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20
Aug 21

Reading our way into the weekend

We had freshmen in the building today. First year students, the direct admits, came in and heard from the dean. He determined very quickly that we are all old. They don’t know who David Letterman is. He’s been off CBS for six years, which is a long time, but he still has his longform interview show on Netflix.

It reminded me of the time I used a photo of Dan Rather to set up a key point in a classroom lecture and none of the students knew who he was. I’d anticipated that. It was just a picture of Rather at a lectern. So I had a second image of the longtime news anchor. He was there at the desk, a graphic box over his shoulder, the CBS bug in the corner. No one knew who he was. He’d been off the air for a little over two years at that point.

Time moves quickly, but it also helps if people are familiar with the character in the first place. Somehow, it’s harder to imagine people being unfamiliar with Letterman.

Anyway, the dean offered a top ten list, but said it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t, but it was useful, and hopefully some of it will stick for them.

This evening there was a grad student welcome program. The day in between is already a blur of meetings and seeing familiar faces for the first time in a long time.

It’s always fun when people come back, until you lose track of how many miniature reunions you’ve had. In a few days I’ll ask a student, not for the first time, about their summer. The week is over, the semester is here, but first …

Let’s do a little reading. This is from one of my grandfather’s magazines, the January 1954 edition of Popular Science. We’re looking at a few of the ads from the thing. We started this particular magazine last week and you can see the first five ads if you click that previous link. Click the image below and you can see the next six advertisements of worth and merriment.

If Popular Science doesn’t interest you, you can see the rest of the things I’ve digitized from my grandfather’s collection. There are textbooks, a school notebook and a few Reader’s Digests, so far. It’s a lot of fun.

At this rate we’ll be reading this Popular Science for several weeks, so there’s a lot of fun yet to come.

Just like your weekend, I hope. Big plans? Little plans? No plans?

We’ve got the same plans. Good, now-traditional, staying safely removed from people, bike riding, book reading plans.

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17
Aug 21

Shoo, fly

My lovely bride — who is as strong as they come and smarter than she realizes — and I have a joke in our house. Whenever there is an insect she asks me to handle the situation.

We all have things we don’t want to do, so this is fine. I say, make sure people you spend your time with have complimentary tastes and services. Not everyone should be scared of, say, clowns, to the point of immobility. Someone present should be able to handle the situation.

But that’s not really what this is. She lets me address the insect and that lets me let the critter outside, or meet it’s untimely fate, and then we make a joke about how I saved her life. From the millipede, or whatever we are dealing with.

Well, today was no millipede. And after I’d returned from a long and fruitful day at the office we were chatting as people do and in the middle of the conversation she says, “Oh, I need a very thin piece of cardboard.” I produce something from the recycling stack in the garage and ask her why. “I trapped the world’s largest house fly under a plastic bowl and you need to slide the cardboard under it to carry it outside.”

OK, not a problem. Paperboard, bowl, we’ve all been there. The flooring that the insect was on was dark, so I couldn’t see it properly until I got outside to notice we had trapped and were releasing a female Tabanus atratus.

Look at that scissoring mouth! And why are we finding horseflies indoors?

She flew off to do horsefly things. We sat outside, for some reason, and I was thinking about how they use their six piercing mouth parts and — this part is unnecessarily gross, apologies — the sponge-like labrum used to lap up blood.

Horseflies don’t often bite people. But you don’t want to be bitten by a horsefly.

Back to my evening reading selection. I’m about to wrap this up.

It’s been a fine read. Again, it’s like an in-depth Wikipedia entry on a given subject from the period. Most of the chapters are about 20-something pages. It’s a great overview. And I have found things in Lord’s book that will prompt me to look for more thorough accounts, but other subjects I’ve read the 20 or 30 pages and felt like I had enough for now.

What was fun this evening was reading a bit about this particular moment in the American culture … through the lens of a 1960s writer.

Riding bikes! Swimming! Smoking! Pants! You knew how that had evolved, but it’s a treat to see little anecdotes like that which help to spell out how it could be liberating and befuddling. It all really stands out, 110 years-and-more later, of course, but just imagine being in the moment. Or consider that the next time something is different compared to the things to which you’ve long been accustomed. Makes you wonder what the social mores will be like in another five generations.

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13
Aug 21

Listen to some music, read some books

Just a week ago yesterday I mentioned Nanci Griffith here. She figured into one of my first blog posts. Back then I said “God Bless Nanci Griffith.” I’ve been listening to her for a long time, about a quarter of a century. This evening it was announced that she’d passed away.

God bless Nanci Griffith; he blessed us with her.

The Flyer, looking back, has a certain mid-century weariness that is overcome by the un-replaceable mid-century optimism she put into so much of her work. It was a wonderful entrance to her folkabilly style.

“These Days in an Open Book” sticks with you.

And there are parts of “Grafton Street” that can haunt you. Indeed, I can hear every important note perfectly well in my mind, even now.

She produced 19 records over the course of her career, which spanned most of my life until her health turned a few years ago. It’s an impressive body of work from a gifted storyteller. The nature of the entertainment industry, of course, is such that an artist’s work never leaves us, thankfully. What a gift it is to have all of this to return to.

I’m not ready to listen to them again just now — one day soon, I hope — but you should definitely try them out.

The planned event for the day was the return to the books section. We made it back there in just a shade under two years. That’s a perfectly average turnaround time, if you ask me. Perfectly average if you are Voyager 1 and you are in between Jupiter and Saturn.

This section of the site is a casual study of some of my grandfather’s books. I didn’t have the good fortune to meet him, but I know him from family stories and some of his things that I’ve inherited. Like a giant box of periodicals I rescued. So, today, we’re beginning a look at an issue of “Popular Science,” January 1954. Click the image to see the first five ads I’ve selected.

