Delanceyplace.com 09/28/07-Girl Talk

In today's excerpt, girls speak three times more words per day than boys:

"Under a microscope or an fMRI scan, the differences between male and female brains are revealed to be complex and widespread. In the brain centers for language and hearing, for example, women have 11% more neurons than men. The principal hub of emotion and memory formation--the hippocampus--is also larger in the female brain, as is the brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others. This means that women are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events. Men, by contrast, have two and a half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive as well as larger brain centers for action and aggression. Sexual thoughts floats through a man's brain many times each day on average, and through a woman's only once a day. Perhaps three to four times a day on her hottest days. ...

"The numbers vary, but on average girls speak two to three times more words per day than boys. ... Girls speak faster on average, especially when they are in a social setting. Men haven't always appreciated that verbal edge. In Colonial America, women were put in the town stocks with wooden clips on their tongues or tortured by the 'dunking stool,' held underwater and almost drowned--punishments that were never imposed on men--for the crime of 'talking too much.' ...

"There is a biological reason for [this female talking] behavior. Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl's brain. Sharing secrets that have romantic and sexual implications activates those centers even more. We're not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It's a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm. Dopamine is a neurochemical that stimulates the motivation and pleasure circuits in the brain. Estrogen at puberty increases dopamine and oxytocin production in girls. Oxytocin is a neurohormone that triggers and is triggered by intimacy. ...

"Why do ... boys become so taciturn and monosyllabic that they verge on autistic when they hit their teens? The testicular surges of testosterone marinate the boys' brains. Testosterone has been shown to decrease talking as well as interest in socializing--except when it involves sports or sexual pursuits. In fact, sexual pursuit and body parts become pretty much obsessions."

Louann Brizendine, M.D., The Female Brain, Broadway Books, Copyright 2006 by Louann Brizendine, pp. 5, 36-39.

Delanceyplace.com 09/27/07-Van Gogh

Today's encore excerpt tells of the odd link between Vincent Van Gogh and his older brother. Van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch-born painter best known for such works as "The Starry Night," "Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear" and "Wheat Field with Crows":

"Every Sunday the family, clad in black and bearing flowers, set off to the little cemetery at Groot-Zundert, where they went directly from the gate to a grave marked 'Vincent Wilhelm Van Gogh 1852.' A single date to mark a birth and a death, for this was the grave of a child six weeks old. As the father, mother, two sons and three daughters prayed, the eldest of the boys--also called Vincent Wilhelm--stared intensely at the gravestone and the name, his brother's, that was also his own.

"The young Vincent Wilhelm was born March 30, 1853, a year to the day after the death of his brother. Was his destiny to be that of an earthly replacement for the child now lying at his feet beneath the slab of gray stone? To take the place of another? Or was he himself the other his identity had usurped? Each Sunday little Vincent Van Gogh--the new Vincent--asked himself the same question, not daring to look at his mother with her hands joined and her eyes brimming with tears. Whom was she praying for? The dead child? Or for Vincent himself, the substitute? As they silently made their way home, Vincent, troubled and riven with doubt, stayed huddled against his younger brother Theo, born May 1, 1857, with whom he was very close. The dismal ritual was repeated every Sunday for years. Every March 30, they celebrated Vincent's birthday, but who were the celebrations really for? The dead child or the boy who was now ten years old? ...

"All his life Vincent would struggle against a brother more insistently present than if he had actually been alive, as his parents inevitably measured him against the virtues they attributed to the lost child."

The Starry Night <http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=nr6u9ecab.0.xwfs5ecab.yo7g7qbab.3604&ts=S0273&p=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThe_Starry_Night>

Self Portrait With
Bandaged Ear <http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=nr6u9ecab.0.9gv9mybab.yo7g7qbab.3604&ts=S0273&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Farts%2Fmultimedia%2Fimpressionism%2Findex_item_12.shtml>

Wheat Field with Crows <http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=nr6u9ecab.0.ywfs5ecab.yo7g7qbab.3604&ts=S0273&p=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWheat_Field_with_Crows>

Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, Terrail, 2006, pp. 7-8.

Delanceyplace.com 09/26/07-Magellan

In today's excerpt--esteemed historian William Manchester offers his own definition of heroism as part of his discussion of Ferdinand Magellan, who in 1519 was the first person to lead an expedition to circumnavigate the globe:

"[Magellan] was not the wisest man of his time. Erasmus was. Neither was he the most gifted. That, surely, was Leonardo. But Magellan became what, as a child, he had yearned to be--the era's greatest hero. The reason is intricate, but important to understand. Heroism is often confused with physical courage. In fact, the two are very different. ...

"Neither, if it is valor of the first [order], may it be part of a group endeavor. All movements, including armies, provide their participants with such tremendous support that pursuit of common goals, despite great risk, is little more than ardent conformity. Indeed, the truly brave member is the man who repudiates the communal objective, challenging the rest of the group outright. ...

"The hero acts alone, without encouragement, relying solely on conviction and his own inner resources. Shame does not discourage him; neither does obloquy. Indifferent to approval, reputation, wealth, or love, he cherishes only his personal sense of honor, which he permits no one else to judge. ... Guided by an inner gyroscope, he pursues his vision single-mindedly, undiscouraged by rejections, defeat, or even the prospect of imminent death. Few men can comprehend such fortitude. ...

