Sofia Kovalevskaya

Posted on 15 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1850, the great mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya was born. She made important contributions to analysis and differential equations. We will not talk about her work in math. This is because I still greatly struggle with analysis. Her work with differential equations — notably, classical mechanics — I do understand, but it would be (1) a lot of work for me to write; and (2) boring for you to read. Luckily, she lived a colorful life.

She showed an aptitude for mathematics very young and so her parents encouraged it and hired her a tutor. But women weren’t allowed in university in Russia at that time, so she had to go out of the country. But that was more involved than you might think. She needed her husband’s written permission to do that, so she pretended to be the wife of paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky. (Despite never actually marrying, they spent the rest of his life together.) And the two of them were off to Germany and then England (where he hung out with Darwin and she hung with George Eliot) and then to France and back to Germany, where she received her PhD at the age of 24 from the University of Göttingen. She was the first woman in Europe to be given the degree.

She and Vladimir struggled for the next decade, doing things like building houses and electrifying street lights. In 1883, Vladimir committed suicide. But the following year, Sofia finally got an academic position in Sweden. Things were pretty good from then on, although not that good because she was a woman. In addition to her mathematics and physics work, she wrote plays, a novel, and an autobiography. And then she died of influenza at the age of 41.

Happy birthday Sofia Kovalevskaya!

Horatio Alger

Posted on 13 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

Horatio Alger As noted, I’m out and birthday posts are the hardest thing to do under these circumstances. So I’m presenting an edited and expanded version of part of last year’s birthday post. It is not, as you will see, a guy I like very much.

On this day in 1832, Horatio Alger was born. He was a very popular writer in the 19th century. He wrote what is charitably called “crap.” Typical kind of story: poor boy goes to rich man’s house in search of employment; rich man has a dog that immediately takes to the poor boy; rich man hires poor boy because of the dog likes him. It is up, up, and away for the poor boy after that! He will probably end up marrying the rich man’s daughter who is beautiful, intelligent, and sweet. It’s exactly the kind of stories that the people wanted to believe during the Gilded Age and exactly the kind of stories the rich wanted the poor to be reading. Today, “Horatio Alger” is a synonym for any kind of unbelievable rags to riches story. In general, we don’t see such stories in their pure form because we are a much more cynical people. (For good reason!) There have been times when there were jobs for the asking. There were times when what most of the Republican Party now believes was true: if you aren’t working, you aren’t trying hard enough. Sorry folks, that’s now no more true than the statement, “Horatio Alger was a great writer!”

There is also the minor issue that Alger was a pedophile. While a young man, he was a pastor for the First Unitarian Church in Massachusetts. He was forced to resign and left town. His crime was “unnatural familiarity with boys.” Apparently, in those days (or in liberal churches), people actually did something about that kind of thing. But he didn’t seem to have any of that trouble in the future. He probably found an acceptable outlet for his homosexuality, but we don’t know that much about it.

Happy birthday Horatio Alger!

Frances Brooke

Posted on 12 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1724, the great writer Frances Brooke was born. She was a successful English novelist, although she wrote a few plays as well. Her husband was a military chaplain, stationed for a time in Canada. As a result of this, Brooke ended up writing the first novel written in that country, The History of Emily Montague. And it is this novel that I want to discuss.

The History of Emily Montague was an epistolary novel. I haven’t read it. To be honest, I’m not that fond of the genre. But according to Wikipedia, the novel was used as an example of the the hyperbolic use of the word “literally” in the original Oxford English Dictionary. The sentence was, “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” And this gives me an excuse to attack grammar snobs.

Many people go crazy when others use the word “literally” to mean “figuratively.” So after hearing the sentence above, the grammar snob will say, “It isn’t literally like feeding among the lilies — it’s figuratively!” But grammar is descriptive, not definitional. The time to have the fight about this was at least 250 years ago. Clearly, Brooke knew what she was doing. When she used “literally” as “figuratively” in the novel — two times — she italicized the words after it. She seems to have meant to be commenting on how the language was used by certain people of that time. It was clearly quite common even then.

