinker Bowen managed to die only a couple of hundred yards from her birthplace, as old as her century. ©

We have lost an irreplaceable leader, a man of greatest good will, but his inspiration remains with us. Ralph Bunche on the assassination of Folke Bernadotte.

The modern word “terrorist” has great flexibility. Had it been available in 1775 George III might well have used it when he declared American revolutionaries to be traitors and outlaws. More recenty, Vladimir Putin has amply demonstrated its selective use. It also brings to mind the 1948 assassination of United Nations diplomat Folke Bernadotte. Bernadotte, a Swedish count, born on January 2, 1895, had towards the end of WWII negotiated the release of 30,000 people, including Scandinavian Jews, from Nazi concentration camps. That record, and his American connections, made him seem a good choice for negotiating peace in Palestine. Bernadotte took up his duties immediately and, following UN policy, recommended a two-state solution with fixed boundaries. Political sovereignty was to be mixed with economic union, and there was to be full protection of minority rights in both states, notably in Jerusalem which was to be an Arab city, then (in a later Bernadotte proposal) a neutral city under UN mandate with free access to its holy sites for Jews, Arabs, and Christians. In 1948 Palestine, there were undoubtedly many people of all stripes who did not like these ideas, but in point of fact Bernadotte was murdered by a Jewish group who called themselves the Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang. One of its members (and probably one of three leaders who ordered the killing) was a future Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who undoubtedly thought of the killers as “patriots.” Thus again we confront the plasticity of words. ©

Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. Antoine Thomson d'Abbadie

The idea that science and religion must be at loggerheads has some power but often depends on naïve views of both. It would have seemed downright absurd to Antoine Thomson d’Abbadie d’Arrast, who was born in Dublin on January 3, 1810. He was of no fixed nationality, father a Basque Frenchman of noble birth, mother Irish. Antoine and his younger brother Arnaud, also born in Dublin, were educated in France and became adept in several disciplines, notably (but by no means only) languages, mathematics, and astronomy. Antoine eventually married, but first the brothers left France in the 1830s to spend a dozen years in East Africa, where (in Ethiopia) Antoine built a castle. And what do you do with an Ethiopian castle if you are a talented and resourceful French polymath? You make thousands of astronomical observations (with that telescope you cleverly packed), do your best to interdict the Arabian and Ottoman slave trades, learn a few of the more arcane languages of the region, take many research notes, plot maps, spend some time with your brother pondering the mysteries of mathematics, and lobby the pope (Gregory XVI) to make Ethiopia a focus of Catholic missionary activity. Arnaud would return briefly to Ethiopia in the 1850s, but the brothers spent most of the rest of their lives publishing 23 works on astronomy, mathematics, geography, and languages (east African and Basque), and building a spectacular castle in France. Then, when all was said and done, Antoine left his property and his entire fortune to the French Académie des Sciences, on condition that the Académie create and publish a huge astronomical catalogue. Il a été fait.©

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary.

To see a team dominant in its sport is a great thing, Stengel’s Yankees in the 50s, Lombardi’s Packers in the 60s, Ferguson’s Man United for far too long. Arguably, though, there was never anything quite like West Indies’ international cricket in the 1970s. The slashing bats of Sobers and Richards; the wily captaincies of Kanhai and Lloyd; the murderous fast bowlers Garner and Marshall: they took on all comers and, using the unfortunate words of England’s captain Tony Greig, they made them grovel. But the West Indies had already produced a cricketing great for the ages, albeit neither a bowler nor a batsman. Rather he was a writer, Cyril Lionel Robert James, born in Trinidad, January 4, 1901, and almost making it through the century. C. L. R. James had one rival and no betters at the press box typewriter. If you want to understand cricket, a fairly impenetrable game unless you grew up with it, read his Beyond a Boundary (1963), thought by some to be the best book ever written on any sport. Fresh off the boat in 1933, the Manchester Guardian hired James to tell its readers about cricket, and he did so beautifully, but he couldn’t stop there. A play about Toussaint l’Ouverture hit the boards in 1934, a prequel to his classic study of the Haitian revolution,The Black Jacobins (1938), and a whole career as a political philosopher, essayist, and activist, wherein he offended many, including both Joseph Stalin and J. Edgar Hoover. The USA deported James in 1953, and as a sporting riposte he made us a political parable out of Melville’s Moby Dick. This was done as elegantly as any Gary Sobers boundary. Great sports call forth great writers. ©

I believe that dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people. Alvin Ailey.

