Name Ideas

Rhinelander Waldo, NYC Police Commissioner in 1911

Chidiock Tichborne, Elizabethan Poet

Barnabe Googe, another Elizabethan Poet

Mountstuart Elphingstone, Victorian colonial viceroy

Tenche Coxe, American colonial writer

Elmo Zumwalt, American admiral 

Hate-Evil Hall, early American quaker

Pringle Stokes, 19th-century British naval officer

Boys can't love

 James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937), the beloved Scottish playwright who created one of literature's iconic characters, Peter Pan, formed an unlikely friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle that survived many years and vast differences between two of the most popular writers of their time. 

Conan Doyle was a sportsman. Fond of skiing, he has been credited with introducing that vigorous activity to Switzerland. An aficianado of pugilism, he was praised for his skills as a boxer and wrote two books with boxing themes: Rodney Stone (1896), which focused on bare-knuckle fighting during the Regency era, and The Croxley Master: A Great Tale of the Prize Ring (1907), about a boxing medical student. Famously, Conan Doyle was asked to referee the racially charged Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries heavyweight championship fight in 1910. Johnson, the new champion, was an arrogant black man, so Jeffries, the old former champion, was called out of retirement in the interest of white supremacy. Conan Doyle declined the offer, stating that it was more likely to foster bigotry than combat it. 

Barrie, on the other hand, stopped growing when he was still quite small (5'3" according to his passport), was extremely introverted, and though he was married, his relationship was apparently uncomssumated. "Boys can't love," he explained to his wife. 

Nonetheless, Barrie and his friends, Jerome K. Jerome, Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, and others, founded a cricket club, called Allahakbarries. Conan Doyle was the only member who could actually play cricket. 

- from Otto Penzler's introduction to J.M Barrie's Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Late Sherlock Holmes", in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories. 

The History of Fishes

Halley's traumas were not yet quite over. The Royal Society had promised to publish the work, but now pulled out, citing financial embarrassment. The year before the society had backed a costly flop called The History of Fishes, and they now suspected that the market for a book on mathematical principles would be less than clamorous. Halley, whose means were not great, paid for the book's publication out of his own pocket. Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, Halley at this time had just accepted a position as the society's clerk, and he was informed that the society could no longer afford to provide him with a promised salary of £50 per annum. He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes.

- from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, 49.

Look at this as you drink and enjoy yourself

At drinking parties of wealthy Egyptians, they always follow the end of their dinner by having a man carry around a corpse made of wood inside a coffin. The wooden corpse is crafted so as to be most realistic, both in the way it is painted and in the way it is carved, and it measures altogether on to three feet in length. As the man displays it before each of the guests, he says, "Look at this as you drink and enjoy yourself, for you will be like this when you are dead."

- Herotodus, Histories, Book Two

an afternoon to read

US policymakers reacted in shock over what they denounced as Japan's unprovoked attack [on Pearl Harbor]. For being so starkly surprised, however, they had no one to blame but themselves. Had they taken an afternoon to read Thucydides and to think about the consequences of Athen's Megarian Decree, or reflect on Britain's efforts to contain the rise of Germany in the decade after 1914, they could have better anticipated Japan's initiative...

- Graham Allison, Destined For War

Punching my sister

"In 1964, 300 years after he made his mark on the world, a page in one of his [Isaac Newton] notebooks, penned cryptically in 1662, was finally decoded; on it, addressed to God, was a list of sins 19-year old Newton had committed."

Some selections:

2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugars
26. Calling Derothy Rose a jade
44. Beating Arthur Storer


- from Lists of Note, ed. Shaun Usher

His only escape

Until now repairing old accordions and playing them had been his only escape.

- from Switch, William Bayer, 1984, pg. 81

For information sake

"...Aretino's dialogues are of additional literary interest for serving as the model for such works as L'Escole des Filles (1655), which appeared in English as The School of Venus (1688). It was the French version of this "novel" - consisting mainly of a discussion of sexual matters by two girls, Fanchon and Susanne - that was purchased on February 8, 1668, by His Majesty' Secretary of Naval Affairs, one Samuel Pepys. He characterized it as "the most bawdy, lewd book that I ever saw," and for this reason procured it "in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it." The next night, after consuming "a mighty good store of wine," he retreated to the privacy of his chamber, where he read the book "for information sake," then proceeded with the burning, "that it might not be among my books to my shame."