So grammar snobs, get over yourselves! If Frances Brooke could make gentle fun of this grammatical silliness 250 years ago, you can at least do the same today. You aren’t impressing anyone with your knowledge. You’re just saying, “When I was in fifth grade, my teacher told me this!” And you don’t want to look that pathetic.

Happy birthday Frances Brooke!

Parmigianino

Posted on 11 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1503, the great painter Parmigianino was born. He was one of the great Mannerist painters — highly influenced by Antonio da Correggio. His work is know for its elongated figures such as Madonna with the Long Neck. What I find compelling about Mannerism generally, is that it isn’t slavishly dedicated to perspective like the High Renaissance. It was a move to make art not so much as nature is, but as nature ought to be. Parmigianino was very important in the development of the school.

Most of what we know Parmigianino for is his religious work, but he was better known as a portrait painter during his own life. It is hard to find much of his stuff online. And the following image of Gian Galeazzo Sanvitale is not the greatest, with the light reflection. But you will get the idea:

The image at the beginning of this article is a self-portrait from the year Parmigianino died at the age of 37 from a “fever.” He looks like he’s in his sixties. Times were hard. But the following self portrait was made when he was 21. It was painted on a convex panel by looking at himself in a convex mirror. It’s an amazing piece:

Happy birthday Parmigianino!

Eldzier Cortor

Posted on 10 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

Today, the great painter Eldzier Cortor is 99 years old. He is known most for the influence of African art of his portrayal of the female figure most especially. This has led to some criticisms of his work as objectifying women. That’s actually a pretty funny criticism of an artist who, you know, objectifies everything. But whatever.

His art is hard to pigeonhole, which is typical of the best modern artists. There is no doubt that much of his work is surrealist. That’s quite explicit in something like Room No V. But here is one that seems less obviously so, Woman in an Interior from 1945. The window panes are similar to what Magritte would do later in The Empire of Lights:

And then, in a totally different vein, but the very same year: Man with Sickle. I’d commented before that the subject seemed to express “pain and anger.” But I’m no longer sure. He may just exhibit exhaustion. I’m not sure there is a difference. But it is an amazing painting:

Happy birthday Eldzier Cortor!

Image of Eldzier Cortor cropped, reduced, and degraded from an image by Fern Logan.

Richard Nixon Superstar

Posted on 09 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

Nixon Fights Back Another 8 January, another year without Nixon to kick around. I’m going to be lazy and reprint mostly what I said last year. I have a lot of outside work to do. But also, there are some articles that I just don’t think got read. That’s especially true of birthday posts where, when they were good, they tended to be very long because I was talking about a number of people. I just want to add to what follows with this: I’ve got to go through my files and see if I can find my old Nixon White House puppet plays. They are some of my favorite writings. Maybe by next year, I can post one of them.

Richard Nixon was born on this day in 1913. Look, the man was imperfect. He had a real paranoia problem — but not without cause. And his foreign policy was a disaster. But was it worse than Johnson’s? Well, I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t a lot worse. And he did eventually decide it was time to pull the plug. He also wasn’t bad on domestic issues. But the reason that I love him is that he is the most successful loser in the history of humanity. Even at the peak of his fame, I think he still felt like a loser. And, as mentioned, there are my puppet plays about the Nixon administration. So in a sense, Nixon is no longer a person to me; he’s a character. And in that group, he’s an okay guy. Kind of a Caspar Milquetoast compared to the rest of the cast.

And another thing. Here’s what Nixon said after he lost his election to become the governor of California:

How do you not love that man? He’s angry. He’s sad. But he thinks he’s being funny. And do you know what? I think he was funny! I present the video because when people quote it, they get the tone all wrong. That’s understandable. There’s a lot going on inside him at that point. But it isn’t an angry denunciation the way people usually say it, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” He wasn’t just talking about the media there either. He was talking to the world generally. It’s poignant.

