Delanceyplace.com 11/30/07-Brewery vs Sewer Rats

In today's excerpt--the Siege of Paris or L'Annee Terrible: the overthrow and humiliation of Paris in 1870 by Bismarck after France declares war on Prussia. France, still limping from the excesses of Napoleon, shows enough hubris to declare war on Prussia over a mere diplomatic incident--the proposed placement of a German prince on the Spanish throne ('The Liberal Empire goes to war on a mere point of etiquette'). Bismarck judged rightly that a war on France would enable him to bond together the loose structure of the German federation into a truly unified nation. Bismarck won after a siege that brought Parisians to the cruel brink of starvation, and he extracted as reparations Alsace, Lorraine and five billion francs--a price which led bitterly to both World Wars. Upon the German's departure, France imploded into a civil war that left 25,000 Parisians dead--more than in the Terror itself:

"By early October [1870] even bourgeois Paris had turned to horsemeat. ... As hunger tightened its grip, so many a splendid champion of the turf came to a well-spiced end in the casserole. Among them were two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis Napoleon at the time of the Great Exposition, originally valued at 56,000 francs, now bought by a butcher for 800. It was mid-November, however, that supplies of fresh meat were exhausted--and it was then that Parisians invented the exotic menus with which the siege will always be linked. The signs 'Feline and Canine Butchers' made their first appearance. To begin with, dog-loving Parisians objected fiercely to slaughtering domestic pets for human consumption, but soon necessity overcame their fastidiousness. By mid-December [columnist] Henry Labouchere ... was telling his readers, 'I had a slice of spaniel the other day,' adding that it made him 'feel like a cannibal.' A week later he reported that he had encountered a man who was fattening up a large cat which he planned to serve up on Christmas Day, 'surrounded with mice, like sausages.' ...

"And then it was rats. Along with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris, and from December the National Guard spent much of its time engaged in vigorous rat-hunts. ... The elaborate sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man's dish--hence the notorious menus of the Jockey Club, which featured such delicacies as salmis de rats and rat pie.

"As the weeks passed, Parisian diets grew even more outlandish as the zoos started to offer up their animals. ... By early January, [a young Englishman named Tommy Bowles] was noting, 'I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule, and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written ... horse is really too disgusting, and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.' His was not the only palate that became more discriminating: there was a significant variation in price between brewery and sewer rats. ... A lamb offered to one British correspondent ironically proved to be a wolf. ...

"Oddly enough, there was never any shortage of wine or other alcohol."

Alistaire Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, Pan Books, Copyright 2002 by Alistair Horne, pp. 295-297.

Delanceyplace.com 11/29/07-Lennon and McCartney

In today's encore excerpt--Paul McCartney talks about the personal tragedies he and John Lennon faced growing up:

"My mum dying when I was fourteen was the big shock in my teenage years. She died of cancer, I learnt later. I didn't know then why she had died. ... My mother's death broke my dad up. That was the worst thing for me, hearing my dad cry. I'd never heard him cry before.

"That became a very big bond between John and me, because he lost his mum early on, too. We both had this emotional turmoil which we had to deal with and, being teenagers, we had to deal with it very quickly. We both understood that something had happened that you couldn't talk about--but we could laugh about it, because each of us had gone through it. It was OK for him to laugh at it and OK for me to laugh at it. It wasn't OK for anyone else. ... John went through hell, but young people don't show grief--they'd rather not.

"John was the local Ted [tough guy]. You saw him rather than met him. ... [A]s I got older, I realised it was his childhood that made John what he was. His father left home when he was four. I don't think John ever got over that. ... He would wonder, 'Could he have left because of me?' ... Instead of living with his mother, he went to live with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George. Then Uncle George died and John began to think that there was a jinx on the male side: father left home, uncle dead. He loved his Uncle George; he was always quite open about loving people. All those losses would really have got to him. His mother lived in what was called 'sin'--just living with a guy by whom she had a couple of daughters. ... John really loved his mother, idol-worshipped her. I loved her, too. She was great: gorgeous and funny, with beautiful long red hair. She was killed, so John's life was tragedy after tragedy."

The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books, 2000, pp. 19-20.

Delanceyplace.com 11/28/07-The Louvre

In today's excerpt--Napoleon establishes a museum at the Louvre in Paris in 1803. Previously a royal palace, the Louvre is now the most visited and one of the oldest, largest, and most famous art galleries and museums in the world:

"Most important [of Napoleon's rebuilding projects] was the establishment in the Louvre, from 1803 onwards, of Europe's biggest art gallery, to provide a permanent home for the many works of art he had stolen from the countries he had conquered and occupied.

"To run this Musee Napoleon for him, the Emperor found one of those extraordinary geniuses ... Vivant Denon. ... The notion of a gallery open to the public stemmed from the historically much maligned Louis XVI. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the royal collections had been kept for the private delectation of the court and of privileged visitors. ... It was Louis XVI himself who suggested reuniting everything that the crown possessed of 'beauty in painting and sculpture' under the name of 'museum' (a concept borrowed from England). Explained Denon, 'The French Republic, by its force, the superiority of its light and its artists, is the only country in the world which could provide an inviolable asylum to these masterpieces.'

"Napoleon took a great interest--amounting to interference--in the museum named after him. On his return from [the Battle of] Jena in September 1806, he was already complaining about the queues on a Saturday afternoon--with the result that the hours on Saturday and Sunday were extended. He was also horrified to see the galleries with smoking stoves to keep the gardiens [gallery attendants] warm: 'Get them out ... they will end up burning my conquests!' Equally shocking was the lack of public lavatories, leading to the misuse of the galleries by the unhappy gardiens, who were paid a menial wage, one-tenth of what Denon received. It was hardly surprising that in 1810 thieves broke in to make off with some priceless tapestries.

"In September 1802, the Medici Venus--'The glory of Florence'--arrived at the Louvre after a journey of ten months. Rumbling across Europe, the heavy pieces of looted sculpture required special carriages drawn by up to fifteen pairs of oxen. The following March came the first convoy of loot from Naples. Napoleon's greed seems to have known no bounds; in 1810 he declared to a deeply embarrassed Canova, the great Florentine sculptor, 'Here are the principal works of art; only missing is the Farnese Hercules, but we shall have that also.' Deeply shocked, Canova replied, 'Let your Majesty at least leave something in Italy!' It was perhaps amazing that not more was ruined on the journey; describing in 1809 the looting of twenty masterpieces from Spain, Denon reported ominously, 'There has been more damage, due to negligence in the packing, of the first dispatch of Italian primitives,' The arrivals from Italy continued until the end of the Empire."

[Many were returned after the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo]

Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, Pan Books, Copyright 2002 by Alistair Horne, pp. 205-206.

Delanceyplace.com 11/26/07-States and Nation-States

In today's excerpt--in the Middle Ages, European city-states and other forms of government begin coalescing into nation-states. Then, in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the divine right of kings discredited, these nation-states have to develop a basis for insuring the loyalty of their subjects:

"From 1000 to 1500, the major activity of European states was warfare: preparing for war, paying for war, recovering from war. This circumstance ... drove European states toward a common form: a territorial state with sufficient wealth generated in towns and cities, and a population sufficiently large to sustain armies. For a while, states that were small but wealthy (such as the Dutch) could hire mercenaries, while those that were large but poor (such as Poland) could conscript serfs into their armies and force them to fight. But by and large the combination that was to prove most successful in the European system of warring states was those with both urban wealth to pay for wars and young men from the countryside to fight in them. Those who had these weapons could claim to be sovereign within their territories and then by force, if necessary, make others subject to them. ...

"In the nineteenth century, states underwent additional changes, becoming much closer in form and function to twentieth-century states, and became linked with another force, that of nation-building, or nationalism, giving us the modern nation-state. ... The idea of 'nations' and nationalism' ... arose only after modern states and industrial society had emerged. States were confronted with a dilemma, especially acute after the French Revolution called into question all the traditional sources of state legitimacy (divine ordination, dynastic succession, or historic right), of how to ensure loyalty to the state and to the ruling system. ...

"Industrialization created new forms of communication, especially the railroad and the telegraph, which in turn spawned economic and emotional needs among people who seemed to share common bonds of language and culture but did not have a unified state--in particular the various German and Italian states. This gave rise to the idea that a 'nation'--that is, a 'people' sharing a common language and culture--ought to have a single, unified state. ... This idea informed the rulers of states, who were feeling pressured by the revolutionary uprisings below, and offered them a way to begin ensuring the loyalty of 'their people.' The problem these rulers faced, though, was twofold. The first aspect was how to get their people to identify themselves as a 'nation' and then link that identity with the state. For this, public education (at first elementary but in the twentieth century increasingly secondary too) was especially useful and so too were historians in constructing celebratory 'national histories.' "

Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World, Rowman & Littlefield, Copyright 2007 by Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 59, 140-141.

Delanceyplace.com 11/23/07-A Christmas Memory

In today's encore excerpt, seven-year-old Truman Capote, abandoned by his parents and raised by dirt-poor relatives in Alabama, with his closest friend a distant cousin--an elderly, simple minded, and slightly crippled woman named Sook. On a cold, bleak and empty Christmas afternoon with the two of them alone together, she exclaims to him:

" 'My, how foolish I am!' she cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. 'You know what I've always thought?' she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. 'I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun shining through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine takes away all the spooky feeling.'

" 'But I'll wager it never happens like that. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are,'--her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie, our dog, pawing earth over her bone-- 'just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with just today in my eyes.' "

Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory, Modern Library, 1996, originally published in 1956, pp. 26-7.

Delanceyplace.com 11/22/07-Chess

In today's encore excerpt--the game of chess:

"When and how and why was chess invented? The very oldest chess myths point toward its actual origins. One story portrays two successive Indian kings, Hashran and Balhait. The first asked his sage to invent a game symbolizing man's dependence on destiny and fate; he invented nard, the dice-based predecessor to backgammon. The subsequent monarch needed a game which would embrace his belief in free will and intelligence. 'At this time chess was invented,' reads an ancient text, 'which the king preferred to nard, because in this game skill always succeeds against ignorance. He made mathematical calculations on chess, and wrote a book on it ... The game of chess became a school of government and defense; it was consulted in time of war, when military tactics were about to be employed, to study the more or less rapid movement of troops.'

"The game, in reality, was not invented all at once in a fit of inspiration by a single king, general, philosopher, or court wizard. ... After what might have been a century of tinkering, chatrang, the first true version of what we now call chess, finally emerged in Persia (today's Iran) sometime during the fifth or sixth century. ... Each [player's] army was equipped with one King, one Minister (where the Queen now sits), two Elephants (where the Bishops now sit), two Horses, two Ruhks (Persian for Chariot), and eight Foot Soldiers. ...

"The game probably evolved along the famous Silk Road trading routes ... between Delhi, Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul, Kandahar, and China's Xinjiang Province. ... No doubt many other games were invented by the same roving merchants, but there was something different about chatrang. In a critical departure from previous board games, this game contained no dice or other instruments of chance. Skill alone determined the outcome. 'Understanding is the essential weapon' proclaims the ancient Persian poem Chatrang-namak, one of the oldest books mentioning the game. 'Victory is obtained by the intellect.'

"This was a war game, in other words, where ideas were more important and more powerful than luck or brute force. In a world that had been forever defined by chaos and violence, this seemed to be a significant turn."

David Shenk, The Immortal Game, Doubleday, 2006, pp. 16-18.

Delanceyplace.com 11/21/07-Chess

In today's encore excerpt--the game of chess:

"When and how and why was chess invented? The very oldest chess myths point toward its actual origins. One story portrays two successive Indian kings, Hashran and Balhait. The first asked his sage to invent a game symbolizing man's dependence on destiny and fate; he invented nard, the dice-based predecessor to backgammon. The subsequent monarch needed a game which would embrace his belief in free will and intelligence. 'At this time chess was invented,' reads an ancient text, 'which the king preferred to nard, because in this game skill always succeeds against ignorance. He made mathematical calculations on chess, and wrote a book on it ... The game of chess became a school of government and defense; it was consulted in time of war, when military tactics were about to be employed, to study the more or less rapid movement of troops.'

"The game, in reality, was not invented all at once in a fit of inspiration by a single king, general, philosopher, or court wizard. ... After what might have been a century of tinkering, chatrang, the first true version of what we now call chess, finally emerged in Persia (today's Iran) sometime during the fifth or sixth century. ... Each [player's] army was equipped with one King, one Minister (where the Queen now sits), two Elephants (where the Bishops now sit), two Horses, two Ruhks (Persian for Chariot), and eight Foot Soldiers. ...

"The game probably evolved along the famous Silk Road trading routes ... between Delhi, Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul, Kandahar, and China's Xinjiang Province. ... No doubt many other games were invented by the same roving merchants, but there was something different about chatrang. In a critical departure from previous board games, this game contained no dice or other instruments of chance. Skill alone determined the outcome. 'Understanding is the essential weapon' proclaims the ancient Persian poem Chatrang-namak, one of the oldest books mentioning the game. 'Victory is obtained by the intellect.'

"This was a war game, in other words, where ideas were more important and more powerful than luck or brute force. In a world that had been forever defined by chaos and violence, this seemed to be a significant turn."

David Shenk, The Immortal Game, Doubleday, 2006, pp. 16-18.

Delanceyplace.com 11/20/07-Steamboats

In today's excerpt--Cornelius Vanderbilt encounters the steamboat--the invention through which he will amass his early wealth, which in turn will lead to the greatest personal fortune in history. During the eighty-three years of Vanderbilt's life, the population of the U.S. will grow explosively, creating an enormous need for transportation, and an enormous opportunity for risk-takers to build fortunes:

"The economists Louis D. Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson estimate the gross domestic product of the United States in 1794--the year of [Vanderbilt's] birth--at $309,960,000 or $70 nominal GDP per capita for a population of 4,428,000. The same economists estimate the gross domestic product of the United States in 1877--the year of Vanderbilt's death--at $8,249,675,000 (or $175 nominal GDP per capita for 47,141,000 inhabitants). In other words, Vanderbilt was to see the net worth of the United States grow more than 26.6 times in his lifetime, while the U.S. population would only grow 10.6 times in the same period. ...

"[In 1815, at age twenty-one], the days in Vanderbilt's work week numbered seven, and the sailing vessels in his fleet numbered five. ... Personally, he became omnipresent throughout the waters around Manhattan, and especially on the Hudson River. ... [Among the sailing ships on the Hudson] were a few stray steamboats, just about three among hundreds of sloops and schooners, but nevertheless loudly present. Each one of the steamers were either owned or controlled by the inventor Robert Fulton and his benefactor Robert R. Livingston, to whom the New York Legislature had granted the exclusive license for 'navigating all boats that might be propelled by steam, on all waters within the territory and jurisdiction of the State.' ...

"Belching flames and smoke, those first steamers--boats such as the Car of Neptune (1809) and the Paragon (1810), both of them roughly 160 feet long and 50 feet wide amidships, with capacity for about a hundred paying passengers--did look and sound ridiculous. By day, their coarse mechanical clanking could be heard echoing through the normally tranquil Hudson Highlands long before they were sighted rounding river bends. By night, still just as loud, they looked like nautical hobgoblins lighted by their own vomit of live cinders as they pushed across dark waters ... their flames accompanied by sparks shooting considerably higher than the limits of the engine's short smoke pipe. ... Male passengers complained about the noise. Female passengers complained about the soot. And Hudson River sailors, in moments when the wind and tide combined to allow them to dash past the clamoring steamers, waved their hats in condescension. They sometimes also turned their backs, bent down, and revealed their bare ends to the dignified ladies and gentlemen who had paid lofty prices to flirt with the future. Cornelius sometimes made such a salute."

Edward J. Renehan Jr., Commodore, Basic Books, Copyright 2007 by Edward J. Renehan Jr., pp. 23, 45- 46.

Delanceyplace.com 11/19/07-Saudi Arabia and Extremism

In today's excerpt--Osama bin Laden and the depravity of the ruling Saudis, circa 1989. As scholars have pointed out, religious extremism and fundamentalism never exist except in the presence of their opposite numbers. And in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the corruption and debauchery of the ruling family required that a bargain be struck with the extremists in the form of support for the muttawa:

"Inevitably, bin Laden's fame [as a pious Muslim] cast an unwelcome light on the behavior of the Saudi royal family, led by King Faud, who was known for his boozing and carousing in the ports of the French Riviera, where he docked his 482-foot yacht, the $100 million Abdul Aziz. The ship featured two swimming pools, a ballroom, a gym, a theater, a portable garden, a hospital with an intensive-care unit and two operating rooms, and four American Stinger missiles. The king also liked to fly to London in his $150 million 747 jet, equipped with its own fountain. He lost millions in the casinos on these incursions. One night, upset with the curfew imposed by British gaming laws, he hired his own blackjack and roulette dealers so that he could gamble in his hotel suite all night long. Other Saudi princes enthusiastically followed his example, notably King Faud's son Mohammed, who accepted more than $1 billion in bribes, according to British court documents, which he spent on 'whores, pornography; fleets of more than 100 high-performance cars; palaces in Cannes and Geneva; and such luxuries as powerboats, chartered jets, ski-chalets, and jewelry.'

"Oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s, sending the Saudi economy into a deficit, but the royal family continued taking massive personal 'loans' from the country's banks, which they rarely repaid. ... 'Al Saud' became a byword for corruption, hypocrisy, and insatiable greed.

"The attack on the Grand Mosque ten years before [by religious insurgents], however, had awakened the royal family to the lively prospect of revolution. The lesson the family drew from that gory standoff was that it could protect itself against religious extremists only by empowering them. Consequently, the muttawa, government subsidized religious vigilantes, became an overwhelming presence in the Kingdom, roaming through the shopping malls and restaurants, chasing men into the mosques at prayer time and ensuring that women were properly cloaked--even a strand of hair poking out from under a hijab could rate a flogging with the swagger sticks these men carried. In their quest to stamp out sinfulness and heresy, they even broke into private homes and businesses; and they waged war on the proliferating satellite dishes, often shooting them with government-issued weapons from government-issued Chevrolet Suburbans. Officially known as representatives of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the muttawa would become the models for the Taliban in Afghanistan."

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Knopf, Copyright 2006 by Lawrence Wright, pp. 146- 147.

Delanceyplace.com 11/16/07-Steve Allen

In today's excerpt--Steve Allen (1921-2000), originator and first host of The Tonight Show in 1954, the father of TV talk shows, and the man whose routines (including Carson's 'Great Carnac') have been liberally appropriated by Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, David Letterman and others:

"[The unknown Steve] Allen come to sudden prominence in 1951 as a replacement for Arthur Godfrey on his Talent Scouts show by making a shambles of the sedate little show--steeping his Lipton tea bag in a cup of soup, pouring the soup into Godfrey's ukulele, and intentionally mixing up the names of the contest winners. ...

"[On The Tonight Show, a] turning point for Allen came the night that Doris Day failed to show up for an interview and Allen was left to his own comic devices with twenty-five minutes of airtime on his hands, which he filled by interviewing people in the studio audience, lugging an old stand-up mike up and down the aisles. 'The physical thing of carrying this big mike around the room helped to get laughs. I just horsed around, like with my pals. That opened up a lot of possibilities.' He later wrote: 'I don't recollect what was said during the next twenty-five minutes, but I do know that I had never gotten such laughs before.' ... Allen had discovered his natural ability to play it as it lays, to talk without a prepared script or format. 'For two years I had been slaving away at the typewriter ... with only moderate success. Now I had learned that audiences would laugh much more readily at an ad-libbed quip, even though it might not be the pound-for-pound equivalent of a prepared joke.' ...

"It was ... his ear for language, an ability to pick up on mangled syntax or an unlikely phrasing that triggered his funny retorts (woman in the balcony to Allen: 'May I have your autograph?' Allen 'Only if you have a very long pencil'). ... Allen, ever the scholar, once remarked: 'English is an easy language with which to turn normal conversation into nonsense, because it is so full of idiomatic expressions which automatically turn into jokes when subjected to straight-faced analysis. To me, the English language is one big straight-line.' ... When a lady in the audience asked him, 'Do they get your program in Philadelphia?' he said, 'They see it but they don't get it.' ... He was sometimes accused of setting up innocent people, yet quite the reverse was true, he insisted. 'When I say to a guest, 'What is your name?' and he answers with calm reassurance, "Boston, Massachusetts,' he is the funny one and I his willing straight man. Were I to talk for a million years I could never say anything funnier than 'Boston, Massachusetts' in that situation. ...

"What Allen found in these roving interviews was a way to unlock TV's structured format by using its formal facade as a bottomless source for his whimsical turn of mind. ... Allen was the ideal bedtime host. Indeed, one night he played the piano in his pajamas, explaining that when the show was over he wanted to go straight to bed"

Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny, Back Stage Books, Copyright 2004 by Gerald Nachman, pp. 160- 165.

Delanceyplace.com 11/15/07-Kind of Blue

In today's encore excerpt, Miles Davis records Kind of Blue:

"In 1959, Miles Davis recorded his sixth album for Columbia Records, a small group session that would eventually be titled Kind of Blue. More than forty years after its release, it is still one of the most-sought-after recordings in the country; in fact, as late as 1998 it was the best-selling jazz album of the year. In both Rolling Stone and Amazon.com end-of- the-century polls, it was voted one of the ten best albums of all time--in any genre--and it is the only jazz album ever to reach double-platinum status. Yet its popularity is not the only extraordinary thing about Kind of Blue. In addition to being an uncontestable masterpiece, it is also a watershed in the history of jazz, a signpost pointing to the tumultuous changes that would dominate this music and society itself in the decade ahead.

"March 2, 1959 ... was the first of two dates on which Kind of Blue was recorded. Miles had worked on the tunes right up until the morning of the session. He had been thinking about this album for a while and had specific goals in mind. On was to steer a new course for jazz, away from Western musical theory [to ward the idea of using modes, or scales, instead of chord progressions]; another goal, even more important, was to record an album on which musicians were forced to play their solos with complete spontaneity. ... Musicians have often brought new compositions to a recording studio, but the Kind of Blue sessions went far beyond that. Not only had the the musicians (with the exception of [pianist Bill] Evans) not seen the tunes in advance, they had never before played music with the very structure of these tunes. ...

"Miles' commitment to spontaneity was in itself a key innovation of Kind of Blue. ... This is how Miles put it: 'If you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that--but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he's got to take more risks.' "

Eric Nisenson, The Making of Kind of Blue, St. Martin's Griffin, 2000, pp. ix, 134-136.

Delanceyplace.com 11/14/07-The Erie Canal

In today's excerpt--with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York vaulted past Philadelphia as the largest city and busiest port in America. The economic importance of canals had been amply demonstrated in England in such projects as the Bridgewater Canal in 1761, and numerous major canals had been proposed in the U.S. However, the scale of a canal from the Hudson to Lake Erie was unprecedented. President Thomas Jefferson, calling it "a little short of madness," thought the proposal for such a canal was ridiculous and rejected it. It was the entrepreneur Jesse Hawley who managed to interest the governor, DeWitt Clinton, and the plan went ahead. Due to the overwhelming perception that the plan was absurd, the project became known as "Clinton's Folly," or "Clinton's Ditch." In 1817, Clinton was successful in convincing the New York State legislature to authorize the funds for building the canal:

"The first section of the [Erie Canal] opened in 1819. And the entire project (including eighty-three locks enabling the rise of some 568 feet from the Hudson to Lake Erie) was destined to sit finished by the end of October 1825.

"Once the Erie Canal opened, the entire logic of trade into, out of, and through the port of New York would be changed forever. As Roy Finch of the New York State Engineer and Surveyor Bureau observed on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the canal's opening: 'After the building of the original canal the city of New York grew by leaps and bounds. Before the canal was built Philadelphia had been the nation's chief seaport, but New York soon took the lead and too late Philadelphia made heroic but futile efforts to regain supremacy.' Finch added that Massachusetts 'had been another rival, having been about on par with New York State in exports.' Nevertheless, a mere sixteen years after the opening of the canal, Boston's exports were only one-third those moving through New York. 'In that period, too, the value of real estate in New York increased more rapidly than the population, while personal property was nearly four times its former value, and manufacturing three times as great. There were five times as many people following commercial pursuits in New York as there were before the completion of the Erie Canal.'

"Men of vision saw this boom coming. Indeed, the boom was being counted upon to help pay off the massive $7 million investment it had taken to accomplish the terrific feat of engineering. Almost more important than the straightforward logistical advantage of the Erie Canal, however, was the sheer heft and grandeur of the project, which captured the imaginations of average Americans and made them feel inspired. Great things were possible; terrific accomplishment was, indeed, achievable--especially in the United States, a country with a brief past and a wide-open future. Not until the late 1860s would another such project, the Transcontinental Railroad, seize the public mind so totally and offer a similar promise for changing the economic map."

Edward J. Renehan Jr., Commodore, Basic, Copyright 2007 by Edward J. Renehan Jr., pp.96-97.

Delanceyplace.com 11/14/07-Sharks and Slavers

In today's excerpt--with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York vaulted past Philadelphia as the largest city and busiest port in America. The economic importance of canals had been amply demonstrated in England in such projects as the Bridgewater Canal in 1761, and numerous major canals had been proposed in the U.S. However, the scale of a canal from the Hudson to Lake Erie was unprecedented. President Thomas Jefferson, calling it "a little short of madness," thought the proposal for such a canal was ridiculous and rejected it. It was the entrepreneur Jesse Hawley who managed to interest the governor, DeWitt Clinton, and the plan went ahead. Due to the overwhelming perception that the plan was absurd, the project became known as "Clinton's Folly," or "Clinton's Ditch." In 1817, Clinton was successful in convincing the New York State legislature to authorize the funds for building the canal:

"The first section of the [Erie Canal] opened in 1819. And the entire project (including eighty-three locks enabling the rise of some 568 feet from the Hudson to Lake Erie) was destined to sit finished by the end of October 1825.

"Once the Erie Canal opened, the entire logic of trade into, out of, and through the port of New York would be changed forever. As Roy Finch of the New York State Engineer and Surveyor Bureau observed on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the canal's opening: 'After the building of the original canal the city of New York grew by leaps and bounds. Before the canal was built Philadelphia had been the nation's chief seaport, but New York soon took the lead and too late Philadelphia made heroic but futile efforts to regain supremacy.' Finch added that Massachusetts 'had been another rival, having been about on par with New York State in exports.' Nevertheless, a mere sixteen years after the opening of the canal, Boston's exports were only one-third those moving through New York. 'In that period, too, the value of real estate in New York increased more rapidly than the population, while personal property was nearly four times its former value, and manufacturing three times as great. There were five times as many people following commercial pursuits in New York as there were before the completion of the Erie Canal.'

"Men of vision saw this boom coming. Indeed, the boom was being counted upon to help pay off the massive $7 million investment it had taken to accomplish the terrific feat of engineering. Almost more important than the straightforward logistical advantage of the Erie Canal, however, was the sheer heft and grandeur of the project, which captured the imaginations of average Americans and made them feel inspired. Great things were possible; terrific accomplishment was, indeed, achievable--especially in the United States, a country with a brief past and a wide-open future. Not until the late 1860s would another such project, the Transcontinental Railroad, seize the public mind so totally and offer a similar promise for changing the economic map."

Edward J. Renehan Jr., Commodore, Basic, Copyright 2007 by Edward J. Renehan Jr., pp.96-97.

Delanceyplace 11/13/07-Strauss and Salome

In today's excerpt--Richard Strauss (1864-1949), the German superstar composer, and the premier of his masterwork, Salome:

"When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had gotten out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale--an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by a British degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna. ... Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma. The bold young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with ... no fewer than six of his pupils. ...

" 'The city was in a great state of excitement.' [the critic Ernst] Decsey wrote. ... [He] fueled anticipation with a high-flown preview article acclaiming Strauss's 'tone- color world,' his 'polyrhythms and polyphony,' his 'breakup of the narrow old tonality,' his 'fetish ideal of an Omni-tonality.' ...

"[At the end of the concert] the crowd roared its approval--that was the most shocking thing. 'Nothing more satanic and artistic has been seen on the German opera stage,' Decsey wrote admiringly. ... Salome went on to be performed in some twenty-five different cities. The triumph was so complete that Strauss could afford to laugh off criticism from Kaiser Wilhelm II. 'I am sorry that Strauss composed this Salome,' the Kaiser reportedly said. 'Normally I'm very keen on him, but this is going to do him a lot of damage.' Strauss would relate this story and add with a flourish: 'Thanks to that damage I was able to build my villa in Garmisch!'

"On the train back to Vienna, Mahler expressed bewilderment over is colleague's success. He considered Salome a significant and audacious piece--'one of the great masterworks of our time,' he later said--and he could not understand why the public took an immediate liking to it. Genius and popularity were, he apparently thought, incompatible. ... 'I was never revolutionary,' Arnold Schoenberg once said. 'The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!' "

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross, pp.3-18.

Delanceyplace.com 11/12/07-Sharks and Slavers

In today's excerpt--sharks, slave ships and the depravity of man, circa 1780:

"Sharks began to follow slave ships when they reached the Guinea coast [of western Africa]. ... What attracted the sharks (as well as other fish) was the human waste, offal, and rubbish that was continually thrown overboard. Like a 'greedy robber,' the shark 'attends the ship, in expectation of what may drop overboard. A man, who unfortunately falls into the sea at such time, is sure to perish, without mercy.'

"If the shark was the dread of sailors, it was the outright terror of the enslaved. No effort was made to protect or bury the bodies of African captives who died on the slave ships. ... Slaving captains consciously used sharks to create terror throughout the voyage. They counted on sharks to prevent the desertion of their seamen and the escape of their slaves during the long stays on the coast of Africa required to gather a human 'cargo.' ... So well known was the conscious use of terror by the slave captain to create social discipline that when Oliver Goldsmith came to write the natural history of sharks in 1774, he drew heavily on the lore of the slave trade. ... Goldsmith recounted two instances:

" 'The Master of the Guinea-ship, finding a rage for suicide among his slaves, from a notion the unhappy creatures had that after death they should be restored again to their families, friends, and country; to convince them at least that some disgrace should attend them here, he immediately ordered one of their dead bodies to be tied by the heels to a rope, and so let down into the sea; and, though it was drawn up again with great swiftness, yet in that short space, the sharks had bit off all but the feet.'

"A second case was even more gruesome. Another captain facing a 'rage for suicide' seized upon a woman 'as a proper example to the rest.' He ordered the woman tied with a rope under her armpits and lowered into the water: 'When the poor creature was thus plunged in, and about halfway down, she was heard to give a terrible shriek, which at first was ascribed to her fears of drowning; but soon after, the water appeared red all around her, she was drawn up, and it was found that a shark, which had followed the ship, had bit her off from the middle.' Other slave-ship captains practiced a kind of sporting terror, using human remains to troll for sharks: 'Our way to entice them was by Towing overboard a dead Negro, which they would follow till they had eaten him up."

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship, Viking, Copyright 2007 by Marcus Rediker, pp.37-40.

Delanceyplace.com 11/09/07-High School

In today's excerpt--high school. By the 1890s, the core of the modern high school has been formed--complete with football and cheerleaders--and with educators working to take over guidance of all aspects of students lives with a goal of socialization and conformity:

"High schools ... were increasingly attempting not merely to instruct their students, but also to offer competitive sports, extracurricular activities and dances, and other social events. By making the high school into a self-contained world, they were attempting to counter the allure of outside sports clubs and commercial amusements dominated by the working class. Increasingly, clubs and teams organized by young people were supplanted by organizations run by adults, often operating on a national or even international scale. The overall effect was to make people in their teens into a distinctive group that was less often relied upon--even by itself--to take responsibility and make its own decisions.

"Team sports, for example, began as voluntary, informal organizations. They occasionally had a loose affiliation with a school. ... The schools were spurred to take control of team sports by the growing popularity--and brutality--of football. ... Already, parents and educators were criticizing 'win at all cost' attitudes that, some said, were leading some young men to drink whiskey during the games to kill the pain and allow them to keep playing. ...

"Defenders of high school sports promoted another innovation during the 1890s. They decided to encourage young women to attend as spectators, and later as cheerleaders, in the belief that they would exercise a refining influence. 'The presence of the fair sex has without a question a telling effect upon the character and result of every game played,' the Somerville, Massachusetts, High School Radiator reported. Before the end of the decade, female students at many high schools had created a role for themselves at the games: leading the crowds in cheers. That quintessential teen couple--the football player and his cheerleader girlfriend--was on hand to greet the twentieth century.

"Increasingly, educators believed their role was not solely, or even primarily, to impart knowledge. The high school, they said, served the community by taking substantial responsibility for every aspect of the student's life, in and out of the classroom. ... Many schoolmen said that what the school ought to do is to develop character, but what they meant by character was itself undergoing a rapid transformation. It was less a matter of personal integrity than of being a good team player. The purpose of schooling, said Newark, New Jersey, superintendent Addison Poland in 1913, is 'not individuality but social unity ... unity which results in efficiency and is rarely, or never, obtained except by and through uniformity of some kind.' He added, 'Children must be taught to live and work together cooperatively; to submit their individual wills to the will of the majority; and to conform to social requirements whether they approve of them or not.' "

Thomas Hine, The Rise & Fall of the American Teeenager, Avon Books, Copyright 1999 by Thomas Hine, pp.163-166.

