Item From the Past: Lady With Lapdog

I've been a few places over the years, and I've almost always taken a book along, or acquired one or more during the trip, if the trip is long enough. They're as essential as good shoes, especially if you're traveling alone. What you're reading gets bundled up afterward with the destination.

For example, Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories. On the inside cover of this edition of I wrote, "26 July 1983 Rome." I bought it at an English-language bookstore near the Spanish Steps. It's a Penguin Classics edition of a translation originally published in 1964. Penciled on the first page is, I think, the price: "5550." That would be 5550 lira, or about $3.70 at the time. I remember reading it on the train to Florence and, once I got there, spending part of an afternoon on the grounds of the Pitti Palace reading some of the stories.

I still have it. The book is a little frayed but the pages not so yellow. Every now and then I read something out of it -- "Ward 6" more than any of the other stories, when I'm in the mood for a large helping of Russian darkness, a tale set in the loony bin of a provincial hospital. It remains one of my favorite short stories. Later, I found out that it was mocking some of Tolstoy's ideas, though I'm not steeped enough in those ideas to fully appreciate what Chekhov was up to. Even later, I also got a kick out of learning that the psychiatric facility that Dr. House spent some time in was Ward 6.

Other books I bought or found or were given that summer -- and in one case, lost -- included Green Hills of Africa, one of Hemingway's lesser efforts; Tales of the Unexpected, a Roald Dahl collection with a high creep factor; By the Green of Spring, a sprawling WWI soap-opera novel; and Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. I didn't finish that last one, not because it wasn't interesting -- and how is it that Conrad didn't speak any English until he was a grown man? -- but because I left it somewhere, maybe on a bench. That summer I spent a good chunk of time on Euro-benches, reading.

RIP, Donald Sobol

I heard -- in an e-mail, of all things -- that Donald J. Sobol has died. I didn't know Sobol, but I did know his creation, Encyclopedia Brown. After I heard, I looked up the NYT obit. I had no idea Sobol had still been writing and publishing books in the series almost until his death. The last one (by him) hasn't even come out yet.

Then again, I haven't read any of the books in about 40 years. But I guess younger generations have. The formula was always the same, as the obit notes: "Each book holds 10 stories, each involving a mystery that 10-year-old Leroy (Encyclopedia) Brown solves by keen observation and deduction. He notices that the culprit has his sweater on inside out, or claims to smell flowers that are fake. The rest is self-evident.

"The solution is not spelled out in the story; readers are challenged to figure it out for themselves — or to flip to the back for the answer, as Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie About Schmidt does as he lies in bed, engrossed in Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man."

They weren't my favorite series as a lad, but I liked them a lot. (I always enjoyed Danny Dunn better, whose creators are long dead now). It's good that there are works of juvenile fiction that cerebrate knowing something, as opposed to cerebrating ignorance (viz., just about anything on the Disney Channel). RIP, Mr. Sobol.

The Next '20s Just Isn't Going to be the Same

Spring break time and it actually still feels like spring, though they say cool (not cold) air is on the way. Back to posting around April 1. In the meantime we will not be going hither and yon, or even part way to yon. But there may be a few new sights to report on come April. Sights are sights, even if they're close to home.

I must be in an early 20th century frame of mind, since lately I've been reading The New Deal (2011) by Michael Hiltzik, an engaging work. Besides discussing the broader scope of the various economic and social policies under that rubric, the book also details the efforts of cabinet members and advisors, some of them mostly forgotten now, who shaped and executed those policies. There are also some wonderful asides, such as a discussion of how a photograph of plutocrat J.P. Morgan Jr. and Ringling Bros. midget Lya Graf at U.S. Senate hearings on Wall Street came to be (June 1, 1933).

Also, I've been watching some Max Raabe videos not posted when we saw him a few years ago. In the one below, he explains why the version of "Singing in the Rain" they're about to do isn't quite like the version from the movie. We heard him discuss this in English in his droll way, and then heard their exceptional rendition of the song. The clip has the added bonus of featuring the fetching Cecilia Crisafulli.

Please continue to pray for Deb, my sister-in-law, in her slow recovery, and for her husband Jay, whose life is quite difficult now.

Spiritual Super PACs

Practically May-like today. A warm sun was out, crocuses bloomed, and a few insects buzzed around my face.

Yesterday I passed through a nearby suburban train station and took a look at the give-away book rack, to see if there was anything beyond the usual bodice-rippers. There was -- a thin volume called The Next President. Subtitle: "Spiritual interviews with the Guardian Spirits of Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum." By one Ryuho Okawa, published by Happy Science Publishing.

Time to go to Wiki: "Happy Science (幸福の科学, Kōfuku-no-Kagaku?) is a new religious and spiritual movement founded in Japan on 6 October 1986 by Ryuho Okawa with over 12 million followers in 85 countries [citation needed]."

By golly, it's a cult -- I mean, new Japanese religion, one of a multitude -- with an inside track into the guardian spirits of Republican U.S. presidential candidates. Wonder how those interviews were set up. Do you contact the spirit's celestial PR firm first?

