Feynman Day! Richard Feynman, mensch, drummer, Nobel winner, born May 11, 1918

No, we’re not joking.

May 11 is the anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman. Borrowed from Luciano’s Tumblr, LikeaPhysicist

In addition to his winning the Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), Feynman popularized the critique of science and other enterprises with what we now call Cargo Cult science, or education, or whatever, where people follow the dance steps, but without the rhythm and music.

Those two things alone would make him a remarkable man.  But, like a product offered for $19.95 as a good buy in a 2:00 a.m. infomercial, with Feynman, there’s more.  With Feynman, there is always more.

I got alerted to Feynman in the first days of the old Quality Paperback Book Club, when they featured his new memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!  QPBC was hot on the book, and with a title like that, how could I resist?  When I got the book a week or so later, I read it within two days, while attending law school and working full time.  I remember Feynman.

Norton published the book — and their description, alone, should make you want to read it:

A New York Times bestseller—the outrageous exploits of one of this century’s greatest scientific minds and a legendary American original.

In this phenomenal national bestseller, the Nobel Prize­-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman recounts in his inimitable voice his adventures trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek, painting a naked female toreador, accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums and much else of an eyebrow-raising and hilarious nature.

All true, and that’s not even the half of the outrageousness, all done with great good humor, about a life lived in great good humor through what should have been a memorable age, but often was just terrifying.

I think sometimes that Feynman’s calm, alone, borne of that great good humor and insatiable curiosity,  may have gotten us through the birth of the atomic age and the Cold War.

Feynman was a giant, and we don’t revere him enough.  Consider:

• Feynman’s high school sweetheart, Arlene, came down with tuberculosis.  He married her, and took her with him to New Mexico to make the atom bombs.  The stories of her confinement to a hospital, and the laborious trekking he had to make between Los Alamos and her bedside in Santa Fe, are touching, and heartbreaking.  It is one of the great love stories of the 20th century, certainly, and perhaps for all time.  It also provided the title for his second memoir, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
• Every single, college-age man should read Feynman’s stories of how to date, and how to seduce women.  His approach was unique, and endeared him to women — in legend, to many women.  Feynman’s dating must have been part of the inspiration for the comedy series, “Big Bang Theory.”  Feynman’s stories are better.  (Heck, it’s even the subject of a popular, classic XKCD comic — probably only Feynman and Einstein among Nobel-winning physicists have made so much money for so many cartoonists.)

US postage stamp featuring Richard Feynman

• Yeah, he’s already been featured on a postage stamp, see at right.  That’s not good enough for Feynman, though — the U.S. Postal Service created a special cancellation stamp for Feynman, featuring a version of his Feynman Diagrams.
  

  A special postal cancel was authorized by the USPS (United States Postal Service) to honor the 80th birthday of Richard Feynman. This cancel was used in Lake Worth, Florida. For this special day the post office was renamed “Feynman Station.”

  

  The Feynman Diagram used for the postal cancel on this envelope depicts what is known as a “bubble process.” It shows a high energy particle, for example, a cosmic ray (a) from a distant supernova, which emits a high energy photon, for example, a gamma ray (b). The photon, in turn, creates a particle (c) and an anti-particle (d) that exists for a brief moment and then recombines.

  As Feynman liked to point out, an anti-particle is the same thing as a particle with negative energy traveling backward in time (which is why the arrow at (d) points backwards, i.e. to the left). So you could say the photon created only one particle that, at first, traveled forward in time (the bottom semi-circle) and then reversed and went back in time (the top semi-circle) and annihilated itself! By inventing diagrams like this, Richard Feynman made it much easier to understand what is going on in the interactions between sub-atomic particles without getting lost in tremendous amounts of tedious math

• Working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, Feynman developed a keen appreciation for bureaucracy and all its follies.  His vexations for the security managers are also legendary.  Here’s a quick version of one story — he asked friends and family to write to him in code, but to not include a key to the code, so he’d have to crack the code to read the letter.  Feynman could do it, but the security people couldn’t.  Hilarity ensued.
• Feynman developed a love for the still-relatively unknown, landlocked Asian nation of Tannu Tuva.  It’s just the sort of place to appeal to a character like Feynman — so obscure most atlases didn’t, and don’t, show it at all — seemingly consumed by the Soviet Union, but held in a special status.  Home of throat singing — and almost impossible to get to.  During the Cold War, Feynman struck up correspondence with people in Tuva, to the concern of Soviet and American intelligence agencies, who seemed not to understand someone might do such thing out of curiosity.  Feynman hoped to travel there to visit new friends, but his final bouts of cancer took him before it was possible.  Tuva, famous among philatelists only, perhaps, honored Feynman with postage stamps and postcards.
• Just try to find a photo of Feynman not smiling. The man was a joy to be around, for most people, most of the time.
• Quantum electro dynamics?  No, I can’t explain it, either — but his work had a lot to do with how particles wobble.  I remember that because, according to Feynman, he got the inspiration for the work for which he won the Nobel while spinning plates, like a Chinese acrobat on the Ed Sullivan Show, to the delight of students in the Cornell University cafeteria, and the shock and horror of the food service people.  Who else has yet confessed to such an inspiration for a Nobel?

There’s more — a lot more.  Feynman outlined our current generation of computer memory devices — in 1959.  No, he didn’t patent the idea.  He did patent an idea for a nuclear-powered spacecraft.  Another delightful story.

Feynman was featured in print and broadcast ads for Apple — not one, but two (did anyone else get that honor from Apple?). “Think Different.” This is one of Apple Computer’s most successful advertising campaigns. The theme of the campaign is one that celebrates figures in history who changed the world by thinking differently. Richard Feynman was among the chosen figures.

Feynman served on the board that approved science books for the California school system — his stories of that work will shock some, but it will make others shake their heads as they recognize the current crop of cargo-cultists and political bullies who dominate textbook approval processes, knowing nothing at all about what they are doing, or why.

No, I didn’t forget his brilliant work on the commission that studied the Challenger disaster, for NASA. There’s so much stuff to glorify!

In history, Feynman should be remembered much as we remember Thomas Jefferson, as a renaissance man in his time, a man who put great intellect to great work for his nation and all humanity.

The second Apple ad featuring Richard Feynman. An excerpt from Apple Computer’s campaign commercial: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them… about the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things, they push the human race forward; and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The sages say we shouldn’t have regrets, but I do have one.  When the Challenger Commission was meeting in Washington, D.C., I was working on another commission up the street.  I knew Feynman was ill, but our work was important, and we’d heard his disease was in remission.  I didn’t goof off a day and go to any of the hearings to see him, to get an autograph, to meet the man.  I though I’d have other opportunities to do that.  Now I regret not having met him in person.

In print, and in film, I know him well.  In our family, reading Feynman is something everybody does.  Feynman’s memoir was one of the last books I read to our son, Kenny, as he was growing up, and growing into reading on his own.  Even reading about Feynman, together, was an adventure.  Our son, James, took us into the real physics of Feynman, and though I struggle with it more than James, we still read Feynman, for humor, and physics.

What would be appropriate ways to mark Feynman’s birth?  At some future date, I hope we’ll have public readings of his books, showings of the documentaries about him, recreations of his lectures, perhaps.  And then everyone can get in a circle, beating drums and singing about getting some orange juice, before sending postcards to our friends in Tuva.

Richard Feynman, we still need you, and miss you dearly.

Tuva’s capital is the delightfully-named Kyzyl. From this map, can you figure out where Tuva is, or how to get there — without Google, or Bing?

