BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

If you want to be an actor, don't. If you need to be an actor, do.
Sir Derek Jacobi

Claudius (10 BCE-54CE) was the fourth and most interesting of Rome’s Julio-Claudian emperors, not least because he survived his childhood infirmities and his family’s murderous instincts to ascend to the throne and its concomitant divinity. Eventually he succumbed to instinct, probably murdered (poisoned) by his fourth wife Agrippina, who was also his niece. I cannot think of Claudius, however, without picturing the actor who portrayed him so brilliantly in the now-classic BBC drama, I, Claudius, Derek Jacobi. Born on October 22, 1938, Jacobi at 38 was already a recognized actor, particularly for breakthrough Shakespearian roles (including a Hamlet, when he was still in high school, at the Edinburgh Festival!), but it was his television Claudius that made him an international star. Before then, his ascent from working-class origins had taken him to Cambridge, then in 1960 to the Birmingham rep. Laurence Olivier found him there, I believe, and was so impressed by his talent to make
Jacobi a founder member of the National Theatre’s company (playing Laertes to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet in 1963). But, living in a northern provincial town, I knew little of this when I first saw Jacobi transform Claudius’s tics—his limp, his tremors, his stuttering, and his strange, scholarly habits—into strengths of character, essential elements in the plot of Claudius’s life. Indeed they probably were, originally back in Rome, as they led Claudius’s family to think of him as a nonentity, no threat to their ambitions and, thus, not even worth poisoning. As for Jacobi, his ability to make something grand out of someone apparently weak enabled him to carry on, on the world’s stage and in its films, a stream of dramatic successes, even to underplaying such roles as Richard III and satirizing himself (as the world’s worst Shakespearian) in the American sitcom Frasier. One who can do that is an actor for many seasons, and one also willing to embrace conflict, as in his well-known advocacy of the (to me, absurd) idea that Will Shakespeare did not write those plays. Jacobi’s nominee is Shakespeare’s contemporary the earl of Oxford. Jacobi has also been a public leader in sexual liberation, in 2006 registering as official (in a civil partnership) his long companionship with the director Richard Clifford and, in 2015, as co-grand marshal (with Ian McKellen) of New York’s annual Gay Pride March. One hopes that Sir Derek (he has knighthoods in Britain and Denmark) has an entirely pleasant, unstuttered, 83rd birthday party. ©

[Stanley]

Da Doo Ron Ron
Ellie Greenwich, 1940-2009.
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Da Doo Ron Ron; Doo Wah Diddy; and Doo Wah Diddy Diddy, all songs written by Ellie Greenwich in the early 1960s.

With some significant exclusions, including even St. Louis, one could argue that the geographical history of 20th-century American “pop” music could be written within a very small compass on the island of Manhattan. First and still most famously came Tin Pan Alley (28th Street between 5th and 6th), the name itself probably created to say something about the sound. It was a place that played home to scores of composers and lyricists, among them the Gershwins, Cole Porter, and Lorenz Hart. Then, suddenly it seemed, “pop” as big business moved northeast to the Brill Building, 1619 Broadway, which became the birthplace of many a vinyl record, 45s and then LPs, and was creative home to (again) scores of artists who traded (according to your point of view) in music for the lowest common denominator or for the latest and therefore most discerning markets, the young and the “with it.” Brill was built just in time, completed in 1930, to house the likes of Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka, Frankie Valli, Paul Simon, and the ultimate in DJs, Phil Spector. They were mostly white, male, and urban, but there were exceptions, Dionne Warwick for example. Another exception, and one not well known to me, was Ellie Greenwich, born Eleanor Louise Greenwich in Brooklyn on October 23, 1940, who first recorded (for RCA) out of the Brill in 1958, but soon shifted her focus to writing—IN the Brill—with “Tell Laura I Love Her” in 1960. She was then only 20, a college student, but proud enough of her new career to transfer colleges when a professor belittled her for writing “pop.” As Greenwich progressed her definition of “pop” broadened, her songs recorded by Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, the Ronettes, and her first corporate name being Pineywoods Records. Ellie Greenwich only changed her name once, to Ellie Gaye, apparently because of her then producer’s fears that the public wouldn’t pronounce Greenwich correctly. But she reverted to Greenwich and to producing; and she continued to write (and to sing backup) until her death n 2009. By then the center of New York pop had moved yet again, only a couple of doors north on Broadway, but Ellie, senior stateswoman of the industry, still identified with—and helped to identify—the Brill Building and the sounds that emanated from it.

[Stanley]

I am your son, white man!
A little yellow
Bastard boy.
--Closing lines of the poem “Mulatto” by Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes’ (1901-1967) play Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, opened on Broadway on October 24, 1935. It starred veteran actress Rose McClendon (1884-1936) as Cora Lewis, the enslaved mistress of Colonel Thomas Norwood. Their four children (of course) all carry their mother’s surname, but something too of their father’s “color” (“pink-grey” according to George Bernard Shaw but “white” in the American hierarchy of color). Thus the children are all slaves, but favored in some senses by their father-owner who sends them off to school to see if they can make something of their (white) racial inheritance. Norwood does not, however, acknowledge them as his own; one of them, Robert, rebels against this cruel form of racialist patriarchy, tries to force Norwood to acknowledge him as Norwood’s son, then (in the ensuing violent argument) kills Norwood. This being the slave south, Cora Lewis tells Robert to flee rather than to face the music, but in the end Robert frustrates the lynch mob by suiciding—upstairs, ‘in his father’s house,’ stealing his own life rather than allowing the mob to take it. Langston Hughes had already explored the theme in his hard-bitten poem “Mulatto;” and he knew something of it himself, born in Kansas with a genetic inheritance that was European, African, and Native American, and one who struggled to make himself known as an artist of language, a poet full-stop so to speak and not a “Negro poet.” But the latter was the role into which his society cast him, and in it he acquitted himself well, even brilliantly. In 1935 New York audiences responded and bought tickets enough to make the play a long-runner, eleven months to be exact. Some critics, then and later, have been less kind, accusing Hughes of playing to melodramatic themes (e. g. a mother’s love) to tug at the audience’s heart strings rather than facing head on the brutal tragedy that Americans have made of “race”. In their ex post facto bravado, those critics have missed Hughes’s courage, his bitterness, his long struggle to be an American poet. They should read the poem before they take down Hughes’s statues. ©

[Stanley]

Things are not so simple always . . .
Irene McCoy Gaines, 1892-1964
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Things are not so simple always as black and white. Doris Lessing.

