BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The best career advice is to find out what you like to do and then get someone to pay you for doing it. Katherine Dunham,

Katherine Mary Dunham, born on June 22, 1909, was a mixed-up girl (of African and French/Native American ancestry). Her black dad owned a dry-cleaning business, first in the village of Glen Ellyn and then in Joliet, and young Katherine attended white schools in both places. She was a good student, and followed her brother to the University of Chicago where she earned bachelor, masters, and doctoral degrees in Anthropology. She went to college to please her dad, who had discouraged Katherine’s interest in the dance, perhaps because she had discomfited her Joliet church by dancing to raise money, more likely because he doubted there was much money in it as a career. Katherine was to prove him very wrong. Anthropology gave Dunham an academic interest in dance, the Rosenwald Foundation of Chicago funded her studies of Afro-Caribbean dance (on site in Jamaica and Haiti) and she brought back a burning ambition to integrate the dance (modern and classical) by grafting into it our culture’s African heritage. From the early 1930s she and her partner John Pratt (they would finally marry in 1949) also revolutionized dance from a stage design point of view. They were first aided in this task by FDR’s Federal Theater Project, then struck out on their own with the Katherine Dunham Company, a wildly successful enterprise in the arts. Along the way, starting as a teenager in Joliet and including a dramatic, 42-day hunger strike when she was “only” 82, Ms. Katherine Dunham was also a tireless and utterly fearless advocate for racial justice. She had some St. Louis connections, and you can see her star in our very own Walk of Fame, in the U City Loop. ©

[Stanley]

Bob sent this message today. (I have edited the offending piece)

I can’t blame such a silly error on midsummer’s night, but it partially covers my embarrassment to get a NAME wrong.
This painter was of course Henry Ossawa Tanner, not Turner. I think somewhere in my semi-consciousness I knew that and was wondering where this Turner had spring from. But I persisted in error and sent it out.
I thank Carol Sholy for spotting the mistake and for bringing it to my attention. You can see one of Henry Tanner's finer works, “Gateway in Tangier”, in Gallery 333 of the St. Louis Art Museum. Today, if you are close by.

Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

I have lit my treasured candles/ one by one, to hallow this night. Anna Akhmatova, Poem without a Hero, 1963.

To be an artist anywhere can be a dangerous calling, and in Soviet Russia creative lives were punctuated by Siberian exiles and secret police “interrogations.” Too many were brought to a period by execution or suicide. But there were survivors, and one of the more extraordinary survival stories is that of Anna Gorenko, born into a family linked to the Tsars on June 23, 1889 and destined to survive the Revolution, the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, the horrors of the German invasion, and not least the sufferings of loved ones, friends, and fellow poets. And through it all Anna wrote and wrote, beginning with her identification as a modernist (and feminist although the concept wasn’t readily available in Tsarist Russia) with her first volumes in 1912 and 1914. She also translated foreign writers into her beloved Russian, and engaged in lifelong study of Pushkin, her very own literary hero. Throughout, she wrote as Anna Akhmatova, a pen-name she found politic whether Russia was empire or soviet. Soon her poetry began to sound a “note of controlled terror,” to be “grim, spare, and laconic.” These were not qualities to endear her to Stalin or his police, and still she stayed and still she wrote, watching friends and family escape to the west, or take the train to Siberian exile (often never to return), or disappear into the Lubyanka, victims of police terror. Only during her son Lev’s second Siberian exile did she bend to necessity and write patriotically (which may have saved her life too in Stalin’s last years). But Anna survived Stalin, and lived long enough after to enjoy world-wide recognition for her indomitable courage and for her poetic genius. ©

[Stanley]

If you are going to lose money, lose it. But don't let them nose you out. Gustavus Swift.

My great-great grandmother’s sister, Jane Galt, inherited a few hundred dollars in 1849 and suddenly became a hot property. Jane was snapped up by one Calef, a cattle trader of Decatur, who pretty much left her alone (other than getting her pregnant) for he was on the road a lot. Calef bought cattle in mid-Illinois and took them to market, first overland to Chicago but very soon by rail car as far as New York City. Unless you wanted salt beef, you took meat to market on the hoof. Then along came Gustavus Swift, born on Cape Cod on June 24, 1839, who after a few years as an apprentice butcher also got into the cattle-driving business. Moving to Chicago, he got a lot bigger than Mr. Calef by first concentrating on retail. Swift’s trademark delivery wagons kept thousands in meat and made Swift & Co. the dominant butchers in the stockyards. But what finally drove Calef and his ilk out of business was Gustavus Swift’s greatest innovation, a workable refrigerated railway car (1878 et seq). Swift went on from that triumph to follow Native American precedent and make use of everything about the animals he butchered, from finding markets for low-grade meat (you’ll still find it in your can of pork and beans) to a host of products ranging from hairbrushes to oleo to pharmaceuticals. Swift famously bought, slaughtered, packed and sold “everything but the squeal.” Soon the “Beef Trust” (Swift, Armour, and a few others) attracted the attention of Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906) and progressive reformers who broke the Trust in the courts and cleaned up the industry with the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. But poor Calef was already six feet under, grist to Swift’s mill. ©