Why doesn't Ron Paul rate a guardian spirit interview? I can't imagine that the guardians are public entities, so consulting them doesn't go against the philosophy of libertarianism. Maybe to show his independence, Rep. Paul turned down help from the spirit world. Stranger things have happened this campaign season.

John Carter of Mars

It was warm enough to eat lunch on my deck. This is my idea of how spring should begin -- in March. But there's probably some kind of cold blast still in the works. It might have been a mild winter, but it isn't going to give up that easily.

When I read absurd things involving large sums of money, I go to the World Bank table of national GDPs for a sense of just how insane the sum is. The recent Disney bomb John Carter, I'm told, cost about $250 million to make, plus $100 million more or so in marketing costs. So -- are there any small nations with a GDP of about $350 million? Yes. Roughly speaking, Tonga, in 2010.

And to think, $100 million in marketing, which even reached the likes of me, didn't boost its prospects. A month or so ago, I saw a commercial for the movie. My reaction was entirely, "where's the of Mars in the title? Does it really have anything to do with Edgar Rice Burroughs?"

Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times said on Monday -- on its business page -- that "based on a century-old character created by author Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter was meant to appeal to young males. But a surprisingly older crowd turned up to see the movie this weekend, as 59% of the audience was over age 25."

Not so surprising, since I'm sure that the current crop of adolescent boys have little familiarity with John Carter of Mars. Former adolescent boys, such as me, are much more likely to have heard of the character, even read some of the books, as I did in early adolescence -- just about the right time for it -- starting with A Princess of Mars.

The Clock We Live On

I'm sure that I learned about Leap Year at an early age, like most people. But I never knew the details -- Caesar and Sosigenes, the longest year in history (46 BC), Julian and Gregorian calendars, etc. -- until I read The Clock We Live On.

When I was in San Antonio last year, I noticed this book off in some corner of my mother's house, its pages yellow and crumbling away. It's never good to throw away a book, but this one's time had come (note the tape; it had long been worn from use). Still, I remembered it so fondly that I saved the cover. The inside cover has an example of my father's handwriting, something I don't have too much of, so I wanted to save that too. Apparently he bought it in 1963, the year before he died.

I first read it in 1977. Besides the story of the western calendar, there was plenty of other interesting topics -- why days have 24 hours and hours 60 minutes, the development of clocks and chronometers, the establishment of meridians and time zones, and so on. The calendar chapter formed the basis of an oral report I did in high school Latin class.

Strangely enough, Ann brought home a book from the school library the other day: Venus: A Shrouded Mystery, by none other than Isaac Asimov. Late Asimov (1990) and a book for kids. But maybe that's not so strange. The man was a writing machine, even back in the days of typewriters, carbon copies and human typesetters, so probably a lot of his books are still stocking school libraries.

New Year Entertainments

The stretch of days between Christmas and New Year's proved to be brown and dry, at least around here, except for the rain and dank drizzle on Friday, and a weak spot of snow on New Year's Day. It's like November never ended -- the least-white December I've seen since '94 in London, which, a native told us, was a strangely warm month as well. Suits me.

Unlike last year, we didn't happen to see any of the holiday movies showing at theaters, such as We Bought a Cemetery for Christmas, Who Cares About the Adventures of Tintin? or The Girl Regretting Her Dragon Tattoo. I did manage to see Duck Soup on television on New Year's Eve.

That was my nth viewing of that movie at intervals of once every two or three years since the mid-70s. I know all the gags but laughed again all the same, and saw some details I'd never noticed before (or had forgotten). I paid particular close attention this time to Margaret Dumont, whose face was remarkably expressive. I've come to doubt the story that she didn't get most of the brothers' jokes, which sounds like something Groucho would make up.

I also paid closer attention to Edgar Kennedy, the lemonade vendor tormented by Chico and Harpo. Turns out he had quite a career and, if Duck Soup is anything to go by, a fitting sobriquet in "Master of the Slow Burn."

Over the holidays I also chewed at some of the books I've been reading lately, such as The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency (Jeremy Lott, 2007), an entertaining read that (among many other things) makes a good case for regarding President Tyler more highly. Still, I didn't find myself in the grip of an intensely good book, as I did with True Grit this time last year.

I did spend some time reading the entertaining blog Lifetime, Wow! which consists of reviews of movies shown on the Lifetime Movie Channel. I'm not particularly familiar with Lifetime, but apparently it shows a lot of risible movies, and the bloggers at Lifetime, Wow! shoot those fish in that barrel with glee. The blog's plot synopses are probably more fun than most of the movies themselves.

Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit

I saw about five minutes of the feature-length abomination known as Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas on TV this evening. That's all I've ever seen of it at any one sitting over the decade or so since it was new, and I've never formed a better opinion of it. An alternate title might have been, Dr. Seuss’ Heirs Eager to Cash In, No Questions Asked.

But at least it reminded me that I own this book, which goes by the fine title Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit. It's a translation by the husband-and-wife team Terence and Jennifer Tunburg, unless that's a ruse, and the original was actually on a fourth-century Greek/Latin codex rediscovered at Mount Athos in the 19th century (and updated a bit in modern versions, to exclude such details as the Grinch's heresy trial for following Arianism).