Irene McCoy (Gaines) was born on October 25, 1892, in Ocala, Florida. Just two years before, Ocala played host to a national convention of Farmers’ Alliances that announced (in the ‘Ocala Platform’) their support of socialist remedies for the existential problems that then faced American small farmers, white andblack. Irene’s parents embarked on a different program, moving to Chicago in hopes of building a better future in a freer climate. Irene certainly succeeded in her studies, first at Fisk and then at the University of Chicago. But even after marrying a prosperous lawyer, she found her ambitions thwarted by her “race”, and she was forced to take work first as a domestic and then as a stenographer in a juvenile justice court. There she heard stories more heartbreaking than her own, and she launched a career in reform that lasted until her death in 1964. Her first route was not that chosen in Ocala by the Farmers’ Alliances. She allied herself—as many people of color then did—with the Republican Party. At first concerned with young people (especially pregnant girls) in Chicago, she directed the city’s Girls’ Work Division of the WWI Community Service program. Then she turned to political organizing, mainly within the African-American community, for the Republican Party, and was particularly active in the congressional campaigns of the Chicago heiress Ruth McCormick. Although both those campaigns (1928 and 1930) were unsuccessful, Gaines’s work for the Illinois Federation of Republican Colored Women’s Clubs came to the attention of national Republicans, and in 1931 President Herbert Hoover appointed her to his National Committee on Negro Housing where she became the guiding spirit behind the ‘Ida B. Wells’ public housing project in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood—segregated, of course. The Great Depression turned Ms. Gaines to the left, and she became active in union organizing (for instance in A. Philip Randolph’s 1940 March on Washington that re
sulted in FDR’s executive order 8802). She also contributed to black history with a film documentary on Frederick Douglass (1952) and by giving her private and public papers to Chicago libraries. Perhaps she ended up not very distant from the Ocala Platform politics of the Farmers’ Alliances. She’s not now very well known, but her papers await a biographer. He or she, white or black, will find them where Irene willed them to be, at the Chicago Historical Society and the University of Chicago Library. ©.

[Stanley]

"We cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government, than hereditary succession, in all its cases, presents." Tom Paine, 1791.
Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn, 1745-1790
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One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense (1776)

First in the American colonies and then in France, Tom Paine proved to be one of the most effective pamphleteers of the ‘Age of Revolutions,’ not least because he focused his best weaponry (wit, satire, irony, and plain common sense) on the principles of monarchy, notably that of hereditary succession. He focused on ruling monarchs, a “rascally” bunch at their best, and I don’t remember Paine drawing a bead on the flotsam and jetsam of royal courts, princes and princesses of the blood royal, even though they then provided (and still do) excellent targets. Take for instance King George III’s younger brother, Prince Henry Frederick, born on October 26, 1745 and destined to be a serious headache for king, court, and parliament for most of his mercifully short (45-year) life. His elders in the family noted early his stupidity (or his density) and his taste for the sybaritic, and put him in the care of minders (who themselves were thus raised to the dignity of tutor, given Henry Frederick’s blood royal), but once brother George ascended to the throne and Henry to adulthood, what could be done with him but give him a dukedom or two and make him into an admiral in the Royal Navy? So he stayed thus, duke of Cumberland and Strathearn and rear admiral, but after am incompetent voyage or two his brother directed that while Henry might be made admiral he should never have a command, even of a rowboat. So instead of ruling the waves duke Henry allowed his passions to rule him. He became most ill-famed for his several affairs with married women, notably Lady Grosvenor and then Lady Horton. The former dalliance led duke Henry into an infamous lawsuit, but Lady Horton became first a widow and then, in 1771 and apparently through no virtue of her own (other than being a “coquette without measure”), Henry’s duchess of Cumberland and Strathearn. Duke Henry also became the favorite uncle of the then Prince of Wales, sharpening the latter’s enjoyment of Brighton and preparing him to be (after a strife-torn regency) the disreputable George IV. But I can’t remember Paine, either in Common Sense (1776) or The Rights of Man (1791-92) making any direct reference to duke Henry Frederick, despite the plain fact that this young man offered so much in comic and satiric potential. It is ever thus for minor royals, whose hereditary virtues rarely receive the close attention they so richly receive. ©.

[Stanley]

Painting is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon.
Lee Krasner, 1908-1984
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Painting, for me, when it really ‘happens,’ is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon—as, say, a lettuce leaf. Lee Krasner.

On autumn walks, I have often taken pictures of fallen leaves, their glorious colors faded somewhat by their fall, or perhaps rain-glued to (and framed by) a section of sidewalk or a woodland path. I took those pictures in homage to (or in memory of) a painting I saw long ago, in a museum exhibition I think, and then lost. But today I found it. It’s “untitled” (1964); it was painted by Lee Krasner; and it’s now in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Lee (then ‘Lena’) Krasner was born of Ukrainian immigrant parents (their first and only American-born child), in Brooklyn, on October 27, 1908. Early on, Krasner committed herself to a career in art, first as a technical arts student in New York’s Washington Irving High School and then on her own, although she continued for a time to study art (and art history) in evening classes. She won her first recognition for a striking self-portrait, en plein aire, and (somewhat fondly, no doubt) I could see my jumbled leaves in the self-portrait’s impressionistic forest background. It won honorable mention, but early on she was held back for various reasons, including her sex. One of her instructors once praised her work as “very good, for a woman.” Whatever the reason, Krasner first came to my attention as the ‘woman behind the man,’ in her case the man being Jackson Pollock, in my youth the king (or court jester) of modern abstract expressionism. They established their relationships (professional and spousal) in the 1940s, and she was characterized as the wife who gave up everything for her husband’s career (before and after his death in 1956). It was a jarringly conventional characterization, and with the rise of feminism it has been rightly revised—in some ways almost overturned. Through her own paintings, her scholarship, and (be it said or admitted) her entrepreneurship, she’s now appreciated as an artist in her own right and her relationship with Pollock appreciated as dynamic
and creative rather than give and take. As for Krasner’s “untitled,” I cannot still say it’s my autumn leaf pictures rendered on canvas. From a distance or at a glance, it looks like it, but studied carefully it’s something else, perhaps inspired by autumn leaves on a Long Island footpath, but something other. Apparently squiggly red lines tie the ‘leaves’ together, and some of those fallen leaves begin to look like other things: faces, bodies, structures. I may yet go to MOMA to reconsider, but I have to conclude for the moment that Lee Krasner was an artist, and I am a snapper. ©.

[Stanley]

It is this patience of women that makes civilizations.
Margaret Elizabeth Noble. 1867-1911.
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For thousands of years Indian women have risen with the light to perform the Salutation of the Threshold. Thousands of years of simplicity and patience . . . speak in this beautiful rite. It is this patience of women that makes civilizations. Sister Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life (1904).

In his novel, S. (1988), John Updike tried a couple of new wrinkles. If we can add recording tapes into the category, S. is an epistolary novel, and it’s told from a woman’s point of view. The ‘S.’ in the novel is Sarah P. Worth, a 42-year-old weary of her suburban life, who leaves her doctor-husband a note (the novel’s first epistle, I think), and flies off to an Arizona where she enters an Ashram and takes up with its guru, Siri Arhat Mindadali. Updike said he was inspired by Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (Sarah’s “P” stands for Prynne), but I wonder also if he knew of the life (and letters) of Margaret Elizabeth Noble. Like Hester Prynne, Margaret Noble came from severe dissenting stock, born a Congregationalist in Presbyterian Ulster on October 28, 1867. Her father, a farmer turned preacher, died early, and that may have sent Margaret on her journeys, first into school teaching and high church Anglicanism (in the English Lake District), then (following on the death of her intended marriage partner, and in rapid succession) Liverpool and the theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and John Ruskin (on, respectively, child development and adult or perhaps adolescent art). Then, in London, in 1895, at a meeting of the Sesame Club (devoted to discussion of educational notions). Margaret Noble met Swami Vivekenanda, a devotee of the Ramakrishna Mission, and in 1898 followed him off to India. There in a flash Margaret became Sister Nivedita (‘the dedicated one’) and became his devoted disciple. There her story and that of Sarah P. Worth diverge. As Sarah discovered that her Ashram was a racket and her guru a confidence trickster, she used her growing stature in the Ashram to bilk the bilkers and ended up a wealthy widow in a Caribbean tax haven. Margaret Noble, on the other hand, remained ‘the dedicated one,’ not so much to Vivekenanda but to her changing vision of who he really was and what he really wanted. Indeed Vivekenanda died shortly after Margaret-Nivedita returned to India, and so dedicated a one was she that, today, Nivedita is seen as a pioneer or precursor of modern Hindu nationalism. That vision was put forth in epistolary form, in letters home (which were collected and published in 1982, certainly in time for Updike to read them) and in her biography of Vivekenanda.The Master as I Saw Him (ca. 1908). Her memory is revered today in nationalistic (Hindu) India, where she is remembered as an advocate for the national liberation of India but also of domesticity for Indian women. How unlike, one must say, Updike’s Sarah P. Worth.

[Stanley]

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
Kate Dickens Perugini, 1839-1929
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There was a child but it died. One of Kate Dickens Perugini’s final reflections (circa 1925) on her father’s affair with Ellen Ternan.

William Lever was a model entrepreneur of Britain’s Victorian age, successful in business (from ca. 1900 he started selling his premier laundry soap, ‘Sunlight,’ in tablet form), in Liberal Party politics, and in benefactions to the British nation, the latter including a fairly daft project for remodeling the poor crofters of the Outer Hebrides into a utopian industrial community. Like the Hebrides boondoggle, many of these schemes failed, but not all. Among Lever’s (so far) permanent gifts was the Lady Lever Art Gallery, which Lever dedicated in memory of his wife in 1922. Within a glorious beaux arts building one can find a broad range of arts and crafts including a moderately famous Victorian painting, The Black Brunswicker (1860) by J. E. Millais. It shows a tragic moment, when a Brunswicker, in formal regimental dress (black) bids farewell to his beloved, she in bridal white. As a Victorian audience would have understood, he was off to death in battle, in the Brunswickers’ gallant, suicidal charges before and at Waterloo. Millais sold the painting for 100 guineas in 1860, a price that made it important to the regeneration of his own career. The Levers bought it for their private collection in 1896, perhaps because they saw its backstory as a complement to their own ideas of domestic bliss and public heroism. It’s not clear whether they also knew that the female model for the painting was Kate Dickens, the novelist Charles’s second-eldest daughter. Kate was born on October 29, 1839, and named after her mother. In 1860 Kate herself was but recently married, unhappily and on the rebound from her discovery of her father’s affair with Ellen Ternan, then almost exactly Kate’s age, and its miserable denouement in fracturing the Dickens family (only Kate stuck with her mother). By 1896, when the Levers bought her likeness, she was Kate Perugini, married more happily to Carlo, and the pair of them making their prosperous way as fashionable painters, portraits and landscapes generally, both fellows of the Royal Academy and Kate a pioneer president of the Society of Lady Artists. A benefactress herself, Kate would do much for Dickens scholarship by willing her father’s letters to the British Museum. But it’s the painting the Levers liked, in which Kate (one imagines her as a young bride) appears beautiful but fearful, her blood-red ribbon and her worried eyes forecasting the fate of her heroic cavalryman. Next time you are in Liverpool, take a ferry ‘cross the Mersey and see it for yourself. Along the way, take in some of the remaining buildings of another Lever scheme, the industrial utopia of Port Sunlight. ©

[Stanley]

The comic difference between 'suit' and 'suite.'
The World Premiere of One Night in the Tropics
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Abbott: Where is that guy?
Costello: Maybe he’s in my hotel suit.
Abbott: Not your hotel suit, your suite.
Costello: You’re cute too, Abbott.
Dialogue from One Night in the Tropics, 1940.

The film One Night in the Tropics had its world premiere on October 30, 1940, in Paterson, NJ. Paterson aside, the film showed some strengths of Hollywood’s ‘studio system.’ Universal had bought the rights to a Jerome Kern Broadway musical, but to save time and money the studio squeezed it into an old ‘property’ of the silent era (Universal’s The Reckless Age, 1925). And the studio had plenty of talent on hand and waiting for work, including William Frawley (later Fred Merz on “I Love Lucy”), but in 1940 already an old Hollywood character actor. Newly available on the lot was Leo Carillo, just setting out on a career path that would take him to fame and fortune as “The Cisco Kid.” Nancy Kelly, one of the film’s two (!!) love interests, would later join the original Broadway run of the four-handed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And several of the film’s songs were written by Dorothy Fields, whom you should know better for she had already written “The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” and would in the future do “Big Spender.” With all these folks just sitting around, production took no time at all (34 days). But why Paterson for the premiere? Not for any good reason, for instance that Paterson was the arena within which Dr. William Carlos Williams envisaged some of his best poetry. Rather it was the birthplace (1906) of one of the film’s “supporting actors,” Lou Costello. Costello was a new Universal boy who’d recently made a hit with Bud Abbott, their “Who’s On First” routine an instant radio classic, and Universal hoped that by plugging the ‘Abbott & Costello’ duo into One Night in the Tropics the studio might begin to find its way out of the financial wilderness. Those hopes could not have been high (“Premiered in Paterson??!! Really??”); but that’s what happened. Listed in support on the playbill of One Night in the Tropics, Abbott and Costello overnight became stars in their own right with (inter alia) BuckPrivates, Hold that Ghost, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. So when in 1949 Universal re-released One Night in the Tropics, Abbott and Costello were re-billed as the film’s **stars**. And that’s how I saw them, in Saturday matinees at Des Moines’ Varsity Theater. I didn’t like films very much, but Abbott & Costello were great fun, and I loved eating popcorn in a place full of kids and empty of teachers. ©

[Stanley]

"I don't like to say a house is any 'style.'" Lutah Maria Riggs
Lutah Maria Riggs, 1896-1984
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I don’t like to say a house is any style. It’s just a house—the best solution I could think of to a given problem . . . a shelter from the elements, a place of retreat and rest, a place for happiness, if possible, and enough beauty to lift the spirit. Luta Maria Riggs.

Following on the professional breakthrough of Julia Hunt Morgan (1872-1957), Lutah Maria Riggs was probably not surprised to see three other women in her graduating class (1919. Architecture) at the University of California. But where Morgan began with family money behind her (she’d obtained her first qualifications from Paris’s Ecole des Beaux Arts) Lutah Maria Riggs had to make her own way. Although Riggs was born (in Toledo, Ohio on October 31, 1896) in comfortable circumstances, her father’s early death left Lutah and her mother in financial straits, and the pair moved to California where Lutah worked her way up through a ‘manual training’ high school and then a junior college, before transferring to Berkeley in 1916. Along the way she’d developed her own sense of style; her early photos (from the 1920s) make her look like a flapper with attitude, bangs, shawls, Chevy roadster and all, but she had enough design sense to land a job in a good partnership and to begin a career which, while it did produce some notable ‘public’ buildings (including a Mormon church, a shopping center, a bank, and the clubhouse at Pebble Beach), concentrated very much on the domestic. Riggs’ homes still litter the townscapes of Santa Barbara and environs, and they show a pleasing eclecticism (not to be confused with the inchoate quotings of post-modernism). If Lutah Riggs had a ‘style’ it would be called Spanish colonial, but with a twist that makes her homes memorably contemporary. The larger houses, for instance one for a German baron and his wife (Montecito, 1937), are grand and striking in appearance (a lot of white wall, a lot of red tile roof, and some curved eminences), but Lutah didn’t turn up her nose at smaller commissions, and many of her more modest designs (including the house she built for herself) still exist and command prices well above what their square footage might warrant. Most of them, grand or modest, fit into and take advantage of their landscapes. Lutah lived a long while (1896-1984), worked for a time (WWII) in Hollywood set design, and finished up with her own firm, working by herself or as senior partner. In Santa Barbara, a “Lutah Maria Riggs Society,” founded in 2013, proclaims that “LUTAH is still going strong, and getting better every day.” I hope so. Having seen some of her houses just today and for the first time, I find her work very pleasing, an encouraging October surprise. ©

[Tripps]

Quite irrelevant, but -

Le Corbusier said " a house is a machine for living in" . I think Stanley has proved that to be correct.

This lady died in Montecito Ca. which is the current abode of Their Royal Highnesses Ginge and Whinge.

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

"They were going to look at war, the redanimal--war, the blood-swollen god." Henry Fleming observes his comrades in The Red Badge of Courage.
Stephen Crane, 1871-1900
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man said to the universe: “Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation." Stephen Crane, 1899.

Generally heedless of even my father’s best advice, I didn’t read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) until graduate school, and then as a source book for late 19th-century social history. Dad’s copy of the novella was the center-piece in Hemingway’s Men at War (1942), a battered anthology dad might have read as he prepared for his own war experience in western Europe. The anthology was marketed as “inspirational,” a multiple irony but especially so given Crane’s treatment of Henry Fleming’s response to (probably) the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville (1863). Fleming runs away, loses himself in mental fog, and then attempts morally miserable ways to bury his cowardice. Looking back, I think that’s why dad recommended Crane’s story, but it’s interesting also because, when Crane’s novella first appeared, several reviewers thought it not a fiction at all but the narrative of a Chancellorsville survivor, even one from a particular New York regiment. It wasn’t, for Stephen Crane was born in New Jersey on November 1, 1871, the son of a Methodist minister, a circuit-rider, and had had never even smelled warfare. Indeed Crane dropped out of a military school on the advice of an elder brother that, since there would be no wars, there was no sense in preparing for one. Crane also dropped out because he was a young man adrift, one who never finished his subsequent college courses. Instead he stumbled around in journalism, reporting on the flotsam and jetsam of the Gilded Age. His first major literary endeavor was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a low-lifer herself whose story did not, at first, sell very well (and was published anonymously). Then came The Red Badge of Courage, serialized all over and issued in book form in 1895. To the then 15-year-old Henry Mencken, The Red Badge came “like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky,” a battle hymn that one could actually believe in. To quite a few elderly veterans of Chancellorsville it seemed to be all about cowardice and lies. Both responses were right, of course, and so Crane suddenly found his name, published The Red Badge as his novel, and for good measure reissued Maggie’s sad tale. After that Crane was the darling of forward-thinking critics and rarely out of employment. Irony being the thing, he was often a war correspondent and had his first whiff of real gunsmoke reporting on the Greco-Turkish war (1897). But it was too late for heroism. Long since tubercular, Crane succumbed to the disease in 1900, aged only 28, leaving us to wonder about the relationship between imagination and reality. ©

[Stanley]

Nothing is new but that which is forgotten.
Queen Marie Antoinette
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Let them eat cake. Almost certainly NOT a quotation from Queen Marie Antoinette, although perhaps an understandable misattribution.

