BOB'S BITS

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"Daddy, why are all the statues naked?" Child's comment, apocryphal, on observing the Vigeland assemblage in Oslo's Frogner Park.

In Spring 1977, we found ourselves in Oslo, on a short Norwegian pause in our Danish holiday. The outing had been meticulously planned, save for one thing. Oslo, perhaps despite Norway’s secular culture, was closed down for Easter, as tight as the proverbial drum, from Noon on Good Friday to Monday morning. Among our improvisations was a longish walk in Frogner Park, also called the People’s Park, once the tightly-designed green space for Frogner Manor, the 19th-century creation of a pair of (unrelated) German immigrant industrialists, then purchased by the city in 1896. The park’s museum was closed, as our hotelier had warned us, but we went to see the Vigeland sculptures, installed outdoors in 1939-1949. They were the work of a carpenter’s son, Gustav Vigeland, born Gustav Thorsen in rural Mandal on April 11, 1869. Trained in his father’s craft, Vigeland developed artistic ambitions and traveled through Europe to learn sculpture, notably with Rodin in Paris. Back in Oslo he adopted Vigeland as his surname, at once memorializing his idyllic youth on his grandparents’ farm and declaring his allegiance, I think, to the rising tide of Norwegian cultural nationalism. All in all, I found his sculptures troubling. Although in Vigeland’s Frogner Park assemblage one could see something of Rodin’s touch, a sensual appreciation of the human body, male or female, other aspects were less attractive. Seen all together, singly or in writhing groups, the figures had cookie-cutter elements of sameness to them, and the themes reminded one of some of the darker aspects of 19th-century romantic nationalism, underlined by the birth-life-death cycle embodied in the rather bizarre central pillar, all 46 feet of it. Later, reading about the man, I discovered that he had indeed welcomed the German occupiers in 1941, and in some quarters he has been seen as a Nazi collaborator. But it’s a matter of dispute, and we need to remember that Gustav Vigeland was also the designer of the Nobel Peace Prize medal. As for our Easter weekend, we continued our exploration of Oslo’s out-of-doors attractions. Everything else was closed, and we returned to Copenhagen on Easter Monday’s night ferry. ©

[Stanley]

"My Lord, I had forgot the fart." Attr. to Elizabeth I, on the earl of Oxford's return to court after a 7-year exile. From John Aubrey's Brief Lives.

Sometimes you can translate Latin by its context, for instance when in 1658 the noble Edward de Vere was admitted impubes to Queen’s College, Cambridge. Aged only 8 at the time, he was certainly also inberbes (unbearded), so you can guess impubes. He’d been born on April 11, 1550, only son and heir of the 16th earl of Oxford; he succeeded to the earldom in 1562, a right secured at law after unpleasantnesses about his legitimacy and about his murder of a cook, bizarrely ruled a suicide by a coroner’s jury . Though young, Oxford soon became one of the most unpleasant of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, a considerable achievement. He was hot-headed, and his private life made him a natural target for insults, which in turn led to several duels of honor. In 1579, one of the better courtiers, Sir Philip Sidney, called him a “puppy.” The ensuing duel, which might have ended the Oxford story, was called off by the Queen’s order; so Sidney died, heroically and poetically, in a war most of which Oxford was able to avoid, apparently through temper tantrums over not being given commands he thought appropriate to one of his rank. He did manage, on his second marriage, to produce a son and thus preserve the earldom, and he did snag some income-producing favors from the Queen, but otherwise why write about him? Well, he was a poet of some merit, lyrical and comic, a fair letter-writer, something of a linguist (at least more so than your run-of-the-mill court fop) and—perhaps crucially—Oxford was for 20 years a patron of a company of players, “Oxford’s Men.” This virtue, if such it was, has led some to argue that de Vere must have been the ‘real’ William Shakespeare. This idea is perhaps most strongly held by those who are troubled by the thought that a mere glover’s son from an obscure country town could even write his name, let alone give us Lear and Hamlet (and Viola and Desdemona). But Will it was who wrote so much, so wonderfully, so imaginatively. He casts the 17th earl of Oxford forever in his shade. And we all know where Shakespeare was born, for he was Will of Stratford. Ed of Oxford was born in a castle, but never managed to make it more than an obscure place in Essex. ©

[Stanley]

"Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science." James B. Conant, in Science and Common Sense (1951).

One of UMSL’s interesting courses is “Science Literacy,” listed prosaically as ‘Interdisciplinary 1234.’ A small team designed it to encourage science-phobic students to think otherwise about themselves and then to grapple creatively with several of science’s truths, fewer of its puzzles. My four presentations concentrate on the connections (and disconnects) between ‘science’ and ‘progress.’ The long history of the steam engine—so crucial to the ‘Industrial Revolution’—is a case in point. The basic scientific principles behind it were enunciated in the mid-17th century by (inter alia) Robert Boyle and Edme Mariotte, but the idea took a very long time to bear profitable fruit, especially to be applied to locomotion. One important pioneer (of several) was Richard Trevithick, born in rural Cornwall on April 13, 1771, over a century after Boyle’s first publication on ‘the spring of the air.’ His life was a parable of steam engine history, chock full of delays and accidents. And for Trevithick, it ended badly. His ambitious parents and a succession of school masters thought him idle and obstinate, and they were right. But the boy had a gift for technology, and at 19 he was hired as “engineer” in the Cornish tin mining industry. Coal was expensive in Cornwall, and Trevithick responded by designing small, lighter-weight engines that operated on high pressure and thus required less coal per ton to pump water and hoist ore. His first engines were stationary but the principles were good for locomotion, and his first patents for this were taken out in 1801 and 1803, his first really successful railway (as we would call it today) came in 1804. He went on to other engineering firsts, for instance a dredger and a thresher, in England and in South America. But on several occasions his stubbornness and a different sort of illiteracy (with words and in the law) did him down. In 1827, bilked by partners, stiffed by mining companies, Richard Trevithick returned penniless to England just in time to see George Stephenson take his efficient steam engine and, so to speak, run with it. Trevithick’s unmarked pauper’s grave, could we find it, would provide another illustration that it’s a good idea to gain access to more than just one literacy. ©.

[Stanley]

An apology received this morning.

A Welsh friend wrote this morning to accuse me of Anglocentrism, or perhaps Cornish imperialism, or even possibly stannum poisoning (tin’s atomic symbol is Sn) in my morning’s reading of Richard Trevithick’s life, and that I had omitted mention of his Welsh successes. I passed it off at first, but my wife said I owed an apology, so here it is. That first successful steam locomotive (and its short railway) worked in Wales, hauling Merthyr coal. So I should have said that Trevithick enjoyed successes in England, Wales, and South America. UP THE WELSH, noble Celts that they are. In that sense, I suppose, they are not unlike the Cornish. But of course my Welsh friend is not big on Celtic nationalism. You can never please everybody all the time, never mind fooling them.
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

"Once you have played Hamlet, it will devour you and obsess you for the rest of your life. It has me. I think each day about it." John Gielgud, circa 1975.

Racehorses have pedigrees longer than your arm and besides being replete with genetic information carry news of past generations’ triumphs on the track and at stud. So, too, it seems do many actors, notably in England. Some long-lived acting bloodlines were established in the early 18th century, and then in the mid 19th Benjamin and Kate Terry spawned a brood of 11, 7 of whom became theatricals, including the famous Ellen Terry, heartthrob of generations of young London gents. Her sister Kate (1844-1924) took to the stage at age 3, but left it at 23 (right after a smashing turn as Juliet) to marry well and produce just one actor (Mabel) and three other daughters, one of whom (also a Kate) married a young man of Polish-Lithuanian heritage, aristocratic on one side but on the other (inevitably?) descended from a famous Polish actress. He was Frank Gielgud, himself bereft of acting talents save those one might need as a stockbroker, but Kate’s and Frank’s third son would out-perform the whole lot of them. Arthur John Gielgud was born in London on April 14, 1904, just possibly in time to be a toddler in arms at his great aunt Ellen’s Silver Jubilee matinée at Drury Lane (in which some 25 of his relations appeared on stage in elaborate costume). In any case, at Westminster School he learned that he was good at acting, and talked his parents into letting him take private drama lessons with another theatrical family, Sir Frank and Constance Benson, who thought he walked like “a cat with rickets” but a cat with potential. His first paid acting job (in 1922) came through a Terry cousin. Then came more formal instruction (at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts); and the rest of Gielgud’s life reads like a history of the English stage in the 20th century. It centers on tragic Shakespeare roles (Sybil Thorndyke called him “the Hamlet of my dreams”) but there was classic comedy too, and contemporary drama, then direction and production, and a host of movie parts. When Gielgud’s knighthood came (in 1953) he still had half his life ahead of him, and he filled it with further successes: starring (including a Lear at 90), in support, and in cameos. Sir John Gielgud was, however, the end of his bloodline. He died in 2000, leaving no genetic traces. ©

[Stanley]

"In Iowa, on a still summer night, you can hear the corn grow." Saying, often repeated, and quite true.