[Stanley]

It is quite time that a decisive stroke was struck for the freedom of women, and not only as regards the suffrage question. Rose O'Neill, 1915

Long ago and far away, in a revision tutorial, a student made such a brilliant point that I told her “you have won the Kewpie doll.” I then had to explain myself, and all I could offer was that it was a doll often given as a prize at Iowa fairs. Little did I know then that the Kewpie doll story involves one of the most extraordinary persons to grace the “Historic Missourians” pages on our state historical society’s website. She was Rose Cecil O’Neill, born on June 25 1874 in Wilkes-Barre. Rose was taken—by riverboat and covered wagon—to the Nebraska prairies, where her artistic parents encouraged her to draw, paint, write, and sculpt. She won local contests, sold works, and was soon making more money than her bookseller dad. So it was off to New York, where Rose became semi-famous as a cartoonist and made still more money. Her dad used some to homestead in the Ozarks, while Rose became yet more famous, had two bad marriages, got involved in film making, and spent some time at the Missouri homestead, “Bonniebrook.” It was there, in 1908, that Rose created her most popular cartoon characters, the Kewpies. They became “Kewpie dolls” in 1912, when under Rose’s supervision a clever German doll maker created porcelain Kewpies. Riding high on royalties, Rose purchased properties in New York, Connecticut, and Italy, was mentored in sculpture by August Rodin, became known as the most beautiful woman in the world, and joined up with the suffrage movement (one of her most famed cartoons is of a Kewpie carrying a “Votes for Women” sign). In the 1930s, Rose lost much of her fortune, moved back to Bonniebrook, devoted herself to good causes, and became an Historic Missourian.©

[Stanley]

Lord Carnarvon: Can you see anything? Howard Carter: Yes, wonderful things.

What do you do when you are a sickly lad, and your parents (and governesses) force you to stay at home, in your castle, and you grow up with few friends. Few will shed tears over a sad story involving castles and governesses, and indeed George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, courtesy title Lord Porchester, later the Earl of Carnarvon, was born (on June 25, 1866) as rich as Croesus and embodying the union of two of England’s oldest and wealthiest houses, to speak colloquially the Carnarvons and the Chesterfields. Our frail aristocrat escaped out to the estate, at Highclere Castle, and dug things up, acquiring an interest in archaeology. His two other main interests were racing and his wife Almina Victoria, the illegitimate daughter of a bachelor Rothschild (she could claim legitimacy as her mother was married, though not to her biological father). So there was a whiff of the unconventional about this excessively wealthy young man, and he made the best of it by actually racing his own motor cars until he was seriously disabled by a road accident in 1901. He then turned to racing horses and Egyptology, an odd combination that he made the most of. His “stud” at Highclere became the pivot of British horse breeding (his grandson, the 7th Earl of Carnarvon, was Elizabeth Windsor’s racing manager and close friend), and his partnership (beginning in 1907) with Howard Carter would issue (1923) in the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun, in the Valley of the Kings and also to a host of adventure flics, some of them rather good. His death only two months later led to the legend of the Curse of Tutankhamun, but in truth it was only an infected mosquito bite. Or was it? ©

[Stanley]

I know why the caged bird sings! last line of Sympathy, by Paul Laurence Dunbar (circa 1900)

Anti-slavery and even abolitionism were strong in ante-bellum Ohio, centered on Lane Theological Seminary in the south and Oberlin College in the north, but with local societies scattered throughout the state. Several of them declared also against racial prejudice as a violation of “the law of love.” This may be why, after the war, the only black student at Dayton’s Central High School made friends so readily (including Orville and Wilbur Wright), edited his school’s paper, and presided over its literary society. Just as likely, his classmates rewarded his talent, for he was Paul Laurence Dunbar. Born (June 27, 1872) the son of an emancipated slave mother and an escaped slave father, Dunbar went on to establish Ohio’s first African-American newspaper (printed on the Wright brothers’ press), but his first love was literature, and he used his writing to capture the voice of the people. His people, to be sure, but general Ohiospeak too. It was a good time to include dialect in one’s oeuvre, and Dunbar struck a chord with his earliest poems, winning plaudits (and financial support) from locals and, more to the point, critical praise from James Whitcomb Riley (the ‘Hoosier Poet’) and William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic and champion of Mark Twain’s literary realism. Something of Dunbar’s politics can be guessed by his friendship with a radical white Democratic politician, Brand Whitlock (a defender of the Haymarket martyrs), and his association with Frederick Douglass. As with his life, so with his writing; Dunbar’s fiction crossed the color line, with white and black protagonists. It would have been good to have more of Dunbar to read, but he died, of tuberculosis, aged only 33. ©

[Stanley]

Much of what we object to as misconduct in children is a natural rebellion against the intrusion of an unimaginative adult despotism in their lives. Floyd Dell.

