BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

To the glory of God, and so that my neighbor might be benefited. J. S. Bach's inscription on his Organ Book.

In early modern Europe (ca. 1500-1750) music retained some of the characteristics of a craft guild, like weaving or glass blowing. Not necessarily highly respected, musicians had their place, and one way they held it was to pass the trade on to their children. So music ran in families, and before we jump to any genetic conclusions we should consider the social forces that kept it so. And why these ‘guild’ families would occasionally produce geniuses (e.g. Antonio Vivaldi) is anyone’s guess. Certainly Johann Sebastian Bach, music genius extraordinaire, was very likely to become some kind of musician. Born in Eisenach on March 21, 1685, his father was the leader of the town’s musicians, all his uncles held musical posts, and so did a couple (at least) of cousins. So Johann’s musical tuition came cheap. His family saw that he was something of a prodigy so when Johann was orphaned at 8, two uncles, a second cousin, and an elder brother stepped up to offer further instruction (and, doubtless, bread and board). At 13, Johann won a music scholarship to Luneberg, and by the time he was 18 he was court musician to a minor German nobleman and learning that to be such was still to be considered something of a menial, a servant. But sheer talent will sometimes win the day, and from age 23 to his death at 65 Johann Sebastian Bach held musical posts of some distinction in Weimar, Köthen, and finally Leipzig (1723-1750). At Leipzig, where his position owed more to the mercantile town and its church than to any aristocrat, Bach found his social position much improved. He received commissions from neighboring princes, married well (twice, secondly to a soprano, Anna Magdalena Wilcke) and produced not only a flood of wondrous music (choral and instrumental, solo and ensemble) but a great passel of children some of whom, oddly enough, became musicians. Music was, when all is said and done, the family trade. ©

[Stanley]

I like my persona; I often wish I were him, and not me. Billy Collins.

I still have my Grandma Simms’s volumes of poetry (one Whittier, one Longfellow) given her by an elder sister (Gretta) for her 11th and 13th birthdays (1886 and 1888). They mutely remind me that once upon a time in America poets could make a living being poets. Indeed, as Christoph Imscher points out, in Longfellow Redux (2006), that might be reason enough to re-evaluate both Longfellow and the culture for which he wrote. Certainly few poets since have been so attuned to their art and to their readership. One who might qualify is Billy Collins, born on March 22, 1941 and, as far as I know, happily celebrating his 76th birthday. Granted, he holds a couple of academic appointments still, at the City University of New York and at SUNY Stony Brook, but of Collins it is possible to say that poetry is his “day job.” And comparisons with Longfellow may be apt. Collins’s style is different and certainly appears to be less rule-bound, but whatever their subject they are easily entered into and can be enjoyed (if that’s your wish) without too much thought. And then again, a turn of phrase, a zinger in the last line, can unsettle the most complacent brain on its most comfortable day. Collins’s popularity was, critically speaking, part of his problem, almost as if we couldn’t accept that a poet with a middlebrow market could quite make the critical grade, but he’s grown on us, and on foreign critics too. His Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000) was praised in the UK for its “rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence” and as containing “great verse, moving, intelligent, and darkly funny.” Indeed, if you don’t like poetry, or don’t think that you like poetry, I would particularly recommend that you pick up a Collins (and Billy Collins would like this) at your nearby public library. He doesn’t need the money. Then find a poetry reading to attend. They are becoming more common, perhaps because good poetry is (again) learning to be more common, too. And the poets you hear there probably still need the money. ©

[Stanley]

Age, weight, sex, occupation, climate, and season must determine the diet of a person in normal condition. From the first chapter of the 1918 edition of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

My grandfather Bliss, a professor of animal husbandry, ran the Iowa State Extension Service to help (male) farmers apply science to their art. Alongside him, although possessed of a BA in English, grandma Bliss spread the gospel of domestic science to farm wives and, indeed, to anyone who would listen. In her Ames neighborhood, for instance, she became an evangelist of the tomato and encountered opposition (which she did not brook) from recent immigrant women who thought it poisonous. “Domestic science” was in the air, arising partly out of 19th-century scientific discoveries about heat, energy, and the intricate chemistry of foodstuffs. Its most famous practitioner was Fannie Merritt Farmer, born in Boston on March 23, 1857, into a middle-class household whose four daughters were expected to go to college and, probably, thus become better wives and mothers. Fannie’s route to education and domestic bliss was entirely disrupted by one of those weird, rare childhood traumas that keep parents awake at night, a paralytic stroke at age 16. At first unable even to walk, she became her parents’ patient, and their favored therapy was cooking. At 30 she was well enough to enroll in the Boston Cooking-School, where she stayed long enough to become its director, fully absorbing its lesson that cooking was indeed a science and passing that lesson on first to students and then, famously, to a very much wider public. Her father had been a printer and editor so perhaps it was second nature for Fannie to compile and publish The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (1896). The publisher, perhaps not yet sold on standard measures, the physics of heat, and the chemistry of food, limited the first run to 3,000 copies, published at Fannie’s expense. It sold like hotcakes and it’s still in print today, now bearing its author’s name, as The Fannie Farmer Cook-Book. You can also acquire facsimile of the 1896 and 1918 editions, to get its original flavor. ©

[Stanley]

The next time I am buried it will not be alive if I can help it. Harry Houdini, 1919, after emerging from an escape trick that almost went wrong.