Tuva postcard, in honor of Richard Feynman — who loved to drum.

There will always be “More” about Richard Feynman, if we’re lucky:

• Richard Feynman: Life, the universe and everything (telegraph.co.uk)
• Richard Feynman Biographical Comic Out Today (tested.com)
• Richard Feynman: Life, the universe and everything (richarddawkins.net)
• A little Feynman for Friday (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• Happy Feynman Day to You (May 11, forever) (lizditz.typepad.com)
• Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Fnding Things Out (ritholtz.com)
• Interest: A Day Celebrating Richard Feynman (thegeneralist.me)
• For the Great Explainer (questioningeverything41.wordpress.com)
• Do not miss the Friends of Tuva site, which is as much a tribute to Feynman from his good friend Ralph Leighton as it is a tribute to the great little nation of Tuva.

Have a great Feynman Day!

 

So-called conservatives out of their minds — still, but moreso: 3 reasons not to fear ‘Brave New World’

You can’t make up this kind of crazy.  This guy’s been Tweeting this to everyone he can find on Twitter:

The Left's plan now is for government hatcheries to replace marriage. Aldous Huxley ~ Brave New World. @JohnCornyn @SenRonJohnson @tedcruz—
Sam Thiessen (@SamThiessen) April 11, 2013

Seriously?  Hatcheries for children?

Isaac Asimov‘s great off-the-cuff essay one why 1984 wouldn’t be like 1984 is sort of a prototype of the sort of take-down of dystopias one finds in literary and historical circles.  (Once I had a link to a version of the essay, but it’s buried in the bowels of the internet now.)

Is this where we are going, so rapidly in this handbasket? First edition cover, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – Wikipedia image

But it never makes the true crazies see the light.  They can’t see contrary evidence.

Asimov’s essay noted Orwell’s lack of foresight in simple things, and human things.  In Orwell’s Big Brother dystopia, Winston Smith couldn’t get razor blades or shoe laces, indicators of the economic failures of Big Brother.  Asimov wrote that, in reality,  he used an electric razor, and wore slip-on shoes.  Blades and laces were foreign to his world, too, but not evidence of dystopia; instead, they were evidence of changing fashion and innovation. Orwell thought Big Brother would watch everyone with electronics.  We learned that people as a mass, who use phones, especially cell phones, and the internet, put out too much information in total for a Big Brother to make sense of it, absent other indicators — and that even when hints of wrong-doing turn up, the bureaucracies tend to prevent quick action, or any action at all.  (See the report of the 9/11 Commission.)

One wishes Asimov were alive to do a take-down of the Brave New World fears.  One also suspects those living in fear of Huxley wouldn’t understand the takedown.

Huxley himself gave it away.  Nothing in scientific discoveries has altered Huxley’s errors of prediction (if he was “predicting” and not simply fantasizing).

So, here are three reasons a rational human should not fear we are on the verge of Brave New World, as Huxley scared us all:

1. Huxley’s dead, and out of date.  Huxley died 50 years ago (on November 22, 1963, coincidentally enough — Sam Theissen with find some omen in that; superstition can’t be stamped out of those who refuse to learn).  Huxley’s premises, his assumptions about society, don’t work in a modern world.  Huxley’s imaginings were almost pre-modern science.  His story doesn’t imagine electricity on the Navaho or Hopi or Apache reservations.  He didn’t foresee Interstate Highways, nor even Route 66, and America’s love affair with travel and the automobile.  He didn’t see the rise of broadcast television and radio, nor rock ‘n roll, nor especially did he see the cultural effects of popular radio on U.S., British or world politics.  Huxley assumes a Soviet-style dictatorship can work.  We know better.  We have Solzhenitsyn.  We had Sakharov protesting in the Soviet Union, and Oppenheimer protesting in the U.S.  That should also remind us that Huxley missed nuclear power.  Huxley simply missed most of the technology and especially culturally-affective technology that makes a Brave New World impossible.
2. Human hatcheries don’t work.  Hatcheries work for fish; we’ve been unable to make them work for most birds.  Critically, they don’t work for humans, nor for any other complex mammalian — nor chordate, in the ways Huxley describes the embryoes being programmed for certain kinds of intelligence and physical traits.  Oddly, that seems to be the focus of Thiessen’s fears — but the technology simply doesn’t work.
3. Sex is fun. Huxley’s story required that sex and procreation be done away with.  Oh, there was some sex — but procreative sex is presented as a shameful character flaw, like patricide, embezzling or drug dealing.  Brave New World is frustrated, in the 20th century, by the backseats of cars and the simple fact that sex is so much fun.  Raising kids is fun, too, and valued by adults the world over, a value that got much more expression after World War II.

It’s difficult to imagine kids in high school reading Brave New World without giggling, and without noting the difficulties of the story now (try to get a high school kid to believe Superman used phone booths . . .).

Sam Thiessen is convinced civilization will collapse — he’s written books about it.  I wonder about people who miss the ultimately fatal flaw of Huxley’s story, that humans love one another, and humans like to have sex.  Those who fear Huxley’s book is a forecast, I think, either don’t get enough sex, or don’t know how.

The things are going with current witch hunts, Texas teachers who use Huxley’s book should look out — Thiessen and his fellow travelers will soon accuse them of indoctrinating students in the stuff, instead of warning them against it.  After all, Thiessen seems to have missed the warnings himself.

I’d wager that in other rants, self-titled conservatives and libertarians like Thiessen rail at the usual-suspect decline in morals, including a lot of actions shocking to them, caused by the fact that most people find sex really fun.  Does it not make sense that they’d take a step back, and see that the behavior they claim disgusts them, also makes possible the broken future they fear?

Oblivious to this odd balance of freedoms, they then campaign to end the immorality they see, never thinking that by doing so they advance the dystopia they claim to fear.  What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to misperceive.

More:

• Aldous Huxley Describes The Ultimate Revolution (disinfo.com)
• Seven years ago I discussed 1984 in relation to the Texas TEKS for social studies – which have been changed since then, but not enough to make the book irrelevant to classroom use
• “What’s Happening in English Class” (a class assignment on Brave New World)
• At Biblioklept:  “Selections from one-star Amazon reviews of  Orwell’s 1984,” including this gem: “Last time I ever read a history book by this Orwell scrub. He doesn’t know a thing about the 80s. Not ONCE did he mention Def Leppard or Karma Chameleon.”
• Historical view:  In 1984, West Germany’s Federal Chancellor was the very conservative Helmut Kohl; Deng Xiaoping led China; the world’s largest democracy in India was led by Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated, and succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi; Prime Minister of Japan was Yasuhiro Nakasone; François Mitterrand was President of France; England’s Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher; and Ronald Reagan was President of the United States — just making notes for the record
• A current review of Brave New World; this guy says it’s a book well worth reading; a few illustrations for a competition to illustrate the book (nice flowers); a more usual take on the book by a normal person

A note about the title of the book:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.

  ♦ William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I; spoken by Miranda

Quote of the moment repeat: Robert C. Lieberman, “Why the Rich Are Getting Richer: American Politics and the Second Gilded Age”

What? You missed this, on February 20, 2011? Well, here it is again. Please pay attention this time.

The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams.  Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression.  Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost — the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security and opportunity — will never return.  They are probably right.

Cover of Winner-Take-All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery.  The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer.  And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer.  In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else’s income went down.  This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom.  The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.

This what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the “winner-take-all economy.”  It is not a picture of a healthy society.  Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class.  Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan.

