May 31, 2004
Known unto God
Rudyard Kipling was perhaps the most popular poet in England at the dawn of the twentieth century. His Barracks-Room Ballads had been a tremendous success upon its publication in 1892, and it propelled him to the top of the list of possible successors to the post of Poet Laureate upon Tennyson's death; Kipling declined, and in 1896, the post was filled by minor pastoralist Alfred Austin. In 1907, he won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first English writer to do so. His reputation as a major writer has been in decline ever since. T.S. Eliot referred to him as a writer not of great poetry but of "great verse", and George Orwell's typically thoughtful 1942 essay (link via Stuttercut) on Kipling's place in history responds by calling Kipling's power that of a "good bad poet".
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May 28, 2004
Feign'd testament
Rugby players, as we know, are a tough bunch. As the bumper sticker says, they eat their dead (even if the film version used tofu legs); the modern sport was born when William Webb Ellis, a student at the Rugby School in Rugby, England, violated all the rules of football and civilized conduct by picking up the ball and running with it. The play soon became accepted, but one imagines that Webb Ellis was promptly and soundly thrashed. Rugby students didn't have to eat their dead, but one imagines they were a touch bunch as well. Under the tutelage of Thomas Arnold, an ordained deacon in the Church of England, who preached that manliness was Christian and Christianity manly. Arnold, the headmaster at Rugby during the early nineteenth century, was the chief proponent of what came to be known as "muscular Christianity" (the phrase comes from a review of Tom Brown's School Days, a schoolboy novel about Arnold's Rugby). Arnold felt that the church of his days was effete, emasculated, aesthetic. His Jesus, the one he taught his charges about, was no rose of Sharon or lily of the valleys. Arnold's Jesus was representative of schoolboy virtues: athleticism, honesty, giving things the good college try. His was the Jesus of the moneychangers in the temple and the Harrowing of Hell.
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May 25, 2004
Pale kings and princes
The idea that suddenly, out of nowhere, a long-lost uncle would pass on a fortune has inspired artists from Frank Capra to Jamaica Kincaid to those interested in less weighty fare. Millions of people want to believe it, which has been the basis for a hundred con games, many notably successful. How much better is it if the rich uncle left not only money, but a crown? So if fashion photographer Phillip von Hessen was a savvy New Yorker, he'd have been hanging on to his wallet when he was contacted by the Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, advising him that he should come to visit the country that might have been his. Finland only gained independence in 1917, and its constitutional planners briefly considered appointing a monarch; their neighbors Sweden and Norway were kingdoms and seemed to get along fine, and naming Kaiser Wilhelm's son-in-law, Friedrich Karl of Hesse, to the throne could counterbalance the looming threat of Russia. Phillip von Hesse, Friedrich Karl's grandson, is the man who would be king of Finland, had the German defeat in World War I not forced Finnish politicians to forego their plan and create a republic. For every Don Juan -- exiled, stripped of his title, and eventually returned to Spain to watch his son ascend to the throne -- or Prince Ra'ad of Iraq, who still has a faint hope of another Hashemite restoration (and has gathered a few supporters, to boot), there's a dozen members of the Greek royal family who are never going to have a hope of returning to the throne. (Rumor has it that the student directory at Brown University listed Prince Nikolaos' last name as "Ofgreece".) And for every Greek prince in exile, there are probably a dozen or more people like Peter Pininski, who discovered that he could trace his ancestry not only back to Polish nobility (Pininski is a count), but to Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose Stuart line was believed to have died out in 1807. Pininski, unlike his celebrated ancestor, shows no sign of plotting the overthrow of the British government. And if computer scientist Mark Humphrys' theory is right, for every Pininski, there are a thousand of the rest of us, each distantly descended from a Hapsburg or a Plantagenet; Humphrys and colleagues assert that just as almost every actor can be traced to Kevin Bacon, almost every person of European descent could trace their ancestry back to a member of the nobility. The real-life man who would be king, a Pennsylvania adventurer named Josiah Harlan, was driven from Afghanistan (where he had become a tribal leader) when the British arrived; he went home, vented his spleen in a memoir which was never published, then left for California where he began practicing medicine without a license. History does not record attempts to regain his throne. The last prince of Korea's Joneson dynasty, Lee Gu (link via Stavros), lives in Japan and cannot speak Korean, but he has spent his life pining for a homeland he never knew. What need do we have for fantastic royalty, the Royal and Serene House of Alabona-Ostrogojsk and all the rest? If Mark Humphrys is right, a thousand secret kings walk down every city street, untroubled by the weight of their crowns.