Eric Weisz was born in Budapest on March 24, 1874, the fourth (of seven) child of Rabbi Mayer Weisz. In the late 1870s the family emigrated to the USA where Rabbi Weisz took a position with a reform congregation in Appleton, WI.. Soon Eric was in New York City as “Prince of the Air,” a 9-year-old trapeze artist. This experience gained him a muscular and agile frame which, after about 1890, he would put to astonishing use as Harry Houdini, Harry Handcuff Houdini if you please (that was how he registered for the draft in WWI). At first, Houdini subsisted mainly on sleight of hand routines, card tricks and the like, but he soon added handcuff escapes and a beautiful assistant, his wife Wilhelmina Beatrice (“Bess”), and in St. Paul, MN, in about 1900, he began to concentrate on the Houdini science, escapology, adding ever more spectacular tricks to his trade and becoming in the process the highest-paid vaudevillian in America. In one that I would have liked to see, he caused the disappearance of an elephant (he always used an Indian elephant named Jennie). This particular trick he purchased from another magician, and one of the more interesting facets of Houdini’s career was that he always stridently insisted that he did magic, not mystery. Not only would he periodically reveal the secret of this or that trick (it made great publicity), but he also ran something of a one-man campaign against those who claimed supernatural powers whether they were competing magicians or working in other popular trades as mediums or psychics. Yet he himself did believe in the possibility of spirit communications. After his death (in 1926, brought on partly by his performing even when quite ill with infection), Bess held highly publicized séances trying to communicate with him. But in 1936 she gave it up, saying “ten years is long enough to wait for any man.” ©

[Stanley]

The artists I most admired were Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and Charles Christian. Igor Stravinsky, responding elliptically to the question of whether the "ebony" in his title meant the clarinet.

In the last century, there have been many efforts to merge, mix, or meld classical music with jazz and blues. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra has a Gershwin concert coming up in a couple of weeks (we’ll be there to enjoy “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Concerto in F”), and among other jazz and blues geniuses Duke Ellington (“Black, Brown, and Beige”, 1943) and Dave Brubeck (“Brandenburg Gate”, 1963) successfully explored classical formats. If that was a challenge, the classical side of the coin has responded to it. Although I have yet to hear an orchestra in a “jam session,” I am sure it’s been tried, and formal compositions which owe much, even almost everything, to jazz or blues are plentiful. The London Jazz Festival of 2014 devoted much time to exploring the classical connection, and they had plenty to choose from. Some, like Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, were never intended for jazz but got jazzy renditions at the festival. But there were deliberate importations, notably Igor Stravinsky’s “Ebony Concerto,” originally composed on commission for the Woody Herman band. It was premiered, to much ballyhoo, on March 25, 1946, when Herman was at the top of his tree and Stravinsky still establishing himself as a modern genius (that task took a while, having begun with “The Firebird”, 1910). In these days of modern miracles you can hear the 1946 performance, by the Herman band, on YouTube. The Guardian’s critic, in 2014, thought the London rendition showed the ultimate incompatibility of these musical formats (“strait-jacketed . . . there isn’t a moment of improvisation”), but let’s face it, we now often hear jazz classics composed by jazz greats rendered from set scores. No improvisation? Perhaps not improvisation as such, but we all know that some performances are very much better than others; therefore exactness is not something we should always listen for in the concert hall or at the jazz club. ©

[Stanley]

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Richard Dawkins, 1976.

Not many people realize that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution provides a powerful model of inquiry for other disciplines than biology. Its wider utility was noted early on by “Darwin’s Bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, but at was discredited by its perverse use (by others) to justify the rise of the 19th-century industrial elite as a manifestation of “survival of the fittest.” There is evidence that Darwin himself would have rejected that “social Darwinist” argument. But he would have been much happier to know of the use of “Darwinism” in literary criticism, an approach pioneered by UMSL’s Joe Carroll, and pleased also that Carroll (in the best modern edition of On the Origin of Species) also gives Darwin his due as a powerful literary artist. Another pioneer in applied Darwinism is Richard Dawkins, born in Kenya on March 26, 1941. Dawkins enjoyed a typical upper-middle class youth on his father’s Oxfordshire estate, then went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied biology. His DPhil came in 1968, and after a brief sojourn at Berkeley he returned to Oxford, where he retired in 2008 as Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. During that whole period Dawkins donned Huxley’s mantle as advocate-in-chief for Darwin’s role in revolutionizing our understanding of evolution; but he also extended it first to animal behavior (not a big jump) and then, very early on, to the evolution of human cultures. We are, after all, a thinking animal, and in several books (starting with The Selfish Gene, 1976) Dawkins argued that our most useful thoughts (or ways of thought) have almost as good a chance of survival (as “cultural memes”) as do our most fortuitous genetic mutations. I have my doubts about all this (it can bear at least a passing resemblance to social Darwinism), but there is no doubt whatsoever that in 1970 when I left Oxford and Dawkins returned, Oxford was the gainer. ©

[Stanley]

The skin colors were part of the choreography. He saw what was going to happen in the world and put it on stage. George Mitchell, remembering Ballanchine's direction to the dancers in the premiere of Agon.