- from Hugh Rawson's enormously diverting Wicked Words. 

I think nothing equals Macbeth.

"Shakespeare's plays appealed to [Lincoln] most. As a boy, he had memorized the soliloquies contained in William Scott's Lessons in Elocution, and in Springfield he owned and frequently read his own copy of Shakespeare's works, but he had never seen Shakespeare performed on the stage until he became President. After that he rarely missed an opportunity. In February and March 1864, at one of the most dangerous periods of the war, he took time off from his duties to see the great tragedian Edwin Booth perform in Richard III, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.

Once his fondness for Shakespeare led to an embarrassment. In August 1863, after seeing James H. Hackett as Falstaff in Henry IV, he wrote the actor commending his performance and expressing the hope that he would have a chance to make his personal acquaintance when he next performed in Washington. The President went on to say that he had never read some of Shakespeare's plays, but that he had gone over others - mentioning King Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet, and Macbeth - "perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader." "I think nothing equals Macbeth," he added. "It is wonderful." Though the letter was intended to be personal, Hackett printed and distributed it, and newspapers had a field day, criticizing the President as would-be dramatic critic. To Hackett's apology Lincoln replied that the hostile comments "constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life." He added, in one of his most perfectly balanced sentences: "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it." "

- from David Herbert Donald's Lincoln, p. 569.

"A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment" - the first sentence of The Return of the Native. Who could read this without remembering this? :

a few and solid authors

" 'Tis not a melancholy Utinam [Latin for 'would that!'] of my own, but the desires of better heads, that there were a general Synod; not to unite the incompatible difference of religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it as it lay at first, in a few and solid authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions of Rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of Scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of Typographers."

- Sir Thomas Browne, 1625, Religio Medici, Book I, XXIV.

Quiet, you lousy amateurs!

"Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht's hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of Ben Hecht Symphionetta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

On the night of their first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht's house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

"Quiet, please!" he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him. The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarassment. "Groucho's jealous," Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

"Quiet, you lousy amateurs!" he shouted. When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. Yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannhauser.

 "Thunderstruck," Antheil recalled, "we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphionetta. We took him in."

- from City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's, Otto Friedrich, 1986.

The best Basie

"He lighted a cigarette and tossed the empty pack into a grey-violet wastebasket. He looked at a yellow-stained radio with a phonograph annex. Then he found himself glancing at the record albums grouped in a yellow case beside the yellow-stained cabinet. "I see you go in for swing," he said. From another room she said, "Legitimate swing." ...

Dragging at the cigarette he stooped over and began going through the record albums. When he came to Basie he frowned. There was a lot of Basie. The best Basie. The same Basie he liked. There was Every Tub and Swinging the Blues and Texas Shuffle. There was John's Idea and Lester Leaps In and Out the Window. He...decided to play Texas Shuffle....He switched on the current and got the record under the needle. Texas Shuffle began to roll softly and it was very lovely. It clicked with the fact that he had a cigarette in his mouth, watching the smoke go up, and the police didn't know he was here."

- from David Goodis' tobacco-stained novel Dark Passage, 1946.

- Sign spotted by your author at a fromagerie in Livarot, France.

- Mitchell Jamieson, "Ladders", 1964, from here. This is one of a series of paintings and sketches of the American space effort which originated from a suggestion by James Webb, NASA's administrator from 1961-1968 (those heady years), that artists might turn their collective attentions to mankind's lunar strivings. From the National Air and Space Museum: 

"Working together, James Dean, a young artist employed by the NASA Public Affairs office, and Dr. H. Lester Cooke, curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, created a program that dispatched artists to NASA facilities with an invitation to paint whatever interested them. The result was an extraordinary collection of works of art proving, as one observer noted, "that America produces not only scientists and engineers capable of shaping the destiny of our age, but also artists worthy to keep them company."

Possibly the best invention in history: