A Fly Went By

Marshall "Mike" McClintock, author of one of my favorite childhood-era books, A Fly Went By (first published in 1958), was born on this day in 1906 in Topeka, Kansas. He was also known for a few other minor children's classics, including Stop That Ball! (1951) and What Have I Got (1961).

As an editor, McClintock secured the publication of the first in a long series of children's books by an old Dartmouth classmate of his, Theodore Geisel -- better known as Dr. Seuss. The book was Mulberry Street (1938).

McClintock also wrote patriotic pulp novels during World War II under the pseudonyms of William Starret (the Nurse Blake series, 1942-44) and Gregory Duncan (the Fighters for Freedom series, 1944). He died in 1967.

The Poet Laureate of Flight Attendants

Lori Jakiela, one of my favorite writers, was born on this day in 1964 in Pittsburgh.

I first encountered Jakiela while driving home from work, listening to the normally monotonous local poetry program on one of our public radio stations. Jakiela, who was reading selections from her chapbook The Regulars, would have charmed the socks off me were I not at that moment engaged in driving down the parkway at 65+ mph. Her funny, often both funny and poignant vignettes from her experiences as an airline hostess made me laugh out loud, and were a breath of fresh air from the usually ponderous fare I had come to expect from the program. I made a mental note to reserve a special space in my very own personal literary canon for Lori Jakiela as the poet laureate of flight attendants.

Last year, Jakiela published a memoir of growing up in Western Pennsylvania and briefly following her dreams in New York City, entitled Miss New York Has Everything. Miss New York is a sweet and mischievous book, and Jakiela’s voice is so disarmingly blithe that at first it is difficult to understand why it gets under one’s skin.

I know that at least some of what attracts me to Jakiela’s tale is that both of our fathers were machinists. Jakiela depicts her adoptive father, who once dreamed of being the next Frank Sinatra, as a bitter and misanthropic man – “probably closest in temperament to the French writer Celine, who could say the word sh*t in seventeen languages and kept company mostly with dogs and whores” – whereas I tend to think of my father as more of a self-assured and chatty cross between Leonardo da Vinci, Jack LaLanne and Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. As Jakiela’s contemporary, the catalog of references from the junkyard of 1970s pop culture that tumble forth in her work, from “Seasons in the Sun” to Shaun Cassidy to Lassie and That Girl reruns, also sends inevitable shivers of recognition up my spine. Although I grew up in Southern California, a place with which I now enjoy a special love-hate relationship and a prison from which the teenaged me vowed to escape, I now live a mere two-stone’s-throws from the little town of Trafford where Jakiela survived her dour childhood; and it is with a mixture of irony and awe that I find myself viewing the 70s, 80s and 90s through the windshield of an adopted person from my adopted home, cruising past familiar Pittsburgh institutions such as the Electric Banana, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Iron City Beer (“If you’ve never had an Iron City Beer, suck on your car keys. You’ll get the idea.”), bingo night at the Polish Club, and the Squirrel Cage.

What really pushes my buttons about Miss New York Has Everything, however – the kernel of the universal in it that rises above the particulars, if you will – is Jakiela’s portrayal of that fine line between love and horror. One feels Jakiela’s warmth and empathy for the people of her hometown, even as she is compelled to share with us, as though possessed of a pair of X-ray glasses from an ad in the back of a comic book, the ruptures and boils that lie beneath the flowered housecoats of the Trafford ladies. Cartoon visions of hell play prominently amid her early memories.

The distance between horror and love for Jakiela, however, seems to be comparable in magnitude, as the crow flies, to the gap between reality and dreams. Everyone around her, it seems, has at least one broken dream, or a real or imagined near-miss with fame or good fortune; and yet, in her unfailing optimism Jakiela conveys the sense that we’re all walking around like unrecognized stars. Even as she admits that her aunt, the one her father called Shirley Temple, had plenty of ambition but no discernible talent, she is happy to remind you that before James Dean became James Dean, he had a bowl haircut and glasses and played Frankenstein in his high school production of Goon with the Wind. We’re all, it seems, a mere accident away from reaching out and touching the impossible.

In the meantime, as Jakiela observes wistfully,

… [L]ife and the people in it are mostly complicated. We might all be jokes, but there are a lot of punch lines and we don’t always see them coming.

The pope, a piece of string, a blonde, an Irish man, a black man, a nun, a rabbi, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, and a midget walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Hold on, this has to be a joke.’

We don’t fit into neat categories, we don’t see ourselves clearly, and, even if we dress the part, there’s a good chance we’ve been miscast.

There you have it. There's a fine line between horror and love, a thin screen between dreams and reality. And, miscast or not, an unforeseen punch line can come along and push you right past those capricious, delicate barriers ... which is how an ex-flight attendant from Trafford can one day become a writer who deserves to be read, the poet laureate of flight attendants.