May 22, 2004
Invisible bullets
Chung Ling Soo was a New Yorker by birth, a Scot by ancestry, and "the Original Chinese Conjurer" by choice. The magician, born William Robinson, gained prominence thanks to a feud with an actual Chinese stage magician, Ching Ling Foo (né Chee Ling Qua; the good people of New York in 1898 were not sticklers for authenticity in their Chinese names). Robinson basically stole Foo's act; Foo called him out (a practice magicians such as Harry Houdini engaged in frequently in the nineteenth century; it was often good for business for both parties, and beyond that, magicians were high-paid entertainers who often poached tricks from one another and carried grudges), but then backed down, leaving Robinson to perform as Soo. The newspapers of the time either believed him or played along, and so he was the undisputed Chinese stage magic champion of New York. But Robinson would be as forgotten today as the great Tampa were it not for the manner in which he died; Bill Robinson, Chung Ling Soo, the Original Chinese Conjurer, botched the bullet catch.
May 17, 2004
Spitting out sparks, scraping at the rails
The sleepy town of Newport, Rhode Island, is home of the Naval War College and dozens of spectacular robber barons' mansions dating from its days as a summer resort. It doesn't seem like it would have been the site of rioting Allman Brothers fans, but in 1971, at the Newport Folk Festival, it was. George Wein invented the contemporary music festival with his Newport Jazz Festivals, dating back to 1954. By 1971, he had branched out to folk festivals and some rock music, and was looking to try something new, so he booked Frank Zappa, Led Zepplin, and a little-known Southern blues-rock band featuring Gregg and Duane Allman. (Jimi Hendrix was turned away, as there was no room on the bill.) By the summer of '71, the Allmans were the hottest band in the country, and all hell broke loose. Wein decided never to have anything to do with rock music again. But the Newport Folk Festival's place in rock history had been cemented six years earlier. In 1965, the folk fans of America booed and the folk musicians of America went apoplectic. The Newport Folk Festival, the most visible stage for commercially successful folk music, was where Bob Dylan went electric.
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May 15, 2004
Black gold, Texas tea
Were it not for two accidents of history, Ibn Saud and his family might have fallen into the deepest recesses of the history books. But in 1915, Ibn Saud entered into an alliance with the British, against his clan rivals, the Rahidi, who were supporting the Turks. The well-timed backing of the nation that would become the dominant power in the Middle East after the First World War lead to increasing influence and eventually a direct confrontation with the Hashemite dynasty that lead to Saudi control over the holiest city of Islam, Mecca. The second accident was less political and more geo: in 1938, Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, struck a gusher. In the nineteenth century, John Rockefeller, son of a patent medicine salesman, got his start in the oil boomtowns of Pennsylvania; Quaker State and Pennzoil got their names for the original center of the world petroleum industry, where a former railroad conductor named Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Titusville. Rockefeller would come dominate Pennsylvania's oil industry, and as later strikes occured, in Oklahoma, Texas, California, his power and influence would grow. He became America's first billionaire, the richest man in the world, somebody people create conspiracies about. But none of Rockefeller's Standard Oil strikes matched the great mother of all gushers lying beneath the sands of the country called Saudi Arabia.
May 09, 2004
KBU3273
P.T. Barnum was a politician, a circus promoter, a cheerful fraud. If his conscience ever bothered him, history does not record it, but perhaps he salved his soul by attending church. Barnum was a Universalist; Tufts University was the first Universalist college in America. And so, as a wealthy promoter of his sect (Barnum's tract, Why I Am a Universalist, sold 100,000 copies in the first three years after its publication in 1890), Barnum provided Tufts University with Barnum Hall. Being P.T. Barnum, however, he filled the hall with an elephant: Jumbo, whose very name was synonymous with size. Jumbo had been hit by a train in 1885; never one to turn down an attraction, Barnum had Jumbo stuffed and took his body on a world tour. When he returned home, he donated Jumbo and a number of other effects to Tufts, where they quietly sat for decades. (Students placed pennies in Jumbo's trunk to ensure luck on tests.) In 1975, Barnum Hall burnt down; a quick-thinking university employee managed to salvage some of Jumbo's mortal remains, however, and today Jumbo retains a place of honor in a school safe, where his ashes are occasionally taken out (in their ceremonial peanut butter jar) and given to coaches for luck before the Tufts Jumbos take on rival teams. It's a hard life, being a dead celebrity.