One thing I definitely think: Richard Nixon was not bad for this country in the way that Reagan, Bush the Younger, and even the New Democrats have been. That’s not to say that he wouldn’t be a crazy Tea Party guy if he were in politics today. But even in his own time, the conservative Republicans didn’t much like his liberal social policy. If Nixon had been more of an economic conservative, his party mightn’t have abandoned him so willingly over Watergate. I for one am damn sad that we don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.

Happy birthday Richard Nixon!

The title is a reference to the David Frye comedy album, Richard Nixon Superstar, which I thought was hilarious as a child, even though I didn’t get a lot of it. The one bit I remember is the obstetrician who delivered Nixon saying, “He was the only baby I ever saw with a five o’clock shadow.” Or something like that.

Elvis Presley and All His Impersonators

Posted on 08 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1935, the King of Rock-n-Roll, Elvis Presley was born. Since I don’t have a lot to say about The King, I’m going to recycle an article I wrote almost two years ago that never got the attention that it deserved, Transubstantiation of Elvis. But let me just add that Elvis would only be 80 years old today. He left us far too young.

In 1992, I went to Hong Kong for the first time. I was sitting in the back of a little Irish pub. And I was pretty drunk. And in walks a Chinese Elvis impersonator in a white jumpsuit studded to the ridiculous extreme that we are all accustom to. Holding an acoustic guitar, he performs “Hound Dog,” collects tips and leaves. You got all that, right? Hong Kong, Irish pub, Elvis. The next day I wasn’t sure myself. I had to ask my colleagues, and they confirmed it: I did in fact see a Chinese Elvis do “Hound Dog” in an Irish pub in Hong Kong. Many people go their entire lives without ever experiencing something as magical.

I love Elvis and even more, I love Elvis Culture. In a sense, Elvis is America: a drug addict who wanted Nixon to make him an undercover DEA agent; a white guy who made millions off the work of poor blacks; and a country rube who somehow connects to a universal audience. In addition to all of this, the music is just fantastic. But it’s the Vegas act silliness that drives the culture. Although I do not particularly like watching Elvis at that stage of his career, I do like what it has spawned. I never would have gone to see one of those shows, but I’d thrill to see Elvis impersonators.

So when I noticed that the film Almost Elvis was available on Netflix, I had to watch it. It isn’t a great film, but it is fascinating. It follows a group of Elvis Impersonators as they compete for the “Images of Elvis” prize for the best Elvis impersonator in the world. It focuses on Irv Cass, a professional from Michigan. Little did I know it, but there is a network of Elvis impersonators throughout the world. If you want one, you call up EEN (Elvis Entertainment Network) and they will send one out. Cass is one them, and seems to make a decent living doing it:

Cass is very free with his opinions of the competition. Since he was one of the most established people in the field at that time, he knows them all. He’s rather good at talking about their strengths and weaknesses. In this way, he nicely systematizes what it is to be an Elvis impersonator. And this brings up probably the most interesting part of the film: race. One of the top people in the field is Robert Washington, who is a black man. Mostly everyone is very respectful of him. But they also admit that he doesn’t look like Elvis because of his race.

But here’s the thing. I don’t think that any of the impersonators looks like Elvis the man. If you take away the hair and the sideburns and the outfits, they just look like random white guys. So really, when we are talking about Elvis, we aren’t really talking about his face. Elvis isn’t a person anymore; he’s an archetype. So to me, it is all about getting up on stage with “the look” (hair, burns, suit) and moving and sounding like Elvis. What’s more, in Washington’s case, he isn’t all that black. Until people started talking about it, I just thought he was really tanned.

All the people said the same thing: I question whether Washington will ever win the title, not because I don’t like him, but because of the judges being, well, racist. This is typical: people generally think their neighbors are more racist than they actually are. At the end of the film, Washington came in second. The good news is he later won the event. Check him out; he’s great:

An academic interviewed for the film referred to the “transubstantiation of Elvis” to explain why people want more than just the music. The music is enough for me. But he’s right: these guys do become The King. And that’s pretty great.

Happy birthday Elvis Presley!