Eugene Sue and The Mysteries of Paris

"Our sole hope is that we will draw the attention of thinkers and of honest folk to some of the great afflictions of society." -- Eugene Sue.

Novelist Eugene Sue was born on this day in 1804 in Paris. The son of a successful surgeon in Napoleon's army and godson of the future Empress Josephine, Sue originally studied medicine and served as a surgeon in the French navy during the 1820s. After the death of his father, Sue took his inheritance and moved to Paris, devoting himself to womanizing, spending lavishly, and writing. His earliest published works were adventure novels with maritime settings (including Atar-Gull, 1831, and Le Salamandre, 1832), leading him to be praised as "the French James Fenimore Cooper." To put that in perspective, we must remember that at the time Cooper was one of America's best known adventure novelists -- although critical opinion about him was not necessarily uniform. As Mark Twain once observed: "In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."

In any event, following these successes, Eugene Sue showed his capacity for adapting to the prevailing literary tastes of his time, turning his hand to historical novels (such as Latreaumont, 1838) and eventually to the serial romance -- of which his serial autobiographical novel, Arthur, 1837-9, was an early precursor. His popularity growing, with the publication of the widely-read romance Mathilde (1841), Sue became the most successful serial-novelist in France, getting paid by the line for works of high melodrama appearing in installments in the newspapers.

In the 1840s, under the influence of his friend, the Socialist playwright Felix Pyat, Sue became deeply interested in the problems of economic injustice. The subject matter of his serials quickly turned from tales of the aristocracy to the lower classes, resulting in Sue's most famous work, The Mysteries of Paris (published as a serial in 1842): an enormously popular, vividly drawn picture of the Paris slums, it focused on the activities of a highly-principled, almost super-human avenging angel, Rodolphe, a wealthy German prince disguised as a common workman who dispensed rough justice to evil men who tormented the poor and socially disadvantaged.

His next best-selling novel, The Wandering Jew (1844-45; filmed in 1933, starring Conrad Veidt), was based on the legend of the Jewish cobbler who was condemned by Christ to wander throughout eternity for having refused to give him water on his journey to Golgotha, again explored the persecution of the poor.

In 1850, Sue won election to the National Assembly as a Socialist, but showed no stomach for public debate and was widely criticized for proofing the galleys of his novels while sitting in the Assembly chambers. After the 1851 coup d'etat which resulted in Louis Napoleon's accession to power, Sue left France for Savoy, dying in exile there on August 3, 1857.

Heidi Bowl

Novelist and children's writer Johanna Spyri was born Johanna Louise Heusser on this day in 1829 in Hirzel, Switzerland. She died on July 7, 1901 in Zurich.

Although Heidi (1880-1, in 2 parts), is considered to be one of Switzerland's best loved pieces of literature, her appeal has lost some its luster over the years. A TV adaptation of Heidi starring Maximilian Schell became the infamous focal point of a network TV gaffe on November 17, 1968 when, with 50 seconds to go in a football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets, NBC cut away from the game to its previously scheduled broadcast of Heidi; in less than 48 seconds, the Raiders came back from a 3-point deficit, scoring 2 touchdowns to beat the Jets 43-32. While Heidi crawled across a mountainside to reach her grandfather, an NBC message crawled beneath her across the screen announcing the result of the game. Outraged fans deluged the NBC switchboard with complaints, causing the NFL to include a "whole game" clause in future TV contracts.

The "Heidi Bowl" aside, a more recent film interpretation of Heidi by Markus Imboden (2001) depicts Heidi as an alienated modern latchkey kid, sending text messages and emails back and forth to her pal Peter and his friends at a Berlin cybercafe. Future Heidis will no doubt have all the web-enabled tools necessary to determine the final score of any NFL game.

Faure

Composer Gabriel Faure was born on this date in 1845 in Pamiers, France.

Writing about music is about as easy and straight-forward as dancing about pies -- and writers about music have had a heck of a time writing about the music of Gabriel Faure. He was born 3 years after the death of Cherubini, the austere classicist; and by the time of Faure's death, Schoenberg was writing in 12-tone technique and Stravinsky had already debuted his Petrouchka. 80 years of musical innovation clamored through Europe during Faure's life, yet critics have never really found a place to put him among the styles of his many contemporaries.

My friend Carlo Caballero, in his book Faure and French Musical Aesthetics, has managed to draw some neat circles around Faure, adding much to one's understanding of Faure's inscrutable work. With apologies to Carlo, here is one way to approach Faure. Despite the influences swirling around him, Faure's works have a timeless sameness, revealing an aesthetic based on notions of sincerity (truth about the artist's interior life) and originality (a novelty of spirit, as opposed to a novelty of style, that is unique to the artist) -- aesthetic values that Faure tried to impart to his students.

