Steve Hely's Blog, page 2

When F. Scott Fitzgerald met Edith Wharton

“Seven almonds” stories

from a July 2, 2016 NY Times article, “Obama After Dark: The Precious Hours Alone” by Michael D. Shear:

To stay awake, the president does not turn to caffeine. He rarely drinks coffee or tea, and more often has a bottle of water next to him than a soda. His friends say his only snack at night is seven lightly salted almonds.

“Michelle and I would always joke: Not six. Not eight,” Mr. Kass said. “Always seven almonds.”

There were jokes about this at the time, that Obama was so precise as to only have seven almonds. However, in a followup article on July 28 of 2016, Michael D. Shear quoted Obama clarifying:

But in an interview broadcast on Thursday, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie put the question directly to Mr. Obama, who seemed eager to set the record straight.

“This is an example of the weird way that the press works,” Mr. Obama said, chuckling.

“Michelle and Sam Kass, who was our chef here, one night they were talking about me and teasing me about how disciplined I was, that I didn’t have potato chips or I didn’t have a piece of cake. And this is when Michelle said: ‘Yes, and he just has seven almonds. That’s it,’ to really drive home the point that I needed to loosen up a little bit.

“And Sam relayed this joke to The New York Times in the article, and somehow it was relayed as if I was counting out the seven almonds.”

In the interview with Ms. Guthrie, Mr. Obama acknowledged the point that Mr. Kass made during our interview: that what impressed him about the president’s nighttime habits was the discipline he has in getting through hours of difficult work without unhealthy snacks.

But Mr. Obama insisted that he’s not quite so disciplined that he counts out seven almonds every time.

“All my friends were calling up, and they’re saying: ‘You know, this seems a little anal. This is kind of weird,’” Mr. Obama told Ms. Guthrie. “And I had to explain to them, no, this was a joke.”

Asked whether he would allow himself to eat 10 or 11 almonds once he has left the White House, Mr. Obama said, “Absolutely.”

As the interview ended, he added with a smile, “I am so glad I had this opportunity, because this has been really weighing on me.”

He did offer an endorsement, noting, “You know, almonds are a good snack; I strongly recommend them.”

So this is a story about a humorous exaggeration or joke being taken as literal truth and printed in The New York Times.

When converted to print, the tone of a joke or semi-humorous remark is often lost.

How much of history and “the news” consists of “seven almonds stories”? Statements or anecdotes taken literally when in fact there was a shade of comedy about them that’s lost in when repeated, retold, set in type? Relay a story somebody told you and some nuance of it is already lost.

Nebraska: Springsteen and Starkweather

(source)

watching Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has me thinking about Charlie Starkweather, the spree killer inspiration for the role played by Martin Sheen in Badlands, shown in the film as stimulating Bruce’s imagination for the song and album Nebraska.

Larry McMurtry, in Roads, says:

Kids in the midwest only get to see even modest levels of glamour if they happen to be on school trips to one or another of the midwestern cities: K.C., Omaha, St. Louis, the Twin Cities.  In some, clearly, this lack of glamour festers.  Charles Starkweather, in speaking about his motive for killing all those people, had this to say: “I never ate in a high-class restaurant, I never seen the New York Yankees play, I never been to Los Angeles…”

I put Perplexity AI on the job of sourcing that quote, and it gave up in failure:

The phrase you provided—”I never ate in a high-class restaurant, I never seen the New York Yankees play, I never been to Los Angeles…”—does not appear in any published 1958 interview transcript or Nebraska prison record in major archival listings. Summaries of Starkweather’s statements, including interrogation by Lancaster County officials and defense attorneys, acknowledge the existence of multi-session transcripts (over 350 combined pages) but do not index or quote this passage in digitized form. Newspaper, trial, and archival indices available online—including items at Lincoln Libraries and the Nebraska State Historical Society—lack specific reference to the Yankees, Los Angeles, or restaurant themes in direct quotations or transcript extracts.​

This absence suggests that, while the quote may be reprinted in retrospectives or literary dramatizations, it is not verifiably documented in digitized or catalogued 1958 primary sources. To definitively confirm or rule out its existence, a physical review of the transcript collections listed by History Nebraska or onsite microfilm holdings of Lincoln-area newspapers from the trial period would be required. 

McMurtry didn’t include footnotes.

A search of Google books reveals James M. Reinhardt included a phrase like this in two books that included Starkweather, one is The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather, the other is The Psychology of Strange Killers

Used copies of The Psychology of Strange Killers are dear in price but I might have to get one to review for this important website. Perhaps the original source lies in these boxes at the University of Nebraska. Here we abandon the trail, unless any readers want to cut for sign.

Mary Hart

(source, an awkward still from a video)

Reading about Dodger superfan Mary Hart, who can often be seen sitting behind home plate on the TV broadcast.

Mary Harum was born in Madison, South Dakota. She was raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Denmark. She speaks English, Danish and Swedish fluently.