Given the terrible encumbrances that poverty imposes on children (of all races), it’s wrong to suggest that ‘education saves lives.’ But there are many stories that show its potential to do so. Among them is Arthur Mitchell’s. At the beginning it didn’t seem that education could help. Born on March 27, 1934, in Harlem, Mitchell became the family breadwinner at age 12 when his father was jailed. He earned money in several ways, not all of them legal, when his case worker suggested that he might do better in life by nurturing his talents. So Mitchell applied to and was accepted by the New York High School for the Performing Arts and graduated from there into an astonishingly productive career as a ballet dancer, choreographer, teacher, and impresario. Aged only 21, in 1955, he was taken into the New York City Ballet by George Ballanchine and in 1957 cast in the lead (with Diana Adams) in the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Agon. This caused much adverse comment but Ballanchine persisted and the performance became a staple in the company’s foreign tours (but American television advertisers were not yet ready to countenance such stage intimacy between a black man and a white woman). In the 1960s Mitchell began his second career as a dance entrepreneur, founding or helping to found new companies in various places (including, in 1966, the National Ballet Company of Brazil). M. L. King’s assassination brought Mitchell back home where he cobbled together quite a bit of capital to found the Dance Theatre of Harlem. His success in recreating and extending the educational pathways he traveled brought honors and awards to Mitchell, not least from President George W. Bush and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the former trumped and the latter soon to be scrapped by a president who apparently doesn’t believe that art, education, and opportunity are natural partners. ©

[Stanley]

I thought then that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end'. Thomas Clarkson, memoirs.

Did you ever write an undergraduate essay that changed your life? In 1784 Thomas Clarkson did just that when he competed for Cambridge University’s annual Latin prize. The essay title was (in English) “Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?” Clarkson won the prize, but his researches (he concentrated on the slave trade) left him devastated. One day, resting his horse at an inn in Hertfordshire, he thought on what he had found and decided to devote his life to ending the evil. Then and there, Thomas Clarkson entered on a long lifetime of work to end the slave trade (1808), to extirpate slavery in the British Empire (1832), and to end slavery in the United States, a task he did not live to see fulfilled. Thomas Clarkson was born in Wisbech, Cambridge, on March 28, 1760, in the grammar school where his father, the Rev’d John Clarkson, was headmaster. His mother Anne was of an extensive Huguenot family of merchants and gentry; Thomas’s inheritance from her enabled him to spend his life, and much of his wealth, in the anti-slavery cause. Along the way, Clarkson clocked thousands of miles on horseback, traversing Britain to rouse his Anglican co-religionists and his Quaker friends to hold private and public meetings, to question parliamentary candidates and then pester them in office, to keep always before them the horrors of the slave ship and the sugar plantation. After 1832, the lessons learned in the British campaign were exported to North America, and Thomas Clarkson was in the chair at the grand inception of that partnership, the World Anti-Slavery Convention that opened in London in June 1840. After Clarkson’s death, William Wilberforce’s family tried to downplay Clarkson’s role in the crusade, but in the 1890s monuments to him were erected at that Hertfordshire inn and at Wisbech, and a discreet Clarkson tablet was installed at the Wilberforce memorial in Westminister Abbey. ©

[Tripps]

I've been to Wisbech. It's not too far away, but it was quite a long time ago, and I don't recall seeing the monument to Clarkson - which surprises me. I just remember a very large town square, with mainly charity shops around the edge. It's an impressive structure, and It doesn't need a DNA test to work out that it was designed by the same chap who did the Albert Memorial.

Interesting to see how very long ago slavery was abolished in Britain and the colonies.

[Stanley]

the different parts of my career seemed to take place in different rooms, albeit in the same house. Richard Rodney Bennett, 2011.

March gives us another opportunity to consider the (permeable) boundaries between classical and jazz music, for March 29, 1936 was the birth-date of Richard Rodney Bennett, who composed and performed in both genres (and, be it said, a few others) well enough to be knighted by the queen in 1998 for his services to the arts. By then, Bennett had been resident in New York City for two decades (and today his ashes rest in Brooklyn), but residential loyalties do not seem to have bothered Elizabeth II very much. Born in Kent to a muscial mother (trained by Gustav Holst) and a poet father who also wrote and illustrated children’s books, a career in the arts might have seemed inevitable and it was made more likely by his years as a scholarship student at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and in Paris with Pierre Boulez. With Boulez (and at Darmstadt) he completely absorbed modernist, serialist and atonal composition techniques, which he took back to London to teach at the Royal Academy. Boulez was also knocked out by Bennett’s artistry at the keyboard, and so piano performance was another of his talents. He composed many classical pieces, including chamber music, symphonies and an opera (“The Mines of Sulphur,” 1965, revived in 2005 to rave reviews), but he soon turned away from atonal modes to compose for the stage, for cinema, and even for TV serials. Increasingly, though, he was absorbed by jazz where, in partnership with vocalists such as Cleo Laine, Annie Ross, and Marion Montgomery he recorded and performed (most famously in long cabaret stints at New York’s Algonquin Hotel). Bennett’s performance repertoire always included the jazz classics and his own compositions. His compositional output in his varied genres was, as The Guardian’s obituary modestly put it, “colossal.” Bennett died in his New York apartment in December 2012. He was survived by his companions, his sister Meg Peacocke and his cat Amelia. ©

[Stanley]

The world is as bad as it is . . . because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed. Anna Sewell, Black Beauty.