"In the long lists of history it is difficult to find another figure whose heroism matches Magellan's. For most sixteenth-century Europeans his [vision]--to circle the globe--was unimaginable. To launch the pursuit of this vision, he had to turn his back on his own country, inviting charges of treason. His ships, when they were delivered to him, were unseaworthy. Before his departure Portuguese agents repeatedly tried, with some success, to sabotage his expedition. ...

"His character was, of course, imperfect. But heroes need not be admirable, and indeed most have not been. The web of driving traits behind their accomplishments almost assures that. Men who do the remarkable--heroic or otherwise--frequently fail in their personal relationships. This unpleasant reality is usually glossed over in burnishing the images of the great. So many eminent statesmen, writers, painters, and composers have been intolerable sons, husbands, fathers, and friends that they may fairly be said to have been the rule. Lincoln's marriage was a disaster. Franklin Roosevelt, to put it in the kindest possible way, was a dissembler. ...

"Yet their flaws, though deplorable, are irrelevant; in the end their heroism shines through untarnished."

William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, Back Bay, Copyright 1992, 1993 by William Manchester, pp. 287- 289.

Delanceyplace.com 09/25/06-Groucho Marx

In today's excerpt--Groucho Marx writes the opening words to his 1959 autobiography "Groucho and Me," and, as is his wont, instantly digresses into a pique:

"The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself, the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

"Although it is generally known, I think it's about time to announce that I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old. Now that we are on the subject of age, let's skip it. It isn't important how old I am. What is important, however, is whether enough people will buy this book to justify my spending the remnants of my rapidly waning vitality in writing it.

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough. It always amuses me when the newspapers run a picture of a man who has finally lived to be a hundred. He's usually a pretty beat-up individual who invariably looks closer to two hundred than the century mark. It isn't enough that the paper runs a photo of this rickety, hollow shell. The ancient oracle then has to sound off on the secret of his longevity. 'I've lived longer than all my friends,' he croaks, 'because I've never used a mattress, always slept on the floor, had raw turkey liver every morning for breakfast, and drank thirty-two glasses of water a day.'

"Big deal! Thirty-two glasses of water a day. This is the kind of man who is responsible for the water shortages in America. Fortunes have been spent in the arid West, trying to convert sea water into something that can be swallowed with safety, and this old geezer, instead of drinking eight glasses of water a day like the rest of us, has to guzzle thirty-two a day, or enough water to keep four normal people going indefinitely. ..."

Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me, Da Capo, Copyright 1959 by Groucho Marx, renewed 1987 in the name of Arthur Marx as son, pp. 3-4.

Delanceyplace.com 09/25/07-Coffee

In today's excerpt--another Arab invention, coffee:

"The custom of drinking coffee seems to have first become popular in Yemen in the mid-fifteenth century. while coffee berries may have been chewed for their invigorating effects before this date, the practice of making them into a drink seems to be a Yemeni innovation, often attributed to Muhammad al-Dhabhani, a scholar and member of the mystical Sufi order of Islam, who died around 1470. By this time, coffee had undoubtedly been adopted by Sufis who used it to ward off sleep during nocturnal religious ceremonies in which participants reached out to God through repetitive chanting and swaying. ...

"Coffee shook off its original religious associations and became a social drink, sold by the cup on the street, in the market square, and then in dedicated coffeehouses. It was embraced as a legal alternative to alcohol by many Muslims. Coffeehouses, unlike the illicit taverns that sold alcohol, were places where respectable people could afford to be seen. But coffee's legal status was ambiguous. Some Muslim scholars objected that it was intoxicating and therefore subject to the same prohibition as wine and other alcoholic drinks, which the prophet Muhammad had prohibited. ... [A ban against coffee was therefore enacted by a local governor, Kha'ir Beg, and] was proclaimed throughout Mecca, coffee was seized and burned in the streets, and coffee vendors and some of their customers were beaten as punishment. Within a few months, however, higher authorities in Cairo overturned Kha'ir Beg's ruling, and coffee was soon being openly consumed again ... [since] coffee clearly failed to produce any intoxicating effects in the drinker ... [and] in fact, it did quite the opposite. ...

"By the early seventeenth century, visiting Europeans were commenting on the widespread popularity of coffeehouses in the Arab world, and their role as meeting places and sources of news. ... They were also popular venues for chess and backgammon, which were regarded as morally dubious. ... George Sandys, an English traveler who visited Egypt and Palestine in 1610, observed that 'although they be destitute of Taverns, yet they have their Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There they sit chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drink called Coffa in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it; blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.' "

Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses, Walker, Copyright 2005 by Tom Standage, pp. 137-140.

Delanceyplace.com 09/24/07-George Washington

In today's excerpt--George Washington:

"By all accounts, [Washington] was the unlikeliest of revolutionaries. He was a man with more English blood in his veins than the Hanoverian German King George III, a man whose estate, Mount Vernon, was named in honor of a British admiral who had commanded his half-brother's expedition in a colonial war against Cartegena, a man so Anglophile he ordered his suits from London and wrote instructions to the tailor to select the fabric, the color, and the cut in keeping with the latest British fashions. He fervently believed in the traditional world of the British upper class. ... He was fond of using the word 'empire,' and was proud of England's. ... This was no republican or radical from Massachusetts: His instincts were aristocratic, and in time he became regal. Affecting the dignified mien of a country squire, he even dismissed the American custom, becoming increasingly commonplace throughout the eighteenth century, of shaking hands. Instead he bowed. And his soldiers called him 'Your Excellency.'