Corn, or maize, was first domesticated about 10,000 years ago in what is today Mexico. Ever since, farmers have been selecting varieties, then crossbreeding them. Sometimes they aimed for particular qualities (e.g. the ‘hard’ varietal became ‘popcorn’ at least 1.000 years ago), more often for higher yield. But in the 19th century (corn culture having by then spread across the world) the pursuit became more deliberately scientific, improvements accelerated, and corn agriculture found its way into new climactic niches, both drier and colder, on different soils, and with longer or shorter growing seasons. In the process, ‘corn science’ became one of the foundations of modern genetics. Among its pioneers was George Harrison Shull, born on April 15, 1874: and appropriately enough on an Ohio farm, and even more appropriately to a farming father who’d already made a name for himself in plant breeding. At some point early on in his life, Shull decided to make a science of it, got a BA at Antioch and then (1904, Chicago) a PhD in botany. After a short spell working for the government and then the Carnegie Foundation, Shull went out to work for and learn from Luther Burbank, who might in comparison to Shull be classed as the last of the great amateurs. They worked together for eight years, but Shull quit in 1914 after learning that large sections of Burbank’s great work Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries had in fact been pirated from Shull’s research papers. George Harrison Shull went on to teach, and research, at Princeton University in New Jersey (not your average corn state), mainly on corn, but also on genetics generally, and there he also, in 1916, founded Genetics, still today a leading scientific journal in the field. Like Charles Darwin, George Shull never fully understood the mechanics of inherited traits (that awaited Crick and Watson, in 1953), but through careful experimentation (in breeding, planting, cultivating, and harvesting) he produced useful varieties of the grass Zea mays, and some pretty accurate ‘guesses’ about how and why these genetic improvements happened. ©

[You could hear the creaking as rhubarb developed in the old forcing houses in the Rhubarb Triangle.]

[Stanley]

"Take heart, poor wretch, for I have prayed to God for thee, that He be merciful unto thee." St. Magnus pardoning his executioner, circa 1117, from the Orkneyinga Saga.

For 11 years we lived in a Lancashire village which bore some evidence of its Viking past, including its name (Kellet) which translated from Old Norse to the English “slope with a spring.” Until 2017 at least the spring still ran. “Earl,” like Kellet, derives from the Norse (“Jarl” or the Old English “Eorl”) and is the only English title of nobility that is not Latinate or Norman French in origin. Way north, in the Isles of Orkney, evidence for Viking settlement is abundant, and Kirkwall’s main church, once a cathedral, is named after St. Magnus Erlendsson, a Norse earl who died on April 16, 1117. Magnus was Earl (Jarl) of Orkney, not the first and certainly not the last to hold that title and its claim of descent from several Norse kings. Granted that by 1100 the Vikings were calming down a bit, still to have a Norse Jarl turn up as a saint seems a bit unlikely. In that sense, the sagas that deal with Magnus’s life (there are three of them) may well ‘protest too much.’ But they do insist that he was a model child, a lover of good tales, a budding scholar, generous to a fault with money and land, a “quiet sort of man,” a sometime pacifist and a pious ruler who, when overthrown, prayed for the souls of his executioners. One wonders whether these prayers took in his cousin Haakon Paulsson, who had led the rising against Magnus and took over the whole earldom of Orkney. Good man or not, the Magnus legend took off and quickly made a martyrdom out of his execution. Miracles abounded, my favorite being about Haakon’s replacement bishop of Orkney, William. When Bishop William tried to suppress these Magnus tales as heresies he was struck blind and did not recover his sight until he prayed for forgiveness at Magnus’s grave. Sight was immediately forthcoming and, seeing the light (literally?), William proclaimed Magnus’s sainthood in 1135. Legend also has it that Earl Magnus was struck dead by an axe wielded by Haakon’s cook, the assembled nobles having demanded his death but then refused to strike the blow themselves. So much for legend, one might say, but a recent dig under St. Magnus’s church has unearthed a skeleton with a deep axe wound to the skull. Perhaps the skull did belong to “a quiet sort of man,” but the bones are silent as to whether the blow was struck by a cook. ©

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"Be a vegetarian and own no car." Stella Mary Newton, on being asked how she'd managed to live so long, in a Channel 4 documentary, 1990, on her careers.

