Helping the heart of man to know itself

How I missed the anniversary of Anthony Trollope’s birth on April 24, I will never know – probably couldn’t put Barchester Towers down long enough to observe the occasion.

One of the two towering figures of Victorian literature (along with Dickens, of course), Trollope alone wears well still.  You can find all of his works at Project Gutenberg, including his Autobiography.  It was the posthumous publication of his autobiography that gave critics an excuse to diminish him – after all, no real artist can stick to a rigorous writing schedule like Trollope did and hold down a mundane job at the post office while doing it.

But like Dickens, Trollope was brought up in a dysfunctional family and had a ne’er-do-well father – he learned the value of a steady paycheck at an early age and never forgot it.

Also like Dickens, Trollope was, in the eyes of his critics, overly prolific. He wrote 47 novels, ten collections of short stories and a great deal of nonfiction. Critics seem to prefer the tortured romantic figure that manages to create a half dozen or so significant works.

Real Victorian pillar box, thought to be oldest surviving one. Photo by Manvyi

But if you haven’t read the Barchester novels or the Parliamentary novels – at least once – then you have a great treat in store. Henry James had his reservations about Trollope, but in sum he admitted that

“His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual. … he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings. … Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent, of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself. … A race is fortunate when it has a good deal of the sort of imagination—of imaginative feeling—that had fallen to the share of Anthony Trollope…”

(Btw, if you are tackling the wonderful world of the church political in the Barchester series – and if you are not English by birth – it is worth checking out the Church of England in Wikipedia to get an idea of the differences between vicars and rectors, deans and archdeacons.)

In addition to leaving the world of literature a better place, Trollope is also reputed to have created the pillar box for the collection of mail.   Surely a man of many talents.

Called to serve

There are some very important anniversaries to be observed today – Parliament passed the Tea Act, Marines attacked Tripoli – and many birthdays of note, including such heavyweights as Edward Gibbon and Samuel F.B. Morse.

Mayor Cory Booker. Photo by David Shankbone

But one man who celebrates today is particularly fascinating – he is a perfect example of the mysterious call to service that some human beings demonstrate and most do not.

So, many happy returns to Mayor Cory Booker of Newark NJ, who turns 43 today.

Cory Booker grew up in nice affluent community, was raised by two highly successful IBM executives, doesn’t seem to have suffered from much discrimination and took all the prizes available to a bright young male American, including a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.

For some reason, he settled on  Newark – blighted, corrupt and downtrodden – as the recipient of his gifts.  He served on the City Council, ran for mayor in 2002, lost, ran again in 2006 and won.  From 1998 until 2006 he lived in one of the city’s worst housing projects – Brick Towers – and after it was torn down, moved to a really bad neighborhood.

All the statistics on how crime is down, affordable housing is up and schools are improving are here, but he is a mayor with a big difference: he has open office hours so residents can talk to him personally, he’s been known to patrol the streets in the wee hours and even shoveled snow for a retiree once.

Dude, on April 12, he rescued a woman from a burning building! Seriously, what more could you ask?

He seems utterly selfless in his dedication – the very personification of altruism.  Where does that come from?

Altruism has been studied by scientists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and neurologists.  There are anthropologists who will tell you that evolution is not just about survival of the fittest, but also survival of the kindest – check out what slime mold gets up to.

Neurologists have several theories, apparently depending on the kind of experiment conducted, but we do seem hard-wired for altruism.  Sociologists have found that altruism is good for your health – a group of older subjects studied showed that those who volunteered were healthier, happier and had a 44% lower death rate than those who did not.

All religions put altruism right up top when it comes to moral values – it is central to Buddhism and all in all for Jains.

So, given all this, why do the Cory Bookers of the world seem so exceptional? Not just among politicians -where they are to say the least highly unusual – but in the wider world as well.Why do people who rescue others or come to the aid of a drowning dog or share what little they have always make the news?

Psychology offers a theory: the very altruistic also seem to have very highly developed feelings of empathy. They are more able to identify with ‘the other’ than most of us and in fact may eventually be seen to be talented in the same way as a painter or musician, artists with a special gift.

Cory Booker, btw, is a master of social media – you can keep up with his exploits on Facebook.  He is also the subject of two movies: Street Fight, the story of his first mayoral campaign, is available on PBS, and Brick City, a Sundance Channel documentary, can be found there.  Here is the trailer:

Naming names

David Hume

Today is the birth date of John James Audubon – whom we celebrated at length last year – and David Hume, Scottish philosopher, whose  writings on philosophy were really more about human psychology – he concluded that humans are motivated by desire, not by reason.  He seemed to think that was a good thing.