"But history has its twists and turns. When his ambitions were confronted with the careless snubs and indignities of the British upper class--among other things, he was denied a regular commission in the king's forces--it transformed him. The what-ifs of world events here are irresistible. Had Washington not been snubbed, his entire life might have been different--the prospect of glorious global service to the king, the surety of continued promotion, and the certainty of increased riches. But tradition was against him. To the Horse Guards, the headquarters of the British army in London, the amateurish colonial army officers were slightly more than nuisances, even a George Washington. And for Washington, it was a gratuitous slap and a slight that would set the course for his loyalties, indeed for much of the remainder of his life. ...

"Compared with the professionally trained generals of the British armada, Washington had relatively little combat experience, and not all of it impressive. Early on in the French and Indian War, he was forced to surrender his outnumbered regiment to the counterattacking French and their Indian allies; in many English circles, his name had actually become synonymous with American military incompetence. ...

"No matter. Washington accepted the bloodshed, destruction and hardship of war with an alacrity that civilians, and even many generals, found hard to fathom. Once the battle began ... he fought to win as no one else did. ... He was prepared to survive the setbacks, the losses, the constant humiliations, and, of course, the heartbreaking prospect of defeat. One cannot help but be struck by his tenacious resolve, ... his unwavering determination. This, of course, paid off in the stunning victory at Yorktown."

Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval, Harper Collins, Copyright 2007 by Jay Winik, pp. 76-80.

Delanceyplace.com 09/21/07-Legs

In today's excerpt--legs. In the early 1800s, world population and wealth explodes and a large middle class emerges. Along with this comes an unprecedented focus on appearance and sexuality in this new middle class which overcomes the inevitable "Victorian" backlash:

"Women's legs had long been important elements in sexual and gender identification. The curves of women's legs proved crucial markers in the concept of feminine beauty, based on painter William Hogarth's idea that curves are more pleasing than straight lines. Throughout the nineteenth century, most women hid their legs under skirts, and both sexes considered legs powerful erotic objects. ...

"[Historian Robert] Allen presented the history of theater in the United States as ... a struggle over women's sexuality, played out through debates over the length of ballet dancers' costumes.' Ballet dancers were the first nineteenth century women to display their legs, clad in wool or cotton tights, in public. ... Ballet survived because its identification with the upper class helped mask its open sexuality. Burlesque performers, who in the mid-nineteenth century also wore short skirts and tights were said to be in the 'leg business.' ...

"By the beginning of the twentieth century ... women's sports became more active and called for looser and shorter clothing, while the beginnings of beauty pageants ... brought briefer bathing suits into wider acceptance. Women's participation in the [industrial] workforce before and during World War I brought clothing that enabled more activity. ...

"Fashion historians talk about the S curve of women's dress at this time. ... Historian Elizabeth Ewing described the S curve as featuring a 'lavish bust and impressive hips,' all hidden and accentuated by long, full skirts over strong corsets. Around 1908, Paris and then American fashions changed to a 'straight line,' with new underwear designed to make the new look possible. Women's own rebellion against corsets played some part in this change. The new straight line and less constricting underwear made shorter skirts easier. Skirts went up in the 1920s, down a bit to mid- calf in the early '30s, and then started climbing again. ... The manufacture of full-fashioned hosiery [ultimately nylons] designed to fit the leg with dropped stitches to make the ankle narrower than the top [reinforced this trend]."

Susan Smulyan, Popular Ideologies, University of Pennsylvania Press, Copyright 2007 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 45-46.

Delanceyplace.com 09/20/07-Stagefright

In today's excerpt, Laurence Olivier and Carly Simon on stagefright:

"Stagefright is a traumatic, insidious attack on the performer's expressive instrument: the body. According to psychoanalyst Donald Kaplan, who studied this morbid form of anxiety, the trajectory of stagefright begins with manic agitation and moodiness, proceeds to delusional thinking and obsessional fantasies, and then to 'blocking'-- the 'complete loss of perception and rehearsed function.' The actor stiffens, trembles, and grows numb and uncoordinated. His mental and aural processes seize up. His throat tightens, his mouth goes dry and he has difficulty speaking. The experience ... is a simulacrum of dying. 'I died out there' or 'I corpsed,' actors say. ...

"In what seemed to be a gesture of defiance, before a show Olivier used to stand behind the curtain muttering at the audience over and over, 'You bastards.' ...

"Olivier wrote of his famous performance in 'Othello,' 'I had to beg my Iago, Frank Finlay, not to leave the stage when I had to be left alone for a soliloquy, but to stay in the wings downstage where I could see him, since I feared I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself.' ...

"Carly Simon, who suffers from chronic stagefright, told me 'It felt claustrophobic being in the spotlight and being expected to finish a song. So I left myself the leeway of being able to leave the stage at the end of every song. What I tell myself now is 'If I just get through the song, I'll be able to leave.' ' "

John Lahr, "Petrified", The New Yorker, August 28, 2006, pp. 38-41.