Robert C. Lieberman, reviewing the book Winner-Take-All Politics:  How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Simon and Schuster, 2010, 368 pages.  $27.00.; review appears in Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011, pp. 154-158.

More:

• Democracy in America column in The Economist, September 21, 2010, comments by M.S.  on the arguments in the book; in the same journal, earlier, harsh commentary against the book’s thesis, by WW.
  
• Review by David Holahan in The Christian Science Monitor
• Comments at Boing-Boing
• Yglesias at Think-Progress
• Have the rich hijacked American democracy?  Rant at the Economist
  

Two years later, even more:

• The Top 1% (cafehayek.com)
• Britain’s Super-Rich Just Keep Getting Richer (dprogram.net)
• Yes, Virginia, the Rich Continue to Get Richer: the Top 1% Got 121% of Income Gains Since 2009 (nakedcapitalism.com)
• Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age? (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Brad DeLong: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age? (delong.typepad.com)
• How the ultra-rich are pulling away from the ‘merely’ rich (washingtonpost.com)
• inequality: Living in the Second Gilded Age (delong.typepad.com)
• View from the Right, Fey: Healthy economy is built on inequalities (norwichbulletin.com)
• Lifting the Curtain…on Myanmar…on Burma (skydancingblog.com)

Query: Who wrote this first? Two novels that change a 14 year-old’s life, Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged

Lord of the Rings features a time when evil almost wins. Atlas Shrugged celebrates such dystopia.

I first heard this within the past couple of years.  As with too many really good lines that get passed around the internet, it came to me first with no source listed.

It’s rather brilliant.  To whom do we properly give credit for its invention?

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Update:  In comments, Ellie and Liam both point to John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey, March 19, 2009.  Sounds good.  Can anyone pin it on anyone else, earlier?

More:

• Atlas Shrugged For Dummies (ourfuture.org)
• Idaho State Senator Introduces Bill Requiring ‘Atlas Shrugged’ For High School Students (addictinginfo.org)
• QOTD: Two Novels That Can Change Your Life (ritholtz.com)
• Idaho lawmaker’s bill forces students to pass ‘Atlas Shrugged’ test to graduate (rawstory.com)
• To Promote Freedom, Idaho Senator Wants To Require All Students To Read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (wonkette.com)
• Quaker Valley senior a finalist in 2012 ‘Atlas Shrugged’ essay contest (triblive.com) [Does this border on child abuse?]

 

GPO Bookstore clearance sale! (Underground Railroad for kids)

One of my great joys in working in a Congressional office was the delivery of a lot of the publications that were available through the GPO, the General Printing Office. Not just Congressional hearings and dull reports, but some excellent volumes on a wide variety of topics — back when America was exceptional (before the Republicans started claiming God made America exceptional, and not hard work by Americans), most Congressional offices kept a list of people who wanted the annual Department of Agriculture farming bulletin.  It was a sort of compendium of state-of-the-art practices, predictions on soils conditions and weather, and an encyclopedia of what the government could do to help farmers out (mostly a list of county agriculture extension agents).

A lot of this activity reflected the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson view that government should serve the people, and good information was like diamonds.

Those days are gone

GPO still publishes some great stuff, though.

Got a note in e-mail that GPO is having a clearance/overstock sale.  As an example, this Junior Ranger workbook on the Underground Railroad — reduced to $3.00 from $6.00.  Ages 5 to 12, or kindergarten to 7th grade.

Need some supplements for your elementary or middle school classrooms?  Want just one to steal ideas from?

Discovering the Underground Railroad: Junior Ranger Activity Book

Publisher: Interior Dept., National Park Service, Southeast Region

Description: Provides activities for children ages 5-12 to learn about the history of the underground railroad and the Emancipation Proclamation. Children who finish the age-appropriate activities can send in to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program to receive a free Junior Ranger badge from the National Park Service. Gently covers topics including: the meaning of freedom and slavery; the hardships and daily life of slaves; the importance and travel routes of the “Underground Railroad;” safe refuge choices; key dates and laws relating to slavery and emancipation; and key figures including Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and abolitionists Levi and Catharine Coffin, among others.

Year/Pages: 2011: 20 p.; ill.

Price: $6.00 $3.00

Of course there are a lot of other books on sale; go see.

(Oh, and a nasty little secret? The material on the Underground Railroad is in the public domain, and the booklet is available in a .pdf version, online, for free.)

Among books on sale you might find of interest:

• Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future: The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction, September 19, 2011 (OMB)
• Ronald Reagan, Intelligence and the End of the Cold War: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California, November 2, 2011
• Official Congressional Directory, 112th Congress, 2011-2012 (Hardcover)
• Neptune’s Table: A View of America’s Ocean Fisheries (NOAA)
• Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2010 (Paperback) (Commerce Department, Census Bureau) — this publication is also available on-line

More:

• President Obama’s Inaugural Ceremony Available on GPO’s Federal Digital System (whattheythink.com)
• Where Was the 1st Underground Railroad? (theroot.com)
• Uncovering the Truth About the Underground Railroad (blogs.wsj.com)

Typewriters of the moment: Isaac Asimov’s astonishingly prolific career

Isaac Asimov remains one of my favorite writers.  He wrote well enough, and his curiosity took him to topics I often find interesting.  At one time having published more books than anyone else in history on a wide variety of topics from quantum mechanics to trivia in the books of the Bible (does he still hold that record?), it was a sure bet one could find at least one book in one’s area of interest penned by Asimov.

When I started the spasmodic feature, “Typewriter of the Moment,” years ago I did a search for Asimov with a typewriter.  I didn’t find an image I thought suitable back when the internet was still operated by steam, and somehow I just never got back to that.

The other night this image popped up on one of my Facebook feeds, from “the Other 98%”:

Painting of Isaac Asimov creating at a typewriter, an early IBM Selectric. Who did the painting?

I appreciate the sentiment in the quote.  Asimov noted the Dunning-Kruger Effect, even if he didn’t have the advantage of Dunning and Kruger having named it yet, and he lamented the powerful undertone of anti-intellectualism that victims of the syndrome exhibit:

Anti- intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. (Asimov in an essay for Newsweek: “A Cult of Ignorance,” January 21, 1980, p. 19)

It’s an arresting image, a heckuva a quote, and it would make a good poster.  Plus, it’s an early IBM Selectric typewriter, marrying Asimov’s creativity with a great technological advancement in writing tools.

One boggles at the idea of Asimov with a great word processing program, a fast computer with great memory, and the internet at his disposal.  If Asimov were alive and creating today, we’d think Moore’s Law a great hindrance to the advancement of knowledge.

The painting delights me.  It’s almost photographic, and I like paintings that take great care to get small details right, photographically.  No dig at more spare or even abstract art, but this sort of painting takes great skill and great creativity.  Rising spirit-like from the typewriter’s platen we see a satellite (manned spacecraft, perhaps?), a flask of chemicals, and a leather-bound book, essential components in science fiction, and science.

So, who did the painting?  Was it done solely for that Facebook poster?

This is what that typewriter in the painting looks like, from the author’s angle. An IBM Selectric typewriter, model 713 (Selectric I with 11″ writing line), circa 1970. Wikipedia image

I’ve searched on TinEye, and Bing and Google, without success to identify the painter.

One version of the painting, before text was added, showed up at IO9, a site dedicated to science fiction, in an article discussing the writing habits of famous writers.

This does not appear to me to be the original, simply because data on the artist is not contained in the information section of the image.  The artist who did this illustration would be proud of it, and want to advertise her or his work.