It was one of the better Christmas presents I've received over the years -- I think it was the Christmas after Lilly was born -- from some old high school friends of mine. Now that's an adaptation of a classic children's tale we call all get behind.

Item From the Past: Ishiyama-dera

November 30, 1991

"Warm and sunny day, flawless weather to visit the exquisite Ishiyama-dera. I went with Ed and Lynn, two former fellow teachers, and Americans as it happens, to the temple, which is in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture. It's near the shores of unscenic Lake Biwa, the sludgepot that provides greater Osaka with its drinking water.

'No, that's not the best way to begin to describe Ishiyama-dera, which is set in the forested hills not far from the lake. You forget about Biwa while visiting the fine old wooden structures, which manage to convey their great age through their smell, somehow, maybe redolent of centuries of incense. This time of year, the temple also has the aesthetic advantage of seasonal reds and yellow. It augments the aura of esoteric objects honoring esoteric gods on remote shores."

Not much of a description, but I can fortify it with more information. "Ishiyama Dera was established in 749 by a Kegon priest named Ryôben at the request of Emperor Shômu (701-756; reigned 724-749) to enshrine an image of Nyoirin Kannon," says the Yamasa Institute's Japan Travel Guide. "At the time, the Emperor was praying for the discovery of gold to assist in his undertaking of the construction of the great Buddha of Tôdai-ji Temple in Nara.

"The Hondo, or Main Hall, designated a National Treasure, was built upon a great megalith, which contributes to the temple’s fame as one of the eight scenic views of Ômi, the Autumn Moon from Ishiyama-dera. The Hondo was built architecturally in a veranda construction style called 'Butai Zukuri'. The Tahoto Pagoda (treasure tower) was built by Minamoto Yoritomo in 1194 in the Kamakura period, and is the oldest of its type in Japan.

"Inside the Hondo is the Room of Genji, where Shikibu Murasaki created the plot of the Genji Monogatari or the The Tale of Genji, a famous court story of the Heian period and believed by many to be the world's first novel. Murasaki is said to have begun writing The Tale of Genji, at Ishiyama on the night of the full moon in August 1004. The temple is mentioned in the Ukifune chapter of the story. A life-size figure of the author at work is displayed in this room."

I remember seeing the Lady Murasaki mannequin, looking pale and mannequin-like. Years ago I read the first few chapters of The Tale of Genji, a Charles E. Tuttle Co. publication (Tuttle Publishing these days) of a translation by British orientialist Arthur David Waley. My copy, a two-volume paperback boxed set, resides in one of the bookshelves near the desk, quietly reminding my that I'll never get around to reading everything I'd like to.

FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944

FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944 by David M. Jordan focuses on the neglected story of that election, and Jordan does a fine job of telling it, from the pre-primary maneuvering among both parties, but especially the Republicans, through to the surprisingly energetic campaign, both on the part of ailing FDR and his remarkably young opponent. Dewey was only 42 at the time, the youngest-ever Republican nominee for the top job and the first major-party presidential candidate born in the 20th century.

This particular election is generally glossed over in histories of the period, probably because hindsight considers it a foregone conclusion. In the event, it wasn't that close: FDR-Truman took 432 electoral votes and 53.4 percent of the popular vote vs. Dewey-Bricker's 99 electoral votes and 45.9 percent of the popular vote. Still, before the election, pollsters weren't quite so sure of the outcome, with some even predicting Dewey's election. That and '48 might tell us that pollsters weren't very good at predicting national elections in the 1940s, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. A Dewey upset was considered plausible at the time, even if not very likely, and in point of fact '44 was the closest presidential election in which FDR participated. As Jordan makes clear, Dewey ran a spirited campaign in the face of the odds.

But at a curious distance from the electorate. Apparently Dewey and his men thought it best, at least at first, to focus on radio speeches more than personal appearances. During an early campaign trip by train to the West Coast, for example, Dewey only made a handful of rear-platform speeches, the kind so effective for President Truman four years later. No doubt the strategy reflected Dewey's personality. "The man had one of the coldest personalities of anyone who ever contemplated a run for the American presidency," notes Jordan. "David Brinkley wrote, 'In public, Dewey came across as pompous and cold. And for good reason. He was both.' He was generally conceded to be intelligent, efficient, a master of detail, 'serious-minded to the point of severity' as one contemporary noted. 'He is as humorless as a man can be,' noted another."

Balancing the Republican ticket that year, at least in one respect, was Gov. John W. Bricker of Ohio. "The governor of Ohio... was an almost complete opposite of Thomas E. Dewey," says Jordan. "John William Bricker, it was said, was 'excellent company.' People liked being around Bricker, and he enjoyed being around others... Big, jovial John Bricker, one author wrote, 'had the essential of popularity, a real and lively interest in people.' " Bricker also represented the conservative wing of the Republican Party, as opposed to the more moderate Dewey, and had the endorsement of Sen. Robert A. Taft ("Mr. Republican") in the early '44 primaries. Bricker didn't fare well in those contests, however, but well enough to be an acceptable choice for the number-two slot.