Delanceyplace.com 09/19/07-Plastic

In today's excerpt--plastic, invented in 1907 and omnipresent today:

"Bakelite, invented in 1907 by Leo H. Baekeland, an industrial chemist who had emigrated from Belgium ... [was] the product of a condensation reaction between phenol and formaldehyde conducted under heat and pressure, [and] was the first chemically synthetic plastic. It was used to mold electric insulation. ...

"As the word plastics [was adopted and] attained general recognition [in the 1920s], the new industry worried about its public image. Using new materials to imitate or substitute for traditional materials tended to imply inferiority. ... Addressing potential customers, the Du Pont company magazine in 1938 defined plastics as 'man-made combinations of basic chemicals and materials.' No longer 'substitute materials,' they were designed 'by man to his own specifications.' ...

"The postwar generation grew up with plastic. ... Annual production in the United States nearly tripled between 1940 and 1945, a year in which 818 million pounds went for such military uses as aircraft cockpit covers, mortar fuses, bayonet scabbards, helmet liners, and even the atom bomb. Expanding explosively after the war ... annual production exceeded six billion pounds by 1960. Baby boomers played with Wham-O hula hoops and frisbees, Barbie dolls and Revell airplane models, Lego blocks and Mattel machine guns. They ate breakfast at formica dinettes, spilled milk from polyethylene tumblers onto vinyl floors, and left for school clutching disposable Bic pens. Their families experienced a flood of new plastic products--Tupperware, garbage pails, and laundry baskets, Melamine dishes, appliance housings, Saran Wrap and dry cleaning bags, picnic coolers, scuff-proof luggage, Naugahyde furniture, Mylar recording tape, Corfam shoes, shrink-wrapped meats, Styrofoam egg cartons, artificial Christmas trees, and endlessly on. ...

"In 1968 ... Dustin Hoffman, starring as The Graduate, received some advice from a family friend. 'I want to say just one word to you. Just one word ... Plastics ... There's a great future in plastics.' This odd pronouncement convulsed audiences and became a line 'repeated into classicdom by a whole generation of kids.' By then plastic was undergoing its greatest shift in meaning since the appearance of the new materials. Expansion of plastic mirrored a civilization that seemed to be abandoning its ideals in pursuit of material goods. ... Plastic became an adjective meaning fake or insincere--referring especially to the older generation, its activities, its accomplishments. ... Given the word's evolution, it is not surprising that some manufacturers spurned plastic as a general name, choosing instead to promote materials with an array of generic and trade names [such as] Plexiglas, Teflon, and Kevlar. ... When the University of Delaware established a research center for synthetic materials in the 1980s ... it became the Center for Composite Materials to avoid association with plastic."

Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic, Rutgers University Press, Copyright 1995 by Jeffrey L. Meikle, pp. 3-7, 1.

Delanceyplace.com 09/18/07-Sing Sing

In today's excerpt--Sing Sing, the most famous of New York's prisons, as reported by Ted Conover, a journalist who went undercover for a year as a Sing Sing corrections officer:

"The Sing Sing Correctional Facility sprawls across fifty-five acres of the east bank of the Hudson River, some thirty miles north of New York City. Convicted criminals used to travel from the city to Sing Sing by boat 'up the river' to 'the big house,' which is how both phrases entered the language. The prison's name was borrowed from the Sint Sinck Indians, who once inhabited the site. It may have meant 'stone upon stone,' which describes the rocky slope that the prison is built upon. ...

"Since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, the former No. 1 jailer, the United States has run neck-and-neck with Russia in the race to become world leader in rates of imprisonment. We lock up six times as many citizens per capita as England, seventeen times as many as Japan. Prisons and jails in the United States now hold nearly two million people, which means that one out of every hundred and forty residents is behind bars. In the nineties, while Wall Street was booming, a third of black men in this country between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine were either incarcerated or on probation or parole. ...

"Fifty-two [New York] prisons were built in the last twenty-seven years, a period in which the number of inmates has increased sixfold, from twelve thousand five hundred to more than seventy thousand, owing in large part to the mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses. The majority [of prisoners in Sing Sing and other New York prisons] are young men of color from New York City. Because the state government is based in Albany, however, and the state senate is dominated by politicians from rural precincts, nearly all the prison construction has been outside the city, where job-hungry communities clamor for it ... [and] most of the corrections officers are white."

Ted Conover, "Guarding Sing Sing", The New Yorker, April 3, 2000, pp. 55-57.

Delanceyplace.com 09/17/07-Holy Moscow

In today's excerpt--Moscow, circa 1685, at the time of the completion of the palace at Versailles in France and the inception of the Salem witch trials in America:

"From a distance, Moscow struck one Western traveler as the most 'beautiful city in the world,' an urban feast topped by hundreds of gold-crusted domes and a sea of glistening crosses that surmounted the treetops. Unlike the stone and marble of its European counterparts, Moscow was a city hewn from wood; even the streets themselves were planked with timber, not trampled down or paved with stone. Also unlike anything in the Western world was the somber medieval citadel of Russian power, the Kremlin, which imbued the city with an exotic mystery. ...

"With its massive red walls jutting from the bank of the Moscow River, the Kremlin was not a single building but an entire walled city--Kreml literally means 'fortress' in Russian--ringed by two rivers and a deep moat. Inside this mighty citadel rose gorgeous cathedrals (three), an astonishing number of chapels (sixteen hundred) and hundreds of houses, as well as government offices, law courts, barracks, bakeries, laundries, stables, and a mighty whitewashed-brick bell tower ... And Moscow had a spiritual dimension rivaled only by Jerusalem and the Vatican: It was the 'Third Rome,' the center of Orthodox faith. ...

"The bazaars of Moscow were frequented by Persians, Afghans, Kirghiz, Indians, and Chinese, while traders and artisans peddled an eclectic slice of the Asiatic world: silks, brass and copper goods, tooled leather and bronze, and innumerable objects of hand-carved wood. The city itself was peopled with tattered, itinerant holy men and bearded priests, as well as ruddy peasants in cloth leggings and soldiers in voluminous caftans. ... Russian customs were uncommonly coarse--basic things like cutlery and toothpicks were unheard of; and drunkenness was so rampant that on feast days, travelers were stunned to see naked men, passed out, who had sold their clothing for drink. Dwarfs and fools, increasingly out of fashion in the West, still amused the tsar and his retainers. ...

"Muscovites were an intensely religious people, and most of the city, rich and poor alike, fell under the church's spell. Few had a hold on the Russian mind or imagination as did the starets--the man of God. but the true master who loomed over this ancient land was ultimately the tsar, the very portrait of absolute monarchy. ... From infancy, Russians were taught to regard him as a godlike creature ('Only God and the tsar know,' went one ancient proverb). ... Russian noblemen did not simply bow, they flattened themselves before the tsar, touching the ground with their foreheads ('we humbly beseech you, we your slaves ...')."

Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval, Harper Collins, Copyright 2007 by Jay Winik, pp. 12-14.

Delanceyplace.com 09/14/07-Lincoln's Girlfriend

In today's excerpt, in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, William Herndon, Lincoln's lifelong friend and law partner, determines to write a biography, and uncovers the Ann Rutledge story:

"No one, [Herndon] thought, quite appreciated Lincoln the way he did. He resolved to set the record straight by writing the true Lincoln biography--telling 'the inner life of Mr. L.,' as he put it. ... Yet he also knew there were facts of Lincoln's life he didn't know. So Herndon began digging, and over the next two years he performed one of the greatest feats of research in American history; it is impossible to imagine the great body of Lincoln literature without it. Herndon traveled to the scenes of Lincoln's boyhood and young manhood in Indiana and Illinois and picked through the ruins of the cabins where the Lincolns had lived. He sought out the surviving countryfolk who had watched Lincoln grow up. He prodded there memories and painstakingly set down their recollections. ...

"Herndon's cache of notes and letters eventually grew to several thousand pages. He knew the value of what he had collected. In his rush to release it to the world he postponed writing a full biography and planned instead a series of lectures in Springfield. The first three, on the 'character,' 'patriotism,' and 'statesmanship' of Lincoln were great popular successes and soon published as pamphlets. ...

"The reception to his fourth lecture in Springfield alarmed him. A few old residents of New Salem had told Herndon the story of a star-crossed romance between young Lincoln and the daughter of a local tavern owner, Ann Rutledge, who had taken sick and died in 1835 before they could be married. ... To Herndon ... it explained many aspects of Lincoln's character that Herndon found otherwise unaccountable: the great man's recurring melancholy, his fatalism, and above all his marriage, undertaken by default, to a woman Herndon thought unworthy of him. ...

"When Herndon made this the subject of his next lecture, Springfield was scandalized. Friends loyal to the widow turned on him. The widow herself was deeply wounded. 'This in return for all my husband's kindness to that miserable man,' Mary Lincoln wrote to a friend. 'Out of pity he took him into his office, when he was almost a hopeless inebriate and ... he was only a drudge in the first place.' "

Andrew Ferguson, Land of Lincoln, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007, pp. 56-58. pp. 165-7.

Delanceyplace.com 09/13/07-Hindering a Friend

In today's encore excerpt, Daniel Gilbert speaks to our predisposition to select both friends and facts that reinforce the self-perceptions and opinions we already hold. Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his work is characterized by extensive testing and research:

"Of course, other people ... are the richest source of information about the wisdom of our decisions, the extent of our abilities, and the effervescence of our personalities. Our tendency to expose ourselves to information that supports our favored conclusions is especially powerful when it comes to choosing the company we keep. ... [W]e spend countless hours carefully arranging our lives to ensure that we are surrounded by people who like us, and people who are like us. It isn't surprising then that when we turn to the folks we know for advice and opinions, they tend to confirm our favored conclusions--either because they share them or because they don't want to hurt our feelings by telling us otherwise. Should people in our lives occasionally fail to tell us what we want to hear, we have some clever ways of helping them.

"For example, studies reveal that people have a penchant for asking questions that are subtly engineered to manipulate the answers they receive. A question such as 'Am I the best lover you've ever had?' is dangerous because it has only one answer that can make us truly happy, but a question such as 'What do you like best about my lovemaking?' is brilliant because it has only one answer that can truly make us miserable. Studies show that people intuitively lean toward asking the questions that are most likely to elicit the answers they want to hear. ... In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

"And it gets worse ... to be considered a great driver, lover or chef ... we simply need to park, kiss, and bake better than most other folks do. How do we know how well most other folks do? Why, we look around, of course--but in order to make sure that we see what we want to see, we look around selectively. For example, volunteers in one study took a test that ostensibly measured their social sensitivity and were told they had flubbed the majority of questions. When these volunteers were then given an opportunity to look over the test results of people who had done better or worse than they had, they ignored the tests of the people who had done better and instead spent their time looking over the tests of the people who had done worse. ...