Living in small towns (Grundy Center, IA, and Beatrice, NB) at the turn of the 20th century, my grandmother and her sister corresponded about many things, including how to read Émile Zola and Victor Hugo. Both women were college graduates and each belonged to her small town’s Literary Circle. So we should not be too surprised to learn that at about the same time young Floyd Dell was also becoming an adept reader. His much larger town, Davenport, IA, was a rail hub and river port with cultural pretensions that, in 1900, accepted Andrew Carnegie’s $50,000 offer and more than matched it with a bond issue to enlarge its public library, already 23 years old. (This, by the way, was the first Iowa election in which women voted.) Dell, born on June 28, 1887, was to repay Carnegie in spades, but first he parlayed his library education (he had dropped out of school) by becoming in 1911 the book review editor of the crusading Chicago Evening Post, where he championed a broad range of writers (from Chesterton and Belloc to Anderson and Dreiser) and made the paper’s literary supplement into an important publication. But thanks to Carnegie’s munificence, Dell had learned socialism and soon moved to New York where he established his fame by editing The Masses and being prosecuted (unsuccessfully) in two treason trials (1917 and 1919) under the infamous Espionage Act. Unbowed, Floyd Dell went on to write novels and plays, a couple of influential memoirs, and a book on sex and society (Love in the Machine Age) before settling down to found the Provincetown Players, then to become a leading light in the Federal Writers Project and further fuel Republican fears about the radicalism of the New Deal. ©

[Tripps]

Random thoughts after reading this - strongly indicating that I should get out more.

Bix Beiderbecke came from Davenport Iowa.

The word parlay is rarely seen in England. In betting we have an 'accumulator bet' .
Sgt Bilko did parlays.

Libraries - I've just read a Gordon Corera's History of MI6. When the Russian spy Oleg Gordievski changed sides -
" The small liberties were what struck him - the opportunity to listen to church music, or to borrow whatever book you wanted from a library."

I used a Carnegie Library in Failsworth - as I guess did both of my parents. I learn that worldwide, he had built - 2509 libraries, of which 660 were in Britain and Ireland.
Carnegie Libraries

Thanks Mr Bob - keep us thinking. . . As you get older certain words take you back to a particular person or situation. here's an example.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

[Stanley]

On State Street that great street I just want to say/ They do things they don¹t do on Broadway. Frank Sinatra et al.

An astute observer in 1845, asked to predict whether Chicago or St. Louis would be the leading metropolis of the Midwest, might have been forgiven for being wrong. It would have been sensible to give the nod to the Gateway to the West, a city older and wealthier than Chicago and already blessed with vigorous public and private institutions. Much of Chicago was still swampland (unlike ours, its river couldn’t decide which way to flow), and its very name derives from an Indian word that meant “smelly onion” or “skunk” or (my personal favorite) “black water.” Ugh!! A rank place, indeed. And yet, look at these cities today. Chicago is big, brash, and bold, holding much of its population, bursting with skyscrapers, its roads, airports, and stations truly the hubs of American transportation. St. Louis, on the other hand, has lost population steadily since 1940, and seems a bit wan in comparison (baseball aside). So what happened? There are a lot of candidates, including (not so oddly) Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, a potential coup de grace that instead cleared the decks for an urban boom, “creative destruction” at its finest. But I like the municipal elections of June 29, 1889, in which several suburbs occupying virtually the south half of Cook County voted to cleave to the urb, and were welcomed. Hyde Park alone brought 85,000 people and 40 square miles to Chicago. In doing so, these suburbs voted for—and extended—the municipal efficiencies that grew out of the 1871 conflagration, leapfrogged past the Gateway City, and made Chicago the heartland’s metropolis. St. Louis City, meanwhile, had since 1844 fought to exclude its county, an effort crowned with “success” in 1877. And thereby hangs our very own tale of two cities.©

[Stanley]

Writing in a foreign language . . . has brought me to my own true origins. Assia Djebar.

