Isebrand

"Best of Enemies" — the Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley debates

From The New York Times article, "Buckley vs. Vidal: When Debate Became Bloodsport," a review by Michael M. Grynbaum of the new documentary, Best of Enemies:

Literary aristocrats and ideological foes, [Gore] Vidal and [William F.] Buckley attracted millions of viewers to what, at the time, was a highly irregular experiment: the spectacle of two brilliant minds slugging it out — once, almost literally — on live television. It was witty, erudite and ultimately vicious, an early intrusion of full-contact punditry into the staid pastures of the evening news.
.....

[The documentary's] directors, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, present their ideas with a wide scope.... “They don’t make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore,” Mr. Neville said in a recent interview. “Their lives are the kind of American lives that people don’t have anymore. To me, just on a theatrical level, it seemed operatic: this kind of grand battle.”

The 5th of November 1605—"5/11" Gunpowder Treason and Plot

Remember, remember,
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot;
For I see no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

The greatest attempted act of terrorism in British history wasn't the work of jihadis but Roman Catholic British conspirators, the most well-remembered of whom is Guy (Guido) Fawkes, who were radicalized (one might say) by extremist Jesuit writings justifying the destruction of Protestant governments. In the conspirators' letters, Protestants and "atheists" are synonymous.

Their plot was to blow up the House of Lords on November 5, 1605 ("5/11" in modern UK dating) during the State Opening of Parliament when King James I would be present. This would, they thought, trigger a Roman Catholic uprising in England.

They nearly succeeded: successfully positioning 36 large barrels of gunpowder underneath the House of Lords—enough to blow the place to smithereens—which weren't discovered by authorities until the night before, the 4th of November.

The conspirators are easily romanticized. They were young—in their 30s—dashing, and determined. Most of them were undeniably brave, too, and committed to one another.

But make no mistake: they were ruthlessly cold-hearted. Their plan would have killed many, including innocents (assistants, pages, attendants, passersby, etc.). They were fully aware that the explosion would kill Roman Catholic lords, too. This did disturb some of the conspirators, enough for one to send warnings by anonymous letter. But it was not a great concern for most of the conspirators, and certainly not for the ringleaders.

Anti-Scottish prejudice was an additional motivation. Many of the conspirators were from families who'd become increasingly disconnected from political privilege largely as a result of prejudice against and suspicion of Roman Catholics. At the same time, Scottish gentlemen were rising in political influence. The conspirators hated the Edinburgh-born and very Protestant king himself, and they saw his desired program for a political union joining England and Scotland as one that would result in spiritual and political contamination. 

Images: (top) Promotional still from the 2014 BBC documentary, Gunpowder 5/11: The Greatest Terror Plot; (bottom) The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators engraving (1605) of eight of the thirteen conspirators, by Crispijn van de Passe.

Boys in dangerous new toys: 8th of September 1914, the first military air combat kill; the late teens and 20-year-olds who created aerial combat

In a span of just four years, 1914–1918, all of the basic principles of military aviation combat, all still relevant today to some degree, were set. The context was the bloody trial-and-error aerial combat of the First World War, and the fliers were often only 18, 19, or 20 years old.

This period began only 11 years after the Wright Brothers' flight.

The airplanes of the First World War were rickety affairs made mostly of linen stretched over wooden frames. They were difficult to fly. Half of all the pilot deaths of the war occurred during take-off. Many early models did not have brakes; they simply slowed to a stop upon landing on the grass runways.

(Click on any image in this post to view it enlarged in a seperate browswer window.)

At first during the war, airplanes were used only for reconnaissance. They had no weaponry. Opposing pilots sometimes waved in greeting upon encountering each other in the the sky even as their respective nations' armies clashed murderously below them the ground.

The first recorded instance of an aircraft bringing down an enemy aircraft was when an Austro-Hungarian Albatros B.II reconnaissance airplane was deliberately rammed by a Russian Morane-Saulnier G on September 8, 1914. Both planes crashed.

In time, pilots started to shoot at each other from their open-seat cockpits with shotguns or pistols. Eventually, not surprisingly, a machine gun was tried.

Ground-based anti-aircraft weapons and techniques improved, too.

Pilots were not allowed parachutes; it was thought they'd encourage pilots to bailout instead of finishing their missions. Airplanes damaged or set alight by enemy fire or mechanical trouble in the air became diving death traps.

British pilots' average life expectancy was only 18 hours of flying time at one point during the war when the Germans possessed a particularly superior model of plane, the Albatross, and Germans began referring to the pilots of the Britain's Royal Flying Corps (RFC) as kaltes Fleisch, "cold meat."

During April 1917, RFC aviators' life expectancy was at its worst during the war: only 11 hours flying time.