At this rate, it’ll take a while, and that’s the point. If Popular Science isn’t your speed, you can see the rest of the things I’ve digitized from my grandfather’s collection. There are textbooks, a school notebook and a few Reader’s Digests, so far. It’s a lot of fun.

And fun is what you’re supposed to have over a weekend. I hope that’s what you have in store for you. Come back and tell me about it on Monday, won’t you?

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10
Aug 21

Not everything here is from the last century

I’m reading through this book right now. It’s the 1960 version of a long-winded, well written Wikipedia series. Each chapter covers one particular moment, almost all of which can and do have several tomes you can dig up. This book is the city bus tour of the historical period. It’s a great read to get an overview, an easy way to discover a new interest.

The San Francisco earthquake and fire gets 24 pages. And, for me, for that, it was plenty.

I’ve read three of the definitive biographies on Teddy Roosevelt, and two on the Wright Brothers, you see, it’s the subject, not the period. Some things are just more interesting than others. There’s one chapter here about a particular insurance man and his social life. Didn’t do much for me. There’s another on how J.P. Morgan forced the American banking system into avoiding a an economic collapse by force of will. It was intriguing, but you got the gist. Right now I’m reading about Peary’s sixth Arctic expedition. I’d probably enjoy a bit more of that. Here’s a bit from the chapter on the Great White Fleet, and a full telling of this story would probably be worth trying. Roosevelt sent the vessels around the world as a projection of American naval power — 16 battleships, 14,000 sailors on board them and their escort with ports of call on six continents — it was one of the first signals of the American century.

I’ve looked a fair amount. Several accounts refer to these cheers, but no one seems to know where they are from. I Assume some Chilean naval officer went to Cornell and brought all of that back. And when the Americans arrived in January of 1908, that was just part of the fanfare. A surrealistic bit of home for the American sailors who’d been on this mission for a month, making just their third port of call.

I wonder how many of the Americans recognized them. Cornell was a big player in early 20th century athletics, but still there wasn’t a lot of opportunities to Google this sort of thing in 1908.

This is from the same chapter. Walter Lord diverged a bit, which is rare in this book, but his point was what the returning sailors came home to after their historic circumnavigation. It was one of those moments where things were changing quickly in the culture.

If you’ve read about Europe in this period, or the American experience just before entering the Great War, you can see an entire world-shaking bit of foreshadowing going on there. It’s a good book. Written in 1960, when some of these things were frozen in memory, rather than frozen in amber. And while new perspectives and information have no doubt come along in the intervening years — Lord was much closer to his subject than we are to him here — the book holds up. Click on the cover, above, and pick up a copy for yourself.

And if you’re not interested in that …

Here’s a bit of Poseidon, god of water, bathtub mortal.

Achilles had his heel, Poseidon has his back paws, I guess.

I like to think he’s not fascinated by the water, but by the physics of the water’s retention and movement.

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2
Aug 21

You’re going to want to listen to this

I’ve been reading The Good Years, by the great Walter Lord. It’s a 1960 casual overview, something longer than the a Reader’s Digest version of history, a chapter-by-chapter read on key moments of the first part of the 20th century. Last night, for example, I read the 24-page chapter on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent fire.

Go ahead and play this while you read on.

Prominently figuring into that chapter is Enrico Caruso, the tenor you are listening to right now. He was visiting California with New York’s Metropolitan Opera for a production of Carmen.

He stars in a great apocryphal story about the disaster — some version of it you’ve run across before, even if it wasn’t San Francisco and Caruso — which you can read here:

It was one of those great moments in history that never actually happened: According to one legend, Enrico Caruso was in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1906, staying at the Palace Hotel. As people panicked and chaos ensued in the aftermath, the great tenor appeared — some said on the balcony of his hotel room, which didn’t exist — and sang an aria to calm the masses.

Or not.

I just learned that he died 100 years ago, to the day. Here’s the August 02, 1921 Evening Star from Washington D.C.

And I’ve reworked that long column to make this a bit more convenient for the web.

Coverage continues, on page 19:

The obit continues, “it seemed as if the very heavens today mourned the tenor’s loss, for scarcely had there appeared on the streets the first extras telling of his death than it became dark as night. Great clouds, heavy with rain, draped the skies.”

The piece details, at great length, that the famed tenor fell ill at Christmas, 1920. Caruso struggled with his health for eight months, including a trip back to his native Italy from the United States. He had several surgeries and struggled to recover — reports of his few public appearances varied, he looked in good spirits, but thin and unwell. Reports were that he’d never sing again.

He refuted that as long as possible.

And why not? The man, in all of his power, sounded like this.

A hundred years to the day … timing worthy of an opera star.

One of the first truly global superstars, he recorded 247 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920. This is thought to be his last one.

One production note … High fidelity wasn’t introduced until about 1925. All of the tenor’s recordings were made with an acoustic process — Caruso sang into a metal horn and the sound was transferred directly to a master disc via a stylus. He was one of the first artists to embrace the technology, others soon did when they saw his record sales. But the process shared only a part of his gift with his fans: the acoustic process captures only a limited range in the singing voice. Even still.

The kitties don’t seem to be fans of tenors. They’ve heard me sing enough that, I’m sure, no classically trained artist is going to turn them around.

But they are fan of attention! It was belly-rub-o’clock when I walked by Phoebe here:

And it was “Don’t stop petting me thirty” here:

Poseidon hanging out in his tunnel. He likes opera. He simply has the right attitude for it:

He also likes staring out of the windows:

I wonder what aria he’s thinking about as he studies the side yard. (‘O sole mio, definitely.)