Self-expression is a struggle, for one has to free oneself to achieve it. Even an upper class, white, male novelist is likely to be a loner, even a bit of a crank. Check out Gore Vidal. So the writings of the oppressed have fascinated historians, literary theorists, lay readers of all stripes. Consider the layers of unfreedom encountered by Fatima-Zohra Imalayan, born in coastal Algeria on June 30, 1936. A female in a patriarchal society, a Berber in an Arabized Muslim culture, Fatima was in addition born into a colonial-imperial setting whose violent liberation lay in the future. For such a person, is writing itself an act of rebellion? It would seem so, as upon producing her first published fiction, La soif (“Thirst,” 1957) she adopted the pen name of Assia Djebar, which became her own. Did she do this to avoid antagonizing her (already westernized) father? Another of her adoptions was French, the language of the colonizer, rather than her native Maghrebi Arabic, and she adopted it well enough to be elected to the Académie Française in 2006 and (before her death earlier this year) to be perennially among those mentioned for the Nobel Prize. Djebar and other North African women like her pose interesting problems of interpretation and criticism. My daughter’s research revolves around those problems, and seeks to address them as problems of “translation,” in which the critic must distance herself from her own culture before concluding that writers like Djebar wanted to free themselves from their own culture. Awaiting Greta Bliss’s opus, let’s meanwhile rest with Bill Gass’s assessment of Assia Djebar: “ . . . she has given weeping its words and longing its lyrics.” ©

David, Bob sent this to me.
Thank “Tripp” for me and note that my Grandmama was for years the chairman (they didn’t have chairpersons in those days) of the Carnegie Library Committee in Grundy Center, Iowa. I was thus a favored reader and even as a little lad was allowed to read books in, and from, the adult section upstairs. I seem to have wasted a lot of my energy on Zane Grey, though. Cheers, Bob

[Mention of Greta writing her doctoral thesis reminds me of how old I am. I remember her when she was knee high to a grasshopper....]

[Stanley]

Lichtenberg is not a household name. He is something rarer: a name savored by household names. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Empiricism and skepticism grew up with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and were among the leading characteristics of the 18th-century Enlightenment. It shouldn’t then surprise us to discover that satire came along as part of the bargain. The scientific imperative to test and disprove (almost as strong as the desire to prove and apply) made it safer than it had been to puncture dignities and expose the ridiculous. One of the leading lights of the 18th century, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, combined both science and satire in a short life. Born the youngest of 17 children (!!) in a Lutheran pastor’s family on July 1, 1742, this tiny, hunchbacked man undoubtedly thought of himself as a scientist, his whole adult life revolving around his professorship of physics at Göttingen. There he became well known for tinkering with electricity (he was a great advocate of the views of Ben Franklin), astronomy, mathematics, and a bit of chemistry. Among other discoveries, we owe to him the first experiments (with electricity and metallic dust) that would (very) eventually lead to the Xerox machine. He was also a bit of a wit, a fan of William Hogarth’s graphic satires, and took great pleasure in using humor to expose scientific fraud. But the world did not know about his secret, and extensive, notebooks, his “Sudelbücher,” which he kept for 34 years and ran eventually to a dozen manuscript volumes, in which he recorded random thoughts, satires, witticisms, and above all aphorisms. These were discovered after his death, published in sequence (Volumes A through L), and are said to have influenced several leading German philosophers, from Goethe to Wittgenstein. ©

[Stanley]

He was a compulsive missionary spreading his gospel that theatre is excitement and entertainment, not "culture". Ian McKellen on Tyrone Guthrie.

In the British Isles, one of the traditional ways through to theatre fame and fortune—for actors, playwrights, producers, and directors—is the radio, specifically the drama programs on BBC Radio 4. Check out their website. Perhaps the challenge of depending only on sound hones special theatrical skills. Of course, this avenue was denied to Will Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, who made do without, more’s the pity, for radio hasn’t been with us all that long, but one of the very first to tread this board was Tyrone Guthrie. Born (on July 2, 1900) into an Anglo-Irish-Scottish family of ministerial and military bent, Guthrie went to Oxford instead and, soon after graduation (History, 1923), landed at the fledgling BBC (in 1924) first as a drama producer and then as a playwright (one of the first to create plays specifically for the medium). From then on, his career blossomed. But his reputation was not mainstream. His itch to innovate kept him in motion around the theatre world both as to place and craft (writer, director, producer), whatever came to hand, from the Bard himself to avant gardists like Pirandello, in Stratford, London, Cambridge, and abroad, e.g. Canada. After WWII, Guthrie turned his hand to opera, where he aimed (oddly, it seems to me) at “realism”, whether he was doing new opera like Peter Grimes or traditional fare like Carmen. In the USA we know him best as the namesake of Minneapolis’s marvelous Guthrie Theater (1963) where playwrights, producers, actors, and directors can mess around and experiment to their heart’s content, usually without radio. Tyrone Guthrie (cousin to Tyrone Power, by the way) was knighted in 1961 and died in 1971. ©

[Stanley]

There is no treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation . . . that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread. M F K Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf.