The plot of Robertson Davies’ Cornish Trilogy (1981-1988) turns on young Frank Cornish’s unmasking an art forgery, an allegedly late medieval panel wherein he espies a tailed (and therefore New World) monkey. Stella Mary Newton discovered no forgeries, but she did re-date Tintoretto’s career in an equally unlikely way, via the clothing styles and fabrics depicted in the artist’s work. That was in 1952, in the midst of Newton’s third career, as an art historian. Depending on how one counts, she went on to a fourth or perhaps fifth career (as a writer) in her mid 70s, one which lasted until she died, aged 100, in the Britain of Tony Blair. She’d been born Stella Mary Pearce in London, on April 17, 1901, when many were still mourning Queen Victoria. Her parents (a bookseller and a concert pianist) agreed on at least two things, socialism and that a girl should have a career. They meant just one career, and they were none too pleased when Stella left school at 16 to became “a very famous” (her words) actor. She did become a good actor, mainly touring, for nearly two decades, but during her ‘resting’ times she developed the skill and the aesthetic to become a leading costumier and stage designer, a business that also branched out (as Stella Mary Pearce, Ltd., in the 1920s) into haute couture and fashion shows for some of London’s best, or as she might have put it, richest, ladies. Then, in the 1930s, Stella married art critic (for The Guardian) Stanley Newton and did the stage and costume design for three T. S. Eliot plays. A devout Anglican, she also worked for RADIUS, the Religious Drama Society of Great Britain. Working with her husband, she became an art critic and historian, lecturing for Cambridge University’s extramural board and contributing background research for Eric’s books (her Tintoretto work first appeared as an ‘appendix’ to Eric’s critical biography). When Eric died (1965) Stella invented and led a postgraduate degree course at the Courtauld Institute, retiring in 1976, aged 75, to become a writer full-time, with four books and a packet of essays and short memoirs. She died, peacefully and in her sleep, shortly after celebrating her 100th birthday dinner at home, with friends and relatives. ©

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"It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both." Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince".

The word “Italy” comes from the Latin “veal,” a tender meat, but the peninsula was the core of the greatest empire the western world has known. By medieval times, however, Italy was a politically fractured land of war and intrigue, requiring a Machiavelli to make sense of it (his name means ‘a war to demolish or tear down’). Its leading characters were families, Sforza (“force”), Borghese, Farnese, Amati, Guarneri, Este: long-lived dynasties that echo down the years, the Savoias into the 20th century. The most famous of them all was the Medici (besides giving us the treasures of Florence, the family provided four popes and two French queens). But for infamy (and the competition was tough) the Borgia family stands atop the whole heap. Its ascendancy was relatively short-lived, but when it was at its peak (ca. 1450-1510) the family looked like it might rule the whole shebang. The mastermind was Rodrigo Borgia (1431-1503). As cardinal and then pope (Alexander VI), Rodrigo fathered quite a brood of children, the most infamous two by his mistress Vannozza Catanei. They were Cesare (Machiavelli’s model “Prince”) and Lucretia Borgia, the most notorious of them all. A legend in her own time, Lucretia was born in Rome (while Rodrigo was still a cardinal of the church) on April 18, 1480. A beautiful girl child, she was a valuable property for Rodrigo. Rumors still abound that her first child was indeed Rodrigo’s; be that as it may, he married her off first (1493) to a Sforza and then, in 1500, declaring that marriage unconsummated, to an illegitimate princeling of Naples. After that husband was strangled on Cesare’s order in 1501, Lucretia was finally (1502) married off to an Este, Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara. The deaths of Alexander VI (1503) and Cesare (1507), left Lucretia at loose ends in Ferrara, where she became a model wife, a jewel of her court, and the mother of 7 children, probably legitimate. She died in 1519 giving birth to an 8th. Historians still argue over how independently Lucretia played the Borgia game, but one must say she played it as well as she could. ©

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"Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception." Stanley Fish, 2011.

Despite the blows to its reputation delivered by a certain member of the class of 1968, my alma mater has produced some useful graduates in all fields of endeavor, including John Wideman (BA 1963, a gifted novelist who taught me much about basketball and race), William Carlos Williams (Med. 1906, one of my favorite poets), and the scholar Stanley Fish. Fish was born (in Providence, RI, of immigrant parents) on April 19, 1938, and, first of his family even to attend college, graduated from Penn (BA) in 1959. I presume he majored in English, for that’s where he got his Yale PhD in 1965. Since then, Fish’s most important work has indeed been in literary criticism and theory, but he’s branched out a good deal, sometimes entrepreneurially rather than substantively, and at present holds an endowed chair in law at Yeshiva University. In literature especially and the humanities generally, he’s had considerable impact and generated much controversy. I’ve read two of his books, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967) and How to Write a Sentence (2011), and several of his essays on university policy and politics, for in the intervening years he was (also) a creative university administrator, notably at Duke and Illinois-Chicago. What I remember most—and, I confess, like best—comes to my mind this morning as slogans. He states that the humanities are worthless in any pragmatic sense, and that that’s what makes them so extremely valuable. He says that a classic text (like Milton’s Paradise Lost) is recreated every time it’s read. There’s much truth to such one-liners (those are not direct quotations), they are worth pondering, and indeed they can be inspiring. Among other things, the Milton book can make one a better teacher. But then at some point you realize that Fish thinks that they are the whole truth, his obiter dicta, and that there’s not a whole lot more that a sane, responsible intellectual could (or should) say about the matter. Since Fish has written a lot, and not always consistently, this has opened him to attack from left, right, and center. Summing up the critics, one might say that in Fish’s writings we see absolutism marshalled in the cause of relativism. Or, perhaps, vice-versa. ©