A self-taught organist as a child, Faure's school inspector-father sent him to study in Paris, ultimately with Camille Saint-Saens, who encouraged him, introduced him to members of his circle such as Verlaine, Proust, Flaubert and Gounod, and helped him secure work. From his 20s to his 40s, however, apart from a stint in the Franco-Prussian War, Faure labored away as an organist in obscure posts in Rennes and Paris while writing mostly intimate pieces -- songs, short piano pieces and sonatas -- until he took dual appointments as the organist at La Madeleine and professor of composition at the Paris Conservatory in 1895. By then his music had found a small following among amateurs and critics, but it wouldn't be until 1905, when he was appointed director of the Conservatory (a post he would hold until deafness forced him to retire in 1920), that his compositions would begin to be considered by the broader public -- among them, his Elegie for cello and piano (1880), Messe de requiem (1887), Pavane for orchestra (1887), piano pieces and song cycles of works by Hugo, Baudelaire, Sully-Prudhomme and Verlaine.

Faure's work is often described as a dignified mesh of classical modes colored by subtle Impressionistic effects -- mild discords, metrical misalignments -- but it is even more typical to refer to Faure's music as "elusive"; Copland wrote of its "certain ungetatable quality . . . disconcerting to the uninitiated." It is probably more precise to say that, rather than beating us over the head with a composer's intentions, Faure's humble and dignified design is to give the initiative to the listener, to listen to his music with sincerity and originality.

Faure died on November 4, 1924 in Paris.

Pynchon

Although his labyrinthine fiction has been accused of being nearly incomprehensible by some, Thomas Pynchon -- born on this day in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island -- is undeniably one of the most important authors of the last century.

An engineering student who switched to literature while at Cornell, perhaps following the lead of his charismatic friend, Richard Fariña, Pynchon published his first novel, V, in 1963 -- a darkly humorous odyssey of a man obsessively searching for the identity of a mysterious person or thing referred to in his father's diary as "V." In this work, as in his subsequent works, Pynchon's hero attempts to make sense out of the factual and experiential chaos of modern life by "grouping the world's caries into cabals." As the canvas upon which this organizing principle of paranoia is depicted in Pynchon's works, he delights in revealing the chaos: he eagerly infects his noisy world with allusions which grow dizzyingly encyclopedic in their Internet-like linkings, from comic books to Eastern philosophy to Busby Berkeley to Wagnerian operas to hard physics -- including, above all, Clausius' Second Law of Thermodynamics, Maxwell's Demon and Planck's quantum physics, scientific concepts which Pynchon raises to the level of defining contemporary metaphors.

Intensely private, Pynchon gives no interviews and permits no photographs of himself to be released (the only known photos of him were taken when he was a teenager, in college or in the Navy); even his official dossiers seem to have vanished. Attempts to draw him out have met with dryly humorous regrets; to Norman Mailer's invitation to have a drink, Pynchon replied with a note saying simply, "No, thanks, I only drink Ovaltine." After the Pulitzer committee refused to accept the recommendation of its literary panel that the novel considered by many to be Pynchon's best, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (the committee called it "unreadable" and "obscene"), the book was awarded the National Book Award and the Howells Medal. To the National Book Award ceremony, Pynchon's publisher sent Professor Irwin Corey, a frizzy-haired comedian specializing in ridiculous double-talk, in Pynchon's place; meanwhile, Pynchon tried unsuccessfully to decline the Howells Medal, writing "The Howells Medal is a great honor, and, being gold, probably a good hedge against inflation too. But I don't want it. Please don't impose on me something I don't want."

After 17 years, Pynchon published two new novels in the 1990s: Vineland (1990) and Mason & Dixon (1997). In 2004, Pynchon broke his "silence" by "appearing" on Matt Groening's long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons as himself, lending his friendly, unmistakably Long-Island-accented voice to the soundtrack and permitting himself to be drawn with a paper bag over his head standing out in front of his well-indicated home, offering his autograph to passersby. Just imagine J.D. Salinger doing anything of the sort.

La Prisonniere

Malika Oufkir, political prisoner, author of the memoir La Prisonniere: Twenty Years in a Desert Gaol (known as Stolen Lives in the U.S.) (2000), was born on this day in 1953 in Morocco.

The daughter of General Muhammad Oufkir, a close advisor to kings of Morocco Muhammad V and Hassan II, Oufkir was "adopted" by Muhammad V to grow up in the royal palace and keep Muhammad's favorite daughter company. Later, after General Oufkir participated in an attempted coup against Hassan II and was executed in 1972, Hassan imprisoned 19-year old Oufkir, her mother, her two brothers and three sisters in horrifying conditions in desert jails for 15 years, for no other reason than that they were the family of the slain traitor.

Oufkir kept her family together by telling chapters of a story of her own creation, a soap opera set in 19th century Russia, every evening for the last 10 years of their desert captivity -- "like a modern Scheherazade." After the plight of the Oufkirs made the headlines following Malika's daring, improbable escape and subsequent recapture with brothers Raouf and Abdellatif and sister Maria in 1987, the family was placed under house arrest in more comfortable surroundings until 1991. Upon their "release," they were subjected to further surveillance and were refused permission to leave Morocco until Malika's sister Maria escaped to Spain in 1996, whereupon international outcry forced the Moroccan government to issue passports to the rest of the family.

Oufkir's memoir, as much as it fills the reader with outrage over the tragedy of lost years of youth, is remarkably affirming and even charming, beguiling us with examples of the spirit and resourcefulness of the prisoners amid the barbarity. In 1996, Oufkir moved to Paris and 2 years later, at the age of 45, married French architect Eric Bordreuil. At the end of the 20th century, Amnesty International estimated that there were still hundreds of political prisoners in Moroccan jails.

Gutenberg

"Artists, sailors, children -- and inventors. Lord, protect your most innocent sheep!" -- Felix Blueblazes.

It is hard to imagine what the last 550 years would have been like without the mountains of printed babel (not unlike what you're reading now, only on paper) which have accumulated as a consequence of Johannes Gutenberg's innovations: individual metal stamp-molded type letters, easily mass produced and reusable, combined with a pressing machine like one previously used principally for squashing grapes, the metal letters painted with an oil-based ink and pushed onto paper to create multiple copies of a page of text which would have taken a scribe several days and a wrist-splint to have created by hand.

Impossible, in fact. Gutenberg's invention is likely the single most widely influential creation in a 1,000 years of workshop tinkering. Suddenly, for the first time since the invention of writing, "the word" was available in mass quantities. It could be shouted (and more importantly, repeated) out from between stiff leather covers, down highways and trade routes. For the poet, more editions offered more chances at immortality; for the scientist, the cost of research was reduced dramatically as formulas and ideas could be exchanged quickly, relatively cheaply and with a guaranteed uniformity; and for the entrepreneur, the press meant greater saturation of the marketplace with handbills and sales circulars. Even the church, initially unnerved by the ease with which any heretic could publish his blasphemies, found a use for Gutenberg's contraption.

The "entrepreneur" is not the central character in Gutenberg's story, however, for the story of Gutenberg and his press is not about the lone innovator who forged a media empire, but another one about how the money guys used their muscle to squeeze the idea-man out of the fruits of his dreams and sweat. (What did you expect? Whoever said Hearst or Murdoch ever invented anything?)

Almost everything we know about Gutenberg comes from litigation records. Trained as a metallurgist, Gutenberg earned his living making and selling tourist trinkets to pilgrims in Strasbourg. He noticed, however, that the hottest item going among pilgrims were "indulgences," elaborately hand-illuminated pieces of parchment which were a kind of medieval Roman Catholic "get-out-of-hell free" card, sold by the church to the fretful faithful -- much to the horror of later reformers such as Martin Luther. Manual painting of these indulgences took time; woodblock printing, occasionally used for illustrations, was time-consuming and impractical for text. In his workshop during the 1430s, Gutenberg secretly toiled away at a method and apparatus which would allow for the inexpensive mass production of indulgences; but as he toiled, Gutenberg realized the greater import of his project and began to work on a printed Bible and a Psalter -- to be mass-produced, but at the same time to incorporate the artistry of the illuminated manuscript.

In October 1448, he persuaded a wealthy financier, Johann Fust, to loan him completion funds. Like all venture capitalists, Fust was looking for a quick return on his investment, and like all inventors, Gutenberg was interested in perfection; and like many venture capital deals, Gutenberg and Fust ended up in court. At about the time of their completion, Fust gained control of Gutenberg's beautiful Bible and two-colored Psalter, as well as all of the instruments of their creation (except for Gutenberg himself). True, Gutenberg hadn't paid back the 2,026 guilders plus interest -- but he had stood on the precipice of his putative fortune, only to have it and his life's work taken away from him. Fust and his new partner published the Gutenberg Bible in 1456.

As Fust and a hundred imitators launched the Gutenberg Age, a patron in Mainz took pity on Gutenberg and gave him some printing tools with which to tinker, but there is no evidence that it ever amounted to much. Blind and frail at the end of his life, Gutenberg was named a ward of the local government and given a yearly allowance of cloth, grain and wine. He is thought to have died on this date in 1468 in Mainz, Germany at the age of 74 or so.

Lorrie Moore and Tillie Olsen

Author Lorrie Moore was born on this day in 1957 in Glens Falls, New York. The winner of a Seventeen magazine short story contest who grew up to be a writing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Moore's novels and stories are crisp mixtures of comedy and sadness, one-liners and confessions. Her female protagonists, in such books as Self-Help(1985; a collection of stories poking bitter fun at personal growth manuals), ANAGRAMS(1986; a "novel" in which Moore "rearranges characters to make new worlds," the same characters reappearing in different roles and environments) and the novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?(1994), are intelligent, perceptive and painfully self-aware of their disconnections with those closest to them -- including the clueless men stumbling around in Moore's fictional world, who sometimes read as though they've just wandered over from a Frederick Barthelme suburb in a late model Chevy. The combination of wisecracks and pathos in her work seems to prompt critical comparisons with the films of Woody Allen, but her voice is distinctly more sedate, cleverly suggesting the bone-chilling turmoil beneath a barely controlled surface.

Author Tillie Olsen celebrates her birthday tomorrow, born Tillie Lerner around 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska to Russian Jewish immigrants. Tillie Lerner enjoyed writing as a young girl, but left high school early to support her family as a slaughterhouse worker, and soon followed her family's leftist instincts as a member of the Young Communist League. She was jailed in Kansas City for trying to organize packinghouse workers; moved to California; participated in the San Francisco Warehouse Strike of 1934; and in 1936 met and married Jack Olsen, a union printer. Tillie had 3 daughters and worked to support them as a waitress and secretary -- living, in her own words, as "the essential angel (there was no one else to do her work)," desiring to return to writing but finding the "habits of years -- response to others, distractability, responsibility for daily matters" -- infringing on her ability to do so.

In 1955, Olsen nonetheless enrolled in a creative writing course at San Francisco State, and within months won a Stanford University creative writing fellowship. The fellowship gave her the time and economic freedom to begin the stories which would make up her brilliant book of stories, Tell Me a Riddle(published in 1961, when Olsen was 48), the title story of which won an O. Henry Award for best short story of 1961. Following the lead of her literary heroine, Rebecca Harding Davis (whose Life in the Iron Mills, written in 1861, was rescued from oblivion by Olsen and republished with Olsen's commentary in 1972 for the first time in 111 years), Olsen's stories highlight, in compelling vernacular cadences, the interior lives of ordinary people who are not often heard in literature: a working mother; a rudderless sailor, long in years and without family; an elderly Jewish wife with no community to support her, and no time to find refuge in reading. Olsen's life and work play out as variations on the theme of women silenced by duty, both demonstrating the impossibility of woman-as-writer and giving the lie to the argument. Her literary output has been small (other works include a novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, and a self-reflective book of criticism, Silences), but accomplished.

"[W]omen are traditionally trained to place others' needs first, to feel these needs as their own . . . their sphere, their satisfaction to be in making it possible for others to use their abilities . . . motherhood means being instantly interruptable, responsive, responsible. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity." -- Tillie Olsen.

Craters, Cosmos and Chronicles

Herbert Shaw, another bard in the long tradition of literature emanating from the U.S. Geological Survey (having served there as a geologist from 1959 to 1995), was born on this day in 1930 in San Mateo County, California.

In his book Craters, Cosmos and Chronicles: A New Theory of Earth (1994), Shaw applied non-linear dynamical systems analysis to the study of meteorites and attempted to identify a relationship between the interior dynamics of the Earth and the entire record of each meteorite hitting the Earth since pre-Cambrian times. In the process, Shaw proposed the possibility of synchronicity between physical occurrences as diverse as volcanic eruptions, meteoroids, biochemical genetic changes, mass extinctions and intergalactic dynamics, positing that instead of viewing such phenomena as randomly disassociated from each other, that they are instead a pattern of interactions occurring within what Shaw described as the "Celestial Reference Frame," a "limitless chain of 'resonances' linking terrestrial microcosms to galactic macrocosms," in the words of writer Mike Davis.

Shaw was an incorrigible scientific eclectic, known to cut a swath in such diverse specialties as magma rheology, thermal modeling, experimental geochemistry and even fractal geometry and linguistics (not to mention poetry, sculpting and painting) -- which corresponds with his desire in Craters to recast the many disciplines of earth sciences as essential parts of one whole, a truly interdisciplinary geo-cosmology.

In the world of science, it may be true that the 20th century was the century of the physicist, but at the end of the 21st century, it is quite possible that we will all be in awe at the breathtaking prescience found in the ideas of our 20th century geologists. Or, what the heck -- maybe Shaw was just crazy.

Shaw passed away on August 26, 2002 in Menlo Park, California.