She has an apartment (Wikipedia reports) in Sierra Towers, a prominent West Hollywood building:

The building is known for being more than 15 stories taller than any other building within a 2-mile (3.2 km) radius. Due to Sierra Towers’ unique positioning at the base of a hill (the same hill from which Beverly Hills gets its name), the building is the highest residential tower in the greater Los Angeles Area relative to sea level. The building is said to get its plural name from scuttled original plans to build a second tower

Cecil Rhodes

from Michael Ledger-Lomas’s review of The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey in LRB.

The Rhodeses were farmers turned developers who had grazed cows on what are now Bloomsbury squares before building terraces in Islington and Hackney. Rhodes’s father attended Harrow and Cambridge before taking orders. His maternal grandfather was a provincial banker who had built canals in the Midlands and got into Parliament. When ill health caused young Cecil to join his brother Herbert in growing cotton in Natal, he went with two thousand pounds from his aunt, which cushioned the brothers against their amateurism. While African labourers hoed rows for them, they wandered into the interior, looking for gold and diamonds. Herbert could not stick at anything for long. In 1879 he died when a barrel of spirits exploded at his campfire and burned him to death. Cecil had by then settled at Kimberley, a town which had sprung up around the ‘dry diggings’ for diamonds.

Picks and shovels -> amalgamation and capital.

Rhodes and his first employer, Charles Rudd, found it easier to make money on side ventures, such as buying a steam-powered ice machine to sell refreshments to miners (Rhodes scooped the ice cream). But when colonial officials grudgingly decreed that diggers and miners could buy one another out and so concentrate holdings, Rhodes and Rudd founded a company to buy up claims in what had come to be known as the De Beers mine. The colony’s policy change reflected the diminishing viability of small-scale mining. Though the diamonds appeared inexhaustible, at deeper levels they were embedded in rock – the ‘blue ground’ – that required costly processing. Tottering over every claim was ‘reef’, friable rocks that often collapsed and buried the diamonds for months. Rhodes’s occasional trips to Britain reassured him that the demand for diamonds was buoyant enough to make it worthwhile to tackle these difficulties, but only if companies could supply capital and machinery, such as steam-powered pumps, at scale.

Personal life:

In the 1970s, the Tory historian Robert Blake dismissed speculation on his sexuality with the testy claim that he was simply one of those men who find getting married too much hassle. Rhodes would probably not have declared himself a homosexual, if he had known the word: he did not need to, living on the macho frontier. No one found it odd when he set up house at Kimberley with Neville Pickering and cradled him in his arms as he grew sick and died. Rhodes filled the void at his loss by hiring dashing young men as secretaries (shorthand not required), who borrowed his clothes and took his cheques but were cast adrift when they got engaged. No women worked at Groote Schuur, which was decorated with stone phalluses from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (supposedly Phoenician relics that illustrated the ancient colonisation of Africa). He built up a coterie of unmarried thinkers and publicists, whose childlessness heightened their devotion to the Anglo-Saxon race.

Hoedown

In October 1937, in the town of Saylersville in Magoffin County, Kentucky, Alan Lomax recorded William Hamilton Stepp playing a fiddle tune called “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” or as he identifies it in the recording, “the Bonaparte.”

You can listen here or here.

Some years later, Aaron Copland found a transcript of the recording in a book:

Composer Aaron Copland, who was commissioned by choreographer Agnes De Mille to score the ballet in 1942, probably did not hear the original field recording before adapting it. Instead, he likely learned the tune from the book Our Singing Country (1941), which presented transcriptions of John and Alan Lomax’s field recordings prepared by the composer and musicologist Ruth Crawford Seeger. According to Jabbour, “when Aaron Copland was looking for a suitable musical theme for the ‘Hoedown’ section of his ballet Rodeo (first produced in 1942), his eye was caught by the version in the Lomax book, and he adopted it almost [note] for note as the principal theme.”

(source)

In 1972, Emerson Lake & Palmer recorded an electronic version:

Some years after that, in 1993, I heard the tune on TV in a “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” commercial. They play “Hoedown” from Copland’s Rodeo all the time on KUSC.

I note all this because I’m interested in transmissions from the past to the present. Fiddle tune -> recording -> transcription -> orchestral score -> recording -> TV commercial is an cool lineage.

Columbus Day

Many people are unaware that Columbus made not just one voyage but four; others are surprised to learn that he was brought back in chains after the third voyage. Even fewer know that his ultimate goal, the purpose behind the enterprise, was Jerusalem! The 26 December 1492 entry in his journal of the first voyage, hereafter referred to as the Diario, 3 written in the Caribbean, leaves little doubt. He says he wanted to find enough gold and the almost equally valuable spices “in such quantity that the sovereigns… will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulchre; for thus I urged Your Highnesses to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem” (Diario 1492[1988: 291, my emphasis]).4 This statement implies that it was not the first time Columbus had mentioned the motivation for his undertaking, nor was it to be the last.5 Columbus wanted to launch a new Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). This desire was not merely to reclaim the land of the Bible and the place where Jesus had walked; it was part of the much larger and widespread, apocalyptic scenario in which Columbus and many of his contemporaries believed.