This version has a slightly higher resolution; click on the image and note the reflections of lights in Asimov’s glasses, the reflections on the desk, and even the dings on the edge of the desk facing the viewer — this is great stuff!

But still I wonder:  Who was the original artist?

Any ideas, Dear Reader?

The painting of Asimov at his typewriter, before posterization with a quote over his head. Found at IO9

Did Asimov write on a Selectric?  Did he switch to the newer version, with a wider carriage, or stick with the old original?  Is there a photo upon which this painting is based?

Almost immediate update:  This site claims the artist is the same as the one at the bottom of the post, Rowena Morrill.  That’s a start.  Here’s more:  At Rowenaart, both pictures appear credited to Rowena.  Mystery solved?  Go buy a poster from her; this is great stuff.

More:

• At Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub
  • “Annals of global warming:  Al Gore didn’t invent it; Asimov explained it in 1989″
  • Asimov’s (usually misquoted and misused) tribute to the American National Anthem
  • “Symphony of Science:  Climate Change”
  • “1984:  History of technology”
• Isaac Asimov explains his three laws of robotics: First Law: A… (exp.lore.com)
• The Roboearth API: Isaac Asimov Would be Impressed (programmableweb.com)
• Paul Krugman’s Favorite Fiction: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy Dramatized for Radio (1973) (openculture.com)
• Isaac Asimov made me an economist (guardian.co.uk)
• Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics (3quarksdaily.com)

Hello! Could this be by the same artist? Caption from Wikipedia: This image is a reproduction of an original painting by renowned science-fiction and fantasy illustrator Rowena http://www.rowenaart.com/. It depicts Dr. Isaac Asimov enthroned with symbols of his life’s work. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Millard Fillmore: Victim of yet another hoax

The Washington Post’s usually great blog on politics, The Fix, features a list of the best presidential biographies.  This comes just in time for the holidays, of course.  It could be a guide to getting the book for that wonk you know, the one who says Franklin Pierce is underrated, or the woman you know who is fixated on what might have been had Warren G. Harding not died in San Francisco.

The list links to good versions of obscure and arcane history, as well as some major stuff — any good biography of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Teddy Roosevelt, has to have some major chops going for it, in those crowded niches of good biographies of important people.

1938 U.S. postage stamp of Millard Fillmore, a 13-cent stamp for our 13th president – Wikipedia image

Then there is poor old, hapless Millard Fillmore.

We can excuse Natalie Jennings and Sean Sullivan, perhaps.  After all, there are not many books on Millard Fillmore.  Pickings are slim.

Ever since America’s favorite curmudgeon, H. L. Mencken, created a World War I hoax on the gullibility of the public, with a completely invented history that claimed the only thing of note ever done by Millard Fillmore was putting a bathtub in the White House, against the advice of the American Medical Association, poor Fillmore has been the butt of jokes, but more often the cruel butt of unintended slights when people cite the fictions of his life rather than his accomplishments.  We approach the anniversary of the Mencken “Fillmore’s Bathtub” Hoax, on December 28.

I said the pickings on Fillmore books were slim.  The list at The Fix  includes a parody history of some five years back by George Pendle, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President.

At Amazon, we learn of Pendle’s book:

Millard Fillmore has been mocked, maligned, or, most cruelly of all, ignored by generations of historians–but no more! This unbelievable new biography finally rescues the unlucky thirteenth U.S. president from the dustbin of history and shows why a man known as a blundering, arrogant, shallow, miserable failure was really our greatest leader.

In the first fully researched portrait of Fillmore ever written, the reader can finally come face-to-face with a misunderstood genius. By meticulously extrapolating outrageous conclusions from the most banal and inconclusive of facts, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore reveals the adventures of an unjustly forgotten president. He fought at the Battle of the Alamo! He shepherded slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad! He discovered gold in California! He wrestled with the emperor of Japan! It is a list of achievements that puts those of Washington and Lincoln completely in the shade.

Refusing to be held back by established history or recorded fact, here George Pendle paints an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary man and restores the sparkle to an unfairly tarnished reputation.

Of course it’s parody!  There’s no indication Fillmore, never a member of the military, fought at the Alamo.  Fillmore never made it to California, nor was he the Mormon who discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill.  In one of his greatest acts, Fillmore dispatched Commodore Perry to Japan to coerce that nation to open its doors to American sailing ships, and trade with the rest of the world.  Fillmore himself did not journey to Japan, and never met the Japanese emperor, let alone wrestled the man. (After his presidency, Fillmore visited Europe; Queen Victoria is attributed with having said he was one of the handsomest men she’d ever met; he refused an honorary degree because, he said, he couldn’t read the Latin it was written in — you can’t make up the real stuff.)

Despite its clearly being a parody, however, there it is on the list of The Fix, as the best biography of Millard Fillmore.

Screen clip showing parody Fillmore biography on The Fix’s list of best presidential biographies

H. L. Mencken at approximately 12:30 a.m., April 7, 1933, at the Rennert Hotel, corner of Saratoga and Liberty Streets, 17 years later, not neglecting a sudsy anniversary – Baltimore Sun photo

The Ghost of H. L. Mencken notes that this item appeared on December 5, 2012, the anniversary of the end of Prohibition — and knocks back a brew.  Every other president gets a serious biography mentioned; for Millard Fillmore, The Fix lists a hoax book as his “best presidential biography.”

More:

• An accurate biography of Millard Fillmore, online, at Big Mo
• A serious work on Fillmore’s presidency:  Millard Fillmore: The American Presidents Series: The 13th President, 1850-1853 (American Presidents (Times)), by Paul Finkelman, with series editing by Sean Wilentz and Arthur M. Schlesinger
  • 5 U.S. Presidents Who Taught School (history.com)
  • The Presidential Trail… in Buffalo NY (buffalorising.com)
  • Sources on Millard Fillmore’s life, listed here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub

A note on fairness to Mr. Pendle:  Pendle has argued here before that his book does contain real history, and it’s there despite the embellishments which he says at least get the book sold.  Earlier, in comments he said:

Dear Sir,

I am the author of the recently published ‘The Remarkable Millard Fillmore’, which I have just discovered has been mentioned by your website on a couple of occasions. Judging by your website’s wonderful name, and your obvious interest in making people more aware of American history, I was slightly troubled to see that you thought I treated Millard Fillmore unfairly in my book.

I don’t know if you have had a chance to read ‘TRMF’ yet, but I can assure you that while it is a faux-biography, and does indeed poke fun at Millard Fillmore’s perceived image (or lack of it), its larger target is that of presidential biographies that are unthinkingly reverential of the office of the president. The cynical revision of history, in which one man is placed at the center of the world’s events is a historical fallacy, as you are probably well aware. Yet it is one which – unlike my book – many historians perpetrate with a straight face.

In ‘TRMF’ I attempted to mock this school of biography by extrapolating the most ridiculous situations from the most basic and inconclusive of historical facts. For instance, I have Millard Fillmore stowing away to Japan, and Sumo-wrestling with the Mikado’s champion, because in real life Fillmore opened up Japan to western trade (albeit from a safe distance in Washington D.C.).

Lest you think I am playing too fast and loose with the truth (some readers have complained that they did not realize my book was a spoof, despite the picture of Millard Fillmore riding a unicorn on its cover!) my book also includes a large appendix of strange but true historical notes to show that many of the ridiculous situations I place Fillmore in were actually based on fact. By reading them I hope one can discover that even the most staid of human lives can be touched by the fantastic.