In the 19th century, European travelers in the USA were a dime a dozen, and many of them itched to write about it. Whether they liked us or not, they often commented on American food and American eaters, uncertain as to which was worse. “They swallow without chewing,” wrote Mrs. Trollope, but perhaps it was to avoid tasting the stuff. Latterly came efforts to make American food worth savoring, and the most extraordinary of all these apostles of the kitchen was Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, M. F. K. Fisher to her afficianados and on the spine of her many books. Born Mary Kennedy in Albion, Michigan, on July 3, 1908, and raised in California, she lived an unconventional life that included writing gags for the “Road” movies of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, two failed marriages, a tempestuous affair or two, a couple of love children (both girls), and finally (from 1971) a restful home (she called it “Last House”) on a friend’s California ranch, from whence she would travel occasionally to research yet more writing on cooking and cuisine and taste. For in the course of all that excitement, M. F. K. Fisher became an authority on food (and wine), her expertise originating probably in her longest-lasting love affair. This is the one she had with France, starting with her four years (1928-32) there as a young bride of an aspiring but not very good epic poet. But for all she wrote about fine foods (and how best to eat them), her lasting fame may owe more, in the end, to the book she wrote to encourage American cooks to make the best of wartime rationing, How to Cook a Wolf (1942), and maybe also to her revealing autobiographies, letters, and diaries. ©

[Stanley]

We need you to channel the magic of Tuskegee towards the challenges of today. Michelle Obama, Commencement Address at Tuskegee, May 9, 2015.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (read Gary Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg) and the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution extended the “self-evident” principle of equality to those among us who had been enslaved and to their generations. And yet, after slavery, the freed slaves were not equal. Among the cultural gaps left to us by that “peculiar institution” was widespread ignorance, and it was one of the main tasks of the liberated generation, black and white, to close that gap. My grandmother Ethel taught in a black school, established by the YWCA, in South Carolina, but that was in 1903-1907. Before then the educational deficit had been taken up by the Freedman’s Bureau, staffed mainly by dedicated volunteers who educated the liberated in the knowledge and skills that they hoped would make liberation meaningful. Efforts to address more fundamental problems—of propertylessness and poverty—failed when the project to confiscate the wealth produced by slaves was abandoned as unconstitutional and impolitic. That left education, and today is a good day to celebrate the project of education for freedom because July 4, 2015 is the 134th anniversary of the founding of Tuskegee University, originally the “Negro Normal School at Tuskegee” and then the Tuskegee Institute. It was the brainchild of a former slave, Lewis Adams, a former slaveowner, George Campbell, and a white legislator in need of black votes (for in 1881 in Alabama, blacks could still vote), W. F. Foster. And Tuskegee was given shape and identity by another freed slave, Booker T. Washington. So if you are looking for a place to celebrate our Glorious 4th, a small town in Alabama would be hard to beat. ©

[Stanley]

Scientific research is knowledge obtained before it is needed. Andrew Ellicott Douglass, 1922.

Ever since Ethan Allen, guerilla fighter and freethinker, we’ve thought Vermonters to be independent cusses, witness Bernie Sanders and Andrew Ellicott Douglass. Sanders you know about. Andrew Douglass was born in Windsor, Vermont, on July 5, 1867, and after a very general education settled on astronomy. By 1894 he was well established as Percival Lowell’s assistant at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona Territory, but that came to an end in 1901 when Douglass’s letter ridiculing Lowell’s notion that Mars had “canals” fell into his boss’s hands. Douglass bummed around Flagstaff for five years and then won a professorship at the youngish University of Arizona. There he became a distinguished astronomer, helped along by a large gift that funded the Steward Observatory. His address at the observatory’s dedication (in 1922) praised the fearless pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (a dig at old Lowell, perhaps?), but also noted that knowledge could turn a profit, finishing his address with an oblique reference to his own idea that the “solar cycle” influenced (and could predict) earth’s climate. He had long searched for evidence to test his hypothesis. One of the things he had done while bumming around in Flagstaff was to count and measure tree rings, and to invent the science that Douglass himself would name as dendrochronology. He would then use tree ring sequences (in found wooden artifacts) to date archeological finds in Arizona’s mesas and canyons back to ~600 AD. Andrew Douglass went on to a distinguished career as an academic administrator where, let’s hope, he never fired anyone for writing injudicious letters about their bosses. ©

[Stanley]

In our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession. Sophia Dana Ripley, The Dial, January 1841.