[Stanley]

"Here, five foot deep, lies on his back// A cobbler, starmonger, and quack." A Jonathan Swift epitaph used with pleasure by the enemies of John Whalley, but prepared for a different astrologer.

Since I like to say that ‘my’ century (the 17th) really produced the modern age, I tend to ignore its retrogrades, to discount its dead ends. This can distort the real lives of real individuals. Isaac Newton, for instance, spent as much time calculating the end of time (from the Book of Revelations) as he did the ‘laws’ that gave us modern physics. Whole groups, too, can fall victim to my ‘modernizing’ instinct. I tell my students, for instance, that the Royal Society of London was the first institution to see the natural world as it was, to unravel its secrets by observation and experiment, citing (with approval) its motto Nullius in verba – “take no one’s word for it.” In that presentation (in a course on science literacy) I play down the plain fact that many early members of the Royal Society were astrologers, or at least avid students of that ancient art, and had hopes that it could be ‘scientifically’ validated. One of their correspondents (never a Royal Society member) out in the nether world of professional fate mappers, was John Whalley, born in Ireland on April 20, 1653. An earlier edition of the Dictionary of National Biography calls him a “quack,” which is my instinct, too, but the DNB has since learned to be more scholarly, and now satisfies itself with “astrologer and almanac writer.” Whatever. In the course of a fairly long life, Whalley gave himself over to several causes, including his quite vitriolic anti-Catholic pamphleteering, and kept body and soul together with his acid pen, his ‘physick,’ and his astrology. In Dublin permanently from 1692, he set up shop (at “the sign of the Blew Post, next door to the Wheel of Fortune”), produced his yearly (astrological) almanacs as “Mercurius Hibernicus” (the Irish Mercury), and corresponded with his astrologer friends (several of them members of the Royal Society) who applauded his efforts to make astrology stick. His group is best seen as ‘Restorationist,’ aiming to resurrect the pure and ancient art as practiced by Ptolemy. But (in a bow to the Royal Society motto?) they promised also to be guided by “reason.” In his last almanac, Whalley predicted that 1724 would be a year of darkness, and almost immediately (in January), he died. Perhaps, after all, there was something to it. ©

[Stanley]

This mail came in from Bob.

I have now had three (3!!!) readers remark on my error in my note about John Whalley, quack or astrologer, or perhaps quack and astrologer, which was to render the Revelation of St. John into a plural “Revelations".
As an historian of religion, I am duly embarrassed, and especially as one of my correspondents is a Presbyterian minister, another a former boss (well, ‘chair’), and the third a current student, I need to concede the point. The New Testament itself labels the thing singularly, so singular it must be. One doesn’t need a God to accept the absolute authority of the Text on this point. I know enough about literary theory to say that.
And I do have an excuse. As an historian of American religion and as an observer, today, of some of its expressions (notably in the heated universe of what’s called, oddly, the Christian Right) I have to point out that the Revelation of St. John has itself been parsed into whole series of disparate, sometimes eccentric, and often conflicting visions. The old (almost traditional) and appealingly simple division between pre- and post-millennialism has been superseded by inventive confusion. A veritable mass of exegetes have been busily at work, and in my lifetime (not to mention the centuries preceding it) they have given us a cloud of revelations, plural if not yet infinite. Not knowing which to pick, I think of them rather than it.
And ‘them’ is how I was thinking when I wrote my note.
My apologies to the author, who seems to have viewed his revelation as singular.
Cheers, Bob

[Stanley]

"So they l played croquet, a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor." Rose Macaulay, in "The Towers of Trebizond," 1956.