In short I come not to bury Fillmore, but to praise him, and all those forgottens who have not been granted a role as a ‘Great Man of History’ by the Academy. I very much hope that although ‘The Remarkable Millard Fillmore’ is primarily a spoof and designed to make people giggle, readers will, possibly without being aware of it, come away from the book with a better knowledge of American History than when they started it.

Yours sincerely,
George Pendle

So we are left with a little mystery.  Did the WaPo reporters know that Pendle’s book is a parody, and are they saying it works wonderfully as a tool of history telling?  Or, did they not know?

_____________

Update:  Comes word this morning that The Fix changed its listing for Fillmore, to the Rayback book (Thanks, Lea).  The column says only that it’s been “updated,” but doesn’t explain where or why.   Mr. Pendle might argue his book should be there:  How many books are there on Fillmore after all?

Typewriter of the moment: Mark Twain’s Hammond

Still hoping to find a photo of Samuel Clemens at work on a typewriter.

But until then, this one will have to do:

A Hammond typewriter that once belonged to Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain. Photographed by Jerry J. Davis, in an unstated location, probably Hannibal, Missouri

Other photos of Twain’s typewriter must exist; and since we know of at least two such machines, there must be some photos of each of them, no?  I wish museums and historians would consider the value of images of some of these objects, and make high quality photos of some of these famous machines.

Twain’s fascination with technology shines clearly in his work.  From his earliest writings we get lyrical and accurate descriptions of the mechanical workings of Mississippi riverboats, for one example.  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court paints a long paean to technology of the late 19th century, transplanted in the tale several centuries earlier.

Some accounts claim The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the first manuscript completed by typewriter — this one, perhaps? TwainQuotes.com features what may be a description of this history:

…I will now claim — until dispossessed — that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature…The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects — devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells…He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.

- “The First Writing Machines”

As a publisher and investor, Twain pushed the development of automated typesetting machines to quickly publish the memoirs of former President Ulysses S Grant.  Though the books were set quickly, and the best-selling memoirs provided an income for Grant’s widow, the technology was still balky and cost Twain his own fortune.

Twain’s Hammond at the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. Image from TwainQuotes.com. Is this the same machine pictured above? There are similarities, but differences more than just the angle.

We shouldn’t be surprised with his acerbic comments on the machines; Twain’s caustic humor targeted everything in modern life.  TwainQuotes.com notes a fraction of a letter to his longtime friend:  Twain’s Hammond at the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. Image from TwainQuotes.com

The machine is at Bliss’s, grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly & implacably rotting away at another man’s chances for salvation.

I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn), but to let me know when he has got his dose, because I’ve got another candidate for damnation. You just wait a couple of weeks & if you don’t see the TypeWriter coming tilting along toward Cambridge with the raging hell of an unsatisfied appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.

- Letter to William Dean Howells, 25 June 1875

Were things really so bad?

I regret to note that in our visit to Hannibal last June I did not encounter any typewriters.  Clearly, I’ll have to go back.

Tip of the old scrub brush to OObjects.

More:

• Twain aboard ship – 1896 photo, 1897 etching (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Birthday of Twain and Churchill: Happy Whiskey and Cigar Day 2012! (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Typewriters: an illustrated guide and a debt of thanks | James Robinson (guardian.co.uk)
• Typewriter of the moment: An old one, manual or electric (yours?) (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Review: “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain (slclteens.wordpress.com)
• 177 years of Mark Twain (neatorama.com)
• “The Big Metal Albatross, and Me” (Threshhold Girl)
• UK’s last typewriter produced (UKMade)

Rachel Carson biography, On a Farther Shore, one of best books of 2012

Kirkus Reviews listed as one of 2012′s top 25 books William Souder’s biography of Rachel Carson, On a Farther Shore.

William Souder, author of On a Farther Shore. Minnesota Public Radio image

Rachel Carson often gets credit for starting the modern environmental movement.  In highly cynical political times, Carson is under cruel smear attack from people who wish the environmental movement did not exist, and who appear to think that we could poison Africa to prosperity if only we’d use enough DDT, contrary to all scientific work and medical opinion.

Souder’s book, issued on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Carson’s best-known book, Silent Spring, lays out the facts.

Nice to see that book lovers like Souder’s work, too.  Carson’s work was painstakingly accurate as science, but also a wonderful read.  Silent Spring has a larger following among lovers of literature than science, a tribute to her writing ability.  Souder’s book plows both veins, science and writing.

Cover of On a Farther Shore, by William Souder

In circles serious about science, the environment, human health, and literature, Souder’s book is the book of the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring.  There is irony there.  Pesticide manufacturers mounted a campaign against Silent Spring and Rachel Carson calculated to have cost $500,000 in 1962, when that book was published.  Souder’s book fights propaganda from Astro-turf™ organizations like Africa Fighting Malaria, a pro-DDT group that collects money from chemical manufacturers and anti-environmental political sources for a propaganda campaign that costs well over $500,000/year.  Despite all the paid-shill shouting against Rachel Carson and her work, it is the voice of On a Farther Shore that stands out.

More:

• William Souder commentary on Silent Spring at Minnesota Public Radio
• Souder in Slate:  “Rachel Carson didn’t kill millions of Africans”
• New Rachel Carson Biography (Book Acquired, 11.13.2012) (biblioklept.org)
• “The Poisoned Earth,” by Elizabeth Royte,  New York Times review of Souder’s book; NYT also named the book one of their “100 notable” books for 2012
• Amy Stewart’s review of Souder’s book in The Washington Post
• Christian Science Monitor review, by Emily Cataneo (Jim Bencivenga, Ron Preston, where are you guys?); also see the CSM blog piece about the campaign against Carson, “Smearing Rachel Carson”
• William Souder’s “On a Farther Shore” Scores NYTimes Nod (thesamerowdycrowd.wordpress.com)
• REVIEW: On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (macleans.ca)
• Birders talk about Rachel Carson (billingsgazette.com)
• Silent Autumn (whattheducks.com)
• “DDT chronicles at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub,” a chronological index to stories here on Rachel Carson, DDT and malaria, and the pseudo-controversy

Twain aboard ship – 1896 photo, 1897 etching

One of my favorite images of Mark Twain I found several years ago.  It’s a photograph of Twain, with a genuine smile of some contentment, seated in a deck chair on a ship, feet on the rail, gazing out to sea.

Correspondent J. A. Higginbotham tracked down the origin of the photograph through the Gutenberg Project, and found a nice etching from the photograph at twainquotes.com, with sleuthing by Barbara Schmidt, the curator of that site.

Here’s the photo, from the Gutenberg Project’s version of the 1898 American Publishing Company edition of Following the Equator:

Mark Twain, aboard ship in 1896. Photo by Walter G. Chase, of Boston. This photo provided the frontispiece for the 1898 American Publishing Company edition of Following the Equator.

Who was Walter Chase?  So far as I have found, he was a Boston-based photographer.

Samuel L. Clemens, the man behind Mark Twain, undertook a world-wide speaking tour, to restore his fortune after bankruptcy, and to take his mind off the death of his daughter Susy, in August 1896.  At the same time, there was demand for newspaper columns and books on travel.  The resulting book, Following the Equator in the U.S., ended the series of travelogues Twain wrote.  Columns and the book covered his and his family’s adventures in 1896 and 1897; this photo must have originated in late 1896, in the early part of the tour.  We know from Chapter 1 that the land part of the trip, by train, “westward out of New York,” took 40 days.  Twain wrote that it took seven days to get to Hawaii.  We might be safe in saying the photograph shows him gazing at the Pacific.