Marie Antoinette’s ill-fated life began ill-timed, for she was born on November 2, 1755, All Soul’s Day, a day of mourning, and so her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) decreed that Marie’s birthday should instead be celebrated on All Saint’s Day. Marie was then Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna, an archduchess of Austria, the youngest of the empress’s many children. Maria Theresa’s title was always in doubt, war-provokingly so, and to make matters worse her treasury (on her accession, in 1740) was almost empty. That Maria Theresa reigned for 40 years, created a workable cash-flow system for her treasury, and at her death had placed her surviving children and grandchildren in courts all around Europe, all this has left her with the reputation of being a successful despot. But not an enlightened despot, and not a very good parent either. Maria Theresa treated her youngest daughter to a parental regime which mixed constant criticism and ridicule with constant indulgence, but
she did manage to make Marie Antoinette (by treaty, at age 14) the consort of the French heir apparent. So at 19, Marie Antoinette became queen of France, though with bad teeth, worse French, and indisposed to learn much new, whether from books or from experience. In this situation, we can see Maria Theresa’s fortnightly letters to her daughter—carping and critical as they were—as further obstacles to a successful reign. Her husband’s, Louis XVI’s, frailties provided even more undertow. Had there ever been a royal pair less qualified to face such daunting challenges, like those provided for them by a régime already qualified as ancient? In the issue, it turned out badly. Creaky finances, crumbling structures, and criminal incompetence dissolved the imperial dreams of the Sun King, Louis XIV, into the desperate (at best) maneuvers employed by Louis XIV (and his Queen Marie Antoinette) to avoid the consequences which awaited them both: first a mock trial and then a real guillotine. Marie Antoinette’s final moments, as she mounted the scaffold on October 16, 1793, were among her finest, a mix of resignation and courage. And she did not need to perform these prodigies for her mother’s satisfaction, for Maria Theresa had died in 1780, of the combined effects of ‘long’ smallpox, age, and of the repeated strain of the many pregnancies that testify to her devotion to dynastic duties. ©.

[Stanley]

John Barry, the master of 007's music
John Barry, Composer.
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Occasionally, you get a nice surprise when someone covers your song in an extraordinary way. John Barry, speaking of Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “Born Free.”

John Barry Prendergast was born in the cathedral city of York on November 3, 1933, and died in Oyster Bay, New York in 2011. By then he was known as John Barry, jazz artist and composer, and more particularly as a master of film soundtracks and themes. He learned to love music, and play it, from his mother, a classical pianist and teacher. The idea of putting music to film he got from his father, who’d risen from being a projectionist in the silent era to owning his own string of cinemas in the north of England. So as a youngster John Barry listened to Mahler (obsessively), Sibelius, and Ravel, and used his Dinky Toys to construct battle dramas organized around this or that classical score. On the side, he learned composition from York cathedral’s chief organist while he earned spending money working as a projectionist in the city’s Rialto Cinema. Then, as in a flash, he learned jazz, how to play it (trumpet, mainly), sing it, and how to compose it too, his work being recorded by, among others, Stan Kenton. But if you follow film sound tracks (I don’t), you’ll know John Barry as the composer most closely associated with the James Bond franchise. Starting with Dr. No (1962) and then more clearly with From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964), Barry became and continued (until 1987) the series’ chief composer and its musical mind. For legal reasons (the outcome of a long and ill-tempered court case in 2001), he can no longer be publicly credited with the “James Bond Theme” (introduced on the track of Dr. No) but the film industry dissented, keeping Barry working on Bond movies through the 1980s. Along the way Barry also won awards (Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe) and giving him wider scope as the composer for many famous films, among them Born Free, Midnight Cowboy, and The Lion in Winter, all from the late 1960s, and (later) Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves. A serious illness (ER drama and near death) and the discovery of domestic stability
with his fourth wife, Laurie, moved him into the calmer pleasures of composing on his own, mostly done in classical mode but, I gather, with Bond-ish signature touches of brass, percussion, and synthesizers. Way back, in 1962, young John Barry was hired (for £250!!!) to clean up and orchestrate an existing plan for the soundtrack of Dr. No. It proved to be a good investment. He has left behind him a lot of music, many friends, and a generous scholarship for youngsters who’d like to try their hand at composing for the cinema. ©.

[Stanley]

To search for 'unity' and 'system', at the expense of truth, is not the proper business of philosophy.
G. E. Moore, 1873-1958.
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If I am asked 'what is good? my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it, G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 1903

In my student days I found two disciplines to be particularly difficult, mathematics and philosophy. This frailty persisted despite the heroic and even kindly efforts of three professors (Elizabeth Flowers and William Fontaine in philosophy and Smbat Abian in math) to make me more comfortable with ways of thinking that were at once absolutely precise and impossibly theoretical. Therefore I am not really qualified to write about George Edward Moore (better known as G. E, Moore) who was born on November 4, 1873 in Upper Norwood, now part of South London. That’s because that when Moore (as almost everyone called him) went up to Cambridge he met Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), and in their common enthusiasm for precision and theory would attempt to remake mathematics, philosophy, their interconnections, and their boundaries: Moore through his Principia Ethica (1903) and Russell through Principia Mathematica (1910-1913, a collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). At Cambridge, they were a pair, those two, both members of the intellectually elite “Apostles”, and later with other common associations, not least with the literary and artistic Bloomsbury Group. They inspired each other, and without being too precise or theoretical about it I think it no accident that their first “big” works had such similar titles. They’re both held responsible for the development of “analytical philosophy” a kind of logical marriage between mathematics and philosophy, which is nicely rehearsed in Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1945), understandable enough to win the Literature Nobel and to become one of my best-loved books. Of the two, Russell lived a much more public (even flamboyant) life. G. E. Moore stuck more closely to the academic grind, first lecturer and then Fellow of Trinity College (and university professor of philosophy) who was instrumental in making Ludwig Wittgenstein feel at home in England. In another marked contrast to his friend Russell,
Moore married but once, Dorothy Mildred Ely (1892-1977), a Newnham student in philosophy who called him “Bill” and helped to make their Cambridge home a place where minds met in comfort and congeniality. Moore’s teaching style was legendary and very effective, though bombastic and thus quite different from the heroically kindly philosophers at Penn who tried to teach me how to think. I first learned about Moore from them, and I am glad I did, for even if I don’t quite understand him I can see his affinities with the ‘common sense’ philosophers of 18th-century Scotland. ©

[Stanley]

Remember, remember, the 5th of November
On Guy Fawkes Night . . .
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Remember, remember the fifth of November;
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot . . . .
Opening couplet of a traditional English nursery Rhyme.