Whatever, he became the father of utilitarianism and logical positivism and a big influence on Adam Smith and William James. I post his portrait because his coat is just spectacular.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

This is also the date of William Shakespeare’s christening, which gives me the opportunity to reiterate that it was the Earl of Oxford that wrote the plays and it’s just too bad that the most convincing arguments for his authorship were put forward by someone named Looney.

Birthday wishes as well to Carol Burnett and to the redoubtable I.M. Pei, who celebrates 95 years today.

Happy Earth Day!

You know what to do and why.

That’s all I got. . .

Sacred mountain, south rim of the Grand Canyon. Photo by jchatoff.

Keeping it classy

Many happy returns to QE II, celebrating her 86th (actual) birthday today. Her job – overseeing a living museum – is odd, but she seems to do her level best.

Tales of the crypt

It’s so often about the weather. If it hadn’t been for the incessant rain that year, there’d have been no story about an aristocrat drinking the blood of his bride-to-be and vanishing into the night.

Dr. John Polidori

That was the basis of Dr. John Polidori’s novella The Vampyre, the first real example of the genre.  Polidori was Lord Byron’s personal physician and spent the summer of 1816 at Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva.  One night in June – after rainy days spent indoors reading German ghost stories -Byron challenged Polidori and two other guests – Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft – to write a mystery story.  Mary’s contribution would become Frankenstein and Polidori’s tale of the evil Lord Ruthven would morph into Dracula.

Sheridan LeFanu wrote a vampire story in the 1870s and ‘Varney the Vampire’ was serialized in a tabloid, but the quintessential vampire didn’t appear until 1897, when Bram Stoker, manager of the Lyceum Theater and assistant to Sir Henry Irving, created the iconic Count Dracula. (Stoker apparently gave Irving’s suave manners to the Count.)

Biographers estimate that Stoker spent about seven years reading about European folklore, studying maps and delving into the history of Wallachia, the home of Vlad the Impaler.  It was Vlad’s family name Dracul – dragon – that he borrowed for the Count.  Stoker never saw the landscape he described, but he cleverly wrote a horror story in a documentary style, with letters, newspaper reports and entries from a ship’s log that make the story so believable.

Polidori’s novella early in the century had been popular and Stoker’s got good reviews, but it wasn’t until the 20th century and the many film versions that it really took off.

Bram Stoker in 1906.

After a series of strokes, Bram Stoker died one hundred years ago today, at the age of 64.  While most of his life is well-documented, two small mysteries remain:  There is no clear evidence of what illness or condition kept him bedridden until he was 7 years old – at which point he seems to have risen and gone to school – and what was the original manuscript of his novel doing in a Pennsylvania barn, where it was found in the 1980s?

The manuscript was auctioned by Christie’s  to a buyer who remained anonymous until author Leslie Klinger tracked him down and asked to see the ms. Klinger wrote The New Annotated Dracula based on the manuscript and was allowed to reveal that the owner was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The manuscript, btw, carried what would soon be considered a working title: The Un-Dead. Read it, or download the ebook, at Project Gutenberg,

The day after

Yesterday was the 106th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake, a surface displacement of 28 feet by the two tectonic plates that meet at the San Andreas Fault. It would have fallen between 7.9 and 8.3 on the Richter scale, if there had been a Richter scale at the time.

Watching the city burn from the Mission District.

Today is the day the survivors began to assess the damage, the day the soldiers from the Presidio moved in to restore order, the day that the fire department tried to control the fires fed by ruptured gas mains by using dynamite to create firebreaks, but only  destroyed more of the few structures still standing.

For years, city officials stood by a death count of fewer than 400, but estimates now put the number at almost ten times that.  As usual, the truth was inconvenient, a threat to real estate values.

Relief shacks built by soldiers from the Presidio.

But everyone agrees that more than half a billion dollars damage was done.  Congress appropriated a million for relief, Canada sent $100,000 to help and Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie each gave $100,000 to the relief effort.  The soldiers built relief shacks, almost six thousand of them, to house some of the 200-300,000 people left homeless by the quake – about three-fourths of the city’s total population.  Families were charged $2 a month to live there and after a year could own them outright for $50.  (One of the few remaining shacks sold in 2006 for $600,000.)