"And if we can't find people who are doing more poorly than we are, we may go out and create them. Volunteers in one study took a test and were then given the opportunity to provide hints that would either help or hinder a friend's performance on the same test. Although volunteers helped their friends when the test was described as a game, they actively hindered their friends when the test was described as an important measure of intellectual ability. ... Once we've successfully sabotaged their performances and ensured their failure, they become the perfect standard for comparison."

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Knopf, 2006, pp. 165-7.

Delanceyplace.com 09/12/07-Depression Dollars

In today's excerpt--as the Great Depression spreads, some local communities try to cope by printing their own money:

"One late summer day in 1931 in Salt Lake City, the money ran out. Not just the money in the banks, and not just the money in the town coffers--the money the citizens had to spend. Locals reached into their own pockets and, finding nothing, began to trade work and objects. Barbers traded shaves and haircuts for onions and Idaho potatoes ... The money drought that America was suffering from had a technical name: deflation. Deflation means that the currency was becoming more valuable every day, rarer and scarcer. ... Today we know the Treasury and the Federal Reserve might have done much to alleviate the deflation problem of the early 1930s. They could have ... taken what we call countercyclical action. ... But in the early 1930s the Fed and its member banks lacked tools and knowledge. They did the opposite of countercyclical action. They acted pro-cyclically--tightening and tightening in the face of a downturn. ...

"[As government action failed to stem the crises] American towns and neighborhoods rallied one more time. ... Salt Lake City had now gone further than barter. The townspeople had banded together and created a group ... that made its own money. They had given their unit the reverberating name of the vallar. Citizens could work to earn vallars. They came in different denominations: V5, V10, V15, V20, and V25. They then in turn could use those vallars to buy and sell oil, soap, coal, food, furniture, meals at a restaurant, and even medical treatment. ...

"Ventura, California, Minneapolis, and Yellow Springs, Ohio, were all also making some form of scrip. ... In Arizona ... the legislature, by a special act, ordained a state scrip, to be issued in denominations up to $20. ... In areas near the border, Mexican pesos began to trade at a premium; the peso, at least for a moment, had become another form of American money. ... The Lane Bryant Store issued money in Indianapolis ... By Spring there would be some 150 barter and/or scrip systems in operation in thirty states. ...

"Still, trading in kind, especially when one did not live on a farm, did not feel like progress. Even vallars could not keep mortgage holders from losing their homes. People were beginning to realize that the problem was simply not something they could solve in the neighborhood, or even in the state. The hour of the vallar was merely that--an hour."

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, Harper Collins, Copyright 2007 by Amity Shlaes, pp. 105- 139.

Delanceyplace.com 09/11/07-Sounds Like Too Much

In today's excerpt--US government beneficiaries:

"More than half of all Americans--53 percent--now depend on government for their income. In 1950 the figure was just 28 percent. While that number shot upward, the proportion of workers in the private sector fell. The economist Gary Shilling totaled up federal, state, and local government workers, plus private-sector workers who owe their jobs to government, plus recipients of Social Security, other transfer payments, and benefits such as food stamps. He also tacked on the dependents of these direct beneficiaries. After adjusting his figures to avoid double counting, Shilling found that for each person earning his pay in the private sector and paying taxes, there is at least one more person relying on a check from the government.

"Historically, government dependence reached its height in 1980, hitting 55 percent at the beginning of the Reagan presidency. Shilling sees the country returning to those days and then going further: He predicts the number of government beneficiaries will grow to 60 percent of the U.S. population by 2040."

Katherine Mangu-Ward, "Data: A Nation on the Dole," Reason Magazine, August/September 2007 Print Edition.

Delanceyplace.com 09/10/07-Blind King John

In today's excerpt--noblemen's love of fighting circa the fourteenth century:

"In the performance of his function, the knight must be prepared, as John of Salisbury wrote, 'to shed your blood for your brethren'--he meant brethren in the universal sense--'and, if needs must, to lay down your life.' Many were thus prepared, though perhaps more from sheer love of battle than concern for a cause. Blind King John of Bohemia met death in that way. He loved fighting for its own sake, not caring whether the conflict was important. He missed hardly a quarrel in Europe and entered tournaments in between, allegedly receiving in one of them the wound that blinded him. ...

"As an ally of Philip VI, at the head of 500 knights, the sightless King fought the English through Picardy, always rash and in the avant-garde. At Crecy he asked his knights to lead him deeper into the battle so that he might strike further blows with his sword. Twelve of them tied their horses' reins together and, with the King at their head, advanced into the thick of the fight, 'so far as never to return.' His body was found next day among the knights, all slain with their horses still tied together.

"Fighting filled the noble's need of something to do, a way to exert himself. It was his substitute for work. His leisure time was spent chiefly in hunting, otherwise in games of chess, backgammon, and dice, in songs, dances, pageants and other entertainments. ... The sword offered the workless noble an activity with a purpose, one that could bring him honor, status, and, if he was lucky, gain. If no real conflict was at hand, he sought tournaments, the most exciting, expensive, ruinous, and delightful activity of the noble classes, and paradoxically, the most harmful to his true military function.