Without knowing more, we might be tantalized by the prospect that Chase accompanied Twain on much of this tour, and took other photographs.  Twain wrote about games played among the travelers aboard ship, with notes indicating a key player was someone named “Chase.”  We have a photo of Twain posing for a sculptor in Vienna, from this trip. Somewhere, there may be a trunk of photographs . . .

According to Barbara Schmidt’s sleuthing, William Henry Warren Bicknell created the etching from the photograph, for the 1899 uniform edition of Following the Equator.  Bicknell was one of several illustrators used, including Boy Scout founder Daniel Beard.

W. H. W. Bicknell’s etching from the 1896 Walter G. Chase photograph of Mark Twain, aboard a ship in the Pacific Ocean.

Schmidt uses a colored version of the etching on her website’s own frontispiece.  No doubt she describes it in more detail, but I have not found that description.

A color version of an etching of Mark Twain, based on Chase’s 1896 photograph. Image via twainquotes.com, Barbara Schmidt’s site.

A fitting way to end a day of commemorating Mark Twain’s birthday, to discover the origins of one of my favorite images of the man.

New question:  With the exception of the color image, each version includes Twain’s autograph, “Be good & you will be lonesome,” with his signature.  Was this an autograph done solely for the book, or was it an autograph to the publisher, editor, or photographer?

Tip of the old scrub brush to correspondent J. A. Higginbotham.

More:

• Birthday of Twain and Churchill: Happy Whiskey and Cigar Day 2012! (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Break Out the Jumping Frogs for Mark Twain’s 177th Birthday (writingfromtheedgeoffantasy.wordpress.com)
• Ready for November 30? Humidor set? Liquor stocked? (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Celebrating Mark Twain (flawedcreations.wordpress.com)
• On This Day In 1835, Mark Twain is Born (rememberinghistory.wordpress.com)
• The Twain of My Exisitence (urtheinspiration.wordpress.com)
• 177 years of Mark Twain (neatorama.com)
• Mark Twain’s pit stop in city (thehindu.com)
• Whatever happened to Dan Beard’s illustrations of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court?

Mark Twain (Photo credit: Wikipedia) – Another, earlier image of Twain, origins to sleuth down!

Birthday of Twain and Churchill: Happy Whiskey and Cigar Day 2012!

Mark Twain aboard a ship, somewhere. Place and photographer unknown (at least to MFB). Young Samuel Clemens apprenticed to be a Mississippi river boat pilot, and held a fascination for water-going vessels his entire life. His pilot years are documented, and analyzed, in Life on the Mississippi.

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), and Winston Churchill (1874).

In 2012, we have the benefit of having had a couple of years to digest Twain’s Autobiography, and we have the benefit of new scholarship and a major new book on Churchill, William Manchester’s and Paul Reid’s The Last Lion.

Twain had a comment on the Texas Education Agency and State Board of Education:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.

- Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson‘s New Calendar

The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win, in 1953.

Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.

Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.

Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine. Churchill’s career was built much on his work as First Lord of the Admiralty, a position he took in 1911.  While he was the goat of the Battle of the Dardanelles (and had to resign as a result), his earlier work to switch Britain’s Navy to oil power from coal, and to use airplanes in combat, kept the British Navy as an important and modern military organization through World War II.

Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.

Each possessed a great facility with words, and wit, and frequently said or wrote things that people like to remember and repeat again.

Both of them rank near the top of the list of people to whom almost any quote will be attributed if the quote is witty and the speaker can’t remember, or doesn’t know, who actually said it.

Both men are worth study. And wouldn’t you really love to have had them over to dinner?

Twain, on prisons versus education:

“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900

Churchill on the evil men and nations do:

“No One Would Do Such Things”

“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”

—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49. (Obviously, and sadly, Churchill was wrong — twice wrong.)

Image of Twain aboard ship – origin unknown. Image of Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine.

More on Mark Twain

• Mark Twain Quotations
• Mark Twain in His Time, University of Virginia (see especially the photo of Twain — with an electric light? — on the opening page)
• Mark Twain, a film by Ken Burns
• The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut
• Ain’t it great that we’ve finally got the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography this year?

More on Winston Churchill

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953
• Churchill Centre, London
• Churchill quotations, from the Churchill Centre
• National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri (an excellent place to visit, great resources for students)
• Washington Post review of The Last Lion

Orson Welles, with Dick Cavett, on Churchill, his wit, humor and grace (tip of the old scrub brush to the Churchill Centre):

Yeah, mostly this is an encore post from past years.

More, contemporary reports from 2012:

• Ready for November 30? Humidor set? Liquor stocked? (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• On This Day In 1835, Mark Twain is Born (rememberinghistory.wordpress.com)
• OMG! First Use of Abbreviation Found in a 1917 Letter to Winston Churchill (newsfeed.time.com)
• HAPPY 177th BIRTHDAY MARK TWAIN! MARK TWAIN was a GENIUS American author, novelist, satirist and humorist, who is most famous for writing “The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” (greatkat.wordpress.com)
• Winston Churchill: The Ultimate CEO (greatfinds.icrossing.com)

Ready for November 30? Humidor set? Liquor stocked?

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens), and of Winston Spencer Churchill.

A good study of American history could be achieved merely in studying the chronicle of the lives of these two men, even though Churchill was British.  A good study of American history, or world history, cannot be had without familiarity with both of them, and why they are important.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill gives the “Victory” sign to crowds in London on Victory in Europe Day. Wikipedia image

Both were writers, of travelogues and geographical romps, of history, though Twain is chiefly known as a fiction writer.  Both were great humorists, often funny, often sharply witty with bon-mots that shone a highlight on some human foible or forgotten-but-shouldn’t-be point of history.

Both of them loved good whiskey, and a good cigar.

(I should have more to say about each of these men, especially having visited with Churchill in Wisconsin, Fulton, Missouri, and Washington, D.C., and with Twain in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, and Washington, D.C., in the past few months.  But I also will attend a funeral for a friend, and I will get a good night’s sleep; get a shot of whiskey, a good cigar if your cardiologist lets you have one on occasion, and toast them whether I write any more or not.)

So, how will you celebrate the anniversary of the births of Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, on November 30?

I wonder how they celebrate in Hannibal, and in Fulton?

Mark Twain was featured in an ad for Old Crow Whiskey, unknown year. Twain wrote, “Total abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extent. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to totally abstain from total abstinence itself.” (Autograph inscription in album to Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, reported in The Washington Post, June 11, 1881)

More:

• Why Winston Churchill will always be the last word in political wit (telegraph.co.uk)
• Winston Churchill’s family heirlooms go on show (itv.com)
• Review: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 (macleans.ca)

Two Alcotts, and the Concord transcendentalists – November 29

April is the cruelest month, and November the most disagreeable.

Students of literature might recognize something in that sentence.

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888), American novelist, at age 20 – image from Wikipedia

Interesting coincidence:  Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832; her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was born on November 29, 33 years earlier.

Do high school literature students find them interesting, even? Or do the students learn about transcendentalism only because they know “it’s on the test?”

American Memory at the Library of Congress holds history for each day of the year.  The entry for November 29 notes and chronicles the dual births of the Alcotts, and discusses the transcendentalist movement — with a lot of good links for teachers or students.

My hope is that more teachers of history will use more literature in their courses.  While Texas standards on history say little about transcendentalism, the reality is that it is difficult to understand America and its development from 1800 to the Civil War, without understanding transcendentalism.  Would America have gone to war over slavery and states rights, but for this movement in literature and social theory?