No one is forgotten faster than a failed vice presidential candidate (e.g., William Miller, who did a "Do you know me?" Amex ad after the '64 election), and Gov. Bricker certainly falls into that category, though some lingering memory of him might remain in Ohio. Bricker did, however, offer the ticket a rhyming slogan, an example of which the book shows in a photo of Republican campaign memorabilia: "Win the War Quicker With Dewey and Bricker." Apparently the slogan wasn't that commonly used, and not destined for the fame of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." Dewey and Bricker lost, after all, but even before that the Republican ticket probably didn't want to emphasize that their victory would indeed mean a change in the management of the war effort, since that was in fact what the Democrats were emphasizing as a negative ("don't change horses in mid-stream").

As for the Democrats, the Roosevelt campaign didn't show much zing until the "Fala Speech" in late September, during which the president had some amusingly choice words for the Republicans, much to the delight of the audience, who were mainly Teamsters leadership. Late in the campaign, and thus late in the book, FDR went on an open-car motorcade through four of the five boroughs of New York City, which Jordan describes in fascinating detail. The president began at an Army base in Brooklyn, went through downtown Brooklyn, then on to Ebbets Field, then through Queens, then across to the Bronx, then down through Harlem and finally on down Broadway and into Times Square. "Through it all, the rain kept coming down, the wind blew, and Franklin Roosevelt kept smiling and waving to the thousands watching for him, with Fala by his side," Jordan says. "After all was over, the police estimated the total crowds at 3,050,000, though it may have been, as Ray Brandt of the St. Louis Post Dispatch put it, "a mere million or two."

The book spends an entire chapter and more on the central mystery of the 1944 election, namely how and why Harry Truman was chosen as the Democratic vice presidential candidate. No account of that event that I've ever read quite spells it out clearly, probably because it isn't quite possible to do so, but Jordan takes a good whack at it. Vice President Henry Wallace wanted to keep the job, but boll weevils and other conservatives in the party wanted him out. President Roosevelt seemed to prefer James Byrnes, but he also seemed to accept the judgment of other party leaders that as a Southerner, Byrnes would cost more votes (Northern blacks, labor) than he would win -- something FDR never told Byrnes he believed. Other names were bandied about, such as Sam Rayburn, Alben Barkley, William O. Douglas, Truman and even John G. Winant (American ambassador to the Court of St. James's at the time), though he wasn't very seriously considered.

Eventually, Democratic Party leaders held an informal but important meeting with the president at the White House before the convention that seemed to settle matters in favor of Truman -- except that it didn't quite, and Truman wasn't really told about it anyway, going to the convention supporting Byrnes for vice president, and even planning to put his name in nomination. When FDR's men told Truman, at first he said he didn't want it, but was famously persuaded by a brusk phone call from President Roosevelt to a room that Democratic leadership had rented in the Blackstone Hotel (not the first time the Blackstone made a president). Even then, Henry Wallace might have been re-nominated by his supporters at the convention, but FDR's men put a stop to it using hasty parliamentary maneuvers, and almost resorted to cutting an electric cable to stop the convention organist from playing "Iowa, Iowa, That's Where the Tall Corn Grows," a song associated with Wallace at the time.

The book also offers interesting sketches of some of the lesser figures in the election. The Republicans' 1940 surprise candidate, Wendell Willkie, wanted another shot and entered the early '44 primaries, only to lose to Dewey. Even more interesting for us (though not for him) was the fact that Willkie died unexpectedly about a month before the election, without endorsing Dewey -- or Roosevelt either, and while it seems hard to believe he might have, it was considered possible because he didn't believe Dewey was internationalist enough, or at least was bowing too much the isolationist elements in the Republican Party (presumably those isolationists would have finished the war and then rejected American participation in the likes of the UN, the Marshall Plan and NATO).

Another supporting character is Harold Stassen. Good old Harold Stassen, always running. That's how we remember him now, but 1944 was before all that. That year, Lt. Comdr. Stassen was off in the Pacific theater as Adm. Halsey's flag secretary, having resigned the governorship of Minnesota to do his part. He wasn't really a contender in '44, but his star was rising (he'd given the keynote at the Republican national convention in 1940), and he later had an important part in nominating Dewey again in '48 and Eisenhower in '52, after which he settled into his recurring-candidate mode. That's another story.

The book also provides some food for speculative thought. After all, we know that FDR was near the end of the line in November 1944, even if at time the electorate didn't. What if he had died six months sooner -- a few weeks ahead of the voting? Who would the Democratic National Committee have picked to take his place? Would Dewey have won against that person, and if so, how would have he deployed the atomic bomb? Assuming that FDR dies in 1945, as he did, what kind of president would Wallace have made, had he been allowed to stay on the ticket? Would he have used the bomb? And what kind of president would John G. Winant made, anyway? In history as it happened, the three-time Republican governor of New Hampshire, first chairman of the Social Security Board, head of the International Labor Organization and ambassador to the United Kingdom through much of World War II, retired to private life after the war and put a bullet through his head in 1947.