My first real encounter with fiction as a concept came in Miss Bielefeldt’s 3rd-grade class at Greenwood in Des Moines. We were reading my favorite book, Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion (1941), and in discussion I averred that Alec Ramsay was a real boy, old Henry a real race horse trainer, and the story a true one. Susan Goldberg, a classmate and friend who knew a lot about horses (and drew them beautifully), disabused me of this comforting idea and used as proof her own favorite “fiction,” Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell. Quite apart from whether these books were ‘true,’ or ‘false,’ Sewell’s has turned out to be the better, longer-lived, and more often read, said to be the 6th all-time best seller in the English language. Anna Sewell was born on March 30, 1820, in Yarmouth, into a prosperous family of Quaker tradesmen (her father Isaac became a banker). In 1832 she suffered an injury which, badly treated, crippled her for life and further compromised her frail constitution. Forever an invalid, she lived with her parents her whole life, sampling various strains of religious dissent but never settling on any one communion. Her single book, written over a long period and published in 1877, a year before her death, is not only about a horse; it’s also about the religious virtues that Anna distilled from her spiritual samplings and the kindnesses she experienced from her carers. In his adventures, Black Beauty encounters them all, and a rather greater number of human vices, and in telling us his story (the book was “translated from the original equine”) gives us a pilgrim’s progress that continues to inspire young readers. Well of course, Susan said, “horses don’t really tell stories!” Teacher (Miss Bielefeldt has always been one of my heroes) referred the question to class discussion, where it turned out that I was in a minority of one. Hurt, embarrassed, and outgunned, I swore off fiction for at least a month. And I never did learn how to draw a horse, although Susan tried to teach me that, too. ©

[Stanley]

A man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. Dr. Johnson, quoted by Boswell, 1776.

During the 1700s, the ‘Grand Tour’ became almost a requirement for young Englishmen of a certain quality and a fat wallet. And while a few might go here or there in Europe, it was to Italy they flocked, so many that “milordi” entered the Italian vocabulary. Most of these swans were indeed migratory, but by the 19th century enough had stayed (with their ‘pens,’ in quasi-colonial gatherings of expatriates) to become objects of biography, history, and (for Henry James and E.M. Forster) fiction. Once there it was fashionable to ogle the art, write feelingly about it (passion was OK when cultivated in a warm climate), and maybe take some home. Better (and cheaper), you could have yourself “done” admiring the bridges of Florence or enraptured by a geographically impossible collection of classic bronzes and marbles. Many artists gathered to exploit this market (it’s said that Italian painting suffered from portraying too many Englishmen), among them a definable group of English painters. Thus it is that the paintings of Thomas Patch appear so often in so many collections, in stately homes, in royal palaces, and even in some American museums. Patch, baptized in St. Paul’s, Exeter, on March 31, 1725, was destined to take up his father’s profession (medicine), but fell off that wagon in 1747 when he traveled to Italy with a young friend (who later became librarian to George III and bought some Patches for his patron), was himself enraptured, and luxuriated in a climate that tolerated his (discreet) homosexuality: not in Rome, where he was tried and exiled by the Inquisition, but in Florence. There he learned to paint, and painted up a storm: portraits of milordi of course, Tuscan landscapes to be sure, ruins you bet, but perhaps above all exquisite miniatures. These were popular among tourists, and Patch liked them too, for he had, he thought, become an expert in understanding human physiognomy. ©

[Stanley]

It is in the hours of darkness that it is most glorious to believe in the light. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Nobel Banquet Speech, 1997, quoting the poet Edmond Rostand.

In Genesis, after finishing with creation, God brought his handiworks to Adam “to see what he would call them.” It’s one way of explaining our most human characteristic, naming things, and among definable groups of humans physicists have run furthest with it. Where they think of their names, heaven only knows. More than one observer has suggested that physicists have a Ministry of Silly Names (after Monty Python’s 1970 ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ sketch), but in truth they’d begun earlier than that. So we have quarks and antiquarks, bare bottoms, charm, and flavors, such a proliferation that once, lost for words, they added “strangeness” to the list, surely a redundancy. They are smart people though, and widely read, so some of their names have really interesting origins, perhaps none more so than “Sisyphus Cooling.” We owe that one to Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who received the 1997 Nobel for the science (not the poetry) behind the name. Born in Algeria on April 1, 1933, he studied physics at Paris’s École normale supérieure and then the University of Paris, receiving its highest degree in 1962, and soon began research in lasers. He devised a way to use laser beams (plural) to “trap” molecules and thus reduce them to impossibly low temperatures. That is a perversely unstable world where every time you think you’ve got one trapped it moves: not far and not fast, but enough to keep itself (and its matrix) just barely above absolute zero, and so you must trap it again, and again, and again, and again ad infinitum. The internet says Cohen-Tannoudji (the name means ‘the Cohens from Tangiers’) got the name “Sisyphus Cooling” from Greek mythology. I think he got it instead from his fellow Franco-Algerian Albert Camus, whose Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) was a major reason for another Nobel Prize, that for literature, in 1957. It would be a Physics-Poetics sort of thing to do it that way. ©