In the Spring of 1970, Paulette and I looked for a house (or lodgings) in or near Lancaster. Among the properties we inspected was ‘Monteagle House’ in the Lune Valley village of Hornby. I was charmed by the idea of it, for I knew that a baron Monteagle had had something to do with the famed Gunpowder Plot (1605) and more to the point of my own research was also an early investor in the Virginia Company. We didn’t buy; ‘Monteagle House’ was far too expensive, it fronted directly on the main highway through Hornby, and though it was just across from Hornby Castle (once the seat of the barons Monteagle) it had no connection with them but had been christened ‘Monteagle’ by some previous owner with romantic notions about Monteagle history or, more likely, an appreciation of how its value might be inflated by association with one of the best-known events in English history. Or non-events, for the Gunpowder Plot fizzled like a dampened fuse, and tonight, in Lancaster and all over England,
including Hornby village, there will be yet another celebration of Guy Fawkes Night (the original on November 5, 1605) and of England’s escape from the plotters’ attempt to blow up parliament, devastate the Protestant peerage, kill King James and his eldest son, and spirit his younger son away to be worked on by Spanish priests, made a Catholic, and (returning to his patrimony) bring the Church in England back to Rome. The plot is known about in surprising detail, including the courage (under torture) and simple sincerity of Fawkes himself, who was surprised and arrested while tending about a ton of gunpowder directly under the Lords’ chamber. And among the details is the “Monteagle letter,” sent to the 4th baron Monteagle (William Parker by common name) warning him to stay away from the opening of parliament. Parker was a ‘recusant’ peer, one who had never renounced Rome, and the plotters hoped that he would, by missing the explosion, be among the Catholic aristocrats who would help the young prince return the English lamb to the pope’s fold. The letter itself put Monteagle in a dangerous place; less courageous than Fawkes, and perhaps less sincere as well, Monteagle divulged the letter to the Privy Council, and tonight the explosion that didn’t happen will be mocked by mere firecrackers and countless effigies of “the Guy” will be consumed in bonfires. Fawkes himself suffered the customarily ghoulish fate of traitors. Monteagle died in his sleep in 1622, leaving to his progeny his worthless Virginia stock shares and his Lune Valley castle, but not, I believe, Monteagle House. ©

[Stanley]

You win some, you lose some.
The Elections of 1860 and 1861
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In life you have to rely on the past, and that’s called history. Donald J. Trump.

On 6th November, two of the more significant American elections took place, the first on 6th November 1860, which made Abraham Lincoln of Illinois the 16th president of the United States of America (USA), and the second on 6th November 1861,which made Jefferson Davis of Mississippi the first president of the Confederate States of America (CSA). Among the several curiosities of the CSA election was that it was carried out under the authority of the “Permanent Constitution” of that new nation. Another was that there was only one candidate for the office. In the national election of 1860, under the amendable US Constitution of 1787, there were four major candidates, Lincoln for the Republicans, Stephen Douglas for the National Democrats, John Bell for the Constitutional Union Party, and John C. Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats. Lincoln won only about 40% of the popular vote, but since this was concentrated in the more populous northern states (Lincoln was not even on the ballot in most slave states), he won 180 electoral votes, well over half the total. Lincoln’s election (given his hostility to any expansion of slavery) meant the secession of the “lower south” (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas). Lincoln’s belief that secession was treason (and, therefore, must be resisted) meant that in due course the states of the “upper south” (Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia) would also secede, and Lincoln’s devotion to the union made Civil War inevitable (although Lincoln made sure that the South “fired the first shot”, at Fort Sumter). With Davis’s election as president of the Confederate States of America, the two nations had presidents born only eight months apart, and in towns only 80 miles apart, for both were from the “border state” of Kentucky, which, perhaps appropriately, remained “neutral” in the Civil War. Three other slave states stayed in the union: Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri, but at war’s end the amendable constitution of the USA was changed to abolish slavery and to make enslaved persons (and all of their progeny) free, equal, and natural-born citizens of the country. But that’s another story, which is still being written. Other parts of the story were implicit in those two elections, wherein there were no candidates of color, and all were white, male, and Christians of the Protestant persuasion. But then, in changeable constitutions, things change. In permanent ones, things are not supposed to change. ©

[Stanley]

The most militant Negro woman in the south.
Ruby Hurley, 1909-1980.
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The most militant Negro woman in the South. Jet magazine on Ruby Hurley, 1955.

Ruby Hurley was one of those fieldworkers who gave shape, purpose, and fire to the Civil Rights movement, in her case as a membership recruiter for the NAACP in the heart of the Old South. She traveled where she could—which turned out to be almost everywhere—and worked whenever she could. Working out of Birmingham, Alabama, she made her regional organization the largest in the NAACP and herself a marked woman. She investigated the murders of Emmet Till and civil rights worker George Lee, once assuming the disguise of an elderly female cotton picker. She was certainly thin enough. Work and travel together often left her without food or rest for long periods; she suffered from what we now benignly call stress disorders. And her enemies often threatened worse. Once the threats grew so intense (and obscene) that Birmingham’s black taxi drivers formed an all-night caravan around her block, lights on, driving slowly in a moving wall of protection and defiance. When in 1956 Alabama made the NAACP an illegal organization, subversive and inclined to terrorism, Ruby moved to Atlanta and carried on. She ‘retired’ in 1978, only to become president of the United Methodist Women (another terrorist group, no doubt) and died in 1980. I knew nothing of her until 1909 when President Obama’s Post Office put her (along with Ella Baker, another unsung heroine) on a 42-cent postage stamp, a belated memorial to someone Jet magazine had once called “the most militant Negro woman in the American South.” Ruby Hurley hadn’t begun that way, though. Born in DC on November 7, 1909 (as Ruby Ruffin—an interesting surname in the light of southern history), she had instead followed the self-improvement route, attending Dunbar, Washington’s premier black high school, then studying law although sidetracked into teaching and work for the federal government. She made some progress, but what galvanized her into active ‘subversion’ was the DAR’s (that’s the Daughters of the American Revolution, who if words mean anything ought to be a subversive organization) decision to close its hall to a Marion Anderson concert. Not yet 30, and newly married, Ruby Hurley swung into action (under a banner unfurled by Eleanor Roosevelt) and was at least partly responsible for the huge crowd (75,000) who heard Ms. Anderson sing at the Lincoln Memorial. Hurley won praise, found she liked the work (and the praise, too), and came to the notice of Walter White, then NAACP president, who recruited Ms. Hurley to work in the south, for freedom, citizenship, and equality. And there hangs her story. ©.

[Stanley]

Bong, bong, bong.
Benjamin Hall, 1802-1867.
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The sound of Big Ben striking . . . [is one of] extraordinary rigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that. Virginia Woolf.