That from an article by Carol Delaney of Stanford, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem.”

Columbus knew from Marco Polo that there was a Great Khan somewhere to the west/east, and that this Khan had requested emissaries from the Pope. So possibly the Khan could be an ally against the Muslims.

Columbus and the other conquistador types commissioned by the King and Queen of Spain must be seen in the conquest of the Reconquista, the 700 year effort to drive Islam from Iberia. Cortes, for example, was a religious fanatic, who used the Spanish word “moscas” or mosques to describe the temples he found in the land of the Aztecs.

(Ridley Scott gets at some of this in 1492: Year of Discovery. My mom at least wanted to walk out of this movie once it gets to the torturing. Sigourney Weaver plays Queen Isabella.)

Delaney expands from Columbus’s religiosity to some bigtime thoughts on how we, today, may not be able to grasp what “religion” meant to someone like Columbus:

The modern understanding of religion did not fully emerge until the late nineteenth century when scholars began to attach “-ism” to make substantives out of adjectives—Buddhism rather than Buddhist, Hinduism rather than Hindu—thus making a ‘religion’ by separating out the spiritual elements from a whole way of life or culture that included ethnicity, language, food, dress, and other practices (see Smith 1962; Rawlings 2002). In reality, however, science, technology, and religion can be and are easily and seamlessly combined. For example, I found Turkish villagers, while mostly illiterate and uneducated, could discuss, understand, make, use, and fix a variety of modern machines and equipment including automobiles, telephones, and television sets; they could talk about international and national politics with more sophistication than most Americans, and they understood the economic networks with which their lives were entangled. They would appear to have a thoroughly modern consciousness. But staying long, getting to know them, and “pushing the envelope,” revealed to me how, at a much deeper level, they lived within a completely Islamic cosmology or worldview. That worldview encompassed their lives, it was the context within which they lived, and it provided answers to the perennial questions: who are we, why are we here, where are we going? It also affected the way they dressed, the food they ate, their practices of personal hygiene, the way they moved, and their spatial and temporal orientations (see Delaney 1991). It was inseparable from the rest of their lives, not something they practiced only on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, or by keeping the fast of Ramadan. Though they evinced varying degrees of devoutness, secularism was not an option. They believed their views were self-evident to any thinking person and they could not understand why I could not accept Islam and, in their terms, submit and become Muslim. Islam, to them, is not one religion among others; it is “Religion.” It is the one true religion given in the beginning to Abraham, and Muhammad was merely a prophet recalling people to that original faith. They had heard of Christianity, of course, and questioned me about it. But to them it was not a separate, equally valid religion, but rather a distortion of the one true word, the one true faith.

Just so did Columbus and his contemporaries view the sectas of the Jews and Muslims. His statement about freeing the Indians from error shows that religion was not a matter of choice but of right or wrong—there was only one right way. Indeed, they really had no conception of alternatives. The Reformation had not yet begun, and Judaism and Islam were seen not as different religions but as erroneous, heretical sects

Like a good anthropologist she quotes Clifford Geertz:

The anthropological critique of this position has been insistent: “[T]he image of a constant human nature independent of time, place, and circumstance, of studies and professions, transient fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion, that what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that it is inseparable from them” (Geertz 1973: 35). In other words, there is no backstage where we can go to find the generic human; humans are formed within specific cultures. This does not mean that cultures are totally closed or that there is no overlap; one can learn another culture—that is, indeed, what anthropologists do during fieldwork. But if we are to understand Columbus (or anyone else), we must attempt insofar as is possible to reconstruct the world in which he lived. While some historians writing about Columbus appear to do this, they still, in my reading, project a modern consciousness onto him, leaving the impression that the time and place are merely “transient fashions.”

Delaney includes a great map, which I steal:

Since I was a kid the tone around Columbus has been a lot less “In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and more he was a genocidal colonialist. But applying our concepts in moral judgment of these figures of the past seems not that far from Columbus applying his concepts to the native people he discovered. Then again, evolving our conceptions and adjusting our heroes as we go seems healthy, right?

Photograph of a Marine Giving Water to a Kitten on Tarawa

perusing the National Archives Record Group 38 as one does and found this.

Also:

This looks like a boring job

although who knows, maybe it was hypnotic. from Lewis Hine’s photographs for the WPA

Macadamia, macadam, tarmac, MacAdam, and McAdam

The macadamia nut was named after John Macadam, Scotch-Australian academic. The nut is native to northeastern Australia, but famously cultivated in Hawaii, for example by Roseanne Barr, whose farm is for sale.

Macadam, a road surface of layers of crushed stones, was named after John Loudon McAdam, a Scottish engineer.

When you add tar to macadam, you get “tarmac.”

While the specific tarmac pavement is not common in some countries today, many people use the word to refer to generic paved areas at airports, especially the apron near airport terminals, although these areas are often made of concrete.

Idle bit of history/etymology I picked up after eating a macadamia nut.