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May 06, 2004
Fashion statements
"Voting is for old people" hasn't reached the hallowed heights of banal t-shirt slogans; it's no "I ♥ NY" or "Virginia is for lovers." It's not even "Pennsylvania has intercourse". But when the commodifiers of dubiously hip at Urban Outfitters offered the shirt for sale, hoping to make a few bucks off camp, it triggered a very brief media frenzy. The fact that the founder of Urban Outfilters is a semi-closeted conservative, a financial backer of Sen. Rick Santorum, gave the story a little bit of bite, but mostly the concern seems to have been that someone was attempting to make money from teenagers willing to drop thirty bucks on a cheaply made shirt to advertise their apathy. But advertising has always been the t-shirts job; although the plain white t-shirt spread into America thanks to the U.S. Navy (with assists from Marlon Brando and James Dean), it really came into its own when someone realized it could turn the wearer into a walking billboard. People have been proclaiming their political identity through their t-shirts since at least 1948.
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May 03, 2004
Warriors' tongues
Since 1992, a small band of scholars has dedicated itself to the study of an obscure language. They've translated Hamlet and the Bible into tlhIngan Hol, their field of study. And although the language is extinct -- there are no native speakers of tlhIngan Hol -- their efforts and the efforts of a few sympathizers have ensured that millions of people throughout the world have heard at least a few words of it. Documentarians have even put together a movie about their efforts. Many mainstream linguists would kill for the visibility of the brave few at the Klingon Linguistics Institute. Unless Michael Dorn knows something he's not telling, Klingon is, of course, an artificial language, the project of Dr. Marc Okrand. Okrand, who currently works with the National Captioning Institute on closed captioning issues, was tapped to provide a realistic-sounding language for Star Trek III, and he just kept going. Okrand is following in a long tradition, not just of real and theoretically practical languages like Fr. Johann Schleyer's Volapük or Dr. L.L. Zamenhof's Esperanto, but of totally fictional inventions that linguists and the philologically inclined sometimes toss off.
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May 01, 2004
Mayday, Malaprop, Mondegreen
It must be an odd and amusing moment for members of the American Dialect Society when they select their annual word of the year. It's a brief moment of fame, a chance to crop up on the front page of the Style section and in filler segments on "Morning Edition", but the words and phrases the select are so often ephemeral: "Mother of All", millenium bug, chad, information superhighway. The coining of words and phrases that last are scattershot; when Sheridan wrote his punningly-named Mrs. Malaprop into The Rivals, did he htink that he would be introducing an entire neatly packaged concept into the English language? Lewis Carroll's portmanteau words were an amusing game (from a man who loved games), but "chortled" (part "snorted", part "chuckled") well and thoroughly stuck, providing translators with something to chew on. When Gen. Ambrose Burnside gave his barber some most unusual instructions, did he think that an entire category of facial hair would be named after him? And then someone had to deny Burnside his chance at lasting fame from people other than Civil War buffs who recall his failures at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania and Brown University students mooning around Swan Point Cemetary when someone misunderstood "burnsides" as "sideburns." San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll is a tireless popularizer of mondegreens (the term is from Sylvia Wright's mishearing of "The Bonnie Earl of Murray"), misunderstood and frequently hysterical song lyrics of which Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" may be the best example. But the phenomenon is an old one, and responsible for words much longer lasting than any sniglet. "Adder", "apron", and "umpire" were originally "nadder", "napron", and "noumpere", just as "nickname" was "ekename" before that pesky indefinite article got in the way. Hoppin' john was quite pois pigeon, stories about John hopping around the table notwithstanding (unless, of course, it was just a misunderstanding of an obsolete term, "hopping"). In Arkansas alone, you can visit Smackover, Pair o' Geese, and Buggywitch, the Anglicized replacements for "Chemin Couvert", "Pirogue", and "Bourgawich." So when a dashing young pilot bailing out over the English Channel in a war movie will call in a "Mayday" even in the middle of winter; the term is an international radio convention settled upon by virtue of its similarity to the French for "Help me!", "M'aidez!" It has absolutely nothing to do with the calendar year, pagan fertility rituals, labor demonstrations, or Soviet propaganda, except when headline writers get very, very lucky.