Those lucky enough to tour the Palace of Westminster will have been told—early and often, I hope—that although it looks Gothic enough it’s not all that old. In fact it’s the new Palace, designed by architect Charles Barry to replace the old one that (already a bit battered) burned down in 1834. They’ll also know that “Big Ben” is not the clock in the tower but the bell that tolls the hours and half-hours, rings on other occasions, and used to be the BBC’s ‘signature’. But why Big “Ben”? The briefest answer to that question is that it was probably named for one Benjamin Hall. Hall was born in comfortable circumstances in London on November 8, 1802, gently educated at Westminster School and, briefly, at Christ Church Oxford, and was for a long while (1832-1857) MP for Marylebone. Politically he was a bit of a troublemaker and from time to time put forth radical views, for instance that tithes should be abolished and that the Church of England in Wales should conduct its services in the local language. He and his wife Augusta (1802-1896) had inherited neighboring Welsh estates, and although Augusta never learned to speak in Welsh she became a leading patron of Welsh culture—arts, crafts, music, and language—and lived long enough to be revered for it, though not (according to my Welsh friends) in all quarters. As for Ben, the 1850s found him still MP and a newly-minted Commissioner of Works. The new palace was still under construction, still without a clock, and still without a bell, and Benjamin Hall set himself the task of bringing its runaway budget under control and finishing the work. He may have made himself a nuisance, but both the first bell (which cracked on installation in 1857) and the new bell (1859) were cast with Benjamin’s name on them. I do not know whether this was intended as an honor or as a satire in 13.5 tons of cast metal, but that the second bell also cracked seems to me an almost funny coda to the whole thing. It was quickly repaired, however, thanks to some clever work by the then Astronomer Royal; and it still rings today, when asked. Or at least it was expected to ring after the current multi-million pound repair job was finished. As for Benjamin and Augusta, they commissioned Charles Barry to remodel their home estate in Wales, at Llanover, and Ben himself was made Baron Llanover of Llanover and Abercam (Augusta’s estate’s name) in 1857. Since his sons predeceased him the barony expired with Baron Llanover’s death in 1867. We will perhaps hear how well Ben’s bell rings when it reassumes its duties next spring. ©

[Stanley]

With your next oyster, take a Pimms.
James Pimm, 1798-1866. and his Cup.
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It’s always Pimms O’Clock. Keep calm and drink Pimms. Advertising slogans for Pimm’s No. 1 Cup.

If memory serves, and it’s becoming fickler every day, my mother used to trek downtown, in Des Moines, to the 3rd Street fish market, where she would buy live oysters. The market was hard by the Rock Island express freight depot, and the oysters came to town via a refrigerated car and as fast as possible, for we were about as far from the oyster beds as you could be—and still have fresh oysters. Well, pretty fresh; we never had them on the half-shell, but as bed rock of a delicious oyster stew, and always as a midwinter treat. It was not so in 19th-century London, where in the City oyster bars abounded, most of them fast-food joints patronized by a socially mixed clientele, top hats, cloth caps and all. Competition was rife, and each establishment tried to rise above its neighbors by offering special alcoholic “cups” to accompany the shellfish down one’s hatch. Among the most popular “cups” was James Pimm’s “no. 1 cup,” served at Pimm’s growing establishment which came to occupy premises at 3, 4, and 5 Poultry Street. James Pimm, who presided in person, was born on November 9, 1798, at Linstead, Kent, one of several younger sons of a yeoman farmer who might have been engaged in the hops trade. Younger sons of the yeomanry traditionally had to find some other way of life, and James Pimm made his own bed with the oysters of the Thames estuary. He prospered, expanded into the sales & consumption end of the oyster trade, and after his death in 1866 his oyster bar did even better, becoming the property of alderman (later Lord Mayor) Horatio Davies, who, by his death (1912) owned five Pimms Oyster Bars in the City—and they all served Pimms No. 1 Cup. The bars have by now gone the way of all flesh (the last one closed in 1962), but Pimms Cup survives, first on offer wherever the Union Jack flew – which in 1912 was just about everywhere—and now served wherever oyster lovers gather, assuming that the landlords know their business and its history and, not least,
how best to slide an oyster down the hatch. The Pimms recipe is still a secret, but the marque has passed through so many corporate hands (at one time Guinness and now Distillers) that the secret must be a badly kept one. Pimms involves gin, fruit extracts, various liqueurs, spices, and bitter herbs (and doubtless special incantations), and Paulette and I can assure you that it goes down very well with fresh oysters. It’s OK as a summer drink, too, served cold with soda and an orange slice. Or lemon, if you are inclined that way. Or even strawberries and cucumber slices. It’s a socially mixed drink. ©

[Stanley]

A Native American is anyone who was born here.
Russell Charles Means, 1939-2012
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It’s unconscionable that America has become so stupid. Russell Charles Means, aka Wanbli Ohitika

Russell Charles Means was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, on November 10, 1939. His mother, a Yankton Sioux, called him Wanbli Ohitika (“Brave Eagle”), but in life Russell kept his father’s name and went with his father’s Oglala Sioux band. Means went with his father in other ways, too, including various addictions but also in the first Native American ‘occupation’ of Alcatraz Island. That was in 1964; in 1969, after his dad died, Means led a longer occupation at Alcatraz, but this time as a leader of AIM, the American Indian Movement, which Means had joined in 1968. AIM gave Means’ life shape and purpose, and helped him shed his addictions, but he would later break with the movement, or more accurately break it apart, over several issues including Means’ claim to have been a founder of AIM. More indicative of his other lives, for Russell Means was a man of many parts and several talents, he broke with AIM over his opposition to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government which (Means believed) aimed at the extinction of the Miskito Indians. Indeed Means was no leftist, later campaigning with the likes of Larry Flynt and Ron Paul for the Libertarian Party, still later for Ralph Nader. These breaches with the AIM leadership were perhaps signaled by his first campaign (1974) for the presidency of the Oglala Sioux. But he was more than a controversialist, and from 1992 built a new career as an actor in TV and the movies. Mainly he played leading roles, or roles as leaders (including the historical figures Powhatan and Sitting Bull, and James Fenimore Cooper’s literary invention, Chingachgook). Means also became a Native American recording artist, and in 1995 joined with a professional writer to produce his autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread. In his last years of Native American activism, circa 2005-2012, Means led a breakaway Sioux band to renounce all Oglala “treaties” with the US government and claim sovereignty over an extensive area in
the High Plains. This was an embarrassment to the main AIM organization, and would have been to Ron Paul, too, had the latter been successful in his 2012 bid for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. After a. long and eventful life, Russell Means died in 2012. By his direction, his cremains were scattered over the sacred ground of the Black Hills as an appropriate memorial for a man named Wanbli Ohitika of the Oglala band, Sioux Nation. ©.

[Stanley]

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving." Albert Einstein.
Annie Kopchovsky and Her Bicycle.
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I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. . . away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood. Susan B. Anthony, 1895.

Among the tallest tales I ever heard was told to me (in 1957) by two elderly Blisses, my great uncle Fred and his cousin Clarence, who in the very late 1880s left southern Iowa to homestead on the high plains. Clarence made it all the way to Greeley, Colorado, where he farmed well enough to retire to a ranch in the Cache la Poudre canyon. Uncle Fred dropped off in Brady, Nebraska, where his homestead gained much in value after irrigation came in. What made their tale so very tall was that they both claimed that they traveled west by bicycle. It seemed tall to me, anyway, even though their contrasting physiques gave it a similitude of truth. In 1957 Clarence was still tall and muscular; in his late 80s, he still looked like one who could have done it. Fred, small, wiry, and with twinkling eyes, looked just like the sort of fellow who would have decided that Brady was far enough. And the two-wheeled, chain-driven “push” bike was a liberating vehicle, not only for Fred and Clarence Bliss of Diagonal, Iowa, but also for Annie Cohen Kopchovsky who, just a few years later (June 1894), set off from Boston to pedal around the world. Annie was not going to homestead, but traveled under an initial $100 sponsorship (of the Londonderry, New Hampshire, Spring Water company) and, through her entrepreneurial spirit and talent for self-promotion, gained new sponsorships along the way. Since someone, no doubt the water company, thought that no one would notice someone called Kopchovsky, she traveled as “Annie Londonderry.” Annie was already a well-traveled person. She’d begun life (in Latvia, in 1870 or so) as Annie Cohen, emigrated with her family to Boston, married Kopchovsky the peddler, bore three children, and then set off on her transworld cycle adventure. She was, then, roughly the same vintage as Fred and Clarence Bliss. Like them, she gained something from her experience, liberation maybe, but like them she worked it out in trade and domesticity. With her husband and children, she established a clothing business in Boston, and then after a fire reestablished it in New York, and died on November 11, 1947. I never did visit Annie Kopchovsky, of course, but although there is considerable doubt, now, about whether she did indeed cycle all the way around the world, she did pedal across the American great plains (west to east) on the return leg of her journey. So if I’m going to believe Fred’s and Clarence’s stories, I must believe Annie’s, too, and pay my own tribute to the liberating power of having your own wheels and the strength to pedal them. ©.

[Stanley]

On the premier birder of the subcontinent
Salim Ali, his yellow-throated sparrows, and his Harley-Davidsons.
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The more I see of the subspecific inanities [of ornithological tangles over taxonomy], the more I can understand the people who silently raise their eyebrows and put a finger to their temples when they contemplate the modern ornithologist in action. Salim Ali, 1956.

In my walking career I’ve often observed fellow humans observing birds. Of course they are walkers too, but they single themselves out from the hiking tribe by standing stock still, legs apart, eyes glued to the small ends of their binoculars, gazing upwards. Some, like the gentleman who conducts “owl prowls” in St. Louis’s magnificent Forest Park, specialize in this or that bird family, some (as with the prowler) focusing on a single species (he’s a great horned owl man). Some, who call themselves “twitchers,” collect sightings, the rarer the better. It may be a common pursuit. Most birds fly, unaided as it were, and that’s been fascinating. Some perform unusual mating rituals. Others are just beautifully bizarre. So “birding” may be a universal eccentricity, and we should not be surprised to find its devotees popping up in other countries. Take for instance Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali, born into an upper class Muslim family in Bombay, British India, on November 12, 1896. A ninth child, Salim Ali was brought up by a doting auntie and a very busy uncle, who both encouraged their slightly odd, hesitant charge to take up boyish things, in Salim’s case marksmanship with an air rifle. He became dead accurate, but at 12 he shot a rare and particularly beautiful sparrow and it changed his life (as he describes the incident in his autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow). He didn’t stop killing but he did begin to collect birds, to arrange them in displays, to learn their life stories and life habits, and to write about it all. This fascination took him to Europe, principally Germany, where he learned scientific ornithology. His methods were not orderly enough for leaders in the field (Ernst Mayer thought Salim hopelessly vague) but Salim kept at it, following Mughal (Muslim) traditions in birding, and on his return to the subcontinent began to work for the preservation of birds and their sustaining environments. That he and his family were also deeply involved in the nationalist movement helped Salim to ensure that when India became independent, conservation and preservation would be on the national agenda. A friend of successive prime ministers (from Nehru on), his own eccentricities (not only for collecting birds but also for collecting motorcycles, including Harleys) became the basis of modern Indian legends. Salim Ali kept at both tasks through his 80s and died at 90, remembered affectionately for his eccentricities and memorialized in the names of new species and several new forest and seaside preserves. ©.

[Stanley]

Grant me charity and continence, but not yet.
Augustine of Hippo
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Love has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like. Augustine of Hippo, Sermons.

More is known about Augustine of Hippo than almost any other of the ‘Church Fathers,’ and today Augustine is renowned, indeed revered, in most of the major Christian communions. Given the Christian predilection for persecuting their heterodox and exterminating their heretics, this is a remarkable achievement. It owes partly to the mountain of writings that Augustine has left us (5 million words or thereabouts, and thus at least a little something for everyone). It also reflects Augustine’s own accomplishments, his ability to synthesize the religious traditions of his time, and the unflinching honesty of his self-studies, his appreciation of the immense distance between himself—willful and wayward yet well-meaning—and a single deity, all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfect. Born Aurelius Augustinus on November 13, 354 on the African fringes of the Roman Empire, Augustine began as a Christian, but his unremitting studies set him adrift amongst Greek traditions and Christian heresies. At the same time, his physical hungers and thirsts made him an enthusiastic sampler of what life had to offer. His period at Milan, as a philosopher to the pope, led to a resolution which was both a conversion to Christianity (which he dated August 386) and a commitment to figure it all out, both his personal story and his society’s. His writings on these subjects, notably his Confessions and The City of God, would in a long millennium make him the spiritual father of the Protestant Reformation (in both its Lutheran and Calvinistic varieties) while his polemic defenses and definitions of an evolving Christian orthodoxy made him a saint of the Roman and some Eastern Orthodox churches (and for good measure his very patient mother became Saint Monica). Augustine’s life climaxed with his long tenure (395 to 430) as Bishop of Hippo (back in the land of his birth, in present-day Algeria). He left behind him models of critical introspection, of charity to others (after his conversion he renounced his inheritances and gave all to the poor), and the self-sacrifice of constant struggle against what he regarded as original sin (“grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”). His mountain of surviving writings (including all or parts of over 500 sermons) helped to ensure that today, Christians in many denominations find in Augustine a model of piety and the idea that a religious life is one of becoming rather than of being. ©.