My Iowa childhood included quite a lot of croquet, always (in my memory) on lawns whose rough, irregular character added an element of chance. I played with my cousins, and although there were instances where vengeful play was suspected, it seemed to us a gentle sport, and we might have called it genteel although we didn’t use that word much. That was before I met croquet in England and in English fiction, both locations where croquet can be red in tooth and claw, but where lawns are as smooth as glass and almost as level as (well) a playing field. That contrast between genteel setting and savage sport has produced some excellent humor writing, and some very gifted players. Among the latter Dorothy Dyne (“D.D.”) Steel reigned supreme, her surname a guide to her style of play. Born a Yorkshire vicar’s daughter on April 21, 1884, she learned to play on the vicarage lawn, with her sister, and presumably both gently and genteelly. But let her loose on a competitive match and she was the apocalypse incarnate. Croquet is one of those games that can be well played by the rickety, and between the ages of 30 and 62 D.D. ruled supreme, both in local and county matches and (against Australia and New Zealand) internationally. In those years she won 15 national titles in singles, five in ladies’ doubles, six in mixed doubles, and many other titles. Were it not for the world wars, and her advancing arthritis after the second one, Miss Steel would have won many more. She is said to have played grimly, with an excessively tight grip, and in the impassioned self-belief that she must, really, be the winner, the match itself a mere formality. Her other sporting nickname (besides the “D.D.”) was “Stainless Steel,” so perhaps she did allow herself the occasional pun. Always apparently a bit short on money, she had enough of it to ride to the hounds in off season, lived with her sister (also unmarried, also a stern croquet competitor), and actually had many friends, including her usual mixed doubles partner, who explained their strategy thus: “She told me exactly what to do, and I did it.” Her life, which earned her a long entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, ended rather spectacularly in 1974 when she left a substantial estate behind her. In England, ladies croquet players still vie, sternly, one imagines, for the Steel Trophy. ©

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"Anybody can play weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach." Charles Mingus.

My dad never liked Heinz 57® steak sauce (his favorites were A1 and Worcestershire), but the Heinz was dad’s favorite metaphor for mongrel dogs and for his fellow Americans (that is, citizens of the USA). We were truly a mixed breed. I don’t think dad ever knew of Charles Mingus (his taste for jazz and blues stopped with Count Basie and old, raunchy favorites like the “Outskirts of Town” blues), but Mingus could have been dad’s perfect ‘Heinz 57 American,’ and it was something that Mingus boasted about. Indeed, Mingus probably claimed more bloodlines than he carried, but the attested ones are Chinese, English, Native American, African, Swedish, and Spanish. Charles Mingus, all-American mongrel and jazz genius, was born in Nogales, Arizona, on April 22, 1922, where his father (an army sergeant) was stationed. Mingus was reared in Watts, Los Angeles, and early showed great musical skill. For a variety of reasons, his musical roots were also mixed in terms both of instruments and genres, but five years’ instruction from the principal bassist at the New York Philharmonic made it look like Mingus would play the classical bass, and very well, indeed, for he was something of a prodigy. But by the 1940s and 50s he was a jazzman, although not pure and not simple. He played with and for Lionel Hampton and Charlie “Bird” Parker, took notes, began recording and composing, moved into smaller combos, sometimes as leader, and began to be famous among aficionados and with his fellow artists, particularly as a leading spirit in the Jazz Workshop. From 1959, a string of LP albums brought commercial success too. His disciplines, intellectual and social, set him apart. He mixed his styles, but didn’t do free form. His best friends were jazzmen and beat poets, but he didn’t like drugs or drink. His hero of heroes was Duke Ellington, and like the Duke it began to look as if Mingus might go on forever. But in the early 1970s he began to fall prey to ALS, maybe from one of those bloodlines of which he had been so proud. Charles Mingus died in Mexico in 1979. At his direction, his ashes were scattered in the Ganges, in India. Presumably, they are now at sea. His music is studied, played, and recorded, to this day. ©

[LINK for ALS.]

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I got mail again from Bob.... I think this is brilliant, see what you think....

"I am sending this to a passel of friends. I hope you find it amusing and even hopeful. If you do, send it on to ten (or more) of your friends. It seems to me it can only do good.
Yours in constant hope for something much better, or, failing that, for something somewhat better. Or anything. Bob Bliss"

LINK

[plaques]

One of my favourite songs The Tokens, still going.Tokens Compulsory Duke box listening in my younger days. Brilliant.

[Stanley]

"I liked the sound of my voice. I liked making it sing, making the voice ring, and I just kept doing it." Roy Orbison.