Afterword

This is probably the guy I saw in Hong Kong. He started in 1992, and I believe I saw him on my 1994 visit.

One Day, Two Great French Musicians

Posted on 07 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1899, the great French composer Francis Poulenc. And exactly 23 years later, the great flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal was born. I believe the two were friends. They were certainly colleagues. Poulenc wrote Sonate Pour Flute et Piano specifically for Rampal.

I know what you might think, “Okay, so he wrote a piece of music for Rampal! Who cares?!” When I was seriously studying flute, my teacher often (Too often!) lamented the fact that there was no great music written from the flute after the Baroque Period and before the Modern Period (if we can define that as starting with Debussy). She was pretty much correct. The great Classical composers didn’t seem to care much for the instrument. When Mozart was commissioned to write three flute concertos, he only managed two write two of them, and one was just a slight reworking of an oboe concerto he had written a year earlier. The Romantic Period was even worse with most of the works written for the flute being tiresome — all fireworks.

Jean-Pierre Rampal Poulenc’s sonata has rightly become a flute standard. As far as I’m concerned, it is the best piece ever written for the flute. But then, Poulenc is one of my very favorite composers. Part of that is just that he is alternately fun, sad, thrilling, sensuous, you name it. But it is also that I never hear him working. That’s my biggest complaint with modern composers: I too often realize what they are trying to do — it doesn’t sound organic. Poulenc always made it sound easy, even when he was being extremely serious.

I feel much the same way about Rampal. Other unbelievably great flutists like James Galway and William Bennett still seem to me to be working at times. I don’t know what it is. But with Rampal it just sounds easy, like water flowing through a stream.

Anyway, here is Jean-Pierre Rampal playing Francis Poulenc’s Sonate Pour Flute et Piano. It features Rampal’s longtime associate Robert Veyron-Lacroix on piano. It is wonderful:

Happy birthday Jean-Pierre Rampal and Francis Poulenc!

Heinrich Schliemann

Posted on 06 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1822, the great archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was born. He was one of the most important ever in the science. In particular, he was the first person to dig at Hissarlik, which later archaeologists were able to prove was the actual site of the Trojan War, which by the 19th century was thought to be pure myth.

His interest in archaeology started late. Early on he made his fortune as in the import and finance business. The one thing that links his business and archaeology careers is that he had an amazing facility with languages. By his death, he could conversant in over a dozen languages — including Greek, Russian, and Arabic. He retired in 1858, but didn’t start pursuing archaeology for another ten years — when he was pushing fifty years of age. At around this time, he divorced his wife — apparently because she wasn’t willing to travel with him. Then he advertised for a wife in a Greek newspaper and married Sophia Engastromenos, who was his assistant and constant companion to the end.

In his work, Schliemann unfortunately destroyed much of the site because of his belief that old sites had to be deep. He was, after all, self taught. But I’m not sure that the professional archaeologists would have done much better. Still, many people did encourage him to go slowly — advice he rejected. It may have also been a question of temperment. It turned out that seven main cities had been built on top of the site dating from about a thousand years before Troy. The whole story is amazing, and I highly recommend watching In Search of the Trojan War. Here is the first episode of it, which deals with Schliemann and the work that he did:

Happy birthday Heinrich Schliemann!

Public Intellectual Umberto Eco

Posted on 05 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

The great writer and philosopher Umberto Eco is 83 years old today. Last year, when I marked his birthday, I talked about his novel, The Name of the Rose. And I said then what I will say now: it is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It is rare that I think a novel is too short. I never wanted it to stop. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it. And if you’ve seen the film of the same name, don’t let that stop you. It is fun enough, I suppose. And it is probably as good a rendering of the book as could be had on the screen. But the book is something else completely.