Fred Cuny

I love hanging out with engineers. Recently, as the vicissitudes of New Orleans have played out in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I've listened to a number of engineers casually lay out their suggestions as to how New Orleans should be rebuilt with the aim of avoiding a similar catastrophe in the future. "Take down the levees, see where the water flows, rebuild only to the waterline," says one. "Keep the existing levees, lay out a greenspace just inside those levees, build another set of levees on the inside of the greenspace," says another. All the ideas make good sense, but when you introduce human desires and needs into the mix, the equation changes dramatically.

Frederick C. Cuny, born on this day in 1944 in New Haven, Connecticut, was an engineer who made disasters his life's work. In 1969, Fred Cuny took a leave of absence from a Fort Worth engineering firm to assist in an airlift of food to Biafra, the beginning of a career of relief work in which he exorcised his impatience with bureaucratic red-tape and waste by founding Intertect Relief and Reconstruction Corp., a relief mission technical assistance and training company. Through Intertect, Cuny designed and built refugee camps in Bangladesh in 1971; created a housing reconstruction and materials recycling program following the 1976 Guatemala earthquake; and helped refugees return to their homes in Ethiopia in 1985. He even argued with Mother Teresa over the viability of concrete housing in the mud-puddles of Calcutta, and was right.

After almost 20 years of working in disaster relief, Cuny assembled his experiences in his book, Disasters & Development (1983), and trained relief workers in the "Cuny approach" to disaster relief -- using disasters and violent conflicts as catalysts for economic development in the Third World, by figuring out how to reestablish and strengthen resource distribution systems following a disaster rather than merely encouraging dependent or combative behavior by handing out food and drawing able-bodied populations to the edges of airstrips.

Reading Disasters & Development today, one experiences an eerie sense of familiarity, as Cuny describes the chronology of relief and government action following a hypothetical Third World hurricane -- the cross-jurisdictional bickering, looting, corruption and the gradual tailing off of emergency relief, leaving lasting deficits in housing, food distribution, potable water and other necessities. Most interestingly, Cuny observes that disasters always hit the poor disproportionately -- not only because the poor live in sub-standard dwellings in areas where land is cheap and therefore often more vulnerable to the elements, but also because prior to a disaster, all resources are spent on maintaining a minimum level of development, with few resources being free for improvement. When a disaster hits an impoverished community, the effect is often epochal, setting back the meager advancements of decades of step-by-step improvements in matters of sanitation and construction. Were he alive today, no doubt Cuny would have said as much about Katrina.

After helping Palestinians in Kuwait and Kurds on the Turkish border following the Gulf War, Cuny went to Sarajevo in 1993, where he secretly built a water filtration plant (concealing it from hostile authorities in an abandoned highway tunnel) to meet the emergency need for potable water outside the range of sniper fire while the Bosnian conflict raged around the city. By 1995, Cuny had begun to articulate the need for the world's major powers to develop a systematic approach to dealing with regional conflicts, and to cease using well-intentioned humanitarian aid as a replacement for decisive political or military action.

In his last crusade, he visited Chechniya and returned to the U.S. waging a war of words against the brutality of Russian attacks; he returned shortly thereafter with a plan for a cease-fire, combined with recommendations to set up a medical center to deal with the cholera outbreak, distribution of repair kits to restore damaged homes and the establishment of an emergency radio station to help separated families find each other. Soon after his return to Chechniya, however, Cuny disappeared. President Clinton raised the question of Cuny's disappearance with Russian president Yeltsin, but it was later discovered that the Russians had been spreading false propaganda about Cuny (that he was anti-Islamic) which resulted in his being detained and executed by Chechen intelligence officials in April 1995.

Cocktail Rules

I recently became aware of a terrific book on cocktails, originally published in 1948, entitled The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David A. Embury. It is encyclopedic, witty and well-written, and it is an anthropological treasure chest of forgotten concoctions, neglected ingredients, rituals that now seem downright exotic to us, and impeccable standards.

The author, David Augustus Embury, was a partner and one of the senior tax attorneys of the venerable old Manhattan law firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt and Mosle, known for its public international law expertise. The firm exists today, but unfortunately it cannot bring itself to acknowledge Embury’s formidable contribution to American culture. A spokesman for the firm simply laughed at me and declined to provide any pertinent information about Embury.(1)

Like all good lawyers, though, Embury begins by defining his terms. A cocktail, for Embury, is an “aperitif cocktail – i.e., one to be taken before a meal as a stimulant to the appetite and an aid to digestion.” This quaint definition opens a window onto a lost world, in which on any given evening men and women “dressed for dinner,” donning formalwear and gathering together “at the club” for a couple of drinks before casually assembling a party for dining. Breezy conversation, and the slow, deliberate savoring of an evening’s available tastes, were the primary practices of such outings.