[Stanley]

Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is in the same stroke and line. Maria Merian.

Maria Merian was born in Frankfurt on April 2, 1647, the daughter of the pioneering Swiss printer and publisher Matthias Merian. He died when Maria was 3; her mother then married the painter Jacob Marrel. From him she learned how to draw and paint, but it’s not clear where she picked up the fascination with insect and plant life that should have made her a great name of the 17th century’s ‘Scientific Revolution.’ Her exquisite artistry and her inquiring mind won her time and space, enabling her to escape (and to take her two daughters away from) an unhappy marriage, and then to acquire powerful patrons, the City of Amsterdam, the East India Company, and the governor of Surinam. Maria Merian’s extraordinary ‘voyage of discovery’ to Surinam was also financed by her sale of 255 of her own paintings, mostly of plants and insects. But not only the images, for Maria was fascinated by all the stages of insect metamorphosis, a fascination fully expressed by her powers of observation and depiction. She united science and art, never more successfully than in her two-year sojourn in Surinam, South America. She is now credited to be the first to follow the whole metamorph for scores of species, the first to identify the dependence of some insects on certain plants, the first to name many South American plant and insect species. Inter alia, she described leaf-cutter and army ants and observed (and painted) giant spiders eating small birds. And then she disappeared from view. Maria Merian was a she, that was the heart of the problem, and she compounded that handicap by writing in the vernacular, by painting in watercolors (women were not allowed oils in Amsterdam), and by using native and folk names for the objects of her study. Noticed by Darwin, she’s more recently been unearthed by modern feminism, and this June there will be an international scientific symposium, in Amsterdam, held in her name. Not too soon? ©

[Stanley]

One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters. George Herbert.

We think of Izaak Walton (1594-1693) as a fisherman, but what really marked him out was his scribbling. His main subjects, besides the pursuit of fish, were men of a certain stripe, high church royalists of refined literary sensibilities and exemplary piety. If they were fishermen, so much the better. Among the Walton subjects who were clergymen, poets, and anglers two stand out, John Donne and George Herbert. Donne you should know about. Herbert too, if you make regular use of an Anglican hymnbook, for many of his devotional poems have been set to music. George Herbert was born to an aristocratic Anglo-Welsh family on April 3, 1593, the 9th of 10 surviving children. John Donne was his godfather, and two his very much elder brothers became well-placed courtiers. So much the better, for Herbert’s father died when George was 3, and in a miracle of will, love, and money his mother Magdalene kept the whole household together (children, servants, and not a few animals) in its various moves, the main ones being to her mother’s Severn estate, then Oxford and London. Magdalene’s “Kitchin Booke” is a useful historical source for those who want to know about early Stuart domesticity or George Herbert’s childhood, including a string of houseguests that was a who’s who of artistic London (though not the raffish Will Shakespeare). Many connections were made with men who were, or became, bishops, which helped George Herbert through Westminster School, Trinity College Cambridge, brief spells in parliament and at Little Giddings (a sojourn that would later interest T. S. Eliot) and then to an utterly exemplary and sadly short life as a faithful, saintly parish priest at Fugglestone St. Peter, near Salisbury. And there were the poems and devotions, published in the year of his death (1633) as The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. They have survived him, thanks in part to the fact that he fished. ©

[Stanley]

A cavalier, a boon companion, a witty, droll, and waggish poet. Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, on Sir Richard Wharton.

My teaching duties this year have included a couple of lectures on the “Scientific Revolution” of the 17th century, and my students have been surprised to learn that among the “sciences” of those times was astrology, an old art now rendered newly energetic by its association with astronomy and mathematics. One of its most prolific and influential professors was George Wharton, born in Westmorland on April 4, 1617, a mere four centuries ago. He was not born rich but there were connections and funds enough to send him to Oxford, where he studied astronomy and mathematics, but he returned home without a degree. His first almanacs came in 1641 and 1642. His ardent royalism drew him south again, into Civil War battles when required, and into new astronomical studies at Oxford and new friendships in Oxford’s royalist circles. By 1644 he was, in effect, “the” royalist astrologer, doing battle in print with parliamentarian astrologers’ contention that planetary alignments presaged the downfall of the “man of three letters.” The alignments weren’t in dispute (that was the science bit), but whether the man of three letters was King Charles Rex or parliament’s John Pym. For the next five years the astrological print wars raged, and did not end with King Charles’s execution in 1649, Wharton kept at it. His annual star-focused predictions of the downfall of the Republic were regarded as traitorous or at least incendiary, and Wharton was imprisoned several times, but bail was paid and bonds were posted by his Oxford friends, not least Elias Ashmole and Bulstrode Whitlocke. Wharton was (they averred) indeed a scholar and in his way a scientist; and it was as both that he came back into fashion and favor with the Restoration of monarchy, which brought him a succession of profitable offices and ultimately a baronetcy. And, of course, brought us yet more almanacs. ©

[Stanley]

Listen my children and you shall hear// Of a lovely feminine Paul Revere// Who rode an equally famous ride// Through a different part of the countryside. Berton Braley, 1940, in the Milwaukee Journal.