Once one switched stations to hear the music one wanted, but now my car radio is locked on NPR, and the music that I want (when the news is too dreadful, a lot of the time) is on my I-pod. Its playlist identifies me as someone who, in music, knows what he likes and likes what he knows, and so I let it switch randomly from Copland to Grappelli to Dylan to Beethoven to the Kalin twins. Those guys (Herbie and Hal) have just one slot (“When,” 1958), a romantic reminder of my misspent teens, but there’s another artist who has way more slots and thus comes up with reassuring frequency. That’s Roy Orbison, he of the truest voice of all, he who never fails to twang my heartstrings. Orbison (still #13 on Rolling Stone’s “greatest singers” list) was born on April 23, 1936 in a small Texas town, offspring of a well-drilling dad (oil, of course) and a nurse mom. From them he inherited terrible eyesight and a love of country & western. His dad gave him a guitar when he was six, but his favorite instrument came to be his voice. The voice: as he matured I suppose you’d call him a tenor. But no register ever claimed him; that voice went all over the place, was true wherever it landed, and as Orbison learned to write music and lyrics he wrote for that voice. Living in Wink, TX, from the age of 14, he called his band the Wink Westerners, pretty dorky, and he wore dorky horn-rimmed glasses and had a dorky hairdo—but soon his own radio show, then (in Odessa) TV show, always with the rest of the Winks, who in 1956 rebaptized as the Teen Kings. Legend has it that Roy was discovered by Johnny Cash, and there’s enough truth in that to stick with it. He wrote “Claudette” for the Everly Brothers (1958), then recorded it himself. Both versions are on my I-pod. Orbison’s miracle years were 1960-65: “Only the Lonely,” “Pretty Woman,” “Blue Bayou,” “Running Scared” (inspired by Ravel’s “Bolero”), “Dream Baby.” Just typing those titles makes my ears ring. Then came tragedy (Claudette, who was Roy’s wife, died in a motorcycle crash in 1966; their sons died in a house fire in 1968) and decline. But people (in his ‘public’ and in the industry) remembered that voice, and in the ‘80s Roy sang again, recorded again, and toured with all sorts, including Dylan and Springsteen. And then he up and died, dammit; but his voice is still there, on my I-pod, along with Bach and Bartok and the Beatles. ©

[Stanley]

"Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it." Benjamin Lee Whorf.

For six years, in the 1990s, I attempted a linguistics approach to the study of early America that I dubbed ‘the language of colonization.’ I then took a detour into academic administration. I found linguistics as such a difficult subject. My historical approach inclined me to “structuralism,” and thus to the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, himself a fascinating illustration of the “life begins at . . .” argument. Whorf, born of an artistic New England family on April 24, 1897, diverted, apparently radically, from family tradition by attending MIT, majoring in chemical engineering, and taking up a distinguished career in fire prevention engineering (for the Hartford insurance company). It was his interest in religion, personal, deep, and very complex, that led him into study, amateur at first, of biblical language (and thus languages). What began as an avocation became an obsession, and he moved into the study of native American languages, in which (at the time) a lot of interesting work was being done. Self-taught, he weaned himself from fire prevention, and by the 1930s was working, at Yale, with Edward Sapir. They didn’t invent ‘structuralism,’ but they refined it and made dominant in American linguistics the view that culture forms language. Since I was exploring the origins of “American exceptionalism,” his was the linguistics route I took, but since I rejected the ‘exceptionalism’ hypothesis (in respect of the American colonies) I soon found the Whorf-Sapir theory unsatisfactory. I also did not like its tendency to rank cultures (and thus languages) as somehow superior or inferior, and became, briefly, an enthusiast for Noam Chomsky’s view that human languages were in a linguistic sense universal, hard-wired into us all by evolution rather than by “culture.” So perhaps my detour into academic administration was a lucky thing. As for Benjamin Whorf himself, he died very young, in 1941. His magnum opus was not published until 1993, just in time to help me shape my initial inquiries. But whatever I think of his linguistic ideas, his life changes (first from family tradition and then from professional career) were, to me, inherently encouraging. ©.

[Stanley]

"I work so that others may play." Stanley Rous.