The Dana families of Cambridge, MA, remarkably well connected with Lowells and Willards and Cabots and such, produced interesting offspring, among them the cousins Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Sophia Willard Dana. Since it’s Sophia’s birthday today (she was born on July 6, 1803), we’ll do her. She comes to notice first as the foundress (with her mother and sister) of a school for girls which quickly enough included boys and listed amongst its pupils children of New England’s intellectual elite (a couple of Channings, a Higginson, some Lowells). The sisters’ marriages ended the school but not their careers. Sophia married a young Unitarian minister, George Ripley, who shared her views on women (he loved her for her “intellectual power, moral worth, and dignity of character”) and they rose together in fame, members of the Transcendental Club and contributors to The Dial. Inter alia, the Danas’ Dial pieces included George’s on a visit to a communistic settlement in Ohio and Sophia’s on “Woman,” and soon they put the radical views they expressed there to work at Brook Farm, America’s most famous (if short-lived) utopian community. It was also an “Institute of Agriculture and Education,” so George generally farmed and Sophia generally taught, boys and girls again, but along with their fellow communards they worked at all things, discussed all things, decided all things in true Transcendental spirit. Brook Farm’s democracy broke them financially and they moved to worldly New York, being one a minister and one a teacher, both for pay, but both still writing and each still yearning for equality. ©

[Stanley]

Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor. Margaret Walker, Jubilee.

Margaret Walker was born 100 years ago, July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, and educated in New Orleans at segregated schools and at home by her father and mother. From them she learned philosophy and poetry. When the family moved north, to Chicago, Margaret took her BA (English) at Northwestern and joined the South Side Writers’ Group under the umbrella of FDR’s Federal Writers Project. There she met Richard Wright, about whom she later wrote an influential biography (Daemonic Genius, 1988). In 1942 she won national recognition as a poet (her collection For My People copped the Yale Younger Poets competition) and also took her masters degree (creative writing) from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Marriage and several teaching jobs followed, until she settled at Jackson State, in Mississippi, in 1949. There she founded and directed the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of Black People, now named in her memory, and which in a sense answered the clarion call explicit in the poems of For My People, in which Kissie Lee, Trigger Slim, and other heroes of violent resistance like Stagolee are praised but in effect told that the best way forward is honest reflection, tenacious intelligence, and institution-building. Her novel Jubilee (1966), which I read many years ago, continues this same line of ‘argument through art,’ and won her the PhD from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Back in Mississippi, later in life, Walker also joined forces with Eudora Welty to give “sister act” literature seminars, and on the U of Mississippi website there is a picture (worth at least a thousand words) of these two grandes dames of southern literature.©

[Stanley]

I have relative pitch. I'm glad I don't have perfect pitch because perfect pitch can drive you crazy. Billy Eckstine.

“He was the essence of cool.” (Duke Ellington). “There was no band that sounded like his.” (Dizzy Gillespie). “One of the greatest singers of all time.” (Lionel Hampton). He lived a longish life (78 years), and a successful one. Not least, his five children were successful in their own right, including a couple of recording company executives (one of them Mercury’s CEO) and an accomplished singer (daughter Gina). “He” was Billy Eckstine. When I first heard his name, I thought he must be Jewish, but he turned out to be African-American instead, born in Pittsburgh on July 8, 1914. Early on, he was more successful than any black musician at crossing the color line, singing about “love rather than hurt” (as Eckstine put it), and widely known as a pioneer of progressive jazz. As a singer, Eckstine was thought to rival Sinatra, and was making million-selling records (for MGM) in the 1940s. A full-page Life magazine picture of 1950 shows him being mobbed by white teenage girls outside of a New York club. That picture cost him dearly in 1950s America. Disk jockeys on “segregated stations” (of which there were many) now refused to play his music, and he suffered an eclipse, pretty much nationwide. “White America did not want Billy Eckstine dating their daughters,” his biographer wrote. Still, afficianados attended his performances and bought his records (and played them for me), so his career (and income) didn’t exactly limp along. “I’m not bitter about anything,” Eckstine reflected late in life. He was doing something he liked to do, “bringing happiness to somebody. How many people have that privilege?”©

[Stanley]

No democratic government can last long without conciliation and compromise. S. E. Morison.