That's just my digression, but it only goes to show how many fascinating stories there are in a good work of political history, such as FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944. Well worth reading.

The President is a Sick Man

The President is a Sick Man (Matthew Algeo, 2011) is my kind of book. A crisply written, popular history describing a fairly well-known yet astonishing incident in presidential history, namely Grover Cleveland's cancer and its secret treatment. The book fleshes the story out with plenty of interesting context and detail. Such as the extreme dread cancer posed for those living in the 19th century. Who can doubt it? Cancer is dreadful enough now. Imagine when the diagnosis meant an almost certain lingering death, the kind that Ulysses Grant suffered.

Turns out that President Cleveland had a rarer, much less dangerous kind of tumor in his mouth than former President Grant. But it was dangerous enough. It seems that medical science was just advanced enough in 1893 for Cleveland's doctors to excise the growth without killing the president, but it must have been a near thing.

"It's worth mentioning just a few of the tools that the surgeons would not have had at their disposal, simply because they had not been devised or perfected," writes Alego. "They would have no suction apparatus for draining blood or other fluids from the operative site and no means of artificially resuscitating the patient should his heart stop. There would be no electronic monitors, no ventilators, no laryngoscopes, no endotracheal tubes. Surgery had come a long way since the Civil War -- but still had a long way to go."

And, of course, no blood transfusions or antibiotics. Fortunately for Cleveland, his doctors were fully persuaded of the benefits of sterile surgery, then a fairly new idea. As Algeo put it, "surgery pre-Lister was a gamble that most patients were bound to lose." So Cleveland got vastly better treatment than poor President Garfield did only 12 year earlier, when doctors examining his GSW couldn't be bothered to wash their hands, even though they must have heard of Joseph Lister's ideas by then.

The medical drama's only part of the story, however. Doubly astonishing is the fact that the July 1, 1893, operation -- performed on the yacht Oneida in Long Island Sound, of all places -- was kept a secret until 1917, long after Cleveland had died of another kind of cancer (probably) elsewhere in his body.

Well, not quite a secret. One of the best-known journalists of the day, E.J. Edwards of the Philadelphia Press, found out about the operation and published a major exposé. But in an age when newspapers -- being the cable news of their time -- weren't above completely making things up, Edwards was discredited. Mostly because the president and everyone else on the ship lied like dogs about what had happened. President Cleveland just went fishing for a few days, that's all. Oh, and he had a few teeth pulled on board. And he has a touch of rheumatism. E.J. Edwards is damnable liar! The book's subtitle tells the tale: "Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Glover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth."

Conspiracy buffs, take note. Edwards found out about the operation because one of the doctors involved blabbed about it to a colleague, who then told someone who knew Edwards, who then went to the doctor who'd first blabbed, who then confessed the whole thing to Edwards.

The president was able to pull off the deception for a number of reasons, but probably most of all because he made a remarkable recovery, and was able to wear a vulcanized rubber prosthetic jaw so lifelike that no one noticed it. (A fact I remember learning in high school U.S. history class from a fine teacher, Mrs. Collins. It amazed me then, and still does.)

Also, to be fair to President Cleveland, he was certain that maintaining secrecy was the right thing to do, since news of his cancer -- about the worst health problem he could have, and still be alive -- would have made the Panic of 1893 even worse, and it was bad enough as it was, idling countless workers and bringing much commerce to a halt. He made a political calculation, too. Being perceived as ill with cancer would have hurt his chances of persuading Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, a cause dear to Cleveland, who was a gold-standard man. It's hard to imagine now the passion of the 1890s political quarrel between goldbugs and silverites, but some of it comes through in the book. It was the polarizing issue of the time, a collision of vested interests.

Cleveland got lucky, too, in that questions about his health were pushed off the front pages by a couple of large hurricanes that hit the United States in the late summer of 1893. One Category 2 storm hit New York City, and among other damage, destroyed an entire barrier island off Long Island. Another storm hit the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, an estimated Category 3 that probably killed a few thousand people and made tens of thousands more homeless.

The story of the Sea Islands Hurricane of 1893 is a fascinating aside in Algeo's book for a number of reasons, such as the fact that such a tremendous storm, on par with Katrina, has been completely forgotten (as has the 1900 storm that nearly destroyed Galveston or even the deadly New England Hurricane of 1938). It's also worth noting that neither the states nor the federal government provided much relief to the victims of the hurricane, partly because most of them were Gullah subsistence farmers, and partly because the Cleveland administration didn't believe disaster relief was within the purview of the federal government. Federal disaster relief is a 20th-century idea and, as far as I'm concerned, an important bit of progress since the Gilded Age, no matter what Ayn Rand-inspired jackasses tell us in our time.

The President is a Sick Man has a happy ending of sorts, in that in 1917 one of the surviving doctors, William Williams Keen, a dean of American medicine, wanted to tell the world what had happened. Cleveland's widow (the remarried Francis Cleveland Preston) agreed to it, so Dr. Keen published a long article about the operation in The Saturday Evening Post. Newspaperman E.J. Edwards was elderly at the time, but still alive, so he lived to see his vindication.