Delanceyplace.com 11/08/07-Victorian Children

In today's encore excerpt, we get a glimpse into raising children in upper-crust London in the mid- 1800's. Jean Rio Baker is married to Henry Baker, and they have eight young children, less the one who has died as a toddler. Jean Rio later forsakes this life for the pursuit of the Mormon religion in America:

"Child rearing was left to governesses, and the children were taught what one of them called 'the pure Queen's English' by private tutors, [while] Jean Rio pursued her musical career throughout Europe. A cook and butler handled domestic matters, and Jean Rio and Henry took their meals separate from the children. The family regularly attended public celebrations for Queen Victoria, and, to judge from their proximity to the royal family at these times, the Bakers were apparently among the elite of mid-nineteenth-century London society.

"Henry, a prominent engineer, built a miniature steam locomotive for his children. The couple routinely read Shakespeare aloud to their children from a leather-bound volume of the complete works--a book Jean Rio would eventually carry with her to Utah, along with many others. 'They were taught personal cleanliness, morals, manners, and religion in no uncertain terms,' wrote a descendant. As each child turned fourteen, he or she was invited to the family dinner table, having received training in etiquette. At that age, the sons were presented with a silver watch and chain. By that age as well, the children were expected to have mastered the common requirements in history and literature, as well as bookkeeping and higher mathematics that included algebra. Upon turning sixteen, the boys received a gold watch and, as son William George remembered the symbolic rite, were told by Jean Rio and Henry that they would now be expected to conduct themselves as proper gentlemen at all times. All the children learned horsemanship and regularly rode the bridle path in Hyde Park; it was a proficiency that would serve them well in their future lives on the American frontier."

Sally Denton, Faith and Betrayal, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, pp.13-4.

Delanceyplace.com 11/07/07-Population Growth and Poverty

In today's excerpt--comments on population growth and poverty from William Easterly, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Professor of Economics at New York University. The unprecedented population growth of the twentieth century--from under two billion people to over six billion, mainly due to the invention of a synthetic process for manufacturing fertilizer--has invited endless studies and comment. (It should also be noted that population growth, while continuing, has decelerated noticeably due to declining global birthrates):

"If there is a single thing that has scared observers of the Third World, it is population growth. To many, population growth catastrophically imperils the prosperity of poor nations, if not the very lives of their inhabitants.

"Population is an old concern in economics. Thomas Malthus in the early nineteenth century famously saw exponential population growth outracing food production, which he said would lead to a major population correction in the form of widespread famines. The latter-day incarnation of Thomas Malthus is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich in his famous cri de coeur of 1968, The Population Bomb, foresaw that within a decade after his writing, famines would sweep 'repeatedly across Asia, Africa, and South America,' killing perhaps as many as one-fifth of the world's population. ...

"The great population scare is mainly notable for what didn't happen: widespread deaths from famine. In the 1960s, when Erhlich penned his eloquent alert, about one out of every ten nations was having a famine at least once a decade. By the 1990s, just one country out of the two-hundred in the world had a famine. Global population did about double from 1960 to 1998, but food production tripled over the same period in both rich and poor nations. Far from us seeing increasing food shortages, food prices have fallen by nearly half over the past two decades. ...

"If population growth causes famine, water shortages, massive unemployment, and other disasters, we would expect to see it show up in overall economic performance. Countries that have rapid population growth should have low or negative GDP growth per capita. ... This prediction can be--and has been--easily tested. The relationship between per capita economic growth and population growth is one of the most intensively studied in all of the statistical literature. ... The most well-known statistical relationship between growth and its most fundamental determinants finds no significant effect of population growth on per capita [income] growth. ... Moreover, there is no association across countries between success at slowing population growth and success at raising per capita [income] growth."

William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, MIT, Copyright 2001 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 87-92.

Delanceyplace.com 11/06/07-Interior Lives

In today's excerpt--in 1952, the introduction of Peanuts, with its clean drawings and psychological orientation, made for a stark contrast with both the clutter and the vaudeville-gag orientation in cartoon strips of the time:

"Most cartoon drawing is about distraction: popular masters like Walt Kelly and Al Capp crowded their panels with characters and activity; Pogo and Li'l Abner are dense with what actors call 'business.' Peanuts, full of empty spaces, didn't depend on action or a particular context to attract the reader; it was about people working out the interior problems of their daily lives without ever actually solving them. The absence of a solution was the center of the story. ...

"The American assumption was that children were happy, and childhood was a golden time; it was adults who had problems with which they wrestled and pains that they sought to smooth. Schulz reversed the natural order of things ... by showing that a child's pain is more intensely felt than an adult's, a child's defeats the more acutely experienced and remembered. Charlie Brown takes repeated insults from Violet and Patty about the size of his head, which they compare with a beach ball, a globe, a pie tin, the moon, a balloon; and though Charlie Brown may feel sorry for himself, he gets over it fast. But he does not get visibly angry.

" 'Would you like to have been Abraham Lincoln?' Patty asks Charlie Brown. 'I doubt it,' he answers. 'I have a hard enough time being just plain Charlie Brown.'

"Children are not supposed to be radically dissatisfied. When they are unhappy, children protest--they wail, they whine, they scream, they cry--then they move on. Schulz gave these children lifelong dissatisfactions, the stuff of which adulthood is made.

"Readers recognized themselves in 'poor, moon- faced, unloved, misunderstood' Charlie Brown--in his dignity in the face of whole seasons of doomed baseball games, his endurance and stoicism in the face of insults. He ... reminded people, as no other cartoon character had, of what it was to be vulnerable, to be small and alone in the universe, to be human--both little and big at the same time."

David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts, Harper Collins, Copyright 2007 by David Michaelis, pp. 245- 247.