Historians do not trace their descent genealogically, but through the line of their PhD supervisors. This has the same fault as the patriarchal trail followed by most genealogists, ignoring collateral lines of descent and debt, but such as it is mine runs back (through David Lovejoy, Edmund Morgan, and Perry Miller) to Samuel Eliot Morison, a crusty old soul (as I might have thought, had I met him) who was himself PhD’d by Albert Bushnell Hart, at Harvard, in 1912. Born in Boston (on July 9, 1887), Morison had some difficulty finding a topic, but then he found an ancestor’s papers moldering away in his family’s wine cellar and thus produced his biography of the Federalist (in style and politics) architect Harrison Gray Otis. It was the first of many works, mainly on New England history and culture, but first Morison had to apprentice at Berkeley, as an instructor, in WWI, as an army private, and then in Paris as a minor diplomat at the Versailles conference. After a time at Oxford (as the first-ever Harmsworth Professor) Morison returned to Harvard to publish many books. Those not on New England included three which owed to his other main interest, sailing: Admiral of the Ocean Sea (on Columbus, Pulitzer Prize, 1943), History of the US Naval Operations in World War II (chief editor and principal author, 15 vols, 1947-62), and John Paul Jones (Pulitzer Prize, 1959). Morison’s New England stuff is marvelous, too, but I think he’s best remembered for the half-dozen pages of pithy advice (on how to write history) he produced for the Harvard Guide to American History (1963) which he co-edited with (speaking of genealogies) the Arthur Meier Schlesingers, Sr. and Jr., and others.©

[Stanley]

Elemental music . . .is a form of music in which one must participate, in which one is involved not as a listener but as a co-performer. Carl Orff.

During the year 1911-1912, a precocious youth in Munich read Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spake Zarathustra and (perhaps in imitation of Richard Strauss) composed music from it. His piece survives today only as an overture, but it suggests a certain approach to composition, underlined by his first opera (1913!!), Gisei, The Sacrifice. The boy was Carl Orff, born on July 10, 1895 (died 1982), and most music critics would say he never quite fulfilled his potential. Still, he lived in interesting times, composed one spellbinder, and was a pioneer in music education, so he repays one’s curiosity. His times were made more interesting because he was (by some definitions) part Jewish and in the 20s he collaborated with friends who, under the Nazis, would be blacklisted if lucky, e.g. the exiles Kurt Weill and Erich Katz. And then in 1936 Orff had performed his great masterwork, Carmina Burana, which one would think offended Nazis on several grounds. Indeed some party faithful concertgoers first gave it a racist roasting, but very soon it was being praised as “a celebration of the power of an uninterrupted life instinct,” and Orff and his music were safe. After the war Carl Orff was closely questioned by American denazification specialists for his cordial relationships with the Nazi party, but—racked with guilt—he was given a “gray acceptable” rating. Be that as it may, Carmina Burana is exceptional, and it was given a marvelous rendering at UMSL a couple of years ago by an intoxicating, innovative mix of student and professional musicians and dancers. One hears, and hopes, that it will have a reprise.©

[Stanley]

Slavery . . . establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? John Quincy Adams, 1820.

My reading of history has left me with two vivid images of our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, born on July 11, 1767. The first has him stalking out of D.C. in early 1829, stung by his electoral defeat and of no mind to take part in the rabble-rousing scenes that accompanied the inauguration of, Andrew Jackson. The second is his defiant rising in the House (1848) to cast a loud “no” vote to a resolution honoring Americans who had fought in the Mexican-American war, a war he viewed as a bloody expression of vainglory and a victory for southern slavery. Right after that vote, still on the floor of the House, Adams was felled by a stroke. He died two days later in the office of the Speaker, saying, “this is the last of earth. I am content.” In his case, one hopes so. Despite his ill success as a gentleman politician in a democratic age (his snobbery was not one of his virtues), Adams was one of our most gifted diplomats, a successful Secretary of State, and a distinguished and (some would say) “incorruptible” member of the House of Representatives for 17 years. For after his presidency, Adams stepped down a peg and returned Washington to insure the survival of the Smithsonian Institution and the US Naval Observatory (perhaps as relics of his unrequited desire for an American National University) and to defend the tribal rights of Native Americans. And, of course, he continued resolutely to oppose the expansion of slavery, to expose its stultifying effects on American political and economic life, and when he could to defend those among us who directly suffered its tyrannies, most famously now as counsel in the Amistad case (1841). ©

[Stanley]

I wheeled with the stars/ my heart broke free on the open sky. Pablo Neruda, "Poetry"