Although John Shy never wrote his ‘big’ book on the military side of the American Revolution, his articles and occasional papers convinced most that the Americans were indeed A People Numerous and Armed (Shy, 1976) and that the ability of the Americans to call up an army out of the woodwork was a constant drain on British resources and on British morale (and a shaping factor of post-war politics). The tendency of that army to fade back into the woodwork was a constant drain on George Washington’s morale, too, but that’s another story. In those days, the only way to rouse the troops was by runner or rider, and the “midnight ride” of Paul Revere is, perhaps, too well known. Another rider who was specifically thanked by General Washington but whose exploit and courage then faded into her family’s memory was Sybil Ludington. She was born on April 5, 1761 into a prosperous New York farming family. Her father Henry was colonel of the local militia. And he may have been more indulgent than most colonial fathers, for he had given young Sybil a horse, Star. So when in the dead of a stormy night word came that the Brits were about to attack the colonial arsenal at nearby Danbury, CT, who but Sybil (aged only 16) flew out into the wind, rain and dark to call up the farmers and tradesmen to rally to the colors and meet the threat? Who, indeed? Sybil and Star raced over 40 miles that night, a good deal further than Paul Revere, but they did not ride into history and she was not immortalized by Longfellow. Rather she rode into a pretty ordinary life as wife and mother, her story finally rescued from obscurity (by a devoted great-grandson) well after her death in 1839. Today she’s remembered by an equestrian statue (a very dramatic one) and, fittingly, by a 40-mile race, retracing her ride, run every year about this time in downstate New York, but by daylight and on foot. ©

[Stanley]

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee, is itself a service. J. S. Mill, On Liberty.

We don’t have many philosophy majors these days, which is I think a pity, but there are some, and there are many more who minor in philosophy or take philosophy courses, so all stand, please, for it’s the birthdate of John Stuart Mill, born on April 6, 1806 in London (albeit to Scottish parents). Mill’s father, a philosopher himself, of the common sense school, discovered precocity in his child, and so by the age of 8 John Stuart Mill had developed a working mastery of Greek, and in his 9th year began a study of Latin and of the great classical philosophers. Mill read for pleasure, too, which was a good thing, and particularly enjoyed fable-stories such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, and found much solace in the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. Thus he learned something about the what-might-have-been side of life. Mill is an important influence on Anglo-American intellectual culture because, while he digested the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the utilitarianism of English philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, he became most interested in, even obsessed by, the problems of freedom and citizenship, and developed a strong theory of liberty. Indeed, his most famous work is On Liberty (1859). Each individual, Mill argued, should be free to act as he lists, as long as he does not harm others. He also developed a radical theory of freedom of speech. On the other hand Mill was not a libertarian (certainly not of the Tea Party variety) for he believed, for instance, that one harmful act was to refuse to pay your taxes. Not surprisingly, Mill found slavery particularly odious and disapproved strongly of the subordination of women and of family nepotisms in government or business. So a tip of the stovepipe hat to J. S. Mill, who knew a freedom when he saw it, and understood some of freedom’s limitations, too. Perhaps he should be put on the White House reading list. ©

[Stanley]

Them that's got shall get// Them that's not shall lose// So the Bible said and it still is news. Billie Holliday.

The abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative (1845), explained the “rude and apparently incoherent songs” of the slave quarters as hymns of “bitterest anguish,” “ineffable sadness,” and “prayer and complaint.” He concluded that “I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness.” There’s no doubt that much of modern jazz and blues music, its mood and (when sung) its lyrics, reinforce that grim yet realistic interpretation, nowhere more forcefully than in the life and artistry of Billie Holliday. The wondrous years she spent at the top of her form and the pinnacle of her profession were only a few (scholars argue, but 1940 to 1952 would be a reasonable approximation), an interval in a life that began and ended in poverty and suffering. Billie Holliday was born Eleanora Fagan, in Philadelphia, on April 7, 1915, to teenage, unmarried parents (Sarah Fagan and Clarence Holiday). Clarence soon skipped out and Sarah did the best she could with menial jobs but eventually, in Harlem, took up prostitution and brought Eleanora into the same work when she was barely in her teens. But Eleanora had a talent, club singing, the intelligence to put her life into song, and the luck to be heard by someone who could do something about it. That was John Hammond, something of an American aristocrat, and by 1933 Billie Holiday (she took the “Billie” from a white actress she admired, Billie Dove) was recording with Duke Ellington. Even after that Billie’s life had its dramas and its tragedies, its inevitable brushes with American racism in various guises (including the forces of law and order). Through it all, the Holliday voice, its phrasing, its moods, kept pace, providing a modern narrative of bitterest anguish, ineffable sadness, prayer, and complaint. In July 1959 Billie Holliday died of the complications of her life. Her net worth at death was $750. ©

[Stanley]

Therefore, a special substance does exist [and] is to be found in [and] constitutes the specific property of these organs. Brown-Sequard, report on the adrenal glands, 1858..