The Idea of Stromatolites

We had a yellow-sky dusk today. Mostly cloudy with rain predicted but not yet happening. The light begins to fade at around 8 now, a mark of the declining summer. I sat on the deck for a while just after 8, admiring the sky and listening to cicadas and crickets. They were almost loud enough to drown out the ambient traffic noise. Good.

Recently I finished reading In a Sunburned Country (2000) by Bill Bryson. I liked it a lot. (And I recommend A Walk in the Woods, too, which I read a couple of years ago.) It's clear from his writing that he enjoys the pure pleasure of setting out to see what he can see, and he takes his well-honed descriptive and interpretative skills with him. I also liked the book because its subject is Australia, a place Bryson's very fond of. Me too.

Toward the end, he describes a marvel that should be on educational flash cards (see yesterday), but never will be. Bryson traveled to Shark Bay on the remote west coast of Australia north of Perth, where he sought out a formation found only there and and a few other places in the entire world. "Nowhere in any direction was there a sign of human intrusion except directly ahead, where a nifty wooden walkway zigzagged for 150 feet or so out into the bay over some low, dark, primeval-looking masses that didn't quite break the water's calm. I had found my living stromatolites..." he wrote.

"Stromatolites are so primitive of nature that they don't even adopt regular shapes. The just sort of, as it were, blob out... In fact, they are shapeless gray blobs, without character or luster. It has to be immediately conceded that a stromatolite formation is not a handsome or striking sight.

"It's not the sight of stromatolites that makes them exciting. It's the idea of them -- and in this respect they are peerless. You are looking at living rocks -- quietly functioning replicas of the very first organic structures ever to appear on Earth. You are experiencing the world as it was 3.5 billion years ago -- more than three-quarters of the way back to the moment of terrestrial creation. Now, if that's not an exciting thought, I don't know what is. As the aforementioned paleontologist Richard Fortey has put it: 'This is truly time traveling, and if the world were attuned to its real wonders this sight would be as well-known as the pyramids of Giza.' Quite right.

"If you peer, you can sometimes see tiny bubbles of oxygen rising in streams from the formations. This is stromatolite's only trick and it isn't much, but it is what made life as we know it possible... For two billion years this was all the life there was on Earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent -- enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real."

Sesquicentennial

Disunion is a excellent blog. Shows the kind of thing old media, the New York Times in this case, can do if it wants to. It follows -- if "follows" is the right word -- the events of 150 years ago, day by day, as the nation falls into disunion and then war. As of 150 years ago today, of course, disunion was in full swing, but war was still only a dreaded possibility.

Today's entry is particularly interesting, since it only indirectly deals with the situation in the United States. Rather, it discusses the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II of Russia on March 3, 1861, the day before Lincoln took office on the other side of the world (February 19 O.S.).

But if your mood doesn't run toward such heavy reading at the moment, see this blog, which promises the dream of reading exactly as much as you want to, and no less.

False Spring in the Great Lakes Glop

It's a false spring, but I'll take it. Today I enjoy such small pleasures as walking on my driveway without much risk of slipping, hearing the drip of water from the downspouts, and going outside without the heaviest of heavy coats. The night was winter clear, which is about the best you can get in the Great Lakes glop (megapolis), though the Moon is getting pretty large, and beginning to wash things out of the sky even if the suburban lights do not.

"Megapolis" (and "megaregion") are too clinical. Especially when you see them depicted on a map. I prefer "glop" to describe an agglomeration of urban areas, but that's just an idiosyncratic choice. Years ago I read an '80s dystopian science fiction novel that involved a post-United States North America (plague, I think), some android-human lovin', a worldwide Internet sort of thing that the characters could plug their brains directly into, pop music based on 20th-century ambulance sirens, pirates who harvested organs for transplant from people they murdered, and whatnot.

The vast, essentially lawless urban areas that had been metro New York, Chicago and Los Angeles were referred to as glops. That's a detail that stuck with me, even though the name of the book and author have not.

Without Bees, Our Nation Would Be Misshapen

Another winter blast for the East again. I traded these e-mails today with an editor of mine based in New York:

Me: Did you make it to the office today? To hear weathercasters tell it, New York has been buried under mountains of snow. But they are an excitable bunch, prone to a little exaggeration.

Him: Yeah, it’s not that bad. A lot of snow, sure — especially in Queens and the other boroughs — but not exactly the apocalypse.

Here on the western shore of southern Lake Michigan, in that region called the Midwest, but which is all part of the North to me, not so much snow today. Maybe an inch fell late this morning and into the early afternoon, just enough to freshen up the dirty snow already on the ground and add a new top ingredient to the snow/ice parfait on certain outdoor surfaces, such as sidewalks. That's not usually a good thing to have underfoot.

The retailer Amazon pestered me with an e-mail this morning, the subject line of which said, "Amazon.com recommends 'Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation.' " I puzzled over that for a moment, then realized that the Amazon Machine had reached the conclusion that if I'd buy one book about bees and honey, I would surely want another. I don't particularly.