Here’s a neat coincidence. In about 1919, Neftali Besoalto, a high school kid in Temuco, Chile, bravely walked to the girls’ high school and handed a sheaf of his poetry to its headmistress, Lucila Alcayaga, asking her opinion. Later that day, he got his answer: “you are a true poet.” And the coincidence? Both players in this drama would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The perceptive headmistress is better known as Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American Nobelist (1945), and the 15 year old she judged a true poet we know as Pablo Neruda, Nobelist of 1971. Neruda is our subject today, for he was born on July 12, 1904. He chose a pen name (after a Czech poet) because his father disapproved of his poetic labors. These bore fruit soon enough. Neruda went to Santiago to major in French at the Universidad de Chile where in 1923 (after many poems had been published singly) he issued his first collection, the Book of Twilights. There followed a fairly astonishing career as a diplomat-poet, residencies in Burma, Ceylon, Singapore, and Spain, conversion to Communism during the Civil War there, and immersion in Chilean domestic politics as a leading left-wing politician. That was a risky business in post WWII Chile, as the government flip-flopped with each election, or coup, so his career as a politico was punctuated by periods of exile and hiding, but the poetry kept coming and in 1971, despite some misgivings about Neruda’s Stalinist past, the Nobel Committee gave its approval to a man now regarded—by Harold Bloom, no less—as central to The Western Canon. Perhaps we should all read Neruda. After all, Gabriela Mistral did, when he was only Neftali Besoalto, his voice hardly broken.©

[Stanley]

Now I¹m looking around to see what I can use this discovery of mine for. Eugene Freysinnet, quoted by Le Corbusier, ca.1920s.

Concrete is a generic term meaning something mixed together with fluid cement that will harden over time into, so to speak, something else. There are some natural concretes (that are not to be confused with metamorphic rocks), but the human variety is old enough. The Romans had a great mix, witness the Pantheon, 2000 years on still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. But the Romans were fiendishly clever, and we needed to do something else to our concrete to make it work as well as theirs. The person chiefly responsible was Eugène Freysinnet, born in the Corrèze, France on July 13, 1879. Freyssinet took his first job at L’École nationale des ponts et chausées where, in 1904-1920, project problems led him to make significant improvements to newly-invented processes for reinforcing modern concrete. The improvements centered around using stronger steel for the reinforcing nets, tensioning the nets to stress the concrete as it hardened, and producing on-site anchorages to better take the flex of large concrete structures. Freysinnet was most famous for the magnificent bridge at Plougastel, Bretagne, with three concrete spans each measuring 617 feet. It still stands, and still carries traffic, though whether it will outlast the Pantheon remains to be seen. It was judged not adequate for autoroute traffic and since 1994 it has been paralleled by the Pont de l’iroise, itself a pleasing suspension bridge. Freysinnet’s name lives on in the shape of his 1943 firm, a hugely successful international civil engineering group that, I am pleased to note, pays some heed to its history on its impressive website. And it now makes suspension bridges, too. ©

I sent Bob this after reading the above....
Bob, I have a Freysinnet story for you.
A friend of mine Jane Straker is a translator and was once asked to collaborate with an existing translator who was working on the original biography of the great man. I think it was first published in Spanish....
Jane asked to see some sample pages of the man's work and when she got them found that they were riddled with infelicities and downright wrong translation. Two leapt out at her, he had translated the 'marquessa' at Le Havre rail station as 'marquee and in another passage which said that Freysinnet had been hampered in his work on a great bridge because he was constipated. Jane said that the Spanish word for influenza was 'constipado' and the bloke evidently didn't know this.
She wrote back to the publisher to say that she would not consider working with the man who was behind with his deadline, however, she would consider starting again and doing a new translation. I forget what the outcome was but she said that if the book was published with the man's translation it would be a laughing stock....

[Stanley]

Tp say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit at the piano. James McNeill Whistler.

In 19th-century America, there was concern, amongst the chattering classes, that the country had no high culture, no fine art, and perhaps couldn’t. While a few (e. g. Emerson) had faith that the country would produce its own Adamic geniuses, in quantity, most felt it was too young, too brash, too busy, and becoming too rich too fast to care about life’s finer things. Certainly the rising new plutocracies were not eager to prove themselves men and women of taste (save perhaps as gourmands). So many aspiring artists went to where they had art, Europe of course. Normally it was a lonely quest, but in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s case he was taken there and it was the whole dam’ family. Born in Lowell, MA, on July 14, 1834, to a rather civil engineer just about to become as rich as Croesus, James and his parents rode the crest of the railway wave right to St. Petersburg, where his dad worked for the Tsar and his over-doting mother discovered that drawing calmed her “delicate” 8-year-old and seemed to make him happy. So it was private lessons, then public, although an English artist-teacher did warn Whistler’s mother that she might be pushing him too hard. Then it was back to the USA, where the foreign looking young man enjoyed the distinction of being booted from West Point by Superintendent Robert E. Lee, and then after a spell drawing highly decorated maps for the government (the Whistlers were well-connected), it was back to “real" art, back to Europe, and onwards to fame and to a reasonable claim (contra John Singer Sargent) to be America’s first “real” artist, although quite a few of his best works, including the rather fine Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871, better known as "Whistler’s Mother") hang in European galleries. ©