Eric Hanson's Blog, page 5

"I am not a crook"

It was on this day in 1973 that Richard Nixon qualified for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Just five words. Five words everybody knew were not true. "I am not a crook." It happened in Orlando, Florida in front of a few hundred AP editors, which made it hard to retract or clarify. By then he didn't have anybody skilled enough to clarify him out of his situation. He hung on for another ten months. He was 60 years-old.

It's hard to correct the habits of a lifetime. What I remember, watching as ...

Moby Dick and the life around it

Moby Dick was published on this day in 1851. It was Herman Melville's sixth book and his most ambitious, but it didn't sell, and the experience nearly destroyed him. Readers wanted roistering sea tales more than deep dish metaphors. Melville's family life suffered. He drank. His wife's relatives urged her to have him put in an asylum. In 1852 the New York Day Book published an article titled "Herman Melville Crazy." Perhaps he was. He continued writing. He wrote an epic poem of 16,000 lines, ...

Veterans' Day

Ninety one years ago, at 11 minutes and 11 seconds after 11 A.M. on the 11th day of the 11th month, the war ended. Sixteen million had died. Twenty one million were wounded. Blinded and maimed veterans would populate city streets for years, selling pencils or pen-wipes or whatever passersby might want. An entire generation was depleted, offices couldn't find the people they needed, women didn't marry. Poets and authors and painters didn't create great works because they died in the trenches. ...

Stanley and Livingstone

Victorian newspapers thrilled their readers with tales of explorers finding the sources of tropical rivers, discovering unknown species of birds and lost tribes. Often as not the famous explorers eventually disappeared themselves, which is what happened to African explorer, Dr. David Livingstone. When Henry Morton Stanley set off to find him in the spring of 1871, Livingstone hadn't been heard from for six years. Stanley found him on November 10th, uttering the famous words "Dr. Livingstone, ...

The High Priest of Self-Centeredness

There are two new biographies of Ayn Rand on the market. She of the icy glare, the modified Hitler hairdo, the large dollar-sign brooch. Her philosophy behaved more like a religion or a cult, with fierce dogmas and sudden excommunications. But her devotees are legion. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was one of the earliest, sitting at her feet during her living room sermonettes in the early days in New York. And her books have sold millions of copies, mostly, it seems, to disgruntled and a...

The Revolution

On November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the short-lived democratic government that had replaced the Tsarist government, putting in place a ragtag, ruthless, disorganized, incompetent, religiously committed but fanatically irreligious Soviet government that nobody thought would last three months, much less 70 years. It lasted far longer than the Thousand Year Reich of the Nazis, who had superior planning and machinery, not to mention far better art direction. In the end it was hard to ...

Guy Fawkes

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated in England with bonfires and with stuffed effigies that children use to extort money and sweets.

On November 5th 1605 Guy Fawkes was caught leaving a rented cellar adjacent to the Houses of Parliament where a subsequent search discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder, enough explosives to break all the windows within a kilometer's radius and exterminate the Mother of Parliaments and King James I during the State Opening scheduled for that day. The Catholic conspi...

Did Not Invent Levis

I just read the obituary of Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who died last Friday in Paris. He was 100. Why didn't I include him in the book? Why indeed.

Although he didn't invent Levis (that was a different Levi Strauss entirely) Claude L-S changed the way we thought about humanity by asking questions that sounded fundamental and were. "Who are we? How did we come to be be in this time and place?" Questions which conjure the same thoughts of simultaneity raised by A Book of...

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite was born on this day in 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri. The family lived in Missouri until he was ten, when they moved to Houston. He was a Boy Scout and went to church. The family changed denominations three times when he was a kid, finally settling on Episcopalian. Young Walter was a member of a youth branch of the Freemasons. He joined things. He joined a theatre group in college; two friends in the company went on to successful film careers. He wrote for the newspaper at th...

Snapshots

Today is the birthday of the photographer Walker Evans, born in St. Louis in 1903. His father abandoned the family when he was 15, and it was around this time that Walker picked up his first camera. It was a Kodak Brownie. He took it around Toledo, everywhere he went, taking pictures of people unaware, "like a spy" is how he later described it. He spent a year in Paris, thought about being a painter, then settled in New York among the Bohemians. His first published photographs were of the Bro...