"Originating in France and referred to by others as 'French combat,' tournaments started without rules or lists as an agreed-upon clash of opposing units. Though justified as training exercises, the impulse was the love of fighting. ... Tournaments proliferated as the noble's primary occupation dwindled. Under the [recent] extended rule of monarchy, he had less need to protect his own fief, while a class of professional ministers was gradually taking his place around the crown. The less he had to do, the more energy he spent in tournaments re-enacting his role. ...

"[Jousting tournaments] were the great sporting events of the time, attracting crowds of bourgeois spectators from rich merchants to common artisans, mountebanks, food vendors, prostitutes, and pickpockets. Because of their extravagance, violence, and vainglory, tournaments were continually being denounced by popes and kings, from whom they drained money. In vain. When the formidable St. Bernard thundered that anyone killed in a tournament would go to Hell, he spoke for once to deaf ears. ... Although St. Louis condemned them and Philip the Fair prohibited them during his wars, nothing could stop them permanently or dim the enthusiasm for them."

Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, Ballantine Books, Copyright 1978 by Barbara W. Tuchman, pp. 64- 66.

Delanceyplace.com 09/07/07-Terror in Rome

In today's excerpt-terror in Rome. In 67 BC, Pompey, early in a meteoric career as a Roman politician and general that includes conquering the East and joining with Caesar in a Triumvirate to rule Rome, is asked to overcome the pirates that have been terrorizing Rome for decades:

"Capture by pirates had recently become something of an occupational hazard for Roman aristocrats. ... However, kidnapping was only a sideline for the pirates. Calculated acts of intimidation ensured that they could extort and rob almost at will, inland as well as at sea. ... The shadowiness of the pirate's organization, and their diffuse operations, made them a foe like any other. 'The pirate is not bound by the rules of war, but is the common enemy of everyone,' Cicero complained. 'There can be no trusting him, no attempt to bind him with mutually agreed treaties.' How could such an adversary be pinned down, let alone eradicated? To make the attempt would be to fight against phantoms. 'It would be an unprecedented war, fought without rules, in a fog'; a war that appeared without promise of an end. ...

"Only once, in 102 BC, had the Romans been provoked into tackling the menace head on. The great orator Marcus Antonius, Cicero's hero, had been dispatched to Cilicia with an army and a fleet. The pirates had quickly fled their strongholds, Antonius had proclaimed a decisive victory, and the Senate had duly awarded him a triumph. But the pirates had merely regrouped on Crete, and they soon returned to their old haunts, as predatory as before. ... Bandits, like their prey, were most likely to be fugitives from the misery of the times, from extortion, warfare, and social breakdown. ...

"The pirate's growing command of the sea enabled them to throttle the shipping lanes. The supply of everything, from slaves to grain, duly dried to a trickle, and Rome began to starve. ... The grip of famine tightened around Rome. Starving citizens took to the Forum, demanding action on the crises and the appointment of a proconsul to resolve it. ... It was a tribune, in 67 BC, who proposed the people's hero [Pompey] be given a sweeping license to deal with the pirates. ... Pompey was granted an unprecedented force of 500 ships and 120,000 men together with the right to levy more, should he decide that they were needed. ...

"As it proved, to sweep the seas clear of pirates, storm their last stronghold, and end a menace that had been tormenting the Republic for decades took the new proconsul a mere three months. It was a brilliant victory, a triumph for Pompey himself and an eye-opening demonstration of the reserves of force available to Rome. Even the Romans themselves appear to have been a little stunned. ... Campaigns of terror were containable. Rome remained a superpower.

"Even though Pompey's victory had demonstrated once again that the Republic could pretty much as it pleased, there was none of the savagery that had been traditionally been used to drive that lesson home. In a display of clemency quite as startling as his victory, Pompey not merely refrained from crucifying his captives, but bought them plots of land and helped set them up as farmers. Brigandage, he had clearly recognized, was bred of rootlessness and social upheaval. For as long as the Republic was held responsible for these conditions, there would continue to be a hatred of Rome. Yet it hardly needs emphasizing that the rehabilitation of criminals was not standard policy. ... The town where [Pompey] settled them was titled Pompeiopolis: his mercy and munificence were to contribute eternally to the greatness of his name."

Tom Holland, Rubicon, Anchor Books, Copyright 2003 by Tom Holland, pp. 164-171.

Delanceyplace.com 09/06/07-Harold Arlen

Today's encore excerpt gives us a glimpse into the creative process--in this case the prolific Harold Arlen, composer of "Over The Rainbow", "Stormy Weather", and "Get Happy":

"In 1933, Billboard heralded ... Arlen as the most prolific composer (in history). ... Arlen, who eventually wrote the music for eight Broadway shows and thirty films, understood his own talent and served it with humble rigor ...