Sometimes, in whimsical mood, I think humanity might be divided into two groups: those happy with their hormones and the rest. When Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard was born (in Mauritius, on April 8, 1817, just 200 years ago) it wouldn’t have worked because no one knew what a hormone was. By the time he died, in 1894, the world—or part of it—was well on the way to an understanding of hormonal health, hormonal illness, and hormonal therapy. Brown-Sequard’s father, Edward, was an American ship’s captain who called long enough at Port Louis to meet and marry his mother, Charlotte Sequard, but not long enough to see his son. It was not the best of fates to be born an orphan, but Charles had a devoted mother (he later honored her by changing his surname), and she indulged young Charles in his ambition to become a novelist. In Paris, he became a physician instead, one who first made his mark with pioneering studies of the spinal cord and the voluntary nervous system. He also became famous for the great courage he showed, back in Mauritius, during the terrible cholera epidemic of 1854. His generally leftist political principles often interrupted his studies, but at the Collège de France, at Virginia and Harvard universities, and in London he turned his and much of the world’s attention to the function of the glands, first with utterly convincing demonstrations of the importance of the adrenal glands (his work included executing pigs by removing the glands and saving humans by injecting them with gland tissue), and throughout his life by a rather cranky insistence on the vital importance of the testicles to (male) health. That aside, his brilliant science won him honors and awards in France (where he elected to become a citizen once Napoleon III was deposed) Britain, and the USA. What Brown-Sequard called “internal secretions” soon became “hormones,” and it is now possible to decide whether you are happy with yours, or not. ©

[Stanley]

I am going to design a railway Station after my own fancy. Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

If ever a name determined a child’s fate, it was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born on April 9, 1806 to a French father, Marc Isambard Brunel, and an English mother, Sophia Kingdom, a romantic liaison that, through many vicissitudes, brought the couple to England and to parenthood. “Isambard” was a family name. Norman French but derived from old German, meaning “iron-bright,” and it was with iron and steel that the father, and then the son, made their name famous. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was educated first in the classics, at an English school and in a French university, but his study was his father’s trade, engineering, and he began his working life on his father’s grand failure, a tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhithe. (It was finally completed in 1865 under other auspices). Brunel the son then moved on to his signature projects, mostly spectacular successes, and many connected with the Great Western Railway (bridges, tunnels, and steam engines), some surviving and in service to this day. His crowning glory, I think, is Paddington Station, the GWR’s London terminus: sedate and aristocratic rather than grand, a temple in which to worship the railway age, a place made of iron and steel, brick and glass, that manages to seem quiet despite its bustle. But he is most famous for his pioneering designs for ocean-going steamships. First came the Great Western, at 250 feet the largest ship in the world at its 1838 launch. But it was still hybrid, wood and iron built, with four sailing masts, and a paddle-wheeler. Brunel went modern and majestic with the Great Eastern, all steel, all steam, propeller-driven, and a 700-foot monster: the largest ship built anywhere until the dawn of the 20th century. Brunel died in his prime, before the Great Eastern’s 1860 launch, but many of his monuments survive him. ©

[Stanley]

I am still a student. Ghanshymandas Birla, interviewed at age 85 by India Today.

India’s progress towards industrial and financial wealth—by no means yet completed—was forecast in the life and career of Ghanshyamdas Birla, born on April 10, 1894 into a mercantile caste in Rajasthan near what is today the Pakistani border. Already based in Calcutta, his family’s traditionalism may be gauged by his mother’s moving back to the ancestral village for his birth and by his entirely traditional caste-based education, in which numeracy and basic literacy were thought to be sufficient. As Birla waxed in wealth and influence, he repaired some of these deficiencies with a rigorous program of self-education that would be mirrored in his many writings. As he became associated with Indian nationalism (at first indeed with a terrorist group circa 1914) he also moved to the head of his family’s business activities, creating a huge industrial and financial conglomerate that was, by 1940, the second-largest in India, based first on textiles then on manufacturing but always with Ghanshymandas’s flair for strategic investment. He was also a pioneer in establishing the political savvy of Indian business, in the 1920s a founder-member of two major political and public relations groupings. Despite these huge accomplishments, he is best known for his long association with Gandhi, which began in 1916 and helps to explain Birla’s move from the terrorist fringe to the center of the Congress movement. And there he stayed, despite the blandishments of the British (he declined a knighthood in 1932) and the temptations—given his religious orthodoxy—of extreme Hindu nationalism. Birla was Gandhi’s banker, remarking wryly about the enormous cost of keeping the Mahatma in poverty, and Gandhi’s assassination (at Birla’s residence!) cost him greatly in influence as Nehru rose to power and implemented Indian socialism. Nevertheless Birla the investor and industrialist continued to support the Congress as modern India’s best hope for the future. ©

[Stanley]

A better way of earning pocket-money than queueing for meat or delivering bread. Dan Maskell on his years as ball-boy at the Queen's Club.