No doubt Embury became an enthusiast of the cocktail while coming of age in college around World War I, a time when some of the greatest of America’s 20th century homegrown entertainments were on the verge of maturing, asking more of their audiences rather than less: silent films were stretching beyond their novelty status, finally building a vocabulary and assuming a decorum to rival the “legitimate stage”; quadrilles had given way to the subtly playful rhythms of ragtime, which in New Orleans was fusing with blues to create jazz; and baseball was shaking off the rowdiness of its turn-of-the-century play and becoming an observational landscape for intellectuals.

All of these – silent films, jazz and baseball -- are now rarefied air, and like the cocktail itself, have each experienced a precipitous decline in their drawing power. The hallmarks of each were that they required a loyal aesthetic temperament, a sophisticated palate and an understanding of special rules. They created, in their respectively segregated fan bases, a fellowship of attentive, informed appreciation. Such are the disciplines that Embury brings to his rarified topic.

This was all well before the collegiate stage had adopted its current interest in beer pong, Jello shots and Everclear-and-Kool Aid. While these are strictly numbing rituals, Embury takes pains to explain that the experience of a cocktail is intended to be bracing and uplifting. It must whet the appetite as well as stimulate the mind, and it must be pleasing to the eye as well. The overall effect of a well-made cocktail, according to Embury, should be as follows: “Taut nerves relax; taut muscles relax; tired eyes brighten; tongues loosen; friendships deepen; the whole world becomes a better place in which to live.” It makes one wonder whether the UN might be more effective with some expert mixologists on staff.

In the service of such goals, however, Embury also advocated moderation. Embury’s careful and exacting advice on this matter is worth repeating. “But how, you may ask, is the average person to know exactly how many drinks he can stand? Should he go on just one binge and have a record kept of how much he consumes in order that thereafter he may know when to stop? My answer is 'No.' It is best that you never find out the limit of your capacity. There is just one safe and simple rule which, if rigidly adhered to, will afford you a maximum of pleasure in your drinking with a minimum of danger of ever becoming drunk. When you reach a point where you feel absolutely sure that you could stand one more but have some slight doubt as to what two more might do to you, STOP. If you resolutely refuse to take even the one extra that you are certain would be O.K., you will maintain your physical stability, your mental balance, and your moral aplomb.”

I could have used this advice once or twice in my own career, but I assure you that now I have committed it to memory almost as a shibboleth.

Embury is nothing if not opinionated. He prefers glass cocktail shakers with metal lids to all-metal shakers, arguing that glass is a better insulator from outside temperatures during the shaking process. Among American whiskeys, Pennsylvania ryes and Kentucky bourbons are the best, and all others are “vastly inferior.” All true Rickeys are made with limes, and never with lemons. Rules are rules.

Perhaps Embury’s most controversial opinion involves proportions. With all the mathematical discipline of an Internal Revenue Code expert, Embury argues, for example, that all “sours” can be made using the same proportions (8:2:1) and that many cocktails, indeed, may be viewed through an isomorphic model – hence his classic statement that “the Side Car is nothing but a Daiquiri with brandy in the place of rum and Cointreau in the place of sugar syrup or orgeat.” This “unified theory of mixing” led one recent reviewer to carp, “Well, all right. And Romeo and Juliet is the same as Two Gentlemen of Verona, if you delete the tragic ending and make Juliet a man.”

Despite Embury’s occasional excesses, his directory of drinks makes for some charming nostalgia. Try ordering a Millionaire, a Tennessee, a Colonel Lindbergh or a Seventh Heaven today, and I think you’ll see what I mean. And if you want to explain to your bartender that a particular drink is only properly made with Oloroso Sherry, Kümmel or Csaszar, you’ll probably experience a similar feeling of anachronism.

It isn’t enough, in most bars today, to say that David Embury knew what he was talking about, but a dip into his world in the pages of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks is still a worthwhile diversion.

(1) Embury was also, for many years, the head of a national organization of college fraternities – which is probably more to the point, notwithstanding the Hollywood stereotype of the dipsomaniacal lawyer, ably essayed by such fellows as Reginald Denny (not the beating victim, but a British character actor) throughout the 1930s.

See also:



And: Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: Food and Drink, and My Baby and Me.

Edgar Tafel at Fallingwater

I am not a real radio reporter. However, I do have an unhealthy interest in a dizzying array of topics far and wide across the vast plains of topicdom, and I guess I’m vocal enough about these odds and ends that people seem to know this about me. So, it wasn’t a complete surprise when a friend of mine from a local NPR station asked me to “cover” an event taking place at Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated creation known as Fallingwater, located just 50 miles south of my own home outside of Pittsburgh.