More than a hundred insurance companies paid out over $250 million in claims – about $6 billion in today’s dollars – and at least twenty companies were bankrupted as a result. Nob Hill was devastated, with only one mansion still standing, so the rich moved out of town and created Pacific Heights, where they remain.

San Franciscans leaving their ruined city.

In sum, the great quake remained second only to the Galveston hurricane as the greatest natural disaster in US history until Hurricane Katrina, which did more economic damage, though it resulted in fewer fatalities.

The quake coincided with developing technologies that made it one of the most documented disasters ever until modern times – there are extensive high-quality photographs of the aftermath (some shown here) and even film footage has been discovered.  The Library of Congress will let you download these images.

Stringent building codes were put in place immediately following the disaster, but they only lasted about a year – San Franciscans had their eyes on a prize and the new codes were slowing things down.  What mattered was showing the world what a beautiful city they had and so, when the Panama-Pacific International Exposition opened in 1915, a brand-new San Francisco was ready, with wider streets, bigger and better buildings and business as usual.

‘On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five…

Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year…’

Paul Revere in his seventies by Gilbert Stuart

Yes, it’s Paul Revere’s Ride Day – a famous feat by a person about whom we are actually taught very little. Here are some of the more interesting bits:

He was named for his father, Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot who came to America and soon changed his name.  Revere Sr. was apprenticed to a silversmith, got married and had twelve children. Paul Jr. would eventually marry twice and father 16, of whom 11 reached adulthood.

That’s a lot of mouths to feed, which is why Paul Revere is one of the first real entrepreneurs in our history – when his silver business suffered before the Revolution, he took up dentistry. When the economy was further depressed afterward, he experimented with other metals, opening an iron foundry first, then the first copper rolling mill in the country.

He added a brass foundry and incorporated as Revere Copper and Brass, Inc.  After many mergers it became the Revere Copper Company and a century later, an employee figured out how to attach copper to the bottom of a saucepan and Revereware was born.

Revere copper factory in Canton MA - the Canton viaduct is in the foreground.

Revere was the go-to guy for metalwork in colonial Boston – he provided the copper dome for the State House and sheathing for the hull of the U.S.S. Constitution. It was Revere copper that was used for the boilers on one of Fulton’s first steamboats.

Paul Revere lived to the ripe old age of 83, died in his bed and is buried in the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street in Boston.

***

And speaking of Massachusetts, it’s Conan O’Brien’s birthday – he was born in Brookline 49 years ago, apparently destined for this:

En klassiker

First, many happy returns to the incomparable Max von Sydow, who celebrates his 83d today.

Second, who is not still traumatized by the first big Ingmar Bergman film we saw – The Seventh Seal -in which von Sydow as the knight who challenges death to a game of chess?

Von Sydow, who made 11 films with Bergman, refused all Hollywood offers until 1965, when he accepted the part of Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told.  Since then he’s played priests, assassins and – frequently – the Mysterious Man who may be God or Satan or  whoever. Most recently he co-stars in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Here he is in The Exorcist:

Ten thousand years later..La-La land

Los Angeles Plaza in 1869.

At the end of the Mexican-American War, in 1848, all of California was transferred from Mexican to US control via the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Two years later – on April 4 – the City of Our Lady of the Angels was incorporated as Los Angeles, five months before California became a state.

Southern California had been occupied and inhabited as an important trading site for more than 8,000 years. When the Spanish arrived, the very first peoples had been replaced by the Gabrilenos, who occupied about 4,000 square miles of SoCal, with their largest settlement in San Fernando.  Without the help of the Gabrilenos, the first handful of pobladores would never have survived.  But we all know how that story ends.

Map of the 'Mother Ditch,' which brought water from the L.A. river to the plaza.

Treaty or no treaty, the first Anglo Angelenos and Mexicans had a very rough period of adjustment, a conflict that has never quite abated. Anglos, from the first days of the city, began to settle on the margins, leaving the central Plaza area to the original inhabitants and incoming minorities. More about the early days here.

Thanks to an intrepid balloonist and an equally intrepid photographer, we have an aerial view from 1883.  The white streak is the Los Angeles River, which became a concrete-lined flood control channel after severe flooding in 1938.  The river has recently been given a new lease on life with a 20-year plan that will restore as much of it as possible.  Even now, it is possible to canoe certain restored stretches.