Starting in 1917, pilots started to focus more on group formations of airplanes and formation tactics. Aerial warfare became less about pilots operating as lone airborne hunters, less about their individual pilot heroics (and a certain degree of recklessness) and more about dog fights between groups of opposing pilots. These fights were often of breath-taking complexity.

But one reality remained throughout: bringing down an opposing aviator generally meant maneuvering to get very close to his airplane. The technique of RFC pilot Albert Ball, but rendered obsolete in the formation flying tactics of later 1917 and 1918, was to spot his target, drop out of the sun, position himself only about 15 feet behind and beneath it, and fire his plane's machine gun upward—directly into the German plane's cockpit.

Josha Levine, writer, actor, historian, and author of Fighter Heroes of WWI:

"Dog fights were a very common occurrence in the First World War, but they never really ever happened again, because by the Second World War...airplanes were simply too quick. And one airplane only had another in its sights for a split second at a time.... If you watch a science fiction movie,... Star Wars for example, and watch the X-fighters take on the TIE fighters, you'll notice that what they're really having is a First World War dog fight. And yet that never really happened again after 1918."

I recommend the Channel 4 program Fighting the Red Baron (2010), which offers a humanizing look at the military aviators of WWI. (See a promo video here.) Some of the British and German aces (i.e, five or more air victories) mentioned in Fighting the Red Baron  are show here, from top to bottom:

Albert Ball, VC, DSO & Two Bars, MC; Royal Flying Corps (RFC); killed in action aged 20.

Cecil Arthur Lewis, MC; Royal Flying Corps (RFC); he survived the war and went on to co-found the BBC; died in 1997 at the age of 98.

Arthur Rhys-Davids, DSO, MC & Bar; Royal Flying Corps (RFC); killed in action aged 20.

Werner Voss; Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte; killed in action aged 19.

Manfred von Richthofen, "the Red Baron"; Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte; killed in action aged 25. (Pictured at left.) Richthofen scored more aerial kills than any other ace of the First World War: 80. Canadian flier Captain Roy Brown was credited with shooting him down.

A List of the Top Aces of the First World War

Top photo: a formation of recreated Fokker DR-1s at a 2005 airshow (via The Vintage Aviator Ltd of New Zealand).

The Trostle Farm, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1–3, 1863. One of the many important locations associated with the battle is the Trostle farm, which still shows a now quite famous hole in it from a Confederate artillery shell.

Here's a photograph (click to enlarge) that I took of the farm when I visited the battlefield with friends.

Below is a photograph of the farm taken some days after the battle. (Click to enlarge.)

From the Stone Sentinels website:

Owned by Peter Trostle, it was occupied at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg by his son Abraham, Abraham's wife Catherine, and their nine children.

Major General Daniel Sickles used the farm as his headquarters after he advanced his Third Army Corps to the line of the Emmitsburg Road on July 2nd.

The Trostles were abruptly forced from their home during the fighting, leaving dinner on the table, which was enjoyed by Sickles' staff. Like many of their neighbors, the Trostles returned to find most of their belongings looted or destroyed.

The 9th Massachusetts Battery fought a desperate last stand on their farm, with at least sixteen dead battery horses just in the front yard and over a hundred on the farm. Damage to property and real estate was estimated a $2,500 in a claim filed after the war, but it appears no compensation was ever paid.

March 10, 1876, First telephone call: "Mr. Watson, come here!" Alexander Graham Bell and invention

On the 10th of March 1876, Scottish-Canadian Alexander Graham Bell, in his Boston, U.S.A. laboratory, first successfully transmitted speech using telephony, saying "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!"

On St. Valentine's Day (February 14th) 1876, American Elisha Gray had submitted to the U.S. Patent Office a caveat for a patent for a liquid transmitter. A caveat is a notice of an intention to submit a patent. However, Bell submitted a patent two hours later the same day. It was a patent for something different but related.

What Bell used for the first phone call was the liquid transmitter as described in Gray's caveat but also Bell's own patented invention of an electromagnetic receiver.

Bell and Gray went through a protracted legal dispute. Eventually, Bell's patent withstood Gray's attorneys' challenges.

Check out the Wikipedia entry, Timeline of the telephone. The timeline of the telephone shows the portraits of more than 10 individuals involved with various ideas and inventions related to the development of early telephony.

The timeline demonstrates one of the principles of invention that, among others, is excellently explored in James Burke's brilliant, landmark television documentary series Connections (1978): the concept that no inventor works in isolation. All inventors borrow upon the work and ideas of others, and often history gives short shrift to the "others."

That doesn't mean genius doesn't exist and that the wrong person always gets ultimate credit or that all those we deem to be great inventors are usually or always nasty fame-seekers, perhaps even unethical ones, too. It means this:

Scientific discovery is a complex process involving connections between myriad ideas and people. And as Burke shows in Connections, those connections can sometimes reach back centuries.