Delanceyplace.com 11/5/07-Vanderbilt and Charity

In today's excerpt--Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), one of the richest men in history with a fortune of $150 billion in today's dollars, was notorious for his lack of charity:

"Vanderbilt's Scrooge-like parsimoniousness was especially damning. ('Let them do what I have done,' he said, with all seriousness, citing his own rise from nothing, when asked to give alms to the poor.) During 1872, Mark Twain addressed Vanderbilt directly on this topic in Packard's Monthly:

" 'All I wish and urge you upon you now is that you crush out your native instincts and go and do something worthy of praise--go and do something you need not blush to see in print--do something that may rouse one solitary good example to the thousands of young men who emulate your energy and your industry; shine as one solitary grain of pure gold upon the heaped rubbish of your life. Do this, I beseech you, else through your example we shall shortly have in our midst five hundred Vanderbilts, which God Forbid. Go, oh please go, and do one worthy act. Go, boldly, grandly, nobly, and give four dollars to some great public charity. It will break your heart, no doubt; but no matter, you have but a little while to live, and it is better to die suddenly and nobly than to live a century longer the same Vanderbilt you are now.'

"But even Twain ... had to afford Vanderbilt a certain grudging respect. As [New York attorney and community leader George Templeton] Strong admitted, this basest of men possessed an instinctive and furtive genius for commercial affairs. Strong, in a letter told a friend: 'He is like some rudimentary but deadly and swift beast who knows not what he knows, but knows enough--through nature--to endure and thrive on the meat of lesser animals, of which the woods are full. [Vanderbilt], that most elemental of creatures, seems capable of great intuitive leaps-- resembling those of a jaguar--when it comes to enterprise. He is a breed apart: evolved for the sole purpose of money-getting. Either that or his is the dumbest of dumb luck lubricated--I should admit--by a great deal of elbow grease. The beast is never lazy.' Vanderbilt, on the other hand, equated both his skills and his ambition to a mania. 'I have been insane on the subject of money-making all my life,' he told a reporter. And money-make he did."

Edward J. Renehan Jr., Commodore, Basic Books, Copyright 2007 by Edward J. Renehan Jr., pp. xii-xiii.

Delanceyplace.com 11/02/07-Groucho on Comics

In today's excerpt--Groucho Marx writing, at least somewhat seriously, on the subject of comics:

"I am not sure how I got to be a comedian or a comic. ... I doubt if any comedian can honestly say why he is funny and why his neighbor is not.

"I believe all comedians arrive by trial and error. This was certainly true in the old days of vaudeville, and I'm sure it's true today. The average team would consist of a straight man and a comic. The straight man would sing, dance or possibly do both. And the comedian would steal a few jokes from the other acts and find a few in the newspapers and comic magazines. They would then proceed to play small-time vaudeville theaters, burlesque shows, night clubs and beer gardens. If the comic was inventive, he would gradually discard the stolen jokes and the ones that died and try out some of his own. In time, if he was any good, he would emerge from the routine character he had started with and evolve into a distinct personality of his own. This has been my experience and also that of my brothers, and I believe this has been true of most of the other comedians.

"My guess is that there aren't a hundred top-flight professional comedians, male and female, in the whole world. They are a much rarer and far more valuable commodity than all the gold and precious stones in the world. But because we are laughed at, I don't think people understand how essential we are to their sanity. If it weren't for the brief respite we give the world with our foolishness, the world would see mass suicide in numbers that compare favorably with the death rate of lemmings.

"I'm sure most of you have heard the story of the man who, desperately ill, goes to an analyst and tells the doctor that he has lost his desire to live and that he is seriously considering suicide. The doctor listens to this tale of melancholia and then tells the patient that what he needs is a good belly laugh. He advises the unhappy man to go to the circus that night and spend the evening laughing at Grock, the world's funniest clown. The doctor sums it up, 'After you have seen Grock, I am sure you will be much happier.' The patient rises to his feet, looks sadly at the doctor, turns and ambles to the door. As he starts to leave the doctor says, 'By the way, what is your name?' The man turns and regards the analyst with sorrowful eyes. 'I am Grock.' "

Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me, Da Capo, Copyright 1959 by Groucho Marx, renewed 1987 in the name of Arthur Marx as son, pp. 87-89.

Delanceyplace.com 11/01/07-James Bond

In today's encore excerpt--James Bond spy novels become wildly successful in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, laying the groundwork for the hugely successful movie franchise that follows. Simon Winder writes that the early success of these novels stemmed from the tattered psyches of the post-World War II British as their cherished Empire rapidly unraveled:

"Fundamentally the War, despite its being won, consisted for Britain of a ceaseless nightly Blitz of humiliations, compromises and setbacks, and these did not stop with 1945 but kept up in a relentless battering until well into the 1970s ... [with Britain as] the European Economic Community's poorest member country ...

"[The establishment of the British Empire], whereby over centuries great chunks of the world were repopulated and reconfigured by British settlers--whose almost insectoid blankness and rapacity will surely to some later global generation make them appear far, far worse than the Mongols--fell to pieces. ... If people understood in 1945 that Britain had won the War only because the United States and the USSR had won it with them, then they certainly did not understand that the consequence would be the demolition of the British Empire, a cornerstone of national identity, hopes, fears and opportunities, in the space of about fifteen years. ...

"The effect of this change within Britain was massive and profound trauma--it enraged millions of British who neither understood it nor saw how they could create for themselves a new identity without the Empire. ... As Britain's greatness went off a cliff with the chaotic mass decolonization of 1960, the James Bond books' sales went higher and higher. ... As a large part of the planet slipped from Britain's grasp, one man silently maintained the country's reputation. When a secret organization with stolen atomic weapons planned to destroy Miami Beach, it was not the Americans who would save the world, but a solitary Englishman, mucking around for wholly implausible reasons in the Bahamas. The beautiful Domino, key to the mystery, approaches him with the immortal exchange, 'And who might you be?' 'My name's Bond, James Bond.' "

Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain, Farrar, Straus, 2006, pp. 4, 51-3, 96-7.