Britain’s Brexit vote, incomprehensible to many, was centered in England, and came as no surprise to those who, over the years, had marveled at English insularity. We got a small taste of it in our north Lancashire village, where I was asked by my hostess (the lady of the manor house) when I was going “home;” and she didn’t mean our cottage at the end of the lane. English soccer, football, also developed a stand-offish attitude towards the ‘rest of the world.’ It was partly that foreigners (particularly Italians) didn’t play the game properly. It may have been about the shock to the system of humiliating international losses (notably to Ireland in 1949 and then, horror of horrors, to the USA in 1950). But there was also a feeling of, well, insular superiority. ‘We invented the game; it speaks English.’ If standoffishness there was, it was countered by big, jovial Stanley Rous, Secretary of the Football Association (NB that it wasn’t even called the “English” FA!!) from 1934 to 1961. Rous, born into a Suffolk grocer’s family on April 25, 1895, never played the game professionally, but (when not in battle) he did in the World War I army, as he had before the war in his village. Come the peace, he qualified as a teacher (sports master), married Adrienne Gacon, a woman of mixed German and French parentage, qualified as a league referee, reinvented refereeing, and rose in the ranks. Somewhat surprisingly, he vaulted into the FA secretary’s office in 1934, and set about making the English game into a truly national pastime, including “how to” courses for almost everything associated with it, on the pitch, in the stands, and in village halls and top clubs’ boardrooms. After WWII, he (from 1949 Sir Stanley Rous) shepherded the FA into the World Cup (and brought Germany back into world football), was a founder of UEFA, and in 1961 became president of FIFA, football’s Fédération Internationale. England’s triumph (over Germany) in the 1966 World Cup was perhaps his finest hour. But a large part of the footballing world didn’t think so, accusing Stanley Rous (and indeed all of FIFA) of European insularity, and worse. That is another story, and in 1974, it resulted in the election of a Brazilian to the FIFA presidency. Sir Stanley Rous, loved by many (though not by all) retired. He died, aged 91, in 1986. ©

[Stanley]

"When the embryo is outside the woman's body, genetics tells us that father and mother have equal rights. When the embryo is inside the body, physiology tells us that the woman's right is paramount." Dame Anne McLaren.

Not the least of Anne McLaren’s extraordinary achievements was her truly amicable divorce (in 1959) from her husband (and scientific colleague) Donald Michie (1923-2007). They remained friends, colleagues, and parents of their three children until death did they part, dying together in 2007 in a car accident just north of London while returning from a scientific conference. One should also mention that she appeared (as a child actor) alongside Ralph Richardson and Raymond Massey in the film Things to Come (1936). Anne Laura Dorinthea McLaren was born (in Mayfair, London, on April 26, 1927), second daughter and fourth child of the second Baron Aberconway, a coal, iron, and steel industrialist, and Liberal MP before he succeeded to the title. After her film role, she studied English for Oxford entry but then at the last moment (deciding that English was too challenging for her) she switched to zoology, in which she enjoyed significant undergraduate success. She then really took off to become world-renowned in zoology, embryology, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics, not to mention bio-ethics. She got a good start from her doctoral supervisors at London, including J. B. S. Haldane and Peter Medawar. During her lifetime she moved around Britain, first London University, the Royal Veterinary College, Edinburgh University, the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and King’s College, Cambridge. Along the way she made significant advances (inter alia) in in vitro fertilization, mammalian fertility, DNA hybridization, viral immunology, and the life (and decay and death) of human and animal cells. McLaren also (especially while at Edinburgh, 1959-74) produced a veritable tribe of graduate students who remembered her with gratitude, noting (among her other generosities) that she had generally declined to put her name on their research papers. In the 1980s and 1990s she worked on bioethical issues with the Nuffield Foundation and with several UK and European commissions. A lifelong member of the UK Communist Party and a rather fanatical follower of English football, Anne McLaren, FRS, was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. ©

[Tripps]

Still a bit spooky on here
A bell rang - and I find that Laura Murray (big wheel in the Labour Party) recently sued by Rachel Riley (are you keeping up?) is the grand daughter of this lady.Laura Murray Her mother was Susan Michie and her father Andrew Murray. There are more communists in her pedigree than most.

[Stanley]

And it takes an old history teacher in a country far away to trigger recognition like that.
I love it!

[Tripps]

It gets better - This lady Susan Michie is well in the news now. She was an 'expert' this morning on Radio 5Live's phone in. She is the daughter of Uncle Bob's subject, and the mother of the lady I mentioned above.

Her husband Andrew Murray is an 'interesting' character. somewhere to the left of Joseph Stalin in his political views.

[PanBiker]

It gets better - This lady Susan Michie is well in the news now. She was an 'expert' this morning on Radio 5Live's phone in. She is the daughter of Uncle Bob's subject, and the mother of the lady I mentioned above.

Her husband Andrew Murray is an 'interesting' character. somewhere to the left of Joseph Stalin in his political views.

[PanBiker]

Her husband Andrew Murray is an 'interesting' character. somewhere to the left of Joseph Stalin in his political views.

Her husband hasn't been her husband since 1997 they divorced. He has been married to someone else since 2003.