Sportscasting is not only an odd word but—when essayed via television—a great challenge. After all, there is the action, on the TV screen (and these days many screens cover half a wall), and the question thus arises, “does the sportscaster need to say anything?” It is our misfortune that most TV sports journalists seem to see silence as a threat to their very existence, and so they pile on the commentary, describing the action in baroque detail despite the fact that I’ve seen it. And then they do it again on the video replay, despite the fact that I’ve seen it for the second (or the umpteenth) time. They suffer, as someone once said, from loose vowels. It’s not needed, and they shouldn’t have to shout, either. As proof, I would offer up a few (certainly not all!!) English commentators, for instance Dan Maskell, born on April 11, 1908 in a London neighborhood near the Queen’s Club where he fit right in as a tennis ballboy, and then rose through the ranks to become a leading professional. In a sport still dominated by amateurs, this meant coaching and teaching rather than tournament match play, but he did very well, becoming lead pro at the All England Club (Wimbledon) in 1929. He also moonlighted elsewhere, teaching the sport to members of the royal family. After war service, getting too rickety to play much, he joined BBC radio as ‘summarizer’ and then in 1951 brought his low key, minimalist approach to the more fitting medium of television. There he stayed, the “voice of Wimbledon,” until he retired in 1991, aged only 83. It was a sotto voce Dan Maskell deployed, speaking softly and saying only the right things so as not to litter the sport he loved with verbal garbage. One could watch a Maskell match and almost forget he was there, until something happened that required a comment, and there it was, smoothly delivered, softly spoken and (usually) perfectly fit for enlightenment rather than non-stop entertainment. That was the players’ job. ©

[Stanley]

If called by a panther / Don't anther. Ogden Nash.

Ogden Nash, who has been celebrated in these anniversary notes already (his birthday was August 19, 1902), left a special gift for all those born on April 12 (any April 12 will do). The poem also perfectly illustrates Nash’s overriding veneration for rhyme. If his words didn’t rhyme, he changed ‘em. The April 12 poem (published in 1941) is called:

Lines in Praise of a Date Made Praiseworthy Solely by Something Very Nice That Happened to It

As through the calendar I delve
I pause to rejoice in April twelve.
Yea, be I in sickness or be I in health
My favorite date is April twealth.
It comes upon us, as a rule,
Eleven days after April fool,
And eighteen days ahead of May Day,
When spring is generally in its heyday.
Down in New Mexico the chapparal
Is doing nicely by the twelfth of Apparal,
And Bay State towns such as Lowell and Pepperell
Begin to bloom on the twelfth of Epperell.
But regardless of the matter of weather,
There isn't any question whether.
No, not till the trumpet is blown by Gabriel
Shall we have such a day as the twelfth of Abriel.

So if your birthday is indeed on this day, do remember these (additional) reasons to think that it is, after all, a very glorious sort of day. Ogden Nash said so. ©

[Stanley]

Scrabble, v. To grope frantically. Derived from the Dutch 'schrabben': to scrape or to scratch. Also (n.) a board game.

Ours is not, I fear, a culture that goes in for modest memorials, but at an otherwise undistinguished junction in Jackson Heights, NY, you will find one, a somewhat enlarged street sign in which all the letters are given subscript numerical values. It is a memorial to Scrabble™ and to Alfred Mosher Butts, who invented the game in Jackson Heights, but was born upriver, in Poughkeepsie, on April 13, 1899. Butts did not set out to torture us with triple word scores or divide families over which dictionary to use, but rather to be an architect. He got his training at the U. of Pennsylvania and became quite a passable architect, but during the Depression fell idle and thought he might make ends meet by inventing a board game. So with some help from Nina, his wife, advice from dinner guests (who tried out early versions), and the New York Times front page (from which he derived his statistical analysis of letter usage—except for ‘S’), Butts loosed his bombshell on the world, calling it first “Lexicon” and then “Criss-Cross Words.” He and Nina (with some help from friends) started turning out sets for sale, but it was slow until James Brunot came to dinner in 1948 and volunteered to take it to market (as Scrabble) in a more deliberate way. Macy’s took it up in 1952 and by Christmas that year Brunot and 35 workers couldn’t meet demand even though they were making 6,000 sets a week. It was then sold to Selchow & Richter, who had rejected the game when Alfred Butts put it to them in the 1930s. Through it all, happily, Alfred did benefit (modestly) from his d2i1a1b3o1l1i1c3a1l1 invention, at the rate of $.03 per set. He always said he paid 1 cent in tax, gave away 1 cent to charity, and kept the last penny to live comfortably the rest of his long life. With Nina, of course, who almost always beat him at his own game and once scored 234 points by ending the game with “quixotic.” ©