Photo #1 (click to enlarge), Alexander Graham Bell makes the first phone call from New York to Chicago in 1892. I cannot find online a date for when the call was made, only the year. Do you know the date? If so, tweet it, please: @isebrand.

Photo #2 (click to enlarge), Bell demonstrating with a 1876 prototype. I think it is not the one used to make the first call, but I'm not very certain of that.

''The Journey of Snow White'' (1971) by Al Carmines

Allan Kozinn's review from The New York Times of a 1990 performance of the operetta The Journey of Snow White, which was composed by Al Carmines, formerly of The Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, NYC. (My friend the late Wayne Eley of Atlanta, Georgia produced a video of the original production of the operetta.)

The Judson Memorial Church has for decades been a home for offbeat art exhibitions and music, theater and dance productions that reflect the spirit of its Greenwich Village neighborhood. This year, the church is celebrating its centennial with a varied schedule of events, including revivals of three shows by one of its former ministers, Al Carmines.

Mr. Carmines, who has moved uptown to the Rauschenbusch Memorial Church, is a prolific composer with eclectic tastes. His 1971 quasi-operatic musical comedy, ''The Journey of Snow White,'' was presented at the Judson Memorial Church (55 Washington Square South) through last night.

In this amusing fantasy, Mr. Carmines freely embellishes the fairy tale. In his version, Queen I - Snow White's mother - predicts her death in a melancholy Purcellian recitative. But before leaping into the grave, she persuades the King to marry Queen II. While not overtly evil, as wicked stepmothers go, Queen II is unusually attached to her mirror (a character here), and the Queen turns on Snow White only when the mirror voices a preference for the younger woman.

When Queen II discovers that Snow White is living in the woods with the seven dwarfs (actually, there were six in the performance on Sunday evening, the seventh singer having sustained an injury), she commissions three witches to kill her. Instead of a single, charming prince who can wake Snow White with a kiss, Mr. Carmines sends three: an opera singer, a cowboy balladeer and a rock star who acts like a young Elvis Presley.

None of them rouse her, and the rock-and-roll prince's aria is lewd enough to get him ejected by the dwarfs. In the end, the full court and the ghost of Queen I turn up, and Snow White is rescued by the mirror, who has decided that he would prefer to be human.

The mood of the work is suggested in some of the aria titles: the two oddest are ''Love Is Our Epistemology,'' sung by the dwarfs, and ''The Impression on Our Retina Has Gone,'' sung by the woodland creatures. But there are serious notions beneath the layers of overt silliness. Mr. Carmines takes his tongue out of his cheek long enough to show the power of love as a transforming force, and his finale is a gorgeous choral paean to free will.

The work's musical side has its charms as well, one being Mr. Carmines's organized approach to eclecticism, in which parodied styles are intrinsic to characterization. Snow White's agile, sugary music would be at home in a Lehar operetta. Queen I hops between moody Baroque settings and a bright cabaret style. Queen II and the mirror are more straightforwardly theatrical, and the King's music bears traces of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The menu also includes the diverse arias of the princes, a blues tune from a witch and Mr. Carmines's best moments, the exquisitely harmonized choral writing that turns up intermittently.

The production by Russell Treyz is endearingly homespun, with Nan Childress's robust piano playing, and Steve Hull's flute, clarinet and saxophone lines serving as the orchestra. Mary Ann Lee's lithe soprano and wide range is perfectly suited to Snow White's music. She was supported ably, if vocally more modestly, by the two Queens (Ann Harvey and Robin Manning), the King (Robert Sevra), the huntsman (Fred Einhorn) and the large community of animals and dwarfs.

Other notable members of the cast were Karl Heist, who as the country-and-western prince yodeled his way through his aria to his own guitar accompaniment; David Edwards, who contributed a fine tenor parody as the operatic prince; Robert McNamara, as the rock-and-roll prince, and Karen Cooper Smith, as the witch who sang the blues.

Photo: Rev. Al Carmines, photo by Gene Bagnato

Doctor Who First Broadcast 50 Years Ago Today (November 23, 1963)

The 799th episode of Doctor Who will air as a global simulcast, itself a historic television event, today.

From "The Man In The Box," by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, November 11, 2013:

"Doctor Who" is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.... It was first broadcast in 1963, three years before "Star Trek," and, with apologies to Gene Roddenberry, is smarter and, better still, sillier. The U.S.S. Enterprise, for all its talking computers and swooshing doors, is a crabbed and pious Puritan village; Doctor Who tumbles through time and space in the Tardis (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), a ship that from the outside looks like an early-twentieth-century British police box, painted blue and bearing a sign on its door that reads, "POLICE TELEPHONE. FREE FOR USE OF PUBLIC. ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE OBTAINABLE IMMEDIATELY.""