But it is probably best to think of Eco as a public intellectual — the sort of person that the United States has largely turned against. I highly recommend his essays. A year and a half ago, I quoted from his essay “Censorship and Silence” in his book, Inventing the Enemy. It is more true than ever: the way that we censor today is not by forbidding the truth but by drowning it out with nonsense. Fox News is the king of this, but more important, it is true of the media establishment writ large. Here is Umberto Eco on the issue:

Noise becomes a cover. I would say that the ideology of the censorship through noise can be expressed, with apologies to Wittgenstein, by saying, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must talk a great deal.” The flagship TG1 news program on Italian state television, for example, is a master of this technique, full of news items about calves born with two heads and bags snatched by petty thieves — in other words, the sort of minor stories papers used to put low on an inside page — which now serve to fill up three-quarters of an hour of information, to ensure we don’t notice other news stories they ought to have covered have not been covered. Several months ago, the press controlled by Berlusconi, in order to undermine the authority of a magistrate who criticized the premier, followed him for days, reporting that he sat smoking on a bench, went to the barber, and wore turquoise socks. To make a noise, you don’t have to invent stories. All you have to do is report a story that is real but irrelevant, yet creates a hint of suspicion by the simple fact that it has been reported. It is true and irrelevant that the magistrate wears turquoise socks, but the fact it has been reported creates a suggestion of something not quite confessed, leaving a mark, an impression. Nothing is more difficult to dispose of than an irrelevant but true story.

Happy birthday Umberto Eco!

See also: The Art of the Opening.

André Masson

Posted on 04 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1896, the great painter André Masson was born. It is hard to classify him, which is what makes him so great. The clearest aspect of his painting is surrealism, especially that of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. But I also see Paul Klee and M C Escher. At least, that’s what I see in his mature work in the 1930s and 1940s. His earlier work is experimental with a lot of automatic drawing, which probably is why he became a major influence of the abstract expressionists much later. I like to think that he was laying the groundwork for his later work — the way that the last dream of the night combines elements of the earlier, simpler dreams.

When the Nazis took over France, they did not like Masson’s work. But really: whose work did the Nazis like? They considered it “degenerate.” So he managed to escape from France and make it to the United States. When people from the customs department found some of his art work that he had smuggled with him, it was pronounced pornographic and destroyed. I know that some people have a real problem with my attitude, but there is really something that connects Germany and the United States. And it ain’t good. They (We!) are a parochial people. And while I’ll allow that Germany is much improved since the Nazis, the United States has regressed in many ways since the New Deal.

In 1938, having seen the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the general rise of fascism throughout Europe, Masson painted In the Tower of Sleep. It is simultaneously horrific and transcendent. He wrote of the central figure whose skin has been flayed off that it came from having seen while fighting in World War I “a figure lying in a trench with his head split open…” I think it’s a masterpiece that better renders the time and place than anything I’ve ever seen:

Happy birthday André Masson!

Sergio Leone

Posted on 03 Jan 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1929, the great film director Sergio Leone was born. It’s rare that a filmmaker like Leone comes along. I wouldn’t call him a complete filmmaker like Akira Kurosawa — from whom Leone learned a great deal. Leone was a highly idiosyncratic filmmaker. There are a lot of fetishistic elements to his films — and I’m not just talking about his vaguely creepy sexual interests. There is something extremely sensual about the way he told stories. His films have a fascination with point of view. I think that is where his interest in extreme close-ups and long takes comes from.

There is one thing that I think we really need to clarify, however. I’m very fond of A Fistful of Dollars. But it is nowhere near as good a film as Yojimbo. There simply isn’t a single thing that Leone did better in remaking the film. And mostly, he did worse. But given that Yojimbo is both a great and a perfect film, that maybe doesn’t say much. But if you have never seen Yojimbo, you really should.

The Leone film that I like best is A Fistful of Dynamite. Most of Leone’s films are more about style than about substance. But this one is about something. Set during the Mexican Revolution, it turns a very cynical eye toward revolution as a means of progress. War means death — whatever the cause. And usually, the cause is just an excuse. Of course, personally, I have mixed feelings about the Mexican Revolution. I certainly admire a lot of the people involved in it, but in the end it didn’t come to much. And even today when Mexico is nominally a democracy, look who leads the country.

Here is the whole movie online. Watch it while it is available:

Happy birthday Sergio Leone!

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