Last month I bought A Short History of the Honey Bee, images by Ilona, text by my old friend Ed Readicker-Henderson (Timber Press, 2009, subtitled "Humans, Flowers, and Bees in the Eternal Chase for Honey"). It is, astonishingly, the first and still only thing I've ever bought from Amazon; but I'm a late adopter in many things. Actually, "adopter" is too strong a word, since I still vastly prefer physical bookstores and will do my little part to help a few survive, along with physical books themselves. I haven't read Ed's book yet, but it's in my vague queue for this year.

Bees seem very important, and Bees in America might well be an excellent work, but "shape a nation"? I'm reminded of a skit I saw long ago, on The Carol Burnett Show or its ilk, that involved a traveling Jim Nabors striking up a conversation with another traveler.

Nabors played an earthworm salesman, I think, and went on at some length about how important earthworms were for farms and the nation and the fate of the free world and so on, with the kind of irritating enthusiasm he brought to Gomer Pyle, much to the other character's displeasure. (Tim Conway? Or maybe it was Harvey Korman, trying not to laugh.) Toward the end of the skit, Nabors said something like, "When you think about it, earthworms are the backbone of this country!"

True Grit Holidays

New Year's Eve 2010: the Great Melt here in northern Illinois. Three or so week's worth of snow started melting in earnest with overnight above-freezing temps early on the 30th. By the 31st, all except the hardiest of snow islands were gone and the air pleasant, like a lost day of spring. A parting gift from the year 2010, which will not be remembered fondly for a while, and then forgotten in its particulars, except by historians and other eccentrics.

I finished True Grit, the Charles Portis novel, on Christmas Day; and saw True Grit, the movie now playing, on New Year's Day. Like a lot of people, I hadn't ever read the book, but had seen and enjoyed the famed earlier movie version, though it's been a good many years now.

The prospect of seeing the new movie led me to the book first, and I was rewarded with the best novel I've read in years. Guess I'm a sucker for books about tough yet sympathetic characters on harrowing journeys as opposed to, say, books about unhappy academics who commit adultery and struggle to write books about unhappy academics who commit adultery.

The Coen brothers' movie hews pretty close to the book, which helped make it satisfying, though they usually make satisfying movies in a lot of other ways, such as by hiring a talented cast and paying close attention to the details of time and place, as they did with True Grit. The arresting visuals, with Texas passing for Oklahoma, greatly added to the effect.

I dragged Lilly, protesting, to see the movie. She's old enough now to see an occasional movie that hasn't been dumbed down for an adolescent audience, male or female. She was one of the youngest members of the New Year's Day audience at the suburban multiplex we visited, a fact she pointed out. But after it was over, she said it was "not bad." High praise indeed for something her dad likes.

The Victorian Internet

We're having a short run of warm days. No one expects it to last. Today I didn't have much time for the outdoors, but I did manage to walk all the way around Volkening Lake, a large pond where the Schaumburg Park District rents canoes and paddle boats in the summer.

The Victorian Internet by British writer Tom Standage is an interesting book, and an interesting turn of phrase to describe the worldwide telegraphy network established in the 19th century. Originally published in 1998 during the flush of the dotcom boom, the book points out parallels between the telegraph and the Internet, though without overstating the case too much.

The comparison can be overstated, because after all Internet has grown into much more than a way to send e-mail, as important as that function is. Then again, as Standage notes, the telegraph was more than just a messaging system, and mind-bending to early Victorians in ways we might not fully appreciate, since a world without instant communications is unimaginable for us, but not for them. The telegraph was something astonishingly new.

Comparative technologies is one thing, but I'm more interested in reading about the history of the telegraph -- about the largely forgotten optical telegraphy of the early 19th century; the men besides Morse who contributed to the building of a practical electrical telegraph; the history of pneumatic tubes, whose first major use was to send telegrams between telegraph stations or to nearby buildings; the struggle to lay the first trans-Atlantic telegraph line; the use of codes and cyphers in telegraphy; and the use of the telegraph by governments, businessmen, journalists and criminals. The book discusses all those and other odd tidbits too, such as the fact that Thomas Edison was a master telegrapher in his youth, and that people occasionally married at long distance, using a telegraph.

Missing in Standage's book is a discussion of the telegraph and the war between the United States and Mexico, a subject I've read about elsewhere. Telegraph lines were expanding across North America before the war, but the outbreak of hostilities spurred their further growth, so that war news could be transmitted faster to the East Coast. If I remember right, by the end of the war dispatches were being sent by fast boat from Veracruz to New Orleans, which had just been connected to the telegraph network, for transmission to Washington and New York and other places.

There's a pointless thesis out there about the use of the telegraph in literature or other media. I remember thinking it odd, for instance, that characters in Of Human Bondage, which I read about 20 years ago, often traded telegrams even with people who lived nearby. But in a world without cheap telephony, it makes sense.