Through manipulation of time-and-space relativity, the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, which has, as Lepore describes it:

something of the character of the reading room of The British Library, if the British Library had a swimming pool and were a pub designed by some who adored Frank Gehry, Lewis Carroll, and typewriters with missing keys.

From this blog, here are some earlier posts about Doctor Who:

Doctor Who Saves the World (Nov. 23, 2006)

Matt Smith Next to Take Up Doctor Who Title Character (Jan., 2009)

Craig Ferguson's "Doctor Who" Cold Open (Nov. 23, 2011; embedded video)

Ray Cusick, designer of the Daleks - obit from The Economist (Mar. 2, 2013)

I was six or seven years old when I saw my first episode of the BBC television show "Doctor Who." It was a broadcast on Iowa Public Television. The episode was from the story "The Sea Devils." Jon Pertwee portrayed the Doctor.

Toothache | Lamp for the journey…

My friend Simon on Peter Englund's book about the First World War, The Beauty and the Sorrow, and on history.

The author explores the story of the war by drawing on the accounts of 20 relatively unknown eyewitnesses, sometimes by paraphrasing and at other times by quoting directly.

What’s most striking about the book are the poignant human details. This is not just a tale of military strategy and sweeping troop movements, though to be sure they are part of it. It’s also the story of the fleeing refugee who cannot take the family dog with her, and leaves behind a vial of ether so that the pet can be put to sleep when the food runs out.

It’s the story of the retreating engineer who sets fire to a railway station to prevent the enemy from using it, and then climbs onto the burning roof to rescue a trapped cat from the flames.

And, to return to my title, the story of an Australian soldier whose medical history tells us he was suffering with toothache on the day he lost his life at Gallipoli in 1915.

I’ve said before that the intrigue and the tragedy of history are, for me, in the myriad human details. Those events and incidents which remind us that what we are studying is not an abstract occurrence in the past, but something which happened to real people with human concerns who found themselves, perhaps, in extraordinary circumstances.

Read Simon's post, "Toothache" at lampforthejourney.com

Simon is the founder of the Remembrance Image Project whose objectives include forming:

a library of creative photographs which document key sites associated with [the First World War], and capture some of the spirit and emotion of those places. The aim where possible is to take these photographs at a point close in time to the one hundredth anniversary of action in that location. These images will be published over the period between now and 2018, and will hopefully form a lasting archive for future generations.

Image: the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge; photograph by Simon Gregor

Blame astronomical physics if your NYC Time Warner cable signal is dodgy

Oh my. The Contact Us page on Time Warner's website for New York area customers as an interesting greeting for October 2nd-9th, 2013. (Click image to enlarge.)

It reads: 

Solar interference, or sun outage, is expected between October 2nd and October 9th this autumn. Solar interference can affect TV services in the spring and fall every year and causes the degradation or loss of satellite signals for short periods of time, up to 15 minutes each day, for 5-7 days.

 

Scholar speaks on ‘God in the White House' - Bennington Banner

Rev. Randall Balmer, Mandel Family Professsor of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College and chairman of Dartmouth's religion department, recently spoke at Zion Episcopal Church in Manchester, VT. A scholar of Protestantism's history in the United States, Balmer makes an important point about the origins of the religious right-wing political movement, as reported by Mark E. Rondeu (@banner_religion) in the Bennington Banner:

It is widely believe that evangelicals turned against Carter and toward the Republicans because of abortion, legalized in the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Balmer calls this "the abortion myth."

Instead he pointed to a lower court ruling which upheld the contention by the Internal Revenue Service that "any organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not by definition a charitable organization. Therefore it has no claims on tax-exempt status, and similarly any donations to such an organizations can no longer qualify for tax exemption," Balmer said.

This was used by the IRS in 1975 to rescind the tax exemption of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school in Greenvile, S.C., which did not admit African Americans to the student body until 1971 and until 1975, out of fears of racial mixing, did not admit unmarried African Americans.

"That is what got people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the other leaders of the religious right activated as political players in order to reverse those actions against these schools," he said. "That was the catalyst for the Religious Right. Abortion did not become part of the religious right agenda until 1979."

Balmer also spoke to American voters' and the media's over-reliance on questioning politicians about their religion.

"Part of the problem, I think, in the American political process is that in America religion serves as a proxy for morality," Balmer said. "Especially after the Nixon administration, we Americans want to know that our candidates for the highest office in the land are good, decent, moral, trustworthy people. The problem is we don't know how to ask the question, so we say: ‘are you religious? What is your religion?'

He added, "The flawed premise behind that question is that somebody who is not avowedly religious, or has no religious affiliation, cannot be a good, moral, decent person. That's demonstrably false."

via www.benningtonbanner.com

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with Randall Balmer at Columbia's journalism school. I was considering attending "J School", and he was generous with his time and advice. I still recall the inspiring glimpse in Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory--a documentary based on his book of the same title--of a Charismatic Episcopal Church.