What can students learn about life in America from reading the Alcotts’ books?

Cribbed entirely from the American Memory LOC site, this is a self-contained literature and history unit by itself [links in the text all from the good people at the Library of Congress]:

American educator and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), father of the literary Alcott girls. From the NYPL Digital Gallery via Wikipedia

Daughter of the Transcendentalists

“November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,” said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

“That’s the reason I was born in it,” observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

“If something very pleasant should happen now, we should think it a delightful month,” said Beth, who took a hopeful view of everything, even November.

“I dare say, but nothing pleasant ever does happen in this family,” said Meg, who was out of sorts….

“My patience, how blue we are!” cried Jo…. “Oh, don’t I wish I could manage things for you as I do for my heroines!…I’d have some rich relation leave you a fortune unexpectedly….”

“Jo and I are going to make fortunes for you all. Just wait ten years, and see if we don’t,” said Amy, who sat in a corner making mud pies, as Hannah called her little clay models of birds, fruit, and faces.   Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Chapter 15

Louisa May Alcott, the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, teacher and transcendentalist philosopher, and Abigail May, social worker and reformer, was born in the “disagreeable month” of November, just like her literary creation Jo March, the rambunctious heroine of Little Women.

On November 29, 1832, Amos Bronson Alcott wrote his mother of his joy in “the birth of a second daughter on my own birth-day.” Convinced of the importance of early childhood, Bronson Alcott continued to keep a regular journal of each of his four daughters’ growth and activities. Shortly before her second birthday, Louisa’s father wrote of her:

Louisa…manifests uncommon activity and force of mind at present…by force of will and practical talent, [she] realizes all that she conceives.…Bronson Alcott, November 5, 1834.
The Journals of Bronson Alcott, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938), page 47.

During Louisa’s early years, her father’s innovative Temple School in Boston failed, as did the family’s experiment with communal living with a group of transcendentalist mystics at Fruitlands, an early eighteenth-century farmhouse.

A happier time began after the family settled at Hillside House, later Nathaniel Hawthorne’s residence, which he renamed the Wayside, in Concord, Massachusetts. There, the Alcotts found a sympathetic community and like-minded friends. Louisa and her sisters were always welcome to participate in the conversations of the poets, philosophers, and reformers that made up their parents’ circle.

The Old Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts, 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

The Alcott girls enjoyed the natural beauty of Concord, boating on the river, ice skating on Walden Pond, and running free in the surrounding fields and woods. Henry David Thoreau was one of Louisa’s instructors when she was a young girl. In one of his fanciful lessons, he taught her that a cobweb was a “handkerchief dropped by a fairy.” As a teenager, Louisa enjoyed borrowing books from Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s collection and delighted in conversing with the “sage of Concord.”

For the most part, the Alcotts taught their daughters at home. Daily journal-keeping formed a significant part of the home curriculum. Louisa and her sisters each wrote a weekly journal in which they recorded family events and published their literary and artistic endeavors. The girls and their neighbors formed a dramatic society, and the Hillside barn became the local theater where they performed the Louisa’s melodramatic plays.

Although their home and community life was rich, the family remained financially impoverished. Of necessity, all family members pitched in to support the family, with the daughters working as teachers, companions, and domestics. Besides their paid labors, they contributed their time and talents to the abolition movement, the women’s suffrage movement, and to the relief of those poorer than themselves.

Louisa resolved early on to earn money to relieve the hardship of her mother’s life. Gradually, she began earning a reliable income from stories and sketches published in and from dime-novel thrillers, including published under the pseudonym “A. M. Barnard.” Her first book of stories, , was published in 1855.

Patients in Ward K of Armory Square Hospital,
Washington, D.C.,
August, 1865.
Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865

During the Civil War, Louisa served as a nurse at a Union Army hospital in Washington, D.C. There, she kept careful journals which she published later as Hospital Sketches. A severe bout of typhoid fever brought her home to Concord an invalid. It is thought that she was treated with mercury for her fever, as were many others who became ill during this period. Mercury poisoning was apparently the cause of the slow debilitation that led to her death twenty years later.

In 1868, at the suggestion of her publisher, Louisa wrote a “story for girls” that was to bring her lasting fame, Little Women; or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, based on the experiences of her own family. Little Women was an immediate success. It was followed the next year by a second volume with the same title, subtitled, “Part Second,” and in subsequent years, by two sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

During the 1870s, Alcott and her mother were deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement, canvassing door-to-door encouraging women to register to vote. In 1879, Louisa registered as the first woman to vote in the Concord school committee election.

Help Us to Win the Vote, 1914.
By Popular Demand: “Votes for Women” Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

Louisa’s later years were financially secure and her family was able to live comfortably and pursue their many intellectual and artistic interests at their second home in Concord, Orchard House. Her last years, however, were shadowed by the deaths of two of her sisters and her brother-in-law. As the sole support of her parents, sisters, and her nephews and niece, she became overburdened with work and ill health. Louisa May Alcott died, two days after her father, on March 6, 1888, at the age of fifty-six.

The Orchard House, Concord, Home of the Alcotts,
Concord, Massachusetts, 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

• To compile a bibliography of works by Louisa May Alcott, search the Library of Congress Online Catalog, using the option “Author/Creator Browse” found on the “Basic Search” search page.
• Search on Concord Massachusetts in the collection Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 to see more photographs of scenes from Louisa May Alcott’s home.
• Today in History contains several features on Concord, Massachusetts and its inhabitants. Search the Today in History Archive on names such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Concord.
• Read the text of Louisa May Alcott’s provided online by .
• Read the poem “” written by Louisa May Alcott in included in the American Memory collection The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books.

Father of the “Little Women”

Woman…is helping herself to secure her place in a better spirit and manner than any we [men] can suggest or devise,…it becomes us to take, rather than proffer Consels [sic], readily waiting to learn her wishes and aims, as she has so long and so patiently deferred to us.Letter from A. Bronson Alcott to Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Concord, Massachusetts, May 4, 1869.
The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1969), p. 471.

On November 29, 1799, Amos Bronson Alcott, educator, philosopher of American Transcendentalism, and father of the original “Little Women”—Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May Alcott—was born in Wolcott, Connecticut. The son of a poor flax farmer, Alcott was almost completely self-educated. As a young man, Alcott worked as a peddler, handyman, and gardener, pursuing a self-selected course of readings in English and German literature and philosophy.

In 1830, Alcott journeyed to Boston to attend a series of lectures on abolition. There he met Samuel Joseph May, Unitarian minister, and his sister Abigail “Abba” May, a teacher and social worker. On May 23, 1830, Alcott and Abba May were married. During the next several years, the Alcotts were forced to move several times, as Bronson’s experimental schools were abandoned as financially unsuccessful.

During this period, the couple’s four daughters were born and Alcott continued to develop his lifelong habit of journal-writing, chronicling the daily events in the development of his children. At the basis of his educational theory was his belief that “early education is the enduring power” in the formation of the imagination and moral life of the human being.

Tremont Temple,
Boston, Massachusetts,
c 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

On September 22, 1834, Alcott opened his famous Temple School, located in the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street in Boston, where he put into effect many of his innovative educational theories. His assistant, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who went on to found the first kindergarten in the United States, published the plan of the school the next year in her book Record of a School.

Alcott believed that learning should be a pleasant experience for children, and that the classroom environment should be beautiful. He built the classroom furniture himself and allowed the children to decorate the room with pictures and plants and to arrange their desks in a manner pleasing to themselves.

Alcott emphasized the cultivation of the virtues of self-discipline, self-expression, and charity. A form of democratic classroom government was instituted. His curriculum included physical education, dance, art, music, nature study, and daily journal-writing. He acquired a juvenile library and also encouraged the children to read classic adult works such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The school was, at first, very successful, and attracted a number of well-connected students. However, Alcott’s inability to compromise on his ideals eventually led to its failure as well. In 1835, the last remaining pupils were withdrawn from the school due to Alcott’s insistence on permitting the attendance of a black child.

Wayside, the Home of Hawthorne, Concord, Massachusetts, [formerly Hillside, home of the Alcotts], c1901.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

With the financial assistance of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcotts moved to Hillside House in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson also paid for Alcott’s trip to England to visit a school founded upon his theories. Alcott returned with a new friend, Charles Lane, a mystic transcendentalist, with whom he embarked on a new experiment, that of communal living at the farm they purchased, Fruitlands, an early eighteenth-century farmhouse.

The experiment in communal living was Alcott’s least successful adventure and proved a great hardship to his wife and children. The experience was later satirized by his daughter Louisa in her story, “Transcendental Wild Oats.” After the farm’s complete failure, the Alcotts returned to Concord, where the family renewed congenial friendships and developed a happy family life, in spite of their constant struggle with poverty.

I have had some faithful readings, during these January days—all of Carlyle including his translations—all of Goethe that came within my reach…. I have found refreshment, too, in Conversing with some little Children who pass the day in my study.… there is begotten in me the liveliest sense of my…duty of Teaching again.A. Bronson Alcott, Letter to Charles Lane, January 1846,
The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1969), 124.

Path to School of Philosophy,
Concord, Massachusetts,
c[between 1910-20].
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

Always notable for his humility, modesty, and his serene and happy spirit, Alcott continued to develop his educational ideas, teaching his children at home, and giving occasional “conversations.” These talks were directed parlor seminars in which he led a Socratic form of dialogue, in return for a small stipend. Eventually, Alcott’s seminars gained a popular following. They were especially well-attended on his tours in the West.

School of Philosophy,
Concord, Massachusetts,
c[between 1910-20].
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

In his later years, Alcott’s daughter Louisa’s financial success as a writer enabled the family to purchase not only necessities, but a few luxuries as well. The family moved to Orchard House where Alcott established the Concord Summer School of Philosophy in a converted barn on the property. Alcott’s School of Philosophy was a gathering center for the Transcendentalists and flourished until shortly after his death in 1888.

Discover more about Alcott and the Concord Transcendentalists in American Memory:

• Bronson Alcott maintained friendships and correspondence with a variety of influential people of his time, including Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford. Search the Today in History Archive for features on the reformers, philosophers, writers, and artists that formed Alcott’s circle, including:
  • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Walt Whitman
  • John Burroughs
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • Daniel Chester French (A native of Concord, Massachusetts, the sculptor who created the Minute Man Statue and the Statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial received his early art instruction from Bronson Alcott’s daughter May Alcott Nieriker.)
• Search on Bronson Alcott in the collection The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books to find Alcott’s book Ralph Waldo Emerson; an Estimate of His Character and Genius in Prose and Verse and Record of Mr. Alcott’s School, Exemplifying the Principles and Methods of Moral Culture, written by Alcott’s assistant Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.
• The collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910 includes the full text of a book of meditations, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, written by transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, a friend of Alcott’s.
• Search on Concord Massachusetts in the collection Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 to see more photographs of the town that was home to the Alcotts and other members of the Transcendentalist movement.
• Two of the Alcott homes in Concord are now museums. Visit the Web sites for Wayside House, formerly called “Hillside,” and for the home that Louisa May Alcott purchased for the family with the earnings from her writing.

More:

• Louisa May Alcott: 10 quotes on her birthday (csmonitor.com)
• A Whisper in the Dark, by Louisa May Alcott (bfgb.wordpress.com)
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (thegoodsoldandnew.wordpress.com)
• Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother by Eve LaPlante (mapleandaquill.wordpress.com)
• A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott (1866) (readramble.typepad.com)
• Marmee & Louisa by Eve LaPlante (karenwhiteaudiobooks.com)

Happy Origin of Species Day! (November 24)

Tomorrow, November 24, 2012, marks the 153rd anniversary of a day that quietly changed all of science, should have changed much of theology, and brought much of the world into the future, though many people don’t know it yet.

It’s a Saturday this year — so let’s be a day early, to get informed and involved the people who don’t check their calendars on the weekends.

On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s book was published, On the Origin of Species.

Title page, 1859 edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species – image from the University of Sydney via Wikimedia image

How to celebrate?  You could read a summary of Ernst Mayr’s shorthand version of Darwin’s theory, and understand it really for the first time  (I hope not the first time, but there are a lot of people who really don’t understand what Darwin said — especially among critics of evolution):

Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarised as follows:^[3]

• Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce the population would grow (fact).
• Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
• Resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time (fact).
• A struggle for survival ensues (inference).
• Individuals in a population vary significantly from one another (fact).
• Much of this variation is inheritable (fact).
• Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their inheritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (inference).
• This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference).

Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch, his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837) on view at the the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Interpretation of handwriting: “I think case must be that one generation should have as many living as now. To do this and to have as many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction . Thus between A + B the immense gap of relation. C + B the finest gradation. B+D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. Bearing relation” (next page begins) “to ancient types with several extinct forms.”  Wikimedia image

This is mostly an encore post — hey, it’s a history blog — with tips of the old scrub brush justified to Larry Moran and P. Z. Myers, and especially Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education.

More:

• The Origin of Darwinism: Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species ebook (guardian.co.uk)
• World’s youngest species (bbc.co.uk)
• Charles Darwin’s insurance documents found by RSA (telegraph.co.uk)
• Was Charles Darwin the world’s most emo scientist? (mnn.com)
• Visualizing Origin of the Species (ritholtz.com)
• Now that’s a tee-shirt! (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• A history of the theory of evolution through natural selection (guardian.co.uk)
• Charles Darwin gets 4,000 write-in votes in Georgia election (mnn.com)
• Creationism and Vitalism (sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com)
• Carl Zimmer wins Kavli Science Journalism Award
• From NCSE:
• NCSE offers a free preview in .pdf of Rudolf A. Raff’s Once We All Had Gills (Indiana University Press, 2012)
• NCSE’s Joshua Rosenau’s invited essay “Science Denial: A Guide for Scientists” was published in Trends in Microbiology 2012;20(12):567-569.

 

Typewriter of the moment: e. e. cummings

Typewriter of the poet and author e. e. cummings:

Typewriter of e. e. cummings, displayed at the New York Public Library, 2012. Photo by Chris Wolack, WildmooBooks

Through March of 2012, 250 objects from the collections of the New York Public Library were displayed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the opening of the library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.  A few of the objects exhibited were typewriters, including this one.

Did you notice?  The keyboard shows only capital letters!  Did that anger cummings, or make him crazy?  Not that we can see.

More: 

Self-Portrait, Oil Painting. Cummings in the 1950s. Courtesy of Nancy T. Andrews, via Modern American Poetry

 

• Brochure of the exhibit, in .pdf
• Profile of e. e. cummings by Nicholas Everett at Modern American Poetry
• cummings profile at poets.org
• cummings bio at the Poetry Foundation
• Typewriter keyboard-shaped waffle iron (lostateminor.com)
• Love a Library Day in New York (theepochtimes.com)
• USB Typewriters for your computer and iPad (lostateminor.com)

Tip of the old scrub brush to Chris Wolack at WildmooBooks.