It’s a long train trip from east Texas to Los Angeles, and a challenging one for an 11 year-old black kid, traveling alone, in 1942, particularly one with a well-founded fear of white people (he had witnessed his mother being raped by a white gang). But Alvin Ailey wanted to join his mother, who had (like many African-Americans) gone west to seek work during the war. She was successful, in a modest sort of way, helping Alvin to get into UCLA to study modern languages, and in the end, a prosperous and proud old lady, surviving her son. Alvin, born on January 5, 1931, also succeeded, though much more spectacularly, for he would leave college, join the art underground in San Francisco (he thought he might be a writer), work the night club circuit with Marguerite Johnson (aka Maya Angelou), but eventually found his metier in modern dance, first in Los Angeles as the astoundingly young (age 22) director of the Horton Dance Company. Moving to New York City to perform on stage as a sort of dance adjunct to the likes of Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, Ailey would become discontent with the existing dance scene, form his own company, and revolutionize modern dance in the USA. In 1958, he formed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, first headquartered in the Young Men’s Hebrew Association but then (ecumenically) moving to larger quarters at the Young Women’s Christian Association. Ailey died in 1989, having gathered many honors and much fame, but his Company lives on in its own mid-Manhattan premises, with its own dance school, and its very own persona as the signature American modern dance company. ©

He had in him something of the Greek, a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King only existed in the world. Henry Adams.

Unofficial Washington has often been more interesting and, sadly, more capable than official Washington, perhaps never more so than when a small group that called themselves the Five of Hearts gathered (sometimes weekly) at the Washington home of Henry Adams, circa 1877-1885. There were actually sometimes seven “Hearts,” but never mind. Among the original Five was Clarence King, born in Rhode Island on January 6, 1842. He was odd man out of the Five because he had never graduated from college, thought of himself as a man of adventure rather than of reflection, had known poverty as a young man, and (entirely unbeknownst to the other four) was to marry an African-American woman and spend his last dozen years pursuing a double life, one as “Todd King”, railway Pullman porter, husband of Ada Copeland and father of her four children, and the other as Clarence King, renowned geologist and geographer, intrepid explorer, first mapper of Yosemite, leader of the famous 40th Parallel Survey, and first director of the United States Geological Survey. On King’s death, the double life became known, including to Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay (another of the original “Hearts”), and Ada Copeland would live out her very long life in a house bought for her by Hay and on a “pension” provided for her by Hay’s daughter, Helen Hay Whitney. Ada Copeland King died on April 14, 1964, aged 104, by then one of the very last surviving Americans who had once been a slave. And, perhaps, poetically, we could count Ada as the very last of Henry Adams’s very unusual circle of friends. ©

Normal is an illusion. Charles Addams.

It is said that subscribers to The New Yorker magazine read it for its cartoons, despite its well-deserved reputation for attracting the finest writers and essayists to produce its regular columns, its fiction, and its in-depth reportage. Famously, the magazine’s cartoon department often worked best by marrying drawings by one contributor to captions by another. “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it” was the most famous of these lines, created by E. B. White for an ‘orphan’ drawing by Carl Rose. A very happy adoption. Of course, then you had to pay two people, and it may be for that reason that publisher Harold Ross, who could be very stingy at times, liked the cartoons of Charles Addams, many of which did not need a caption. Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey on January 7, 1912, and it may have been his childhood fondness for visiting nearby cemeteries that gave him his near obsession with bizarre, cadaverous figures doing quirky things at midnight. Addams, whose cartoons ran regularly in the magazine from 1940 to the 1980s, never joined the staff, preferring free-lance status. This may have been for financial reasons but more likely it reflected Addams’s personality, about as quirky as his drawings. He typically collected his cartoons in volumes whose terrifying titles tell tales, for instance Drawn and Quartered (1942),Nightcrawlers (1957), and Dear Dead Days: A Family Album (1959). If you like to be humorously horrified, pick one up at a used book store or, on late night telly, take in The Addams Family and its trademark characters Morticia, Lurch, and Uncle Fester. ©

The Oberlin faculty did not forbid a woman to take the gentleman's course, but they did not advise it. I took a long breath and prepared for a delightful contest. Fanny Coppin.