September 22 will mark the 70th anniversary of Wright’s original concept drawings of Fallingwater, often described as the single greatest piece of architecture of the 20th century. Thus it is that 93-year old architect and former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Edgar Tafel visited Fallingwater last Saturday, to stand on one of his master’s famous balconies in front of a documentary film crew and, as a witness to history, to discuss Wright and Fallingwater with University of Pittsburgh professor Franklin Toker, author of a definitive study of the house, Fallingwater Rising. (Photo of Toker and Tafel at left.) Tafel is, in fact, the last surviving human being to have been present when Wright drew the house.

I am fortunate enough to own a home designed by another of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, the late Peter Berndtson; my home is featured in another book, Organic Vision: The Architecture of Peter Berndtson, by D. Miller & A. Sheon (The Hexagon Press, 1980). Armed with my enthusiasm for the work of Wright and his Taliesin fellows, after a crash course in sound engineering given to me by my reporter friend, I arrived early at Fallingwater on a rainy Saturday morning, wearing one of my best suits. (I doubt that Edward R. Murrow wore anything else, unless he was in a war zone. Even then . . .) My job, handed to me by an apparently seriously understaffed news department, was to meet with Tafel and Toker, record their conversation, and if possible ask a few questions of my own.

Although Tafel and the film crew were running late, shortly after I arrived I encountered Franklin Toker, a scholar with a twinkle in his eye. We discussed Wright, Fallingwater, Tafel and Berndtson, and he regaled us with tales from his “eighteen years” of research on Fallingwater Rising. Although he is principally a scholar of medieval Italian architecture, Toker was inspired to write about Fallingwater for a number of reasons. First, if you are an architect in Pittsburgh, it is simply expected that you should be able to say something intelligent about Fallingwater. Secondly, Toker points out that while booksellers will claim that dozens of books have been written about Fallingwater, in his own experience he came to believe merely that dozens of books have a picture of Fallingwater on their cover, and that no single work had come close to telling the full Fallingwater story.

Toker’s usual research involves translating medieval Latin texts, so researching Fallingwater was a challenge in that he actually had to sit down and interview people. He noted that it was often the emotional content of an interview, rather than the facts elicited, that was of most value in compiling oral histories – especially where the frail memories of people in their 90s were concerned.

The day's star nonagenarian, courtly Edgar Tafel, seemed anything but frail when he arrived. Sporting a snazzy gold print jacket and a collarless black shirt, he was hobbled a bit by arthritis, but it was also clear that he enjoyed basking in the glow of his master’s creation, and that it gave him a certain energy to be in its presence. As the camera crew readied itself and I concentrated on my sound chores, plugging in to the sound of the obliging film crew, Tafel chatted jauntily with Toker, and even sang a few bars of an old Taliesin song (“we love Mozart . . . we hate Beaux Arts”).

Tafel has been telling the story of Wright first putting pencil to paper for so long, it has an air of being rather rehearsed at this point. But Tafel is part showman, to be sure, so as he tells the tale, he is measuring his audience's reaction. He tells how Wright and his team were ensconced at Taliesin in Wisconsin, when they received a call from E.J. Kaufmann, Wright's anxious client, informing Wright that he and his wife had just landed at Milwaukee and would be arriving soon, wanting to see his preliminary drawings. There were none, of course, at that moment, so Wright sent his assistants scurrying to make Taliesin ready for his visitors, and with pencils flying, a mere couple of hours later Wright had a picture of Fallingwater on his drawing table, waiting for E.J. and Liliane. The design just poured out of him, Tafel recalls. He had not sketched one line prior to Kaufmann's call.

As the discussion took its course, Toker invited me, standing off camera, to shoot a couple of questions at Tafel. I noted that Tafel was part of a select group of architects who had received their early training from Wright, many of whom had gone on to interesting careers, and asked if there was one thing that all of the Wright apprentices seemed to share from their experience with Wright. Tafel’s answer meandered a bit, but by the giddy end it was clear that the one thing that the Wright apprentices all shared was a poor education in engineering – most had to supplement their education in order to be certified, and many, like Wright himself, were never certified as architects. I think I can attest to this, given my own experience with the work of a Wright apprentice. Roofs seem to be a special problem for Wright-style homes. It reminds me of the comments of one of Wright’s clients regarding chronic roof leaks: “That’s what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”

I also asked Tafel what he hoped people would be able to take away from Fallingwater 70 years from now. He paused, then quietly mused, “Who can tell? . . . who can tell?”

With the formal interview completed, Tafel was led off by Fallingwater curators for a board meeting, leaving Toker and I to wrap up some final thoughts on Fallingwater. His answers to my questions were so beautifully rendered, I will await the transcript and bring them to these pages in a later installment.

Luckily, my excitement did not interfere with getting good sound -- the crisp tones of Tafel and Toker, with the gentle hiss and bubble of the famous waterfall underneath. I am hoping to report in a few weeks that some portion of it will be airing locally.