In the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. Grant describes his telegraphic conversations with Secretary of War Stanton -- which went on for hours, sometimes. I could imagine a rumbled Grant sitting at a table, cigar in hand and drink glass in front of him, blowing puffs of smoke and telling the telegraph operator what the tell Stanton, and then sipping his whiskey while the reply came through (and was decoded? I'd think so).

Without the depiction of telegram deliveries in old movies ("Telegram!"), no one my age would know much about the device or the lore surrounding it. Fewer and fewer people watch these kinds of movies, so I suspect even a second-hand sense of the telegraph is vanishing. Too bad. The lore is rich.

I sent a telegram only once, in 1990. I'd arrived just the day before in Japan, so it seemed a better -- and probably cheaper -- option than figuring out how to use the local phone system for an international call. The main post office in Tokyo offered the service, so I filled in the blanks and paid (a few hundred or a thousand yen? I can't remember). The message was (I think) ARRIVED JAPAN OK. My mother probably still has it somewhere.

I didn't realize that Western Union was sending telegrams as recently as five years ago. But not many. As this New York Times article says, "At the height of business in 1929, more than 200 million telegrams were sent around the world. Just under 21,000 were sent last year [2005]."

Texas City, 1947

It might be a good read: "In 1947, Texas City was experiencing boom times, bristling with chemical and oil plants built to feed Europe's seemingly endless appetite for raw materials to rebuild its ruined cities. When an explosion ripped through the docks, the effect was cataclysmic. Thousands of people were wounded or killed, the fire department was decimated, planes were knocked out of the sky, and massive ocean-bound freighters disintegrated. The blast drove people to their knees in Galveston, ten miles away; broke windows in Houston, 40 miles away; and registered on a seismograph in Denver."

The book is City on Fire by Bill Minitaglio (2003), and that's a slightly edited version of part of the blurb, which needed a little editing. I hope that doesn't portend careless editing of the rest of the book, because I'm looking forward to reading another story of a generally forgotten yet enormous disaster, in this case an ammonium nitrate explosion in April 1947 that caused other explosions.

It wasn't something that came up in Texas History class in the seventh grade that I remember -- even though the teacher surely would have remembered the event herself -- nor in Texas History Movies, a collection of comic strips formerly used to teach Texas history that we had kicking around the house when I was growing up. (It's likely that the strips were published before 1947.) I forget where I first heard about the Texas City explosion, but it's always been a shadowy reference. Time to read a little more about it.

The Original Berenstain Bears

Hard rain early Monday afternoon, after which I was expecting clear skies and cool air. But no, the air got warmer. Here we are practically at the equinox and summer tugs back. Today was positively summer, up to and including temps at nearly 90 F. and a summer-style thunderstorm around dusk, though not one with a lot of wind or lightning displays.

Ann has been reading a lot of Berenstain Bears books lately, which isn't a bad thing, but I have noticed how relentlessly didactic most of the titles are. Such as The Berenstain Bears [each title begins with those words, or the possessive Bears']... Go to the Doctor; Visit to the Dentist; Trouble With Friends; Trouble With Money; and the Messy Room; and Too Much TV; and Too Much Junk Food; Learn About Strangers; Forget Their Manners; Trouble at School; and the Bad Habit; and on and on.

Those aren't the books I remember reading as a kid. Before Stan and Jan Berenstain went all educational with their series sometime in the 1970s, they created more entertaining bear books, though of course the point was to encourage children to read. The early bear books also relied on that old trope, as old as Plautus and probably older, of the dimwitted father leading his family into trouble.

In The Bears' Picnic (1966), for instance, the father bear tries to find a picnic spot, only to be driven away each time by a smoky locomotive, a mass of other picnickers, an enormous swarm of mosquitoes, a dump truck that dumps garbage on them, a jet that flies right over them, and then a sudden thunderstorm while they are on the top of a hill. It's the one-damn-thing-after-another style of storytelling, with not a moral in sight, at least not explicitly. Each page is vividly drawn, as are the expressions of the bears: the father is befuddled in the later style of Chevy Chase, and the mother's expression grows angrier and angrier without saying anything. She has exactly four lines in the entire book, after she takes it upon herself to head home with her son and let the father bear be hit by lightning. Hit on the butt, a perfect detail for kids.

The older titles are constantly checked out of the library, so I finally reserved The Bears' Picnic and The Big Honey Hunt (1962) for Ann's amusement, and we got them today during our Tuesday run to the library. I'm glad to report that she was much amused by them.

Someone Else Was Sitting Around With a Book For a Change

I went to get my hair cut today and while I was waiting, a nondescript kid, maybe 11 or 12, came in to wait for a cut himself, and opened up a book to read. He had a hardback without a dust jacket, so I couldn't see the title. But for the purpose of my observation that didn't matter.

It was a kid with a real book, here in the middle of summer when it's unlikely to be assigned reading. It wasn't a comic book or graphic novel or Amero-manga. It wasn't the current equivalent of a Game Boy or any other kind of electronic time-killer, or a Kindle. It was an honest-to-God verso-recto book made of paper.

Cracking a book was more surprising that almost anything else he could have done, up to and including riding a unicycle into the shop and parking it to wait for his haircut.