"To Arlen, the arrival of a song was a sort of blessing. 'You wonder later, in mystery, how it happens,' he said. His daily quest was to find what he called 'the unsought phrase.' 'He tries to be different,' (Johnny) Mercer explained. 'He won't let a simple phrase take him where it would ordinarily lead somebody else.' 'When your daemon is in charge do not try to think consciously,' reads a newspaper snippet that Arlen clipped to his journal. 'Drift, wait, and obey.' Arlen was also in the habit of invoking his unconscious through prayer. Before he began his day's work at the piano, he lowered his eyes, brought his hands together, and put himself in a worshipful state of mind--a gesture that bemused his less pious collaborators. 'When he gets to the piano, it's a feeling of witchcraft,' (the late lyricist E.Y.) Harburg said of Arlen's ritual. ...

"Oscar Hammerstein, Jr., said, 'You are listening to [Arlen's] sweet and caressing notes and suddenly the tune flies up and away and you are carried with it. This is thrilling.' "

John Lahr, "Come Rain or Come Shine", The New Yorker Magazine, September 19, 2005, p. 90.

Delanceyplace.com 09/05/07-Sierra Leone

In today's excerpt--Sierra Leone, 1993, and twelve-year-old Ishmael Beah, encountering the grotesque sights of civil war for the first time as rebel troops attack near his town of Kabati, tries to think of calming things:

"As we emerged from the bushes, we saw a man run from the driver's seat [of a van] to the sidewalk, where he vomited blood. His arm was bleeding. When he stopped vomiting, he began to cry. It was the first time I had seen a grown man cry like a child, and I felt a sting in my heart. ... He got to his feet and walked toward the van. When he opened the door opposite the driver's, a woman who was leaning against it fell to the ground. Blood was coming out of her ears. People covered the eyes of their children. In the back of the van were three more dead bodies, two girls and a boy, and their blood was all over the seats and ceiling of the van. ...

"One man carried his dead son. He thought the boy was still alive. The father was covered with his son's blood, and as he ran he kept saying, 'I will get you to the hospital, my boy, and everything will be fine.' ... The last casualty we saw that evening was a woman who carried her baby on her back. Blood was running down her dress and dripping behind her, making a trail. Her child had been shot dead as she ran for her life. Luckily for her, the bullet didn't go through the baby's body. When she stopped at where we stood, she sat on the ground and removed her child. It was a girl, and her eyes were still open, with an interrupted innocent smile on her face. The bullets could be seen sticking out just a little bit in the babies body and she was swelling. The mother clung to her child and rocked her. She was in too much pain and shock to shed tears. ...

"[Later, as we waited], I closed my eyes and the images from Kabati flashed in my mind. I tried to drive them out by evoking older memories of Kabati before the war. ... 'We must strive to be like the moon.' An old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often to people who walked past his house on their way to the river. ... I remember asking my grandmother what the old man meant. She explained that the adage served to remind people to always be on their best behavior and to be good to others. She said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it gets cold. But, she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own way. Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the square to tell stories and dance through the night. A lot of happy things happen when the moon shines. These are some of the reasons why we should want to be like the moon."

Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone, Sarah Crichton Books, Copyright 2007 by Ishmael Beah, pp. 12-17.

Delanceyplace.com 9/4/07-Roman Cuisine

In today's excerpt--exotic cuisine becomes a craze among the rich in newly wealthy Rome circa 60 BC:

"Back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early [Roman] Republic ... the cook 'had been the least valuable of slaves,' but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than 'he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function instead came to be regarded as high art.' In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial. The Senate, alarmed, had accordingly attempted to restrain it. As early as 169 [BC] the serving of dormice at dinner parties had been banned, and later Sulla himself ... had rushed through similar laws in favor of cheap, homely fare. All mere dams of sand. Faddishness swept all before it. Increasingly, millionaires were tempted to join their cooks in the kitchens, trying out their own recipes, sampling ever more outlandish dishes. This was the crest of the [Roman oyster fad], but oysters did not lack for rivals in the culinary stakes. Scallops, fatted hares, the vulvas of sows, all came suddenly and wildly into vogue, and all for the same reason: for in the softness of a flesh that threatened rapid putrescence yet still retained its succulence the Roman food snob took an ecstatic joy. ...

"A favorite affectation was to build couches in a villa's fruit store. ... Most treasured, most savored of all, were fish. So it had always been. The Romans had been stocking lakes with spawn for as long as their city had been standing. ... Freshwater fish, however, because so much easier to catch, were far less prized than species found only in the sea--and as Roman gastronomy grew ever more exotic, so these became the focus of intensest desire. Rather than remain dependent on tradesmen for their supply of turbot or eel, the super-rich began to construct saltwater ponds. Naturally, the prodigious expense required to maintain these only added to their appeal. ...

"The craze reached epidemic proportions. Hortensius ... as one of his friends commented wonderingly, 'Would sooner let you take his carriage-mules from his stable and keep them, than [let you] remove a bearded mullet from his fish- pond.' In pisciculture, as in every other form of extravagance, however, it was Lucullus who set the most dazzling standards of notoriety. His fishponds were universally acknowledged to be wonders, and scandals, of the age. To keep them supplied with saltwater, he had tunnels driven through mountains, and to regulate the cooling effect of the tides, groynes [sea walls] built far out into the sea. ... 'Piscinarii,' Cicero called Lucullus and Hortensius--'fish fanciers.' It was a word coined half in contempt and half in despair."

Tom Holland, Rubicon, Anchor Books, Copyright 2003 by Tom Holland, pp. 181-183.