Everything has to have a first, but Fanny May Jackson Coppin gathered more than her fair share. Then again, on the fairness scale, Fanny Jackson was born a slave, on January 8, 1837, in our nation’s capital, so maybe turnabout was fair play. D.C.’s population of free blacks included Fanny’s aunt, who purchased her freedom, moved to Rhode Island, and got her a job as a philosopher’s servant. The philosopher was George Henry Calvert, and there Fanny May got a good education. It sent her to Oberlin College, the first to admit women, first to admit blacks, and thanks to Fanny May Jackson the first to graduate a black woman, in 1865 (Fanny May studied Classics and Mathematics, and while in Oberlin taught a preparatory course for white college students and evening classes for free blacks). In 1869 she became the first black female school principal, spending 37 years at it, at the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Children (now Cheyney University). She did such a good job that, for a time, she served as the first African-American superintendant of a school system, in Philadelphia, but she returned to the Institute as Principal and probably would have lived out her life there but fell for the Rev’d Levi Coppin, an African Methodist Episcopal clergyperson, married him, and after a time in Philadelphia the couple went off to South Africa (in 1900) to spread the gospel of Christ and the gospel of work at the Bethel Mission. Declining health sent Fanny Coppin back to Philadelphia, where she died in 1913.©

He has a future and I have a past, so we should be all right. Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph.

Henry James’s transatlantic fiction often dealt with European decadence (and sophistication) meeting American moralities (often female and naïve). And indeed a subtheme of the grand rapprochement between the US and Britain was the marriage of eligible American heiresses with impecunious English aristocrats. But it’s unlikely that James was thinking of Jeanette “Jennie” Jerome, born in Brooklyn on January 9, 1854 to a financier father and an aristocratic (American-style) mother. Jennie grew up beautiful, talented, witty, and too wise for Henry James; at a very tender age she captivated one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors, Lord Randolph Churchill. Their first son Winston, who would gather a certain amount of fame himself, came suspiciously soon after their wedding (7 months) but let’s not dwell on that. Her second son may have had a different father, but that’s also immaterial. Jennie Churchill (aka ‘Lady Randolph’) had quite a succession of aristocratic lovers before and after Lord Randolph’s death in 1895, including (possibly) the Prince of Wales, Viscount Falmouth, and the son of Prince Otto von Bismarck. Her eldest son was also quite in love with her, but chastely, and her close connections with high society—including the royal court—helped him in his early career. She later married men (two, in fairly quick succession) who were Winston’s age, which might have fueled speculation but the world looked on with a Jamesian reserve. Jennie Churchill, Lady Randolph, died well before she intended to, in 1921, tripping downstairs in her new high heels.©

Breguet is not only a brand . . . but also a part of our cultural heritage, brimming with history and emotions . . . and endowed with genuine soul. Breguet advertising circular, 2014.

Among those who can afford one, there was a collective shudder when Bréguet watches were taken over by the mass-producer Swatch in 1999. Surely the quality would suffer? But never fear: Swatch knew a good thing when it saw it, and had faith that the world’s mega-rich would continue to grace their wrists (and one or two other parts) with absurdly expensive ways to demonstrate their wealth and keep time all at once. Thus tradition was saved. The founder of the whole business, Abraham-Louis Bréguet, born in Neuchâtel on January 10, 1747, an undeniably creative watchmaker (he invented the self-winding watch in 1780!!), served anyone with enough money to pay him, and moved with some ease from making watches for Marie Antoinette to making watches for Jean-Paul Marat (set to the Republican calendar!) to making watches for George III to making watches for Napoléon and his Joséphine. And I am sure he made watches for the restored Bourbons after Waterloo. So M. Bréguet, a Swiss Protestant of Huguenot extraction, moved from client to client, cause to cause, but always innovative in elegant design and mechanical operations, not only the perpetuelle but the first anti-shock device, a sympathique set where a larger carriage clock wound and set a smaller, detachable watch, a ringing watch, a watch that could be read by the blind, and a “tourbillon” watch, wherein a small, devilishly clever mechanism helps the watch defy gravity. Recently, a watch he made for Napoléon’s sister-in-law sold for $1.3 million. New ones, I am told, are a bit cheaper. But not much. ©

If a gifted young man can write a symphony like that at age 23, within five years he will be ready to commit murder. Walter Damrosch, from the podium, 1/11/1925.

The winter months are full of anniversaries of orchestral premiers, which makes one wonder, sometimes, what musicians do in the summer. Play oldies, I guess. But on January 11, 1925, in New York City, there was a very special premier, Aaron Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, with a very special soloist, Nadia Boulanger. The premier was conducted by Walter Damrosch, but soon it would have a very special conductor, with the Boston Symphony, in Serge Koussevitzky. These performances were big deals for Copland, by then only 24, but his talents had already been recognized by Mlle. Boulanger when she agreed to take him on as a student. She didn’t teach just anybody and, recognizing his talent, brought the young whippersnapper into contact with leading musicians of the day, not only Koussevitzky but also Sergei Prokofiev, all of whom nurtured the boy and gave him confidence. At a meeting at Koussevitzky’s flat, the famed conductor is reputed to have said, “you vill write an organ concerto, Mademoiselle Boulanger vill play it, and I vill conduct it.” And so it came to pass. True or not, it makes a nice story, and what’s nicer is that Nadia Boulanger, a sophisticated, talented Frenchwoman, saw in young Copland a strong desire to give a distinctively American voice to classical music, and she encouraged it. In the words of a recent study, Boulanger “shaped and sustained [Copland’s] concepts of national identity in music.” So perhaps we could say that Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid were also birthed that day in Serge Koussevitzky’s Paris flat. ©

Nature made cotton pretty good to begin with. I just gave it a little boost. Ruth Benerito.

Back in the days when women weren’t supposed to be scientists, quite a few women defiantly became scientists, but then what? Universities, slow to admit that women could be educated and then slow to admit them, were slower still about hiring them to teach. One route forward was to work for the gummint, which was what Ruth Benerito did, mainly as a staff scientist for the USDA, Southern Region, amassing 55 patents before her retirement. Born Ruth Rogan, in New Orleans, on January 13, 1916, Ruth’s engineer father and feminist mother insisted she be educated to her highest abilities, which led her into science and, eventually, via Tulane and Bryn Mawr, to a Chicago PhD in chemistry. Then to Agriculture, where she started off on cotton fibers. She did not stop there, but while pondering cotton’s polymeric qualities she figured out how to bond a coating to the fibers that made them stronger and less permeable than natural cotton. Presto!! Ruth Rogan Benerito invented wrinkle-free, wash and wear, stain resistant cotton. She is said to have "saved the cotton industry." Not content with saving southern agriculture, she used similar principles to work out ‘binding’ compounds for paper and plastics manufacture and developed sideline in wood preservatives. Before all that, in her first gummint job, in the Surgeon-General’s office, Ruth Benerito had discovered how to add necessary fats to intravenous feeding solutions. This was first used in the Korean War in the treatment of grievously wounded soldiers. Dr. Benerito died, aged 97, in 2013, having never held a tenured post in universities, and not the worse for wear either. ©

The greatest comedies that were made by anybody were made in two reels, and I don't care who it was. Hal Roach.

Hollywood attracted many geniuses, actors, writers, and directors, but we don’t remember too many production geniuses. One whose name I recall from “Saturday matinees” film credits was Hal Roach. Along with Rip Torn and Gale Storm (who worked for him now and then) I thought it must be a made up Hollywood moniker. But who would call himself “Roach”? Think of the puns!! But Harold Eugene “Hal” Roach he was, born as such, in Elmira, New York, on January 14, 1892, and finding his way to LA at 20. Thanks to a small inheritance, he moved from playing bit parts in the silents to producing them, and enjoyed some brilliant successes, e.g. with Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, the Little Rascals, and Will Rogers. There were also some astounding misjudgments, as in his 1937 proposal for new studio (“RAM") in partnership with Benito Mussolini, but come the war he partnered instead with Uncle Sam to turn his studio over to war films. The government invested heavily in “Fort Roach” and then gave it back to Hal in 1945. Good business. Plus it gave us postwar continuations of Laurel and Hardy, Amos n’ Andy, and Topper, and a brand new Abbot & Costello. This was not high culture stuff to be sure but it raked in the cash, and it marked Hal Roach as among the first in Hollywood to see how to make use of television. Hal Roach made films that made money: short comedies and cartoons, mainly (Of Mice and Men was his only masterwork) and, luckily, he knew he was making history. The archive he kept still survives. And Hal did, too, almost, making his last public appearance at the 1992 Oscars, aged 100. ©